Beauty of Power / Power of Beauty / Beauty of Resonance

Riefenstahl, Ishioka, Arbus: a Sadean discipline of looking

This essay is a walk through my own cabinet of curiosities, guided by a set of questions I would rather not ask: why a certain beauty moves me, what kind of hold it has on my body and my thinking, and how far that hold colludes with a smooth, amoral power that lets form shine while the screams stay offstage. I move between Leni Riefenstahl’s stadiums and reefs, Eiko Ishioka’s advertising and Olympic ceremonies, Diane Arbus’s deformed faces, the baroque crime tableaux of the television series Hannibal, and the intellectual circle around Susan Sontag. They share little on the surface except the ability to seize the eye and hold it longer than is safe. I keep the Marquis de Sade in the background as a discipline rather than a hero, a knife laid on the table to cut through the alibis that usually protect such pleasures. Riefenstahl stands here for beauty enlisted by power, Ishioka for beauty used as force, and Arbus for something more fragile that I can only name later. What follows is an attempt to let each of these figures speak, then to turn the same impolite question on them and on myself: who is enjoying what, and what has to be pushed out of sight to keep that enjoyment intact?

Opening the Pandora’s box

There is a kind of image that cuts me more deeply than I would like to admit.

A body held in clean light: an Olympic diver suspended in air, a Nubian wrestler, a swimmer inside a vertical shaft of blue. The framing is so strict that my eye obeys before thought has time to form. The arc of the back, the pale figure against a dark crowd, the rhythm of shoulders and flags: everything falls into line with a muscular calm.

My first response is pleasure. I am not ashamed of that, and I will not lie about it.

Only afterwards do I remember who made the image, and what it was serving.

Leni Riefenstahl is, for me, the clearest case of what I call the beauty of power: an eye that makes domination look luminous and inevitable, followed by decades of insisting that she loved only “form,” “harmony,” and “nature.” Eiko Ishioka, much later, lives out the power of beauty: a woman who falls for the same visual voltage, turns it toward Dracula, Tarsem Singh, Olympic spectacle and advertising, and then watches her own name dissolve into the credits. Diane Arbus stands on another axis: beauty with no request for permission, the beauty of those who never agreed to be acceptable in the first place. What moves me in her work is a different kind of connection, a brief, exposed sharing of meaning between photographer and subject, what I call the beauty of resonance.

Behind these figures I keep a fourth presence: Sade, less as a hero than as an instrument, a scalpel I have used more than once on myself. He strips away every noble story that says “this pleasure is for a higher good.” In his world there is no God, no History, no Revolution waiting to redeem what is done to a body. Pleasure and power meet directly. That lack of alibi is what I need from him.

When I speak of a “Sadean stance” here, I am not borrowing his cruelty or his politics. I am taking one discipline: refuse alibis for seduction. In Sade’s world, power is never washed clean by God, Nation, History, Revolution, or “the oppressed.” When someone hurts someone else, they do it because they want to, and he does not veil that fact with theology or dialectics. That refusal of consolation matters. For the purposes of this essay, a Sadean stance means that whenever ideology or moral rhetoric appears with beauty, I ask a narrow, impolite question: who is enjoying what, why, and what does that enjoyment need to ignore?

With that Sadean scalpel on the table, one I am prepared to turn on myself, I move through Riefenstahl, Ishioka, Arbus, Sontag’s circle, and my own responses.

Riefenstahl: the beauty of power and the seduction of the eye

Calling Riefenstahl (1902–2003) a mere technician would be comfortable. The Sadean discipline I have set myself does not allow that.

From Triumph des Willens (1934) and Olympia (1938) to The Last of the Nuba (1973) and the underwater photographs, the same temperament keeps surfacing: hard axes, clean diagonals, sculptural bodies, controlled space. Crowds are drilled into legible shapes. Torch processions and rallies are designed so that, from the camera’s height, individual bodies disappear and the mass resolves into pattern. In Olympia, the athlete is isolated as an object of worship: the diver in mid-air, the runner trimmed against sky, the discus thrower held just before release. In the Nuba sequences, dark muscle replaces Aryan flesh. Their outlandishly elongated, exquisite bodies carry a strange echo of the gorgeous creature of Giger’s Alien. In the late underwater films and photographs, human figures mostly recede. Shoals of fish, fans of coral, and drifting plants become the new cast—an ocean vivarium transformed into saturated Wagnerian bursts of pattern and light.

