Kitsch, Camp, and Cringe as the Agents of Profanation

The article is dedicated to the definition of the term “cringe” placed in the modern ethical and aesthetics discourses. The author claims that camp aesthetic, generally described in Notes on Camp by Susan Sontag, is the closest to cringe. To reveal their similarities, there is a following separation in the actual understanding of cringe, namely, cringe1 as a direct reaction of shame on something external, the basic definition of cringe; cringe2 as a deactivated or sublated cringe, meaning by sublation the moment of cringe being turned onto itself, collapsing and allowing people to stay themselves. Cringe2 is what the author compares with camp as an aesthetic of vulnerability and “failed seriousness,” while cringe1 reveals similarities with kitsch.

Critical analysis of camp indicates that camp as a style still exploits vulnerability, therefore it doesn’t complete the therapeutic work it has started. As an alternative or post-camp aesthetics, the author proposes to highlight the conception of hypo aesthetics (Michael Kurtov) by which one may accept reality as it is. Based on texts by Giorgio Agamben Profanations and The Coming Community, the author comprehends cringe as an agent of profanation and an actor of liberation from dispositives of power. Unlike the other actor — parody, which is based on a distance to its subject, there is a fact of disappearance of this distance at the core of cringe. According to the author, this specificity of cringe allows the radically profane revelation to happen. Thus, transgression by the means of cringe becomes possible. An example of such transgression can be found in works by Georges Bataille and contemporary psychedelic cinema (Everything Everywhere All at Once, 2022).