Adorno and Philosophical Modernism by Roger S. Foster

Author:Roger S. Foster
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2012-03-11T05:00:00+00:00

4. The Convulsion of the Subject in the Sublime

According to Adorno, Albrecht Wellmer writes, “the sublime is a modification, an intensification of the beautiful, not its actual negation as in Kant.”[14] My reading of the sublime and its centrality to aesthetic experience is close to Tom Huhn’s perceptive account of the Kantian account of the sublime and its relation to what he refers to as a taking pleasure in domination.[15] In the sublime, he suggests, nature “is accorded power in order for subjectivity to stage itself as dominant over it.”[16] Kant makes a number of introductory distinctions, in the first section of the Analytic of the Sublime, between judgments of the sublime and of the beautiful. He claims, firstly, that in contrast to beauty, which concerns the form of the object, the sublime is associated with a formlessness and absence of limitation (KU § 23). This is the basis for Kant’s claim that the experience of the sublime comprises the imagination’s striving to present an idea of reason, and not, as in the case of the beautiful, its interaction with the understanding. Secondly, Kant suggests that the pleasure afforded by the sublime differs from that in the beautiful. The latter, he suggests, is akin to a “feeling of the furtherance of life.” It is as though we feel empowered by what the beautiful purports to reveal about the suitability of nature to our cognitive faculties. In the sublime, however, what we experience is firstly a “momentary checking (Hemmung)” of our vital powers, followed by a consequently more powerful outflow (Ergießung) of them. This means, Kant claims, that the sublime is not a “play” like the beautiful, but is a sober and serious employment of the understanding. He also identifies this experience with a Rührung, a being affected or being touched that seems to reach the subject at a more fundamental level than the play of the beautiful. Kant restates the dual nature of the sublime in the paradoxical formula of the “negative pleasure” afforded by it. We seem to be at the same time attracted towards the object and repelled by it. The object that occasions a judgment of the sublime seems to promise us something, it offers us the prospect of a certain pleasure. But it repels us at the same time, and precisely because the pleasure it offers to us is one that is a threat to our identity as discursively constituted subjects. Kant will try to inoculate the subject against this threat by associating this negative pleasure with the respect for the moral law, which he will claim is occasioned by the object in a judgment of the sublime. Instead of simply, as in the beautiful, staging the semblance of our attunement towards nature, the sublime can then become a staging of our superiority, Überlegenheit, over nature (KU § 28).

The sublime returns us to the full-blown fear of being overwhelmed by a chaotic nature, and it is this fear, furthermore, that underlies the formation of the constituting subject.

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