SEXUATED TOPOLOGY AND THE
SUSPENSION OF MEANING
A NON-HERMENEUTICAL PHENOMENOLOGICAL
APPROACH TO TEXTUAL ANALYSIS
WILLIAM J. URBAN
4.2 The Topology of the Kantian Sublime
If the overwhelming tendency today is to conceive our universe as a meaningful self-enclosure, then the foremost issue that confronts the student of the human sciences interested in a viable alternative vision concerns the development of an appropriate strategy to re-conceptualize the semantic field of interpretation so as to move it towards its suspension. The argument running through the present section338 suggests one such way of doing so. It examines the aesthetic theories of four very different contemporary French thinkers – Lyotard, Rancière, Deleuze and Nancy – organized around Kant's conception of the sublime. Their explicit or implicit understanding, application and even rejection of certain aspects of Kant's logic of the sublime can be further brought out against the work of an outlier to this group: Heidegger. The discussion proceeds as follows. While always mindful of Kant’s revolutionary achievement in breaking away from his sophist philosophical inheritance, the deficiencies of Kant’s thinking are first indicated in regard to the sublime with respect to artworks and with the aesthetic field in general. Next a brief outline is provided demonstrating how it is possible to utilize the logic of the sublime found in the third Critique to re-read the first Critique. In this way, all objects – artworks and otherwise – may now be said to concern the sublime and not just those things which can never be objects of our possible experience, which Kant calls the Ideas of reason: God, the soul and the universe as a whole. With the notable exception of Heidegger, the claim is made that each of the contemporary thinkers examined here, at least implicitly, has accomplished this re-reading of the first Critique in light of the third Critique inasmuch as the truth they uncover with their respective aesthetic theory can be extended in a homologous fashion to non-aesthetic realms of objects.339 But they each extend the implications of doing so in their own unique fashion. Two of the thinkers examined, Lyotard and Rancière, actually form a curious pair: while ostensibly at odds, their aesthetics are quite complimentary, almost necessitating each other. Here it is suggested how Lyotard’s ‘dynamical’ or ‘masculine’ preoccupation and confrontation with the Thing can be seen as operating as a symptomatic point for Rancière’s ‘mathematical’ or ‘feminine’ generation of that Thing. Between these two it is indicated where Heidegger goes wrong. Concluding the core argument with Deleuze and Nancy, it is claimed that their work fares much better as it attempts to articulate the ‘collapse’ of the schematic framework which discloses objects into a ‘sublime object’ whose singularity allows us to unlock the secret of the Thing as ultimately phantasmatic. This object they attempt to discern in painting. Such an object is the Lacanian objet a, or surplus-jouissance. It should be noted that although he has not developed a specific aesthetic theory, Žižek haunts the entire discussion and must be explicitly acknowledged, especially as his Hegelian-influenced reading of Kant’s transcendental schemata through the logic of the sublime forms the crucial theoretical backdrop for this section. A brief examination of Hegelian aesthetics brings this section to a close. If the sublime indexes the unsurpassable ethical limit in artworks and the aesthetic field in general, the sublime in art should be viewed as instantiating the same topology which supports a proper strategy to suspend meaning.
Crucial to this undertaking is presupposing the existence of what Lyotard in his The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (1988) calls the ‘aesthetics of the sublime.’340 Kant clearly understood that the sublime experience is intense, greatly affecting the subject and there is some evidence that he at least implicitly understood how this was an aesthetic affectation when he writes of the ‘emotional effect from the magnitude of the pyramids’ of Egypt or ‘the bewilderment or kind of perplexity that is said to seize the spectator who for the first time enters St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.’341 Further to this, it should also be mentioned that Kant does not completely deny a place to the sublime in fine art, though the three references are brief and rather incidental and it should be noted that his thinking here is not extended to art in general.342 However, it must be stressed from the onset of this argument that Kant did not work out a specific aesthetic theory of the sublime. His interest was to establish a critique of the faculty of judgment and insofar as aesthetic feelings are concerned, this only involves a preoccupation with the role played by things like beauty and taste. So Rancière is quite right to note in his Aesthetics and its Discontents (2004) that when the sublime is experienced while standing before St. Peter’s Basilica or the pyramids at Giza, for Kant this never points either to the work of Michelangelo or to some ancient Egyptian architect.343 Rather, if such man-made objects trigger a sublime affect, this is simply due to their colossal size as approximating the impossible-to-grasp magnitude of nature, for only the latter involves a pure aesthetic (i.e., non-teleological and non-rational) judgment, since the ‘sublime [is] not in products of art (e.g., buildings, columns, etc.), where both the form and the magnitude are determined by a human purpose, nor in natural things whose very concept carries with it a determinate purpose (e.g., animals with a known determination in nature), but rather in crude nature... merely insofar as crude nature contains magnitude.’344 As strange as this may seem to us, by privileging crude nature over art or even banal natural objects, Kant is attempting to preserve the aesthetic character of the pure judgment of sublimity.345 By doing so, he is pointing out that if there is something of the sublime in St. Peter’s Basilica, it is only because it so easily dwarfs the individual subject. So as far as Kant’s third Critique is concerned, the sublimity of art is expressly linked to its size: if an artwork is to contain the sublime, it has to be really big.
In the 200 years since its initial publication, readers of Kant have suspected otherwise and the contemporary aesthetic thinkers examined here have recently made significant headway in reading Kant against himself. That is, regardless of whether the third Critique itself lacks a specific aesthetic theory of the sublime, the underlying logic first articulated there can be re-read in conjunction with the first Critique such that even small artworks like paintings could be seen as triggering a sublime experience in the subject. We can consider certain passages in Nancy’s The Ground of the Image (2000–4) as representative of the need to re-read Kant, which also give us an indication how this has recently been done. For instance, in a footnote to a chapter entitled ‘Masked Imagination,’ he tells us that ‘[i]t would not be a matter of indifference if Kant’s own aesthetic analysis maintains a hidden but definite relation with that of the schematism’ and proceeds to detail at length in this chapter the inner workings of the Kantian theory of the schema found in the first Critique346 in order to evaluate Heidegger’s Kantbuch347 through the latter text’s symptomatic point of the Death Mask.348 It is, however, Žižek who has most clearly emphasized Kant’s schema as the key link between the first and third Critiques with respect to the sublime. The precise manner in which this is done is beyond the scope of the present discussion. However, the general idea can be readily understood as the conception of the sublime as the (impossible) schema of the Ideas of reason. Through such a notion, one is retroactively made aware how the synthesis of imagination via the application of a schema is unproblematic only in the first Critique, while in the case of the Sublime, the imagination falters when it attempts to grasp really big objects like God, the soul and the universe as a whole.349 Since the schema involves a ‘pure image,’ which Kant equates with time itself, such a faltering operates like an ‘earthquake in being that opens the chasm or the fault of presence,’ which is how Nancy quite vividly expresses the violence done by the imagination with respect to the image in general.350 In this way, the ‘normal’ flow of time is disrupted and we can discern a certain potential crack in even our homogeneous, schematized temporal experience of ‘normal’ objects and their respective images, inclusive of artworks.
