Intorno al brutto : Una categoria controversa

Paul Valéry, in his “Discourse on Aesthetics”, which he pronounced in 1936 in front of an audience of philosophers, reproached them, accusing aesthetics in particular of having pursued the abstract idea of beauty for too long, losing itself in the shadows of specialized terminology or in verbal games and thusforgetting the varied reality of works of art. Following an abstract idea of beauty means losing sight of the artistic object. It also means deluding oneself that the ugly is merely a counterbalance to a dominant category. But what does ugly mean? Its ambivalence lies precisely in a continuous oscillation between an evaluative and a descriptive use. There is a duplicity, so that on the one hand it expresses a negative judgment, and on the other hand -suspending its normal semantic destiny -it reclaims for itself some positivity. It is precisely from this positivity that the ugly begins its journey in the field of aesthetics.