Sublimity, the Imp of the Perverse

“That which is beautiful,” Kant writes, “pleases universally without a concept” (CJ, 219). Beauty refers to “that object the form of which (not the material aspect of its representation, as sensation) in mere reflection on it (without any intention of acquiring a concept form it) is judged as the ground of pleasure in the representation of such an object—with its representation this pleasure is also judged to be necessarily combined, consequently not merely for the subject who apprehends this form but for every one who judges at all” (CJ, 190). Arendt’s political thinking issues from this interpretation of the beautiful. As opposed to the beautiful the sublime is not a judgment about a particular object at all: “we express ourselves…incorrectly if we call some object of nature sublime…We can say no more than that the object serves for the presentation of a sublimity that can be found in the mind” (CJ 5:245). The sublime is to be found, first and foremost, in a formless object “insofar as limitlessness is represented in it” (CJ, 5:245).

There are however, to be sure, certain appearances found in certain regions of nature that incite sublime feelings for Kant: “bold, overhanging, as it were threatening cliffs…volcanoes with their all-destroying violence…the boundless ocean set into a rage, a lofty waterfall of a mighty river” (CJ, 5:261). These are all particular objects, even if their boundaries may seem indeterminate. And yet it is the vault beyond representation, the confrontation with the limit, or the real in Lacanian language, that comprises the sublime. Though the sublime experience of limitlessness is found through one’s judgment in a forceful object of aesthetic intensity, it is nonetheless the painful pleasure of boundlessness felt in the mind that makes that experience sublime. It is the formlessness contained within the form of the aesthetic object that interests Kant. Likewise for Lacan the beautiful (form) symbolized heralds us closer to the “realization” of our desire, the ethical, the sublime (formlessness).

In his impressive study of Kant’s third critique, *Art of Judgment*, Howard Caygill locates the relationship between the beautiful and the sublime as one best characterized by certain “family resemblances.” “Both involve orientation, in the one a movement toward proportionality [beauty], in the other, a movement toward disproportionality [sublimity],” (AJ, 340). The beautiful is, as we have seen in Kant, a “question of the form of the object, and this consists in limitation,” while the sublime is “devoid of form.” (CJ, 23) The beautiful is “directly attended with a feeling of the furtherance of life,” while the sublime is “brought about by the feeling of a momentary check to the vital forces followed by a discharge all the more powerful,” (CJ, 23). Although ostensibly opposing, both sentiments involve, for Caygill, correlative movements. The mutual implication of the beautiful and the sublime is manifest in their “most important and vital distinction.” The beautiful object “conveys a finality in its form making the object appear, as it were, pre-adapted to our power of judgment,” while the sublime “may appear to contravene the ends of our power of judgment, and to be ill-adapted to our faculty of presentation, and to be as it were an outrage to the imagination,” (CJ, 23). Both the beautiful and the sublime involve a disposition of the power of judgment. Caygill: “in the first objects appear in agreement with its finality, while in the case of the sublime, objects appear to violate (gewalten) the finality of judgment,” (AJ, 340).

These important family resemblances between the beautiful and the sublime intimate those between Arendt and Lacan on the question of judgment. It is within these latter family resemblances that the relation between the political and the psychoanalytic becomes tenable. The beautiful is “life affirming,” and is as such instrumental for Arendt who wishes to assert the initiation to the public-political world particularized individuals assume in judging. The sublime suggests a cinching off of that life insofar as it represents a “momentary check to the vital forces.” This notion is influential for Lacan who wishes to assert the dissolution of the public world in our steadfast pursuit of our private desire. One’s “momentary check,” indeed one’s “outrage to the imagination,” indicates one’s life between two deaths, a space wherein judgments are forged. Just as the beautiful and the sublime should be seen, for Caygill, not as two opposing, but rather, as two inverse correlative movements, so too should we look upon the relation between Arendt and Lacan. The political involves the perception of the world’s beautiful density and richness won through mental traveling, and the palpable pleasurable feeling of being both a participant within and belonging to this density. The ethics of psychoanalysis avows the existence and consequence of the unconscious. In conforming to our desire we attune ourselves to the ethical, and we judge ourselves as such from within the rocky vault, caught, sublime, between two deaths.

Perhaps the family resemblance between the beautiful and the sublime, the political and the psychoanalytic, can best be seen in Kant’s definition of artistic creation. Kant defines beautiful art in terse fashion: “purposefulness without purpose.” Beauty is a product of deliberate human creation, an artifact of man’s conscious activities, and is, as such, purposeful. And yet an object appears beautifully only insofar as it is purposeless, as an outgrowth of a spontaneous and unconscious enterprise. The fact that beauty, for Kant, can never be seamlessly reconciled to purpose is precisely what opens a space for sublimity. Slavoj Žižek puts best the relation of the sublime to the beautiful: “The sublime is to be conceived precisely as the index of the failed synthesis of Beauty and Purpose—a negative intersection to be sure, i.e. an intersection containing elements that are neither beautiful nor purposeful.” Phenomena which arouse in the subject sublime sentiment are in no way beautiful: they are chaotic, formless, “the very opposite of a harmonious form,” and they also serve no purpose, they are monstrous. As such, “the sublime is the site of the inscription of pure subjectivity whose abyss…Beauty…endeavors to conceal by way of the appearance of Harmony.” Whereas beauty figures as the symbol of the Good, the sublime fails to figure; the sublime fails to serve as the symbol of anything. It evokes its “Beyond” by the very failure of its symbolic representation. And yet if the sublime fails as a symbol, what might it evoke? Žižek concludes: “There is only one answer possible: the nonpathological, ethical, suprasensible dimension, for sure, but the suprasensible, the ethical stance, insofar as it eludes the Good.”

Perhaps, had Arendt left stranded on her type-writer at the time of her death two different epigraphs, taken from two differing poets, a political theory of the sublime—that is, one indebted to “the suprasensible, the ethical stance, insofar as it eludes the Good”—could have been advanced. Where Cato and Goethe seem, for Arendt, to account for a politics of the aesthetic judgment of the beautiful, Poe and Celan might have stood in for a politics of the aesthetic judgment of the sublime:

Edgar Allen Poe, from The Imp of the Perverse:

We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss—we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably, we remain. By slow degrees our sickness, and dizziness, and horror, become merged in a cloud of unnamable feeling. By gradations, still more imperceptible, this cloud assumes shape, as did the vapor from the bottle out of which arouse the genius in the Arabian Nights. But out of this our cloud upon the precipice’s edge, there grows into palpability a shape, far more terrible than any genius, or any demon of a tale, and yet it is but a thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror. It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height. And this fall—this rushing annihilation—for the very reason that it involves that one most ghastly and loathsome of all the most ghastly and loathsome images of death and suffering which have ever presented themselves to our imagination—for this very cause do we now most vividly desire it.