The Beautiful Alone is Arrayed Against Mutual Surrender

In his *Psychotheology of Everyday Life* Eric Santner recounts Holderlin's definition of beauty as "The one differentiated in itself." As far as I can tell, the definition has a tortuous genealogy, dating as far back as Heraclitus--Hen Diapheron Heauto--to which Plato refers in the *Symposium*. Beauty as that which is internally divided, self-contradictory, un-sutured, domestically disjoined, aporetic. Of course, such an understanding flies in the face of more conventional understandings of beauty as harmonizing, balanced, and symmetrical. For Holderlin (for Heraclitus), beauty is not equated with aesthetic totalization. But, for Santner, nor is it "a merely melancholic or romantically ironic index of the incomplete aspect of all human endeavors, an aesthetically rendered insistence on the fragmentation constitutive of human experience. Rather it is one of the occassions, one of the ways in which the defenses that keep human beings from inhabiting the midst of life can be disarmed. That is, beautiful objects are disarming not in the sense of releasing us, once and for all, from the too much of excitation that is, at some level, constitutve of human life, but rather in the sense of loosening our defenses, opening beyond our stuckness in an especially rigid and defensive organization of this pressure." In other words, beauty, and beautiful objects, are such because of the way they render us defenseless against the rush of life. In witnessing the writhing tensions that dwell at the center of beautiful objects, we are folded back on ourselves in a way that opens for us a sublime field of freedom.

I submit that, according to this (astonishing) definition, our ever-mulitplying scenes and contexts of post-conflict trauma--from Bosnia and Rawanda, to South Africa and Argentina--are beautiful. Perverse sounding I'm sure this is. Surely, a setting torn by past violence ought correspond with something aesthetically monstrous. And yet, it makes sense for those of us who disparage the rhetoric of harmonizing reconciliation that consumes these contexts. All too often, in the wake of some terrible episode of genocidal mania, a call for apology, forgiveness, and amnesty is made. On the ground, such a limiting mode of reconciliation resolves in the harrowing and deservedly notorious slogan, "fogive and forget." Here reconciliation tends to look more like surrender and assimilation of the victim to his perpetrator. The more radical types will appeal to a politics of reparations. In this case the trouble lies in the fundamental impossibility of quantifying suffering. Reducing pain to a monetary sum means sublimating it into use-value, something which all too often unwittingly reproduces the very logic which impelled the violent episode in the first place.

In opposition to these feeble measures stands one that avows the irreconciliability of certain situations. Here resentment is not thought as some affect debilitating for the reconstruction of a totalizing (and totalized) society built on foundation the of mutual respect. Instead, resentment is affirmed as the very basis of reconciliation itself, understood as the ceaseless striving for an impossible telos of forgiveness. This would be a post-conflict society riven by its internal divisions. The antagonisms which deservedly arise out of the violent conflicts of the past would not be smoothed over but rather confronted and embraced, lived out to their very agonic limit. This would be a beautiful society, inhabiting the very midst of a life held in common by that which divides it from the inside.

This, I maintain, is precisely the beauty Lacan refers to in his seminar on ethics, when he writes,

"The true barrier that holds the subject back in front of the unspeakable field of radical desire that is the field of absolute destruction, of destruction beyond putrefaction, is properly speaking the aesthetic phenomenon where it is identified with the experience of beauty—beauty in all its shining radiance, beauty that has been called the splendor of truth."