Moreover, Žižek reads the sublime experience as inherently involving a point of madness, of an excessive dimension of subjectivity qua void of negativity. Thus the claim made here is that this excessive point is indexed not only ‘in what we usually call sublime in nature;’ nor is it only ‘in its chaos that nature most arouses our ideas of the sublime, or in its wildest and most ruleless disarray and devastation, provided it displays magnitude and might;’351 rather, the sublime can also be experienced in the creative products of those individuals called artists. The French thinkers examined here may not all agree that the sublime experience of an artwork registers one’s subjectivity. But they certainly have all extended, at least implicitly, Kant’s initial logic of the sublime from its once exclusive domain of chaotic nature to the aesthetic realm and its objects. This, of course, will not be revealed to anyone who does not read both Critiques simultaneously, which is precisely the problem with Heidegger.352 We return to Heidegger below.
Of the contemporary thinkers being examined, it is certainly Lyotard who has most forcefully put a logic of the sublime directly to work in the realm of art and has even entrusted a particular group, the avant-garde, with keeping the faith. Without question, Lyotard discerns a gap in the temporal order, so ‘that it is always both too soon and too late to grasp anything like a “now” in an identifiable way,’ such that we are forever wavering between a ‘disappearing’ and ‘an excess with respect to what? To... the thing itself.’353 The first thing to note is how Lyotard is operating with an excess of subjectivity where the subject is split in terms of its desire, a desire which cannot be satisfied under the secure terms of a demand for identity.354 And often in expressed contrast to Heidegger, he speaks of a subject who lacks, but not one who is then exclusively preoccupied with communicating and interpreting that lack; rather, the question regarding the enunciating subject of any communication is and must be kept open.355 The second thing to note is that Lyotard says the subject is split with respect to the thing. But what is this thing? It is Freud’s Das Ding, Lacan’s Thing and Kant’s thing-in-itself, all of which he addresses in his second chapter, and it is certainly no coincidence that he evokes Sophocles’ tragedies as further support for his argument. That is, Lyotard's discussion brings to mind the use Lacan made with the figure of Antigone, that exemplary figure who achieved a sublime status by elevating her subversive act against the state to the dignity of the Thing. This is not to say that Lyotard ventures as far as Lacan did with specifying Antigone or any other figure as a stand-in for the sublime object. On the contrary, the thesis here is that Lyotard got stuck in his fascination with the purely presupposed Thing and accordingly articulates an aesthetic project to keep the monstrous jouissance that it generates at bay.
To bring this out, we must consider how for Kant there are actually two sublimes, or rather one sublime that is divided into two with two different corresponding logics: the mathematical and the dynamical.356 As we have known since Joan Copjec, these two logics directly map onto Lacan’s feminine and masculine sexuated logic, respectively.357 And as Žižek makes clear, the mathematical-feminine for Kant has logical primacy in that it ‘”dissolves” phenomenal reality in the direction of the monstrous Real’ while the dynamical-masculine logic attempts to save phenomenal reality by transcending it and establishing the noumenal Law as its constitutive exception, thereby providing an external guarantee to phenomenal reality.358 It is this secondary logic concerning the masculine gesture which Lyotard’s theory is almost exclusively preoccupied with, although he is quite adept at articulating the underlying topology of the sublime experience in general and in terms similar to Kant. For instance, he tells us that when our minds are directed toward an object that is not of a possible experience, toward such an object that the imagination cannot hope to properly schematize as unproblematic, the failure to provide a representation corresponding to this object
‘gives rise to a pain, a kind of cleavage within the subject between what can be conceived and what can be imagined or presented. But this pain in turn engenders a pleasure, in fact a double pleasure... [and this] dislocation of the faculties among themselves gives rise to the extreme tension (Kant calls it agitation) that characterizes the pathos of the sublime, as opposed to the calm feeling of beauty.’359
There are two points to note here. First, with this formulation ‘pleasure in pain’ we have the elementary definition of Lacanian jouissance, which attends all sublime experiences and arises due to the subject’s proximity to the Thing. Second, far from directly identifying with any sublime ‘object’ in this experience, Lyotard (much like Kant) views this experience as providing a ‘negative presentation, or even a non-presentation’ for the Thing.360 That is, although the Thing is unapproachable and forever inaccessible, the sublime experience operates as a kind of guarantee that the Thing exists in some exceptional noumenal realm, which at the same time acts as the external guarantee and ‘substantial’ support for phenomenal reality. The point here is that the Thing qua being is disclosed completely within thought for Kant and Lyotard, while Lacan would contend that in truth it is only a phantasm that fills out the empty shell of the sublime object.
On missing this point, occupied as he is with granting the avant-garde guardianship over artistic approaches to the Thing, Lyotard reveals himself as operating within a masculine logic, concerned almost exclusively with Kant’s dynamic disclosure of the sublime. This is quite explicitly brought out in the first chapter of The Inhuman, which is divided into two sections entitled ‘HE’ and ‘SHE.’ There is much promise in this chapter, as he uses wonderful metaphors of the eye to bring out the fact that the subject is split with respect to its field of vision and how the uncertainty of this experience results in a partial blurriness and incompleteness in the perception of objects.361 But he reveals a theoretical failure in conceptualizing sexuation, which should be read as directly concerning a choice with respect to the two logics of the sublime when he asks ‘I don’t know whether sexual difference is ontological difference. How would a person know?’362 That he italicizes the final word is indicative of his ultimate position, that this difference is one of only epistemological concern. Most tellingly at the end, he writes that ‘gender difference’ inscribes transcendence on the body, and this difference is what makes ‘thought go on endlessly.’ Such ‘infinite thought’ indicates the annihilation of the One.363 But does not such a strong argument for the One’s annihilation (the impossibility of completely determining the object seen; of perfect sexual union) silently presuppose its possibility, something that could be achieved in a kind of self-imposed endless task? If this is the case, what we have is the obsessive-compulsive (male’s) fantasy par excellence, so it should be no surprise he talks of necessary recourses to ‘bodily ascesis to understand and make understood a type of emptying of the mind, an emptying that is required if the mind is to think.’364 What we have here, in terms of the two poles embedded in the title of the chapter (Can Thought Go On Without A Body?) is a clear choice on Lyotard’s part for body or being over-against thought. Primordially speaking, the author of this text makes the ‘masculine’ choice of being, so thought becomes his elemental symptom – thinking hurts, he reminds us365 – and precisely one in which being becomes structured by a phantasmatic framework or in Kantian terms, how it is that any object is only disclosed to us through the transcendental schemata.
Thus for Lyotard, the Thing is a definite body, has substantial being and because of the jouissance that its ‘monstrous’ dimension generates, the advent of the ‘aesthetics of the sublime’ in the 19th and 20th centuries is obligated to bear ‘witness to the fact that there is indeterminacy.’366 Moreover, to represent this ‘unpresentable’ is the assigned job, even duty367 of the avant-garde, whose work defines the very task of art today as that which must allude to a non-edifying ‘immanent sublime.’368 In a nod to the philosophical origins of his aesthetics, he tells us that ‘we are incapable of so much as recognizing a work of art’ without the radical dimension first opened up by Kant’s transcendental critique.369 What all this amounts to is the certainty on Lyotard’s part of the absolute existence of the Thing and with instituting an aesthetic project to approximate our experience with respect to it. In the final analysis, it is not so much the logic that underpins his aesthetic theory that is faulty but rather that his analysis stops abruptly at this point and with such certitude. He ends a key chapter dedicated to today’s ‘state of aesthetics’ in our supposed post-sublime condition with respect to matter with the following words: ‘One cannot get rid of the Thing. Always forgotten, it is unforgettable.’370 While Lyotard should certainly be applauded for telling us how it is ‘indispensable to go back through the Analytic of the Sublime from Kant’s Critique of Judgement in order to get an idea of what is at stake in modernism,’ it seems that there really is no ‘after the sublime’ after all as his aesthetic theory appears eternally caught within the dynamical-masculine logic of the sublime.371 This is precisely the reason why Lyotard is so disturbing for Rancière, as the latter ultimately opts for the other logic of the sublime that Kant articulated, the mathematical-feminine. But before turning to Rancière, the reasons for the absence of both logics from Heidegger's work is first discussed.
