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August 3, 2007
Jean-Francois Lyotard called for a renewed commitment to a sublime aesthetic that accentuates the inadequacies and limitations of representation rather than the yearning for fullness. Lyotard's sublime is calculated to discredit the Enlightenment faith in reason as a faculty that can grasp the world in its totality and legitimize political meta-narratives. There is still access to the experience of the sublime in postmodern society, where natural disasters are not a serious threat to everyday life. This should be viewed positively; the sublime moment is now a common occurrence: not dependent on a "nature experience." The sublime is no longer a rare and unpredictable natural occurrence, it is commonplace experience.
Jean-François Lyotard, argues that the `fundamental task' of Romantic art was to bear `expressive witness to the inexpressible.' It was through the figure of the sublime, Lyotard says, that Romanticism expressed the limits of its own powers of expression, and also faced the simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating prospect of that which lay beyond its grasp. For Romanticism, the sublime was - as the word itself suggests (sub-limen: up to + limit, threshold) - a figure of the limit. And in Lyotard, as in other key contemporary or `postmodern' thinkers, the sublime returns as a name for the dizzying moment in which the limits of thought and representation are encountered. This course focuses on the ways in which the question of the sublime connects Romanticism and postmodernism in a shared concern with the aesthetics and politics of `presentation' (Lyotard).
Dick Hebdige has argued that these theories stress the primacy of aesthetic experience and evacuate the aesthetic of any political intents or effects. Taking Lyotard's notion of the sublime as exemplary of this trend, Hebdige concedes that Lyotard's emphasis on the unrepresentable is "Politically nuanced" insofar as it militates against the terroristic and totalitarian potentialities of Enlightenment reason. But, Hebdige goes on to argue, Lyotard's aesthetic of the sublime precludes all political possibilities in its effort to guard against the dangers of political modernity. For Lyotard, the sublime must remain "the prerogative of art alone: the socio-political aspiration to 'present the unrepresentable,' to embody in the here and now the that-which-is-to-be, is deemed untenable" (65). Emphasizing the limits of language as a medium of human communication, Lyotard's sublime effects a wholesale retreat from sociality itself and from any project to define and actualize collective interests and values. Insistence on what is impossible within language tends "to seriously limit the scope and definition of the political (where politics is defined as the 'art of the possible')"
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I have recently been interested in the intersection of the sublime and the Kantian notion of enthusiasm.
Lyotard has a yet untranslated (or unpublished translation actually) monograph on enthusiasm and it pops up in various places in his work (differend, etc). I have had to end up developing a post-Kantian Deleuzian notion of enthusiasm for my diss derived from Kant's discussion of enthusiasm (also in various places).