From Aristotle to contemporaneity: an architectural of beauty

Abstract

The theme of beauty, and especially of female beauty, has been signified under different historical and theoretical perspectives. Pari passu to aesthetic procedures, surgical or not, academic debates about this signifier also grow. In this work, we propose a reflection on the role of memory as well as its implications in the imagination of the feminine of today. Based on the theoretical-analytical assumptions of the Discourse Analysis of the French line (Pêcheux), we take a historical-discursive perspective to think about the movements of slips / displacements of “beauty” over time, in order to denaturalize the meanings about this signifier, in view of the inherent historicity. We bring, for that, the concept of Architectural, by Aristotle, and we developed some gestures of interpretation about the effects of meanings on the feminine in artistic expressions when starting from a time frame that includes Antiquity classical, Renaissance and, then, the 20th century and, still, the resonance of these senses today. Throughout our reflections, we consider the body as a place of memory that directs meanings and calls contemporary subjects to occupy their ideologically predetermined places in the social sphere.