It was mentioned above how Žižek, who got his philosophical start as a young Heideggerian, argues that his former master refrained from reading Kant’s first and third Critiques together. This is symptomatic of the fact that Heidegger’s ontology has no discernible cracks – a fact which deeply informs his aesthetics and markedly distinguishes his thought from these French philosophers. Textually, we can trace Heidegger’s halting point to the first Critique itself, for in §31 of his Kantbuch we read how Kant already ‘shrank back’ from the transcendental power of the imagination beginning with the second edition of the same book.372 In Heidegger’s work, there are only a scattering of references to the second Critique, still fewer to the third and absolutely no mention of the sublime. This is likewise the case with his aesthetic work on Nietzsche. Despite an entire chapter on Kant’s doctrine of the beautiful, the word ‘sublime’ never occurs, nor does its logic appear in any form in this book. To understand why this is so, consider that his entire analysis in Chapters 11 and 12 of his Nietzsche: Volumes I and II: The Will to Power as Art; The Eternal Recurrence of the Same (1961) regarding the ‘will to power as art’ is predicated on establishing a privileged link between the artistic being (not subject) with the ground of Being. It is the artist qua producer who is met with approval rather than those who ‘enjoy’ and ‘experience’ art.373 Indeed, ‘aesthetic man’ is dismissed as a nihilistic notion.374 Moreover, his language throughout the text emphasizes ontology over the more subjective realms of epistemology and thought. In general, the very existence of ‘aesthetics’ is an index of the inferiority of our situation today with respect to the magnificence of the pre-Socratic universe, which had no need of any such category.375 What all this points to is Heidegger’s attempt to traverse the horizon of modern subjectivity. As Žižek tells us, the modern subject is the Cartesian cogito, which Lacan dubbed the ‘subject of the unconscious’ and which concerns an excessive moment of madness philosophers have endeavored to account for ever since René Descartes first detected it as a crack in our ontological universe. The problem with Heidegger is that he simply does not account for this excess of subjectivity.376
This thesis appears well supported, as a few citations will show. For instance, it is clear Heidegger is not working with any modern notion of a subject qua abstract counterpart to every ontological disclosure of being (as most modern philosophers implicitly do) when he tells us how ‘[w]e do not dwell alongside the event as spectators; we ourselves remain within the [aesthetic] state.’377 Perhaps Heidegger’s anti- Cartesian stance is most revealing when he directly critiques ‘Kant, who because of his transcendental method possessed a larger number of more highly refined possibilities for interpreting aesthetics, remained trapped within the limits of the modern concept of the subject. In spite of everything, we must try to make more explicit what is essential in Nietzsche as well, going beyond him.’378 A page earlier he tells us what is worthwhile in Nietzsche in starkly negative terms: the schema of the ‘subject-object relation,’ which is the ‘starting point for man as subject,’ is never to be accepted, for such a ‘schema simply casts aside what is worthy of question in Nietzsche’s aesthetics.’ The ‘distinction between the subjective and the objective’ simply has little to contribute to a proper aesthetic theory. In Heidegger's essay entitled "The Origin of the Work of Art" (1935) he makes reference to his opus, Being and Time, to tell us that ‘resoluteness... is not the decisive action of a subject,’ nor is creating nor willing to be ‘thought of as the achievement or action of a subject who sets himself a goal that he strives to achieve.’379 In explicit contrast with Kant’s autonomous ethical subject, ‘[m]odern subjectivism, of course, misinterprets creation as the product of the genius of the self-sovereign subject,’ which again means that ‘”subject” and “object” are inappropriate terms, here’ for they prevent our thinking of the essential nature, truth and origin of an artwork.380 Rather, these terms are to be avoided as they encourage reflective contemplation of aesthetics and sensory apprehension of art. Far from this ‘experience... [being] the standard-giving source not only for the appreciation and enjoyment of art but also for its creation,’ Heidegger suggests that ‘experience is the element in which art dies.’381 Thus, if we assume, as is the case in the present section, that the sublime of art is, at its most basic level, a sublime experience of art, we can make little use of Heidegger’s aesthetic theory. And doubly so when we note the additional assumption of how the sublime experience indexes the fact of one’s excessive subjectivity: what ultimately is experienced in the sublime is an abyss that is the radical autonomous freedom of a ‘sovereign’ subject. This concept is lacking in Heidegger. However, Heidegger’s example is useful in providing a counterpoint to the other thinkers examined here (most notably Lyotard), bringing out the fact that they are all concerned with an indeterminacy which ultimately has to do with the modern subject. The excess of this subjectivity makes its ambiguous presence felt not only when contemplating the Ideas of reason and the massive and chaotic objects of nature, but also with regard to the objects of everyday experience, especially artworks.
Against Heidegger, Rancière presupposes the excessive gesture concomitant to split subjectivity much like Lyotard, although this is slightly harder to discern. For example, in his critique of Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben and their suggestion of an ‘ontological destiny of the human animal’ found in his book Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (1996–2004), he argues that the true ‘subject of politics’ and of ‘the Rights of Man’ as the ‘process of subjectivation’ is that which bridges a particular gap in the existence of those rights and thus must be rethought ‘were it out of its very lack.’382 This ‘dispostif of subjectivation [is] constructed by subjects who rise up to contest the “naturalness” of [their assigned] places and functions by having counted what I call the part of those without part.’383 However, does this not give rise to the question of whether his entire political and aesthetic project, concerned as it is with the ‘part of no part,’ of giving a voice to the voiceless and visibility to the unseen over-against the consensual Police, involves the elementary matrix of the hysterical gesture? If so, Rancière is clearly using a Cartesian subject, for Lacan’s subject is nothing if not a hysterical subject (as Freud already knew when he conceptualized obsessional neurosis as a ‘dialect’ of hysteria). So it should not be surprising that against Heidegger, we find Rancière particularly focused on the experience of subjects in relation to art throughout his texts, especially when he articulates the revolutionary Aesthetic Regime of Art as an ‘[a]esthetic experience... of an unprecedented sensorium in which the hierarchies are abolished that structured sensory experience’ but at the same time is that which isolates art’s specificity and claims itself better suited than politics in promoting ‘a new human community, united no longer by the abstract forms of the law but by the bonds of lived experience.’384 Thus it is equally unsurprising that he has much to say on that most intense experience of the sublime, though this is as a general rule always introduced into his texts through another figure, almost as if a more ‘direct’ approach would betray his aesthetic theory. This figure is usually Lyotard, and suggested below is a reason why this might be the case.
