The Topology of the Kantian Sublime
Lyotard, Heidegger, Rancière, Deleuze and Nancy
WILLIAM J. URBAN
Introduction
If the overwhelming tendency is to conceive our political universe as a self-enclosed field where no viable alternative to liberal democracy exists nor can even be thought, then the foremost issue that confronts an emancipatory politics today concerns an appropriate strategy of conceptualizing this field. Indeed, that our true political problem today is not one of breaking out of any positive, pre-given field naturally follows if we except Lacan’s claim that the ‘Other does not exist,’ for then the only feasible approach open to us would be to endeavor to conceive how the Other knows that it does not exist. Such an ‘impossible’ conceptualization has its own paradoxical logic and it is only by working through this logic that we can experience how something new can emerge – a new state of affairs which cannot be fully accounted for by reference to the previously existing circumstances. We contend that the experience of the Kantian sublime offers such an opportunity precisely because it involves this paradoxical logic, indexing as it does a moment of creatio ex nihilo which ruptures the causal chain by introducing another temporality. The operating assumption we make here is that the logic of the sublime which Kant articulated for the field of ontology can be extended by homology to the political field. Properly conceived, we claim that the sublime experience can indelibly inscribe onto the mind of the subject both its capacity for autonomous freedom with respect to the political field as well as the ethicality associated with a proper subversive political act. In this paper, we furthermore assume that the logic of the sublime first articulated by Kant for ontology can be linked to politics by a third term: aesthetics. Accordingly, we exclusively occupy ourselves with this connecting link, examining the aesthetic theories of four very different contemporary French thinkers – Lyotard, Rancière, Nancy and Deleuze – with respect to the Kantian 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.
We will proceed as follows. While always mindful of Kant’s revolutionary achievement in breaking away from his sophist philosophical inheritance, we first indicate the deficiencies of Kant’s thinking in regards to the sublime with respect to artworks and with the aesthetics field in general. We next briefly outline 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 – inclusive of artworks as well as political objects – 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, soul and the universe as a whole. With the notable exception of Heidegger, we claim that each of the contemporary thinkers we examine here, at least implicitly, has accomplished this re-reading of the first Critique in light of the third Critique in as much as the truth they uncover with their respective aesthetic theory can be extended in a homologous fashion to the political realm.1 But they each extend the implications of doing so in their own unique fashion. Two of the thinkers we examine, Lyotard and Rancière, actually form a curious pair: while ostensibly at odds, their aesthetics are quite complimentary, almost necessitating each other. Here we suggest 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, we will indicate where Heidegger goes wrong. Concluding with Deleuze and Nancy, we will argue 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, which we have known since Žižek is something that can be leveraged for maximum political effect. Finally, although he has not developed a specific aesthetic theory, Žižek haunts our text 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 paper. We will conclude with an important point raised by one of his former students, Alenka Zupančič, who notes that the subjective experience of the sublime actually domesticates (though does not alter) the truly traumatic dimension of that which directly determines the subject’s will. The obvious potential of this dimension for a radical politics should be obvious as it involves the subject’s freedom qua autonomy. With her and Žižek’s argument in mind, 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 radical political strategy.
Lacanian-themed puzzles
