2 - ‘A stranger to consciousness …’ – Lyotard and the Sublime

Summary

The abyss between what can appear and what can be thought was opened

at the outset by the coming of winter. (Lyotard 1998: 191)

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’ (1994: 2). For Lyotard, it is precisely the way such judgments, and the art works that embody and inspire them, take us beyond our conditions of possibility that will give them an onto-political impetus. For reasons we will consider, it is the judgment of the sublime rather than the beautiful that Lyotard believes breaks with our received modes of knowledge, morality and subjective production, and so carries with it a radically heterogeneous kernel that remains undetermined by any norm or institution determining who we are or might become. In this sense, the sublime actualises a disruptive and genetic force of the future, it is an unconditioned ‘event’ that erupts within the causal determination of the actual to force the new into existence.

THE DIFFEREND

For Lyotard, the transcendental and real condition of existence that Kant discovers in the sublime is difference. In the sublime, experience is overwhelmed by something that goes beyond its limits, a feeling that reveals the realm of thought's genesis– what Kant calls the practical realm of Ideas, and in particular those of the infinite and of freedom– a realm that cannot be represented.