Communal Narcosis and Sublime Withdrawal: The Problem of Community in Kant's Critique of Judgment

That is sublime in comparison with which everything else is small.

—Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment

Introduction

The moment of "high theory" may be long behind us, but the categories and distinctive habits of thought that go by the name of "poststructuralism" are still very much with us. They will be for a long time to come. If there are those today who believe naively that a "critique" of poststructuralism is possible and even overdue, it is only because poststructuralist ways of thinking have become so naturalized that the criticisms themselves are articulated in the languages poststructuralism has bequeathed us. The course of intellectual history is glacial, punctuated now and then by cataclysms of geological proportion. In the aftermath of an intellectual revolution such as the one we have just witnessed, we would do well to leave criticizing aside for the moment and take stock of the legacy that is now ours for better or worse.

One of the animating impulses of the diverse poststructuralisms is a sustained and uncompromising attack on the concept of totality and on the political totalitarianism that is supposed to follow from it. As a result, we are today deeply suspicious of concepts that are predicated on a notion of totality: community, happiness, utopia, history, globality. Yet these are some of our most crucial political concepts. Instead of simply abandoning them, the task that confronts us in the wake of the poststructuralist revolution is how to think these concepts anew. Surprisingly, poststructuralism itself provides us with the intellectual resources for this project. Properly thought, totalities are heterogeneous, complex, differentiated, irreducible. For this reason, it is the peculiarity of those ideas, which depend on a concept of totality, that they cannot be intuited or experienced: they are only accessible as totalities through writing, representation, language, narrative, and fiction. Paradoxically, poststructuralism has been in the vanguard of revalorizing the latter categories, and yet the concepts that could most benefit from this revalorization have largely fallen into disuse.¹ Can we think totality in a nontotalitarian way? This task has barely begun: it is one of the most urgent intellectual and political projects that confronts us today.²

My paper is a modest contribution to this larger project.³ Jean-Luc Nancy has already begun the work of theorizing community in nonsubstantivist and nonidentitarian ways. But how does his reconceptualization of community transform our understanding of the aesthetic, which traditionally has been predicated on notions of harmonious and organic communities? In this paper, I will show that Nancy's notion of the "inoperative community" opens the way to a radical rereading of Kant's Critique of Judgment,⁴ which will allow us to reappraise both the significance of this text for aesthetic and political theory and the importance of aesthetic judgment for any thinking of community.⁵ There is of course nothing new in the claim that the aesthetic is irreducibly political, though it will always be important to reaffirm the insight when new formalisms threaten. But Kant's text, read after Nancy, teaches us to think the relation between the aesthetic and the political in an unfamiliar and surprising way. When we speak of the aesthetic as political, it is usually in the mode of ideology critique: there is an ideology of the aesthetic that must be exposed, and perhaps a utopian dimension of the text that must be salvaged (Eagleton; Marcuse; Bloch). All aesthetic artifacts are deemed political in this double way. We have become adepts of a hermeneutics of suspicion, and this mode of criticism is the very conscience of democracy today. However, such a strategy of reading concedes in advance the priority of politics over aesthetics: while every work of art conceals reflections on a social, historical, and political conjuncture, affirming its belatedness in relation to the political, politics can get along just fine without the aesthetic. Paradoxically, through its unreflective privileging of politics, ideology critique remains at the level of aesthetic theory rather than political thought. What ideology critique cannot comprehend is that there may be a more fundamental...