This is more than competent camera work. It amounts to a doctrine of form. Beauty appears where bodies or seascapes fall into proportion and noise is driven out of the frame. My own response is physical. My eye craves this symphony. That appetite is part of the danger and the temptation.

I also know that the framing acts as an aphrodisiac of power. The gratification lies in seeing disorder replaced by one rhythm: torches lifted together, columns in step, a leader fixed where all gazes converge, the Nubians glistening with sweat, the fish in an intoxicating orgy of existence. Power becomes lovable because it has been composed so elegantly. Seen with Sade’s question in mind, the scene is not complicated: someone is taking pleasure in the sight of bodies and creatures turned into obedient, breath-taking ornaments.

The television series Hannibal (2013–2015) adds another configuration of beauty and violence in this same field. Its crime scenes are arranged as tableaux: bodies turned into trees or totems, organs laid out with the care of a still-life painter, color graded like a scent advertisement. The murders revolt. And still, the images are sensuous, clever, deliberately delectable. That tension is not an accident. The show invites the viewer to admire the composition while knowing exactly what is being shown. My own response splits: part of me recoils, another part is charmed by the staging and the calm intelligence of the camera. The easy defense is “this is only fiction.” On the level of actual bodies, that is true. On the level of training the eye, it is less innocent. Beauty here does not serve the state, as in Riefenstahl, but it does serve a habit of mind: learning to separate aesthetic pleasure from ethical horror, and to keep both running at once.

John Fowles gives a harsher version of this unease in The Magus (1965). There is a cultivated Nazi officer who plays classical piano with real feeling and skill while torture goes on nearby. At a certain point, the protagonist hears music and screams together. The officer feels no contradiction. Bach and the cry belong to one aesthetic field. This is close to the space in which Riefenstahl moves. The scream is usually offscreen, but always nearby. My own reflex is to split them, to enjoy the music and file the other sound as “context.” In Sade’s terms, that reflex is simply pleasure defending itself.

Later, Riefenstahl speaks of herself as a kind of innocent. At times, she reminds me of a child who discovers that pulling the legs off a fly leaves an interesting figure on the table. The act is cruel; the fascination is fixed on the symmetry. Her post-war statements repeat the same line: she loved beauty and athletics; she was “apolitical”; she only filmed what was already there. From a Sadean angle, this is a coarse excuse. She knew enough about the project she was glorifying. She chose the pattern over the body.

Susan Sontag’s essay “Fascinating Fascism” (1975) tears at this self-image. She tracks Riefenstahl’s lies about her proximity to Hitler, her claim that the Nuremberg rally of 1934 was not staged for the camera, her later repackaging as a neutral explorer of nature and the body, and the way fascist imagery reappears in Nuba and in S/M style. Sontag is sharp about the laundering of the aesthetic. What she does not linger on is the depth of the seduction. She lays out the machinery of allure but writes as if she herself were untouched by it.

There I part company with her. I know the pull. I feel it more clearly because of someone who seems, at first, far from Riefenstahl: Diane Arbus. Riefenstahl’s images present bodies eager to be accepted by power, to be chosen as its ideal ornament. Arbus will come back later as the opposite pole. For now it is enough to say that I feel the tug of both: Riefenstahl’s severe ordering of the ideal, and Arbus’s faces that refuse the ideal and stare back.

Riefenstahl through Sontag; and Zox-Weaver, Onfray, Fallaci against Sontag

Since Riefenstahl is such a catalytic case of the beauty of power, I want to take time with one of her most notable critics, Susan Sontag (1933–2004). I will sketch how Sontag handled Riefenstahl, mainly relying upon Annalisa Zox-Weaver’s reading of Sontag herself, especially her reconstruction of Sontag’s drafts and notes in the UCLA archives, and finally bring in Michel Onfray and Oriana Fallaci—not as commentators who wrote on Sontag, but as two lines of argument I apply to Sontag’s stance.

