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These lil nigga funny
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That art speaks of the primordial fantasy is also hinted at by Freud. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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.
The beautiful emphasizes procreation and regeneration.
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. 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. The real lurks behind the beautiful, but it cannot touch it.
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. In this respect, the beautiful can be 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.
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.’ 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.”It 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 one’s present. In other words, the impossibility and the necessity of existence.
This is one of Lacan’s descriptions of love. The ‘reacher’ isn’t looking to find a love object, only a fruit or a flower, and then they happen upon another hand, also reaching. This conception of love occurs within the realm of the Real, rather than the Imaginary or Symbolic.
Does a flower really have beauty? Does a fruit really have beauty? No: they have only color and form. And existence. Beauty is the name of something that doesn’t exist. But, that, I give to things in exchange for the pleasure they give me. It means nothing. So why do I say about things: they’re beautiful?
@Primalsplit @girthygirt @Shrek2OnDvD @inversions @True truecel