The Ghost of Theology: Readings of Kant and Hegel || Kant's Sunshine

Kant's SunshineAuthor(s): Richard KleinSource: Diacritics, Vol. 11, No. 2, The Ghost of Theology: Readings of Kant and Hegel(Summer, 1981), pp. 26-41Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/464727 .

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KANT'S SUNSHINE

RICHARD KLEIN

There is a moment towards the beginning of "Economimesis" when, in the course of paraphrasing the preliminary argument in section 43 of Kant's third Critique, Derrida draws the reader's attention to the "brief passage" of an acrobat in a "confidential" note that Kant appends to the discussion of the difference between science and art regarded as human skill. Kant confides that in the region he comes from [In meinen Gegenden . .1], the common man has no trouble distinguishing between, say, the science of an illusionist and the art of a rope-dancer [ein Seiltinzer]. The common sense judgment, as it always seems in Kant, conceals a strictly rigorous principle. The first is a science because one can do it, if one knows how; the second is an art, because one many know completely what must be done and yet not possess the skill to do it. Science, says Kant, is a theoretical faculty, like geometry; its knowledge is immediately a capacity or power. Art is a practical, technical faculty, like surveying; knowledge of it is not know how.

The principle allows us to imagine, for example, impeccable critics who may know "what ought to be done and are consequently cognizant of the desired effect" but are utterly excluded from art, in this scheme; for "only that which a man, even if he knows it completely, may not have the skill to accomplish belongs to art." But what, according to this principle, should we decide about philosophers? Is their skill a science or an art? Kant does not raise the question but in the footnote invites the opinion of a non-philosopher from his own region regarding the art of rope-dancers.

What is a rope-dancer? Derrida notes the brief passage of this "funambule" and without

elaboration offers succint hints to the reader who "wishes to take the plunge and insert here something of his own": Pour qui veut faire le saut et y mettre du sien: Kant, Nietzsche, Genet. Derrida cases a veil, creates a little enigma, opens a depth in the surface of the text and invites the reader to let his curiosity plunge, at the risk of breaking his neck-like the rope-dancer in the "Prologue" of Zarathustra. Derrida himself might have risked it. He has already, here and there, suggested how it might be done. In Glas, he proposes that all of Nietzsche can be read from the perspective of the "funambule," who like the acrobat in Genet's text Pour un funambule is not the dancer but the dance of the cord itself. Zara- thustra exclaims to the crowd gathered to watch the acrobat; "Man is a cord, stretched between Beast and Superman-a cord above an abyss." And then, "What is great in man is that he is a Bridge and not an End." In the "Introduction" to the Critique of Judgment, Kant displays what he

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calls the "abyss" that separates the realm of sensible experience from that of the super-sensible, the gap that divides the concept of the understanding governing nature from the concept of reason that legislates a priori for freedom. "So far, then, it is not possible to throw a bridge between one realm and the other." Kant hopes that the third Critique will be the bridge or link that will span that abyss. Aesthetic judgment-or art-is the cord on which the philosopher hopes to dance across the yawning chasm that separates nature's necessity from the freedom of the will. The common man, in Kant's region, knows what high art is demanded of the rope dancer.

Derrida invites the reader of "Economimesis" to insert something of his own, here or there. To make a jump or take the plunge.

The last paragraph of "Production as Mimesis," the end of the first part of "Economimesis," is Derrida's opaque condensation of a luminous page in section 49 of Kant's third Critique-the most aesthetic, poetic, the sunniest, happiest page in the whole flinty volume. The opacity results in part from Derrida's decision to fashion a conclusion merely by citing the three examples of poetic expression that Kant quotes on this page, and by quoting without commentary in his own last lines the last lines of Kant's reflection on these examples in which he evokes "a boundless prospect of a joyful future" [Critique of judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Press, 1951), ? 49, p. 160]. Kant deploys these poetic quotations in order to illustrate here what he has been calling "aesthetical attributes," and in so doing not only provides a brief anthology of the philosopher's taste in poetry but virtually the only examples of poetic expression in the whole of the Critique, which assigns to Dichtung the summit of the fine arts. Perhaps Derrida concluded that these examples required no commentary, or that everything up to this point in his own text had prepared the reader to grasp the general principles they reflect. Indeed, one has no trouble seeing why the first two examples of poetry might have the sun as their theme after Derrida in the penultimate paragraph of this section has announced the topic of "Helio-poetics," and argued for the existence of a long and powerful chain of traditional interpretations of artistic production that take as their economic model the generous over-abundance of a solar source. A chain of philosophical texts that extends from Plato, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche to Bataille acquires its integrity from their seeming analogous to one another in the way they proceed by analogy to take the sun as the paradigmatic figure of analogy itself--as the master metaphor of the whole system of analogy that will link nature to man. In this essay Derrida has no difficulty displaying the logocentric bias in Kant that elevates the poet's voice to the summit of the artistic hierarchy from where it pours forth its speech or Dichtung, its vivifying logos, on a grateful world, flooding it with the prodigal generosity of its spontaneously creative, purely productive, imaginative gifts. Analogous to the sun's rays, the poetic logos springs forth as the sun shines, the way God pours down his blessings on man, or as the Absolute Monarch, the Sun King,-in Kant's region the "enlightened/enlightening" monarch Frederick the Great-bestows his beneficence on his flattered/flattering subjects and distributes his golden favors to the most shining poets (and to some philosophers). That may too readily explain why of all poets Kant chose to quote Frederick the Great at greatest length in the third Critique. But before dismissing the philosopher's motives as venal or his taste as vulgar, we should remember, Derrida says, that these final lines of Frederick's immense epistle to le Marichal Keith, in which he compares himself at the end of his royal life to the setting sun, are rigorously framed by a philosophical context in which the animating power of aesthetical attributes is formulated in economic terms that invite comparison with the sun.

