Beauty and Modesty

Laure Naveau

Beauty and Modesty
Reflections on the Obscene

“In these times of omnipresent misery,
(...) talking about beauty might seem incongruous,
inappropriate, provocative.
Almost a scandal.”

François Cheng, Five Meditations on Beauty

The ultimate barrier, the last defence against the real: a beauty, that mustn’t be touched!, teaches Lacan in his Ethics.[1] And Jacques-Alain Miller gives a magisterial reading of this when he deciphers Lacan’s reference to Hogarth in the Seminar on The Sinthome, in these terms: “The ethic sketched out in The Sinthome is complemented by an aesthetic. [...] This is not peaceful Fibonaccian beauty in the pattern of the golden ratio designed to accord with the stable existence of the universal; it is the winding, varied and haphazard beauty that Hogarth’s genius depicted in a single undulating ethereal line.”[2]

Lacan, taking a close interest in Joyce, deciphers him as follows: [Joyce wanted to make of his art] “an eaube jeddard, [...] that should be a jet of art on the eaube scene of logic itself.”[3] Then, with Hogarth, Lacan introduces the question of beauty: “The eaubscene, [homophonous with obscene] write-it eaub, to remind us that beauty is just that.”[4] “Hogarth, who examined beauty in great detail, thought that it always had something to do with this double curve. […] [B]ut in the end it moves in the direction of connecting beauty to something other than obscenity, that is to the real.”[5]

Although obscene – anything that offends modesty is obscene – beauty constitutes a barrier against the real, as long as you don’t touch it...

But today, barriers are constantly being crossed, and the veil of modesty is being torn, leaving us helpless in the face of a certain horror, a barbarism with an inhuman face. What cannot and must not be seen is nevertheless exposed in an unprecedented jouissance of transgression. There are no aesthetics in war!

The ethics of psychoanalysis are summoned here as ethics of the gaze, with beauty and modesty defined as barriers that must not be crossed.

Isn’t this what Daniel Roy reminds us of in his fine argument for our next Congress, when he refers to Freud’s inaugural gesture of proposing to his patients that they move to the couch, and thus installing the gaze outside-the-field of the visual, “as a separated object, separated from the exchange of the specular relation,” [6] an isolated object thus born of a subtraction.

Associated here with the terms beauty and modesty, the gaze summons up that faculty of judgement proper to any subject worthy of the name, the aesthetic judgement that conditions for each of us the attribution of the predicate beautiful or ugly to an object.

It is important for the efficacy of the venture that the analyst – with his outside-the-field dimension[7] – should do his bit. This is what we call interpretation. It is enough, for example, to know how to transform, through a Witz, the waste [la poubelle] into the most beautiful [la plus belle]; palea into agalma... Another view then becomes possible for the subject, another relief becomes apparent...

And where the savagery of the image revulses to the point of nausea, the urgency is to know how to summon the right words [le bien dire], the only ones capable of putting a veil back over this forcible effraction of the real.

This is how I sort out for myself a formulation of Lacan’s late in his teaching: “the right thing to say [le bien dire] is governed only by modesty.”[8]

For let us make no mistake about it: showing and seeing everything, the foreclosure of castration, and its corollary, being seen from all sides by this absolute eye so designated by Gérard Wajcman,[9] can only lead to its return in the real, as Lacan predicted, in an oracular utterance, calling for a sacrifice to an obscure God.[10]

In his Ethics, a path is sketched out: the beautiful “stops us, but it also shows us in which way the field of destruction lies. That in this sense, in aiming for the centre of moral experience, the beautiful is closer to evil than to the good, is here not, I hope, going to surprise you too much.”[11]

This is the meaning that for my part I give to the wearing of the veil, which the three monotheistic religions, each in its own way, call upon, considering the sublime in its link to this kind of adornment, the veiling of women and their castration, the other side of which is their destruction, pure and simple. If a hair slips, she is punished, falsely divine, with the murder of her youth, her beauty, her entire body banished, where outrage for beauty reigns with an iron fist. Masha is a new Antigone, exposing the truth of these inhuman precepts and suffering the same misfortune as those caught up in the cruel game of the gods, obscure indeed.