Just as Lyotard’s choice of the dynamical-masculine logic of the sublime could be said to act as the key to understanding Lyotard’s aesthetic project, as something which deeply informs what we might call its ‘ontological outlook at its zero-level’ and thus provides its topological support, likewise with Rancière’s choice of the mathematical-feminine logic. But it should be reiterated that claims made with respect to Rancière’s aesthetics are more difficult to demonstrate than with Lyotard, for not only is the actual logic much more complicated, but as was said above, there is a primacy to such logic over the dynamical-masculine version. What this means is that any attempt to articulate just how the mathematical dissolves phenomenal reality toward the monstrous Real at once involves a dynamical gesture of establishing an exceptional point to bring out that articulation. It is for this reason that Kant much of the time lapses into a dynamical logic when speaking of the sublime, and this of course makes is rather easy to compare Lyotard with Kant since both are predominately using the same dynamical-masculine logic. However, by suggesting Rancière consciously makes the opposite choice of a feminine ‘Not-all’ logic to frustrate any masculine gestures toward establishing an ‘All’ field, we immediately gain insight into the nonengagement which many of his readers reportedly experience when engaging with the dispersive nature of his texts. As we see when we more closely contrast Kant’s mathematical with his dynamical version of the sublime, Rancière’s choice can be felt at the very level of his practice of writing. Indeed, his Dissensus editor contends the author consciously ‘strives’ to convey ‘an egalitarian leveling out of discourses.’385 Although calculated to break with any ‘master’s discourse’ which would claim ‘access to the thing itself,’ this strategy of ‘setting all discourses within the horizon of this common language’ may have the unintended effect of flattening-out his ‘poetics of knowledge’ to the point that it becomes extremely difficult to discern what exactly Rancière seems to be claiming with his aesthetic project. As his editor further explains, ‘[t]he upshot is that every idea in these pages appears only as the idea of someone’ and we might hasten to add ‘else.’ Rancière’s dissensual writing style no doubt comes from his situating philosophy in the ‘intervals between discourses’ and of conceiving political and artistic innovation as a ‘multiplicity.’386 The point would be to consider how the lack of exceptional points to his system makes the articulation and extraction of an actual aesthetic or political project virtually impossible. To better see that his strategy is founded on the dispersive mathematical logic of the sublime, we can again look to Kant’s text.
Returning to the third Critique is certainly not without Rancière’s blessing, as he tells us that the first formula for his key operating notion of dissensus was given by none other than Kant himself, who thereby broke with the Representative Regime of Art’s ground in human nature to establish aesthetic experience as that which lay between nature and humanity. Hence, the whole problem now becomes ‘how to determine this relation without relation’ for, to move ‘from one humanity to another, the path can only be forged by inhumanity.’387 Although Rancière opts to explain this rather enigmatic statement by initially focusing on Kant’s analysis of the aesthetic experience of the beautiful, a closer examination of Kant’s logic of the mathematical sublime is instead advised, for there Kant does directly deal with Rancière’s problem of a ‘relation without relation’ and implicitly links this with how such a dynamic may actually itself generate its own solution of movement through an ‘inhumanity.’ Kant tells us in §26 of the third Critique that whenever we try to grasp a really big object like the ‘universe as a whole,’ our imagination falters. This faltering can be explicated through the functioning of two key components of the imagination. On the one hand, there is the apprehension of our perceptions of the dispersed multitude with which the subject is bombarded and on the other, the synthetic act of the comprehension of the unity of this multitude. What happens is that the second forever lags behind the first, so a painful gap forever exists between the two. It is as if there is not enough time to synthesize all the apprehended units.388
In this way, Kant is theorizing an inherent imbalance in the imagination, between its two functions of apprehension and comprehension. But does this imbalance not immediately bring to mind the fissure associated with Rancière’s key notion of dissensus? As he writes, the ‘aesthetic rupture... relates to a disconnection between... sensory forms’ the efficacy of which is called ‘dissensus, which is not a designation of conflict as such, but is a specific type thereof, a conflict between sense and sense. Dissensus is a conflict between a sensory presentation and a way of making sense of it.’389 In contrast, ‘consensus is an agreement between sense and sense, in other words between a mode of sensory presentation and a regime of meaning.’390 As Rancière correctly states, ‘[i]n the Kantian analysis, free play and free appearance suspend the power of form over matter, of intelligence over sensibility’ and this ‘refutation within the sensible’ thereby is able to disclose something new.391 Therefore, in both Kant and Rancière the same Kantian faculty392 is conceived as inherently split with itself, which means that it is self-relating and the answer to the problem of how to determine the ‘relation without relation’ may lie entirely within sensibility or imagination over against intelligibility. Inversely, this split with itself can be thought of as ‘the putting of two worlds in one and the same world’ so that dissensus is a division inserted into ‘“common sense”: a dispute over what is given and about the frame within which we see something as given.’393 What is important to notice here is that Rancière’s frame is spoken of in strikingly similar terms to Kant’s schema. Both seem to operate as transcendental frameworks of sorts which disclose objects we see as given. The crucial difference with Lyotard is that while he focuses on the phantasmatic Thing qua aspect of the object that is disclosed by the schematic frame, Rancière focuses on the frame as such. His project can be seen as the eternal task of articulating and specifying this frame, of providing accounts of how and what it has disclosed throughout history and of tracing the different forms (i.e., Regimes) it has taken in the past. Most importantly, Rancière is concerned with the ‘specific distributions of space and time, of the visible and the invisible’ as he wants to articulate the need to formulate new ‘strategies…intended to make the invisible visible or to question the self-evidence of the visible; to rupture given relations between things and meanings and, inversely, to invent novel relationships between things and meanings that were previously unrelated... [This] involves the re-framing of the “real,” or the framing of a dissensus.’394 Of course, it should be clear by now that the schema is the Kantian name for Rancière’s ‘distribution of the sensible.’ As the transcendental schemata is one of the most notoriously obscure components of Kant’s idealist philosophy, no wonder Rancière’s writing fails to excite, as the very epistemological field he endeavors to undertake is flattened and dispersed, busy as it is with specifying a ‘relation without relation.’
In the citation above, Rancière indicates that the problem of forging a path through such a field devoid of all relation but relation itself can only be done by ‘inhumanity.’ Rancière informs us that this is also a problem which confronts many other works, including Deleuze’s texts on art. As per usual with his thoughts which implicitly concern the logic proper to the sublime, his text is presented negatively through what it is not, so we only get a sense of what he means by ‘inhumanity’ through the failure of other attempts: Kant, Hegel, Friedrich von Schiller, Nietzsche, Theodor Adorno and of course Lyotard are all named as well and examined in turn. Instead of looking at what he has to say about each of these, we briefly return to Kant’s text and then suggest how Lyotard may function for Rancière. The former’s sharply dismissed work, The Inhuman, is so often cited by Rancière that one might almost on that basis alone conclude that it undoubtedly forms a source of much disavowed value for Rancière’s own aesthetic theory.
