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J. Jennifer Jones, "Introduction:
Romantic Training: Education and the Sublime."
"Romantic Training"
introduces this special issue, which is devoted to
exploring some of the ways we can think the entanglements
of two concepts that are constitutive to Romanticism but
are not often thought together, education and the sublime.
As a means of introduction, this essay defines what has
been a significant inspiration to me in putting together
this special issue, both in terms of its topic and its
contributors: the possibility of an immanent pedagogical
sublime. Theorization of this structure of possibility
includes the analysis of Immanuel Kant’s
pedagogical theory in relation to the critical philosophy;
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s
theorization of Kant, specifically the third critique, in
her own pedagogical theory, which foregrounds Romantic
poetry; the work of Romantic poetry in itself theorizing a
Romantic pedagogical sublime, particularly Wordsworth; and
finally, a figuring of an immanent pedagogical sublime
through the example and theorization of the equine sport,
Dressage.
[go
to essay]
Forest Pyle, "Letter on an Aestheticist Education."
Pyle's epistolary essay approaches the topic of a sublime
education first as a particular pedagogical assignment: just
how does one teach the sublime as a mode of aesthetic
experience as well as a question posed for and by philosophical
aesthetics. This directive prompts readings of two poems by
Shelley which explicitly link aesthetic experience to forms of
instruction: "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" and
"Mont Blanc." He argues that one lesson to be learned
from Shelley's poetic teaching is an aestheticism.
Subsequent sections in the essay address the implications of
this aestheticism for those who resist it (de Man, Spivak) and
those who don't (Wilde, Foucault). He concludes the essay by
turning to a passage—at once sublime and pedagogical—from
The Triumph of Life which arrives at what he calls a
genuinely radical aestheticism.
[go to
essay]
Christopher Braider, "Unlearning the
Sublime."
The essay argues that, if the
sublime continues to fascinate scholars and philosophers
long after the critical dismantling of its metaphysical
underpinnings in Kant, Hegel, and Romanticism, it is
because it has found a refuge in the topology of critical
thought as such. The solution of the ongoing problem of the
sublime accordingly lies in investigating the afterlife
this topology grants not only the sublime itself but
metaphysics even (if not especially) for writers like
Benjamin, Derrida, Agamben, and Zizek committed to the
skeptical and/or materialist deconstruction of the
transcendental pretensions the sublime keeps alive. The
investigation begins with close analysis of the grounds on
which, for Kant, the sublime requires no transcendental
"deduction" or justification of the sort he
provides the beautiful. What emerges from this analysis is
the fact that, where the beautiful ultimately falls under
the net of empirical (historical, ethnographic) skepticism,
the sublime is naturalized as an expression of a structure
of feeling to which most critics and philosophers remain
wedded despite their programmatic hostility to the idealist
patterns of thought they keep reproducing. As a probative
case in point, the essay analyses how Benjamin's
critique of historical materialism in the parable of the
chess-playing automaton in "Theses on the Philosophy
of History" betrays the more worldly and humane vision
of human experience outlined in his earlier essay on the
Storyteller. This in turn sets the stage for discussion of
the lessons to be learned from Hume's refusal to talk
about the sublime at all and from Kierkegaard's
"leap of faith" construed less as a gesture of
blind faith than as what he himself described as a dance
step the whole art of which consists of coming gracefully
back to earth.
[go to essay]
Anne C. McCarthy , "Dumbstruck:
Christabel, the Sublime, and the Willing Suspension
of Disbelief."
Readers since William Hazlitt
have commented (often with some anxiety) on the ability of
Coleridge's Christabel to give rise to the
experience of stupidity. This essay argues that rather than
being an index of readerly or authorial failure, stupidity
provides the grounds of sublime experience. The sublime,
for Coleridge, consists in the "Suspension of our
Comparing Power," a phrase which evokes Kant's
description of the "momentary inhibition of the vital
forces followed immediately by an outpouring of them that
is all the stronger." This inhibition or suspension
is, McCarthy argues, analogous to the state of not being
able to "tell" that is so pervasive in
Christabel. Within this context, McCarthy proposes a
broad reconsideration of Coleridge's famous
"willing suspension of disbelief" as a posture of
radical receptivity to the unexpected, one that risks
stupidity and the failure of the sublime. What we
"learn" from the sublime, she concludes, is not
how to replace stupidity with knowledge but rather to
"comprehend" (in a broad sense) the
"experience of stupidity ... that goes beyond
confusion and ignorance or even the knowledge of what we do
not know."
