CHAPTERS

THE SUBUME AND THE AMBIANCE OF SEDUCTION

In 1764, a philosopher who was later to become famous wrote: "Of the peoples of our part of the world, in my opinion those who distinguish themselves among all others by the feeling for the beautiful are the Italians and the French, but by the feeling for the sublime, the Germans, English, and Spanish. Holland can largely be considered as that land where the finer taste becomes largely unnoticeable"l. To continue to quote and paraphrase, the sublime, according to national character, is at once terrifying (the Spanish), noble (the English), and splendid (the Germans). This distribution also confirms what sort of taste each of these nations have in the arts: "In England, thoughts are of profound content, tragedy, the epic poem, and in general the solid gold of wit, which under French hammers can be stretched to very thin leaves of gold. In Germany, wit still shines very much through a foil"2. Our philosopher can also be seen situating the difference between the beautiful and the sublime in the relation between the sexes. The feminine sex is beautiful, the masculine sex is sublime. Fortunately, to be a bit more subtle, he adds: "It is not to be understood by this that woman lacks noble qualities, or that the male sex must do without beauty completely. On the contrary, one expects that a person of either sex brings both together, in such a way that all the other merits of a woman should unite solely to enhance the character of the beautiful, which is the proper reference point; and on the other hand, among the masculine qualities the sublime clearly stands out as a criteria of this kind"3. Women have a sense for beauty, elegance,

10[ the Beautiful and the Sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), p. 97.

2/bidem, 94.

3/bidem,76-77.

III

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© Kluwer Academic Publishers 1993

112 Chapter 5

decoration, a taste for ornamentation: "The fair sex has just as much understan­ding as the male, but it is a beautiful understanding, whereas ours should be a deep understanding, an expression that signifies identity with the sublime". Since their virtue is beauty (that of men being nobility), women avoid evil not because it is injust, but because it is ugly: "do not speak to them of duty, compulsion, or obligation". Vanity and conceit are feminine tendencies that employ the pretty more than the beautiful: a pretty woman only inspires a cool admiration, like a bouquet, and has a tendency toward conceit. A charming woman, as opposed to a pretty one, reflects a delicate sensibility: feminine charm fills us, again, according to our philosopher, with tenderness and constant esteem. Since the sublime spirit of the man makes him capable of sublimation, it is the pale but healthy complexion of the woman (not the flushed and hearty complexion) that arouses the sentiment of the sublime in the man. Our philosopher, in evoking the different effects that the figure of the woman has on the tastes of men, will not, for the sake of tactfulness, speak about "what in this impression relates too closely to the sex impulse and may be a piece with the particular sensual idea". In addition, the qualities of the beautiful and the sublime also characterize the human being in general, his faculties and his passions. Thus intelligence is sublime, spirit is beautiful, boldness is sublime, tricks are beautiful. Sublime qualities inspire respect, beautiful qualities inspire love. Friendship has the character of the sublime, love the character of beauty. Tragedy arouses the sentiment of the sublime: in this way, the anger of a terrifying man - Achilles' anger for example - is sublime, whereas affectation is rather comical, and like the preoccupations of the seducer or charmer, beautiful. Even the physical features of people emanate from either of the two sentiments: those with brown hair and black eyes have a greater affinity with the sublime, those with blue eyes and blond hair are more closely related to beauty. Advanced age is more in keeping with the sublime, youth corresponds more with beauty. Temperaments also exhibit a particular affinity with the beautiful or the sublime. If the sentiment of beauty dominates the sanguine temperament, the melancholic is particularly sublime. Friendship, it also being sublime, is a sentiment which suits the melancholic. The melancholic, in fact, nurtures a lofty sentiment that dignifies human nature, and maintains man as a being worthy of respect: this profound sentiment makes the melancholic a virtuous exemplar of the sublime spirit.

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One will have already guessed that these observations Of the Beautiful and the Sublime are the work of "that sensualist endowed with a penchant for bad dogmatic habits" as Nietzsche said, that Shaftesbury of Germany, that new La Bruyere, that "fat Chinaman from Konigsberg" (another nasty remark from Nietzsche). Immanuel Kant intended in his small essay of 1764 to observe rather than to philosophize: one can easily see the enormous ground he covered between 1764 and 1790, the year his Critique of Judgment was published, with its brilliant Analytics of the Beautiful and of the Sublime. It is obviously objec­tionable to condemn Kant's monumental thought on the basis of writings from his youth or old age, of marginal or peripheral works - these observations for example, or the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, as certain psychoanalysts d04• Kant's racism and misogyny have often been raised, and his archaic educational conceptions have been pointed out as well. But this has been done in abstraction from the national and cultural context from which Kant drew his schemas of evaluation and appreciation - the society of Northern Germany in the second half of the eighteenth century. Obviously it will be the Analytics of the Sublime, and not the observations of 1764, which will serve as the inspiration for this chapter.

The route to be taken is the following: how is one to use the Kantian Analytics of the Sublime in order to formulate a better phenomenology of the ambiance of seduction, an ambiance in which all intersubjectivity worth experiencing is immersed, as well as all discourse worth producing and interpreting? Some suggestions are to be resumed under the title Hypostasis and Criticism of the Sublime in the first section of this chapter: how the sublime has been conceived from pseudo-Longinus to Kant will be discussed there, as well as the infatuation of postmodernism with the Kantian sublime. What will be the focus of attention are the main lines of force in Kant's text itself, and the distillation of its central intuitions. In the second section, The Schema of Aesthetic Values, certain aesthetic theories will be examined, such as those of Lalo, Bauer, and Souriau. These authors characterize the sublime in relation to the beautiful and to a whole group of minor categories, such as the pretty, the graceful, and the elegant. Broadly speaking, the third section of this chapter brings the sublime

4M. Edelman, La Maison de Kant (Paris: 1987).

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and seduction into a dialectical relation, by sublimating seduction of course, but also by 'seducifyinlf the sublime. The eulogy for sublime elegance will be another plea - elegance, in fact, seems at first glance to be nothing but fluidity, suppleness, and continuity, but actually attains sublimity once it causes its space to grow fractured and heterogenuous.