Ishioka knew Sontag. She worked under an intellectual sky shaped in Paris and refracted through New York, a sky Sontag helped import and legitimize: Sartre, Beauvoir, Genet; later Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Lacan, Barthes. Sontag admired these Parisian caviar revolutionaries, their talents and militancy, their fusion of art and politics, and she enjoyed being the one who translated them for an Anglophone public.

Sontag did not begin as Riefenstahl’s prosecutor. As Zox-Weaver shows, Sontag in the mid-1960s first stages herself as a defender of the aesthetic realm. In an essay on style, Sontag argues that content is basically bait: a lure that brings the reader’s or viewer’s attention to the formal transformations in the work of art. That, she argues, is how we can, in good conscience, cherish works that would be morally repellent if judged only by subject matter. In that context she names Triumph of the Will and Olympia as “masterpieces.” The Nazi propaganda, she admits, “is there,” yet something else is there, too. In other words, the ideal spectator in this scheme is the one who sees “Hitler” rather than Hitler, the “1936 Olympics” rather than the 1936 Olympics, and rises above indignation or approval into pure contemplation.

It is hard to imagine a posture farther from Sade’s refusal of alibi. Here is a woman who saw the same films that trouble me, felt the pull, and turned her own susceptibility into a badge of higher intelligence. It is also a safe posture. This detachment costs Sontag nothing in her own circle. It demands no reckoning with her attraction to the images, and no friction with the intellectual world that surrounds her.

As Zox-Weaver shows, in Sontag’s essay “Fascinating Fascism,” she performs a reversal. Triumph of the Will becomes “the most successful, most purely propagandistic film ever made.” Riefenstahl’s Nuba book is treated as an extension of the same aesthetic into coffee-table exotica, and a slim volume on SS uniforms becomes a case study in the sexualization of Nazism. The argument is often persuasive. Sontag tears apart Riefenstahl’s lies about her proximity to Hitler, her claim that the rallies were not staged for the camera, and her rebranding as a neutral artist of “primal” bodies.

Now imagine three readers in the room with that essay: one real, Annalisa Zox-Weaver, and two imagined, Michel Onfray and Oriana Fallaci. From where I sit, all three, in different ways, are or would be irritated by Sontag’s shortcomings.

Of these three, Zox-Weaver is the only actual reader of Sontag’s drafts in the UCLA archive, and everything I know about those drafts comes via her 2025 essay “The Feminist, the Filmmaker, and the Führer.” She traces versions of “Fascinating Fascism” where an anxious preface briefly appears and then disappears. In those pages, Sontag admits that shifts in popular taste make judgments seem “dishonest, almost in bad taste,” worries about dark longings coming out into the open, and warns that silence about such changes leaves “us even more vulnerable than we already are.” (The wording I quote here follows Zox-Weaver’s transcription of Sontag’s fourth draft.) Then Sontag cuts that prologue. It revealed too much: concern about fascism, but also anxiety about her own attraction to Riefenstahl’s imagery and about the desires circulating in her milieu. The published essay opens instead like a court case: “First exhibit. Here is a woman…”

Zox-Weaver is brilliant at reconstructing this shift and the pride behind it. She calls out the self-importance, the envy, the self-shielding. She shows how Sontag moves from the risky admission “I am also susceptible to this” to the safer position “I am the one who diagnoses everyone else’s susceptibility.” What Zox-Weaver underplays, to my ear, is the timidity. Sontag chooses the safest object for her moral severity. She turns her full seriousness on an aging German filmmaker and on Nazi kitsch, while keeping a tactful silence about the Parisian theorists and radicals on whom she depended, whose own flirtations with violence, Maoism, pedophilia (in Foucault’s case), and elegant anti-Semitism (though not in Sartre and Beauvoir’s) would have been more dangerous to confront. She knows where the live wires are and keeps her hands off. That, I would add to Zox-Weaver’s file, is a form of cowardice.

