Avello Publishing Journal Vol. 1, No. 1. 2011
Lacan and the Concept of the Beautiful
Filip Kovacevic,
University of Montenegro
In this article, I examine the relationship between the form of the Beautiful
and the nascent human subjectivity from the standpoint of Lacanian psychoanalysis.
Supported by references ranging from Kant and Sade to Heidegger and Adorno, I argue
that the Beautiful has an indispensable role to play in the formation of subjectivity.
Psychoanalysis made philosophy re-consider the world it had rejected. The world of the
unintentional, the contingent, the minute, and the particular, which philosophy had
stripped of meaning and importance, had stripped of rank, and in this way kept out of the
brightly illuminated hall in which it has feasted on the universal, the permanent, and the
intentional for centuries. But there are things light does not reveal. Only from darkness
come its limits and its beyond.
Freud’s thought encompasses this darkness, because it gives voice to its despised
children. It is exactly the “refuse of the physical world” that speaks through it.1 Or, as
Lacan would later affirm, the Vorstellungen are structured in the manner of signifiers.2
The account offered in this article is based on Lacan’s work prior to the 1960s. For a
discussion of similar issues, which incorporates Lacan’s later work as well as the recent theoretical
formulations of Jacques-Alain Miller, see Ellie Ragland, Psychoanalysis and Courtly Love, Arthuriana,
(1995), Vol. 5, 1-20.
See Theodor W. Adorno The Actuality of Philosophy, Telos (1976/1931), 126-129.
2
One can think of the Vorstellungen as denoting the imaginary and the symbolic
representations of objects governed by the laws of metonymy and metaphor. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of
Psychoanalysis: Seminar VII, 1959-1960, Trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 60- 61. See also
1
1
Hence the fragmentary memory of a yellow-striped butterfly provided a clue to the most
significant aspects of the Wolf Man’s neurosis, as Freud says, to his “weightiest secrets.”3
Likewise, the “unobtrusive” action of a young woman to position herself several times a
day by the stain on the tablecloth of her dining room table and then call her maid to come
in spoke the original situation that her neurotic symptom was attempting to “put right.” 4
Her husband was impotent on the night of their wedding and, to avoid the embarrassment
at the gaze of the maid, he spilled a bottle of red ink (creating a stain!) in the place he
expected the maid to look to find the young woman’s virginal blood. In psychoanalytic
terms, the woman’s reaction to her husband’s deceptive action, which was played out in
terms of the described symptomatic act (no matter how insignificant it seemed compared
to other daily activities), articulated her unconscious demand, the demand that the Other
not be lacking (in terms of impotence), that she be an object of the Other’s tangible
(a)rousing love, and, as such, it constituted the ontological core of her neurosis.5
This article takes its cue from such psychoanalytic attentiveness to the minute and
the particular. It was inspired by a single sentence, a sentence by Lacan in the work that
marked his first significant encounter with the psychoanalytic Establishment. In speaking
of the constitution of subjectivity (and thus involving himself with the question that the
Moustafa Safouan, Pleasure and Being: Hedonism From a Psychoanalytic Point of View, Trans. Martin
Thom, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 21-32.
3
Sigmund Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (1918)” in Three Case Histories,
Ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier Books, 1963), 281. Considering that the recollection of this butterfly
was more important for the course of his neurosis than his dream of wolves, I think that the Wolf Man
should be renamed the Butterfly Man.
4
Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1915-1916), Trans. James
Strachey (New York: Norton, 1966), 323-327.
5
Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and Dialectic of Desire” in Ecrits: A
Selection, Trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 321. It is interesting to note that even her
husband’s action contained neurotic tendencies: he also attempted to fix the lacking Other (particularly the
Other seen in terms of the standards of a patriarchal culture).
2
greatest philosophical minds of all ages grappled with – ‘What is consciousness?’), Lacan
refers, as if in passing, to “the question of the meaning of beauty as both formative and
erotogenic.”6 Beauty (or the beautiful) is not mentioned again, but the factors surrounding
the formation of subjectivity are delineated, and my claim is that it is in connection with
them that one can expect to find the clues about the nature of the beautiful itself.
