Changes

The notion of the ugly as an aesthetic category was first systematically deployed by Karl Rosenkranz—editor and scholar of G. W. F. Hegel, author of his first "official" biography, although himself a reluctant Hegelian—in his ''Ästhetik des Häßlichen ''(Aesthetics of the Ugly, 1853).(1 ) Rosenkranz's starting point is the historical process of the gradual abandonment of the unity of true, good, and beautiful; not only can something ugly be true and good but ugliness can also be an immanent aesthetic notion; in other words, an object can be ugly ''and ''an aesthetic object, an object of art. Ro­senkranz remains within the long tradition from Homer onwards that associates physical ugliness with moral monstrosity; for him, ugly is ''das Negativschöne ''(the negatively beautiful): "The pure image of the beautiful arises all the more shining against the dark background/foil of the ugly." Rosenkranz distinguishes here between a healthy and a pathological mode of enjoying the ugly in a work of art; in order to be aesthetically enjoyable and, as such, edifying and permissible, ugliness has to remain as a foil of the beautiful. Ugliness for the sake of itself is a pathological enjoyment of art.

Second, the notion of the ugly as the foil for the appearance of the beautiful is in its very core profoundly ambiguous. It can be read (as it is by Rosenkranz) in the traditional Hegelian way: the ugly is the subordi­nated moment in the game the beautiful is playing with itself, its imma­nent self -negation that lays the (back)ground for its full appearance; or it can be read in a much stronger literal sense, as the very (back)ground of the beautiful that precedes the beautiful and out of which the beautiful arises—the reading proposed by Theodor Adorno in his ''Aesthetic Theory: ''"If there is any causal connection at all between the beautiful and the ugly, it is from the ugly as cause to the beautiful as effect, and not the other way around. If one originated in the other, it is beauty that originated in the ugly and not the reverse." (In a homologous way, one should turn around the standard Thomist notion of evil as a privative mode of the good: what if it is the good itself that is a privative mode of evil? What if, in order to arrive at the good, we just have to take away excess from the evil?) Adorno's point is here double.  First, in general terms, concerning the very notion of art, the ugly is the archaic or primitive chaotic (Dionysian) life substance that a work of art gentrifies, elevates into the aesthetic form, but the price for this is the mortification of the life substance; the ugly is the force of life against the death imposed by the aesthetic form.  Second, with a specific reference to the modern era in which the ugly became an aesthetic category, Adorno claims that art has to deal with the ugly "in order to denounce, in the Ugly, the world which created it and reproduces it in its image." The underlying premise is that art is a medium of truth, not just an escapist play of beautiful appearances; in a historical situation in which the beautiful is irreparably discredited as kitsch, it is only by pre­senting the ugly in its ugliness that art can keep open the utopian horizon of beauty.

For the borderline to be a mode of hysteria, the line that separates in­ side in­side from outside is still maintained, but what happens when this line itself vacillates? Recall our unease when we stumble upon a decaying hu­man corpse or, in a more ordinary case, upon an open wound, shit, vomit, brutally torn­out nails or eyes, or the skin that forms on the surface of warm milk. What we experience in such situations is not just a disgusting object but something much more radical: the disintegration of the very ontological coordinates that enable me to locate an object into external reality ''out there''. The phenomenological description of such experiences is Kristeva's starting point in her elaboration of the notion of ''abject: ''the reaction of horror, disgust, withdrawal, and ambiguous fascination trig­gered by objects or occurrences that undermine the clear distinction between subject and object, between ''myself ''and reality ''out there''. (14) The abject is definitely external to the subject, but it is also more radically external to the very space within which the subject can distinguish itself from reality ''out there''. Maybe we can apply here Lacan's neologism "extimate": (15) the abject is so thoroughly internal to the subject that this very overintimacy makes it external, uncanny, inadmissible. For this reason, the status of the abject with regard to the pleasure principle is profoundly ambiguous. It is repulsive, provoking horror and disgust, but at the same time it exerts an irresistible fascination and attracts our gaze to its very horror: "One thus understands why so many victims of the abject are its fascinated victims— if not its submissive and willing ones" (''P,'' p. 9). Such a mixture of horror and pleasure points towards a domain beyond the pleasure principle, the domain of ''jouissance: ''"One does not know it, one does not desire it, one enjoys in it ''[on en jouit]. ''Violently and painfully. A passion" (''P,'' p. 9).

