Работа върху чувствата: културната психология и чуждостта като психосоциален регион
Work in Feelings: Cultural Psychology and Strangeness as a Psycho-social Region

Summary/Abstract: The subject of olfaction – one that was put under a long and symptomatic silence (if not stigmatized) by the discourses of the humanities and social sciences – has been becoming quite important during the last two decades. The topic – and this is also a symptom – has been covered with more and more diversified descriptions while at the same time most of them have hardly touched its real nerve. I guess that such a nerve could not be ever approached and touched if the researcher would stay away of a psychoanalytical interpretation. It is namely the psychoanalytical ‘set of instruments’ that draws a different and, obviously, not so easily bearable picture on the subject in question. It appears that the world must have been symbolically constructed not only through posing a sort of a ‘vault’, i.e. a set of high referent points (values) which somehow pose it ‘from above’; in addition, the world must continuously be safeguarded ‘from below’. And this is because in the cultural process, i.e. in the process of constituting cultural symbols, there are remnants which systematically precipitate; there are unconscious formations which constantly endanger the world itself. What is the nature of such a danger? It consists in the fact that in every moment there is a risk the culturally repulsive malodorous formations to become once more a source of inspiration, of non-sublimated emotions, of affects which cannot be socially controlled. That is why I would say the disgust, the aversion is not just a defense symptom (in a psychoanalytical sense) but also, on the other side, it is a social construct and a power dispositive – and the sociality preserves and conserves itself through this very construct/dispositive.

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