Kantian Sublime Research Articles

“Wie alles sich zum Ganzen webt, / Eins in dem andern wirkt und lebt!”: Goethe's Faust I as aesthetic experiment

AbstractGoethe's Faust I stages an aesthetic experiment akin to the theoretical program of Schiller's Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen: an education of the senses through art, an aesthetic education, in both meanings of the word. The play self‐reflexively presents itself as presenting a new aesthetic: a new sensory experience and a new type of art that shares conceptual affinities with the negative representation of the Kantian sublime. Focusing on the weaving metaphors that recur throughout the play, this article argues that the text comprises a negative representation, an aesthetic solution to Faust's quest for knowledge of the Absolute.

Stuplime Orientalism

The essay reads Edward Said’s seminal work Orientalism through Sianne Ngai’s category of the “stuplime”. Unlike the noble emotions elicited by the Kantian sublime, the stuplime causes the ugly feelings of tedium, excitation, fatigue. In the Kantian sublime, viewing subjects experience an overwhelming feeling which impresses on them their own inadequacy; in my reading of stuplime orientalism, the “Orient” becomes the object of this “inadequacy”. This shift from inadequate subjects to inadequate objects is one manifestation of the political valence of the stuplime, a means by which control is maintained both of the “Orient” as a colonial project and of the orientalist’s mind. As Ngai argues, however, the political potential of ugly feelings is always ambivalent: stuplime orientalism can therefore also be coopted through curation of stuplime orientalist detail, which I deploy in the second half of this essay to read Jade Snow Wong’s memoir, Fifth Chinese Daughter. Resisting the urge to summarize Jade Snow Wong’s exhaustively descriptive rice passages, I delineate an alternative interpretation to the prevailing view that she merely self-orientalizes, instead suggesting a reading that engages histories of denigrated racial formation and labour precisely through, and not in spite of, stuplime orientalist detail.

MÈRE MÉTAPHORE

Bridging feminist new materialism and feminist phenomenology, Astrida Neimanis’s volume, Bodies of Water, discusses water in terms of nurturing maternality based on a figural reservoir of what she terms “amniotics” and “planetary breastmilk” in order to posit this maternality as the material condition of the embodiment of life. In this article I show that this imagery is a construction consistently haunted by figures of anxiety and loss. I do this by first revisiting earlier interventions in deconstruction concerning materiality and feminist theory as follows. First, pointing out a resonance between this figuration of wateriness and Kant’s notion of the dynamic sublime, I turn to Paul de Man’s reading of materiality in the Kantian sublime in order to suggest that Neimanis’s figuration of maternal water is an effect of an aesthetic ideology. Subsequently, I will revisit Diana Fuss’s reading of Irigaray – Neimanis’s main feminist resource – to show that the ontological status of water as maternal is constructed via an Irigarayan distinction between metaphor and metonymy. Finally, in order to show ways in which the maternal materiality of water is haunted by figures of anxiety and loss, I will consult Elissa Marder’s more recent work on the maternal function.

From the Dialectic of Power to the Posthumanist Sublime

This essay rereads the Kantian sublime both as an epitome of humanism and as a lesson for posthumanist thought. First, I unfold “On the Dynamically Sublime” as a failed dialectic in which “reason” seeks to sublate the power of “nature.” But Kant’s sublime is irreducible to the “Analytic,” I argue: it exemplifies a quasi-dialectical relation between human and nonhuman that recurs across the third Critique and defines its humanist teleology as a whole. Rereading Kant against that telos, and heeding the natural-historical concerns animating his project, I uncover paths towards a posthumanist or “natural-historical” sublime of “nature” as anarchic phusis.

Taste and the claims of war: the Kantian sublime and the function of war in public aesthetic judgement

ABSTRACT Although Kant disapproved of war, he asserted it was sublime. His views of war are disconnected and in places surprisingly positive, but he avoids grappling with their implications. This article analyses these heterogeneous discussions through Kant’s notion of the sublime to argue that some of his statements imply war’s sublimity can provoke an educated public into forming an international federation: the power to keep all in awe in Kant’s interpretation of international foundation is not the Hobbesean sovereign or a coercive international government, but reflection on war itself. Kant’s ideas about sublime warfare are internally contradictory. Although they are valuable as an encouragement to work toward peace, working toward peace in actual fact may have unintended results.