This abjectal excess can also appear in the guise of an indivisible re­mainder of the Real which resists the process of idealization/symbolization; in this sense, Kristeva mentions the pagan opponents of Western monotheism who praise the notion of remainder as that which prevents the teleological closure of creation, keeping the movement forever open: "the poet of the ''Atharva Veda ''extols the defiling and regenerating remain­der ''(uchista) ''as precondition for all form. 'Upon remainder the name and the form are founded, upon remainder the world is founded Being and non-­being, both are in the remainder, death, vigor' "(''P,'' p. 77). (16) The remainder here is the support of the cyclic notion of the universe; it enables the rebirth of the universe. (We find the last traces of this logic even in Kabbalah where the evil in our universe is accounted for as the remainder of the previous universes created and then annihilated by God because he was dissatisfied with the result of his creation; remainder thus grounds repeated creation.) Hegel and Christian monotheism are here easy targets; they allegedly tend to abolish the remainder in a complete sublation of the evil in the good, in a fulfilled teleology that redeems all previous lower stages. (17)

In our daily lives, we deal with what Julia Kristeva calls 'abject' in a variety of ways: ignoring it, turning away from it with disgust, fearing it, constructing rituals made to keep it at a distance or constraining it to a secluded place (toilets for defecation, etc.). Disgust, horror, phobia  . . .but there is yet another way to deal with abjection which is to enact a split between abjectal objects or acts and the symbolic ritualisation meant to cleanse us from defilement, i.e., to keep the two apart, as if there is no shared space where they may encounter each other since the abject (filth) in its actuality is simply foreclosed from the symbolic. Kristeva evokes the case of castes in India where the strong ritualisation of defilement (numerous rituals, prescribed in painful details, that regulate how one should purify oneself) ["]appears to be accompanied by one's being totally blind to filth itself, even though it is the object of those rites. It is as if one had maintained, so to speak, only the sacred, prohibited facet of defilement, allowing the anal object that such a sacralization had in view to become lost within the dazzling light of unconsciousness if not of the unconscious. V. S. Naipaul points out that Hindus defecate everywhere without anyone ever mentioning, either in speech or in books, those squatting figures, because, quite simply, no one sees them. It is not a form of censorship due to modesty that would demand the omission in discourse of a function that has, in other respects, been ritualized. It is blunt foreclo­ sure foreclo­sure that voids those acts and objects from conscious representation.  A split seems to have set in between, on the one hand, the body's territory where an authority without guilt prevails, a kind of fusion between mother and nature, and on the other hand, a totally different universe of socially signifying performances where embarrassment, shame, guilt, desire, etc. come into play—the order of the phallus. Such a split, which in another cultural universe would produce psychosis, thus finds in this context a perfect socialization. That may be because setting up the rite of defilement takes on the function of the hyphen, the virgule, allowing the two universes of ''filth ''and of ''prohibition ''to brush lightly against each other without necessarily being identified as such, as ''object ''and as ''law.'' On account of the flexibility at work in rites of defilement, the subjective economy of the speaking being who is involved abuts on both edges of the unnamable (the non-­object, the off­-limits) and the absolute (the relentless coherence of Prohibition, sole donor of Meaning [" (''P,'' p. 74)].  Do we not find similar cases also in Christianity as well as in Islam? When, a decade ago, the (then) Iranian president Ahmadinejad visited New York to attend a UN general assembly session, he was invited to attend a live debate at Columbia University. When asked about homosexuality in Iran, his reply was rudely mistranslated into English as if he claimed that in Iran they have no problem with homosexuals since there are none there.  An Iranian friend (very critical of Ahmadinejad) who was there told me that Ahmadinejad's reply was in reality much more nuanced: what he hinted at was that in Iran they don't talk about homosexuality in public, they condemn it officially and mostly ignore its actual occurrences, thereby 'allowing the two universes of ''filth ''and of ''prohibition ''to brush lightly against each other without necessarily being identified as such, as ''object ''and as ''law'''. And does the same not hold for paedophilia in the Catholic church? Paedophilia is publicly condemned while (till recently, at least) tolerated by being ignored in practice, as if public Law and material practice of sinful filth belong to different domains. This logic at work in Hinduism, Islam and Catholicism should not be confused with repression: nothing is 'repressed' or 'unconscious' about filth or homosexuality or paedophilia, the filthy act in question is practiced more or less openly and without any qualms, its practitioners are (mostly) not traumatised by their perverse desires or haunted by any deep guilt feelings, they just simply keep the two dimensions apart. Our problem today is that, within the predominant logic of Political Correctness, such a procedure of keeping the two domains apart no longer functions: the PC stance by definition collapses the two dimensions since it aims precisely at directly controlling and regulating 'the body's territory where an authority without guilt prevails, a kind of fusion between mother and nature'. (Kristeva, 1982, p. 74).  