The Female Body in the Looking-Glass by Sliwinska Basia;

Author:Sliwinska, Basia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786720085
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2016-03-16T16:00:00+00:00

In a series of articles entitled ‘The ugly’84 Mark Cousins discusses the negativity attached to ugliness since antiquity. The dichotomy between beauty and ugliness relies not only on a simple negation but also on the mode of representing the truth. The latter is associated with distortion, error, contingency and, as mentioned before, with individuality, and Cousins remarks: ‘At a logical level, ugliness is the negation of beauty; at the level of perception, ugliness is the opposite of beauty.’85 It could even be said that it functions on an utterly different level. Since antiquity, what was beautiful needed to embody ideas of totality and completeness. Therefore, the ugly referred to everything that resisted wholeness. Thus, it can be regarded as a certain type of beauty that does not necessarily deform it, but, on the contrary, strengthens it.

Cousins argues that the inquiry into ugliness ought to be detached from aesthetics, which describes beauty and the subject’s relation to it. Ugliness is not an aesthetic experience and cannot be preferred or hierarchised as a certain set of attributes. It functions as a space between the subject and the object. Ugliness constitutes the object that is in a wrong place, contaminated and stained. Cousins indicates that ‘[a]‌n economy of dirt is therefore one way of opening up the question of ugliness’.86 It needs to be purified but not aesthetically, as the stain is not ugly and does not require beautification, but it is out of place and thus needs relocation. The ugly can spread and contaminate what is around it, crossing boundaries and flooding the space where it should not appear. In a sense, it demonstrates it is larger than its representation and can consume the entire zone between the subject and itself. Cousins suggests that ‘[c]ontemporary aesthetics has established the beauty of ugliness, reclaiming for art everything in human experience that artistic representation had previously rejected’.87

Drawing on the Freudian concept of reality as a hindrance to desire, Cousins frames desire as both capturing and rejecting pleasure. The ugly object constitutes an obstacle; it should not be there.88 This obstacle – the ugly – becomes a punitive force, threatening the subject as an excess, not lack of beauty. The only way out is, as Cousins suggests, is for the subject to disappear. Therefore, ugliness implies not looking, but turning away. At the same time, ugliness connotes pleasure. According to Cousins: ‘It is an account of the ecstasy which the unconscious enjoys in all that is dirty, horrifying and disgusting – that is, of ugliness as an unbearable pleasure.’89 This pleasure is embodied by the figure of Medusa.

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