The principal carrier of the formative process is described by Lacan as being the
Gestalt. It is the self-enclosed totality, “the total form of the body” that the emerging
subjectivity perceives in the mirage of the mirror-image.7 This Gestalt exists as external
to subjectivity and therefore creates a distance, a space that makes possible the dynamic
of the subjectivity’s unfolding. It elicits the movement from the non-differentiated to the
differentiated, because it provides the image of the ultimate difference. In a dialectical
process resembling that described by Plato, what-is-not reaches for what-is in order to
become it, in order to really come to be.8 But that what-is (that which is taken as what-is)
is primarily what-is-not; the subjectivity being constituted essentially misrecognizes the
what-is-not nature of Gestalt: it remains forever oriented or fixed in the “fictional
Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in
Psychoanalytic Experience (1949)” in Ecrits, 3. This focus on one sentence brings to mind political
philosopher Leo Strauss’s concept of the esoteric writing. Strauss, whose work was mentioned by Lacan in
Seminar I (p.260), argues that there could exist two types of writing within the same philosophical treatise:
the exoteric and the esoteric. The former is socially approved, or at least has a useful societal function: it
does not question the values and principles the society is built on. The latter is addressed only to the
‘initiates.’ It does not become apparent until after a persistent questioning of the text. The understanding of
its meaning requires a prolonged, committed study and acute attention to details, such as sentences that
appear only once or that contradict all that the author had written previously about the subject. These may
not be the manifestations of “a blunder,” but may be presented in this way in order to slip unnoticed by the
gaze of those who read the work superficially, and also by the possible censors, the enforcers of social
values. (see his books The Art of Writing (1945) and “On a Forgotten Kind of Writing” in What is Political
Philosophy and Other Essays (1958). One wonders whether Lacan’s work should not be classified as
esoteric under the definition given here.
7
Lacan, “The Mirror Stage,” 2.
8
See Republic, Trans. Grube & Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), 180-185.
6
3
direction,” in what Lacan calls the imaginary.9
This understanding of Gestalt is later incorporated by Lacan into his notion of das
Ding, which is examined in depth in Seminar VII.10 Das Ding is conceptualized as a
“fundamental hallucination” which serves as an indispensible reference in structuring the
subject’s relation to the Umwelt, to the external world.11 It occupies the place of a
primordial object to which the subject is irresistibly drawn, but which, ontologically, it
cannot attain, because it is located beyond the reach of the primary process of psychic
functioning, the pleasure principle. In fact, it is exactly insofar as there exists a distance
between the subject and das Ding that the pleasure principle can function, it is only in
this detour that the chains of the Vorstellungen it governs evoke sensations of
satisfaction. Beyond it, there is das Ding and there is pain.12
As pointed out by Freud in Beyond The Pleasure Principle, this field of pain, the
field holding out the lure of the impossible, of the fusion with das Ding, is the original
“starting point” of all that is living, the source from which the life drives emanate. 13 It is
the ancient Heimat to which they strive to return, the goal of their pursuit being that
which reveals that their future is actually their past, that their dynamic is actually the
product of inertia which marks their essence. Their ceaseless Fort is nothing else but an
immobile Da: their guarding of life no more than a masquerade for their proper function
as “the myrmidons of death.”
Lacan, “The Mirror Stage,” 2, 6.
10 It is also worth noting that 'for Derrida, following Levinas, traces, unlike Hegelian “forms” (Gestalten),
are not visible' (Crockett & Malabou 2010: 22).
11
Lacan, Seminar VII (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis), 52-53.
12
Ibid., 57-59, 63.
13
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Trans. James Strachey (New York: Bantam
Books, 1959), 70-72.
9
4
The same insight is affirmed by contemporary philosophy. In The Rome Discourse,
Lacan quotes Heidegger: death is seen as that “possibility which is one’s ownmost,
unconditional, unsupersedable, certain and as such indeterminable.”14 Death is an axis
around which one’s life is organized, in relation to which one perceives and is conscious
of the outer and inner world. Life exists in a detour, in a meandering path, from death15 to
death. Hence it is death that occupies the space that is das Ding, but death can manifest
itself in several guises.
