NUN?! On the Idea of the Immanent-Sublime to the Minds of Jean-François Lyotard and Helmut Lachenmann

NUN?! ON THE IDEA OF THE IMMANENT–SUBLIME TO THE MINDS OF JEAN-FRANÇOIS LYOTARD AND HELMUT LACHENMANN LIVINE VAN EECKE After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a whisper, like a gentle breeze. —I Kings, 19:12 I. INTRODUCTION OMMENT COMPRENDE QUE LE SUBLIME, disons provisoirement l’objet de l’expérience sublime, soit ici et maintenant?”1 How to understand that the sublime, say the object of the sublime experience, would be here and now? This question verbalizes the basic thought of Lyotard’s study of “Le sublime et l’avant-garde” (“The sublime and the avant-garde”). In the same chapter of his book L’inhumain (The “C 56 Perspectives of New Music inhuman), Lyotard illustrates his research question on the basis of some paintings of Barnett Newman, dating from the fifties and sixties, with the evocative titles: Vir heroïcus sublimis, Here I, Here II, Here III, Not Over There, Here, Now, and Be. Several decades later, in 1999, Helmut Lachenmann composes his Music for flute, trombone, male voices and orchestra, which he adopts with the title NUN. On the origin of the work, he comments as follows: Basically, it was the time of a philosophical weariness: no more Hegel, no more Adorno—wherever the rational apparatus was still willing to something, say assuming to get a grip on something, I became suspicious.2 By these words, Lachenmann deliberately relinquishes Hegel’s teleologically oriented Objective Spirit and Adorno’s historical dialectic of musical material. Even though Lachenmann used to attach much importance to a historical legitimation3 of his “musique concrète instrumentale”4—especially of his compositions since temA and Notturno (1968) until Accanto (1975)—in NUN he is looking for something which can hardly be grasped by history, namely the pure experience, as situation, the “now.” In Lyotard’s opinion, this sensation may only occur when thinking is being disarmed and made receptive to the situational, “the events” (“die Ereignisse,” Heidegger).5 Although Lyotard’s thinking sheds light on Lachenmann’s longing for a philosophical tabula rasa, it will be shown that the aesthetic core of Lachenmann’s composition is, in fact, deeply rooted in the European philosophical tradition. In this essay, I will attempt to elaborate and to illustrate this thesis on the basis of Lyotard’s idea of the immanent– sublime and the score of NUN by Helmut Lachenmann. II. LYOTARD’S IDEA OF THE IMMANENT–SUBLIME To Lyotard’s mind, the experience of the immanent–sublime requires a receptivity to the contemplation of the moment, that can never really be grasped by reason. Unlike the conceptual description of the event (quid), the mere experience (quod) belongs to the pre-rational.6 (At this point, the immanent–sublime may be distinguished from the Kantian sublime, in which any intellectual synthesis is frustrated by the enormous dimensions of the shape of the aesthetic object, which actually fits the ideas of reason.) Lyotard’s idea of the problematic measure, or graspability, of the “now” is not something new, but has already been suggested by Saint Augustine: “it [the now] is coming out of what NUN?! On the Idea of the Immanent–Sublime 57 does not yet exist, passing through what has no duration, and moving into what no longer exists.”7 Furthermore, the Jansenists were, to Lyotard’s mind, “masters in the field of . . . receptivity to the Will-ithappen ?”8 and also the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers connected an ethical meaning to their experience of the instantaneous, the ataraxia and the apatheia respectively. An ethical dimension can also be found in the aesthetic thinking of Helmut Lachenmann, who detects an opportunity to question his own ingrained aesthetic and philosophical ideas in the susceptibility to the pure presence (“reine Präsenz”).9 In this receptive, quasi-religious attitude, Lyotard notices something sublime, namely the fact that something is happening, rather than nothing, “It happens!” In this context, he refers to the aesthetic ideas of Burke, who described the state of a receptive, tense expectation as a situation of terror or fear that nothing will occur. When, in this situation, something happens at last...