The Orc—Playing the “Wholly Other”: Investigations of Kant's Sublime and The Technological Sublime in Blizzard Entertainment's Massive Multiplayer Online Game World of Warcraft

While the complicated scheme of the philosophical sublime may at first hand seem mere platitude when brought to life in computer games, this article claims that the action/adventure game World of Warcraft wedges open a space in which to operate the sublime and navigate radically “other” subjectivities. The hypothesis is that the assembly of fantastic elements in World of Warcraft duplicates the Kantian sublime while at the same time commenting upon and even radicalizing it. The Romantic tradition of the sublime as it unfolds in Immanuel Kant's third Critique is outlined followed by an attempt to topologize elements of the fantastic in Blizzard's game design philosophy leading to a clarification of what we call “the knotted point of play” where game object, game interaction, and game subject intervene. Finally, we explore how the notion of the technological sublime relates to World of Warcraft and beyond.

The music of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the sublime object of cinema

A notable stylistic element of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is the innovative use of classical music, which, isolated from dialogue or sound effects, possesses an autonomous dimension of meaning. Borrowing Michel Chion’s concept of “anempathetic music”, we posit that two musical pieces—the Also sprach Zarathustra fanfare and the Blue Danube waltz—have very specific narrative and formal functions, to be analyzed here in terms of Lacan’s concepts of the imaginary and the symbolic, the gaze, suture, spectatorship, and the Kantian sublime. We aim to address and build on Annette Michelson’s formulation, in her seminal criticism, that 2001 is a film of cognitive restructuring and redefinition of cinema’s “shape of content”, through the role of music.

Immaginazione, sublime e apertura del tempo Deleuze lettore dell’estetica kantiana


 
 
 The aim of this essay is to outline the genesis of a plural conception of temporality within Gilles Deleuze's thought, using as a starting point his reflection on the Kantian sublime and showing how this reflection has significant repercussions in place of the pages that Deleuze dedicates to painting. To show the implications of the overcoming that Deleuzian conception tries to make on the ordinal character of Kantian temporality, we will first focus on the role played by imagination within the doctrine of faculties; then, we will focus on the passage from the ordinal temporality disclosed by Kant to the plural one conceived by Deleuze. Finally, we will show how this new temporality manifests itself through Deleuzian aesthetic conceptions in the field of painting, with reference to the notions of "actual" and "virtual" and to the role that the Kantian sublime continues to play in this phase of Deleuzian thought.
 
 

Desublimare il sublime kantiano? Alcune considerazioni a partire da Lyotard e Deleuze lettori dell'Analitica del sublime

This paper aims to desublimate the Kantian sublime starting with the mitigation of the enthusiasm with which some French philosophers have woven its praise. Contrary to what Lyotard and Deleuze argue in their works, in the Analytics of the Sublime Kant does not go beyond himself, nor it is hard to set up a philosophy of the subject after reading these pages. Sublime, for these two clever readers of Kant, is any excessive use of the faculties. But Kant is less interested in excess than in its regulation. Thus, while harmonising with other 80-90s French readings of the Kantian sublime, the faith placed by Lyotard and Deleuze in its potentialities seems unfounded. It is fuelled by a lack of consideration of what happens in the second stage of this complex feeling. Unlike the encounter with the moral law introduced as a ‘fact of reason’ in the Critique of Practical Reason, in the Analytic of the Sublime reason makes itself heard not at the expense of the ego but in support of it. And the ego thus elevated is not only an ego ‘super’. It is a (Freudian) super-ego.

