The Topology of the Kantian Sublime
Lyotard, Heidegger, Rancière, Deleuze and Nancy
WILLIAM J. URBAN
A Kantian Sublime Aesthetics?
Crucial to our undertaking is presupposing the existence of what Lyotard calls the ‘aesthetics of the sublime.’ (Lyotard 101) 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.’ (5: 252)2. Further to this, we should also mention that Kant does not completely deny a place to the sublime in fine art, though the three references are brief and rather incidental and we should note that his thinking here is not extended to art in general.3 However, we must make it clear at the onset of our 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 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. (Rancière 2009: 89) 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 (ie, non-teleological and non-rational) judgment, since the ‘sublime [is] not in products of art (eg, 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 (eg, animals with a known determination in nature), but rather in crude nature... merely insofar as crude nature contains magnitude.’ (5: 252–3) 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. (Allison: 337) 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 our contemporary aesthetic thinkers 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 seen as triggering a sublime experience in the subject. We can consider certain passages in Nancy’s The Ground of the Image 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 Critique4 in order to evaluate Heidegger’s Kantbuch5 through the latter text’s symptomatic point of the Death Mask. (Nancy 152n14) 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 paper. 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. (Žižek 1999: 39, 61) 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. (Nancy 23–4) In this way, the ‘normal’ flow of time is disrupted and we can discern a certain potential crack in even our homogenous, 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’ (5: 246); but rather the sublime can also be experienced in the creative products of those individuals called artists. Our French thinkers 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. (Žižek 1999: 43, 61) We will come back to Heidegger.
Lacanian-themed puzzles