Onfray, if we bring him into the same room, drags the background forward. His great labor is to refuse the idea that the Paris canon is sacred weather. He lines up Sartre, Beauvoir, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, and the rest like a gallery of compromised saints and knocks them from their plinths. He presents himself as speaking against the “court philosophers” who provided glamor for regimes and movements that crushed bodies, whether under Soviet Stalinism, in Maoist China, or in the various anti-Semitic currents they were willing to excuse. On that point, Sontag remains almost entirely silent.

If Onfray had read Sontag on Riefenstahl, he would not stay with Riefenstahl for long. He would ask why the same cold light is not turned on the friends, mentors, and idols whose names float through Sontag’s essays. He would see in her silence about that circle the classic reflex of an insider: the courage to condemn a distant emblem of evil, and the reluctance to expose the complicities of one’s own house. In his fashion he performs one operation Sontag never quite risks. He treats the sky under which she moves as an object of moral scrutiny.

Fallaci (1929–2006), the third reader, comes from another angle again. She does not grow up between lofts and seminars. She liked to recall that she had been “a little girl fighting as a partisan against Nazi-Fascism.” She spent her life interviewing presidents, dictators, revolutionaries, often at real personal risk. She was furious and stubborn, and, in her later years, wrote about Islam, anti-Semitism, and the West in a language shaped by the wound she carried from those early battles. She was also one of the first to warn that parts of the left-wing intelligentsia would flirt with, or even embrace, Islamist movements.

If Fallaci reads Sontag’s early defense of Triumph of the Will and later prosecution of it, I imagine her impatience would be simple. She would have interviewed Riefenstahl as well as Sontag and then asked both of them: “Where were you when it mattered? And where are you when it matters now?” For Fallaci, the idea that truth always sits in the middle is not sophistication but betrayal. Sometimes, she insists, truth gathers on one side; pretending otherwise serves those who hold power and guns. She grants no prestige to suspended judgment. In this sense, she is far from what is now called “politically correct.” The whole notion of the “ideal spectator” floats, for her, in an airless room. Images are not just for contemplation; they are tools regimes use to prepare real violence. Detachment at a safe distance from risk is not a higher form of ethics. It is what you can afford when you are not in the line of fire.

Set against that, Sontag’s fascination with which viewers may safely enjoy fascist imagery feels like a salon problem. Where Sontag presides over a séance of taste, deciding with which images the elite can play without moral contamination, Fallaci prefers the interrogation room. Her long interviews with Kissinger, Khomeini, Arafat, the Shah have one aim: strip away justifications, expose vanity, force the man in front of her to hear his own words. She is not beyond indignation and approval; she is fueled by indignation, and by a partisan memory of what fascism did to ordinary lives. She is willing to risk her own body for the questions she asks. Sontag, in contrast, risks reputation within a circle, but not the circle itself.

From my angle, all three—Zox-Weaver, Onfray, and Fallaci—reveal a different face of Sontag’s double talk around Reifenstahl. Zox-Weaver exposes the pivot from seduced viewer to moral judge and the pride that accompanies it. Onfray exposes the refusal to apply that same severity to Sontag’s own intellectual sky. Fallaci exposes the distance between salon courage and the kind that costs something. Together they make my own verdict harsher than Zox-Weaver’s cool irritation about vanity and envy. Facing Riefenstahl, Sontag is not just pompous: she is careful to aim her boldness where it will not endanger her affiliations.

And I am not exempt from their scrutiny. I am close to Sontag in education and habits, close to Onfray in my impatience with fashionable nihilism, close to Fallaci in my distrust of “political correctness” as a moral pose. I recognize myself in Sontag’s sentences, in Onfray’s bluntness, in Fallaci’s refusal to bend. I also enjoy standing at a slight angle to each of them, harvesting what I want without paying their full price. That, too, is a strategy of safety. The Sadean discipline demands that I name it as such: another form of enjoyment, another alibi I would prefer not to see.

Ishioka: the power of beauty and the cost of bracketing

Eiko Ishioka (1938–2012) enters as another worker of images, another woman intent on controlling the frame. For readers who do not know her name, you almost certainly know some of her work. The red armor and blue velvet gowns in Coppola’s Dracula (1992); the impossible white and crimson costumes that turn Jennifer Lopez into a moving icon in The Cell (2000); the gold-and-blood visuals of Immortals (2011); the candy-poisoned fairy-tale surfaces of Mirror, Mirror (2012); the massed drummers and scroll-like banners at the Běijīng Olympics (2008). All of that comes from the same eye.