It can be dressed up as the Mother.16 Even on a superficial level, which unfortunately
represents the limit beyond which some schools of psychoanalysis never advanced, the
union with the Mother connotes the world of disappearance, of primordial nondifferentiation, of the nature that is akin to the inanimate. Only in the distance from the
maternal object can one’s separate life path be developed, only in this margin do the
networks of the Vorstellungen acquire an opening necessary to cover over the real, to
“escape” from the real.17
This escape is facilitated by particular defenses articulated by the principle that
organizes the play of the Vorstellungen, the pleasure principle. Freud refers to them as
Jacques Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” in
Ecrits, 103. See also Heidegger’s exposition on the being-toward-death in Being and Time, Trans. Joan
Stambaugh, (New York: SUNY Press, 1996), 219-246. Realizing that the essential feature of one’s Da-sein
is being-toward-death provides an access to authentic existence, because death marks out the radical
individuality and particularity of one as Da-sein. In this way, Da-sein is enabled to break out of the
enchanted circle of the deceitful and superficial they (das man). Or in Heidegger’s words, “When Da-sein
is imminent to itself as this possibility [death], it is completely thrown back upon its ownmost potentialityof-being. Thus imminent to itself, all relations to other Da-sein are dissolved in it.” Ibid., 232.
15 The A.O Prickard translation of Longinus' On the Sublime offers us: 'Only for us, when we are
miserable, a harbour from our ills is reserved in death; the gods, as he draws them, are everlasting, not
in their unhappiness' (1906: 17). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
16
Lacan, Seminar VII, 67-68, 106; “Subversion of the Subject,” 311.
17
Lacan, “Subversion of the Subject,” 304.
14
5
“the resistances that maintain the repressions,”18 and, in the particular case of one’s
relation to the Mother, the defense manifests itself in terms of the prohibition of incest.
Lacan conceptualizes desire as a defense against certain level of excitation (jouissance)
being reached,19 and hence the desire for incest exists precisely insofar as it is barred
from attaining the desired object.
The same fundamental relation between the subject and das Ding is also revealed by
the eleventh and twelfth century phenomenon of Courtly Love.20 If one examines the
technique used by the troubadour poets in singing praises to their Lady, one will notice in
it the presence of a certain barely visible, but still structurally marked gap that forever
divides the two parties. Something stands between the poet and his Love: she is his “good
neighbor,” but never his bedroom companion. Rather than reflecting the particular
circumstances of the Lady’s life, such as the fact that she lived next door to the poet or
that she was already married, this neighborly relation, which is destined to fall short of
fulfillment, cannot but refer to an ontological condition.21 The Lady is always beyond
reach exactly because she takes up the place of das Ding. She is located in the realm of
the beyond-of-life: the sole type of love for her that can generate pleasure is amor
interruptus. Hence she must remain inaccessible: (once again) it is insofar as she is
inaccessible that she is an object of desire. 'Cross-dressing unhinges certainties and
disturbs the familiar' (Wakefield 2011: 274).
Freud himself stresses the significance of the figure such as the Lady for what he
18
19
20
21
Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 77.
Lacan, “Subversion of the Subject,” 322.
Lacan, Seminar VII, 145.
Lacan, Seminar VII, 151-152. One is reminded of Heidegger’s claim in his Letter on
Humanism that “man is a neighbor of Being.”
6
calls “the erotic life of mankind.”22 Her remote and self-absorbed manner elicits the
recollection of the early period of infantile development, of the stage of the narcissistic
indifference to the outside world: it brings one back into the time of the closest encounter
with das Ding. Freud’s account seems to suggest that there is a point at a specific
distance from das Ding that, once the subject positions himself in it, calls forth the most
intense sensation of pleasure, which in its most profound moment turns into pain.23 This
point is at the very limit of the functioning of the pleasure principle: it is permeated by
the traces of that which lurks in (or lures from) the beyond. It is to this point that the
recognition by the Lady carries the enamoured troubadour, it is from this point that the
beautiful speaks.
