File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1999/lyotard.9907, message 219


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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