She begins in Tōkyō advertising in the 1960s, jolting conservative visuals with muscular women, uncanny poses, disruptive compositions. From there she moves into theatre and film: Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), Dracula, The Cell, The Fall (2006), Immortals, Mirror, Mirror. She designs uniforms and outerwear for several national teams at the Salt Lake City 2002 Winter Olympics, and later serves as director of costume design for the opening ceremony of the Běijīng 2008 Olympics, drilling thousands of bodies into a single, terrifyingly unified image. She creates album covers and posters that sink into a city’s visual memory. Her signature is a kind of aggressive clarity: bodies turned into living calligraphy, color pushed until it almost vibrates, silhouettes that claim the whole screen. In her memoir, she describes Riefenstahl as a woman driven by three passions—reverence for nature, creative fervor, and Eros—and she calls the twentieth century a time when women artists at last outran men. She clearly wants Riefenstahl inside that lineage. For Ishioka herself, the satisfaction lies in making images that dominate the field and feel unmistakably hers. Her life is a long experiment in the power of beauty.

Ishioka does not encounter Riefenstahl as a distant case study. She handles her work directly. First, she conceives a major Tōkyō exhibition of The Last of the Nuba and edits the Japanese Nuba volume, presenting Riefenstahl’s images of scarified, elongated bodies to a Japanese public as a kind of ultimate athletic beauty. Later, she curates a second show at Bunkamura devoted to Riefenstahl’s life and images, and brings Riefenstahl herself to walk through it. She moves inside those photographs with the confidence of someone who could have taken them. When she writes about Riefenstahl’s films, she reaches for a sports metaphor: other directors show off with little breaking balls, she says, but Riefenstahl throws a fastball straight into the viewer’s chest. That is the quality she admires, the unembarrassed directness of the appeal, the refusal of half-measures. In books and interviews, she speaks of Riefenstahl less as Hitler’s decorator than as a model of ruthless artistic will and of what a woman can force out of a hostile industry.

Here the political irony bites. Ishioka is moved by Riefenstahl’s Nuba images, by the beauty of those elongated bodies and scarified skins, and helps reintroduce them to Japan. Not long after, she lends her talent to the Běijīng Olympics, producing another kind of disciplined spectacle for a regime that, in the same years, is shielding the Sudanese government whose genocidal violence falls on peoples like the Nuba. The circle is not exact, but the echo is hard to ignore: one woman elevates a threatened African culture into icons of physical grace; later she helps choreograph the public face of a power that protects its persecutors. The beauty on the stadium floor does not mention any of this. It does not have to. Its task is to dazzle.

The appeal remains clear. Ishioka sees in Riefenstahl proof that a woman can seize the camera and dictate how bodies and space will look. In the macho environment she knew, that is almost intoxicating. Her implicit bargain is simple: “I will take the will, the discipline, the formal grammar, and hold the politics at arm’s length.” The self-flattery lies in believing that such a clean extraction is possible. Even when critics like Sontag revive the argument that any celebration of Riefenstahl is a form of collaboration, Ishioka recounts it as if it were a misunderstanding: audiences want clever, ironic “breaking balls,” while Riefenstahl simply throws what she believes in. The problem, in her telling, is the viewer’s taste, not the object of admiration.

I am very close to Ishioka here. The same charge runs through me when I look at Riefenstahl’s and Ishioka’s work. What grips me is not any love for the regime but the sense of someone bending the medium to her will. It would be easy to tell myself that I care only about this grammar and can carry it away, purified. The hesitation comes from knowing how often “pure beauty” has been invoked to hide what lies underneath. After the twentieth century, and after the recent carnival of anti-Semitic spectacle dressed up as justice, I no longer trust that phrase.

