Saving Beauty by Han Byung-Chul; Steuer Daniel;

Saving Beauty by Han Byung-Chul; Steuer Daniel;

Author:Han, Byung-Chul; Steuer, Daniel;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 2017-11-15T00:00:00+00:00


The child is in raptures over the infinity of the empty sky. Torn out of its inwardness, it is shifted to an a-topical outside and thus moved beyond boundaries and emptied. The disaster proves to be a formula for happiness.

The aesthetics of disaster contradicts an aesthetics of pleasure where the object of the subject’s enjoyment is the subject itself. The aesthetics of disaster is an aesthetics of the event. Inconspicuous events such as white dust swirled up by a drop of rain, snow falling silently in the morning twilight, or a scent coming off a rock in the summer heat, all these can also be disastrous events, namely events of emptiness which empty the ego, de-subjectify it and take away its inwardness, thus making it happy. These events are beautiful because they expropriate the ego. A disaster means the death of the autoerotic subject which clings to itself.

Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal contains the poem Hymne à la Beauté. The stars (des astres) out of which beauty rises, Baudelaire rhymes with disaster (désastres). Beauty is a disaster which upsets the order of the stars. It is the torch (flambeau) which the butterfly approaches and in which it burns to death. Flambeau rhymes with tombeau (grave). Beauty (beau) is inscribed into the flambeau as well as the tombeau. The negativity of disaster, of what is deadly, is a moment of beauty.

Beauty, Rainer Maria Rilke’s first Duino Elegy says, ‘is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure’.10 The negativity of terror forms the matrix, the deep layer of beauty. What is beautiful is the still just bearable unbearable, or the unbearable that has been made bearable. It shields us from the terrible. But, at the same time, the terrible can be seen through the beautiful. This is what constitutes the ambivalence of beauty. Beauty is not an image, but a shield.

For Adorno, too, the negativity of terror is essential to beauty. Beauty is the form which inscribes itself into the formless, into what is undifferentiated: ‘Of that on which it was active the aesthetically forming spirit allowed entry only to what resembled it, what it understood, or what it hoped to make like itself. This was a process of formalization; …’11 The beautiful sets itself off from the formless, from the terrible, from undifferentiated totalities, by positing forms, i.e. differences: ‘The image of beauty as that of a single and differentiated something originates with the emancipation from the fear of the overpowering wholeness and undifferentiatedness of nature.’12 However, the semblance of beauty does not banish the terrible altogether. It does not fully succeed in ‘making itself impervious to the immediately existent’, to the formless.13 Beauty ‘digs in on the perimeter like the enemy in front of the walls of the beleaguered city and starves it out’.14

The semblance of beauty is fragile and threatened; it is ‘progressively destroyed’15 by its other, the terrible: ‘The reduction that beauty imposes on the terrifying, over and out of which



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