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Abstract
This paper seeks to demonstrate that in Lyotard’s later works the sublime is posited as a response to nihilism. This demonstration is significantly complicated by the fact that while Lyotard frequently gave the sublime a positive valuation, he also identified it with nihilism. The paper charts Lyotard’s confrontation with nihilism throughout his career, showing how the themes with which he characterizes nihilism in his earlier works are repeated as characteristics of the sublime in his later works. It then argues that for Lyotard the sublime acts as both a characterization of the nihilism of contemporary cultural conditions, and as a resource with which to respond to nihilism. Lyotard’s deployment of the sublime as such a response can be understood as an instance of his use of the sophistical strategy of retorsion, finding from within nihilism itself the potential for resistance. Moreover, this position may be understood as motivated by a rejection of revolutionary programmes for changing social conditions, and by the desire to preserve a space for justice – understood as respect for difference. For Lyotard, the abyss between meaning and existence which characterizes both nihilism and the sublime preserves this space better than any attempt to close or bridge it.
Notes
Thanks are due to an anonymous reviewer of this article, whose comments contributed to its substantial improvement.
1. Nietzsche, The Will to Power 7.
2. Williams in fact raises the possibility that the sublime might act as a response to nihilism, but dismisses it as ineffective. See Lyotard and the Political 132. My strategy here is to offer an alternative interpretation of nihilism and the sublime in Lyotard, rather than argue against Williams's interpretation. I therefore forgo a discussion of it.
3. Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” in The Essentials of Psycho-analysis.
4. In his Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern, Wil Slocombe notes the close relationship between nihilism and the sublime in Lyotard's work, but does not recognize how for him the aesthetic of the sublime also acts as a positive response to nihilism.
5 Like most everything in Nietzsche's work, his understanding of nihilism is open to multiple and contesting interpretations. Here I draw on White. For Nietzsche on nihilism, see in particular the notes from 1887 collected under the title “European Nihilism” in The Nietzsche Reader.
6. For interpretations of Nietzsche's complex and changing views of art, see Young; and Ridley.
7. Ansell Pearson 159.
8. Lyotard was a member of the Marxist organizations Socialisme ou Barbarie (1954–64) and Pouvoir Ouvrier (1964–66).
9. Lyotard, “Dead Letter” in Jean-François Lyotard 38–39.
10. Ibid. 34.
11. Ibid. 35.
12. Ibid. 39.
13. For an account of this loss of faith, see Lyotard's “A Memorial of Marxism: For Pierre Souyri,” trans. Cecile Lindsay, in Peregrinations.
14. In so far as it emphasizes the book's merits as an analysis of and response to nihilism, the reading of Libidinal Economy here follows that of Williams and of my own in Nihilism in Postmodernity.
15. Lyotard, Libidinal Economy 43.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Lyotard writes:
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[S]emiotics is nihilism. Religious science par excellence … It is a religious science because it is haunted by the hypothesis that someone speaks to us in these givens [i.e., signs] and, at the same time, that its language, its competence, or in any case its performative capacity transcends us … Thus the sign is enmeshed in nihilism, nihilism proceeds by signs; to continue to remain in semiotic thought is to languish in religious melancholy … (Libidinal Economy 49)
19 For example, in the paper “The Unconscious” Freud writes: “The nucleus of the Ucs. [unconscious] consists of instinctual representatives which seek to discharge their cathexis; that is to say, it consists of wishful impulses” (in The Essentials of Psycho-analysis 159). On this issue, see Bennington 16.
20. See “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” 224–27.
21. The quotation above continues as follows:
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Our question is: who suffers in pain? Freud's response is: the child, thus an already constituted subject, formed in the object-mother's gaze, in symmetry with her, already, then, there is the specular partition between them, already the auditorium-side and the stage-side, already the theatre; and the theatre the child constructs with the edge of his bed as the footlights, and the thread attached to the bobbin as curtain and scenery, governs entries and exits, this prosthesis-theatre is of the same type as that already hollowed out within him, it is the replica in “exteriority” of the hollow volume in which the two poles of his own body and that of his mother, theatrical counterparts, non-existent poles, capture, secure in their field, dominate every event of the libidinal band. (Libidinal Economy 23)
22 In section V, “The Special Characteristics of the System Ucs. [Unconscious],” Freud writes:
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There are in this system no negation, no doubt, no degrees of certainty: all this is only introduced by the work of the censorship between the Ucs. and the Pcs. [preconscious]. Negation is a substitute, at a higher level, for repression. In the Ucs. there are only contents, cathected with greater or lesser strength. (The Essentials of Psycho-analysis 159)
23 See Lyotard, “On a Figure of Discourse” in Toward the Postmodern 13.
24. For Lyotard's criticisms of Libidinal Economy, see Lyotard and Thébaud, Just Gaming 3–6; and Lyotard, Peregrinations 13–14.
25. “An Interview with Jean-François Lyotard” 300–01.
26. Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. Meredith 106 [257].
27. Keith Crome and James Williams suggest that the sublime develops through four modalities in Lyotard's work: aesthetic, political, ironic, and bodily. See The Lyotard Reader and Guide 18.