In other words, there is no domain left unseen, ignored by the PC law—its law tolerates no unwritten rules, there is no space here for a transgressive behaviour that violates explicit rules and is precisely as such not only tolerated but even solicited by the law    Is the mechanism described here not a case of so-­called fetishist disavowal? Kristeva locates the most radical fetishism, fetishist disavowal, into language itself: "But is not exactly language our ultimate and inseparable fetish? And language, precisely, is based on fetishist denial ('I know that, but just the same', 'the sign is not the thing, but just the same,' etc.) and defines us in our essence as speaking beings. Because of its founding status, the fetishism of 'language' is perhaps the only one that is unanalyzable." (Kristeva, 1982, p. 37). Kristeva locates the fetishist dimension of language into the implicit overcoming of the gap that separates words (signs) from things: 'I know that words are only signs with no immanent relation to things they designate, but I nonetheless . . . (believe in their magic influence on things)'.  But where, exactly, is here fetishism? In his classic text, Octave Mannoni (Mannoni, 2003 [1968]) distinguishes three modes of ''je sais bien, mais quand meme . . . '', and reserves the name 'fetishism' only for the third one. The first mode is the standard functioning of the symbolic order, namely the relation between the symbolic title of a subject and his/her miserable reality as a person: 'I know very well that this guy in front of me is a miserable stupid coward, but he wears the insignia of power, which means that it is the Law which speaks through him . . .' Is it, however, accurate to charac­terise this basic 'alienation' in a symbolic title that changes our perception of an individual as a case of fetishism? Not yet, for Mannoni. Then there is the mode of falling into one's own trap, like a guy who, in order to calm his small child when a storm is ravaging around their house, draws a circle on the floor with a chalk and assures him that one is safe if one stands inside the circle; when, soon thereafter, a lightning directly strikes the house, he in a moment of panic quickly steps into the circle, as if being there will protect him, ignoring the fact that he himself concocted the story about the magic property of the circle to calm down the child.  For Mannoni, this is also not yet fetishism proper which only occurs when we have no need for any belief at all: we know how things really stand, plus we have the object-fetish with no magic belief attached to it. A foot fetishist has no illusions about feet, plus he simply has a strong libidinal investment in feet, playing with them generates immense enjoyment. So which among these three versions pertains to language as such? Maybe, all three are activated at different levels. First, there is the disavowal that characterises the symbolic mandate ('I know very well that you are a miserable individual, but you are a judge and the authority of the law speaks through you'). Then, there is the self-­deception of a manipula­tor who, as it were, falls into his own trap. In his ''Anthropology'', Kant (Kant, 2006 [1798]) explores how the love of the illusion of the good can lead to the love of the good itself: if one loves the illusion of the good and enacts this illusion in social intercourse, one might come to appreciate its worth and to love the good itself for its own sake. Correlatively from the point of view of the spectator, loving the illusion of the good in others may make us be polite in order to become lovable, which, in turn, exercises our self­-mastery, leads us to control our passions and, eventually, to love the good for its own sake. In this sense, paradoxically, by deceiving others through politeness and social pretence, we in fact deceive ourselves and transform our pragmatic, polite behaviour into virtuous behaviour. . . .  The differ­ence between this and the first mode of disavowal is obvious: in the first mode, we are dealing with the straight confusion between an object/ person and the properties that belong to it only on behalf of its inscription into a symbolic network (to paraphrase Marx, a king is a king only because his subjects treat him as a king, but it appears to them that they treat him as a king because he is in himself a king), while in the second case, the illusion is generated purposefully and consciously (the subject produces an appearance in order to dupe another, and then he ends up falling into his own trap and believing in it himself). One should note how, although the cynical manipula­ tor manipula­tor consciously cheats and is in this sense less naïve than the subject of the first mode of disavowal, he ends up believing in a much more direct and naïve illusion: he fully falls into his own trap, in contrast to the first mode in which the subject retains to the end the distance towards his belief ('I know very well it's not true . . .').(18)

