For Those Who Disagree – Rancière and the Sublime

The work of Jacques Rancière is concerned with the sublime, but in a negative sense. He hates it. And as well, he hates the way thinkers such as Deleuze and Lyotard (and in fact them in particular, his colleagues in the Philosophy department at Paris VIII) have constructed both an aesthetics and an ethics from it. And as well, how this sublime aesthetics draws upon a politics (which is also an ontology) of otherness. In fact, he is even going to accuse Derrida of this, although without roilling him up with the problems of the sublime. So Rancière is going to be very useful to us as a critical reflection on those who have gone before, but as well he will because he is the one who speaks most about contemporary art. But his place here is not entirely negative, despite his constant and methodological disagreements. Rancière also offers an aesthetics based upon Kant’s Third Critique, but one that begins from the beautiful rather than the sublime. This will be a useful addition to the aesthetics we have already examined that emerge from Kant’s work, and another possible way to understand its political possibilities.

‘Contempt for the world’ – Kant’s Aesthetics and the Sublime1

A book on sublime art must begin with Kant’s theory of the sublime. First, because it is the focus of our central authors (Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari, Rancière and Derrida), whether they affirm, deny or deconstruct it. Second, because Kant’s description of ‘aesthetic’ experience is foundational for ‘aesthetics’as a philosophical discipline and has been central to the theorisation of art from Romanticism until today. Third, because of the not always simple pleasure of exploring Kant’s amazing system. And finally, fourth, because the sublime provides irresistible drama as it emerges in all its monstrous ambiguity, the paradoxical– but no less necessary–Collapse and fulfilment of Kant’s system in an experience of the supersensible rising from the ashes of human experience.

Framing the Abyss – The Deconstruction of the Sublime

Both Derrida and Deleuze develop transcendental philosophy in the direction of difference, and both use the sublime to dissolve the bridge it supposedly forms between the sensible and supersensible, just as both see the foundation of experience to be transcendental difference. As well, they share a conception of difference that rejects the principle of contradiction, a difference that conditions everything but is not itself given. Perhaps it is this that inspired Derrida to claim ‘nearly total affinity’with Deleuze’s philosophical ‘theses’ (2001: 192). Nevertheless, there are fundamental differences between their respective accounts of difference. For Derrida, transcendental différance deconstructs the possibility of any supersensible ‘outside’ emerging from the sublime experience (différance is the condition of its impossibility, we might say), and so poses itself against any form of empiricism, including Deleuze’s ‘superior’ or ‘transcendental’ version.

‘A stranger to consciousness …’ – Lyotard and the Sublime1

Lyotard’s Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime is a book collecting his ‘unpolished’ (1994: ix) lecture notes on sections 23–29 of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. As such, they modestly present themselves as an ‘explication de texte’ while in fact being a highly original interpretation of Kant’s concept of the sublime that focuses on and indeed exemplifies the heuristic function of reflective aesthetic judgment. For Kant this judgment is neither legislating nor provable, and so is excluded from the realms of both pure and practical reason, but as a result Kant hopes it can unite the faculties by revealing the transcendental conditions of an object’s particularity beyond its a priori conditions of possibility. Reflective judgment ‘endeavours’, Lyotard tells us, ‘to “discover” a generality or a universality in them [particular objects] which is not that of their possibility but of their existence’.

Postscript: ‘Art after experience’– Speculative Realism and the Sublime1

It seems undeniable that in the last ten years or so continental philosophy has undergone a shift that could turn out to be epochal and that takes the name ‘Speculative Realism’. It would therefore seem negligent not to include some sort of account of it in a book that claims to pertain to contemporary art. Nevertheless, while the sublime is arguably a factor in the development of Speculative Realism, it is certainly tangential to its major concerns, which in large part rest upon a rejection of Kant. As a result, my discussion of Speculative Realism is brief and by no means sophisticated, but is offered here as an attempt to indicate what the sublime’s future might hold, both philosophically and in the realm of art.

‘My whole structure of perception is in the process of exploding’ – Deleuze and Guattari and the Sublime1

Deleuze’s reading of the sublime reveals both his closeness and distance from his colleague Lyotard. Both thinkers ground their ontology of sensation on the difference between the faculties of the supersensible and the sensible found in the sublime, both seek to reverse the domination of cognitive thought over aesthetic experience in the name of a sublime ‘intellectual-feeling’, and both privilege modernist art as a mechanism by which we can experience this. Lyotard, however, as we have seen, increasingly saw the sublime in terms of the fundamental dualism irrevocably separating the supersensible from its sensible event, and its‘negative presentation’ in aesthetic experience. While negative presentation also plays a part in Deleuze’s account, this significantly differs from both Kant’s and Lyotard’s versions. In fact, in Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari criticise precisely this aspect of Lyotard’s Discours, Figure, and subsequently this difference will only become stronger.

Introduction: Exiled from Oneself– Art and Other Strange Migrations …

The sublime is a philosophical concept for an experience or sensation that exceeds its subjective conditions, and as such is unrepresentable. The introduction will sketch its development from Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) where it is distinguished from the beautiful and associated with terror, to Kant’s extension of it in his Critique of Judgment (1790). As Kant remains the source of all the contemporary versions of the sublime we will be concerned with, it will be important to have an understanding of his work. In particular, Kant’s affirmation of the autonomy of the aesthetic realm of sensation, and is development of the sublime as an experience that goes beyond its human conditions of possibility will be central to the book. The sublime experience itself can appear within a variety of different affects, but its dominant mode, beginning with Burke, is one of overwhelming terror and pain. Although this affect is important to its aesthetic trajectory, we shall understand the sublime in the somewhat altered sense in which Nietzsche claimed overcoming the human involved the pain of childbirth. In other words the experience of the sublime, and the emergence in Kant’s account of the transcendental realm of the Ideas that reconstitutes human subjectivity, will be rethought as a generative and aesthetic event that takes us beyond our bio-political conditions of possible experience, and expresses the vital force of the future as the transcendental dimension of our material reality. As Antonio Negri has put it, sublime art is the embodiment of an event in action, and as such ‘Art is simultaneously the creation and reproduction of the absolute singular’ (Art and Multitude (Polity press, 2011)).