Like the sun, aesthetical attributes vivify and animate through the gift of an over- abundance. They are forms, says Kant, which are generated by the productive imagination; they present a given concept not with its logical attributes but with approximate representations of the imagination. They "arouse more thought than can be expressed in a concept determined by words," they "enliven the mind by opening

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out to it the prospect of an illimitable field of kindred forms." An aesthetical attribute is not adequate to a given concept; rather it is more than adequate (hence a less than logical attribute) and "consequently aesthetically enlarges the concept itself in an unbounded fashion." It occasions more thought concerning the concept "than can in it be grasped or made clear." "This is properly speaking the art of the poet." So when in the example Kant gives, the Poet-King attributes to himself at the end of his career the representations associated with the setting sun, his poetry "excites a number of sensations and secondary representations for which no expression is found." The Sun- Poet-King has the power in these lines to arouse in Kant that sort of sublime experience which consists in thinking more signifieds than one can find signifiers to express. Such excess "excites," "arouses," "quickens," "animates," the rational ideas. Poetry vivifies by giving an excess, as the sun pours forth its rays. Hence, Frederick's poem not only serves as an example to illustrate the general principle of aesthetical attribution, but it also lends the philosopher an aesthetical idea with which to quicken our understanding of the way aesthetical attributes lend their representations to a concept. A metaphor bestows its vivifying power on a concept the way the sun gives its over-abundance, the way a King pours forth his grace. This theory of poetic metaphor is therefore a theory of liberality, of a certain absolute or pure generosity. The example in Kant becomes the rule: the way aesthetic attributes lend their power to concepts exemplifies the way the sun gives its over-abundant benefits to the world. Or the way the king pays.

Liberality of the imagination, in section 49, obeys a paradoxical requirement. The imagination, which is "a productive faculty of cognition," animates the other nature it creates-the worlds of imaginative fiction-with "the material that actual nature gives it." It generates aesthetical ideas out of representations that lie beyond the bounds of experience. With the aid of the productive imagination we take what nature gives and remold experience into something different that surpasses nature -but "always indeed," says Kant, "in accordance with analogical laws." At the same time, the pure creativity of the productive imagination resides precisely in its inde- pendence of any laws or prior determinations, any constraints on its freedom to produce spontaneously, freely, liberally according to its generous impulse: "Thus we feel our freedom from the law of association (which attaches to the empirical employ- ment of imagination), so that the material supplied to us by nature in accordance with this law can be worked up into something different which surpasses nature." Derrida identifies "economimesis" with the distributive principle that governs this paradoxical requirement of imaginative production-that its representations must be determined by the laws of association from which it must feel itself most free. Economimesis is the name of the productive limit or the place of passage between the economy of associative law-the law of equivalents and identities-and what exceeds and surpasses that law. Between law and out-law imagination generates the wealth of its pure productions; like the absolute monarch, the imagination is both constrained by the law (of association), which it embodies and enacts, and projected outside the law by virtue of the limitless power of its boundless prerogatives. It performs its productive role according to an economic principle that lies between the terms which Derrida, following Bataille, has identified, on the one hand, with a restricted economy and a general economy on the other. [Cf. "De I'economie restreinte a I'economie generale," L'&criture et la difference, (Paris: Seuil, 1967.)] Easy to say, the whole difficulty resides in thinking that between.

Economimesis-the economic principle governing helio-poetics-is what Derrida calls an immaculate commerce, one which allows a certain profit to be made without falling into the venality of what Mauss calls the mechanical cruelty of money exchange. Indeed, helio-poetics has much in common with the structure Mauss ana- lyzes as potlach. In it an operation of spontaneous, limitless generosity appears to be compatible with an utilitarian system of mutual profit: each instance of gift giving is an occasion for boundless generosity, free of all contractual obligation, but the totality of occasions for giving allows all the participants to balance their books in the long run. The poet at the summit of the hierarchy gives his logos freely and spontane-

diacritics/June 1981 29



ously; no wage is exchanged for pure poetry, but God supports him-indirectly so to speak-by giving him inspiration through the mediation of nature and genius. God furnishes him with his poetic capital and in giving profusely thereby reproduces the poet's own labor power [sa force de travail], which essentially consists in his capacity to give generously and spontaneously. Like the sun, the poet pours forth his voice more abundantly, over-amply, more than is expected or could be predicted or determined in advance by any law or contract. God gives the poet the gift of expression -a surplus-value of His own generosity-and gives him the gift of giving surplus value. The gift in the system of economimesis is always the gift of a content and of a capacity for giving-of a constative thing and a performative act. An immaculate commerce between God and poet, it has its analogue in the city.

The Sun King bestows pensions on the poet, who is therefore not paid a salary, but receives what he needs to sustain his labor power from the beneficence of a solar source; the monarch is "a sort of national fund of letters which serves to soften the rigors of supply and demand in a so-called liberal economy". Derrida is careful not to import into the logic of economimesis the venal constraints of a restricted economy, by supposing that the gift entails an implicit contract marking a debt and guaranteeing in advance a gift in exchange. Although even in such cases, when the purest gift given with the most spontaneous generosity and with no thought of return is nevertheless received as a gift, it has in a sense been paid for by symbolic acknowledgement- which under some circumstances is the best payment of all. Nevertheless, Derrida insists on the way helio-poetics allows Kant to preserve the freedom and spontaneity of pure production-the freedom that defines the highest form of art-within a system that allows everyone to be taken care of, within a system of generosity in no way incompatible with forms of absolutist, even sacred authority.

