reading the lisbon earthquake- adorno, lyotard, and the contemporary sublime.pdf

8/14/2019 Reading the Lisbon Earthquake- Adorno, Lyotard, and the Contemporary Sublime.pdf

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Gene Ray

Reading the Lisbon Earthquake:

Adorno, Lyotard, and the Contemporary Sublime

Whatever is in any sort terr ible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in

a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime.Edmund Burke1

1.

That Auschwitz is sublime is an assertion that, while never quite at-taining full articulation or acceptance, seemed always to have been onthe verge of becoming a commonplace of late twentieth-centurythought and theory.That critics and philosophers could have found itappropriate to link the twentieth-century historical event con-densed in this place-name to an aesthetic category of the seventeenthand eighteenth centuries is upon reflection not so astonishing. In theextremity of its violence, in its intractable core of incomprehensibil-ity, and in its fateful legacy for the future, this massively traumaticgenocidal catastrophe marks a radical break in historical consciousness.Once upon a time,encounters with the power or size of nature defeatedthe imagination and moved us to terror and awe.After Auschwitz, how-ever,we have had to recognize such sublime effects among our own re-sponses to this demonstrated human potential for systematic and un-bounded violence. After this history, human-inflicted disaster willremain more threatening, more sublime, than any natural disaster.

Sixty years later we still live in the shadows of this event. We con-tinue to be unsure of its meaning for our present and future. Histori-ans and intellectuals are still debating to what extent Auschwitz canbe understood at allwhether as the result of specifiable conditionsof possibility, of structural social, economic, and political dynamics, orof individual and collective human failures. These debates have so fartended to hinge on the question of the uniqueness of the Nazigenocide. For some, like Elie Wiesel and Claude Lanzmann, the sin-

gularity of the Jewish shoa is such that any attempt to intellectuallyunderstand it, for example through comparison to other historicalgenocides, is already an unacceptable insult to the memory of its vic-tims.Othersperhaps a majority of the historians and theorists work-

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The Yale Journal of Criticism, volume , number (): 118 by Yale University and The Johns Hopkins University Press


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ing on this issue, a group that would include Saul Friedlander, Dom-inick LaCapra, and Enzo Traversohave tried to do justice to the sin-gularity of Auschwitz while at the same time insisting on the need toanalyze its origins and specificity by means of rigorously contextualand comparative methodologies.2 This debate itself emerged from a

postwar context in which a specifically post-Auschwitz Jewish collec-tive memory was constructed against the resistance of constant pres-sures for normalization. It continues to simmer and flash against ashifting contemporary context marked by the gradual ossification ofexpressions of mourning and remorse into rigid conventions and for-mal rituals, by evidence of the organized instrumentalization of vic-tim status for political and financial gain, and by an intensification ofthe Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The polarized international reception

of Norman Finkelsteins The Holocaust Industry is itself an indication ofthe complex and contentious juncture this legacy has reached.3

As the name for a threshold event of twentieth-century violence,Auschwitz stands for a qualitative break in historical consciousness. Inthe apparatus of Nazi genocide, a societal capacity for maximum vio-lence was irreversibly realized.The conditions of possibility for this re-alization are more or less traceable to the deep structures and logics ofEuropean modernity and the capitalism from which it is inseparable.However debatable particular attempts to specify its conditions andcauses may be, this catastrophic ethical and political failure undeniablyleaves a global legacy of diminished human dignity and increased inse-curity. In its wake,disenchantment is radical; there is no return to naivet.The brute fact that centuries of Enlightenment culture failed to preventAuschwitz remains a severe and implacable indictment of that cultureand the capitalist social forms that produced it.This minimal formula-tion would reflect the common ground between two influential post-war figures whose struggles with this genocidal legacy would in other

respects part radically,Theodor W. Adorno and Jean-Franois Lyotard.

2.

Adornos sustained reflections on the topos after-Auschwitz from on are indispensable for the postwar processing of that catastro-phe.4 It is also Adorno who, in the Draft Introduction to his posthu-mously publishedAesthetic Theory, calls for the dialectical transforma-

tion of the categories of traditional Western aesthetics:

In the age of the irreconcilability of traditional aesthetics and contemporary art, the

philosophical theory of art has no choice but,varying a maxim of Nietzsches, by de-

terminate negation to think the categories that are in decline as categories of transi-

tion. The elucidated and concrete dissolution of conventional aesthetics is the only

remaining form that aesthetics can take; it at the same time sets free the transformed

truth of these categories.5

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Adorno makes no concessions to accessibility in his treatment of thesublime in theAesthetic Theory: invocations of the category and pass-ing, fragmentary discussions occur across the whole of that difficulttext. He does, however, offer two relatively concentrated shards ofanalysis, and these two moments are consistent with and illuminated

by propositions and argumentation to be found in his literary criticismand in the Negative Dialectics.6 In the latter work, as we will see,Adorno concisely formulates the impact of catastrophic history on thetraditional sublime.

