from the Sublime to the Ugly

Re the publicity for ‘Ugly Betty’ note how ‘ugliness’ is merely signified – by thick specs, teeth braces, dowdy clothes, shapeless hair. Any contact with some real ugliness is safely foreclosed. Indeed, the appearance of ugliness as signifier is, simultaneously, the repression, the tucking away behind a screen of any ‘real’ ugliness. And the reverse is thereby posited as true: that ugliness is merely a question of signifiers. I quote this merely as cipher and example (of something or other).

Here is Zizek on the Ugly:

Contrary to the standard idealist argument that conceives ugliness as the defective mode of beauty, as its distortion, one should assert the ontological primacy of ugliness: it is beauty that is a kind of defense against the Ugly in its repulsive existence – or, rather, against existence tout court, 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, because of the distorted
balance between its ‘representation’ (the symbolic features we perceive’) and 'existence’ – being ugly, out of place, is the excess of existence over representation

As opposed, then, to an excess of representation over existence.

n.b., 3 categories that might be brought into conversation: The Monstrous, The Ugly, The Horrible (as it appears in Sartre).