Date: Fri, 23 Jul 1999 09:43:29 -0400 From: "J. B. Sclisizzi" <jbs-AT-toronto.cbc.ca> Subject: Re: the sublime (was Trusting liars to lie) colin.wright3-AT-virgin.net wrote: > Lyotard and accountancy? actually, i think eric's an accountant, so it's not that difficult to imagine ... > - An important point to make, is that Lyotard is always interested in > reflective judgements as against determinate judgements. yes. i don't think anyone would call lyotard a kantian. he sees in the third critique another (non-conceptual) way of judging. in my notes on postmodern fables i find: "She: You were quoting Kant. Do you remember the same reversal with regard to the sublime. It's a sentiment contrary to the interests of the understanding and of sensibility. But this *Zweckwidrigkeit,* this anti-finality, is final in relation to the destiny of the soul. Not to taste the pleasures of nature and art, to feel only their nullity, is to orient oneself toward the essential: namely, that there is something unpresentable ..." [57] most important, however, is this sense of the unpresentable. which is the absolute in the sense of nullity. "Nihilism does not just end the efficiency of the great narratives of emancipation, it does not just lead to the loss of values and the death of God, which render metaphysics impossible. It cast suspicion on the data of aesthetics." [245] the sublime is the absolute, nothingness, the unnameable, that-which-has-no-relation. It does not exist of itself. "There is no sublime object. And if there is a demand for the sublime, or the absolute in the aesthetic field, it stands to be disappointed." [29] the sublime is that excess which "must be thought as the "presence" through which the absolute (which is what has no relation) makes its sign in forms (which are relation). [28] ... "The "presence" of the absolute is the utter contrary of presentation. The sign it makes escapes semiotics as it does phenomenology, although it emerges as an event of the occasion of the presentation of a phenomenon that is otherwise sensible and sensed." [29] and this event is what gives us (non-metaphysical) soul: "The *aisthetonce* (sp? i can't read my handwriting) is an event; the soul exists only in that events stimulates it; when it is lacking, the soul is dissipated into the nothingness of the inanimate. Works of art are charged with honoring this miraculous and precarious condition." [245] brent ...
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