File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1997/lyotard.9712, message 76


From: df803-AT-freenet.carleton.ca
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 1997 16:57:39 -0800
Subject: Re: presentation, representation





>
>
> This latter case has both moral and aesthetic instances.  In the case of
> morality, it would mean finding the right action without any guidance aside
> from the moral law itself (be just!).  In the case of aesthetics,  it results
> from the aesthetic feeling which declares an object beautiful or sublime from
> a harmonious or impossible relationship between the faculty of conceiving and
> the faculty of having objects. (This latter faculty of presentation, Kant
> terms the imagination.)
>
> A final note regarding the sublime.  For Kant this is not to be found in the
> object, in the way that the beautiful may be found.  Instead, it is an
> aesthetic response to the conflict of the faculties.  Just one example must
> suffice here.  Reason has an idea of the infinite which is of a higher order
> that anything the faculty of the imagination is capable of presenting.
> Nonetheless the imagination strives to present or find examples of the
> infinite, only to end in failure and frustration.  It is in this very failure
> or negative result that the sublime is to be found.  To present the
> unpresentable is to engage an aethetics of failure.  Beckett knew this long
> ago.

  In the essays in _the Inhuman_ on this, which I unfortunately don't have with
me, Lyotard talks about a distinction between a sublime sentiment which involves
artistic work if it is to be brought into play as the unpresentable; and the
beautiful which has more to do with cultural activity and the gathering around
shared representations? of taste. As I read him, it is cultural activity that
lends itself to decipherment, to a legibility that satisfies the desire to get a
clear view of what otherwise remains unpresentable. One of the questions I ask is,
well, what is it that is being frustrated? is it the imagination in so far as it
wants to represent forms and not the nuanced play of matter (timber, tone) ?
and/or is it the understanding in so far as it strives for a whole grasp of
everything? I am asking also what is the relation of the sublime and the idea of
freedom which is the "object" of reason? Remembering that in the _Critique of
Practical Reason_ reason does not have an empirical feeling as guide but a
quasi-feeling that kant calls humiliation -- Is this humiliation the painful
pleasure of the sublime sentiment?


   

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