Relating to a Conversation...

Contrary to the standard idealist argument that conceives ugliness as the defective mode of beauty, as its distortion, one should assert the essential primacy of ugliness: it is beauty that is a kind of defense against the Ugly in its repulsive existence -- or, rather, against existence itself, since, as we shall see, what is ugly is ultimately the brutal fact of existence (of the real) as such.

The ugly object is an object that is in the wrong place, that "shouldn't be there." This does not mean that the ugly object is no longer ugly the moment we relocate it to its proper place; rather, an ugly object is "in itself" out of place, on account of the distorted balance bertween its "representations" (the symbolic features we perceive) and "existence" -- being ugly, out of place, is the excess of existence over representation. Ugliness thus . . . designates an object that is in a way "larger than itself," whose existence is larger than its representation. The presupposition of of ugliness is therefore a gap between an object and the space it occupies, or -- to make the point in a different way -- between the outside (surface) of an object (captured by its representation) and its inside (formless stuff). In the case of beauty, we have in both cases a perfect symmetry, while in the case of ugliness, the inside of an object somehow is (appears) larger than the outside of its surface representation (like the uncanny buildings in Kafka's novels that, once we enter them, appear much more voluminous than they seemed from the outside).

Another way to put it is to say that what makes an object "out of place" is that it is too close to me, like the Statue of Liberty in Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent: seen from extreme proximity, it loses its dignity and acquires disgusting, obscene features. In courtly love, the figure of die Frau-Welt obeys the same logic: she appears beautiful from the proper distance, but the moment the poet or the knight serving her approaches too close to her, she turns to him her other, reverse side, and what was previously the semblance of a fascinating beauty is suddenly revealed as putrefied flesh, crawling snakes and worms, the disgusting substance of life, as in the films of David Lynch where an object turns disgusting when the camera gets too close to it. The gap that separates beauty from ugliness is thus the very gap that separates reality from the Real: the kernel of reality is horror, horror of the Real, and what constitutes reality is the minimum of idealization the subject needs in order to be able to sustain the Real. Another way to make the same point is to define ugliness as the excess of stuff that penetrates through the pores in the surface, from science fiction aliens whose liquid materiality overwhelms their surface (see the evil alien in Terminator 2 or, of course, the alien from Alien itself), to the films of David Lynch where (exemplarily in Dune) the raw flesh beneath the surface threatens to emerge. . . .

In the case of beauty, the outside of a thing -- its surface -- encloses, overcoats, its interior; whereas in the case of ugliness, this proportionality is perturbed by the excess of the interior stuff that threatens to overwhelm and engulf the subject. This opens up the space for the opposite excess, that of something that is not there and should be, like the missing nose that makes the "phantom of the opera" so ugly. Here, we have the case of a lack that also functions as an excess, the excess of a ghostly, spectral materiality in search of a "proper," "real" body. Ghosts and vampires are shadowy forms in desperate search for the life substance (blood) in us, actually existing humans. The excess of stuff is thus strictly correlative to the excess of spectral form: it was already [Gilles] Deleuze who pointed out how the "place without an object" is sustained by an "object lacking its proper place" -- it is not possible for the two lacks to cancel each other out. What we have here are the two aspects of the real: existence without properties and an object with properties without existence. [my emphasis] Suffice it to recall the well-known scene from Terry Gilliam's Brazil in which, in a high-class restaurant, the waiter recommends to his customers the best offers from the daily menu ("Today, our tournedo is really special!"), yet what the customers get on making their choice is a dazzling color photo of the meal on a stand above the plate, and on the plate itself, a loathsome excremental lump: this split between the image of the food and the real of its formless remainder exemplifies perfectly the two modes of ugliness, the ghostlike substanceless appearance ("representation without existence") and the raw stuff of the real ("existence without appearance").

One should not underestimate the weight of this gap that separates the "ugly" Real from the fully formed objects in "reality": [Jacques] Lacan's fundamental thesis is that a minimum of "idealization", of the interposition of fantasmatic frame by means of which the subject assumes a distance vis-a-vis the Real, is constitutive of our sense of reality -- "reality" occurs insofar as it is not (it does not come) "too close." Today, one likes to evoke our loss of contact with the authentic reality of external (as well as our internal) nature -- we are so accustomed to aseptic, pasteurized milk that milk direct from a cow is unpleasant. This "true milk" necessarily strikes us as too dense, disgusting, undrinkable . . .

-- Slavoj Zizek, 'The Abyss of Freedom', p. 21-23