The Topology of the Kantian Sublime
Lyotard, Heidegger, Rancière, Deleuze and Nancy
WILLIAM J. URBAN
Between the Lyotard and Rancière Couple: Heidegger
Of the contemporary thinkers we are examining, 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.’ (Lyotard 25) 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. (ibid 44) 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. (ibid 77) 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 certainly 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. We are thinking here of 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, our 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. (5: 247) As we have known since Joan Copjec, these two logics directly map onto Lacan’s feminine and masculine sexuated logic, respectively. (Copjec 213) 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. (Žižek 1999: 38–9) 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.’ (Lyotard 98)
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. (ibid) 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. (ibid 17) 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?’ (ibid 21) 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. (ibid 23) 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.’ (ibid 19) 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 us (ibid 20) – 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.’ (ibid 97, 101) Moreover, to represent this ‘unpresentable’ is the assigned job, even duty,6 of the avant-garde whose work defines the very task of art today as that which must allude to a non-edifying ‘immanent sublime.’ (ibid 128) 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. (ibid 117) 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 we find fault with 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.’ (ibid 143) While we certainly applaud Lyotard 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. (ibid 135) We argue that 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 we turn to Rancière, we first examine why Heidegger missed both logics.
We 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 discernable cracks – a fact which deeply informs his aesthetics and markedly distinguishes his thought from our 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. (Heidegger 1997: 112–3) 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, we read in Chapters 11 and 12 that his entire analysis of 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. (Heidegger 1991: 70) Indeed, ‘aesthetic man’ is dismissed as a nihilistic notion. (ibid 90) 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. (ibid: 80) 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 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. (Žižek 1999: 2)
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.’ (Heidegger 1991: 139) 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.’ (ibid 123, emphasis added) 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 another of his texts on aesthetics, Heidegger 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.’ (Heidegger 2002: 41) 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. (ibid 48–9) 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.’ (ibid 50) Thus, if we assume as we are doing in this paper 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 our other 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 we are examining (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 not only makes its ambiguous presence felt when contemplating the Ideas of reason and the massive and chaotic objects of nature, but also with 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 Arendt and Agamben and their suggestion of an ‘ontological destiny of the human animal,’ 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.’ (Rancière 2010: 67, 75) 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.’ (ibid 96) 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.’ (ibid 176–7) Thus it is equally unsurprising that we find 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 we will suggest 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 we reiterate 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 non-engagement 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.’ (Rancière 2010: 22) 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.’ (ibid 24) Our 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.’ (Rancière 2010: 173–4) Although Rancière opts to explain this rather enigmatic statement by initially focusing on Kant’s analysis of the aesthetic experience of the beautiful, we instead turn to more closely examine Kant’s logic of the mathematical sublime, 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.7
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.’ (Rancière 2010: 139) In contrast, ‘consensus is an agreement between sense and sense, in other words between a mode of sensory presentation and a regime of meaning.’ (ibid 144) 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. (Rancière 2009: 30–1) Therefore, in both Kant and Rancière the same Kantian faculty8 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.’ (Rancière 2010: 69) 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 (ie, 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.’ (Rancière 2010: 141) 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, Schiller, Nietzsche, 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 will 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 we 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. (5: 247, 253) 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.’ (5: 209’) 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 we are reading 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.”’ (5: 316) 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).’ (Žižek 1999: 40–1)
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.”’ (Rancière 2009: 94) 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.’9 (Rancière 2009: 131) As well, ‘the concept of regimes of art undermines the idea of an historical rupture with respect to the constituent elements of art.’ (Rancière 2010: 208) 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.’ (ibid 148) 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.’ (ibid 82–3) 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.10 Rather, for Rancière ‘politics expresses the nature of... the inseparate,’ or the ‘relation without relation’ as above. (ibid 86) 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.’ (ibid 207, 149) Although he is correct that shocks are never ‘between worlds, but shocks between worlds in the same world’ (ibid 212), 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.11
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.12 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.’ (ibid 209) Indeed, this is his standard argument to how even the Holocaust is representable, since nothing separates fictional representation from the presentation of reality. (Rancière 2009: 125) 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.’ (Rancière 2010: 213) 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.’ (ibid 210) 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 (ie, 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. (ibid 215–6, 218) 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.
Lacanian-themed puzzles