But the speech of beauty is in part that of emptiness. It speaks of its various
imaginary guises that cover over the fact that das Ding as such is empty, that the Other
has no Other.24 It is precisely in a specific relation to this emptiness that that which is art,
the activity that concerns itself with the creation of the beautiful,25 becomes a component
of human endeavor. Lacan refers to this relation as one of Verdrangung, of repression.26
Art represses das Ding in the sense that it lures the subject into believing that das
Ding is not there where it is, but is there where it is not. It reveals the presence of das
Ding in its absence through the anamorphotic nature of its activity. 27 Art is able to make
Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction (1914),” in A General Selection from the
Works of Sigmund Freud, Ed. John Rickman (New York: Doubleday, 1957), 113.
23
Does this not confirm the truth of the ancient saying – res severa verum gaudium (true
delight is austere)?
24
Lacan, “Subversion of the Subject,” 310-311.
25
Lacan calls artists “the creators of beauty.” Seminar VII, 238.
26
Ibid., 130-131.
27
An object marked by anamorphosis is that which yields a coherent image (only) if it is
22
7
appear, in the realm governed by the pleasure principle, that which is excluded from it,
that which by its nature is an eternal “outside.” The objects in which art is embodied, the
products of its activity, are far from being the imitations or reflections of the external
world.28 They are in fact masked amplifiers: they transmit the speech of das Ding.
That art speaks of the primordial fantasy is also hinted at by Freud.29 What is
involved in the artistic activity is not a simple undirected shaping of the matter, but an
essential raising of the given material onto a higher ontological plane. Freud contends
that in this way a “new kind of reality” is created. It is a reality infused with displaced
pleasure, with the satisfaction of the drive in an object, which differs from the one that
the drive originally aims at.30 Art works therefore constitute the reality of sublimation.
Something takes the place of something else, and in light of that comes to share (or as
Plato would say, participate) in the same level of being, even if imperfectly and also
deceptively because it hides the nothing.
The deception is revealed when the object itself speaks from the position in which
the sublimatory activity has placed it. It becomes clear that it has the nothing as its core,
that it is articulated around that which is the hole. The artist and his or her audience prefer
not to hear the object’s voice, because it rends the veil. In Freud’s parlance, they repress
approached from a specific perspective. In other words, it enables the birth of a something out of an
(apparent) nothing. Lacan, Seminar VII, 135. Here one is reminded of the concluding paragraphs of
Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology, Trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row,
1977), especially the following sentence: “Could it be that revealing lays claim to the arts most primally, so
that they for their part may expressly foster the growth of the saving power, may awaken and found anew
our look into that which grants [that is, Being or das Ding] and our trust in it?”, 35.
28
Lacan, Seminar VII, 141.
29
Sigmund Freud, “Formulations Regarding the Two Principles of Mental Functioning
(1911)” in A General Selection from the Works of Sigmund Freud, Ed. John Rickman (New York:
Doubleday, 1957), 44.
30
8
Lacan, Seminar VII, 110-111.
what they know that they know, which is the knowledge that their desire is in fact a
desire for the nothing that is not nothing, the nothing that is the something constituted by
nothingness. They would rather believe in the unbroken, complete and wholesome nature
of the object of their desire, as it is presented in the products of their sublimations.
This is why the troubadour poet refuses to “blow [his Lady’s] trumpet.”31 He refuses
to be close to her thing, to encounter her thing in its nakedness, because, as the verse of
the troubadour poem affirms, “it is not fitting that he who puts his mouth to that pipe be a
favorite.”32 In other words, once one has to recognize that the object of one’s
sublimation, the object one saw as being capable of representing a higher realm of being,
the realm of das Ding,33 does not possess the harmonious and lack-less features one
sought to find in it, one can sublimate no more in relation to that object, one can be an
artist, the favorite of the Muses, no more. Of course this does not mean that the link
between this object and das Ding dissolves: on the contrary, it is even more strongly
confirmed, but the nature of the link is revealed to be different from the kind one hoped
and wanted to find and get to know better.
