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

1 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 Moustafa Safouan, Pleasure and Being: Hedonism From a Psychoanalytic Point of View, Trans. Martin Thom, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 21-32.

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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

greatest philosophical minds of all ages grappled with – ‘What is consciousness?’), Lacan

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).

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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

direction,” in what Lacan calls the imaginary.9

6 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), 180-185.9 Lacan, “The Mirror Stage,” 2, 6.

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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.”

The same insight is affirmed by contemporary philosophy. In The Rome Discourse,

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.

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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 non-

differentiation, 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

“the resistances that maintain the repressions,”18 and, in the particular case of one’s

14 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 potentiality-of-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,” 304.18 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 77.

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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

calls “the erotic life of mankind.”22 Her remote and self-absorbed manner elicits the

19 Lacan, “Subversion of the Subject,” 322.20 Lacan, Seminar VII, 145.21 Lacan, Seminar VII, 151-152. One is reminded of Heidegger’s claim in his Letter on Humanism that “man is a neighbor of Being.”22 Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction (1914),” in A General Selection from the

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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

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 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

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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

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

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 Lacan, Seminar VII, 110-111.

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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

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

31 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, 112.34 Lacan, Seminar VII, 210-211.

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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.

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

35 The Marquis de Sade, Juliette, Trans. Austryn Wainhouse, (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 766-767.36 Sade, Juliette, 769.37 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.

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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

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.

38 Sade, Juliette, 770, 773-775.39 Sade, Juliette, 772; quoted in Lacan, Seminar VII, 211.40 Lacan, Seminar VII, 216-217.41 Ibid., 238-239.

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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

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

42 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), 197.45 Lacan, Seminar VII, 137-138.

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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

‘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

46 Ibid., 298.47 Ibid., 296-297.48 A verse by Paul Eluard quoted by Lacan. Seminar VII, 154.

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one’s present. In other words, the impossibility and the necessity of existence.

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Wakefield, J. Derek Jarman's Angelic Conversations. Film Philosophy Journal. Vol 15, No 1. 2011.

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