Lyotard, for his part, is the figure most associated today with thecontemporary revival of the aesthetic category. His analyses of thesublime as the feeling that accompanies evocations of the unpre-sentable, published in a series of essays and texts beginning in ,

were and remain widely influential on the theory and criticism ofcontemporary art.7 Lyotards historicization of the sublime, however,is limited to his claim that its reinscription in European literary criti-cism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries marked a shift froma classical poetics centered on the imitation of models to an aestheticsconcerned with provoking intense feelings in the spectator: It isaround this name [the sublime] that the destiny of classical poetics washazarded and lost; it is in this name that aesthetics asserted its criticalrights over art, and that romanticism, in other words modernity, tri-umphed.8 Relying heavily on Martin Heideggers notion of Ereignis(event or occurrence), Lyotard reformulates the sublime as theevent of a passion, of a possibility for which the mind will not havebeen prepared, which will have unsettled it, and of which it conservesonly the feelinganguish and jubilationof an obscure debt.9 Themodernist artistic project, which for Lyotard continues to be the proj-ect of the artistic avant-garde today, is then defined as the ongoing in-vestigation of these effects: The artist attempts combinations allow-

ing the event.10 As stimulating as Lyotards rewriting of the sublime is,his account of its historical development is inadequate.He does not tellus why sublime effects suddenly became interesting for seventeenth-century literary critics like Boileau, or why this shift from poetics toaesthetics was received so readily.Nor do we learn what social or ideo-logical functions the valorization of the sublime may have served orhave been made to serve. Such a historicization, handled dialectically,would be part of the full elucidated and concrete dissolution of the

category called for by Adorno.What Adorno and Lyotard had in common,with respect to the sub-

lime, was a lucid appreciation for the possible applications of Im-manuel Kants notion of negative presentation (negative Darstellung:negative exhibition, in Werner Pluhars translation), from the Ana-lytic of the Sublime of the Critique of Judgment.11 For Adorno,this method of evoking without invoking, consistent with the tradi-

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ground itself firmly in the realm of feelings and emotion.15 Eagletonsaccount inflects the basic Marxist critique of bourgeois artistic auton-omy, formulated powerfully in for example Herbert Marcuses essay The Affirmative Character of Culture.16 The new bourgeoissubject of capitalism, Eagleton argues, was required to perform under

some tough conditions: it had to accept and function within an iso-lating and barbarous economic competition and at the same time con-sent to be collectivized under a new form of state power organizedaround the notion of formal, rights-based equality. Aesthetics, as adiscourse of the body that codifies the responses to autonomousart objects, provided the needed model for a projected ideal of bour-geois subjectivity. Like the work of art, the ideal bourgeois subjectwould be self-determining and self-regulating.

The codification of aesthetics in the mid-s, then, not onlymarked out a compensatory field of respite from the stresses of sur-vival under the antagonistic and unforgiving reign of exchange value.It also reflected the actual investment and mobilization of feelings asa modality of what Antonio Gramsci called hegemony. The re-quirements of the social structure are internalized and harmonized tothe body just as, in aesthetics, the body is harmonized to the artefact.The ultimate binding force of the bourgeois social order, in contrastto the coercive apparatus of absolutism, writes Eagleton, will behabits, pieties, sentiments and affections. And this is equivalent to say-ing that power in such an order has become aestheticized.17 Thus,while the aesthetic is a bourgeois concept in the most literal histori-cal sense, it is a deeply ambivalent and contradictory one. For whileaesthetics helps to mystify the bourgeois subject into mistaking ne-cessity for freedom and oppression for autonomy, it also belongswith the historic victory of bourgeois liberty and democracy over abarbarously repressive state.18

Eagletons Marxist account reminds us that the formalized sphere ofthe aesthetic, despite the ideological role assigned to it, preserves theliberatory logic of its historical origins. Its categories, no less thanthose of Enlightenment political liberalism, reflect, at least negatively,what Marcuse and Adorno liked to call the promise of happiness.Torecover the force of that blocked utopian demand would be, perAdorno,to set free the transformed truth of these categories. Eagle-tons handling of the category of the sublime, however, is less than

convincing. His reading of both Burke and Kant suggests, reductivelyand too literally, that the sublime plays the role of a jolting antidote tothe pleasure of the beautiful. The harmony from which that pleasurederives (in Kant, the fit or correspondence between the way in whichthe imagination synthesizes manifolds and the way in which the un-derstanding subsumes particulars into concepts) provides an ideolog-ical model for the self-description of bourgeois subjectivity. But, he

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continues, the dependence of this model on pleasure is not withoutrisks, for the lures of sensory pleasure are always capable of turning thebourgeois subject into a decadent sensualist.That wont do, since thewhole point is to put subjects to work: to plug them into the econ-omy, as the exploiters or the sellers of labor. The danger, then, is that

the beautiful, which the eighteenth century gendered as feminine,might tempt subjects into trying to actualize the promised harmonyas unproductive and uncompetitive seekers of warm, fuzzy feelings.The sublime offers a manly solution to the problem. The pain anddisturbance of the sublime functions to jolt would-be aesthetes out oftheir voluptuous reveries and set them back to work.The sublime isnecessary within bourgeois aesthetics, Eagleton contends, to counter-act the threat beauty poses to productivity.19