There is another, quieter brutality in Ishioka’s story. Riefenstahl never stops marking her work as hers. Ishioka’s authorship often dissolves. Directors, studios, and campaigns lift her inventions and present them as inevitable, as if they appeared by themselves. My earlier pleasure, as a viewer, was in spotting “Eiko traces” everywhere. Under Sade’s question—who gains when her name disappears—the picture shifts. Beauty still does its work, selling films and brands and prestige, while the woman whose eye created it is treated as a replaceable technician.

Among her many achievements, one work points in a different direction and will eventually bring us closer to Arbus. The Fall sits in a different light from her more openly spectacular projects. Co-created with her future husband Nicholas “Nico” Soultanakis and Tarsem Singh, in a position that gave her a reach beyond costume into the whole fabric of the film, it tells a small story about a suicidal stuntman in a 1920s hospital and a little girl who refuses to leave his side. He keeps her there with an extravagant fantasy tale; she answers by believing him enough to tie him back to life. When it was remastered in 4K and shown in Tōkyō in November of 2025, after nearly 20 years of relative obscurity, younger viewers received it not as a glorification of power but as a baroque relay for meaning, wrapped in beauty, in a world that offers very little of either. If Triumph of the Will stages beauty as an accomplice to harm, The Fall shows the same appetite for image harnessed to keep nihilism at bay a little longer. I will come back to that shift when I turn to Arbus and to a third kind of beauty.

Arbus: beauty of resonance

Diane Arbus (1923–1971) stands at the far edge of this field. If Riefenstahl shows the beauty of bodies drilled to serve power, and Ishioka spends her life testing the power of beauty, Arbus belongs to another line again. I think of it as a beauty of resonance. It is the small, stubborn echo that passes between two exposed beings who recognize themselves in each other’s unease and stay in the room.

Her photographs draw me with a different kind of force. They are breathtaking, yet they do not console. They are also not cold. The people in them are “freaks” in the old vocabulary, visibly different—wrong for the stadium, wrong for the ideal. The feeling I have in front of them is not curiosity about deformity and not admiration of defiance. It is closer to com-passion in the original sense: feeling with. A shared fever, a shared wound, a shared effort to stay standing in a world that has already judged.

The beauty in these images does not lie in smoothing anything over. Faces remain awkward, bodies remain strange, the rooms are often shabby. Nothing is softened. What matters is the way Arbus stands with them. She enters their space and lets the same hard light fall on all of them, herself included. There is no balcony, no safe distance. The gaze is level. Her subjects look into the camera, and, by extension, at us, without apology and without any gesture of “take me in.” The picture holds the moment where two discomforts meet and neither retreats. That is the shape of resonance I mean.

Before I stay longer in these rooms, I want to mark a small constellation of lives and fictions that sit closer to Arbus’s side of the field than to Riefenstahl’s: Stefan Zweig, C. S. Lewis, Salinger’s Esmé, and, on another register, The Fall.

Stefan Zweig (1881–1942), a Viennese Jew steeped in European high culture, watches the rise of the regime Riefenstahl served. His chosen beauties are books, music, private decency. As that world collapses, he goes into exile and finally kills himself in Brazil. His last letters carry a flat, drained grief. He does not turn disaster into a “tragic sublime” or frame his suicide as a meaningful gesture. He lets beauty fail. In a field where Riefenstahl fuses beauty to political power and turns it into a narcotic, Zweig stands for a very different relation: beauty that is powerless against the state, and a writer who refuses to convert that powerlessness into a consoling myth.

In 1939, C. S. Lewis tells nervous students at Oxford that “favourable conditions never come.” People have always tried to think and create while the world burned somewhere: war, plague, invasion. If one waited for safety, there would be no thinking at all. There is a kind of quiet beauty in that stance, the image of a small circle of minds continuing their work while bombers cross the sky. At the same time, Lewis is careful not to treat this as heroism. He does not aestheticize war or baptize it as a purifying ordeal. He is describing a discipline rather than staging a spectacle. Where Riefenstahl offers beauty as an amplifier of power, Lewis presents a modest intellectual constancy that neither glorifies power nor pretends to stand outside it. His position is simple: carry on, without turning endurance into theater.

