Plato's Performative Sublime and the Ends of Reading

Abstract

F Richard Rorty's critique of foundationalist thought did not exist, literary theory would do very well to invent it. By his cogent resistance to foundationalism-that is, notion of knowledge as accurate representation, made possible by special mental processes, and intelligible through a general theory of representation-Rorty offers critics freedom from the empirico-analytic model of philosophical authority which we often clumsily crave or uneasily spurn.1 Even more important, Rorty gives a direction for making use of that freedom by showing how texts consigned by that authority to the mode of mere emotive discourse in fact engage in dramas of self-judgment and self-projection traditionally rooted in the Longinian sublime and basic to traditional defenses of literary education. Instead of proceeding by a chain of arguments and building a single coherent edifice on demonstrable foundations, these texts constitute what, following Kierkegaard, Rorty calls discourses. They offer exemplary states of reflection, promising to take us out of our solid selves by the power of strangeness, to aid in becoming new beings. That promise ought to be very important for literary critics, especially since we seem no longer to be able to justify our practices by the claim that we are custodians for the special nondiscursive truths hidden in literary texts. Here we have a view of writing which clearly fits what most of the authors we teach intended to accomplish and which clearly establishes the social importance of what the imaginary exploration of values makes available. Yet it is not for this concept that most critics read Rorty nor, more generally, how they use thinkers like Kuhn who make ours an antifoundational epoch. Literary critics want to be heroic figures of lucidity who take their antifoundationalism straight, without the edifying chaser. So we no longer attempt to identify with the claims about value texts produce. Where works assert stable grounds of value or permanent truths, we