1. Hypostasis and Critique of the Sublime

From Pseudo-Longinus to Kant

The etymology of sublime is uncertain, but three proposals are to be taken seriously: 1. sub-limus, of an oblique manner (sub: just below, close to, lightly); 2. sub-limen (limen: threshold), just up to the threshold, or, on the contrary, where the threshold is just below, thus above the threshold; 3. sub-limes (limes: border, limit), leading up to the limit, very high, very fa~; or again, suspended in mid-air, soaring in the air, transponed through the air. Ovid called columns whose tops disappear into the clouds 'sublime'. This third etymOlogy (sub-limes) seems to preserve the most of the resonances from this notion's history, but the spirit of the other two etymologies has to be preserved as well. Especially the idea of the proximity of thresholds very quickly receives the connotation of moral elevation, and, in aesthetics, of a lofty style transponing us, reviving us, sweeping us away to the heights. The Greek rhetorical term of hupsos, translated into Latin as sublimis, designates height, elevation, as well as peak, summit, and figuratively, the pinnacle, the highest degree of a given order6• Sublimity therefore is applied panicularly to style, as in pseudo-Longinus' On the Sublime (Peri Hupsous) 7, which studies the diverse ways in which inspiration is translated

5See H. Parret, Le sublime du quotidien (PariS/Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1988), 229-230.

6see in Plato the term hupsos amotheas, the "pinnacle of ignorance".

7Longinus, Peri Hupsous: see the commentary and English translation by J.A Arieti and J.M. Crossett, Longinus: On the Sublime (New York!l'oronto: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1985). It has been claimed that Longinus lived from 213 to 273 AD.; other commentators consider the Treatise to date long before Longinus. It is claimed that the author must be a nco-Platonist, a fellow student of Plotinus', and the work is pervaded by a mysticism that is close to what one finds with certain

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into actual works. It is indeed in the Hellenic tradition that pseudo-Longinus evokes the relations the sublime has with passion, enthusiasm and the exaltation of the soul. On the Sublime has some reflections on grandeur in discourse and on the proofs of inspiration: inspiration can be recognized by certain formal features bound up with the expression of passion (this concerns Pindaric metrics, for example). It is, one could say, recognized 'pathemically', in a Plotinian sense, by a jolt of astonishment or a sacred horror that gives rise in us to the apparition of a god as well as a clap of thunder: the sublime, Longinus tells us, crashes down on us like a bolt of lightning. Boileau is the first to translate Longinus' On the Sublime into French, and this book was to exercise a tangible influence until the end of the eighteenth century. La Bruy~re, and especially the Encyclopedia, made use of it. It is interesting to note that Diderot, like Kant in his Of the Beautiful and the Sublime, will define the sublime as a 'system of deformities'. He will even go so far as to call sublime the works of people whose civilization or barbarism vanishes in the mists of primitive races. Kant too writes that "Among all savages there is no nation that displays so sublime a character than those of North America"!s

It is precisely around 1750 that a number of authors begin to develop a true aesthetics of the sublime, in its relation to the enormous and the deformed. The sublime becomes an aesthetic category whose importance equals, and for some surpasses, that of beauty. This is what was happening simultaneously in France (Turgot), in England (Burke and Home) and in Germany (Kant). Home's ideas in the Elements of Criticism (1762-65) are vague enough, and largely moralizing; they were of lesser importance to Kant, in comparison with Burke, and especially with Rousseau. Edmund Burke published A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful in 1757, a few years before Of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764). Like Kant, Burke opposes the beautiful and the sublime. Beauty is on the side of love and therefore on the side of social passions, while the sublime is on the side of terror and individual passions.

Alexandrians; it is probable that Longinus was a member of a school where Hebraism had a major influence: in the Treatise one discovers a Biblical citation as an example of the sublime: "God said: Let there be light. And there was light."

81. Kant, Of the Beautiful and the Sublime, 111.

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Sacred terror gives rise to a "pleasant thrill", in Burke's words, seeing as how the sublime (terrifying) spectacle can only be tasted by those who are protected from it. For Kant too, one appreciates the sublimity of the storm from onshore; it is with two feet firmly planted on the ground that we can delight in a sort of wild flight towards celestial space. This finding is developed later on in Kant as an aporia: the emotion of the sublime gives rise to the idea of a pain or a danger that we are not really exposed to. Burke, in hisA Philosophical Enquiry, not only presents the corporeal physiognomy of the beautiful and the sublime but also a psycho-physiological description of the sensations that accompany the sentiment of the beautiful (relaxation) and the sentiment of the sublime (nervous tension)9. It is especially these psycho-physiological reflections that Kant alludes to in the Critique of Judgmentto. He says that he appreciates Burke's research in 'empirical anthropology', and he admits that all represen­tations of the beautiful and the sublime affect the sentiment of life: in this way, they procure pleasure or pain, which are essentially of a corporeal order. What Kant reproaches Burke with is that these psychological or 'anthropological' reflections cannot go beyond the empirical demonstration of aesthetic judgments and that they neglect what is essential: the a priori principles of taste from which the transcendental deduction of the Third Critique is to be made.

Nevertheless, the Kant of 1764 is still very close to Burke, even in the examples he uses, the majority of which will be taken up again elsewhere, thirty years later, in the Critique of Judgment. Here is the taxonomy of examples that appears in 1764. A mountain range whose snow-covered summits rise above the clouds, a hurricane or an infernal kingdom as Milton would have described it: this is what gives us that pleasure marking the sentiment of the sublime. This sentiment arises when the soul is confronted with chaotic circumstances, the most violent disorders and havoc in nature, provided that one is able to percieve magnitude and strength in it. The sentiment of beauty, on the other hand, is aroused by the view of a meadow sprinkled with flowers, valleys where streams

~. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, edited with an introduction and notes by J.T. Boulton (London: Notre Dame University Press, 1958), for example Chapter XIX.

101. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Paragraph 29.

