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2. The Ordinary Sublime
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TWO The Ordinary Sublime I have argued that Cavell’s ambiguous relation to religion should be understood against a wider cultural backdrop of modernism. If religion and thus theology have become problematic yet not impossible, then we must expect such possibility to show up within what Cavell terms the ordinary. However, the ordinary does not provide the location for experiences of incontestable divine revelations, nor does it unfailingly offer clear criteria by which we can assess such experiences . Nevertheless, the ordinary must be so inhabited as to provide glimpses, events, or perspectives from which religious orientation can gain a foothold in our form of life—or else such orientation seems to participate in the escape from the ordinary. Indeed, the ordinary is religiously open, however ambiguous such initial openness can seem. In order to encircle such a minimal condition for religion , I explore what I call “the ordinary sublime,” in which aesthetical, ethical, and religious registers resonate all at once. To be more specific, my interest is in a certain dynamics of the sublime, between its powerfulness and its weakness, which I find reflected in Cavell as well as in Cora Diamond’s fruitful and thoughtprovoking elaborations of related themes. Neither of them treats the sublime at length or unfolds its implications in the way I do here, but they provide sufficient clues for a further elaboration of that concept. The ordinary sublime sounds like a contradiction in terms—and some of its inner tension should indeed be preserved. The tension in question is not so much between something completely other, breaking into an inside that is otherwise closed in on itself, which is a model that has been attractive to some postmodern and deconstructive treatments of the sublime.1 Rather, the ordinary sublime must be regarded as a function of the ordinary itself. Inherent to the ordinary sublime, however, is indeed a sense of extraordinariness. If Cavell occasionally expresses unease with the notion of ordinary language philosophy, it is because the label is sometimes taken to contrast, and thus exclude, the extraordinary . What “ordinary language” is meant to contrast, however, is not the extraordinary in the ordinary, but, in Cavell’s words, “a fixated philosophical language which precisely would pre-empt the extraordinary from disturbing customary experience.”2 Even if it can be argued that such a transposition of the sublime within the ordinary is not necessarily incommensurable with postmodern or deconstructive conceptions, the approach from the ordinary still entails a sig- 34 Stanley Cavell, Religion, and Continental Philosophy nificant shift of emphasis. An approach from the ordinary is not so much concerned about the otherness, which metaphysics has tended to repress, but the repression of the familiarity inherent to the conception of the ordinary. Such repression must somehow first be lifted in order to take the extraordinariness of the ordinary into account. Transposing the Sublime In order to indicate some initial points of orientation, let me briefly refer to three relevant features that I take to be central to Kant’s influential analysis of the sublime. First, the sublime is, according to Kant, initiated by an experience that transcends the limits of finite understanding. The feeling of the sublime concerns something that our sensible faculties—our senses and our imagination— are unable to represent. Second, the sublime harbors an unappeasable ambivalence between repulsion and attraction, between horror and fascination. Kant explains this ambivalence in terms of the abyss that opens up once we experience the failure of our representations, combined with the satisfaction in realizing that the ideas of reason nevertheless surpass the limits of our sensible faculties . And third, there is something to be gained from the exposure to the sublime, namely an otherwise unrevealed dimension of our humanity. For Kant, this means that we awaken respect for ourselves as bearers of autonomous reason.3 Throughout the chapter, I return to these characteristics in order to measure the distinct way in which they are transformed according to the philosophical approach from the ordinary. Wittgenstein occasionally speaks of our tendency to conceive of logic as something sublime, and more generally of our tendency to sublime our language (PI, §§ 38, 89, 94). Wittgenstein’s invocation of the sublime clearly has negative connotations, which is also reflected in Cavell’s writing. The wish for the sublime thus understood is indicative of our rejection of ordinary language, and an urge for something purer, something beyond the instability of everyday speech and acts (CHU, 98–99). But there is also a more...