Cosmetic Surgery

We are told that we know no limits in our pursuit of this perfect body; this is the concern voiced by those who worry that cultural toys like endoscopic lasers and other miracle-making tools of cosmetic surgery will stave off for us the necessary encounter with the reality of the flesh.

We driven souls who turn to the gym to lose weight and flab and to cosmetic surgery to hone what the gym can't adjust are told that we need to understand that the body itself is the limit-term we are trying to subjugate with our armamentarium of devices and our utter conviction that if you have the money and find the right cosmetic surgery procedure, you can overcome even the hint of ugliness.

Why, the stakes are raised on the category of ugliness itself, which can now be as minimal as the slight bump of a mole or eyes that aren't absolutely symmetrical. In contrast to this account of runaway grandiose narcissism, however, I suggest that is the reverse. It's not that we are giddily disregarding the very real pull of mortality and the flesh. We aren't trying to transcend the limits of your bodies with cosmetic surgery so much as we strive to create something from nothing.

The body is nothing until it's jolted into being by the image of something it could become through cosmetic surgery - a movie star, a supermodel, a beautiful body. It's a body you have only when it's the body. Perhaps we want to possess the body we don't have to begin with. Working out, having cosmetic surgery, just dieting - these are acts that give the body cultural reality.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the cultural conditions were right for the near simultaneous emergence of tree different cultural phenomena that have proved central in the Western experience of the self in the twentieth century. These phenomena were celebrity or star culture, psychoanalysis, and cosmetic surgery.

As documented extensively, the modern history of cosmetic surgery is coincidental with and ideologically related to the history of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic developmental accounts of the human subject and the psychical agencies are elaborated within a culture with a particular set of assumptions regarding the relationship between the identity and physical appearance.

Consider how necessary this institutionalization of star culture has been to the creation of a culture of cosmetic surgery. In order for cosmetic surgery to be appealing, not to mention a viable professional solution, enough of us have to agree on standards of beauty.