워즈워스의 빌둥과 숭고: 쉴러의 미학으로 『서곡』 읽기

This paper is an attempt to re-examine Wordsworth’s poetic claim of his spiritual growth in The Prelude with German ideas of Bildung and the sublime. I start with Schlegel’s remarks that the prevailing tendencies of his age are the French Revolution, Fichte’s transcendental philosophy, and Wilhelm Meister, which I think could also be an apt summary of what is contained in The Prelude because all the Bildungsgeschichte of the age across Europe were motivated more or less by the same historical occasion, the French Revolution. Bildung, in this context, may well be understood as the process of materializing in an individual’s life the idea of freedom, one of the ideals the French Revolution was supposed to make into reality, which would explain why The Prelude should be understood along with its German equivalents in the same philosophical context. My argument is that Wordsworth’s poetic claim of his own poetic growth could best be made sense of by Schiller’s idea of “pathetic sublime” because Wordsworth’s Bildung in The Prelude is prominently accelerated by the “sublime” experiences within the key episodes such as Simplon Pass, Snowdon, and the “Sleep no more” scene of Book X. In the first main section, I recover Goethe’s idea of Bildung from his classic Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahr for the comparison with the other kinds of Bildung in Wordsworth’s poetry. In the second, I explained the Bildung of “Tintern Abbey” which is based mainly on British empiricist philosopher such as David Hartley. In the third, I critically reviewed the works by other scholars who have studied The Prelude in the light of Kantian sublime to prepare my own reading of The Prelude with Schillerian sublime as the rationale for Wordsworth’s Bildung in the final section.

L’aporie architectonique dans la phénoménologie richirienne

Marc Richir has made innumerable mentions of architectonics in most of his major works. The very name comes from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason where it refers to an “art of systems” which status is rather elusive. Yet, the egregious systematicity of Kant’s thought may give the feeling that it is nothing more than a monstrous theoretical construct, that which Marc Richir would denounce as Gestell. His fascination for architectonics nevertheless endures while he radicalises the dichotomy between the Gestell – a machine-like logical automaton – and a newly coined version of the Kantian sublime to locate the “phenomenon as nothing-but-phenomenon”. Phenomenology, especially in Husserl’s legacy, struggles to establish itself as a rigorous science and fails to acquire the required “transcendental theory of methodology” for doing so. Marc Richir, while tackling head on the same aporia in his Phenomenological Meditations (1992), hopes for a solution in promoting an utterly radicalised phenomenology solely concerned with nascent phenomena with no regard to epistemological concerns of methodology. I suggest that such aporia may prove indomitable as long as the phenomena which phenomenology undertakes to explore only exist as scriptural descriptions, i.e. as text(s).

The Left Reflects on the Global Pandemic and Speaks to Transform!

The structure of this intervention is deliberately schizo-analytic: “and then—,” and “then—.” They are preparatory notes for a webinar by Transform! Europe on the COVID, arranged before the global explosion of Black Lives Matter. I question the top-down philanthropy of the bourgeois Left. I take the Rohingyas as bottom-line victims. I speak from two hometowns—Calcutta and New York. I ask the bourgeois Euro-U.S. Left not to monolithize the Global South. Many examples of how “India” is constructed are given. From New York, the United States is declared a failed state. Trump’s delinquencies are mentioned. It is argued that the only remedy at present is human behaviour and the typical U.S. character is not ready to practice this. This empirical fact shows the failure of the Kantian Sublime and reminds us that Kant thinks that the human moral will comes in to protect us from a hugely frightening natural phenomenon only by “subreption,” the same impulse that says that following steps provided by institutional religion will absolve us. Class and caste are taken into consideration throughout. I mention that as a coronavirus convalescent, I am donating plasma regularly.

