La Formation des Formes (review)

Juan Miguel Garrido's La Formation des Formes is a conceptually intricate contribution to the study of Kant that focuses on the question of sensibility, an overlooked topic in the history of Kant's reception. Garrido's main question is: what leads to the formation of the "pure forms of sensibility" (space and time) that condition human intuition? To address this question, Garrido focuses on Kant's Transcendental Aesthetic, which he reads along with Kant's Third Critique. In this way, fundamental theoretical and ontological questions are brought to bear on that domain which one all too easily calls "the aesthetic." Garrido's analyses are informed by the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger, by the work of French philosophers like Granel, Derrida, and especially by the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy, whose work on the syncope in Kant is to a large extent vindicated in painstaking philosophical detail.

Examining sensibility as Kant presents it when it is detached from objective experience, Garrido finds in Kant a form of pure sensibility that "return[s] neither to the imagination nor to the understanding to find its foundations" (19; translation mine). If form, as Garrido explains in his introduction, is "a concept [that] is not able not to engage in relation to a content that it, the form, is not," this negative formulation emphasizes both a relation to something (a material, a phenomenon) and, along with this, an originary opposition (of form to content) (19). Both this relation and this opposition, he shows, are structurally prior to the "pure forms of sensibility," and thus cannot issue from them. Rather, these structures first enable the formation of "pure forms" of sensibility, which Garrido develops in terms of three syntheses, each of which makes up one of the three main sections of the book: "La Synthèse de la Forme," "La Synthèse de la Limite" and "La Synthèse de la Chose."

"La Synthèse de la Forme" begins by showing how the pure forms of sensibility are at once pre-objective (not determined by the understanding) and already "synthetic": the content coincides entirely with the formation of the "pure forms" (29). Throughout, Garrido pays particular attention to the "synthesis of apprehension," and it is one of the study's merits to open up this term beyond the usual triadic account in the B Deduction where it is usually embedded: the syntheses (by the imagination) of apprehension, reproduction and recognition. Of particular interest is Garrido's discussion of succession in the Transcendental Aesthetic and in the B Deduction, which includes a close and innovative reading of Kant's discussion of the "image" of a drawn line that represents only the one-dimensionality of time (B 156). Garrido supports his alternate reading of this passage (in terms of apprehension) by means of a detail in Kant's text: the line must be successively drawn for the analogy to work. At stake in the passage, Garrido argues, is less the "image" of a line that could be presupposed beyond each of its successive determinations than the "advance of a diversity of points succeeding themselves in apprehension," which thereby sensibly engender the form of succession (39). This analysis of succession enables Garrido, in the same section of the book, to go on to examine the beautiful as the "sensible representation of time or of the apprehension of the time of apprehension" (40).

Although Garrido's focus on apprehension uniquely positions him to examine the beautiful, he also has much to say about the sublime, where apprehension is opposed to the faculty of judgment—or, as Garrido puts it, is "anti-phenomenon" (44). What the aesthetic apprehension of the sublime shows, for Garrido, is that intuition is able to register something that exceeds its a priori conditions and that "evades" or "deforms" the pure forms of space and time, thereby exhibiting the internal limits of the power of apprehension. This limit is described in terms of a "cut," a "syncope," a "suspension" and a "shattering," all terms that suggest an exposure of the...