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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.
Ugliness is, as such, immanent to beauty, a moment of the latter's self development. Like every concept, beauty contains its opposite within itself, and Rosenkranz provides a systematic Hegelian deployment of all the modalities of the ugly, from formless chaos to the perverted distortions of the beautiful. The basic matrix of his conceptualization of the ugly is the triad of the beautiful, the ugly, and the comical, where the ugly serves as the middle, the intermediate moment, between the beautiful and the comical: "A caricature pushes something particular over its proper mea sure measure and creates thereby a disproportion which, insofar as it recalls its ideal counterpart, becomes comical."
A whole series of issues arises here. First, can this third term not also be conceived of as the sublime, insofar as the ugly in its chaotic and over whelming overwhelming monstrosity that threatens to destroy the subject recalls its opposite, the indestructible fact of reason and of moral law? Which, then, is the triad: the beautiful, the ugly, and the comical (ridiculous)? Or the beautiful, the ugly, and the sublime? It may appear that it depends on what kind of ugliness we are dealing with, the excessive monstrous one or the ridiculous one. However, excess can also be comical, and ''du sublime au ridicule, il n'y a qu'un pas''. The sublime can appear (turn into) the ridiculous, and the ridiculous can appear (turn into) the sublime, as we learned from Charlie Chaplin's late films.
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.
What, precisely, is the ontological status of this weird ''Genuss ''that threat ens to drag us into its selfdestructive, vicious cycle? It is clearly not culture, but it is also not nature, as it is an "unnatural" excess that totally derails nature. So, should we not posit a link, an identity even, between this ''Genuss ''and what Immanuel Kant isolated as the
"unnatural" savagery ''(Wildheit) ''or passion for freedom specific to hu man nature: "Savagery [or unruliness, ''Wildheit"] is independence from laws. Through discipline the human being is submitted to the laws of humanity and is first made to feel their constraint. . . . Thus, for example, children are sent to school initially not already with the intention that they should learn something there, but rather that they may grow accustomed to sitting still and observing punctually what they are told, so that in the future they may not put into practice actually and instantly each notion that strikes them. Now by nature the human being has such a powerful propensity towards freedom that when he has grown accustomed to it for a while, he will sacrifice everything for it." The predominant form of appearance of this weird "savagery" is passion, an attachment to a particular choice so strong that it sus pends rational comparison with other possible choices. When in the thrall of a passion, we stick to a certain choice whatever it may cost: "Inclination that prevents reason from comparing it with the sum of all inclinations in respect to a certain choice is ''passion (passio animi)''." As such, passion is morally reprehensible: "far worse than all those transitory emotions that at least stir up the resolution to be better; instead, passion is an enchantment that also refuses recuperation. . . . Passions are cancerous sores for pure practical reason, and for the most part they are incurable because the sick person does not want to be cured and flees from the dominion of principles, by which alone a cure could occur…… And, as the subdivision "On the inclination to freedom as a passion" tells us, "For the natural human being this is the most violent ''[heftigste] ''inclination of all." Passion is as such purely human; animals have no passions, just instincts. The Kantian savagery is "unnatural" in the precise sense that it seems to break or suspend the causal chain that determines all natural phenomena—it is as if in its terrifying manifestations, noumenal freedom transpires for a moment in our phenomenal universe.7''
Do we not get here even an echo of what Julia Kristeva calls the abject? The object of enjoyment is by definition ''disgusting, ''and what makes it disgusting is a weird superego injunction that appears to emanate from it, a call to enjoy it even if (and precisely because) we find it ugly and desperately try to resist being dragged into it:
Kant insists on the non-representability of ugliness in art: "[in] ''dis'<nowiki/>'''gust . . . '''''<nowiki/>'''that strange sensation, which rests on nothing but imagination, the object is presented ''as if ''it insisted, ''as it were, ''on our enjoying it even though that is just what we are forcefully resisting." This is a typically Kantian approach: in a single phrase, there is a ''gleichsam (as '<nowiki/>'''''<nowiki/>''it were) ''and an ''als ob (as if)''. The ugly object has no reasonable effect on the ''Gemüth''. Instead, an excited and dangerously disconcerted imagination petrifies the subject ''in its corporeity''. This is the very essence of disgusting ugliness: it threatens the stability of our corporeity, our body 'forcefully resists' the incitement to enjoy that ugliness deceitfully imposes on us. ["U"]
This, finally, brings us to the very heart of disgust: the object of disgust "threatens the stability of our corporeity"; it destabilizes the line that sep arates the inside of our body from its outside. Disgust arises when the bor der that separates the inside of our body from its outside is violated, when the inside penetrates out, as in the case of blood or shit. "It's similar with the saliva: as we all know, although we can without problem swallow our own saliva, we find it extremely repulsive to swallow again a saliva [which was spit into a glass] out of our body—again a case of violating the inside/outside frontier." What distinguishes man from animals is that, with humans, the disposal of shit becomes a problem: not because it has a bad smell, but because it issued from our innards. We are ashamed of shit because, in it, we expose/externalize our innermost intimacy. Animals do not have a problem with it because they do not have an "interior," as humans do. Hence I should refer to Otto Weininger, who called volcanic lava "the shit of the earth." It comes from ''inside ''the body, and this inside is evil, criminal: "The Inner of the body is very criminal."9
One should return here to Sigmund Freud who, in ''Beyond the Pleasure '<nowiki/>'''Principle, '''''<nowiki/>'''describes how the living substance:'''
floats about in an outer world which is charged with the most potent energies, and it would be destroyed by the operation of the stimuli proceeding from this world if it were not furnished with a protection against stimulation ''(Reizschutz)''. It acquires this through its outermost layer—which gives the structure that belongs to living matter—becoming in a measure inorganic, and this now operates as a special integument or membrane that keeps off the stimuli, i.e. makes it impossible for the energies of the outer world to act with more than a fragment of their intensity on the layers immediately below which have preserved their vitality. These are now able under cover of the protecting layer to devote themselves to the reception of those stimulus masses that have been let through. But the outer layer has by its own death secured all the deeper layers from a like fate—at least so long as no stimuli present themselves of such strength as to break through the protective barrier. For the living organism protection against stimuli is almost a more important task than reception of stimuli; the protective barrier is equipped with its own store of energy and must above all endeavor to protect the special forms of energytransformations going on within itself from the equalizing and therefore destructive influence of the enormous energies at work in the outer world.10
Or, as Ray Brassier put it concisely, "the separation between organic interiority and inorganic exteriority is won at the cost of part of the primitive organism itself, and it is this death that gives rise to the protective shield. Thus, individuated organic life is won at the cost of this aboriginal death whereby the organism first becomes capable of separating itself from the inorganic outside."11
Disgust arises when the dead barrier is broken and the organic inte riority penetrates the surface. One should be clear here and draw all the consequences; the ultimate object of disgust is ''bare life itself, ''life deprived of the protective barrier. Life ''is ''a disgusting thing, a sleazy object moving out of itself, secreting humid warmth, crawling, stinking, growing. The birth itself of a human being is an ''Alien-''like event: a monstrous event of something erupting out from the inside of a body, a big, stupid, hairy body crawling around. Spirit is above life; it is death in life, an attempt to escape life while alive, like the Freudian death drive that is not life but pure repetitive movement.