In a detailed analysis, Kristeva presents the work of Céline as a long and tortuous confrontation with the abjectal dimension; t'''his this is what ''Jour'''''<nowiki/>''­'''ney to the End of the Night '''''<nowiki/>'''alludes to; the night is the night of the abject that suspends not only reason but the universe of meaning as such, not only at the level of content (describing the extreme states of dissolution) but also at the level of form (fragmented syntax) and others, as if some pre-linguistic rhythm—"the 'entirely other' of signifiance"—is invading and undermining language:'''

Céline carefully walks on the edge of this vortex of ecstatic negativity like the hero of edgar Allan Poe's "A Descent into the Maelström" (1841), flirting with it but avoiding complete immersion into it, which would mean a descent into madness. Here, of course, Kristeva confronts the big problem. One would have expected that such a confrontation with the ab­ject and its libidinal vortex, allowing it to penetrate our universe of meaning, would have a liberating effect, allowing us to break out of the constraints of symbolic rules and to recharge ourselves with a more primordial libid­inal energy; however, as is well­-known, Céline turned into a fully pledged fascist, supporting Nazis to their very defeat. So what went wrong? At a general level, Kristeva's reply is to avoid both extremes; not only is the to­tal exclusion of the abject mortifying, cutting us off from the source of our vitality (when the abject is excluded, "the borderline patient, even though he may be a fortified castle, is nevertheless an empty castle" [''P,'' p. 49]), but the opposite also holds. every Every attempt to escape the patriarchal/rational symbolic order and enact a return to the pre-patriarchal feminine rhythm of drives necessarily ends up in anti-­Semitic fascism: "Do not all attempts, in our own cultural sphere at least, at escaping from the Judeo­-Christian compound by means of a unilateral call to return to what it has repressed (rhythm, drive, the feminine, etc.), converge on the same Célinian anti­ -Semitic fantasy?" (''P,'' p. 180).

"One has to admit that out of such logical oscillations there emerge a few striking words of truth. Such words present us with harsh X-­rays of given ''areas ''of social and political experience; they turn into fantasies or deliriums only from the moment when reason attempts to ''globalize, unify, ''or ''totalize. ''Then the crushing anarchy or nihilism of discourse topples over and, as if it were the reverse of that nega­ tivismnega­tivism, an ''object ''appears—an object of hatred and desire, of threat and aggressivity, of envy and abomination. That object, the Jew, gives thought a focus where all contradictions are explained and satisfied. " [''P, ''pp. 177–78] The limitation of Kristeva's theory of the abject resides in the fact that she conceives the symbolic order and abjection as the two extremes between which one has to negotiate a middle way. What she neglects to do is to inquire into ''what the symbolic order itself is in terms of the abject''. The symbolic order is not just always already embedded in the feminine ''chora'' (or what Kristeva in her earlier work referred to as the semiotic), pene­trated by the materiality of its immanent libidinal rhythms that distort the purity of the symbolic articulations. If it is here, it had to emerge out of ''chora'' through a violent act of self­-differentiation or splitting. Consequently, insofar as we accept Kristeva's term ''abjection ''for this self-differentiation, then we should distinguish between ''chora'' and abjection; abjection points towards the very movement of withdrawal from ''chora,'' which is constitutive of subjectivity. This is why we had to further specify Kristeva's diagnosis: every "unilateral call to return to what [the Judeo­-Christian compound] has repressed (rhythm, drive, the feminine, etc.)" generates fascism (as in Céline's work) not because it regresses from the symbolic but because it obfuscates abjection itself, the primordial repression that gives rise to the symbolic. '''The dream of such attempts is not to suspend the symbolic but to have the (symbolic) cake and eat it—in other words''''', '''to dwell in the''' '''symbolic without the price we have to pay for it '''''<nowiki/>'''(primordial repression, the subject's ontological derailment, antagonism, out­-of-­joint, the violent gap of differentiation from natural substance), the ancient dream of a mas­culine universe of meaning, which remains harmonically rooted in the maternal substance of ''chora''. In short, what fascism obfuscates (forecloses even) is not the symbolic as such but the gap that separates the symbolic from the Real. This is why a figure like that of the Jew is needed; if the gap between the symbolic and the Real is not constitutive of the symbolic, if a symbolic at home in the Real is possible, then their antagonism has to be caused by a contingent external intruder—and what better candidate for this role than Judaism, with its violent monotheist assertion of the symbolic law and rejection of the earth­-bound paganism?'''  

