From: colin.wright3-AT-virgin.net
Date: Fri, 23 Jul 1999 23:36:06 -0700
Subject: Re: the sublime (was Trusting liars to lie)


J. B. Sclisizzi wrote:
> 
> 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 ...

Brent,
       This informative post brings out an aspect of the sublime, as
proffered by Lyotard, that could be taken in a way I know Lyotard would
not want (yet it is present in his words). His emphasis on the
unpresentable, on a certain nullity, a nothingness, on the unnameable
etc. could suggest a kind of romanticism of the ineffable. Because there
is this element to the sublime (which we haven't talked about), much of
Lyotard's words here (soul, the essential, the absolute, miraculous
etc.) are couched in a veiled theology - of a distinctly Judeo-Christian
genealogy. I wonder if this is a little misleading? In fact, it seems to
me that the sublime is, by definition (if this phrase were not
paradoxical), highly recalcitrant of description, theological or
otherwise. One could apply this paradox to his project as a whole, at
least in terms of its attempt to present the presentation of the
unpresentable. In a way, the whole edifice rests on this differend. This
by no means makes it imossible or irrational or logically
self-contradictory. But, also, this need not lead into reifying the
ineffable AS ineffable, don't you think? Again, I feel this reveals a
tension in Lyotard: on the one hand, he decries the violence
constitutive of representation, but on the other, say in 'The
Differend', he foregrounds the ethical import of creatively forming NEW
modes of expression. So I feel that the ineffable is not at all a
positive thing in itself, not something to be sacralized and preserved.
He is not aggrandizing the irreducible alterity of the Other, as Levinas
does. I would rather read him as testifying to a necessary alterity in
all representation, the better to recoup that particular alterity (not
alterity per se) to a more sensitive, 'better educated' representation.
Having said this, the name Auschwitz would seem to be an important
exception to this rule. These tensions I have discerned, then, are not a
problem at all if they are thought of as moments in a process, in which
the either/or binary is not really tenable. 
     What do you think about the theological or quasi-religious
dimension of the sublime, that is, if it even has one?
Cheers,
Col.