[go to essay]
Deborah Elise White, "Menace to
Philosophy: Jacques Derrida and the Academic
Sublime"
This essay explores how
Derrida’s writings on the institutions
of philosophy (primarily in Du Droit à la
Philosophie) draw on the discourse of the sublime to
rethink the university as a site of institutional
responsibility. In the university, philosophy undergoes
"the risk of presentation"—at
once exposing itself to and yet shielding itself from an
apparently menacing exteriority. In the ironically sublime
setting of "The University in the Eyes of its
Pupils" a sublime temporality, the chance of an
instant or the blink of an eye, is allegorically
represented and extended through a temporally enduring
institutional norm. A similarly allegorical structure
shapes Derrida’s portrait of the
professorial body in "Where a Teaching Body Begins and
How it Ends," a text in which the teaching body is the
focal point of incommensurabilities of letter and spirit or
institution and idea that are directly characterized as
sublime. In both cases, philosophy undergoes a "risk
of presentation" that it cannot avoid. The sublime
also recurs in more oblique fashion throughout Droit
in the text’s many references to
"menace"—as it were, the underside of the
quasi-messianic promise so often invoked in
Derrida’s writings. What is at issue
throughout his writings on the university is the feeling of
menace against which a certain discourse of the sublime and
a certain allegorical (re)presentation seek to erect an
institutional and disciplinary shield as if in defense of
(the right to) philosophy. Yet that same shield, in its
very defensiveness, may be what menaces philosophy most of
all. Through a sometimes ironic figuration of the sublime,
Derrida thus considers how one can defend a right to
philosophy and yet still strive to leave philosophy without
defenses or defensiveness—that is, open to
exteriority and to "the entirely other of a terrifying
future."
[go
to essay]
Paul Hamilton, "The Sublime:
History of an Education."
This essay argues that at least
five main versions of the sublime have recently tried to
account for its excessive or transgressive structure.
Psychoanalysis, taken generally, is committed to explaining
the phantasmal structure by which we typically compensate
for otherwise unsustainable losses of psychic integrity by
educational or progressive advances elsewhere. But the
sublime’s aesthetic component allows it
an opt-out clause freeing it from complete imprisonment
within a psychic economy. The same goes for its putative
escape from normative linguistic patterning. The paper
defends the sublime’s irresponsibility
here against the scepticism of critics from Weiskel to de
Man. The same exorbitance is then investigated in political
and historical contexts, again reading these with or
against a tradition of commentary on the sublime. Finally,
the post-modern sublime’s attempts to
conceive of a politically exemplary but unavowable
community is considered, and this final harnessing of the
sublime to further an educational impetus evaluated.
[go to essay]
Frances Ferguson, "Educational
Rationalization / Sublime Reason."
Like a modern writer like
Pierre Bourdieu who is continually looking at the ways in
which it is possible to draw distinctions between
apparently identical terms (as he does when he notes the
different values of the same gift given at different
times), educational writers like Rousseau, Barbauld,
Bentham, and Kant portrayed education as a process of
recognizing the difference between apparent similarities
and identities (and the identity of apparent contrasts).
They were, that is, shifting attention from the notion of
content and the transmission of a body of knowledge to a
more insistent attention to context and
relationship—the perception of relative
value. For a certain strand of thinker (such as Joseph
Priestley) this constant attention to shifting values leads
to an insistence on the idea of progress itself (rather
than attaining particular goals). A writer like Kant,
however, reverses this forward-lookingness, to discover in
the young and virtually untutored child the foundational
importance of practical reason—in the
form of an interest in gossip, which is in his account a
benign activity of moral entertainment.
[go to essay]
Ian Balfour, "Afterthoughts on the
Sublime and Education; or, 'Teachable
Moments?'"
This essay provides a
commentary on and critique of the other essays in the
volume. It tracks the claims of the several essays with
attention to the status of the examples adduced and the
give and take between examples and theoretical paradigms.
There is also some consideration of the historical
continuities and discontinuities of the theory and the
productions of the sublime.
[go to essay]
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