There were, however, other historical and equally materialistic rea-sons for the reappearance and acceptance of the category at that time.Kants analysis of the sublime in the Critique of Judgmentmarks the in-tersection of the rationalist Enlightenment project by the culturaltraces of some historically specific corporeal experiences. As MarjorieHope Nicolson had carefully demonstrated in , it was the steadyaccumulation of testimonies and travel accounts of English elites onthe Grand Tour that transformed the literary sublime of Longinus andBoileau into a new taste for mountains and the sublime in nature.Fol-lowing the religious wars and again after the Restoration,members ofthe English ruling classes and their middlemen made their way toItaly, crossing the Alps en route and encountering there the toweringpeaks and vertiginous passages and vistas that would become the ba-sic tropes of sublimity. By the end of the seventeenth century, the en-thusiastic reports of writers like John Dennis were reconceiving theexperience of Alpine transit. Formally an unavoidable episode of fearand trembling endured as the price for reaching the pleasures and

treasures of Italy, the mountain crossing now became an object of aes-thetic appreciation in its own right.We walkd upon the very brink,in the literal sense, of Destruction, writes Dennis, after crossing theAlps in .The sense of all this producd different motions in me,viz., a delightful Horrour, a terrible joy, and at the same time, that Iwas infinitely pleasd, I trembled.20 The mixing of terror and delightformulated here precisely anticipates the later descriptions of the feel-ing of the sublime in Burke and Kant. Dennis was in fact the first to

have critically distinguished between the sublime and the beautiful onthe basis of the feelings they provoked.Only in , after the passionfor mountains had taken strong hold and laid the affective ground forthe new scientific discipline of geology, would Edmund Burke be ableto systematize this categorical distinction and establish it as central forEuropean aesthetics in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of OurIdeas of the Sublime and the Beautiful.



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Developing the social and ideological dimensions that Nicolson leftunanalyzed, we can recognize in this emerging capacity to derive apainful aesthetic pleasure from the observation of the size or power ofnature a new mark of distinction.Pierre Bourdieu has sharpened ourability to understand forms of taste as the bearers of social functions that

are anything but disinterested: they define sets of competencies thatelevate members of groups possessing the means to acquire them abovethe members of other less-privileged groups, thus confirming and re-producing social hierarchies.21 To be able to find pleasure in avalanchesand fissured glacier fields sets English nobles and bourgeois travelers onthe Grand Tour apart from Swiss peasants for whom such natural fea-tures are a despised daily danger.The rich on vacation can be movedto a pleasurable awe by the sight of a storm at sea; the fisherman and

sailor know otherwise. To workers in the coal mines and mills of thenewly industrializing centers, sublime peaks and the stormy sea wouldhave been equally alien. In a revealing moment of the Critique of Judg-ment, Kant would acknowledge that the sublime presupposes the pos-session of a certain culture, that it indeed requires more culture thanthe beautiful: the sublime is thus a more exclusive tastea more ex-pensive distinction.22 The mountain sublime so central to Englishelite taste, then, emerged as a kind of happily motivated by-product ofthe impulse behind the Grand Tour, that institution for the acquisitionof distinction and of cultural goods in the form of Mediterranean artand antiquities. One more material marker, that is, of Londons rise,within the context of latent and emergent imperialist competition.While it would be interesting to analyze the role of nationalism withinthe reception and dissemination of this new form of taste, the fact thatthe mountain sublime was by the end of the seventeenth century arecognizably English enthusiasm may well have facilitated its canoniza-tion within continental aesthetics over the course of the next century.

4.

Between the establishment of the sublime as a new form of taste anddistinction and its classic Kantian formulations in the Critique of Judg-ment, another formative event irrupted into European consciousness.On November , an earthquake destroyed the city of Lisbon,killing, according to Walter Benjamin, roughly a quarter of its ,

inhabitants and damaging towns and villages from Morocco to France.Tremors were felt throughout Europe, and tidal surges observed inFinland and at the mouth of the Elbe. In October , Benjaminwrote a twenty-minute radio talk for children on the subject of theLisbon earthquake.This talkexploiting the narrative potential of thedisaster while ostensibly drawing on a shared reservoir of humanistempathy for the suffering of its victimsreads today rather like a

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failed advertisement for technologys promise to liberate man from thedestructive power of nature. Benjamin vividly describes how theearthquake excited and preoccupied the entire world like few otherevents in that century. All over Europe the presses rushed into printcountless eyewitness accounts; these pamphlets were hungrily con-

sumed by people who had felt, albeit from a distance, the power of thisdisaster in the senses and sympathies of their own bodies.As Benjamininforms his audience of children, one of those hungry consumers wasa young man in East Prussia:

No one was more fascinated by these remarkable events than the great German

philosopher Kant, whose name may be familiar to some of you. At the time of the

earthquake he was a young man of twenty-four, who had never left his hometown of

Knigsbergand who would never do so in the future. But he eagerly collected all

the reports of the earthquake that he could find, and the slim book he wrote about it

probably represents the beginnings of scientific geography in Germany. And certainlythe beginnings of seismology.23

This slim volume, published in , bears the ponderous title His-tory and Natural Description of the most Remarkable Incidents of the Earth-quake that Shook [erschttert hat] a Large Part of the Earth at the End ofthe Year 1755.