Kant tells us that opposed to the experience of the beautiful as that which ‘sustains the mind in restful contemplation, the feeling of the sublime carries with it, as its character, a mental agitation’ and by way of the violence of the imagination specifically pertaining to the mathematical sublime, we are confronted with a ‘monstrous’ object.395 As well, in his First Introduction to the third Critique, he speaks of how, beneath empirical laws, there exists ‘natural forms’ that are ‘infinitely diverse and heterogeneous and [manifest] themselves to us as a crude chaotic aggregate without the slightest trace of a system. Yet, according to transcendental laws, we must presuppose such a system... a system of experience.’396 Kant is saying that nature is a chaotic aggregate not subject to laws, but nevertheless must be presupposed as ‘organized’ in its own unique system, which should be read as precisely following the mathematical-feminine logic of Lacan’s double negative gesture of the Not-all whose lack of any exceptional point infinitely flattens the field in question: there is no presupposition which is not previously posited. This ‘no presupposition’ of experience can come to haunt us in particular situations, inscribing itself in the sublime (artwork) as a monstrous object-Thing, as a phantasm of sorts that perhaps ‘fills in’ the eternal gap between the apprehension and comprehension of the imagination if that gap becomes too wide. Consistent with this reading is a striking footnote where the mathematical logic is referred to as both primal and feminine. Kant tells us there that because of our finite temporal existence, we can never access nature as the totality of phenomena: ‘Perhaps nothing more sublime has ever been said, or a thought ever been expressed more sublimely, than in that inscription above the temple of Isis (Mother Nature): “I am all that is, that was, and that will be, and no mortal has lifted my veil.”’397 Žižek points out other passages in which Kant refers to the first painful time in the experience of the sublime as having a ‘”stepmotherly nature,” nature as a cruel mother not subject to any Law.’ However,
‘Kant gives a masculine twist to the secret behind the veil: “The hidden Goddess in front of whom... we fall on our knees, is none other than the moral Law in ourselves.” Here, literally, woman (the primordial Mother Nature) appears as “one of the Names-of-the-Father” (Lacan): her true secret is the paternal moral Law. We are dealing here not with the totality of phenomena but with what is beyond phenomena, the noumenal Law. Of course, these two versions of what is behind the veil refer to the two modes of the Sublime (mathematical/dynamic).’398
The two sexuated logics of the sublime are paradoxically related. For his part, Rancière clearly understands how Lyotard chooses the masculine gesture in order to attest to the ‘subject’s misery’ of its ‘immemorial dependency of the human mind on the unmasterable presence that, following Lacan, he calls the “Thing.”’399 Although it is more difficult, we can also discern that Rancière makes the opposite gesture at the very level of the language he uses to articulate his aesthetics, his politics, and when he articulates his opposition to Lyotard.
First, consider that he has a rather flattened view of history which tends to de-emphasize exceptional turning points and eschews an overall historical trajectory. His concept of ‘the ethical turn is not an historical necessity, for the simple reason that there is no such thing.’400 As well, ‘the concept of regimes of art undermines the idea of an historical rupture with respect to the constituent elements of art.’401 Indeed, ‘[t]here is no “real world” that functions as the outside of art. Instead, there is a multiplicity of folds in the sensory fabric of the common, folds in which outside and inside take on a multiplicity of shifting forms, in which the topography of what is “in” and what is “out” are continually criss-crossed and displaced by the aesthetics of politics and the politics of aesthetics.’402 Art here is explicitly defined as Not-all. And likewise with politics, as there is no possibility of rupturing the smooth operations of capitalism, since that system of organizing ourselves is a universal field constituted precisely through a lack of political alternatives: ‘Capitalism only ever produces capitalism’ and ‘communism’s heterogeneity cannot have its network framed in a place other than in the capitalist world; it has no place outside it.’403 Thus, we should not be fooled when he tells us that ‘everything is political,’ for such a universal All would comparatively hold emancipatory promise as it is constituted precisely through the masculine logic of establishing an exception to that field which could in turn play its part and act as noumenal rupture.404 Rather, for Rancière ‘politics expresses the nature of... the inseparate,’ or the ‘relation without relation’ as above.405 Indeed, because ‘[t]here is one distribution and a re-distribution’ that he rightly understands involves a logic that is prior to every masculine noumenal suspension, this seems to justify his thinking that it is sufficient to suspend every univocal sensorial (masculine) consensus through ‘[p]olitical and artistic fictions [which] introduce dissensus by hollowing out that “real” and multiplying it in a polemical way.’406 Although he is correct that shocks are never ‘between worlds, but shocks between worlds in the same world’407 so that the feminine gesture disrupts the masculine economy, Lyotard is also equally correct if we view his project of keeping a vigilant, avant-garde watch over the Thing as not only giving us a solid subjective ‘ground’ to withstand the violence of the imagination, but also to remind us of our duty to put such violence to emancipatory use. In the end, we need to be reminded how these two strategies are not simply opposed to one another, but are antinomies for both Kant and Lacan, which means that to properly delimit the sublime object, we must accomplish the impossible task of thinking them together.408
This is precisely what Rancière refuses to do in his dialog with Lyotard, busy as he is pointing out how his own manner of engagement with the Thing is logically prior to Lyotard’s still too substantial notion of an external Thing.409 More exactly, whenever Lyotard endeavors to delimit the unpresentable Thing, Rancière counters with how this can only be posited as the essence of art if ‘art is submitted to a dominant regime in which everything is representable.’410 Indeed, this is his standard argument to how even the Holocaust is representable, since nothing separates fictional representation from the presentation of reality.411 What he rightly recognizes is that there is no-thing that is not unrepresentable, and this logic takes precedence over any claims by Lyotard that the representational field, precisely by being ‘All there is,’ nevertheless exceptionally misses the unpresentable Thing. However, what Rancière himself misses is that in order to represent, one must first presuppose oneself as representing; otherwise, there is no way to account for why the representational field, the schema or the distribution of the sensible does not immediately collapse onto ‘reality.’ Such a paradoxical point concerns subjectivity and Rancière is quite clear that no such point exists, as there is ‘no subject possessing a power of rupture or of unbinding, no subject that exercises an ontological power of exception. The exception is always ordinary. The attempt to attain the exception of the "proper" entails a process whereby the proper ends up disappearing in the indifferentiation of ethics.’412 With this statement, Rancière implicitly announces his rejection of the Lacanian subject and its capacity for radical ethical acts. Contrary to Rancière, it is exactly the paradoxical embodiment of certain ‘ordinary’ exceptional objects which can be leveraged for rupturing the Police. But we should note in passing that even Rancière evidently cannot do away completely with an exceptional point, as he does conceptualize a ‘sensory exception.’413 But judging from its description as ‘a self-differing sensible that is inhabited by a self-differing thought,’ it seems to be a mere ‘use of distinction’ (as per the chapter title) or perhaps a conceptual short-hand for his schema of a distribution of the sensible rather than the singular short-circuiting point operating between that schema and the field that it discloses (i.e., in Kantian terms, that which ‘touches’ the two radically heterogeneous logics of the sublime). Since there is no such point for Rancière, he can ultimately equate Lacan, Žižek and others with Lyotard and critique them all for ‘punching holes in the chain of knowledge’ and for similarly remaining caught in a fatal relation to the Thing. The irony here is that the Thing’s phantasms arise precisely through the articulation of a dispersed, critical egalitarian philosophy such as his, which endeavors to ensure all narratives and investigations are accorded equal status as originating from a common capacity in a common language.414 But such an aesthetic project must nevertheless have an exceptional short-circuiting point to provide a minimal distance from and to keep it from collapsing into its ‘aesthetic reality.’ This point is certainly not the phantasmatic Thing, though it seems that in lieu of successfully articulating the necessity of the sublime object, Rancière’s mathematical-feminine project finds its stand-in formation – quite symptomatically – in Lyotard’s dynamical-masculine project of taking a measured distance from the Thing.