In the first poetic example Kant gives, the King animates his rational idea-a cosmopolitan ruler at the end of life-with an aesthetic attribute; he compares himself to the setting sun. In the second example, also quoted by Derrida, the mechanism of attribution is reversed: the light streaming from the sun is compared to the calm that springs from virtue. Here, an intellectual concept serves as an attribute of a sensible representation.

The sun streamed forth As calm from virtue springs.

Die Sonne quoll hervor, wie Ruh aus Tugend quilt.

"le soleil jaillissant comme le calme jaillit de la vertu."

In the first example in Kant, that Derrida quotes at the end of the first section, the King animates his rational idea-a cosmopolitan disposition at the end of life-with an aesthetical attribute, when he compares himself at the end of his career to the setting of the sun. The solar source is inverted in Kant's second example and is made the object of an aesthetical attribute, when the poet compares the sun's rising to the springing forth of calm from virtue. The reversal also occurs conceptually when, as here, an intellectual concept serves as the attribute of a sensible representation. In the rhetoric of this comparison, the sun is what is supposed to be unknown, and virtue is presumed by its function as a metaphor, or aesthetical attribute, to be better known. This type of metaphor, of course, is rarer than the obverse since we are usually supposed to find sensible representations more familiar than intellectual concepts and therefore better suited to clarifying what normally seems indeterminate, vague and intangible. In this poetic example, the sun is like virtue, as if virtue could illumi- nate the sun.

By this comparison the imagination is not representing an intellectual concept with which to determine scientifically the limits of the nature of the sun's streaming. This is an intellectual concept-as calm from virtue springs-which functions aesthetically, that is, according to Kant, it serves here to enliven our idea of the sun in so

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far as we have associated with it many different thoughts or secondary representations which are more numerous than can be expressed by any concept. The concept of virtue is not operating as a concept, but in the way a sensible representation enlivens or animates an idea, as an aesthetic attribute. Normally it is the pale cast of intellectual thought, the morbidity of its abstractness that requires the vivifying help of aesthetical attributes to give us to think more than can be comprehended by the limits of the concept. Here, conversely, it is thought that comes to vivify a sensible representation with more thought than can be expressed in words [with more than thought] or "can ever be comprehended in a definite concept." Less than a concept, virtue here as an aesthetical attribute serves only as an approximate representation of the thing, not the concept itself; virtue in this comparison is also more than a concept since it gives more thought to be thought than a concept can express. What it gains on the side of extension, of the vastness which it lends to our idea of the sun's streaming, it loses on the side of concrete determinations of the quellen.

To speak more precisely, the way the sun is like virtue here is not to be understood in the way one image is said to resemble another-in their representational, constative function as reproducible copies of each other's form or content or essence. In this

example, it is the sun's shining that is compared to the streaming forth of calm from virtue. Two quellen are being compared, two modes of springing forth abundantly as from a source; two actions are placed side by side and compared as if one were the double of the other. But how do actions double or copy one another? How do actions imitate? At stake here is the model of imitation Derrida designates in the second half of the term economimesis; the Greek is preserved in the neologism in order to resist the too familiar interpretation of mimesis as imitation, which normally refers to the reproduction of images or representations. To say that two quellen imitate one another is to evoke a performative notion of imitation, one that allows us to understand why a dentist might display on his wall the picture of a monkey brushing his teeth, above the epigraph, "Good examples are contagious." Examples not only reflect, they touch; they not only illustrate, they transform. A good example, merely by performing itself being what it is, incites another to repeat the performance, to enact the same role. Performative mimesis refers to this possibility of one action being an enactment of another.

In "Economimesis" Derrida reminds us that in the third Critique Kant has a reflection on monkeys. To be exact, Derrida notes that while for Aristotle mimesis is a prerogative of the human, Kant distinguishes the merely mechanical imitation of aping [Affengeblirde, ? 49] from the production of the pure artist who in imitating nature is not servilely dependent on its laws and prescriptions but freely creates a double of nature, an other of nature that proceeds in its freedom to be as "naturally" itself, as original and exemplary, as actual nature. Here the sun's shining is illuminated by a comparison with the shining calm that springs forth from virtue. The manner of their different quellen allows one to clarify the other, to be as it were the imitation of the other; the one streaming forth in the very transparency of its mode of being con- ceptual allows us better to understand our material representation of the sun's streaming. It is as if the way calm springs from virtue spontaneously enacted, freely performed the same gesture that the sun enacts when it shines freely forth. The imitation or comparison is between two freedoms, two actions which are in themselves the freest pouring forth of the purest abundant production. We have here

something like what Derrida calls "that free imitation of a freedom that freely imitates divine freedom." Imitation in this sense may be understood by analogy with the way one says an actor imitates a king. The greatness of the actor does not consist in his impersonating, mechanically aping this or that king, but in his enacting himself, as it were spontaneously, the kingly spontaneity of a "real" king. If an actor were to imitate the princely generosity of an absolute monarch, like Louis or Frederick, he might imagine himself to be like the sun, divulging his beneficence on the grateful subjects of his estate the way the sun shines forth. Quellen.