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meander while cattle graze on its slopes; by the descriptions of the Elysium or by "Homer's portrayal of the girdle of Venus"l1. Kant's words, uncharacteris­tically lyrical, will be quoted at length: "Tall oaks and lonely shadows in a sacred grove are sublime; flower beds, low hedges and trees trimmed in figures are beautiful. Night is sublime, day is beautiful. Temperaments that possess a feeling for the sublime are drawn gradually, by the quiet stillness of a summer evening as the shimmering light of the stars breaks through the brown shadows of night and the lonely moon rises into view, into high feelings of friendship, of distain for the world, of eternity. The shining day stimulates busy fervor and a feeling of gaiety. The sublime moves, the beautiful charms. The mien of a man who is undergoing the full feeling of the sublime is earnest, sometimes rigid and astonished. On the other hand the lively sensation of the beautiful proclaims itself through shining cheerfulness in the eyes, through smiling features, and often through audible mirth. The sublime is in tum of different kinds. Its feeling is sometimes accompanied with a certain dread, or melancholy; in some cases merely with quiet wonder; and in still others with a beauty completely prevading a sublime plan. The first I shall call the terrifying sublime, the second the noble, and the third the splendid. Deep loneliness is sublime, but in a way that stirs terror. Hence great far-reaching solitudes, like the colossal Komul Desert in Tartary, have always given us occasion for peopling them with fearsome spirits, goblins, and ghouls. The sublime must always be great; the beautiful can also be small. The sublime must be simple; the beautiful can be adorned and or­namented. A great height is just as sublime as a great depth. A long duration is sublime". It is on the basis of the combination of terror, simplicity, magnitude, and long duration or eternity that Kant's two architectural examples emerge: the pyramids of Egypt and St. Peter's cathedral in Rome. The hypostasis of the sublime in Of the Beautiful and the Sublime of 1764 is clearly a pre-Critique stage, only serving as a prelude to the Analytics of the Sublime of 1790, to which we now tum.

111. Kant, Of the Beautiful and the Sublime, 47.

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The Overwhelmed Imagination

In a very simpistic manner, one could say that according to Kant the beautiful and the sublime correspond to the harmony or to the antagonism of two faculties: understanding and imagination. The sentiment of beauty originates from a harmony between these two faculties, while the sublime results from their antagonism. When the sublime object strikes the senses, the understanding is awakened, and the idea of the infinite or a supra-sensible power which surpasses us is disclosed. Imagination, for its part, cannot manage to gather any representation of this infinity. Consequently, a struggle is established between imagination and understanding. The idea of infinity makes us feel the sentiment of a threat or a dread which is accompanied in us by the inhibition of our sensible nature. However, the soul becomes enthusiastic before the sublime object or event, experiencing the greatest enjoyment that it is capable of having, because it participates in what is infinite, divine, and moral in its own essence. Kant is known to have added a distinction between the mathematical sublime and the dynamic sublime. In the mathematical sublime, infinity appears as magnitude; in the dynamic sublime, it appears as strength. In fact, it is not the Object or event itself that is sublime, since the sentiment of the sublime is dependent on reflective judgment: the play of our faculties gives birth to the sublime. An epistemological problem is bound to crop up, though: why does Kant reconstruct the sentiment of the sublime from experiences of nature (the pyramids, like St. Peter's, are rather derivative examples)? Could it be that the beautiful qualifies art, and the sublime qualifies nature?

Before proposing an alternative to the dualism of the beautiful and the sublime, and in view of the formulation of this alternative, this is the time to recall the three characteristics of the sublime that Kant makes extensive use of in his Analytics. First of all, its negative valorization: in order to define the sublime, one has to make an appeal to transcendence, excess, inhibition, and par­ticipation. If the beautiful is canonically definable, the sublime presupposes mechanisms that only get their value negatively. Secondly, there is an emotional intensity both constitutive of and inherent to the sublime. The sublime leads to paroxysms of aesthetic experience: the intense intoxication of the sentiment of the sublime seems to be due to some exceptional existential circumstances, and a kind of grip on us which is total and irresistable. Finally, since one can say

The Sublime and the Ambiance of Seduction 119

that the sublime opens up to an infinity of a qualitative order, it seems that it establishes a contact with the supra-existence or with the supra-sensible, therefore with the religious. Many philosophers have identified, all too readily no doubt, the sentiment of the sublime and religious sentimentl2. Hegel is one example of this: he deals with sublimity, even quoting pseudo-Longinus, in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion13. The sublime does violence to the imagination, it leads it astray, since the imagination is not capable of grasping its object uno intuito. The starry sky, like the dome of St. Peter's, must be regarded as a vast vault "encompassing everything", like the Idea of infinity itself. Imagination has to make an effort to measure up to absolute magnitude, that is, to the unity or totality of the diverse intuitions. The sublime arises precisely from this failure to grasp absolute immensity14. The consequence is that, in the emotion of the sublime, the imagination is "hurled into the abyss"ls, and the free play of faculties is left bewildered. As ChMin says, "In the presence of beauty, the imagination plays a kind of 'even game' with understanding, it 'mimicking' its lawfulness in and through the regularity of its very appearance. On the contrary, faced with the sublime, nature imposes an impossible task on it, absolutely exceeding its capacity for understanding"16. It is with and through an 'overwhelmed', even dumbfounded, imagination that we appreciate the sublime. However, this downfall of the faculty of images, this failure to be able to imagine the unlimited totality, is not dysphoric. It is here, in this laceration, that pleasure, and even happiness, are born. This euphoria of the imagination is created by a paradox. The hyperactive imagination, necessarily in ruins since it cannot manage to grasp the infinite, is at the same time the faculty that makes us feel the infinity of the soul, the power of a freedom that is impossible to represent. This is how the sentiment of the sublime brings about both fear and ultimate pleasure: the very impossibility to imagine the infinite, the unlimited

12gee, for example, A Lazaroff, "The Kantian Sublime: Aesthetic Judgment and Religious Feeling" in Kantstudien 71(1980), 202-220.

13G.W. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, translated by P.C. Hodgson (University of California Press, 1987), Volume II, 433ff.

141. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Paragraph 29 (Translation Pluhar, 124 ff.).

