The Topology of the Kantian Sublime
Lyotard, Heidegger, Rancière, Deleuze and Nancy
WILLIAM J. URBAN
NOTES
1 Here is the reason why Badiou, another notable contemporary French thinker on aesthetics, has been left out of consideration, since his ‘inaesthetics’ expressively prohibits the ‘singular and immanent’ truth of art from circulating with politics or either of the other two ‘registers of work-producing thought,’ viz., science and love. (Badiou: 9)
2 Citations to the Critique of Judgment are made following the standard KGS volume and page number, with italic script representing Kant’s original emphasis. References to the Critique of Pure Reason are to the standard A and B pagination of the first and second editions, respectively. References to other works contain original emphasis, unless otherwise noted.
3 For a discussion of these three references in the third Critique, see Allison (336–41).
4 See the chapter ‘The Schematism of the Pure Concepts of Understanding.’ (A137–47/B176–87)
5 This is Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Throughout his text, Nancy refers to Heidegger’s work by this title (translated as ‘Kantbook’) which Heidegger himself gave to his own work on Kant. (Heidegger 1997: 219)
6 ‘The sublime is not a pleasure, it is a pleasure of pain: we fail to present the absolute, and that is a displeasure, but we know that we have to present it, that the faculty of feeling or imagining is called on to bring about the sensible (the image).’ (Lyotard 126, emphasis added).
7 In contrast and as we saw above, the schema’s transcendental determination of time in the first Critique seems to provide enough time for a full comprehension of a common household object or a painting; with such objects, there are no gaps discernable and the imagination ‘successfully’ presents its own synthesis for a complete conceptualization in the understanding and in reason. Again, this was Heidegger’s exclusive focus and thus for him the imagination’s operation was not problematic. But as we also saw, if we conceive the mathematical sublime as the impossible schema of the ‘universe as a whole,’ we can reread this logic back into the first Critique and hypothesize that the frustrating experience of not being able to grasp this infinitely large object all at once may very well occur when viewing much smaller objects. Thus even a painting could sublimely affect the subject due to the violence of the imagination as it endeavors to overcome the inherent gap between its own apprehending and comprehending functioning.
8 In the literature, there is some debate as to whether the imagination is its own faculty alongside sensibility. Certainly they are afforded separate status in the first edition of the first Critique, although thereafter Kant seems to use them equivalently (which is the main reason why Heidegger argues Kant ‘shrunk back’ from the singular transcendental power of the imagination). However, we follow the example of all our other thinkers in this paper who use these two terms interchangeably or at least treat the imagination as the essential force of sensibility, pitting both against the two other major Kantian faculties, viz., the understanding (with its intelligibility) and reason (with its rationality).
9 This is certainly true for the post-Marxist, but must he not account for the necessity to our thinking that behind every contingency lurks a hidden necessity?
10 Kant is consistent in saying that what occupies the noumenal realm in the dynamical antinomy are God and soul.
11 We could express this in terms of Lyotard’s first chapter in The Inhuman where he makes use of Kant’s reflective judgment. (Lyotard 15) He would need to accomplish one more crucial reflexive turn by reflecting his entire meditation in this chapter into itself. Textually, it is not enough to ‘prepare post-solar thought’ for its inevitable separation from the body (ibid 23); rather, we need to experience that singular point where this separation necessarily supports itself. By doing so, epistemological ‘failure’ becomes ontological ‘success’ and we see that the masculine and feminine subjective positions simply become two (ultimately failed) strategies to deal with the traumatic fact that there is no such thing as a sexual relation. So in a way Lyotard is quite right to divide his first chapter into just two (and only two) sections – HE and SHE – since there can be no other section to write.
12 Cf Rancière (2009: 90ff). If Lyotard is sure of the substantiality of the forever inaccessible Thing, it seems reasonable what he would abstractly theorize on the ‘immaterial materiality’ of pure difference and pure passion and this is precisely where Rancière levels his criticism.
13 Although he does not provide an analysis of Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation, we are particularly emboldened in our endeavor by the fact that in his book on Deleuze, Žižek mentions that Lacan was appreciative of the fact that Deleuze managed to theorize objet a in his much earlier The Logic of Sense. (Žižek 2004: 27)
14 The crucial point is that such an object frustrates the mere re-arrangement of the sensible into a new distribution. Rather, it is paradoxically at once disclosed by that distribution and the point which embodies the anticipated ‘re-distribution’ of that distribution.
15 Indeed, Lacan’s objet a has two faces, one real and the other imaginary. It is never symbolic.
16 Cf. Zupančič (ch. 7).
Lacanian-themed puzzles