But how does the sun shine or spring? What is the nature and what is the ethic of shining that springs forth like calm from virtue? In this poetic example, the streaming




of calm from virtue is aesthetically attributed to the sun's shining. The intellectual concept, functioning here as a metaphor, is supposed to enliven the liveliest sensible representation (the solar source of life) with the pale shadow of thought. As we have seen, virtue here is not a concept given to the sun by the understanding but is bestowed by the imagination, approximately, aesthetically, as if the streaming of the sun could be animated by a brighter, wider idea of streaming, by a more ghostly intellectual streaming that haunts the sun and enlivens the very source of life.

What can be compared to the sun's shining, if it is the sun which is the source of all comparison-if it is the prodigal abundance of the sun that allows us to think how an aesthetical attribute can give more thought than can be expressed in a concept by words. It is this giving more, this gift of surplus and over-abundance that it is pre- eminently the gift of the sun to give. How can anything be given or attributed to the sun? Calm streaming from virtue can be attributed aesthetically to the sun because calm has already been understood as streaming like the sun; the repetition (quoll, quilt) means that virtue attributes to the sun more of the abundance which it originates. The circle of streaming between sun and virtue is an infinite circle. Between virtue and the sun is a passage to infinity: the gift of one uses the gift of the other to give itself the gift it gives. The circle is theological; it describes the way God giving to Nature gives Genius to the Poet who gives speech to men who give thanks to God.

God in the Kantian system of economimesis breaks out of the venal round of commercial transactions and contractual exchange in order to contract an infinite pact-says Derrida-with himself. As soon as the infinite is given-as by the over- abundance of a solar source-as soon as one trys to think the thought of an infinite gift, the opposition and perhaps even the distinction between a restricted economy and a general one tends to dissolve. Economimesis, as we have seen, is a system in which the infinite pays off-not by any vulgar commercialism (God's gift is given without counting, without commerce, immaculately) but nevertheless the infinite abundance of purely productive generosity insures that the circle will circulate. Every point on the circle is a value and a surplus value that gives more than could be expected, could be promised or contractually indebted for, because the gift that it has received is the capacity to give abundantly, the freedom of spontaneous generosity, of infinite expenditure. Every point on the circle is absolutely free in its pure productivity but every point contracts a debt with itself, returns its gift to itself, on the infinite circle of economimesis. That circle also describes the logic of a certain pure morality, the morality that resides in the idea of man's freedom to imitate the freedom of God, or the Sun. Economimesis is the logic of helio-poetics that links the sun to virtue and permits all the sorts of ideological alliances that Derrida evokes in the first line of this essay between empirical culturalism and pure morality--between an idea of man's freedom having the spontaneity of a natural production and yet separated from nature, from any mechanical, animal condition, by the culturalism or morality attached to man's pure productive freedom. All vulgar socio-biology presupposes the ontological difference between man and animal in order then to use the animal to explain the origin and nature of man. In every such explanation there is always implicit a passage to infinity. Something gives in the mode of overflowing.

Zarathustra asks the sun to bless him so that he in turn might fill up and overflow with happiness which will pour forth over all.

So bless me, thou peaceful eye, that without Envy can even look upon excessive (allzugrosses) Good Fortune.

Bless the cup, which will overflow, so that its golden water may flow from it and carry the Reflection of thy Happiness over all. ["Prologue"]

The sun's gift or blessing is interpreted here in an economy of overflowing, not within a system of exchange, but by thinking the passage between the limit and limitless, between the cup and the lip, between what in the contained exceeds the con- tainer. The passage to infinity-between the finite and the infinite-is also, Derrida suggests, the way we think the movement between a "kantianism" and an "hegelian-

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ism"-between, say, the paradoxical logic of the antinomies and the dialectical logic of speculative reflexivity. Like the aesthetical attribute, which expresses more than can be contained in a concept determined by words, the sun presses out from itself a limitless quantity. What is a limitless quantity? In the third Critique it is regularly associated with the sublime. Derrida at the end of the first part of "Economimesis" quotes the sentence Kant gives as a commentary upon the second poetic example, in which the punctilious philosopher invites the reader to share his solar vision of happiness: "The consciousness of virtue, if we substitute it in our thoughts for a virtuous man, diffuses in the mind a multitude of sublime and restful feelings, and a boundless prospect of a joyful future, to which no expression measured by a definite concept completely attains."

For Kant there are two kinds of sublime-the mathematical and the dynamic. The dynamic in fact is a modification of the mathematical and obeys the same principle of organization. The sublime is an aesthetic experience which means for Kant-as Hegel never fails to recall-a subjective one. It is an experience of pleasure or satisfaction, of Wohlgefallen, which unlike the calm associated with the experience of the beautiful moves and excites us. The sublime moves us, unlike the experience of the beautiful, because its object arouses in us contradictory feelings of pleasure-what Kant calls negative pleasure-and because its object is not able to be represented with the calm repose of the beautiful. In order to be able to call an object beautiful it must be able to be distinguished and differentiated from other objects whose limits and terminuses-whose determined margins-can be precisely and unmistakably drawn. The feeling of excitement that accompanies the sublime is aroused, says Kant, by "a formless object." Such a thing is hard to conceive; indeed Kant makes it clear that he knows that it is quite impossible, for he says that when we experience the sublime we do it in relation to an object "in so far as in it or by occasion of it boundlessness [Unbegrenzheit] is represented." The object of the sublime itself-being a determined entity--is not without form, but its form has the power to represent itself to us as boundless. And it is the subjective experience of pleasure or satisfaction we find in the contemplation of vastness, of greatness, of limitless magnitude that is sublime. Kant says that he himself finds it to be a surprising but unmistakable fact that we can have an aesthetic experience of an object whose attribute is sheer size: a complex experience of subjective satisfaction, mingled with the fear that accompanies feelings of respect, as we contemplate the size of what is absolutely great. The fact that we call this experience aesthetic means that this estimation of boundless magnitude belongs to the imagination which is the highest faculty of sensible representation in man. The intuition of sheer greatness is not an a priori concept of the understanding, even less a purely sensible representation of an entity in nature; neither is it a supra-sensible category like the laws of rational morality. It is therefore a judgment, that is a subjective representation that only approximates the universal validity and general certainty of a concept.