1SSee O. Chedin, Sur l'esth~tique de Kant (Paris: Vrin, 1982), especially Chapter 11.

16lbidem, 253.

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and the totality, is experienced as a possibility itself for the infinity of the soul. To feel the necessary surpassing of the imagination is to feel the soul in its unlimited freedom. The sentiment ofthe sublime experiences this laceration, this paradox, and it is undoubtedly this that accounts for the fact that the sublime and the beautiful do not have a common measure.

To Restore the Autonomy of the Two Analytics

The relation between the Analytics of the Beautiful and the Analytics of the Sublime is one of great architectonic complexity, and it is not possible to do more than sketch its outlines here. While it is true that the Analytics of the Sublime was added on later, this does not explain everything. Kant may have been able to use the definitional elements of the Analytics of the Sublime afterwards, in order to enrich the original focus of the sentiment of beauty. For some, it has been very tempting to interpret the Analytic of the Sublime as most radically making the Analytics of the Beautiful more profound. It is true that the beautiful and the sublime have things in common: they are both pleasing by themselves; they are independent of determining judgments; they both lay claim to universality. But there are also clear differences. Beauty touches upon the form of the Object (in its delimitation), whereas the sublime appears when the soul is confronted with the unformed (precisely where the absence of delimitation is presented). Again, where beauty by itself gives rise directly to the sentiment of growing vital intensity (Beforderung) before the attractions of the beautiful object, the sentiment of the sublime is a pleasure that only springs up indirectly, namely in such a way that it is produced by the sentiment of a sudden inhibition (Hemmung) of vital forces followed by a discharge (£rgiessung) , this paradoxical movement of the soul being due to the downfall of the imagination already referred to.

This is to be considered a plea for a radical dissociation of the beautiful and the sublime as two equivalent and complementary aesthetic categories, therefore for a dissociation of the two Analytics. Kant insists elsewhere that the deduction of aesthetic judgments is not oriented towards the sublime, but only towards the

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beautiful11• In order to suggest the 'abyss' between the two, Kant even exaggerates the tranquillity of the beautiful, thus throwing the violence of the sublime into even sharper relief. There could therefore be no continuity between the beautiful and the sublime: 'perfect' beauty does not necessarily transform itself into the sublime. Even if the beautiful and the sublime are comparable, their relation is not one of indispensible coexistence. The postmodern reading that Lyotard and other philosophers have suggested for the Critique of Judgment supports this effort towards a radical dissociation of the beautiful and the sUblime18. The sublime, for Lyotard, creates affects, such as enthusiasm, which have nothing to do with the sphere of beauty19. The 'interest' of the sublime is quite different from the 'interest' of beauty, the latter remaining fundamental­ly formal and intellectual. The interest of the sublime is much closer to desire, and it does nothing less than bringing a complete heterogeneity of faculties into play: the heteronomy of understanding and imagination creates abysses that instigate terrifying pleasures. One could add that while there is no bridge between the beautiful and the moral, the bridge between the sublime and the moral is essential: the sublime generates Achtung, Kant says, respect for something that is never there in its totality, which the overwhelmed imagination attests to. This architectonic debate concerning the relation of the beautiful and the sublime will not be pursued any further20• It is better to draw our attention to two aspects of the Kantian sublime which have hardly been exploited at all, aspects that make it possible to enrich, in what follows, the idea of the sublime as the ambiance of seduction.

111. Kant, op. cit, Paragraph 30.

18gee J.F. Lyotard, L 'enthousiasme. La critique kantienne de l'histoire (Paris: Galilee, 1986), and the compilation of writings entitled Du Sublime (Paris: Belin, 1988), with the collaboration of M. Deguy, J.L. Nancy, E. Escoubas, Ph. Lacoue-Labarthe, J.F. Lyotard, J. Rogozinski, J.F. Courtine and L. Marin.

19J.F. Lyotard, op. cit, 59-61.

20see especially the article by J.L. Nancy in Du Sublime, op. cit, 35-75.

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The Time of the Sublime and its Thresholds

It has often been said that Kant's aesthetics of the sublime contains the foundations of an aesthetics of an art that is very contemporary, an informal, non-representative form of art, aiming at the formation of a (re)presentation (Darstellung) of time and space without the mediation of figures or images. This hypostasis of the sublime would then be a consecration of the massacre of academic art and the cult of the apocalyptic and the chaotic. The object vanishes there, but so does the form of the object, insofar as it is harmonious and proportional. Kant greatly insists upon the formal character of the beautiful Object: for example, the outline of the form in a drawing (which for Kant held eminent priority among the plastic arts) is what is apprehended in the sentiment of beauty. However, according to his reflections on the sublime, Kant seems to be drawn towards an art that is totally free, one where the imagination is confronted with the unformed-unlimited, or more precisely, one which enables the imagination to take pleasure, on account of the resistance of the infinity of the unformed, of the sentiment of infinity of the soul.

Ideal art is, as a consequence, totally free art, genuinely abstract, and this is why it is often said (and rightly so) that Kant's aesthetics is ahead of its time21• It is undoubtedly difficult to interpret certain particularly 'frivolous' examples that Kant mentions, and to understand why he sees a complicity between the sublime and the decorative (the 'accessory works' or parerga that Derrida evaluates so positively in his text on the Critique of Judgment)22. The absence of motifs and figures, the absence of all natural configuration, the decorative ambiance -ornamental foliage, tattoos, gardens - caprices, embellishments: these must lead to a truly free art that opens up onto a gaping infinite space, an unlimited void. Decoration is, in fact, a grid, a whimsical pattern that creates a perspective on the unlimited and the unformed - in this context, one obviously thinks of the Palladio Theatre in Vicenza. But there is more: ornamental foliage, just like

21For the same opinion see O. Ch~in, op. ciL, 243 ff.

22In The Truth in Painting, translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeon (Chicago University Press, 1987). Theodor Adorno mentions the Kantian theory of the sublime and its aesthetic, but in a more than simplistic way inAesthetic Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 280-284.

