Date: Tue, 26 Mar 1996 10:49:45 GMT
From: Richard Ashcroft <R.E.Ashcroft-AT-liverpool.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: sublime silence


 Bill Schaffer wrote:

> Is the list listening?
> 
> A while ago someone mentioned 'reading the sublime' but nothing seems to have
> resulted. Am I still on the right wavelength? 
> 
> Anyone got any nagging questions that arise from the reading of a Lyotard
> text? Let's honour the dignity of the list ...
> 
Well, I'm listening, and in a spirit of bold experimentation and ignorance, has anyone 
considered (a) the relations between Lyotard's expropriation of the third critique and the early 
Romantics version of this expropriation (esp. Fr. and A. Schlegel and Novalis) and (b) the 
analogy (or something stronger) between Lyotard's ethical reading of the sublime and Kant's 
bridge between second and third critiques.  Somebody must have, but it puzzles me.  JFL 
certainly acknowledges the Athenaum fragments at the end of PMC, but in a somewhat 
backhanded way (in local politics this is a sort of compliment to Lacoue-Labarthe who 
published a book about early romanticism and whose recent career parallels JFL's in several 
respects).  And the early Romantics represent both a sympathetically anti-Hegelian 
aesthetics and a suitably non-totalising politics (again, anti- or rather pre-Hegelian).
A crucial feature of the Schlegels and Novalis was a turn to religion (of a negative theology 
kind, and then in the Schlegels' case to Catholicism); can we expect this from JFL?

Not exactly a close reading of Lyotard's sublime, but I hope something like an orientation.
It's what intrigues me, at any rate.
Richard Ashcroft