The two remaining thinkers, Deleuze and Nancy, have gone further than Lyotard and Rancière in attempting to delimit the sublime object in art. A brief demonstration is offered here that this is indeed the case, but it should be noted upfront how their texts have an additional degree of complexity as it builds on the analysis above. If Rancière’s Kantian schema of the distribution of the sensible is difficult to discern, embedded as it is in a demanding text supported by the obscure mathematical logic of the sublime, then to further purport that another philosopher has theorized the ‘collapse’ of that schema into a point which it itself discloses is a difficulty of far greater magnitude. But there is at least one sense in which engaging with the texts of Deleuze and Nancy is easier than with those of Lyotard, Rancière, Heidegger or Kant: the former both have sustained and focused analyses of particular artworks. Thus, we have visual objects to keep in mind as we follow along with their theoretical commentary on them and in doing so, we cannot but see how these paintings function as more than mere exemplifications of their theoretical discourse; rather, these objects of analysis are instantiations of their theoretical projects so that it is no exaggeration to claim that a particular artwork is the theoretical commentary ‘on’ it. In a word, the gap between the two is precisely sustained by the sublime object. This is perhaps Deleuze's and Nancy’s secret in having been more successful in specifying the elusive sublime object in the aesthetic field, for indeed it would be hard to overlook the ‘stain’ in one’s field of vision, which necessarily accompanies any prolonged viewing of a painting. If such a gaze emanating from the artwork has to do with the sublime object, an intensive analysis of a particular painting would not only expose and localize this object, but would reveal how it is identical with one’s search for it. Sketched out below is how both Deleuze and Nancy theorize the sublime object as they discern it in paintings, particularly with respect to Francis Bacon in the case of Deleuze415 and with respect to Pontormo’s Visitation for Nancy. Fortunately, having already laid much of the conceptual groundwork with the discussions of Kant, Lyotard, Heidegger and Rancière above, the identification of the proper elements involved in their articulation of the sublime object in paintings is made that much easier.
We know that according to Rancière, what may come to pass is the occasional dissociation or ‘rupture in the relationship between sense and sense’ which arises due to ‘a conflict between sense and sense’ and which was seen as corresponding to the inherent imbalance in the Kantian faculty of imagination.416 Rancière proceeds to argue that Deleuze reprises Kant’s thinking by theorizing that through this process, some ‘suprasensible element [is] encountered in the experience of the sublime…the pure sensible, the inhuman power of life.’417 Such an element is perfectly unacceptable to Rancière. If Rancière’s use of the term ‘inhuman’ brings to mind Lyotard, this is not merely coincidental, as Rancière at once sets out to compare them to each other with respect to the Thing and reluctantly concludes that although the consequences of Lyotard’s aesthetics ‘are assuredly less appealing... [I fear] however, that they are more logical.’418 Without getting into the nuance of the comparison, Rancière would rather opt for Lyotard’s externally reflected relationship to the Thing than for Deleuze’s conceptualization of a ‘pure sensible’ element that indexes a transcendence from immanence. A compelling reason for Rancière’s unease with this Deleuzian object is because it paradoxically at once condenses the Rancièrian schema of the distribution of the sensible to a singular point (in other words, it is an elusive object which necessarily ‘drops out’ of self-relating sense) and simultaneously transcends and unifies sense itself into a new state.419 Such a scenario would spell ruin for Rancière‘s eternal project of shunning all such exceptional points and bring his project to its disastrous and hitherto disavowed truth. No wonder he opts for the comparatively safer Lyotardian externalized relation to the Thing rather than with a potentially fatal confrontation with the Thing. Thus Rancière is certainly correct to suspect that Deleuze’s inhuman is not the same as Lyotard’s inhuman, though for the wrong reasons. The Deleuzian Thing perceived by Rancière is only the sublime object viewed from a certain (Lyotardian or Rancièrian) perspective. In Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation (1981),420 where do we find such an object?
This question can be approached by focusing on a key recurring theme announced in the opening pages and which underscore the entire work: the need to break the figural or Figure from mere figuration or narration. Deleuze approvingly points out how Bacon’s paintings offer us ‘two possible ways of escaping the figurative: toward pure form, through abstraction; or toward the purely figural, through extraction or isolation,’ the latter of which is ‘the simplest means, necessary though not sufficient, to escape illustration, to liberate the Figure.’421 In even stronger language, he tells us that ‘Bacon’s path’ is one in which ‘[f]iguration and narration are only effects, but for that reason they are all the more intrusive in painting. They are what must be eliminated.’422 Deleuze’s interest with suspending these intrusive elements is linked with a suspension point concerning the subject. He writes that the ‘painter must enter into the canvas’ although paradoxically one in which ‘he is already there... [and must] get out of,’ all in order to ‘extract the improbable Figure from the set of figurative probabilities.’423 Certainly a contradictory statement on the face of it, though it is just such an ‘irrational logic, or this logic of sensation, that constitutes painting’ that articulates just how ‘the act of painting is always shifting... constantly oscillating between a beforehand and an afterward: the hysteria of painting’ and in this shifting ‘the Figure will emerge into view.’424 This experience is notably expressed in terms of (free) choice versus (mechanical) probabilities such that there involves an unaccountable ‘leap’ between two figurations from which emerges the ‘place of the Figure’ due to the ‘pictorial act.’425 The artist as active subject is the central figure here and we can express how he is able to suspend the self-enclosing narrative field of painting in Kantian terms.
The artist accomplishes his suspension act with respect to the ‘diagram,’ and it is here that Deleuze comes closest to specifying an equivalent to the Kantian schema, for it is variously described as a grid or graph or ‘the operative set of asignifying and nonrepresentative lines or zones’ which suggests or introduces ‘possibilities of fact’ and is ‘destined to give us the Figure.’426 Just as Kant’s schema is the ‘impossible’ mediating term between the chaotic faculty of sensibility and the pacifying and unifying conceptual functioning of the faculty of understanding, the diagram is a bit of two extremes but neither wholly one nor the other: ‘The diagram is indeed a chaos, a catastrophe, but it is also a germ of order or rhythm. It is a violent chaos in relation to the figurative givens, but it is a germ of rhythm in relation to the new order of the painting.’427 What Deleuze undeniably adds to the foregoing discussion of the Kantian schema is a stronger emphasis on the element of violence, on how there is a ‘collapse of visual coordinates’ whenever we experience this ‘chaos-germ, this ‘abyss,’ this ‘leap over itself,’ as ‘painting... necessarily, “hysterically,” integrates its own catastrophe, and consequently is constituted as a flight in advance.’428 It should be clear that with this notion of an abyss, we are dealing with the excessive dimension of subjectivity, whose ‘presence’ is most felt in the sublime, whether the sublime object is indexed to the experience of devastating, chaotic nature or when viewing a Bacon painting. What is extremely interesting in light of the previous discussion is Deleuze’s response to this added dimension to Kant’s own formal understanding of the schema. He theorizes three paths to deal with this abyss and the first two should be quite familiar: the first is reminiscent of Lyotard’s own path, as it attempts to reduce the abyss to a minimum, transforming the abstract form into a visual transformation and it is no surprise that Deleuze here makes an analogy to Kant’s own ‘ascetic’ morality; the second path of expressionism is at the opposite extreme of abstraction and likewise should bring to mind Rancière’s strategy, as the ‘abyss is deployed to the maximum... [so that] the diagram merges with the totality of the painting; the entire painting is diagrammatic.’429 Accordingly, this second path involves the ‘abandonment of any visual sovereignty’ and such a lack of exceptional points predictably leads to ‘the unity of the catastrophe and the diagram’ such that there is ‘no longer an inner vision that gives us the infinite, but a manual power that is spread out “all over” from one edge of the painting to the other.’430 In a word, we have the two options of Lyotardian abstraction and Rancièrian dispersion.
