Lyotard, Beckett, Duras, and the Postmodern Sublime (review)

Part of the series Currents in Comparative Languages and Literatures, this book begins with the postmodern supposition of humanity’s inherited trauma of mechanized twentieth-century warfare, in order to posit the postmodern sublime as an ethical processor of trauma. Andrew Slade establishes the relevance of his topic in the larger discussion with references to Jean-Luc Nancy’s 1986 essay “The Sublime Offering,” translated by Jeffrey Bloechl in Of the Sublime: Presence in Question (New York: Fordham UP, 2000), and the consideration of the sublime as witness to historical violence in the works of Jean-François Lyotard (1). Like many other critics, Andrew Slade employs superlative adjectives when describing the sublime: “terrible, shocking, and awesome. It is often seen as the limit of possibilities: light and shadow, depth and surface, visible and invisible, beautiful and terrible” (10). With its formulations of quality, taste, genre, and legitimacy, the postmodern sublime defines the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of literature, and therefore, is often the creator of the dimensions of the canon. As a marker of modern artistic loss and postmodern creative play, the sublime legitimizes those who define and contextualize the sublime, even as it is challenged with commodification and fetishization. Incomprehensibility and incoherence often categorize descriptions of the sublime, as if the very attempt to define the sublime were to colonize it. However, it is primarily an ethical imperative. Slade acknowledges that the popularity of his project is at once at odds with, and a testament to, the postmodern sublime’s primary objective: that of authentically transmitting trauma without ever reviving or diminishing the event. His engagement with Jean-François Lyotard’s, Samuel Beckett’s, and Marguerite Duras’s texts are the fruit of his work in tragedy and the aesthetics of representations; he covers several theoretical objectives: characterizing the trauma of the twentieth century; arguing how the sublime is a central modality yet secondary to trauma itself; describing how the sublime is aporetic; differentiating the sublime from the beautiful; and demonstrating how the sublime is best situated in the postmodern era.

Slade sifts through various threads of French postmodern sublime in Lyotard, Beckett, and Duras, drawing comparative conclusions about tragedy and trauma, while his observations on translation, his analysis of Beckett’s radio address, and his reading of Duras with Luce Irigaray demonstrate his expertise in French literature. Beginning with its romantic roots, he distinguishes eras of the postmodern sublime. The postmodern sublime, unlike the romantic sublime, is neither beautiful nor necessarily invested with a moral imperative; instead, between knowing and feeling, it is at the limits of ethics and aesthetics. Unlike the romantic sublime of the past, or the hermetic completeness of the modern sublime, the postmodern sublime seeks neither closure nor origin. The postmodern sublime does not subject the feminine to the beautiful, sincere, and good without the intelligence accorded to the masculine, nor does it mourn a nostalgic center (33). What it seeks is itself, and it begins with experimentation and modern possibilities. Citing Robert Lifton’s study on the subjective effects of technologies and practices of mass death and the psychical structures of survival, Slade defends the aesthetic of sublime as a mode of witnessing historical trauma and intercepts Edmund Burke’s idea of the sublime as a tool for preservation. Synthesizing current ideas of the sublime, he reformulates them as a means of understanding how the sublime is the most appropriate tool for witnessing historical trauma, particularly the shock of and guilt for pleasure after survival. At the same time, the sublime “serves as a support for the existential fact of survival and hence is always secondary to events of terror and trauma” (13).

In “Chapter Two: Jean-François Lyotard and the Thought of the Sublime,” Slade juxtaposes Lyotard’s question “is it happening?” with the painter Barnett Newman’s answer “Now” (33). Thus, the postmodern is not just a discrete instance, but includes an “entire genealogy” (33) and as such, is irreducible...