Perhaps wishing to reassure his young audience less than a year anda half before the Nazis gained control of the German state, Benjaminemphasizes the ways in which the Lisbon earthquake was a stimulusto scientific research and to the development of technical instrumentsof measurement and prediction. On the philosophical impact of thedisaster, Benjamin is conspicuously silent. In the words of one Voltairescholar, the Lisbon earthquake was nothing less than the death ofoptimism.24 At the very least, it confronted a longstanding debateamong European philosophes with some very troubling counter-evidence to the intuitive endorsement of metaphysical optimism. A

short review of this debate will clarify an under-remarked context ofKants third Critique. Pierre Bayle had in constructed a dialecti-cal pastiche of fragments of classical history and philosophy thatseemed to conclude that the universe was not all for the best: evil wasloose in the world and largely in control.Leibniz, in his Theodicy,answered this pessimism with a metaphysics grounded in a rationalproof of Gods existence and goodness: from the very idea of God, itfollowed that the universe he created was, famously, the best of all

possible worlds. Pope, in his Essay on Man, confirmed Leibnizsconclusion: reason itself proves that evil can only exist for the sake ofa greater good.Voltaire had initially aligned himself with Leibniz andPope, but the Lisbon earthquake broke his faith with Popes formulaWhatever is, is right (rendered into French as tout est bien). He re-pudiated that doctrine in his Poem on the Lisbon Disaster,thereby provoking an angry diatribe from Rousseau.25



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Well-read in these debates and personally invested, so to speak, inthe Lisbon disaster, Kant would eventually consider the pessimists an-swered by the three volumes of his critical system. For if Kants sup-plementary discussions of enlightenment and universal history openlyendorse the ruling order and its state (Dare to know and argue, but

obey!), the articulation of these essayistic political writings with themajor texts of his transcendental idealism implicitly vindicates thedoctrine Whatever is, is right.Within the Critique of Judgmentitself,we can read the effects of the Lisbon earthquake between the lines ofthe Analytic of the Sublime. In his analysis of the aesthetic judgmentof the beautiful, Kant had attributed the feeling of pleasure by whichbeauty is recognized to a harmony between the minds powers or fac-ulties of imagination and understanding. Judgments of the sublime,

however, involve an indirector negative pleasure: a pleasure mixedwith pain. Specifically, the feeling of the sublime is a pleasure whichthe mind itself produces in order to compensate itself for the pain itfeels when the imagination reaches its limit.

This can happen in two ways. Before the magnitude of rude na-ture (desolate deserts, the ocean, the starry night), the imagination,striving to synthesize this manifold,breaks down and falls back in frus-tration. Similarly, before some expression of natures violent power(lightning storms, volcanoes, hurricanes), the imagination can onlyrecognize the bodys physical impotence. The first case Kant namesthe mathematical sublime; the second, the dynamic sublime. Inboth cases, the imagination is rescued from its pain and distress by thepower of reason: the crisis or privation itself calls to mind the fact thatamong the minds own powers is one that is supersensible and supe-rior to nature. Reason produces the idea of infinity to soothe the painof the mathematical sublime, and answers the dynamic sublime by re-minding itself of the irreducible dignity of the human calling to live

as free moral agents who legislate to themselves the law of their ownreason. First, pain: the imagination is humiliated before the power orsize of nature.Then, pleasure, admiration, self-respect: the fall-back toreason, that power of the mind that elevates humanity above meresensible nature, however mighty or boundless it may be. Terror andshame give way to a proud and enjoyable self-contemplation.

It is at the end of the analysis of the mathematical sublime, and justbefore Kant begins the explication of the dynamic sublime, that the

textual effects of the Lisbon earthquake first become legible, as anechoing resonance:

In presenting the sublime in nature the mind feels agitated[bewegt], while in an aes-thetic judgment about the beautiful in nature it is in restfulcontemplation.This agi-tation (above all at its inception) can be compared with a tremor [Erschtterung: ashuddering vibration, disruption, blow, shock, trauma], i.e., with a rapidly alternating

[schnellwechselnden] repulsion from and attraction to the same object. For the imagi-

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nation (driven to such agitation as it apprehends some object in intuition), this gush-

ing and effusing [das berschwengliche] is, as it were, an abyss [Abgrund] in which it fearsto lose itself. Yet at the same time, from the perspective of reasons idea of the super-

sensible, this object doesnt gush or effuse at all; rather, it conforms to reasons law for

the imagination to strive in this way. Thus, the object is now attractive to the same

degree to which, before, it was repulsive to mere sensibility.26

Unmistakably, we can feel the memory of Lisbon in Kants metaphorand word choice: the sublime moves the mind like the tremors ordeep shudders of an earthquake. Amidst all the vibrating, gushing andshaking, this natural object that defeats the imagination opens up likean abyss. Registration of threat, reason to the rescue.