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gardening (English and Rousseauist, diametrically opposed to the French garden), manifests musicality more than plasticity. Kant explicitly says that he has a presentiment of free art in "the free musical improvisation without a theme"23: it is improvised music, completely decorative, that induces our mind to dream as it does before the flames in a fireplace, awakening the sentiment of long duration, of infinite time. It is on the basis of the idea of the very musicality of the sublime that the two, often poorly understood, components of the Kantian conception of the sublime are crystallized.

The sublime, first of all, is the sentiment of the heterogenuous, of grids and patterns, of ruptures and fractures, of thresholds. Certain commentators have wrongly maintained that the sublime is intrinsically connected with the colossal and magnitude, even if the colossal (e.g. of the pyramids, St. Peter's in Rome) clearly evokes infinite space. It is rather the frame, the enframing, opening out to the gaping void, that leads the imagination astray. Lightheadedness and shivering are the aesthesias that one feels before this enframing of the void, since they combine the anxiety and the extreme enjoyment that mark the sentiment of the sublime. Where the heterogeneous 'presentifies' (Darstellung) itself, the sublime emerges. Nevertheless, this void that we have a presentiment of, this enframed infinity evoked through grids, is above all a temporal void, unlimited and infinite. The downfall of the imagination is the downfall of the temporality of the imagination: the temporal exercise of the imagination is led astray. Here are a few passages from the important Paragraph 27 of the Critique of Judgment, where Kant analyzes the temporal exercise of the imagination along with the experience of the sublime. "In presenting the sublime in nature the mind feels agitated (bewegt), while in an aesthetic judgment about the beautiful in nature it is in restful contemplation. This agitation (above all at its inception) can be compared with a vibration, i.e. with a rapid alternation of repulsion from and attraction to one and the same object. The transcendent (das Ueberschwengliche) for the imagination is, as it were, a sort of abyss in which the imagination is afraid (farchtet) to lose itself. Measuring (as a way of apprehending) a space is at the same time describing it, and hence it is an objective movement in the imagination and a progression. On the other hand, comprehending a multipicity

231. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Paragraph 16, 77.

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in a unity (of intuition rather than of thought) and hence comprehending in one instant what is apprehend successively, is a regression that in tum cancels the condition of time in the imagination's progression. Hence, (since temporal succession is a condition of the inner sense) it is a subjective movement of the imagination by which it does violence to the inner sense"24. Therefore, there is a leading astray of the time of the imagination, and a violence exerted on the inner sense, the time of succession. The fractures and heterogeneities that instill the sentiment of the sublime in us consequently do violence to the temporality of the imagination, and in this way the imagination loses all possibility of a coordination with the understanding. The sublime leads the time of the imagination astray, and it imposes frivolous thresholds on it. This time of the sublime and its thresholds is what gives substance to the 'ambiance of seduction', which is above all movement: Kant employs Reiz (attraction) and Rahrung (emotion) in order to speak about seduction, two terms that refer to movement. To anticipate the third section of this chapter, one speaks of seduction when the imagination sets time into motion - the sublime is nothing but the ambiance of seduction.

2. The Schema of Aesthetic Values

Aestheticians and the Joys of Classification

Categories, since Aristotle, are the main instruments of the classificatory judgment, and since Baumgarten has published the first Aesthetics of all time in 1750, the term 'aesthetic category' has been used and abused. The beautiful and the sublime are thought of by Burke, Home and Kant in the second half of the eighteenth century as two irreducible and fundamental categories. A true pluralism of aesthetic value quickly established itself, and the list of aesthetic attributes never ceases to expand. Charles Lalo, writing at the tum of the century, enumerated nine of them: beautiful, sublime, spiritual, grandiose, tragic, comic, graceful, dramatic, humorous. Etienne Souriau will count twenty-four

241. Kant, Op. cu, Paragraph 27, 115-116.

The Sublime and the Ambiance of Seduction 125

aesthetic 'flavors': we will come back to these later on. Since Baumgarten, one has witnessed a true disintegration of the idea of the aesthetic category by way of dispersal. Every Stimmung, once one has an epithet at one's disposal, can become an aesthetic category (the strange, the ardent, the savage, the solemn, the serene, etc ... ). The aesthetic category is certainly in crisis, and many aestheticians now are of the opinion that aesthetics should no longer offer speculations concerning the system of aesthetic categories, but should just become a philosophy of art, which it never was in Baumgarten, Kant, Schelling, and Hegel. Consequently, one has rather seen a methodological eviction of the notion of beauty and sublimity, just as one witnesses in contemporary art The Banlaupcy of Beauty, the title of a very provocative little book by Lalo (1923)25. As a matter of fact, some empty dogmatism of aesthetic categorization has been shown, and a game of labeling can be seen taking place, especially if one is content with producing a simple rhapsodic enumeration. It is better not to pursue this methodological debate, but instead to impose two constraints on the reflection on aesthetic categories: first, one must start from a central intuition serving as the principle of organization of the whole schema of aesthetic values; then, one must make the background of an aesthetic categorization be of use for 'phenomenologies' or 'little ontologies'. Neither the deductive nor the dogmatic method, where the table of categories is deduced from a closed reasoning, nor the inductive and tentative method which can only introduce an intuitive taxonomy devoid of importance, are particularly satisfying. It would be better, undoubtedly, to reflect upon the relationships, affinities and transitions, and to drop the idea of the categorial exclusions (what is opposed to beauty: the ugly or the sublime?). To illustrate the stagnation in this domain, it is sufficient to present three examples: the systematization of aesthetic categories according to Lalo, Bayer, and Souriau.

Charles Lalo, in his Notions d'esthetique'1l>, constructs his table through the combination of two principles. The first one is derived from the fundamental

25Ch. Lalo, La Faillite de 10 beautt (Paris: Ollendorff, 1923). M. Dufrenne writes in his The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. LVIII: 'We shall avoid invoking the concept of the beautiful, because it is a notion which, depending on the extension we give to it, seems either useless for our purposes or dangerous".

'1I>Ch. Lalo, Notions d'estMtique (Paris: Alcan, 1925), 57-66.

