LACAN AND MEANING
SEXUATION, DISCOURSE THEORY, AND TOPOLOGY IN THE AGE OF HERMENEUTICS
CHAPTER 2
WITHDRAWALS FROM MEANING
— page 46 —
Contemporary aesthetic theorists imagine otherwise. They have made significant headway in reading Kant against himself, extending his logic of the sublime from its once exclusive domain of chaotic nature, to the aesthetic realm and its objects. In this way, even small artworks like paintings prove capable of triggering sublime effects in the subject. Subjectivity is precisely what holds the key to this accomplishment. Kant had articulated the sublime experience well enough. But his investigations stopped short of questioning the subject’s relation to the sublime. Doing so reveals how the subject is fully complicit in its inherent discord. The subject’s imagination is simply stretched past the breaking point when attempting to grasp really big objects like God, the soul and the universe as a whole. What Kant called the Ideas of reason, these objects are not of the domain of possible experience. Yet a question arises. Are there not circumstances in which imagination falters when directed at smaller objects which seemingly belong to this domain? For Kant, this was not the case. The transcendental schematism – a notoriously obscure component of his critical philosophy – provided enough time for imagination to complete its task. But for theorists like Lyotard, Rancière, Deleuze and Nancy, it is not just the Ideas of reason that are inadequately schematized. Temporal gaps can also be experienced with everyday objects, especially artworks.
Most clearly, Lyotard puts a logic of the sublime directly to work in the realm of art. The use here of the indefinite article is deliberate. Kant actually specified two sublimes, or rather one sublime divided into two each with its own logic: the mathematical and the dynamical. The mathematical logic takes priority, as it fragments reality into discrete phenomena. While the dynamical transcends and establishes a constitutive exception in the noumenal domain, thereby providing an external guarantee for the coherence of phenomenal reality. These two logics effectively delineate two different strategies to deal with the failure of imagination. With Lyotard, it is the dynamical logic which unlocks his aesthetic project. He expresses this largely on the subject-side. The experience of the sublime gives rise to a pain stemming from the lack of beautiful forms. But this pain engenders pleasure. Not only does the impotence of imagination attest a contrario to a striving to harmonize the aesthetic object with reason. The failure to provide a representation of the unpresentable is also, in a way, successful. For this very experience acts as a (negative) confirmation that the ungraspable Thing exists. Lyotard enlists the avant-garde to ensure the aesthetic sublime receives ample testimony. He entrusts it to perform the essential task of art today, to allude to non-edifying indeterminacy in artistic form.
While slightly more difficult to discern, Rancière opts for the mathematical strategy. The dispersive nature of his texts already suggests this. They seem devoid of exceptional points or moments where definitive conclusions could be drawn. This may disengage his reader, but it no doubt reflects Rancière’s commitment to artistic innovation qua multiplicity. Apparently, even discussions of aesthetics should avoid the representative regime. For Rancière, there is no
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