Lyotard and the 'figural' in Performance, Art and Writing by Kiff Bamford

Author:Kiff Bamford
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781441181909
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

The Sublime

A new sublime may have been ‘a terrible prospect’ to Meaghan Morris writing in 1988 but Lyotard’s writings on the sublime have become central to his aesthetic legacy, particularly in the Anglophone context. In the intervening two decades there have been different attempts to deal with the gendered implications of the concept, though never directly by Lyotard himself.1 Nevertheless, given the importance of the body as a source of inarticulate affect, as we began to explore in the previous chapter, it is possible to contextualize Lyotard’s own approach to the sublime within a wider discourse of the body and to argue for the specificity of his contribution.

This chapter concerns Lyotard’s use of the sublime in his writings on art, considering both the essays which have become his best-known contribution to contemporary aesthetics and the role played by the sublime in his major philosophical work. The different contexts to which these writings contribute, in both France and the United States, will be highlighted as part of the broader aims of the book to investigate the extent to which Lyotard’s work has been caught between these two traditions. What is peculiar to his writings on art in relation to the sublime is the use of sources other than that of Kant’s Third Critique, particularly his reference to Edmund Burke’s Enquiry in three of the essays collected in The Inhuman. Burke’s sublime was an unusual source for thinkers in France at this time and it demonstrates one of the ways in which Lyotard was rethinking the sublime rather than merely adapting an existing concept. In his introduction to The Inhuman he castigates the uncritical acceptance of Kant’s humanism by many contemporary writers – a humanism based on reason which has led, he continually reminds us, to the horrors of modernity which, following Adorno, he unites under the name ‘Auschwitz’. Although Lyotard’s references to Burke’s sublime are considerably less detailed than his readings of Kant, the emphasis which he places on time, the physiological aspects of the body and the terror of death opens up a series of different possibilities in relation to the process of thought through art. Indeed, it is the idea of a sublime which is particular to Lyotard – referred to by others as a postmodern or Lyotardian sublime – that suggests the often noted ‘turn to Kant’ does not necessitate a complete break with the earlier libidinal work nor a rejection of the earlier approaches to art as having an essential critical capacity. In describing Lyotard’s work on the sublime I will emphasize the role of Burke in some detail before turning to the aspects of Kant’s thought which Lyotard also adapts to his own ends in the development of The Differend. This interface between Kant, the sublime and the differend connects with that outlined so far in this book in relation to the figural and is key to an understanding of Lyotard’s propositions for art which extend beyond a passive witnessing to an engagement that is still radical.

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