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tendency towards harmonization and unification which, according to Lalo, all activities of thought have in common; furthermore, this harmony or unity is found/possessed, searched for/aimed at, or lost, according to a three-part division. The second principle is based on the traditional division of our faculties, which is a ternary as well: intelligence, will, and sensibility. By combining these two triparitions, one obtains a table with nine aesthetic categories:

Harmony Searched Possessed Lost

Intelligence Sublime Beautiful Spiritual Will Tragic Grandiose Comic Sensibility Dramatic Graceful Ridiculous

Diverse aesthetic qualifications are distributed, from the headings down, between these nine categories. In the sphere of the graceful, Lalo gathers together: the pretty, the elegant, the dainty, the coquettish. To quote the definition of this sphere: "The graceful, the pretty, the elegant, the dainty, and the coquettiSh inspire a protective sympathy for those beings or Objects that are small and weak; a social or cosmic solidarity that is grounded, to our advantage, on a hierarchy that makes itself spontaneously acceptable by flattering our affective life. It is in this way that it procures for us a pleasant increase of our sentiment of ourselves: charm"7:I. Some relations between neighboring categories appear: the tragic is the sublime of action (will), just as the sublime is the tragedy of intelligence, and the dramatic is the sublime of sensibility! Obviously, everything about this classification is problematic: the old division of the faculties is scholastic and obsolete; it is doubtful whether the ridiculous is an aesthetic value at all; the values classified under 'Lost Harmony' are arbitrary; the table is clearly constructed on the basis of the literary arts, and so on.

We now turn to another example, the classification by Bayer, author of the voluminous Esthetique de la grlice'1B. The fundamental tripartition is very

7:l0p. cit, 58.

2IR. Bayer, L'estMtique de la grace (paris: Alcan, 1934).

The Sublime and the Ambiance of Seduction 127

simplistic: the beautiful is situated between the sublime on the one hand and the graceful on the other. The sublime, as for Burke, is the mother of categories: Ibsen, Caravaggio, the Judgment of Sixtine, as well as the extravagant mus­culature in the works of Michelangelo and the poetics of energy - all of these are referred to. Grace, for Bayer, is on the side of form and accomplished technique; he defines it as ease - grace is diametrically opposed to effort - and by movement that is "easy and unexpected"29. Grace - and dance embodies it more than any other art - is economical and supple, it is the quality of the rhythms experienced, it is the harmonious and intimate energetics. Finally, the beautiful is the equilibrium found between the two structures of the sublime and the graceful: "that is why its effects on us tend towards a lyricism of the perfect"30. Strangely enough, Bayer enriches his system by adding, without much regard for logic, antinomic notions (the ugly as well as the comic are - why? -antinomies of beauty) and all sorts of Stimmungen, such as the fantastic, the wonderful, the naive, the sentimental, etc. And he sometimes arrives at formulations that are more striking than relevant, such as: "baroque is a failed sublime", or again, "this failed sublime is a sublime that appears to be graceful"31.

The third example, by far the most consistent of the three, is the famous schema of aesthetic categories according to Etienne Souriau. His schema of twenty-four branches includes (I) the values of classical style (the comic Aristophanes is situated diametrically opposite to the sublime Pindar, the pretty Anacreon opposite to the tragic Aeschylus), enriched by (II) the romantic system of values: emphatic, pathetic, dramatic, ironic,fantastic, and poetic. (III) Proceeding now by pure formalism, Souriau still intersperses everywhere a station between these two, in this way gaining twelve complementary stations: here one can find the noble, the grandiose, the spiritual, the picturesque, the graceful, etc. Souriau proposed his schema in 193332, but after the war he no longer referred to it in his lectures. Nevertheless, he develops a strategy there which is not without interest: the values indicated under the rubrics I and II directly originate from

~. Bayer, TTait~ d'estMtique (Paris: A Colin, 1956), 223-230.

3OOp. cit, 227.

31/bidem, 229.

32In "Art et Veritl:", Revue Philosophique, 1933, 186-189.

128 Chapter 5

two of the most important aesthetic paradigms of our civilization: the classical and romantic ideals. But the schema still suffers from an excess of artifice, and fortunately Souriau will change his mind on two important points: first, that the poetic and the sublime are not simply aesthetic categories amongst others, and that the minor aesthetic categories, such as the pretty, the elegant, and the

poetic

graceful

pretty

picturesque

fantastical

spiritual

comical

elegiac

satirical ironical

beautiful noble

grotesque

emphatic

grandiose

SUblime

lyric

pathetic

heroic

graceful have structural interrelations that are interesting to uncover. The poetic, in fact, can be said to be the a priori of any aesthetic axiology whatsoever: without the poetic, no beauty, no sublime, no graceful, etc. It is not desirable to enter into this discussion at this poine3• The sublime, being connected to the sentiment of transcendence and excess, can modify any aesthetic value whatsoever, not only the beautiful. But first a word about the minor categories, which are minor like the 'little' ontologies: they are certainly peripheral, but are a powerful force behind the constitution of tensitivity between subjects.

33See R. Blanch~, Des cat~ries estMtiques (Paris: Vrin, 1979), Chapter V.

