Disgust
Revulsion
Rejection of a contaminating stimulus. The interior recoil, older than judgment and faster than it. Disgust is the only aesthetic response that is also a reflex.
The word
Latin gustus, taste, with the negating dis-: distaste, made general. The word entered English through French in the sixteenth century. Darwin treated it as taste-rejection extended outward, the mouth's oldest refusal, offered to the whole world.
The feeling
The recoil arrives before the reasoning. Nose narrows, upper lip lifts, the throat closes a fraction: the body configured to keep something out. It is fast, involuntary, and strangely contagious; watching someone else's revulsion can trigger the full sequence secondhand. Whatever caused it stays marked afterward, sometimes for good, because disgust learns in one trial.
Against its neighbours
Contempt ranks its object below and stays cool; disgust does not rank, it expels, and it runs hot in the body. Fear retreats from what can harm you; disgust retreats from what can contaminate you, which is why it survives even when the danger is provably zero.
In the work
A form that reads as wrong before it reads as anything. The wrongness is in the surface rather than the subject.
No work carries Disgust yet. The element is named and the table is not finished.