However, this (un)truth of sublimation is not without its watchmen, without the
guardians of its limit. The foremost among them, the one that overlooks and protects its
outer edges, is the beautiful. In order to chart the coordinates that define the location of
the beautiful in the psychic field, Lacan refers to Sade, and specifically to the
See the troubadour Arnaud Daniel’s poem. Lacan, Seminar VII, 162. As Lacan points out,
the Lady is in effect saying to her devoted troubadour: “Just blow in that for a while and see if your
sublimation holds up,” 215.
32
Quoted in Lacan, Seminar VII, 162.
33
Lacan, Seminar VII, 112.
31
9
philosophical system of one of Sade’s characters from Juliette, the Pope Pius VI.34
It turns out that Pius VI was also concerned with sketching out the nature of a
relationship between something that is outside the signifying chain of meaning, and yet
establishes its structure, and the creatures who are shaped by that original act of creation
and have no choice but to live within such an always-already-there structure.35 He calls
that which is in the beyond ‘Nature,’ and its conceptualization resembles in many ways
Freud’s Ding. Nature, as the ultimate creator, establishes the laws of the animate and
inanimate realms by setting in motion the self-enclosed cycle of generation and
corruption of matter, the perpetual flux that fuses life and death in a framework
reminiscent of a serpent biting its own tail. It is necessary for Nature to assume the role of
creating ex nihilo only once, after which it can withdraw, considering that the structure of
the established mechanism enables it to function on its own.36 As Lacan points out, Being
therefore is not manifested in being, but the two must be thought of as ontologically
distinct.37 Nature, Being, das Ding, or God do not concern themselves with the affairs of
their creations, not at least until the possibility of creating everything anew emerges once
again. But another creation ex nihilo necessitates the complete annihilation of the order of
beings and laws which is already in existence. It requires the second death.
34
35
Lacan, Seminar VII, 210-211.
The Marquis de Sade, Juliette, Trans. Austryn Wainhouse, (New York: Grove Press, 1968),
766-767.
36
37
Sade, Juliette, 769.
Lacan, Seminar VII, 214. Heidegger refers to the same point to show that neither the claims
of philosophical realism nor those of philosophical idealism are entirely right (or entirely wrong). The
world is not separate from consciousness, but neither is it created by consciousness. Beings cannot explain
being, but neither can being give birth to beings. But for Heidegger (as opposed to Kant, Sade, Freud and
Lacan), the two are equally primordial; they come into being together; they are present in the relation of
being-in. (Being and Time), 124.
10
According to Pius VI, there are two kinds of death. The first death, the one that is
denoted as death by ordinary discourse, is actually no death at all: it simply leads to a
transformation of matter from one shape to another, so that what was once an animal
body becomes a flower plant, a fruit tree, or a worm nest. This kind of death is in reality
more life-enabling than life-threatening.38 The second death, however, is quite different.
It goes to the heart of the functioning of the cycle of generation and corruption, and aims
at stopping its recurrence. It seeks to disable “the regeneration resultant from the corpses
we bury,”39 and in this way rupture the existing laws of the animate and inanimate
realms. It hands back to Nature the possibility of exercising its “primary power;” it lets it
engage in an act of original creation once again. The field of the second death is therefore
the field of radical desire, of the impossible raising of oneself to the godlike position, of
one’s becoming what is unthinkable that one can ever be, the rescuer of Nature (that is, of
das Ding) itself.
It is at the entrance into this space of absolute annihilation, at the very limit of the
Hades, that a form, a presence, surges forth: the knife falls from the murderer’s hand, the
glass filled with poison is spilled, the sleeping figure awakes from a dream of destruction.