Both these paths are to be abandoned, or perhaps rather thought together for Bacon’s own (third) path, which is precisely the path in which we find an approximation to the logic of the sublime object. Indeed, because the diagram must not remain a purely external abstraction or alternatively, must not be allowed to eat away at the entire painting, the only option left would be to specify a paradoxical ‘object’ that allows for the constitution of the Figure to ‘produce the new resemblance inside the visual whole, where the diagram must operate and be realized.’431 This realization of the schematic diagram is a ‘stopping point in the painting... [though this is] not to say that it completes or constitutes the painting; indeed, on the contrary. It acts as a relay... [so] that something must emerge from the diagram.’432 Thus, the diagram at the same time dismantles the optical world and re-injects something into the visual whole. And what is this something? ‘Roughly speaking, the law of the diagram... is this: one starts with the figurative form, a diagram intervenes and scrambles it, and a form of a completely different nature emerges from the diagram, which is called the Figure.’433 One would be hard pressed to find a more concise 'political' lesson from Francis Bacon on how to pass from one form to another, which underscores how true change is not gradual, nor that which results from an effort to introduce complete chaos, but one that ‘invokes two contradictory ideas at the same time: a gradual series and a sudden whole.’434 What is crucial to take out of Deleuze is how we can experience a stain of sorts in the visual field of a painting, as the diagram acts by ‘imposing a zone of objective indiscernibility or indeterminabililty between two forms, one of which was no longer, and the other, not yet: it destroys the figuration of the first and neutralizes that of the second. And between the two, it imposes the Figure, through its original relations.’435 In a word, the Figure delimits the sublime object, embodying the atemporal minimal gap between two forms. It is precisely this logic that allows one to overcome a fascination or preoccupation with the Thing, for the ‘Figures seem to be monsters only from the viewpoint of a lingering figuration, but they cease to be so as soon as they are considered “figurally.”’436 The Thing is revealed here to be the result of a perspectival illusion; its truth is that it is a phantasm that fills out the empty shell of the sublime object.437 Hence, the ‘pure logic’ of painting as a lesson for an interpretive strategy: ‘The essential point about the diagram is that it is made in order for something to emerge from it, and if nothing emerges from it, it fails. And what emerges from the diagram, the Figure, emerges both gradually and all at once… where the whole is given all at once, while the series is at the same time constructed gradually.’438 As with the aesthetic universe, so with the interpretive: neither is a self-enclosed field of meaning for ‘[w]e thus see how everything can be done inside the same form’ whereby one can introduce ‘new distances and new relations’ between existing relations in the same form.439 This is possible because of the ex-sistence of a short-circuiting point, the sublime object of the Figure, that necessarily holds open our frame of the given whole of the field and prevents it from collapsing onto our piecemeal experience of the ‘reality’ of that field.440 A formulation of such a paradoxical point can be found in Nancy’s work as well.
Already noted above is how Nancy undertakes a detailed commentary of Kant’s schema in The Ground of the Image in order to critique Heidegger’s own reading of it, but his best formulations of the logic of the sublime are found peppered throughout the remainder of the book. By extracting out some of these formulations with his discussion of Kant in mind, considerable light can be shed on his reading of the Visitation. Now, one feature of Nancy’s work that immediately strikes the eye is the reoccurring theme of the image qua monstrous (or alternatively as monstrative, monstrant and many other variations of the term) that is implicitly linked with the failure of the imagination to schematize the Kantian thing-initself. For instance, in the depths of photography ‘there stalks – like a Minotaur – the monster... [so that the] encounter is always monstrous, or monstrating, ostensive and threatening, invasive and evasive in the same moment, straying in its capture, released in being grasped. This is not a dialectic, or else it is the point – the seed or grain – of madness that vibrates at the heart of every dialectic.’441 So when he tells us that ‘[t]he image is of the order of the monster,’ it is not a banal observation of the Thing’s manifestation at the level of the image; rather, there is an underlying logic to consider and again we must keep in mind how this madness references the excess of subjectivity.442 As with Deleuze, Nancy indicates the logic of how these monsters arise when he discusses the intimate link between the image and violence (of the Kantian imagination). The manifestation of the Thing again seems to be linked to a singular point within the image, for ‘an image is detached from itself while also reframing itself as an image’ and this is expressly linked with subjectivity as ‘[t]here is no image without my too being in its image, but also without passing into it, as long as I look at it, that is, as long as I show it consideration, maintain my regard for it.’443 He further tells us that ‘[i]n this double operation, the ground disappears... [and thus] passes entirely into the image,’ becoming a force of the ‘impalpable non-place’ and the ‘insensible (intelligible) sense that is sensed as such.’ Are we not compelled to read Nancy’s conception of ground as the Kantian schema? Is he not further articulating the paradoxical collapse of the schema into a point that it itself discloses? If so, this would be precisely how ‘[t]he image suspends the course of the world and of meaning:’ it can only be due to that which ‘[i]n the image... is without an “inside”... a sense that is nonsignifying but not insignificant, a sense that is as certain as its force (its form).’444 Nancy in effect argues how our experience of art reveals an image within which must ex-sist a bit of nonsense but which simultaneously also functions as the enigmatic ‘unity buried under the ambivalence of violence.’ By formulating in this manner, do we not thereby specify the ex-sistence of a sublime object in artworks? Indeed, in Nancy’s own words art ‘is not semblance, but, on the contrary…art touches the real.’445 Consistent with the Lacanian notion of the objet a as real, Nancy writes that the true revelation of art is one that does not take place, but rather remains imminent ‘[o]r rather it is the revelation of this: that there is nothing to reveal... not even an abyss, and that the groundless is not the chasm of a conflagration, but imminence infinitely suspended over itself.’446
By thus revealing the secret of the Thing as a mere phantasm of an ambiguous object which condenses the operative logic of the ground of the image, Nancy has no need to speak of monstrosity with respect to Pontormo’s Visitation. Rather, he uses another closely related term previously introduced concerning how the mark made by violence becomes (non-quantitatively) excessive due to the enjoyment [jouissance] embodied in that mark.447 Elsewhere, this is formulated with respect to the ‘thing as image’ which reveals how such ‘a force of the same – the same differing in itself from itself’ – gives rise to ‘the enjoyment [jouissance] we take in it.’448 Evidently for Nancy as well there is ambivalence surrounding jouissance in the precise Lacanian sense noted above with respect to the experience of the sublime. But further, if the unmasked Thing is void, jouissance must index a paradoxical singular point. But does this point lie with the object, the subject, both or neither so as to be radically decentered with respect to each? This ambivalence carries over to Nancy’s depiction of the Visitation as alternatively a painting which ‘finds itself enjoying [jouir] itself’ and at the same time jouissance indicates a subjective experience of the painting which proffers a ‘veil beneath which no presence is hidden and no god is waiting except the place itself, here, and the singular touch of our own exposure.’449 These statements can be understood only by conceiving them together, and this is instanced in Nancy’s actual procedure in analyzing the painting. He indicates that the key to the painting is how its gazes seemingly ensnarl the subject into its web, so that ‘[t]he fixity of the servants’ gazes... seek our own and await it... [so that] what the painting is seeking is the mutual visitation of a spectator and a painting, or a subject of painting.’450 This subject is further linked directly to an element within the painting: ‘the presence hidden in the womb.’ There is an overlap of those gazes emanating from the painting with those of the viewer and this overlap condenses into an element within the painting itself. Just like in dream analysis, such elements suspend signification such that if extracted, the entire (dream) work is unwoven; these elements disclose how meaning as such is dependent on the work’s nonsignifying elements. A page later Nancy’s own subjective gaze settles on two small indistinct figures and one could say that the mutual search for a subject again falls on an element in the painting which is equally as indiscernible as the Christ-child. This gesture is repeated many times where the only variation is with the settled-upon element (triangle areas, tufts of hair, folds of clothing, patches of light...). In each case and in each sublime object, one could say that the subjective framework used in analyzing the Visitation is itself re-framed or re-embodied. Such objects ground the schema by embodying its minimal gap with the artwork in question. In truth, it is only through such objects that the artwork could be said to have found a proper subject.
