외모문화와 시대욕망

Appearance Culture and a Desire of the Age: Lacan’s “The Graph of Desire” and Psychoanalytic Analysis of Desire for Appearance

Cultivating bodily and facial appearance according to desirable image has become one of the dominant cultural phenomena, and the desire for appearance one of the dominant desires of the age(Zeitwunsch). Based on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory of subject and desire, the current paper will examine Korean appearance-cultivating desire and phenomena, which are overdetermined by multiple elements. The main targets of the current appearance cultivation are body and face. Cultivating the body focuses on weight-losing and body-shaping, and cultivating the face on making eye-lids, nose, or chins look desirable by plastic surgery. The desire of the subject for such desirable appearances is, psychoanalytically speaking, the desire to make himself look like the image which is provided for him by the symbolic Other and with which he identifies and which he internalizes into his ideal ego. The desire operates in metonymy and metaphor. The metaphoric working on the subject of multiple symbolic codes or discourses of mass media, gender ideology, visual culture, physiognomical culture, Western beauty ideal, and Korean collectivist culture result in the appearance-cultivating phenomena. The appearance cultivation has two categories. The first category is that the subject accepts the ideal image of the Other into his own ideal ego and his identification with such ideal ego image is not much libidinalized and his fantasy about it is not fixated; in such fantasy, the symbolic and the imaginary are much involved but the real is not. The second category is that the subject has a very strong fantasy about the appearance ideal ego in which the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real work together and he feels great pleasure. The second category also has two types. The first is the happy type in which the subject enjoys the agreement between his appearance ideal ego and his actual appearance. The second is the troubled type in which the subject feels radical difference between his appearance ideal ego and his actual appearance and is addicted to appearance cultivation, which is usually accompanied by serious pain or symptom. Plastic surgery addiction and anorexia are examples of this type. In order that desire for appearance does not result in serious symptom or pain and that healthy and diverse appearance-cultivating cultures develop themselves, every subject should be allowed to pursue his own appearance, with his own uniqueness being respected. It is the time to build the culture of appearance democracy in which each subject enjoys his own appearance without being discriminated or judged.