The idea that we can have an aesthetic experience of magnitude is further com- plicated by the distinction between greatness or size and absolute greatness. "We call that sublime [Kant never prejudices the question of whether there is a sublime; the

rigor of his analysis depends on his always analyzing locutions: what is said by ordinary language or common sense, as well as by the history of scholastic philosophy, a certain doxa.]-we call that sublime which is absolutely great." There is greatness or size which is measurable and there is that for which no unit of measure can be represented as being adequate, because it it precisely that which is greater than everything. It is that-says Kant-in relation to which everything else is small. The sublime may therefore be called a mathematical sublime since the experience is concerned with mere estimation or measuring. When something appears so great that it cannot be measured by comparison with any unit of measure, then it is absolutely, beyond all limits or finitude, infinitely great.

But how does one measure greatness or size? How does one estimate the magnitude of anything? Mathematically, says Kant; that is, by numbers, by counting numbers. But how does one count or what is called counting? Let us return to the




experience of the sublime, which insofar as it is an aesthetic experience concerns a judgment, and whatever we present in intuition according to the precepts of judgment is phenomenal and as such a quantum: all phenomena have some magnitude or size. The estimation of size belongs to the faculty of the imagination which is the source of all our judgments and therefore the seat of our conception both of greatness itself and of absolute greatness: the limit between an estimation of size, any magnitude whatever, and the estimation of the boundlessness that provokes the sublime lies within the imagination. Indeed the boundlessness which exceeds all our power to estimate or count, the infinity that exceeds all number, turns out to be the very limitlessness that makes it possible to count at all.

Suppose in wanting to measure things, we took as our unit of measure "the average size of men known to us, of animals of a certain kind [like horses], trees, houses, mountains, etc." In order to use the thing as a measure or as a unit for estimating the magnitude of other things, and in order to do it numerically (the mountain is 500 men tall), the imagination must perform two operations. Both of them require infinity. The first is the operation to infinity that Kant calls apprehension (apprehensio, Kand adds in parentheses in case we forget the scholastic origins of this psychology of faculties) which is allied to the understanding and its logical schemata. It is the metonymic process which allows us to place one unit next to another in a progressive series. Apprehension is the operation of the faculty of imagination that exercises itself on the multiplicity which may be seen to compose any entity that is always presumed to have parts; there is always some unit of measure smaller than the unit with which we are measuring--in this case, men to measure mountains. Apprehension aligns the parts in a series, enumerates the units one after another, next to another-in time or space--in order to determine "how great" something is.

Apprehension requires memory, at least the capacity to remember one and another-to remember that this is the other of one. If between one and two, the one is forgotten, then counting cannot be said to occur. Estimation that occurs through the operation of apprehension in the imagination is an act of comparison, says Kant-a mediated acitivity that requires the reference to a second object in order to perform an estimation of the first. But too much memory makes counting impossible; counting, the imagination needs only to keep simultaneously in mind, to comprehend in single manifold, the size of a few numbers in the series (10 in the decimal scale, 4 in the quaternary) in order to progress without difficulty to infinity. The laws of combination of numbers that the understanding gives imagination allows it to proceed "of itself to infinity without anything hindering it." When the unit of measure is not a number but some intuition of the imagination ("the average size of men known to us") apprehension proceeds to estimate size in relation to it merely by way of progression "in accordance with an assumed principle of progression." Apprehension has no trouble conceiving infinity as the possibility of limitlessly continuing to apply the metonymic principle of combination, the assumed principle of progression, with no inherent reason why the mind should encounter any limit on its capacity "because the numerical concepts of the understanding, by means of progression, can make any measure adequate to any given magnitude." It may be boring, this infinity, it is nevertheless possible for the imagination to apprehend it as the possibility of endless combination. This infinity, says Kant, is a logical one that comes to the apprehension from the understanding that provides it with the schema for combining numbers. It is to be distinguished from the aesthetical infinity, which arises out of the imagination's purely subjective intuition.

Aesthetically, counting to infinity is boring, the opposite of the feeling of the sublime that excites, arouses, and animates the mind and is associated with the aesthetic estimation of magnitude, the intuition of the infinitely absolutely great. Counting is boring. Can the boring be sublime? Can the sublime be boring? Only in a manner of speaking, as when, in the first case, you read La Nouvelle H1oiYse for the second time; or when, in the second case, we read Shelley's "The Triumph of Life" for the first. Strictly speaking, the purposiveness of counting is logical, not aesthetical -says Kant.