One important amendment to Nancy’s text is that when he speaks of jouissance, he is really speaking of surplus jouissance. By using strict Lacanian terminology, one can see how he accomplished a defeat of the merely monstrous dimension of the image and moved on to theorize an object which embodies the inherent tension in the subjective experience of the sublime in artworks. Together with Deleuze, in these moments Nancy also occupies the position of agent in the analyst’s discourse, and it is thus readily seen how full knowledge of a sublime painting is barred to them as they both confront its inherent split. Most importantly, by accomplishing the move to the sublime object, Deleuze and Nancy underscore how objet a as surplus enjoyment is the only enjoyment to be had, retroactively revealing how the presupposed field of ‘full enjoyment’ is illusory (what is truly revealed is that there is nothing to reveal) – just like the Thing itself. One thus recognizes how Deleuze and Nancy’s aesthetic theories provide a better homology to re-conceptualize the presupposed self-enclosed semantic field of interpretation than either Lyotard or Rancière with their respective preoccupation and disavowal of the phantasmatic Thing and its associated illusion of total jouissance. The logic of the sublime object thus reveals how this field is Not-all and furthermore uncovers how it is necessarily tethered to a singularity which can be directly ‘assumed’ as such by those wishing to overturn this field.
The recent analysis of Zupančič451 should be acknowledged for drawing attention to the fact that the subjective experience of the sublime domesticates the truly radical dimension of Kant’s moral Law articulated in the second Critique which originally exposed an ethical dimension directly affecting the subject because it is nothing but its relation to the subject. This changes nothing of the above analysis but serves as a reminder that Kant’s aesthetic thinking in the third Critique veils somewhat the possibility of accomplishing a radical subjective act. However, as the sublime object of art rests precisely on its own limits and can go no further, the lesson it extends to interpretive theory still stands.
By way of summary of the findings from this exploration of the foregoing aesthetic thinkers in this section, it is clear how certain concerns have led aesthetic theory to specify a suspension point to the semantic field by way of a re-conception of the sublime.452 On the one hand, Lyotard's use of Kant's dynamical logic in specifying the sublime generates an indeterminate, unpresentable Thing we are admonished not to rush in to fill with meaning as Ingarden and Iser would have it; rather, simple attestation to its existence is sufficient. On the other hand, Lyotard's obligating the avant-garde to keep vigilant watch over such meaninglessness is still too meaningful a project for Rancière. By using Kant's mathematical logic to articulate the schematic frame which discloses given relations between things and meanings, Rancière is able to introduce dissensus into every spatiotemporal regime of meaning. However, Deleuze and Nancy go further than Lyotard's preoccupation with the Thing disclosed by the Kantian schematic frame and Rancière's focus on articulating the frame itself, by effectively theorizing a collapse of this frame into a point which it itself discloses. Deleuze does so by detecting the object of the Figure which breaks from the secondary effects of meaningful narration in the 20th century paintings of Francis Bacon, while Nancy describes how the gazes emanating from Pontormo’s Visitation ensnarl our own, overlapping with the indiscernible Christ-child, which re-grounds our analytical framework by embodying its minimal gap with the painting. This is nicely captured in the third quotation which opens the present chapter. There Nancy not only makes a distinction between meaning and sense as do all the aesthetic thinkers examined in this chapter, but goes further to specify a third 'insensible' point to the image which is thoroughly 'nonsignifying.' It is this point in the image that indexes the paradoxical object that suspends meaning.
Almost two centuries ago Hegel was already in line with these contemporary critiques of Kantian aesthetics. In fact, even though he does not expressly specify such an object or even specifically discuss the sublime in his Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics (1842 posth),453 there is evidence that he understood the logic behind its need. In one part of this work Kant's third Critique is discussed as a good starting point for aesthetic theory, but we are to overcome Kant's defects to grasp the true unity of the particular and the universal. Hegel recalls how 'Kant defines the power of judgement generally as "the power of thinking the particular as contained under the universal"' but finds Kant's reconciliation is 'purely [a] subjective one.'454 The problem is that Kant feels their reconciliation takes place within the mind of the subject alone, whether this is the artist or audience, and so such reconciliation is not deemed intrinsic to the work of art or to natural objects themselves. According to Hegel, while Kant does lead the way to showing the lack of union between the particular and the universal, he cannot adequately resolve them because he always works with the subject-object or with the phenomenal-noumenal/thing-in-itself dichotomy in mind. So any resolution Kant can effect is too subjective and abstract. However, for Hegel there is a non-severance of sorts between the particular and the universal to any judgment of art. This is so because '[t]he universal need for expression in art lies... in man's rational impulse to exalt the inner and outer world into a spiritual consciousness for himself, as an object in which he recognizes his own self' and in this reduplication of himself lies the original ground and necessary origin of art.455 Later Hegel implies an analogy from the Christian Trinity (where the gap between God's universality and particularity is reconciled by the unity in Christ) to the aesthetic realm, which equally finds its abstract universality as appearing concretely among its particulars.456 In other words, Hegel reverses the usual criticism that Kant is too formalist and needs to be more concrete. Rather, Kant is not yet 'formalist' enough to conceive the concrete as pure form, or in terms from the discussion above, as a sublime object which is nothing but the collapse of the schematic approach to it.
Book based on this dissertation
FREE Lacanian-themed puzzles
