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The sublime and the ugliness in Lacan: focusing on the seminar VII
The Journal of Aesthetics and Science of Art
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In the aesthetic traditions, the ugliness has often been either ignored as the category without the aesthetic quality or undervalued as the negative one, that is, as the absence of beauty. But, in this paper, I tried to find a clue to reappraise the ugliness through the theory of Jacques Lacan. By infering the category of the ugliness from Lacan’s theory, I suggest that the ugliness implies a new aesthetics, which has an ethical attitude without repression of the sensible and the material. Topologically, the ugliness is located in the same place as ‘the end of analysis’. At the end of analysis, ‘identification with the symptom’ can be analogous to the ugliness because it is an experience of the reduction to an object, which is both nothingness and the sensible, that is ‘object a’. As long as the end of analysis means to surmount the neurosis, we should study what the neurosis is. In the same manner, we can put the prior step to the ugliness in the logical sense. It is the sublime. Thus, I presented a comparative study between the sublime and the ugliness. Actually, Lacan, especially in his seminar VII and VIII, alluded to this comparison by his comments to two tragic plays, “Antigene” by Sophocles and The Hostage by Paul Claudel. The sublime and the ugliness have a * Ph. D. candidate and lecturer of Hongik University common characters in that they cause negative sentiment unlike the beauty. But the latter has a different function from the former. While the sublime is apt to sacrifice the sensible (the pathological objects, in Kant’s terminology) in order to reveal the transcendental quality of the desire, then to run into a danger to keep the fantastic faith to the existence of Other, the ugliness is to relatively free from such a danger for it has a ‘indifferent’ attitude to the objects without sacrificing them. Lacan’s concept of ‘sublimation’ contains both the sublime and ugliness. Though it can be overlapped with the sublime in many aspects, it also leaves another character which remains out of the sublime. It is the satisfaction of drive (pulsion). The aim of the drive is not to reach its object in the material aspect, but to maintain its turning movement itself. It makes a kind of indifferent relationship with the sensible objects. In effect, while the sublime is to express the transcendency of desire, the ugliness is to express the ‘reality’ of drive. In addition to two plays mentioned above, Lacan makes some comments and criticisms on several texts, such as Kant’s The Critic of the Practical Reason, Sade’s novels, and James Joyce’s novels. He warns a potential danger that Kant’s morality turns into Sade’s perversion. Lacan sees it in Kant's will to sacrifice all ‘pathological’ objects in the field of morality, to avoid to sensual ‘jouissance’, the other side of the law, and to eschew the encounter with the Real. Then, Lacan sees an image of the sublime in Antigone, the heroine of “Antigone”, and the one of the ugliness in Sygne, the heroine of The Hostage. Unlike Antigone, whose sublime death protects her own desire in its invisibility, Sygne reveals the impossibility of the satisfaction of desire, and turns into the image of ugliness with her convulsion of the face. She turns into the object a. Sygne’s image shows us an example of ugliness; Joyce’s novels show us a new way of creation with ugliness. Lacan names Joyce’s writing ‘sinthome’. Mixture of the fantasy and the symptom, sinthome indicates how the category of ugliness makes the artistic creation possible.
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