The Sublime and the Ambiance of Seduction 129

The Minor Aesthetic Categories

Is there a hierarchy between aesthetic categories? It is true that such values as the beautiful, the sublime, the tragic, and the dramatic are values which cover an important philosophical and existential content. They are categories that produce or presuppose strong emotions, noble and profound sentiments, and intense mental states. Now we proceed decrescendo, towards the weaker values, the softer ones, the ones more pleasing to the senses. If one was to prefer, for example the pretty to the sublime, this would reveal that one had a fragile soul, barely fit to stand up for itself, and a lazy heart. The pretty, like the elegant, does not take us to the high summits, so they say, but rather to pleasant hilltops. Certain aestheticians, such as Cuvelier, wish to demonstrate that the pretty is a form inferior to beauty ("It is the beautiful in little things: we smile at the pretty")34. In opposition to the majority of aestheticians, the position taken here is that the minor aesthetic categories are truly puzzling. It is tempting to present oneself as an advocate of the elegant against the beautiful! To begin with, is it true that the pretty is necessarily allied to physical smallness? A certain smallness promotes the pretty, but, on the other hand, vast landscapes can also be pretty. The pretty corresponds to a pause when the violence of the universe is suspended (the vast seascape, for example, whilst the eruption of its terrifying forces remains in suspence). It is indeed the fragility of the object that gives rise to the idea that the pretty is precarious, the slightest thing being sufficient to destroy it. If one were to make a morphology of the pretty in nature (a dewdrop sparkling in the sun, a tiny flower discovered in a herb), one would be rather amazed by the demands that this surprising outcome, the pretty, has to satisfy. Fragility, precariousness, and also gratuitousness: the domain of the pretty seems to escape from the order of necessity. The pretty carries with it its own spectacular demise. One thinks of the delicacy of frost flowers on a window pane: its delicacy is ephemeral; it blossoms only by chance. There is certainly a sublime of the pretty: Mozart, for example, always conveys the pathos of the end, of fragility, of precariousness.

34 A Cuvelier, Precis de phiJosophie, cited by E. Souriau in his Cat~ries esthttiques (1be Courses at the Sorbonne, University Documentation Center, Paris), mimeo., no date.

130 Chapter 5

Grace is another minor value. It is especially manifest in movements and is thus based on a constitutive temporality. It is always in relation to a virtual dance that one appreciates grace. If one places the graceful in the plastic arts, in sculpture for example, it is always by prefiguring a possible movement: the graceful position is like the point of inflexion of an attitude35• Bayer's Estheti­que de la gri1ce has some interesting supplementary details about this. As Bayer says, actual or virtual movement must lend an impression of ease and suppleness through its continuity and through its calmness and measure. Grace is essentially melodic, legato e cantabile. In a certain sense, one can say that grace seduces us by being in agreement with our intimate aspirations. Bergson had already noted that "the truth is that we believe to discern in everything that is very graceful, also in the nimbleness which is the sign of mobility, the indication of a possible movement towards us, of a mobile sympathy, always at the point of giving itself, which is the essence of what superior grace is"36. If there is a sublime of grace, it will be at the level of this mobile sympathy, of this animated introceptive life, of this eurhythmic intimacy of our body. It is interesting to study the forms of the degeneration of grace: the affected and the mannered, for example. It is also of interest to determine what is specific to baroque gracefulness, to mention only one very important type. This will not be pursued now: instead, a third minor aesthetic category will be discussed - the elegant.

The Aestheticity of Elegance

The elegant should not be confused with the graceful. In the animal kingdom, the jaguar, the snake, and the greyhound display a natural elegance. An old debate exists in the philosophy of painting about elegance: not the elegance of forms, but the elegance of colors. Do elegant colors exist? Souriau claims that certain paintings by Veronese and the Venetian School display an extraordinary elegance of colors, in which the essential is conveyed by a gamut of nuances (silver greys, subdued yellows, etc.). The elegance of colors - keeping Veronese

35For details concerning this conception of grace, see R. Blanch~, op. cit, 107ff.

~. Bergson, Essai sur les donntes immtdiates de La conscience, 1889 (English translation: Time and Free Will An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, London, McMillan, 1910, 11-13).

The Sublime and the Ambiance of Seduction 131

in mind, as opposed to Titian - would be produced by a search for nuances, but with simplicity, precision, and in particular by stylization. It seems that sobriety and discretion, the denial of all emphasis and all redundancy, are also inherent to elegance. The category of elegance is also one of the most intellectualizable: one speaks of an 'elegant demonstration' in mathematics, of an 'elegant solution', that which is at the same time both the most efficient and the simplest. It is evident that the category of grace does not support this extension into the intellectual domain. Moreover, 'moral elegance' is applied to actions that are not utilitarian but nevertheless display a great economy of means. In art, one could evoke the elegant arabesques of Leonardo de Vinci: it is the surprising precision that creates the effect of elegance. The right measure and reserve impose themselves on elegant reasoning or behavior. This right measure has already been referred to in speaking of the meru and the midwife as Aristotle presents them, the symbol of this elegant intelligence that has gone by the name of 'reasonableness'. One can therefore discover here a conglomerate of connotations that reach as far back as Tertulian's De cultu feminarum and Balzac's Traite de la vie elegante31: intelligence, rightness, discretion, simplicity, and reasonableness. These were the terms in which elegance was conceived in the era in which Kant wrote his Of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764). Burke devotes a small chapter to elegance in his Enqui,ys, where the qualifications of smooth, polished, regular shape, and specious reemerge. What is of greater interest is that the first Aesthetic Treatise in history, that of Baumgarten (1750), introduces elegance in order to qualify a certain type of understanding or a property of the soul: an 'elegant spirit' displays what Baumgarten, who was to inspire Kant, calls a 'natural aesthetics,39. Moreover, Baumgarten adds that elegance of the soul turns the philosopher into a 'happy aesthete', adding a note to the semanticism of elegance: intelligence, rightness, discretion, simplicity and ... happiness.

31Tertulian, De cultu feminarum (Opera, Brepols, 1954); H. de Balzac, Trait~ de la vie ~l~gante (1833; Paris edition: Delmas, 1952): here Balzac condemns dandyism and gives an anecdotal and psycho-sociological account of the 'elegant life' as a nineteenth century ideal.

38E. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, 1757, Book III, Section XXIII.

39 AG. Baumgarten, Aesthetica, Section I, Paragraphs 24 to 30.

132 Chapter 5

3. The (Sublime) Ambiance of Seduction

Being Seduced by the Sublime

The sublime is not an aesthetic category to be placed among others, or to be put on the same level. Some authors have said that the sublime is the convergence of all the aesthetic emotions, but the position taken here is that the sublime carries any aesthetic emotion whatsoever to its paroxysm. In an extremely simplistiC sense, one could say that the stronger the intensity of the sentiment which the aesthetic experience affects us with, the stronger our presentiment of the sublime. Souriau also arrives at the same conclusion in his later writings: "it is appropriate to conceive of the sublime, unlike that of any particular aesthetic value, as the summit which values attain at the moment of their highest fulfillment. All aesthetic categories are approaches to the sublime, and only acquire their full authenticity with reference to it"40. It would be pointless to take over this projection of some sort of authenticity, and it is enough to pursue only the (undoubtably too simple) idea that the sublime would be the superlative degree of not only the beautiful, but all of the categories. Conse­quently, there has been no hesitation in mentioning the sublime of the pretty (Mozart), the sublime of the graceful (prototypically, dance) and the sublime of the elegant (the Venetian School, Veronese).