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Simultaneously at work in the imagination is a second operation necessary for the estimation of magnitude that Kant calls comprehension (comprehensio). Kant recognizes that any use the imagination makes of a quantum received in intuition for the purpose of measuring or estimation cannot proceed exclusively by means of apprehension. For in comparing one unit with another, for the purpose of counting, or in the estimation of one thing with reference to another, something is always pre- supposed-namely, the size of the unit which is serving as the fundamental unit of measure for determining size. In order to measure mountains with reference to men, we must assume that a certain average size is familiarly known. The average size of men, our fundamental unit of measure, may be the rule with which we determine the size of other things, but it in turn presupposes that we have some other fundamental unit-a foot, for example-with which to measure the size of man that in the first instance was merely assumed. If apprehension were the only operation of the imagination it would never be able to count, for it would quickly find itself in an infinite regress of having to measure the size of its measure with a unit of fundamental measure whose size would need measuring in turn. In order to stop that infinite regress, the imagination must have the capacity to seize a size or greatness-a quantum or

magnitude--directly, by means of an "aesthetic" subjective operation of

judgment, without the mediation of some other fundamental unit of measure. Such a grasp of comprehension seizes size in a single intuition, as a totality. Whereas apprehension understands the size of something as the homogeneous collection of its parts, comprehension judges a magnitude of totality presented at once to the imagination. In that sense the magnitude it grasps is equal only to itself, a size, says Kant, "which is like itself alone." If apprehension may be thought of as a metonymic operation, it depends for its possibility on what one might call the metaphoric operation of comprehension, which postulates a relation of equivalence, not between one term and another, but between one term and itself. The aesthetical comprehension of size or magnitude immediately intuits a quantum which is only equal to itself, which is unlike everything else except itself, which cannot be compared to anything else since it is the immediately given equivalent form which is the measure by which everything else may be measured. Such greatness is absolute. It is that in comparison to which nothing can be compared, to which everything appears to be small. It is absolutely great or infinitely great, and as such it is indistinguishable from what provides the experience of the sublime. It is as if a micro-experience of the sublime was the condition of every mathematical estimation of size.

But if we call anything, not only great, but absolutely great in every point of view (great beyond all comparison), i.e. sublime, we soon see that it is not permissible to seek for an adequate standard of this outside itself, but merely in itself. It is a magnitude which is like itself alone [Critique of Judgment, ? 25, p. 88].

At the heart of the most familiar act of measurement is an aesthetic judgment of absolute size, or of size intuited absolutely, which is indistinguishable from the aesthetic judgment of the sublime. Both depend on the possibility of thinking a metaphoric figure of equivalence, the metaphor of a figure without comparison, a figure so resembling itself that it is only able to be equivalent to itself. Such a powerful self-equivalence requires the idea or produces the idea of infinity-aesthetic infinity. For we have seen that apprehension is the infinity of the mind's capacity for combining in an endless series of progressions, and that is the mathematical infinity which the mind has no difficulty apprehending. Whereas the aesthetic infinity is the intuition of a totality which is so like itself, so in-itself-for-itself that it does not permit of being judged in relation to anything outside itself, that it gives rise to the aesthetic idea of the sublime-the idea of what is absolutely infinitely great beyond all comparison. The infinity of the absolutely great is what the imagination in the experience of the sublime cannot represent to itself, and yet in every aesthetic representation of size or magnitude is implicit an idea of the absolutely, infinitely great as




the condition of an immediate intuition of a given totality. Comprehension, says Kant, has no standard with which to sensibly represent the totality of infinity, for that would require some definite standard by which to measure what is without limits or finitude. And yet the very constitution of finitude, the very possibility of estimating of measuring size depends on an immediate aesthetic judgement that contains the idea of a thing which is like itself along, beyond comparison, absolutely, that is

infinitely great. The mystery of this Kantian self-equivalence that underlies the most common acts of measuring, this aesthetic experience with its infinite self-reflexivity -which already smacks of Hegelian self-consciousness--is also the source of value. In its structure is the intuition of something like a solar source of abundant wealth, a

golden principle of infinite productivity that underlies the construction of numbers and the equivalent form of value which in Kapital leads Marx to discover the "dazzling money form". The mystery of money or the glitter of gold depends for its analysis on the postulation of a form of value which in its structure is aesthetically sublime. A certain passage to infinity within the finite is at the heart of abundance and wealth; it is the logic of economimesis that makes gold gelt, glittering with all the vivifying, animating power of the sun.

Marx, at the beginning of Kapital, proposes to perform a task never even attempted by bourgeois economics, "to trace the development of the expression of value contained in the value-relation of commodities from its simplest, almost imperceptible outline to the dazzling money form." The simplest expression of value is "evidently" that of one commodity to another commodity of a different kind.

x commodity A = y commodity B or: x commodity A is worth y commodity B.

Marx immediately adds: "The whole mystery of the form of value lies hidden in this

simple form. Our real difficulty, therefore, is to analyze it" [Kapital, Vol. I, part 1, chap. 1, 3a].