What is remarkableand surely symptomatic of an interest, if notremembered anxietyis that Kant does not name the Lisbon earth-

quake anywhere in the Critique of Judgment. In fact, it is conspicuouslyabsent from the passage, early in the explication of the dynamic sub-lime, in which we would expect to find it. Kant lines up a set of ex-amples (in order: overhanging cliffs, thunderclouds with lightning,volcanoes,hurricanes, the heaving ocean,high waterfalls,and so on)to suggest the violence of sublime natural power: Compared to themight of any of these, our ability to resist becomes an insignificanttrifle.27 But no Lisbon earthquake, or any earthquake at all, makes it

into this list. Only several pages on, when he pauses to summarily re-iterate the sources of the dynamic sublime, does Kant let slip thefeared word, in its most generic form:in certain situationsin tem-pests, storms, earthquakes, and so on.28 Despite these evasionsand,indeed, through the very figure of negative presentationthe Lisbonearthquake haunts the text: its very absence calls it back into presence.And this brief symptomatic reading clarifies to what degree the ideo-logical function of the aesthetic category of the sublime within Kantscritical system is anxiously bound up with the deep metaphysical op-timismindeed bourgeois optimismat the core of the Enlighten-ment project.

On the standard interpretation, Kants transcendental idealism wasintended to refute both skepticism and unbound metaphysical specu-lation (or: both Hume and Leibniz). Following the fissures of the Lis-bon disaster to the point of their repression in the Critique of Judgmentbrings back into view a different textual burden: the need to silencepessimismas a metaphysical position to be sure but even more as a

persistent psychological anxiety. Kants well-known political essays onuniversal history, cosmopolitanism, and enlightenment argue that it isat least reasonable to believe that nature has a purpose and unfoldsprogressively through human reason. But even our cursory sympto-matic reading shows that the tremors of the earthquake were stillbeing felt in Knigsberg more than thirty years later, as Kant was



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yond the human. The second nature, the social one (der zweiten,gesellschaftlichen), is, since Marx and Lukcs, the human realm of reifiedsocial relations that appear to us as natural.32 That is, the social seemsto be ruled by immutable, timeless and therefore naturalized laws,because from inside society, the fact that social relations are a con-

structionhistorical, human, and thus alterableis concealed fromexperience. What we experience as second nature is naturalized ide-ology, or phantom objectivity. For Adorno reification is the veil ofuntruthtoo little enlightenment, a deathmask, ideology thatdrones, as it were, from the gears of an irresistible praxis.33 It wouldappear, then, that the second, social and historical, disaster wasAuschwitz itself. But Auschwitz, he tells us later in the same para-graph,was only the first sample (erstes Probestck) of a structural bar-

barism he here names perennial suffering (das perennierende Leiden).34

Auschwitz should rather be seen as a sublime eruption of a violencethe objective social conditions of which quite bluntly continue toexistboth in the capitalist West and what was then the Soviet bloc.For Adorno, the division of labor and the reified nexus of instrumen-tal reason, universalized exchangeability, and culture industry are thebases of a social order in which most people are held in enforced po-litical and ethical immaturity (Unmndigkeit) and in which, therefore,the potential for genocidal repetitions is always present.35

What Adorno concisely, if implicitly, carries out in this one sentenceon the Lisbon earthquake, then, is that determinate negation thatconfronts the traditional category of the sublime with the materialdisaster of contemporary history. Sublime natural disasters were stillcomprehensible (berschaubare: literally,overseeable) and recuperablebecause, in Kants idiom, human reason and dignity could still claimto be superior to nature. Auschwitz objectively shattered the fictionof this supersensible human destination (Bestimmung) by confrontingit with the fate(Schicksal) of the victims.The compensatory, second-stage pleasure of the traditional sublime, anchored in metaphysical op-timism, is no longer possible: after the industrialized genocide of thecamps, all we are left with is the anguish of the imagination and a des-olated human dignity. Moreover,Kant had made it clear that we can-not have the feeling of the (traditional) sublime if we are actuallyafraid: it is impossible to like terror that we take seriously.36 Thelegacy of Auschwitz is that there is no safe place from which to ob-

serve and reflect on this event.There is no place that the threat of ter-ror and extreme violence does not now reach.

Adornos treatment of the sublime in theAesthetic Theory confirmsand elaborates the transformation just analyzed.While a separate essaywould be necessary to track and gloss the category as it appears withinthat resistant but rewarding text, a short citation from one dense pas-sage in particular will reinforce the reading advanced here. For it is



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certainly no accident that Adorno chose to condense the ruination ofthe Kantian sublime in the face of contemporary history into a wordwith which we have now become familiar: Erschtterung, the tremoror shudder of what is beyond imagination and conventionalized ex-periencethe shock waves of traumatic occurrence:

The shock [Betroffenheit: consternation, confusion, dismay] aroused by important[art]works is not used to trigger personal,otherwise repressed emotions.This shock be-

longs rather to the instant in which the recipients forget themselves and disappear into

the work: the moment of Erschtterung. They lose the ground beneath their feet; thepossibility of truth, embodied in the aesthetic image, becomes corporeal for them. . . .