J. D. Salinger’s For Esmé—with Love and Squalor (1950) works at a much smaller scale. A damaged soldier, a cheap room, the letter of a child who barely knows him, and a slight loosening of the knot in his mind. The beauty here sits in a minimal gesture of care, almost nothing in outward form. The pleasure is modest, the relief of not being entirely alone. There is no claim to redemption, no stadium, no myth, only a tiny increase of meaning in one life. The Fall, which Ishioka helped shape far beyond the wardrobe, does something similar on a different scale: a man who wants to die keeps living just long enough to finish a story for a girl who believes him. Beauty here is neither stadium nor freak-show. It is a relay for meaning against the pull of nothingness.

All four mark a different weather from Riefenstahl’s stadium. Here beauty neither intoxicates crowds nor redeems history. It gives one mind just enough resonance with another to keep going a little longer, or, in Zweig’s case, to show that even when that resonance fails it need not be dressed up as glory. This is the climate in which I place Arbus.

Sontag, in On Photography (1977), chose to see Arbus as a connoisseur of freakishness, a voyeur feeding on the damaged. It is worth remembering that Arbus was another woman she did not like. There is a narrow truth in her accusation: someone is always looking, and the one who holds the camera has more freedom than the one who holds still. Yet the verdict misses the temperature of the work. The passion in these photographs is not the sadism of the spectator. It is the fire and hurt that pass between sitter and photographer and settle into the frame. Pain is there, but it is not isolated as a specimen. It is recognized. Arbus does not decorate it, does not redeem it, does not hide it. She stays in the room with it.

If I bring Sade’s question here and ask who is enjoying what, and what has to be ignored to keep that enjoyment intact, the answer shifts. My pleasure in Arbus is not the pleasure of looking at the other from safety. It is the jolt of recognizing that the line between “freak” and “normal” is thin, and that the unease in their eyes is also mine. There is still a risk of self-flattery, the comfort of believing myself to be on their side, against the stadium. I do not want to pretend that risk is not there. Even so, I cannot read these pictures as mere exploitation. The photographer has put herself into the same harsh light. The images feel less like trophies than records of a fragile communion.

In the larger pattern of this essay, Arbus anchors another corner. Riefenstahl’s beauty is the beauty of submission to an ideal that belongs to someone else. Ishioka’s beauty is the beauty a woman tries to wrest back into her own hands, only to see it often stripped of her name. Arbus’s beauty is the beauty of resonance: two human beings standing in a bare room with no alibi, no myth of health or nation to hide behind, and enduring the look together. Whatever power there is in these images comes from that com-passion, not from the humiliation of the person seen. In that sense she belongs to the same small family as Salinger’s Esmé and The Fall, where a man and a child keep each other alive a little longer through words and images. Beauty appears there, as in Arbus’s rooms, as a relay passed between exposed beings so that neither has to face the void entirely alone.

Where I stand, without alibi

What remains is the question of why any of this matters: what, if anything, such fragile resonances and refusals have to do with beauty, and, beneath that, what kinds of meaning with which a person can still bear to live.

My pleasures are not pure. I enjoy Riefenstahl’s images at the level of eye and nerves. I relish Ishioka’s transformations, the way she drags that grammar into new myths and surfaces. Arbus’s faces draw me with the sense of standing in the room with them. The perverse elegance of Hannibal’s crime scenes attracts me, along with my own discomfort in that attraction. I also take pleasure in seeing through the excuses of Sontag’s milieu and the French theorists, and through the current radical chic that turns anti-Semitic excitement into moral theater. I enjoy the feeling of holding all this in view without collapsing.

I protect these pleasures with useful stories: that I am only analyzing, that my distance from every tribe keeps me honest, that knowing how seduction works makes me less seducible. I calculate that tracing the mechanisms gives me a margin of freedom, while admitting that it does not cancel the appetite.

Since Riefenstahl built her fame on glorifying the man who ordered the camps, it seems right that at least one voice here should come from someone who saw them from inside. Viktor Frankl (1905–1997) stands at an angle to all this. What Salinger sketches in miniature—a cracked mind held together a little longer by a child’s letter—Frankl tries to name as a law. In the camps he concludes that a person’s main concern is not simply to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but to find meaning, and that life is not primarily a quest for pleasure or for power, but a quest for meaning. People will sometimes endure suffering not because it becomes acceptable, still less beautiful, but because they can still fasten it to a task, a promise, a responsibility, or to someone they refuse to abandon.