To analyze this enigma Marx postulates the necessity of distinguishing the "two

poles" of this simplest expression of the value relation. They are the relative form of value and the equivalent form of value. They are "two inseparable moments which

belong to and mutually condition each other; but at the same time, they are mutually exclusive or opposed extremes, i.e. poles of the expression of value" [Ibid]. In this

they exactly resemble the poles of comprehension and apprehension, of equivalent and relative magnitudes, which are opposed to one another but are mutually required in order for the imagination to perform the operation of estimating magnitude with numbers. The distinction in Marx depends on the possibility that in the equation of

commodity value-relation, the value of one commodity is expressed relative to another

commodity whose value is not expressed, because it is the pole equivalent to itself in the equation; and what is equivalent to itself, and not relative to something else, cannot express its value. "I cannot, for example," says Marx, "express the value of linen in linen. 20 yards of linen = 20 yards of linen is not an expression of value"

[Ibid.]. It expresses nothing, the expression of equivalence, for as Kant says of the ab-

solutely great, "it is a magnitude which is like itself alone." "It is not permissible to seek for an adequate standard of this outside itself, but merely in itself," Kant adds, as if here speaking of linen in linen. For Marx, the equation 20 yards of linen = 20 yards of linen is not an expression of value, "rather the contrary." What is the contrary of the expression of value, which is no expression at all? The contrary is the mystery of equivalent form: "20 yards of linen are nothing but twenty yards of linen, a definite quantity of linen considered as an object of utility." Those yards are in their equivalent form, if inexpressible as value, of such supremely inherent value that they have no value except in so far as they are in themselves what they are, a certain immediately given quantum of value magnitude relative to nothing outside themselves. The equivalent form is exactly equivalent in its logic to Kant's aesthetic comprehension of magnitude. And just as counting needs to presuppose a standard or fundamental unit of measure by which magnitude can be estimated, Marx needs the inexpressible,

36



incomparable value of the equivalent form in order to construct the expression of value which eventually leads to the dazzle of money or gold. He needs, that is, the aesthetic estimation of a magnitude of value, the sublime infinity of equivalent form, whereby whenever a magnitude is given immediately as "like itself alone" it postulates an absolute beyond all measure and finitude, that which is comparable to nothing: the infinity of the absolutely great, that is, the sublime. Simultaneously, the inexpressible mystery of the equivalent form is what permits the institution of an expression of value within the limits of a restricted economy, as the concept of value that governs the possibilities of commodity exchange and money-form.

In Chapter 2, when Marx comes to speak about gold, the notion of the equivalent form reasserts itself. Since gold is money, that means it can be universally exchanged; it is the standard against which the value of all other commodities is measured, hence it is an equivalent form. Money has no price, says Marx.

Therefore, even if we know that gold is money, and consequently directly exchangeable with all other commodities, this still does not tell us how much 101b. of gold is worth, for instance. Money, like every other commodity, cannot express the magnitude of its value except relatively in other commodities [Kapital, Vol. 1, chap. 2].

Gold, in order to be money, cannot express itself; it can only speak its value within a relation to other commodities. In order to be the medium in which value is expressed it must be that which has no expression of value, but is, as it were, infinitely valuable. Sublimely and beautifully valuable; infinitely and divinely valuable. Gold comes from God; he issues it forth in golden rays from his sacred banks and it pours forth its abundance by virtue of the infinity it contains in its source. Like calm that from virtue springs, the golden gift of money brings with it sublime and restful feelings of happiness. Money is beautiful, the source of subjective feelings of pleasure, or as Marx quotes Herr Roscher saying, "Money is 'a pleasant commodity'" [Ibid.]. It gives pleasure, a certain sublime Wohlgefallen. The gift gold gives is, like the sun, a source of infinite abundance; it is in itself the gift of the sun, of God who gives the gift of limitless giving.

Marx quotes Christopher Columbus writing in his letter from Jamaica in 1503:

'Gold is a wonderful thing! Its owner is master of all he desires. Gold can even enable souls to enter Paradise.'

And Marx continues on gold's divine sublimity as the universal equivalent form of value.

Since money does not reveal what has been transformed into it, everything, commodity or not, is convertible into money. Everything becomes saleable and purchaseable. Circulation becomes the great social retort into which everything is thrown, to come out again as the money crystal. Nothing is immune from this alchemy, the bones of the saints cannot withstand it, let alone more delicate res sacrosanctae, extra commercium hominum [Ibid].

Not only is there gold in the dusty bones of saints, but the goddess of love herself can make a profit from the immaculate intercourse of her virgins. Marx continues in a footnote:

Henry ll, roi trbs chritien, robbed monastaries etc. of their relics and turned them into money. It is well known what part the despoiling of the Delphic temples by the Phocians played in the history of Greece. Among the ancients, temples served as the dwellings of the gods of commodities. They were "sacred banks." With the Phoenicians, a trading people par excellence, money was the transmuted shape of everything. It was, therefore, quite in




order that the virgins who at the feast of the goddess of love gave themselves to strangers should offer to the goddess the piece of money they received in payment [Ibid].

The virgins give what is most purely themselves to strangers who can most purely receive it, since they incur no debt of familiarity, who in turn give the virgins what for the Phoenicians is the sacred par excellence, the money of gold which pours forth from the purses of the grateful strangers into the hands and through the hands of the virgins on its way to rejoin its sacred source in the lap of the goddess of love. In a venal interpretation, the virgins are whores, but in the Phoenician understanding of economimesis, the profane medium of money payment lets itself be transmuted into the sacred element of divine giving through the alchemical power of the crystalline infinity-the little self-reflecting instance of equivalent form-the sublime drop of sunshine that inhabits every ounce of gold, which magically, says Marx, becomes money "immediately on its emergence from the bowels of the earth," into the light of its father the sun. The sun's gold is gelt. Gold is the fitting gift of solar abundance to match the generosity of the goddess whose gift is the treasure of love.

The Phoenician goddess of love, whose temple was a sacred bank, was Isis. That brings us to the third poetic expression in section 49 of the third Critique. Kant adds a confidential footnote to the passage on the boundless prospect of a joyful future, which Derrida quotes as well:

Perhaps nothing more sublime was ever said, and no sublimer thought ever expressed than the famous inscription on the Temple of Isis (Mother Nature): "I am all that is and that was and that shall be, and no mortal hath lifted my veil" [Critique of Judgment, ? 49].

