In Statu Nascendi: Subjectivity and the Beautiful in Lyotard

Abstract

While Lyotard’s interest in the sublime is well known, his later investigations of the beautiful are much less so. In part this seems to have to do with his own evolving views toward the beautiful as an aesthetic category, which in much of his best-known writings appears mostly to be aligned with representation and thus with Classicism and the Enlightenment. Nonetheless, there is another and more subtle understanding of the beautiful to be found in Lyotard, where it is even found alongside the sublime and what he calls, following Freud, “unconscious affect.” In these works, the beautiful appears to take on another relevance, and may even help us to begin to take the full measure of the “philosophy of the affect” that Lyotard seems to be largely engaged in during many of his last writings. This essay is an attempt to begin this process by giving a detailed reading of one of the major of these texts, in order, on the one hand, to show how the beautiful comes to be counted alongside the sublime and unconscious affect, and on the other, to make some suggestions about how it differs from them and might thus offer a broader understanding of Lyotard’s late account of affectivity. This reading of the beautiful appears most clearly in an essay devoted to the Kantian judgment of taste entitled “Sensus Communis.” I try to elucidate the main contours of this argument in terms of the split in Kant’s sensus communis that Lyotard introduces there: a communis that is formed not by any shared sensibility but by the “voices” of the faculties themselves; and the sentiment of beauty as a sensus that exceeds not only the faculties of knowledge and action but even the conscious subject itself. As with the later conception of the sublime and unconscious affect, the beautiful here appears as a very specific “temporal crisis” that undoes the temporalization of the subject. In this sense, it is consistent with other readings of the affect in this stage of Lyotard’s writings. Nonetheless, it also differs in that it is time in statu nascendi, in the state of birth, and as a result I argue that it seems to figure a certain promise that is absent in both the sublime and unconscious affect, even if that promise is always and only ever to come.