Penumbr(a) No. 2/2022: BEAUTY

If no external measure or rule determines the logic of the feeling of "life being quickened,” as Kant suggested, or of what is said to be beautiful, then beauty, beyond a category for theoretical discussions, appears as something vital to the subject’s singularity, as that part of a human being that emerges in excess of both biology and cultural norms and ideals, and with which psychoanalysis is centrally concerned. At the same time, although the beautiful lacks a general rule to determine the validity of a specific kind of excitement, Kant, in requiring the communicability of this subjective feeling, places it in connection with speech, which raises questions about the relationship between beauty, body, language, and the political.

 Consider three statements on beauty in 1930s Europe: “Beauty is one way in which truth occurs as unconcealedness,” Heidegger wrote in “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1935-7). Freud, for his part, in Civilization and its Discontents (1930) stated that there wasn’t “any clear cultural necessity for [beauty],” “yet civilization could not do without it.” In stating that the feeling of beauty is a veiled form of sexual excitation, he invites us to consider sex and sexual difference – beyond anything visible – as crucial to the problem of the nature and origin of the beautiful. In Freud’s reflection beauty reveals by concealing “the sexual object.” In 1934, the surrealist Breton famously proclaimed that “beauty will be convulsive or will not be.” While the Nazi party had banned and mocked “degenerate" avant-garde art in the 1920s, Breton invoked a hysteric body that defied good form and moral codes.

 Beyond Europe, Négritude strove to unlock a different perspective on beauty. In Senghor’s famous “Femme noire” (1945, “Black woman”), it is also a matter of erotic unveiling that enlivens its witness, and of a body, though not convulsive. The poem’s addressed black woman is naked, and “dressed in [her] color that is life, in [her] form that is beauty.” Affirming her black color as life subverts dominant, racialized cultural and linguistic codes. Her beauty, the speaker tells her, “strikes” him “in the light of day like the lightning of an eagle.” But like most Ladies of the European lyrical tradition, this woman says nothing, until Calixthe Beyala’s protagonist begins to speak in the 2003 novel Femme nue, femme noire, by stating that this poem’s words “are not part of [her] linguistic arsenal.” A profound anxiety emerges across these voices and statements, in oscillations between undressing and concealing, speaking and silencing, and at the crossroads of the sensual and the sexual, between resistance and a push to transgress. What if welcoming beauty leaves us, first of all, without the words for an object?

 In his proposal to think ethics formally, Lacan gave beauty a prominent role ­– as eighteenth-century British aesthetics did before him ­– in the interest of upholding virtue. Like Shaftesbury, Lacan emphasizes the distinctly formal qualities of beauty as a mental apparatus; for both thinkers, beauty is a process of the mind, a necessary aesthetic phenomenon that orients the subject to the world. Like Hutcheson, Lacan emphasizes the immediacy by which we respond to beauty, noting that it is our fundamental sensibility to the aesthetic that makes possible our engagement with language and the world. While eighteenth-century British aesthetics strove to sustain “moral sense,” which emphasizes the innate connection between beauty and virtue, Lacan aims at rethinking the form of transgression as such, yet without leaving the beautiful behind in favor of the sublime. This comes across in his definition of beauty in close proximity to horror, where the effects of das Ding move a subject to act beyond fear and self-preserving interest, according to desire.  The “dazzling radiance” of the beautiful is, at once, a barrier and lure, pointing towards a “field of destruction” ­– a field beyond the symbolic, of “unnamable, radical desire” that refuses the consolation of the object ­– while, at the same time, preventing the subject from fully falling into such a field. Beauty is horror and beauty is refuge:  singular, deathly, generative.   

 This unhinging of beauty from the ideal of the good implies a need to rethink, from the position of the unconscious, the act of speech and the relationship to language to which the beautiful is tied. How, for instance, are beauty and its way of transgressing the social link at work now, during the return of ethnonationalist politics? Remarkably, after global capitalism, the clashing encounter of different cultures has put criteria for a consensus on beauty and morality in disarray. One of the consequences lies in a proliferation of reactionary movements that attempt to make up for the current absence of well-defined limits with attempts at enforcing identities and ideals. An additional consequence lies in a proliferation of art—and art criticism—that seeks to disarm these fascistic efforts by offering quite explicit political counterattacks. How might psychoanalysis’s aesthetics-ethics intervene in the current popular trend of asserting art’s political imperative, and how might this intervention allow us to rethink questions of form, critique, taste ­– that dirty word linking embodiment and judgment?

This issue welcomes articles on these and other questions, such as:

Where do we discern beauty’s distinctiveness and the absence of an external criterion or rule today?

Can we consider beauty beyond the function of concealing a fundamental lack, which ends up serving the purpose of perpetuating the repression of femininity, understood as a structural internal heterogeneity that resists any kind of identity? How might beauty welcome the unsayable in its uncanny modes of emergence? How do these considerations intervene in the field of aesthetics? Can an analytic consideration of the beautiful produce, for instance, a shift in the notion of the sublime? And how do the beautiful and the sublime speak to psychoanalysis beyond what it already knows? How is theory beautiful?

Send enquiries and article abstracts to Fernanda Negrete (fnegrete@buffalo.edu) or Marta Aleksandrowicz (martaale@buffalo.edu). Deadline for article submissions: April 24, 2022.