Who Needs Yalom When We Have Žižek?
WILLIAM J. URBAN
The Kantian Sublime
The Kantian Thing-in-itself (Ding an sich) is transcendent, trans-phenomenal and strictly ontic. It is that part of the ontic – of ‘inner-worldly’ entities – that must fall out from the ontological horizon if that ontological horizon is to constitute itself. That is, the Thing-in-itself must fail to appear if the ontological difference is to occur. (For They, 219)
In simpler terms, there is an insurmountable gap between inner-worldly, empirical, sensuous objects and the Thing-in-itself, and no empirical object or representation thereof can adequately represent the Thing. But for Kant, the sublime is an object in which we can experience this insurmountable gap, this very impossibility, this permanent failure of any object to represent the Thing. With such an object, we thus have at least a ‘negative’ representation of the Thing, one that gives a presentiment of it and delimits it as such. (Sublime, 203) This object provides us with a thought of ‘Yes, It is out there!’ So while it is not possible to represent the Thing within the domain of phenomena, what we can do is represent this very impossibility. The conversion is thus one from ‘the impossibility of presentation into the presentation of impossibility.’ (For They, 144)
A sublime object thus simultaneously evokes in us a feeling of pleasure and displeasure since it is pleasurable to realize that even though this object fails in its adequacy to the Thing (thus evoking displeasure), it does, at least, indicate the greatness of the Thing, surpassing every possible, empirical experience. In other words, our very judgment of the inadequacy of the sublime object evokes in us pleasure, an enthusiasm and this enthusiasm is a purely negative representation. (Sublime, 204) For Kant, the insurmountable gap between phenomena and the Thing-in-itself is abolished in a negative way, since the phenomenon’s failure to represent the Thing in an adequate manner is inscribed in the phenomenon itself.
Hegel’s criticism of Kant in no way provides a direct, positive representation of the Thing-in-itself. Rather, he retains in its entirety Kant’s notion of the experience of the sublime, while simply removing its ‘transcendent presupposition – the presupposition that this experience indicates, in a negative way, some transcendent Thing-in-itself persisting in its positivity beyond it.’ (Sublime, 206) What Hegel reproaches Kant with is determining the Thing on the basis of a representation. That is, in Hegelian terms, Kant remains in an ‘external reflection’ of the Thing, as we shall see below.
Hegel’s Thing-in-itself is nothing but this displeasureable experience of the radical inadequacy of all phenomena to the Thing-in-itself. For Hegel, there is nothing beyond the representational field, beyond phenomenality. The ‘negative experience of the Thing’ (which for both Kant and Hegel indicates the Thing in a negative way) converts into the ‘experience of the Thing-in-itself as radical negativity’ (for Hegel alone). (Sublime, 206) For Žižek, Hegel thus would have us limiting our understanding of the experience of the sublime to what is strictly immanent to this experience, to the negative self-relationship of the representation. This means that Kant’s transcendent Thing-in-itself as a positive entity is non-existent, that the ‘sublime is an object whose positive body is just an embodiment of Nothing... an object which, by its very inadequacy, “gives body” to the absolute negativity of the Idea.’ (Sublime, 206)
How can we apply Žižek’s understanding of Hegel and Kant’s notion of the sublime to the social setting of a psychotherapeutic group? We can consider the group members a subject, who, once in the group, collectively can be seen to be asking themselves questions such as ‘What are we doing here? What are we here to accomplish? What is this all about, anyway?’ – in short, ‘What is the Thing of the Group?’ Any answer to this question put forward will usually fail to satisfy all the members, or at the very least, fail in the sense of raising still more questions about the nature of the group. And it is precisely this failure that gives the members a negative representation of what the group truly is and how it works – frustrating and ultimately ungraspable as it may be, at least the members can take a satisfaction in trusting that the answers are ‘actually out there.’ This (Kantian external) refection of the group on its own questions is nicely demonstrated from Yalom himself, our theorist of the group process, in the very first line of his book, in which he asks himself whether group therapy helps clients. He answers an emphatic ‘Indeed it does’ (1) and goes on to delineate exactly how it does for much of the remainder of the book, although confessing a few pages later that ‘[s]till, I do not consider these conclusions definitive, rather I offer them as provisional guidelines... [f]or my part, I am satisfied... that they constitute the basis of an effective approach to therapy.’ (4) The very failure of arriving at a completely adequate approach provides the negative proof of the Group-Thing’s existence.
Hegel, of course, would accept all this, with the proviso that the presupposition of the Group-Thing existing in its positivity in some Beyond is removed. His gesture would have the group members ‘stop’ on the negative, frustrating experience of reaching for the Group-Thing and have them experience the Group-Thing as precisely this pure negativity, this negative self-relationship of the representation. That is, the sublime object of the group is an object which, by its very inadequacy, embodies the absolute negativity of the Group-Thing-Idea so that the ‘it’ in the ‘Indeed it does’ is nothing but a positive form of the ultimate failure in approaching it, an object which occupies the place, filling out the empty place of the Thing as the Void, as the pure Nothing of absolute negativity. And this is precisely what must be grasped by the group. In short, Hegel would urge the group and its members to accomplish the passage from external reflection to ‘determinate reflection’ and it is to Hegel’s logic of reflection we now turn.
Lacanian-themed puzzles
