The Symptom of Beauty by Pacteau, Francette - 1994

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. 232 pages, illustrations (some colour); 25 cm. Withdrawn from library collection, with usual markings. No writing in text. DJ in mylar. "For a woman in the Western world, there's no escaping beauty. She has it or she doesn't. If she doesn't, she may hope to gain it. If she already has it, she will certainly lose it. But what is 'it'? Not a singular thing, Francette Pacteau tell us, but a generic term for an unspecifiable number of disparate experiences. What these experiences are, what they mean, how they manifest themselves as a notion of beauty is the subject of Pacteau's book, an intriguing psychoanalytic study of beauty that looks into the eye of the beholder and to the mind conjuring behind it. Less interested in the contingent object of desire than the fantasy that frames it, Pacteau considers the staging of the aesthetic emotion. Her book is an ambitious attempt to describe the mise-en-scene of beauty within a… Read More

Harvard University Press, 2005-12-02. Hardcover. Very Good. 0.8583 9.5118 6.5118.

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Harvard University Press, 1994-05. Hardcover. Good.