The Veil of Isis, of course, is the veil of appearances, of Maya-all that is and its illusion. Appearance is a veil that reveals what it hides. Nature conceals itself behind the veil of illusion, only from time to time piercing the surface of mere appearance to reveal itself aletheically in its true--appearance. Appearance is simultaneously mere appearance, the lie that masks the truth, and the medium in which everything including truth must appear in order to manifest itself, to exteriorize itself in the plenitude of the full and present manifestation of what it is. The veil of Isis is therefore the medium of the play of appearances, the texture of the analogical surface where everything appears and disappears, like the cloak of color that Nature throws over herself, the prism of resemblance and correspondences. Isis is also always Iris, and her veil is the scarf of Iris or the rainbow. Paul De Man writes:

A traditional symbol of the integration of the phenomenal with the tran- scendental world, the natural synthesis of water and light in the rainbow is, in Shelley, the familiar "dome of many-coloured glass" whose "stain" is the earthly trace and promise of an Eternity in which Adonais' soul is said to dwell "like a star." As such, it irradiates all the textures and forms of the natural world with the veil of the sun's farbiger Abglanz, just as it provides the analogical light and heat that will make it possible to refer to the poet's mind as "embers" ["Shelley Disfigured," Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: The Seabury Press, 1979), p. 54].

Nerval's description of the veil in "Isis," like that of Apuleius, his literary model in "Sylvie" and fellow devotee of the syncretic Mother of Nature, (bride and mother of the Nile God Osiris, the solar-water divinity of Nature's pure productivity, its out- pouring of wealth and abundance) has the glittering changing color of iridescence like the rainbow's prism of water and light or like the silver shine of a clair de lune. Isis is a lunar goddess and her iridescence is better suited, says Nerval, for aesthetically animating, for bringing life to the ruins of Pompey than the light of the sun. It gives not life but the gift of the illusion of life to the ruins it haunts. The effect of iridescence

38



is to produce something like a ghostly wink on the surface of nature; it does not itself add color but lends to color the peculiar play of intensity and shadow that arises when a surface is thickened by a double layer whose diverse refractions interfere and cor- respond with one another in regular patterns of intermittance. It is an emblem of the place where the surface of appearance calls attention to its being surface-where color remarks its own being a veil. As De Man argues, there is no difficulty in taking the veil of Isis as a symbol of integration or synthesis between what appears in the phenomenal world and what is hidden in the crypt of nature-between the sensible and the suprasensible, between sun and virtue. Surely the goddess Isis can be associated with the sun, and her iridescence can be explained by the system of economimesis -the moon being then the reflection or dark light of the sun, its dialectical shadow, a soleil noir whose gleaming blackness is the hole behind the light from which light emerges or the hole in the eye that cannot see what it allows to enter. Dialectically, Isis belongs to the streaming forth of the sun and to the sublime commerce of its pure productivity.

The Phoenician virgins give themselves to strangers who accept their gift and give gold in return which is bestowed upon the goddess. Is there another circle of giving possible, some other principle of exchange between poet and nature-which would precisely not be exchange or gift? Is there an outside of the system of helio- poetics wherein the gift does not always return and where the circle between nature and man need not be conceived in terms of economimetic indebtedness? Can one imagine a circle of giving in which wealth could be poetically transferred without the politics of solar liberality?

In "Tristesse de la lune," Baudelaire compares the moon one evening to a beautiful woman on numerous pillows, swooning on soft avalanches of clouds and indolently watching their white flowery visions mount in the sky. Then the tercets:

Quand parfois sur ce globe, en sa langueur oisive, Elle laisse filer une larme furtive Un porte pieux, ennemi du sommeil,

Dans le creux de sa main prend cette larme pile, Aux reflets irises comme un fragment d'opale, Et la met dans son coeur loin des yeux du soleil.

(When sometimes on this globe, in her indolent languor, She lets a furtive tear escape, A pious poet, ennemy of sleep, In the hollow of his hand takes this pale tear With iridescent reflections like an opal fragment And puts it in his heart far from the eyes of the sun.)

[Les Fleurs du Mal, "Tristesse de la lune," LXV.]

The other of a system of pure giving is theft. Here the moon goddess gives the poet the gift of her tear in a gesture of the most indolent generosity. What she gives is not a token of her reflected solar abundance but of something like the vanishing trace of her distracted hand. She does not give the tear; it escapes her like a thief. Furtive, from the Latin fur, thief, and furtum, theft, is the attribute stealing from the tear, whose opalescence is the enemy of the sun's streaming. The pale treasure of the moon's tear (6 pile) that threads its way into the hollow of the poet's hand does not fill it up with overflowing abundance, the surplus value of solar genius which he in turn divulges. The furtive tear is not given, but taken by the poet in the hollow of his hand, and like a thief, he puts it out of sight in the hollow of his heart. The poet steals from what he steals, or steals what is stolen away. The moon's gift is the gift of what steals itself away from possession and steals the self's capacity for possession. The tear stolen steals the heart it inhabits.




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The model here of poetic expressivity is no longer that of a generous solar illumination but of an indeterminate play of contrasting and complimentary reflections on a surface invisible to the sensible or supra-sensible eye of the enemy sun. This iridescence has no source, no brilliance, no value; it is a light that is not light or dark but that steals the light from the darkness and lets it glimmer with no enlightenment in the intermittent intensities of opalescence.




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