This moment marks the appearance of the beautiful, the appearance of the appearance,
which holds one back.40 It is not that one stops in one’s tracks with the will to move as if
spent, because of what this beautiful form is in itself, but because one glimpses
something that is behind it, something that gives it support, from which it has separated
38
39
40
11
Sade, Juliette, 770, 773-775.
Sade, Juliette, 772; quoted in Lacan, Seminar VII, 211.
Lacan, Seminar VII, 216-217.
in the final bid to prevent this planned plunge into death.41 It might even be said that in
the beautiful there is embodied the desire of the evil, the evil protecting itself from itself,
shielding itself from its own repetition compulsion.
One of the faces of the beautiful is that of the Sadean fantasm. This fantasm is given
birth by the suffering object, by that victim of unspeakable tortures and never-ending
torment. Yet it represents the victim’s “indestructible double,” something that is
impervious to all pain: bizarre atrocities devised by Sade’s libertines cannot affect it. 42 It
is exactly this inability to be affected, this indifference to the state of the object giving
rise to it, that constitutes the essence of the beautiful. One is reminded of Kant’s
definition of the beautiful as that which elicits a “contemplative” stand, an attitude of the
imaginary that manifests explicit unconcern with the consequences that the actual
existence of the object may have on the way reality is structured. 43 The real lurks behind
the beautiful, but it cannot touch it.44
It is not the case either that the beautiful can be touched by the one perceiving it, the
one that is on the way to das Ding. But the beautiful stops this traveler: what the
understanding of its message provides is none other than a source of jouissance. In fact,
one of the fundamental conclusions Lacan draws from the Freudian discovery is that all
satisfaction first takes place in the realm of the imaginary, it is hallucinated, it represents
41
42
Ibid., 238-239.
Ibid., 261; see also Octavio Paz, The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism, Trans. Helen Lane,
(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995), 23-24.
43
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, Trans. James C. Meredith, (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1911), $2, $4.
44
Lacan, Seminar VII, 239. On the subject of the autonomy of the beautiful, see Friedrich
Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Trans. Elizabeth Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby,
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), 197.
12
a psychic Besetzung into something that proved to be capable of pleasing in the past. It is
only after this initial surge of pleasure that an effort is made to connect this experience –
for the sake of its continuation – with something that approximates the hallucinated (the
pleasurable) object out there in the external world.45 In this respect, the beautiful can be
seen as exactly that site toward which the imaginary is oriented, the site revealing both
the limit of the most intense jouissance and the production of fantasms that constitute it.46
The beautiful is therefore the space of a peculiar generative process. Any object that
enters it becomes an inscription, a cut around which a network of the Vorstellungen will
be established. Transformed in this way, the object is incorporated into the functioning of
the pleasure principle: it comes to be permeated with jouissance at the same time as its
substance undergoes a qualitative modification. In order to speak from the position of the
beautiful, the object has to become a form, a semblance, an Erscheinen. Its content,
whatever it might have been before being captured by the irresistible pull of this field of
the limit, is unimportant. Heidegger has shown, for instance, that the worn-out shoes Van
Gogh painted mirror that which is beautiful as convincingly as a statue of a Greek god, or
even Titian’s ‘Birth of Venus.’47 The only thing that matters then is that the possibility of
the object’s further metamorphosis is taken away: its new identity - represented by a
signifier - makes it die for the second time. It becomes forever “joined to a mouth that is
closed.”48It is at this point that one can perceive the connection between the formative
and the pleasurable aspects of the beautiful hinted at by Lacan in that sentence from the
45
46
47
48
13
Lacan, Seminar VII, 137-138.
Ibid., 298.
Ibid., 296-297.
A verse by Paul Eluard quoted by Lacan. Seminar VII, 154.
‘Mirror Stage,’ which guided the desire behind the creative endeavour of this entire
account. One can therefore say that the beautiful is none else than a constituting field,
which creates forms, due to its nearness to that “closed mouth,” to that silent, ultimate
shaper, and, which pleases for precisely the opposite reason: it makes distance from it
possible. In the beautiful, one uncovers one’s future as one’s past in the non-existence of
one’s present. In other words, the impossibility and the necessity of existence.
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