Sublime Repetitions

university of toronto quarterly, volume 71, number 2, spring 2002 BERNHARD RADLOFF Sublime Repetitions Is a discourse >on the sublime= still possible for contemporary literary theory? What can the poststructuralism of Derrida and late Barthes teach us about the possibility and the implications of such discourse within the horizon of postmodernism? >The beautiful in nature,= Kant proposes, >is connected with the form of the object, which consists in having (definite) boundaries. The sublime, on the other hand, is to be found in a formless object, so far as in it or by occasion of it boundlessness (Unbegrenztheit) is represented, and yet its totality is also present to thought= (Kritik, 105, 106; Critique, 82). Kant distinguishes the sentiment of the sublime from that of the beautiful, which is bound to forms; it is the boundlessness of the formless which occasions the sentiment of the sublime, for the sublime properly belongs to the mind, not to the object itself. Consequently, because the sublime indicates the irrelevance of forms B and thus of >presence= (as Jean-François Lyotard notes, 298) B it becomes possible, and perhaps necessary, to revive the long eclipsed question of the sublime, this time on postmodern grounds. For Lyotard, the question of the sublime poses itself as the question of the mode of givenness (of presence) of art >after the sublime,= which is to say, in the train of the sublimination of nature into mind: >Nature, Kant claims, is no longer the addressor of ciphered, tangible messages whose addressee is imagination ... The Geistesgefühl, the feeling of the mind, indicates that the mind lacks nature, that nature is missing from it. It can feel only itself= (298B99). In The Critique of Judgement, Kant avers that >nature is therefore sublime= in those of its phenomena whose intuition brings with it the idea of its infinity. And this >makes us judge as sublime, not so much the object, as our own state of mind in the estimation of it= (Kritik, 105B6; Critique, 94). Given that the poststructuralism of Derrida and late Barthes allows for the possibility of a sublime object, however understood, what idea of infinity would be proper to this object under the regime of the signifier? What concept of subjectivity would be commensurate to the sublimity of a postmodern >object=? The direction of my argument may be anticipated as follows: with the dissolution of self and object into textuality, the field of language itself emerges as both the source and the >object= of sublime sentiment as experienced by the postmodern, deconstructed self. sublime repetitions 675 university of toronto quarterly, volume 71, number 2, spring 2002 Kant=s theory of the sublime, as Lyotard proposes, implicates the superfluity of nature. The revelation of the transcendental power of human freedom in the mathematical as in the dynamical sublime allows nature to withdraw and give place to the mind=s contemplation of its own superior power (Kritik, 99, 113; Critique, 87, 101). What happens to this motif under the regime of deconstruction? In what sense does nature withdraw, and in what sense is it given, in whatever mode of presence? For while deconstruction does indeed implicate the withdrawal of nature in the withdrawal of being as being-present (which is the form of presence of the object), the question remains how nature is given in its withdrawal from objectivity. The withdrawal of nature by way of its functionalization, which is to say, its dissolution and reintegration into textuality, will, as we shall see, also bring with it a transformation of the subject and the mode of transcendence proper to it. It is already clear that the possibility of the sublime in the postmodern landscape will take its orientation from our experience of the sublimity of language; to be precise, of l=écriture in Derrida=s sense. For language as a signifying system subsumes nature into its regulatory models or programs; this >linguistic turn= emerges as one of the most self-evident presuppositions of structuralist and poststructuralist discourse. The theory of l=écriture is understood here as the metalanguage of writing in general, of what one may call >programmatics=: >the contemporary biologist,= Derrida writes, >speaks of writing and program in relation to...