28. In Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained to Children 19.
29. In Postmodernism. ICA Documents 4 and 5 11.
30. Lyotard, Postmodern Fables 245.
31. See Heidegger, “Nihilism as Determined by the History of Being” in Nietzsche, vol. IV: Nihilism.
32. Lyotard, The Inhuman 113.
33. See Kant, The Critique of Judgement, sections 23–29 (“Analytic of the Sublime”).
34. Heidegger gives a striking early illustration of this in section 23 of Being and Time, in terms of the effect of modern technologies such as the radio on Dasein's spatiality:
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All the ways in which we speed things up, as we are more or less compelled to do today, push us on towards the conquest of remoteness. With the “radio,” for example, Dasein has so expanded its everyday environment that it has accomplished a de-severance [“bringing-close” or “making the farness vanish”] of the “world” – a de-severance which, in its meaning for Dasein, cannot yet be visualized. (Being and Time 140 [105])
35. Lyotard, “Sublime Aesthetic of the Contract Killer” in The Assassination of Experience by Painting.
36. Ibid. 192.
37. Ibid. 191.
38. Ibid. 192.
39. Ibid.
40. Lyotard, “Critical Reflections” 92.
41. Libidinal Economy 46–47.
42. Ibid. 44.
43. Lyotard, “Anima Minima” in Postmodern Fables 242.
44. Ibid. 245.
45. Ibid. 246.
46. As this point suggests – in so far as the wording evokes Heidegger's “ontological difference” – there is an ontological dimension to Lyotard's analysis of the sublime. For an extended discussion of this, see Gasché.
47. For Lyotard's most significant discussion of this idea, see his “Presence.”
48. Ansell Pearson 5.
49. In Lyotard, Driftworks 72.
50. In the posthumously published essay “The Greek State,” for example, Nietzsche fears “the cry of compassion tearing down the walls of culture,” in which case “the desire for justice, for the equalization of suffering, would swamp all other ideas.” See Ansell Pearson 73.
51. See, in particular, sections 39 and 40 of The Critique of Judgement.
52. Lyotard, “Answer to the Question: What is the Postmodern?” in The Postmodern Explained to Children 19.
53 “Representation, Presentation, Unpresentable” in The Inhuman 119.
54. Ibid.
55. Kant writes:
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… I say that taste can with more justice be called a sensus communis than can sound understanding; and that the aesthetic, rather than the intellectual, judgement can bear the name of a public sense … We might even define taste as the faculty of estimating what makes our feeling in a given representation universally communicable without the mediation of a concept. (The Critique of Judgement, trans. Meredith, section 40, 153 [295])
56 Lyotard, “Something Like: ‘Communication … without Communication’” in The Inhuman 109–10.
57. Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime 239.
58. Bennington 167.
59. For an indication of such a possibility, see Vandenabeele.
60. “Answer to the Question” 24–25.
61. See, in particular, chapter 3 of Libidinal Economy, “The Desire Named Marx.”
62. See, for example, Crowther.
63. See, for example, “After the Sublime, the State of Aesthetics” in The Inhuman 140.
64 To elaborate this point a little further, we may note that feeling is usually thought on the sensible side of the sensible/intelligible opposition. The feeling of the sublime is analysed by Kant as a feeling of both pleasure and pain, and pleasure and pain are both identified by Plato as lying on the side of the sensible and distracting the soul from remembering its true divine origin in the intelligible world of the forms. In the Phaedo, for example, he has Socrates say: “[E]very pleasure and every pain provides, as it were, another nail to rivet the soul to the body and to weld them together” (Plato's Phaedo 34).
65. In The Lyotard Reader.
66. Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. Bernard 120 [345]. Quoted in “Judiciousness in Dispute” 326–27.
67. “Judiciousness in Dispute” 326.
68. Critique of Judgement, trans. Bernard 102 [329]. Quoted in “Judiciousness in Dispute” 327.
69. “Anima Minima” 243.
70. Peregrinations 43.
71. For Lyotard's argument linking artworks made with new technologies and the aesthetic of the sublime, see also “Something Like.”
72. “Sublime Aesthetic of the Contract Killer” 228–29.
73. Ibid. 227–28.
74. Elsewhere, in the context of a discussion of childhood, survival is unambiguously given a negative value:
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… we have to be children if we are to be capable of the most minimal creative activity. If we are sent to space after the explosion of the sun (I don’t even know if it will be us), if something is sent to space without this extraordinary complexity that is precisely the paradox of childhood, I am afraid that this complexity is not complex enough. In this case, we could call this by the terrible name of mere survival, which is not very interesting. I am not interested in surviving, not interested at all. I am interested in remaining a child. (“Oikos” in Jean-François Lyotard: Political Writings 107)
75 “Anima Minima” 247.
76. For example, in Libidinal Economy he refers to the linguistic turn in French thought, associated with “the closure of representation,” as
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that sarcastic discovery, that sham dropping of the scales from our eyes, by those thinkers who come and tell us: what is outside is really inside, there is no outside, the exteriority of the theatre is just as much its interiority … this sad piece of news, this cacangelism which is only the other side of evangelism, this wretched news that the artefact-bearers running along their little wall behind the backs of slaves who are bound and seated at the bottom of their cave, do not even exist, or what amounts to the same: that they themselves are only shadows in the cave of the sunlit world, reduplication of sadness … (4)
77. A prominent example of this technique is one analysed by Lyotard in the first “Notice” of The Differend, on the sophist Protagoras. Protagoras’ student Euathlus has to pay him only if he has won a dispute at least once. Euathlus claims he has not won a dispute, and should not have to pay. Protagoras retorts that he does have to pay, for either he has won a past dispute, in which case he must pay, or he has not won a past dispute – in which case he wins the present dispute – and should therefore still pay. See The Differend 6–8.
78. Crome writes:
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If, and as Lyotard says in the introduction to The Differend, the context of the book is to be understood as “the ‘linguistic turn’ of Western philosophy” […], then that turn is itself put through another turn, a sophistical turn, a retorsion, by Lyotard. (147)
79 Nietzsche writes that “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified” (in The Birth of Tragedy 32).