Awful Parenthesis: Suspension and the Sublime in Romantic and Victorian Poetry, by Anne C. McCarthy

Reviewed by: Awful Parenthesis: Suspension and the Sublime in Romantic and Victorian Poetry by Anne C. McCarthy Casie LeGette (bio) Awful Parenthesis: Suspension and the Sublime in Romantic and Victorian Poetry, by Anne C. McCarthy; pp. x + 218. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018, $75.00. Anne C. McCarthy’s Awful Parenthesis: Suspension and the Sublime in Romantic and Victorian Poetry is primarily concerned with the relation between suspension and contingency. Suspension functions in this book as a way to live in and with the unstable contingency of the world, and the different chapters investigate the ways in which a series of nineteenth-century poets (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alfred Tennyson, and Christina Rossetti) negotiate contingency via suspension. Coleridge is by far the most important figure here: two chapters are devoted to his philosophical and poetic treatments of suspension. Coleridge is where the sublime comes in, as McCarthy argues that he provides a crucial revision of the Kantian sublime by privileging the role of suspension. Whereas Immanuel Kant (according to McCarthy) moves quickly from the unsteady state of suspension to the moment of transcendence, when the mind reasserts its own powers, Coleridge lingers in that state of suspension instead. This model, in which suspension is understood “as the constitutive movement of the sublime[,] discloses the essential discontinuity of the world—a discontinuity that cannot be fully recovered or resolved” (13). McCarthy is right that Coleridge is at his most fascinating and compelling when grappling with such discontinuity. The poet’s desperate desire for unity and wholeness is painfully at odds with his awareness of contingency, and McCarthy offers a sympathetic and sophisticated reading of Coleridge’s attempts to bridge that gap by, interestingly, remaining in the gap that is suspension. McCarthy’s understanding of suspension is a capacious one. At times throughout Awful Parenthesis, this reader wondered if the concept was being asked to cover too many different ideas and forms and moments. But the advantage of McCarthy’s capacious treatment of suspension is that it allows her to put into conversation works that are often shunted off into separate silos. The most exciting such moment is her second chapter on Coleridge, which combines “Christabel” (1816), Biographia Literaria (1817), and Coleridge’s religious text, Aids to Reflection (1825). “Christabel” shows, most obviously, the terror of suspension, as Christabel suffers profoundly from the trance state that leaves her unable to confront or blame Geraldine. But with her work on Coleridge’s prose and religious texts, McCarthy shows that Coleridge considers suspension as a means to acknowledge discontinuity within the self. So rather than seeing Christabel’s hospitality to Geraldine as a mistake, McCarthy argues that Coleridge is affirming, here and elsewhere, the necessity of granting hospitality to the dark, unacknowledged parts of the self. Coleridge’s thinking and writing about religion is critically important to his poetry, and it is a pleasure to watch McCarthy pull those threads together. Her combined treatment of Christina Rossetti’s religion and poetry (discussed below) is similarly valuable. In the second half of Awful Parenthesis, with a turn to Tennyson, McCarthy shifts to the idea of the suspended body. Although McCarthy does include references to bodies in the first half of her monograph, this chapter still feels like a departure from the book’s earlier concerns. McCarthy nonetheless offers an intriguing reading of suspended animation in Tennyson, showing persuasively that the poet returned over and over to the problem of bodies that look dead but are not. This chapter puts Tennyson’s concerns in conversation with a detailed and fascinating discussion of Victorian anxieties about being [End Page 151] buried alive. The central text here is Maud (1855); McCarthy argues that suspension appears in that poem not only in relation to the worry that a suspended body might be buried alive, but also in relation to poetic form: “Enacted through a frequently disjunctive poetics, Tennyson’s rhetoric of suspended animation resists the ascendency of narrative suspense and the closure upon which that suspense depends—implying that such closure may always come too soon” (120). McCarthy’s final chapter on Christina Rossetti is more immediately connected to the philosophical and religious concerns of the...

Editor’s Note

Editor’s Note

Poe’s Dark Sublime and the Supernatural

ABSTRACTPoe's sublime distinguishes itself from the Romantic Sublime by its link to a literal, rather than a metaphoric or perceptual, supernatural world. Such a construction—in which the perceiving subject actually comes into contact with the Sublime object—counters the “aesthetics of optimism” generally associated with the Sublime mode. This counter-sublime takes the perceiving subject into an experience of dissolution generally associated with dread of the underworld. In other instances, Poe seems to be parodying Sublimity. His purpose seems to subvert the Kantian dynamic Sublime, an inversion which critics have noted in Poe's fiction but not his poetry. Despite its removal from the world of actual phenomena, Poe's Sublime of the true supernatural is some of his most evocative writing.