Here “beauty” has nothing to do with the camp itself. It clings instead to small, stubborn traces of value that refuse to die: a remembered line, a scrap of music hummed under the breath, the decision not to let every sense of worth be extinguished. That is a kind of beauty of resonance, a faint echo between an inner image and a possible future self, enough to keep someone from dropping into nothing. It does not redeem the horror. It keeps one human thread from snapping.

Somewhere between Esmé and The Fall there is also that tiny stop-motion film Lost & Found (2018): a crocheted dinosaur unravelling itself to drag a knitted fox out of danger, thread by thread, until nothing of its own body is left but a heap of yarn. Then comes the frantic, clumsy work by the fox of knitting it back together. The film withholds the easy consolation of a restored creature. The attempts fail, again and again, and we watch the fox go on knitting, stubbornly. Even if the fox were to succeed, what reappears would be necessarily imperfect: crooked, scarred, nothing like the original toy. That outcome is not the point. The beauty here does not lie in restoring an ideal form, but in the decision to come apart for the other and in the imperfect labor of trying to remake something that can exist again. That is the same beauty of resonance I feel in Esmé’s letter, in The Fall’s dying stuntman and stubborn child, in Arbus’s rooms, and in Frankl’s “will to meaning.” It has nothing to do with the beauty of power or the power of beauty as spectacle; it is simply a refusal to abandon the other to nothingness.

Riefenstahl and, often, Ishioka find beauty in purification: mess pressed into pattern, conflict dissolved into form. The stadium, the reef, the Běijīng ceremony, the crimson silhouettes in Dracula all offer the same reassurance. Whatever chaos lies behind them has been tamed into a single rhythm in which the eye can rest. The figures gathered around Arbus, Esmé, Frankl, and Lost & Found live in the opposite condition. Their beauty stands inside an unsolved mess and refuses to pretend it is anything else. That is the terrain where I place the beauty of resonance.

Jacques Zylberberg (1939–2010) gives that messy terrain another name: complexity. For him, complexity is not a knot to be cut through or disentangled, but an au-delà, a horizon that always recedes, held, when we are lucky, by a fragile triangle he called sagesse, lucidité, liberté: a kind of wisdom that still holds after horror has stripped away illusions, lucidity as the refusal of comforting lies, and freedom in the small, stubborn acts that still defy circumstance. In that light, the beauty of resonance is simply what appears when someone stands facing that horizon without editing it into purity: Arbus in a cramped room; Frankl trying not to let the inner eye go blind in the camp; the fox knitting on; the rare spectator who does not let the pattern drown out the scream. Set against that, my own position is narrower. This essay lives mostly in lucidity. It reaches, where it can, toward wisdom. As for freedom, it does very little. I know that, and I go on writing anyway, because I am not willing to give up the pleasures this position protects.

From Sade’s vantage, I am simply another person whose tastes and conscience cross in an untidy way and who would rather not examine the crossing for long. I am not outside the field I am describing. If this essay has a protagonist, she is neither Juliette nor Justine, but a woman sitting in the blue light of a screen, trying to make sense of the “unravelled” threads of these three lives.

I see myself now as the fox in Lost & Found, fumbling with the yarn of Riefenstahl’s symmetry, Ishioka’s vibrant armor, and Arbus’s exposed faces. I am knitting them into this text, not to restore them to some original, “pure” beauty, but to see if they can hold together a different kind of meaning. It is a clumsy, imperfect labor. The result is crooked, scarred by the history of the twentieth century and the complicities of the twenty-first.

I keep the Sadean scalpel on the desk because I need to remember the price of the patterns I admire. I am the spectator who has opened her own Pandora’s box and refused to close it. I go on knitting these sentences in the dark, well aware that the most impolite question is the one I must keep asking until the thread runs out: Who is enjoying what? What am I refusing to see in order to keep this beauty intact?

My own name belongs in that inventory along with everyone else’s.