Date: Sat, 24 Jul 1999 15:51:06 -0700
From: hugh bone <hughbone-AT-worldnet.att.net>
Subject: Re: the sublime (was Trusting liars to lie)


colin.wright3-AT-virgin.net wrote:
> 
> 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.

-AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT-

Colin, Brent et.al.

The historical artifacts available to Kant must have been mainly
Greek philosophy and Judeo-Christian theology:  A pantheon of Greek
gods, the one god of Judaism, the lives and teachings of Old Testament 
figures, the visionary experience of 17 centuries of Christian Saints.

Kant could not view Christ-on-the cross from a modern, much less
post-modern viewpoint of anthropology.

Christ as shaman, man-god, may have known a sublime experience, a
pleasure in fulfilling the Father-ordained destiny of crucifixion,
and at the same time, and in addition to the physical pain,  the mental
pain reported as: "My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?

It would seem that only a believer could suffer this very special pain
of being forsaken.  

Or, as a nephew who had loved not too wisely and not too well, said of
his younger brother:  "He hasn't even had his heart broken once."

Was Kant a believer?  He was decades ahead of Darwin and his
metanarrative of the "Descent" from the trees.

The Bible is full of inspirational stories of pain and glory, but 
do modern instances of sublime experience often combine the two?

Best,
Hugh

-AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT-
'
 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.