Temporality and the Lyotardian Sublime: Kant between Husserl and Freud

ABSTRACT While Lyotard's first book was an introduction to phenomenology, most of the work that follows can be said to openly challenge the limits of phenomenological analysis. This is particularly evident in the well-known writings on the Kantian sublime, which Lyotard reads as a “temporal crisis” that undoes the conscious knowing subject and escapes “experience” in the phenomenological sense. Nonetheless, if this allows him to relate the sublime to Freud's “unconscious affect,” this “crisis” only becomes visible in contrast to a figure of subjective temporalization the model of which, I argue, is broadly Husserlian. Approaching the sublime as a temporal crisis thus allows not only for a clearer view of the import of Lyotard's late work on the affect with regard to subjectivity, knowledge, and experience; it also reveals what that work continues to owe to a certain phenomenological analysis.

Self-Injuring Body Art

Abstract Artistic self-injury, established as an art form since the late 1960s, polarizes the audience and still raises questions about the motivations behind such actions as well as about the narrative contexts in which they occur. While past research has focused on either specific performers or specific trajectories of violence in the contexts in which each artist was working, for instance, the Vietnam War (Kathy O’Dell), this article localizes artistic self-injury within the larger coherencies of the history of mind with respect to aesthetic theories. Questions of subjectivation and desubjectivation seem especially productive for such a discussion. Read against the backdrop of the aesthetics of the Kantian sublime as a strategy of self-empowerment that sets the independence of the will against the powerlessness of the body, the self-wounding act can also be understood with Georges Bataille as a purposeful desubjectivation, in which the artist strives for a radical disempowerment through pain. A consideration of selected artists sounds out the range between these two theoretical references.

Satirizing Modernism: Aesthetic Autonomy, Romanticism, and the Avant-Garde

Satirizing Modernism: Aesthetic Autonomy, Romanticism, and the Avant-Garde

Spinoza, Kant and the sublime

ABSTRACTIn this article, I draw out the implications of understanding Kant’s influential analysis of the sublime through Spinoza’s framework. By delineating different stages in the sublime experience, I map Kant’s description of the dynamic and mathematical sublime, with their associated pleasure in pain, onto Spinoza’s analysis of our encounter with any (art) object. Both describe experiences that start with imagination and sad passions turning to joyful affects with our employment of reason. In addition to joyful affects, both describe experiences that hold deeper implications for our self-understanding in relation to God/Nature. However, the meanings of these terms and the conceptual frameworks are radically different. From Spinoza’s position, experience of the Kantian sublime would prompt superstition and diminish us, reducing our power and virtue. I then consider what would be the equivalent of the sublime experience for Spinoza that would be associated with joy. Finally, I draw on both Spinozist and feminist critique to rethink the Kantian tradition of the sublime.

Enmeshed Landscapes: (Re)Constructing Canal Zone Aesthetics in Las novelas canaleras

The Canal Novel is characteristic of the political rupture of the 1960s decolonial movement in Panama, when writers and intellectuals sought to oppose US interventionism. This essay outlines how Gil Blas Tejeira’s Pueblos perdidos and Joaquín Beleño’s Los forzados de Gamboa situate a new political potential in the Canal Zone landscape by contesting the legacy of Theodore Roosevelt’s environmental logic as well as the importation of US imperial spatial models. In the Canal Novel, the landscape of the sublime proposed by Kant is no longer tenable: the aesthetic distance associated with the Kantian sublime is displaced by “enmeshment,” wherein humans and both organic and non-organic objects are fused together. By reading the Canal Novels against US imperial paradigms, we can better understand the racial organization of the landscape previously hidden by megaprojects like the Panama Canal.