In 2001, J.-A. Miller posed the problem in these terms: “The true question is to know why psychoanalysis has not taken root in Islamic lands. Perhaps it should, to mop up the mortifying jouissance of sacrifice.”[12]

In 1972, Lacan had prophesied the worst [le pire]: “you should know that what is on the rise, the ultimate consequences of which we have not still seen, and which is rooted in the body, in the fraternity of bodies, is racism. You have not heard the last of this.”[13]

The woman, the Jew – in the sense of François Regnault’s Notre objet a[14] – we are there, and Freud’s pessimism about the battle between Eros and Thanatos stares us in the face today.

Against the obscenity of images of war and death, against the prevailing negationism and the cynical want to terrorise people, the unbridled jouissance of the gaze must be drained.

We must then assert how analytic discourse, as a refuge from the malaise of civilisation, is at odds with this mad media war, which aims at the disappearance rather than the appearance of the subject.

With a resolute engagement, the analytical discourse constitutes one of the bulwarks that restores to the subject the power of speech robbed from him by this shamelessness, the power to inscribe himself in his absolute difference, to make his voice heard, to cast a courageous gaze on the world’s filth [l’immonde] in order to allow – and it is a wager – a certain re-aesthetisation. No ethics without aesthetics, that would be the thesis.

I conclude with Plato, and his Protagoras: “Zeus feared that the entire race would be exterminated, and so he sent Hermes to them, bearing modesty and justice to be the ordering principles of cities and the bonds of friendship and conciliation.”[15]

But since God does not exist, or rather, is unconscious, as F. Regnault wrote in his remarkable essay,[16] it is up to us to invent another way of escaping.

And to get out of the eaubscene – by virtue of analysis – we must not shy away from a well-saying [bien dire], from a half-saying [mi-dire] of that of the real which remains nonetheless unsayable.

Without forgetting that before the lightning bolt, which governs the world and perhaps, on its outer reaches, the analytic experience – it is indeed the [fundamental] fantasy that governs us, in the here and now, and that it is never, as is its destiny, beautiful to behold.

That’s why it’s important, as the only way to create friendship and some degree of gaiety, to traverse it and dismantle its logic.

References

[1] Cf. Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. D. Porter, New York/London: Norton & Co., 1992, p. 239.

[2] Miller, J.-A., “A Note Threaded by a Stitch,” Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII, The Sinthome, trans. A.R. Price, Cambridge, UK/MA, USA: Polity, 2016, pp. 218-19. [TN: Modified translation.]

[3] Lacan, J., “Joyce the Symptom,” trans A.R. Price, The Lacanian Review 5, Paris: New Lacanian School, 2018, p. 16

[4] Ibid., p. 13.

[5] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII, The Sinthome, op. cit., p. 54.

[6] Roy, D., Presentation of the Theme of the 2024 NLS Congress. Available here:

https://www.amp-nls.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/ARGUMENT-ENG.-CONGRES-NLS-2024.pdf

[7] Naveau, L., “Sous le regard, Manifeste pour le hors-champ,” Lacan Quotidien 76, 1 Nov. 2011. Available here: https://lacanquotidien.fr/blog/2011/11/lacan-quotidien-n°76-sous-le-regard-par-laure-naveau-manifeste-pour-le-hors-champ/

[8] Cf. Lacan, J., Seminar XXI, “Les non-dupes errent,” lesson of 12 March 1974, unpublished. 

[9] Cf. Wajcman, G., L’œil absolu, Paris: Denoël, 2010.

[10] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. A. Sheridan, London/New York: Norton, 1977, p. 275. [TN: Modified translation]

[11] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, op. cit., p. 217. [TN: Modified translation]

[12] Miller, J.-A., “La tendresse des terrorists,” Lettres à l’opinion éclairée, Paris: Le Seuil, 2002, p. 163.

[13] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book  XIX, ...or Worse, trans. A. R. Price, Cambridge, UK/MA, USA: Polity, 2018, p. 211.

[14] Cf. Regnault, F., Notre objet a, Lagrasse: Verdier, 2003.

[15] Plato, Protagoras (380 B.C.E), trans. B. Jowett. Available here: https://classics.mit.edu/Plato/protagoras.html.

[16] Cf. Regnault, F., Dieu est inconscient, Paris: Navarin éditeur, 1985.