The Political Sublime

Michael J. Shapiro. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. 224 pp., illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $94.95 cloth (ISBN 978-0-8223-7033-8); $24.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-8223-7052-9); $24.95 electronic (ISBN 978-0-8223-7205-9).

The world seems intent to announce that a condition of catastrophe shall remain in effect until further notice. As we wrap our heads around this apparent fact of daily life, how might we invest in the catastrophic despite our reactive bewilderment? Might there be a way to turn toward it as something more than a test of endurance? What new forms of political subjectivity might we discover in its negative promise?

In his newest book, Michael J. Shapiro attempts a radical recuperation of the sublime, arguing that it is the basis for an aesthetic politics of alternative and multiplicitous world-making. Although Shapiro is a political scientist, he makes the fresh move of reading Kant politically but from outside his corpus of political works, instead proposing that there is still uncharted radical political potential in the “Analytic of the Sublime” in Kant's ([1790] 2007) Critique of Judgement.

His primary insight focuses on a temporal gap in that analytic wherein, it is proposed, apprehension of the at-first incomprehensible opens a space of fractured subjectivity before comprehension imposes itself. For Kant, the sublime initiates a process of mentality, a “negative pleasure” as the imagination submits itself to an authoritative faculty of reason, a triumph of mind in its capacity to hold the vastness of the natural world. For Shapiro, the putative inevitability of this process of closure is the genesis of a probable and implausible universalism, Kant's sensus communis. Shapiro dissents, invoking a triad of influential post-Kantian critical theorists of aesthetics and politics—most prominently Ranciere, closely followed by Lyotard and then Deleuze—to trouble and forestall this naturalized teleology of Kant's archetypal scene.

Shapiro identifies an anxiety in the figure of Kant himself who, unable to account for how the imposing sublime gives way to any accord, resolves only with the existence of culture. Shapiro opposes this to that pleasing accord between nature and mind that he identifies as Kant's theory of beauty elsewhere in his corpus. Shapiro interprets this necessary turn to culture as a forceful mediation of closure to sublime events by bodies of authority. Shapiro wants to rescue Kant's insight of a subjectivity fragmented by the incomprehensible but, with Lyotard, infinitely defer its closural process, opening this temporal gap into a durative historical-critical space. Through this opening, Shapiro allows the sublime to emerge as a call to political praxis, an alternative and oppositional form of collective sense making.

The thesis is traced and returned to many times through deepening engagements with a series of contemporary sublimes and their corresponding aesthetic interventions. Each episode deals with a form of natural or social violence; some sudden and some slow, including earthquakes, industrial and imperial expansion and nuclear testing leading to cultural genocide in the western United States, 11 September 2001 (9/11), and the uneven distribution of state violence and premature death among African Americans since the plantation era, which Shapiro dubs a “racial sublime.”

The book enters into sublime experience through textuality. In his trace of the concept, Shapiro moves backward from our Burkean notion of the sublime as ineffable, pointing to Longinus, for whom the sublime indicates a figuration beyond text, a greater concept that haunts works of literary or performative mastery. This suggests a very compelling kind of presence that is countenanced through text but not within them, making it distinct from meaning or structure. Shapiro defines texts as “methodological fields” rather than artefacts or semiotic systems.

The book is lean and not overly theoretically dense. It will appeal to the critically inclined for its original appropriation of Kant and intelligent commentary on temporality and politics, continuing a theme of Shapiro's earlier books. Yet it might also appeal much more broadly for its methodological reinvigoration of film and literature and a novel strategy of engagement. Its engagement with #blacklivesmatter and discussion of the nuclear sublime with its slow state violence against native Americans and Pacific Islanders might appeal to advanced undergraduates in the social sciences and fine arts.

