The Topology of the Kantian Sublime
Lyotard, Heidegger, Rancière, Deleuze and Nancy
WILLIAM J. URBAN
Conclusion
For our purposes, 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, we 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 we can thus readily see 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. We thus see how Deleuze and Nancy’s aesthetic theories provide a better homology to re-conceptualize the presupposed self-enclosed field of politics 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 the political field is not-All and furthermore uncovers how it is necessarily tethered to a singularity which can be directly ‘assumed’ as such by those engaged in emancipatory struggle.
We conclude by acknowledging the recent analysis of Alenka Zupančič16 who draws 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 our analysis but serves to remind us how 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 us in the political field still stands.
Lacanian-themed puzzles
