Beauty and the Beast

Michael Taussig

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780226789866
  9780226789859
• eBook ISBN:
  9780226789880
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Plastic & Cosmetic Medicine
• Index: Social Sciences

Beauty and the Beast begins with the question: Is beauty destined to end in tragedy? Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Colombia, Michael Taussig scrutinizes the anxious, audacious, and sometimes destructive attempts people make to transform their bodies through cosmetic surgery and liposuction. He balances an examination of surgeries meant to enhance an individual's beauty with an often overlooked counterpart, surgeries performed—often on high profile criminals—to disguise one's identity. Situating this globally shared phenomenon within the economic, cultural, and political history of Colombia, Taussig links the country's long civil war and its bodily mutilation and torture to the beauty industry at large, sketching Colombia as a country whose high aesthetic stakes make it a stage where some of the most important and problematic ideas about the body are played out.

Central to Taussig's examination is George Bataille's notion of depense, or "wasting." While depense is often used as a critique, Taussig also looks at the exuberance such squandering creates and its position as a driving economic force. Depense, he argues, is precisely what these procedures are all about, and the beast on the other side of beauty should not be dismissed as simple recompense. At once theoretical and colloquial, public and intimate, Beauty and the Beast is a true-to-place ethnography—written in Taussig's trademark voice—that tells a thickly layered but always accessible story about the lengths to which people will go to be physically remade.

index

abjection, 11. See also sublimation and desublimation

Abu Ghraib, 68

Adam and Eve, in relation to fashion and the tabooed cleft, 144

Adorno, Theodor, and hell missing from Benjamin’s précis: 131

adult’s imagination of the child’s imagination, 32

aesthetic of terror, ix. 26. See also aesthetics; mutilation; paramilitaries

aesthetics: of agriculture, 2, 23–24; and Du champ’s readymades, 24; and prostitutes in Medellin, 26; and social theory, 2–5; and Wittgenstein’s “forms of life,” 25

agribusiness: and cosmic surgery, 109; and fairy tales, 109

Apachedom (Baudelaire’s invention), 36

Aragon, Louis (surrealist), 145

Arenas, Jacobo (leader of the FARC), 13

baroque (and cosmic surgery), 1, 109

Bataille, Georges, 3, 8–9; and the big toe, 98–99; and the language of flowers, 140–41. See also depense

Baudelaire, Charles, 16, 36; and the correspondences in relation to the face, 44–45; and fashion in relation to moral and aesthetic feeling of the time, 84; and the flaneur, 80

Bauman, Zygmunt, and the postmodern body, 135–36

beauty: and beauty queens, 48; and beauty salons, 12–13, 106; and tragedy, 1, 7, 16, 39, 86; and work clothes, 87–89. See also Lawrence, D. H.

Benavides, Antonio (herbalist in Puerto Tejada), 149–50

Benjamin, Walter: and Bataille’s depense, 7; and connection of fashion with death, 127; and connections of fashion with surrealism, 84; and cool, 38; and the “death ritual of the commodity,” 136; and double relationship of storytelling to death, 64–65; and the face, 43–44; on fashion and the “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 130; and natural history, 7; and the storyteller, 7–8; and storytelling and the body, 64–65

Berger, John, and the smile, 43

Beuys, Joseph (and fat), 143

Bey, Hakim (The Temporary Autonomous Zone), 131

Black Eagles, 134

black women emulating white women and visa versa, 54–55

Botero, Fernando(Colombian painter), and liposuction, 76

breast surgery: in Cali and Pereira, 48; demonstration of surgery, 75; exploding after implants, 74–75; and infection, 55; as standard procedure, 50; the surgeon’s alchemical office, 75

Burroughs, William S.: “beauty is doomed,” x; “the black hole,” 60

Caballero, Miguel (Bogotá designer of bullet proof clothes), 61

Caillois, Roger: and the executioner, 110–12; and fashion, 143; and mimesis, 58

Cambio Extremo, 48

cartago, and narcos, 71

Carter, Jon, 141

Castro, Fidel, 124

cemetery, 25; and the church, 137; and gang f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Gift of the Gods
• El Mexicano
• A Rare and Delightful Bird in Flight
• Winnypoo
• Spending
• Cool
• The Designer Smile
• The Designer Body
• Mythological Warfare
• Beauty and Mutilation
• The Exploding Breast
• Virtual U
• The History of Beauty
• History of the Shoe
• Surgeons of the Underworld
• The Designer Name
• Law in a Lawless Land
• The Tabooed Cleft
• The Fat Kid and the Devil
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Works Consulted
• Index