The Kantian Analytics of the Sublime, detached from the Analytics of the Beautiful, has supplied us with the most potent determinants of the sublime. The sublime leads the imagination astray, since it confronts it with the unformed-unlimited, with the heterogeneous, with ruptures and fractures. In a word, the sublime is the sentiment of thresholds. Nevertheless, the downfall of imagination is the downfall of the temporality of imagination: the sentiment of the sublime does violence to time, which, as Kant says, is "comprehending in one instant what is apprehended successively"41. Consequently, the sublime is what

~. Souriau, Les cattgrJries esthetiques, 99 and 107.

411. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Paragraph 27, 116.

The Sublime and the Ambiance of Seduction 133

seduces. To seduce, as has been said already, is to set time into motion with imagination, and the two terms that Kant uses to talk about seduction do indeed evoke this ambiance of sublimity: Reiz, ascending and descending (the swelling of the sea, for example), and Rahrung, stirring emotion. The sublime is the ambiance of seduction. Seduction comes from seducere, where se- means 'apart, aside', capturing a sense of separation. One might say that to seduce is to steer, or lead away. A supplementary sense is that of diverting, of pulling something closer to oneself, as the dux draws those who follow him. There is no seduction without a relation to deflection, without an animated rerouting. Seduction sketches a path in paradoxical time-space. The seductive Object plays with nothingness, which explains its theatrical aim and its strategic amplifications42•

One can see why the 'seductification' of the sublime is something perfectly natural. The beautiful does not seduce, nor do the pretty, the graceful, or the elegant; what seduces is the sublime of the beautiful, the sublime of the pretty, the sublime of the graceful, the sublime of the elegant. In Kantian terminology: as long as the play of the faculties of understanding and imagination remains harmonious, as long as the imagination is not free, there cannot be seduction, since there will be no sublimity as the ambiance of seduction. The sublime establishes a path of abysses and fractures, a field of thresholds or enframings opening out to the gaping unlimited or nothingness - a paradox where nothing is beautiful, perfect, and harmonious, and where dread produces the most intense of pleasures. Nevertheless, thresholds are fundamentally temporalized. There is Reiz and Rahrung, ascent/ descent and stirring emotion, the cataclysm of linearity, temporality led astray: eternalization, elasticity, concentration, and rupturing of time, all of which constitute the Mozartian sublime of the pretty, the elegant Venetian. The Sublime is the ambiance of seduction.

Flirtation, the Elegant, the Dandy

This section is one last word about elegance, and, by the way of hors d'oeuvre, about flirtation. Georg Simmel presents a few relevant reflections on flirtation

42See the chapter on seduction in H. Parret, Le sublime du quotidien (Paris/Amsterdam: Had~­Benjamin, 1988).

134 Chapter 5

in his Philosophy of Love43• He notes: "A sidelong glance with the head half­turned is characteristic of flirtation. A hint of aversion lies in this gesture; but at the same time it connotes fleeting submission, a momentary focusing of attention on the other person, who in the same moment is symbolically rebuffed by the inclination of the body and the head"M. The flirt plays on the antithesis: the movement of turning away, the attraction of the secret and the concealed, the ludic rhythmicity of a continuous alternation, the double gesture of agreeing and refusing, the stamp of the provisional and the uncertain, the charm of the frivolous, the mysterious overlapping of the yes and the no, all mechanisms that regulate a very subtle intersubjectivity. One may ask oneself whether flirtation can be raised to sublimity, something that is not certain. It seems that the flirt is not a real aesthetic value: if this is correct, the flirt could not be said to be modified by the sublime.

Elegance is another story altogether. The aesthetics of the elegance of the dandy suggests that elegance has nothing to do with beauty, i.e. with the static, the perfect, the harmonious. Nothing about the practices of the dandy will be mentioned here, nor anything about the history of dandyism throughout the nineteenth century, from Brummell to Baudelaire and Wilde. One will only mention that certain authors, such as Kleist and most recently Lyotard, have derived dandyism directly from Kantian aesthetics, in particular from his Analytics of the Sublime, which has led many a romantic on the search for transcendence, an elsewhere, even towards a pursuit of madness. Dandyism, as a philosophy of life, could disclose precisely where sublimity and elegance meet. It has been noted about dandyism that "The dandy shows himself to be riddled by the incertitude of being. He reinforces the inevitable instability of those who follow fashion through an obligation of incertitude. Through this incertitude, the dandy affirms his philosophical calling"45. Doubt is elegant for the dandy, and his life is a work of art. Not a beautiful work, nor a harmonious and perfect one, but a work of art that is sublime and seductive. The yawning of the

43G. Simmel, Philosophy of Love, in Georg Simmel on Women, Sexuality, and Love, translated by Guy Oakes (Yale University Press, 1984), 133-152.

MOp. cit, 134.

45F. Coblence, Le Dandysme. Obligation d'incertitude (Paris: P.U.F., 1989),20.

The Sublime and the Ambiance of Seduction 135

unlimited, of nothingness, of the void: here, some say, is where the dandy suffers and enjoys himself. It is understandable how the Analytic of the Sublime, transforming itself into a philosophy of dandyism, leads to a aestheticist nihilism.

That elegance - which is intelligence, soundness, discretion, simplicity, reasonableness - has its paroxysm in the sublime - which is fractures and thresholds - and presents itself as an intriguing enigma of aesthetics. It consists in the fact that elegance sublimizes and modifies itself in a paradoxical path of thresholds: it leads imagination astray and establishes a syncopated temporality. It is undoubtedly here that the aesthetic experience of sublime elegance is forged, which one only enjoys with dread and respect.

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