The most effective material is found in those chapters that distill their own mise-en-scène to closest accord with Kant's archetypal scene. These chapters are organized around collective catastrophes precipitated by a singular historical event, such as the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Shapiro sketches events of initial forceful mediation by government or media but remediated (and “premediated”) through texts that trouble the first authoritative acts of sense making, forming oppositional communities of sense through aesthetic practices. An especially effective engagement with aesthetic practice is found in the final chapter's discussion of Douglas Gordon's video installation on 9/11 and the works of Don DeLillo, through which Shapiro's interest in ontologies of duration and a related political subjectivity characterized by memory are most clearly articulated.

Other textual engagements feel less original, such as familiar analyses of films by Antonioni (1964) and Jarmusch (1995) as well as novels by Alexie (1995) and Silko (1977). Although Shapiro is effective in showing how these texts remediate sublime experience and although his selection of texts is invigoratingly au courant (i.e., Ta Nehisi Coates) these engagements are flatter. At times, I was unconvinced of his thesis and found myself wondering if he might also be negatively stumbling into a reinvigorated poststructuralism wherein Lyotard's “deferral” feels simply Derridean.

Clearly there is a compelling original commentary on textuality and method here. Yet, I found it more opaque than the book's cogent primary thesis. Shapiro humbly compares his method to Longinus and his selected texts as analogous to using a particular series of stones to cross a river. He quite conspicuously iterates and reiterates the book's thesis in a manner that suggests intent deliberation. At the book's close, Shapiro prominently notes the notion of quotation. Elsewhere in the book, he speaks of “hostility” to the text. There seems a parallel here between the forcefulness of quotation (which justifies its text by some means other than the text's buildup) and the sublime that I feel I have not fully understood. Is this due to a perplexing imprecision or my sublime experience of the work? Who is to say?

Perhaps problematically, Shapiro also avoids critiquing the grounds of sublime experience. Although he is ostensibly hostile to Kant's universalism, Shapiro still seems to reify a Euro/Western “problem” of the sublime by suggesting an archetypal scene within which it takes place—a universally human confrontation with threatening vastness—but never clearly questions how that sense of threat might be uneven across lifeworlds. This might be less of a problem with the work, however, than an opportunity for explorations of locally specific alternatives to the sublime experience itself.

What is most striking and enduring about the work is that Shapiro seems to have offered the first figuration of a novel way to theorize individual and collective trauma as political without relying on a primary psychoanalytic dimension or its correlate literatures. He has begun to figure a traumatized subjectivity that is both porous and agentive. Although this move is never stated outright, it is clearly suggested in Shapiro's statement of some equivalence in the parallel he draws between Kant's sublime and Freud's uncanny early on in the book. By framing subjectivity as duration through memory, Shapiro rejects both the inevitability of comprehension by mentality or disappearance into the Freudian unconscious, rendering a political subject for now decoupled from any universal psychoanalytics.

The book suggests many compelling subplots worthy of sustained investigation. There is a historical movement in the work from direct experiences of natural disaster (earthquakes) to natural disasters that reveal others' lifeworlds (Hurricane Katrina, nuclear landscapes) to socially produced disasters experienced at the scale of a natural disaster (9/11). Yet how do the natural sublime and its ostensibly less natural other interact, cloud, or reinforce one another? How does the programming of nature and culture apparent in Katrina, for instance, affect the historically later reveal of the racial sublime to white Americans? Second, what will prevent “the sublime” from becoming a metaphor for that which an author wishes to render substantial, a hyperbolic attribution not unlike the proliferation of different kinds of “space?” Does the diversity of aesthetic practices and an author's feeling of social significance justify this figuration of infinitely plural sublimes? Third, the material in the racial sublime is timely but too brief, beggaring more focused consideration as the chapter wherein the thesis of many sublimes most clearly implies additional questions about subjectivity and class. I would be quite interested to see Shapiro develop the implied parallel between Kant's racialized figuration of black bodies as a site of white incomprehensibility and Kant's own seeming unease at resolving the “problem” of the sublime.