Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality

by Richard Beck

The “monster” is sociomoral disgust at its most severe, and it illustrates, in the extreme, the associations between purity/sacrifice and expulsive violence. These associations are important to note due to the fact that, while scapegoating has become more transparent, the monstrous has not. This is largely a consequence of the fact that the monstrous is an attribution fueled by the passions, very often the emotions of disgust and revulsion. Monsters are transgressive hybrids, objects of desecration and degradation. Consequently, sociomoral disgust makes it difficult for us to step back from monster-hunting crusades to expose the scapegoating mechanisms at work within our own hearts and minds.