Erschtterung, starkly opposed to the normal conception of experience [Erlebnisbegriff],is no particular satisfaction for the ego, is not at all like pleasure. It is rather a memento

of the liquidation of the ego, which, shaken to the core [als erschttertes], becomesaware of its own limitedness and finitude.37

In , fourteen years after Adornos death, Lyotard published TheDifferend. In a crucial moment of that text, in a section that struggleswith the status of phrases that include Nazi names, he argues contro-versially that Auschwitz imposes a silence on historians, because itrefers to something that cannot be phrased under accepted idioms, ina way that could then be validated under the cognitive regimen ofhistory. This silence, however, does not impose forgetting. Rather,it

imposes a feeling that is a sign for the common person.Suppose,Lyotard writes,

that an earthquake destroys not only lives, buildings, and objects but also the instru-

ments used to measure earthquakes directly and indirectly.The impossibility of quan-

titatively measuring it does not prohibit, but rather inspires in the minds of the sur-

vivors the idea of a very great seismic force. The scholar claims to know nothing

about it, but the common person has a complex feeling, the one aroused by the neg-

ative presentation of the indeterminate.38

The struggle of this passage, which seems almost to respond to theremnants of optimism still legible in Benjamins text on the Lis-bon earthquake, is exactly contemporaneous with the beginning ofLyotards sustained engagement with the category of the sublime. InJanuary of the same year in which The Differendappeared, Lyotard readthe first version of his essay The Sublime and the Avant-Garde atthe Kunsthochschule in Berlin.

6.

Adorno ends, we have seen (or at least glimpsed), by moving thesublime in the direction of a theory of collective trauma. Lyotard, too,has noted that the sublime can be resumed and elaborated in aFreudian-Lacanian problematic,39 a possibility he would go on toexplore in the Heidegger and the jews. Indeed, Jacques Lacans

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rewriting of Freuds theory of trauma as the tuchor hitof a missedencounter with an unassimilable real helps us to grasp how centralthe problem Freud named Nachtrglichkeit, or after-effectiveness,must be for the full elucidation of a transformed and demystifiedsublime.40 From this direction, it would then be possible to distinguish

once again between the sublime in the sphere of art and representa-tion and actual historical catastrophe. For while sublime contempo-rary art practices evoke and avow traumatic collective history and im-itate, in their effects, the structural belatedness or after-occurrence oftrauma, these practices do not silence us so intractably as do the realevents that are their referents. And precisely for this reason, such art,when successful, can function as an opening for the processing of trau-matic history: for testimony and reflection, for the work and play of

mourning, for acting-out and working-through. Kants negativepresentation, as a strategy for avowal and evocation, would be a ma-jor means for such an art.

Neither Adorno nor Lyotard claimed that their exemplars of theartistic sublimeBeckett and Barnett Newman, respectivelycon-tributed to the processing of collective trauma in this way. But it be-gins to be clear that certain lines of artistic practice deployed and elab-orated sublime negative strategies for confronting catastrophichistory in the so-called public sphere. A certain line of postwar Euro-pean visual art generated its force precisely by developing, as visualand sculptural means, the negative possibilities of specific historicalimages and materials. This line would be roughly traceable throughthe work of Arman, Daniel Spoerri, Joseph Beuys,Wolf Vostell, JannisKounellis,Anselm Kiefer, Christian Boltanski, Rebecca Horn, RachelWhiteread, Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz, Horst Hoheisel, andDaniel Libeskind. It would even be possible, at this point, to recognizethe mid-s as the moment in which this negative approach to

traumatic history attained full institutional favor and became conven-tionalized. This moment coincided with the realization of Beuysspowerful installation Plightand the release of Claude Lanz-manns Shoathe latter a devastating reconstruction of the documen-tary form around the technique of negative presentation.

This notion of a transformed contemporary sublime is not withoutdangers, nor would it propose to do other than to maintain the sub-lime as the name of an ethical, political, and aesthetic problem. A

fully dialectical history of the sublime and its cultural politics remainsto be written. For most of that history, we know, the sublime has beenaligned on the side of power and domination. In its irreducible linksto excess and the boundless, it conceals a dangerous capacity to trans-form the worst into the best.41 And yet that history is indeed dialec-tical. One of the wonderful discoveries of Kristin Rosss study ofRimbaud and the Paris Commune is the way in which French work-



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ers used the term sublime as slang for a successful act of resistance totheir employers attempts to discipline and control their work and pri-vate lives. On the eve of the Commune, one anxious Parisian indus-trialist felt so threatened by such worker insubordination that he pub-lished a polemic against sublimisme.42 This example alone indicates a

need to brush against the grain of what has emerged in the postwarperiod as a pronounced bias, among some Marxist critics and criticaltheorists, against the sublime. To liberate the transformed truth ofthis category in transition, in Adornos sense, would be to gather itspromise of happiness and direct it against the structural barbarism ofperennial suffering: to link, that is, the tasks of mourning to theproject of social transformation. Such liberation would need to avoidmistaking itself as redemption or allowing itself to be naively recuper-

ated back into a positivist metaphysics. But it would also have toprevent the blockages of Adornos aporias from reifying and devolv-ing into melancholic resignation and political paralysis. It would needto seek and develop those openings through which art and theory canorient the processing of trauma toward utopian demands and collec-tive political action. Only in this way can critique make the sublimesown traits of domination speak against domination.43

Notes Edmund Burke,A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beau-

tiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . On this debate, see Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History,Theory,Trauma

(Ithaca: Cornell University Press,), ; Enzo Traverso, Understanding the NaziGenocide: Marxism after Auschwitz, trans.Peter Drucker (London: Pluto Press,), ;and Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solu-tion (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, ), .

Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suf-fering(London: Verso,). For Finkelsteins account of his books comparative interna-

tional reception, see his foreword to the edition. Adornos major reflections and formulations of the philosophical and cultural impact of

Auschwitz are in Negative Dialektik, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol., ed. Rolf Tiedemann(Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, ); in English as Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ash-ton (New York: Continuum,). Other crucial statements and arguments are in MinimaMoralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschdigten Leben (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Verlag,);Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans.E.F.N. Jephcott (London:Verso, );and in the / essay and radio talk Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit,

in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. .;The Meaning of Working Through the Past, in CriticalModels: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia Uni-

versity Press, ). Adorno,sthetische Theorie,in Gesammelte Schriften, vol., ; in English asAesthetic Theory,trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), .

The passages are:sthetische Theorie, and ;Aesthetic Theory, and. The latter passage will be cited toward the end of this essay.

Lyotards theoretical work on the sublime was disseminated broadly through timely trans-

lation into English and German. Among the most widely read and taught texts in English

are the essays The Sublime and the Avant-Garde (),Newman:The Instant (),

and After the Sublime, the State of Aesthetics (), all in Lyotard, The Inhuman: Re-

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flections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: University ofStanford Press, ). The latter also includes Representation, Presentation, Unrepre-

sentable, a revised version of Lyotards first essay on the sublime, published as Presenting

the Unpresentable: The Sublime, trans. Lisa Liebmann, inArtforum : (). Lyotardsfurther elaborations of the category include The Interest of the Sublime, in Of the Sub-lime:Presence in Question, trans. Jeffrey Librett (Albany:State University of New York Press,); Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event(New York: Columbia University Press,); Hei-degger and the jews, trans.Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, ); and Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime:Kants Critique of Judgment,trans. E. Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ).

The continuing influence of Lyotards sublime is manifest in such publications and ex-

hibition catalogs as Paul Crowther, ed., The Contemporary Sublime: Sensibilities of Transcen-dence and Shock (London: Academy Group, ); Bo Nilsson, ed., Om det Sublima/On theSublime(Malm:Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art, ); and Tracey Bashkoff, ed.,On the Sublime(New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, ).

Lyotard, Inhuman, . Ibid., .

Ibid., . We need not worry that the feeling of the sublime will lose [something] if it is exhibited

in such an abstract way as this,which is wholly negative as regards the sensible.For though

the imagination finds nothing beyond the sensible that could support it, this very removal

of its barriers also makes it feel unbounded, so that its separation [from the sensible] is an

exhibition [Darstellung] of the infinite; and though an exhibition of the infinite can neverbe more than merely negative [blo negative Darstellung], it still expands the soul. Perhapsthe most sublime passage in the Jewish Law is the commandment:Thou shalt not make

unto the any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven or on earth, or

under the earth, etc. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft,in Werkausgabe, vol.,ed.Wil-

helm Weischedel (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, ), ; in English as Critique ofJudgment, trans.Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, ), . See Adorno,Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol., ;

translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen as Trying to Understand Endgame, in Notes to Lit-erature, vol. (New York: Columbia University Press,), . See also Adorno,Negative Dialektik, ; Negative Dialectics, .

On the development of Adornos after-Auschwitzethic of representation in these and

other texts, see my discussions in Mirroring Evil: Auschwitz, Art and the War on Ter-

ror, Third Text ():; and Conditioning Adorno:After Auschwitz Now,forthcoming in Third Text ().

Lyotard, Inhuman, and . Adornos attacks on Heidegger are relentless and are launched from texts across the post-

war oeuvre. The cited phrases are from his summary cr itique in Wozu noch Philoso-

phie? in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. ., ;Why Still Philosophy? in Critical Mod-els, .

Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic(Oxford: Basil Blackwell,). In English in Herbert Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro

(Boston: Beacon, ).

Eagleton, Ideology, . Ibid., and .

Ibid., , .

Qtd. in Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory:The Development ofthe Aesthetics of the Infinite[](Seattle: University of Washington Press, ), . Pierre Bourdieau, Distinction:A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice

(Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, ).

Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, ; Critique of Judgment, :It is a fact that what is calledsublime by us, having been prepared through culture, comes across as merely repellent to

a person who is uncultured and lacking in the development of moral ideas. In all the ev-

idence of natures destructive force, and in the large scale of its might, in contrast to which

his own is nonexistent, he will see only the hardship, danger and misery that would con-



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front anyone forced to live in such a place.Thus (as M. de Saussure relates) the good and

otherwise sensible Savoyard peasant did not hesitate to call anyone a fool who fancies gla-

ciered mountains. [Here Kant references Horace Bndict de Saussure, whose Voy-ages dans les Alpes represents a proto-professionalization of the passion pioneered by theEnglish dilettantes. In the very next line, Kant denigrates the latter as travelers.G.R.]

He might even have had a point, if Saussure had acted merely from fancy, as most travel-

ers tend to do, in exposing himself to the dangers involved in his observations, or in order

that he might some day be able to describe them with pathos.

The text of Benjamins talk, broadcast by the Berliner Rundfunk, is in Gesammelte Schriften,vol., ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhuser (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp

Verlag), ; in English as The Lisbon Earthquake, trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Se-lected Writings, vol. , ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cam-bridge, Mass.:Belknap/Harvard University Press, ), .

Theodore Besterman, Voltaire(Oxford: Blackwell, ), . In a preface to his poem,Voltaire tactfully maintains that his intention is not to attack Pope

and tout est bien, but only to raise his voice against the improper use of such a doctrine:If, when Lisbon, Mesquinez,Tetuan, and so many other towns were swallowed up in the

month of November , philosophers had called out to the miserable individuals whobarely managed to pull themselves out of the ruins,Tout est bien.The heirs of the dead willget rich; the construction workers will make money rebuilding houses; animals will fatten

themselves on the bodies buried under the rubble. This is the necessary consequence of

inevitable causes; your personal ill fortune is of no account, for you contribute to the over-

all well-being, such a speech would certainly have been as cruel as the earthquake was de-

structive. Voltaire, Candide and Related Texts, trans. David Wooton (Indianapolis: Hackett,), . The latter also includes relevant excerpts from Leibniz, Pope, and Rousseau.

Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, ; Critique of Judgment, , translation modified. Ibid., ; .

Ibid., ; . Adorno, Negative Dialektik, ; Negative Dialectics, . Adornos qualified defense of speculative culture and his critique of the correspondence

theory of truth (adaequatio rei atque cogitationis) are both formulated against the young Lud-wig Wittgenstein of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, whom the Frankfurt criticaltheorist typically has stand in for a positivismthat restricts itself to the given. As Henry

Pickford observes in a sharp translators note, Adorno typically condenses and recites his

arguments by obliquely invoking (or parodistically mangling) the famous opening line of

Wittgensteins Tractatus:Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist. (The world is everything thatis the case.) See Adorno, Critical Models, n. .

Adorno, Negative Dialektik, ; Negative Dialectics, , translation modified. While an inflection of Hegels notion of second nature from the Philosophy of Rightis

arguably implicit in the young Marxs materialist reconception of alienation, Georg

Lukcs fully develops the notion in his own Hegelian reading of Capital, giving it theformulations that would exert a strong pull on Walter Benjamin and the prewar Frankfurt

School. See Lukcs,Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat, the central es-

say of his History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.:MIT Press, ), .

Adorno,Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol..,,, and ,respectively; in English as Cultural Criticism and Society, in Prisms, trans. Samuel andShierry Weber (Cambridge, Mass.:MIT Press,), , , and .

Adorno, Negative Dialektik, ; Negative Dialectics, . Adornos clearest statement of this argument is in Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Ver-

gangenheit, ;The Meaning of Working Through the Past, .

Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, ; Critique of Judgment, . Adorno,sthetische Theorie, ;Aesthetic Theory, , translation modified. As

Robert Hullot-Kentors translation does faithfully reflect, an operative distinction in this

passage is that between Erlebnis, or experience degraded into discrete moments of livedtime, and Erfahrung, that experience which, through reflection, would correspond to en-lightened, autonomous subjectivity. As autonomous subjectivity is increasingly blocked at

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the structural or systemic level, Erlebnis becomes the usual or conventional form of ex-perience, rendering those rare moments of Erfahrungeven more emphatic.

Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press,),. See also his lecture Discussions, or Phras-

ing after Auschwitz, which registers one moment in Lyotards confrontation with

Adornos Negative Dialectics, as well as underscores the role of Auschwitz as an ethical im-petus shared by critical theory and so-called poststructuralism: in English in Andrew Ben-

jamin, ed., The Lyotard Reader(Oxford: Blackwell, ), . Lyotard, Inhuman, .Jacques Lacan,The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller and

trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, ), .

Lyotard, Peregrinations, . Sublime(along with other slang expressions denoting superlatives: chouette, rupin, dattaque)

was the word insubordinate workers used to refer to themselves. Kristin Ross, The Emer-gence of Social Space:Rimbaud and the Paris Commune(Minneapolis:University of MinnesotaPress, ), . Ross acknowledges Alain Cottereaus introduction to the reissue

of industr ialist Denis Poulots Le Sublime, ou le travailleur comme il est en 1870, et ce quil peut

tre(Paris: Maspero, ). Adorno,sthetische Theorie, ;Aesthetic Theory, .


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