The Aesthetic Taboo: Aura, Magic, and the Primitive

“The Aesthetic Taboo” concerns the place of primitive anthropology in the aesthetic theory of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. It traces the influence of Freud’s Totem and Taboo through their work, in the concepts myth, magic, and aura. Neither thinker ever manages to escape the historical narrative of aesthetics: the transition from a state of necessity that defines the Savage as pathological subject, through a state of domination to an ideal state of freedom. Adorno and Benjamin continue to think within the traditions of Kant and Schiller. Yet in Aesthetic Theory magic images the sensuous remnant in the artwork that withstands rationalization. This “pathological” moment restores to the aesthetic its foundations in pleasure and pain and demands the destruction of the racial regime of representation. Its analogy with the Subaltern suggests another conception of life in common, predicated on the pains and pleasures of the pathological subject.

Race under Representation

Working from the aesthetic thought of Kant and Schiller, “Race under Representation” elaborates how metonymy and metaphor function in the formation of the stereotype. Racialization works through the organizing tropes of representation and those tropes embody an order of representation, framing a civilizational narrative for which inclusion always functions simultaneously as excision. The metaphorical place of whiteness, or the “Subject without properties,” is constitutively barred to the racialized subject, as the work of Tayeb Salih and Frantz Fanon illustrates. Inclusion always requires the effective but impossible erasure of race even as it repeatedly constitutes racial positions. The chapter critiques the notion of “under-representation” in its demographic usage, arguing that the goal of inclusion consolidates institutional claims to universality and reaffirms the violence of the racial regime of representation that relegates racial others to the exteriority of race “under representation.”

Under Representation

David Lloyd offers Under Representation as a contribution to the genealogy of the racial formation of the human in aesthetic culture. There have been far too few substantive accounts of the central role of the aesthetic in the emergence and dissemination of that universal human subjecthood. In Under Representation, Lloyd argues that the constitutive relation between the concepts of universality, freedom, and humanity and the racial order of the modern world is grounded in the founding texts of the disciplines that articulated them and that we now term the humanities.

Representation’s Coup

Commencing with a critique of Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, “Representation’s Coup” explores the regime of representation through a reading of Marx’s I8th Brumaire. It argues that representation has historically been the means by which the intellectual has mediated the relation of subjects to the state. Where the Savage or the Negro stand at the threshold of humanity in the developmental narrative of representation, the Subaltern is radically exterior, unavailable for identification or assimilation, and troubles the ethical self-identification of the intellectual as representative figure of the human. The chapter concludes with Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, seeing it as an allegory of the failure of identification with the racialized subaltern. The breakdown of novelistic representation in this modernist work correlates to a post-colonial crisis in the overarching regime of representation that frames it.

The Pathological Sublime: Pleasure and Pain in the Racial Regime

“The Pathological Sublime” shows how Kant’s location of aesthetic experience in the subjective yet universal judgment of taste generates a concept of representation that is fundamentally racial and developmental. He labels Edmund Burke’s alternative approach to aesthetic affects “pathological,” meaning an unfree state based on sensation, fear or desire. The pathological subject is the antithesis of the ethical human who can participate in civil society through sharing the common sense that grounds aesthetic universality. Burke’s reflections on the sublime horror inspired by the sight of a black woman mark the limit of the argument for universality he bases on sensations. Where Frantz Fanon’s racial phenomenology of being seen in Black Skin White Masks dramatizes his “lived experience” of being barred from human identity, Burke’s anecdote foregrounds the anxious abyss into which the encounter with blackness throws the white subject and his representational schemas.

The Aesthetic Regime of Representation

“The Aesthetic Regime of Representation” focuses on the work of German idealist aesthetic thought in the political context of the bourgeois revolutions of America and France. Analyzing Kant’s Critique of Judgment, it considers the “turn to the aesthetic” as a means of forestalling the immediacy of revolution and installing an implicitly pedagogical and developmental system of representation that defines the human and the political subject as universal and disinterested. That system relies on a notion of common sense that separates the civil subject from the Savage, who remains fixed at the threshold of humanity. The foundations of aesthetic philosophy are at the same time the foundations of a “regime of representation” that offers not a means to inclusion, but a mode of regulating access to recognition as a fully human and politically capable subject.