The Jew as the enemy allows the anti­-Semitic subject to avoid the choice between working class and capital: by blaming the Jew whose plotting foments class warfare, he can advocate the vision of a harmonious society in which work and capital collaborate. This is also why Julia Kristeva is right in linking the phobic object (the Jew whose plots anti­-Semites fear) to the avoidance of a choice: 'The phobic object is precisely avoidance of choice, it tries as long as possible to maintain the subject far from a decision.' Does this proposition not hold especially for political phobia? Does the phobic object/abject, on the fear of which the rightist-­populist ideology mobilizes its partisans (the Jew, the immigrant, today in europe Europe the refugee), not embody a re­fusal to choose? Choose what? A position in class struggle. (20)

This is how anti­-Semitism relies on a paranoiac totalization of playing with abjection; the anti­Semitic anti­-Semitic fetish figure of the Jew is the last thing a subject sees just before he confronts social antagonism as constitutive of the social body.

From here follows another crucial consequence with regard to Kriste­va's theoretical edifice: ''hora chora ''(the semiotic) is not more primordial than the symbolic but strictly a secondary phenomenon, the return of the presymbolic pre-symbolic mimicry (echoes, resemblances, imitations) within the field of symbolic differentiality. Roman Jakobson drew attention to the fact that we can discern in our language traces of direct resemblance between signifier and signified (some words signifying vocal phenomena seem to sound like what they signify, sometimes even the external form of a word resembles the form of the signified object, like the word ''locomotive, ''which resembles the old­-fashioned steam locomotive with the elevated cabin and chim­ neychim­ney). This, however, in no way undermines the priority and ontological primacy of the differential character of linguistic signifiers (the identity and meaning of a signifier depends on its difference from other signifiers, not on its resemblance to its signified). What we are dealing with in the case of phenomena like these are the secondary mimetic echoes within a field that is already, in its basic constitution, radically different (contin­gent, composed of differential relations). And the same holds for ''horachora, ''for the immanent rhythm of pre-symbolic materiality that pervades the symbolic: what happens first is the violent cut of abjection that gives birth to the symbolic, and what Kristeva describes as ''hora chora ''is a strictly secondary phenomenon of pre-symbolic mimetic echoes within the symbolic field.

"an ontology finally taking into account, as previous orientations have not yet done, explosive events of indigestible, meaningless traumas in which destructive plasticity goes so far as to destroy plasticity itself, in which plasticity is exposed, thanks to itself, to its own disruption. . . . The massive cerebro­lesions of catastrophic neuro­traumas produce the bodies of human organisms living on but not, as it were, living for, that is, not Inclining toward future plans, projects. Plasticity (including neuroplasticity) stands permanently under the shadow of the virtual danger of its liquidation. " (22)

A materialist notion of humanity should effectively take into account the shadow of a permanent threat to our survival at a multitude of levels, from external threats (an asteroid hitting the earth, volcanic eruptions, and others) through individual catastrophes like Alzheimer's up to the possibility that humanity will destroy itself as a nonintended consequence of its sci­entific and technological progress. Is there, however, a ''catastrophe ''that always already occurred and that is missing from the list of external threats: the catastrophe that is the emergence of subjectivity, of the human mind, out of nature? The exclusion of the real Real of ''this ''catastrophe (what Freud called primordial repression) is what introduces the gap that separates the real Real from reality—it is on account of this gap that what we experience as external reality always has to rely on a fantasy and that when the raw real Real is forced upon us it causes the experience of the loss of reality. G. K. Chesterton was on the right track here in his wonderful description of Charles Dickens's realism:

