Agamben wrote of the doctor who, terminally ill with leukemia, turns his body into a laboratory. This marks a certain extreme point in the production of the biopolitical body. But what are we to make of the plastic surgeon who operates on the mere surface of the body, and even their own body. Can we speak of a threshold beyond the threshold: of a space of pure surface, in which the involuted topology of the biopolitical body has been folded out again into a contact, essential and irreducible, with the values (metaphysical, spectacular, even ideological) that have always concealed its presence. Of course: the surface is just a surface. But doesn’t this surface already come from beyond the deepest depths?
The beauty of appearance resists the formation of the biopolitical body. The cosmetic surface of the body, as limit and boundary, is the zone of a coming-into-appearance that always transcends the structure of sovereign domination. Hannah Arendt, in the Human Condition, saw this clearly: the fateful turn of metaphysics was from the idea of beauty to the idea of the good. We cannot exactly follow her in a move that threatens to aestheticize politics, but there is this grain of truth. The superfluity of beauty resists the gesture by which power enforces itself through the production of depths. It is the anti-metaphysical moment of metaphysics: the surface of metaphysics that betrays its inner truth. There can be no return to the polis: but perhaps we can recognize in the everyday a residual space of appearance.
The plastic surgeon wants to operate on himself. This is impossible for every other surgeon. But for the plastic surgeon it is almost possible. The next best thing is to get a friend to do it: surgery, the most violent of interventions, becomes the gift of friendship.
A strange exchange. Politicians becoming doctors, doctors becoming politicians — this is the terrible story of the 20th century. But now doctors become friends…
The greatness of the modern television drama is this: the perfect fusion of kitsch sentimentality and macabre, Baroque, sophistication. If there were only aesthetic daring, the relentless exposure of nasty truth, it would be much more insipid, predictable, easy. The plastic surgeon — like the vampire, like the undertaker — is a a metaphor for this uncanny conjunction. The corpus, invoked in the first gestures of political modernity, becomes the beautiful corpse.
Is the camp the paradigm of biopolitical modernity? Or is it not, rather, Miami: the city overwhelmed with floods of every kind — of refugees, of drugs, of crime, and every sort of “contamination.” The city exposed: the city as the exposure and porosity of national boundaries. But also of savage beauty…
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