"[Dickens] was a dreamy child, thinking mostly of his own dreary prospects. Yet he saw and remembered much of the streets and squares he passed. Indeed, as a matter of fact, he went the right way to work unconsciously to do so. He did not go in for 'observation,' a priggish habit; he did not look at Charing Cross to improve his mind or count the lampposts in Holborn to practice his arithmetic. But unconsciously he made all these places the scenes of the monstrous drama in his miserable little soul. He walked in darkness under the lamps of Holborn, and was crucified at Charing Cross. So for him ever afterwards these places had the beauty that only belongs to bat­tlefields. For our memory never fixes the facts which we have merely observed. The only way to remember a place for ever is to live in the place for an hour; and the only way to live in the place for an hour is to forget the place for an hour. The undying scenes we can all see if we shut our eyes are not the scenes that we have stared at under the direc­tion of guide­books; the scenes we see are the scenes at which we did not look at all—the scenes in which we walked when we were thinking about something else—about a sin, or a love affair, or some childish sorrow. We can see the background now because we did not see it then. So Dickens did not stamp these places on his mind; he stamped his mind on these places. For him ever afterwards these streets were mortally romantic; they were dipped in the purple dyes of youth and its tragedy, and rich with irrevocable sunsets."

Herein is the whole secret of that eerie realism with which Dickens could always vitalize some dark or dull corner of London. There are details in the Dickens descriptions—a window, or a railing, or the keyhole of a door—which he endows with demoniac life. Things seem more actual than they really are. Indeed, that degree of realism does not exist in reality; it is the unbearable realism of a dream. And this kind of realism can only be gained by walking dreamily in a place; it cannot be gained by walking observantly. Dickens himself has given a perfect instance of how these nightmare minutiæ grew upon him in his trance of abstraction. He mentions among the coffee­shops into which he crept in those wretched days one in St. Martin's Lane, 'of which I only recollect it stood near the church, and that in the door there was an oval glass plate with "COFFee COFFEE ROOM" painted on it, addressed towards the street. If I ever find myself in a very different kind of coffee­room now, but where there is an inscription on glass, and read it backwards on the wrong side, MOOR eeFFOC EEFFOC (as I often used to do then in a dismal reverie), a shock goes through my blood.' That wild word, 'Moor eeffoc', is the motto of all effective realism; it is the masterpiece of the good realistic principle—the principle that the most fantastic thing of all is often the precise fact. And that elvish kind of realism Dickens adopted everywhere. His world was alive with inanimate objects. (23)

Strange realism whose exemplary case—"the motto of all effective realism" —is a ''signifier ''MOOR eeFFOCEEFFOC, whose lack of meaning (signified) is more than supplemented by a rich condensation of unconscious obscene libidinal echoes (fears, horrors, obscene imaginations) so that it effectively functions as a direct signifier (or, rather, cypher) of ''jouissance, ''signaling a point at which meaning breaks down! So if we are looking for the traces of ''das Ding ''in all this, they are not to be found in external reality the way it operates independently of our investments into it—say, the way oval glass plates on the doors of coffee rooms really are—but at those myste­ rious points within the universe of meaning where meaning breaks down and is overshadowed by a nameless abyss of ''jouissance''. This is why when he stumbles upon the meaningless signifier MOOR eeFFOC, "a shock goes through [his] blood." It may appear that Chesterton is here simply asserting the key role of inner psychic traumas, desires, obsessions, and fears: "Dickens did not stamp these places on his mind; he stamped his mind on these places." That is, certain places impressed him deeply not because of their inherent qualities but because of the intense inner experiences (concerning sin and love) they served as a pretext for and gave birth to. One can easily imagine here a critic of psychoanalysis like Malabou sarcastically asking if a devastating catastrophe in ''external reality ''like a gigantic tsunami or being exposed to brutal torture also acquires weight only if a previous psychic trauma resonates in it. But are things as simple as that? What makes inanimate objects alive is the way they are enveloped by dreams; this is not the same as the famous Freudian dream where the burning cloth on the son's coffin triggers in the sleeping father the terrifying dream image of his dread son approaching him with "Father, can't you see I'm burning!" In Freud's case, the dreamer (father) escapes from reality into a dream where he encounters an even more terrifying real. In Dickens, there is no escape from ordinary reality; a detail of reality itself gets spectralized, is experienced as a moment from a nightmarish dream. Something similar takes place continuously in Franz Kafka's work; Kafka is also a master of "effective realism." But let us rather take an unexpected example from cinema.