Notes
1. K. G. Hamilton, “Structure of Milton’s Prose,” as cited, with a diagnostic commentary, in Fish 168. As readers of Fish’s book will note, I endorse his diagnosis.
2. On the beautiful, see below. On truth, see Williams 163: “Everybody everywhere has a concept of truth; indeed, they all have the same concept of truth. (The fact that they may have very different theories of truth just shows how much people’s theories of truth misrepresent their grasp of the concept.)” The most eloquent point in the passage is of course the resort to a parenthesis for the key idea.
3. My colleague Christopher Kopff at the University of Colorado has informed me that, though the author of Peri hypsous is surely not the phantom “Dionysius Longinus,” a name universally regarded as the product of a Byzantine scribal error, there do seem to be good grounds for thinking he is the third-century sophist Cassius Longinus. For the case in the latter’s favor, see Heath. However, though anticipating Heath in attributing the Peri hypsous to Cassius Longinus, the author of the translation I have used notes that the one surviving contemporary list of Cassius Longinus’ works does not mention our text: see Longinus, xvii. As Heath himself acknowledges, moreover, short of the discovery of a papyrus fragment with Cassius Longinus’ name on it, the attribution remains a matter of informed guesswork. We are accordingly left in the odd if interesting position of owing a major current in the history of ideas to an orphan. I will pay tribute to this oddity by conforming to skeptical usage in calling our author “pseudo-Longinus.”
4. The sublime’s role as a structural condition of the possibility of modern (post-Enlightenment) history is forecast in Kant’s pre-critical Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. In section 2, “Of the Attributes of the Beautiful and Sublime in Man in General,” 51-75, a universal taxonomic table of human character types keyed to the traditional humors (the sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, and melancholic) transparently trades on an external standpoint available only to the melancholic, whose distinctive aesthetic characteristic is the sublime. After a discussion of the “beautiful and sublime in the interrelations of the two sexes,” this is then followed, in section 4, by the extension of humoral characteristics to the nations of the world. Only the melancholy have access both to the whole of human nature and, as a consequence, to the full span of human history because they alone have access to the totalizing standpoint sublimity affords. This in turn enables us to modify White’s classic picture of the rhetorical foundations of modern historiography. The precondition of the various modes of “emplotment” different historians bring to the business of writing history is not simply the place occupied in the mythico-tropological scheme of possibilities (e.g., the comic and synedochic for Hegel or the tragic and metaphorical for Nietzsche) but, behind and beneath all of these, the posture of sublimity that gives emplotment a grip.
5. The central problem of limits (the problem itself and the fact that it is central) emerges in the preface to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, 3: “Thus the aim of the book is to draw a limit to thought, or rather—not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to draw a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought).” That this traffic with the limits of thought and expression is essentially traffic with the sublime, already obvious on its face, and emphasized by the very possibility of the amazingly hubristic first sentence of the main body of the text (“The world is all that is the case”), becomes still more so by the laconically pyrotechnical close of the Tractatus: “Wovon mann nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß mann schweigen” ("Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent"). For a comparable sublimization of philosophy keyed to limits, see Derrida’s defense of the Cartesian cogito against the historical reduction to which it is exposed by Foucault, “Cogito et histoire de la folie.” Foucault’s critique of Cartesian reason in the light of rational terror in the face of madness is refuted by aligning the merely historical form Descartes gives reason in his capacity as a being in history with the form of “reason in general,” which not only aims to exceed all limits, including those history imposes, but, in its vocation as a mode of radical “excess,” turns out to be a form of madness in its own right.
6. See Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 117-24. I borrow the phrase from Abrams, who borrows it from Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus.
7. Escaping the self-defeating dogmatisms of metaphysics is in fact the point of departure for the entire critical enterprise, staked out in the preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, 7-15. Kant’s evocation of the “endless controversies” that bedevil metaphysics echoes the picture drawn in the introduction to the book that woke him from his dogmatic slumber, Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature:
Nor is there requir’d such profound knowledge to discover the present imperfect condition of the sciences, but even the rabble without doors may judge from the noise and clamour, which they hear, that all goes not well within. There is nothing which is not the subject of debate, and in which men of learning are not of contrary opinions. The most trivial question escapes not our controversy, and in the most momentous we are not able to give any certain decision. Disputes are multiplied, as if every thing was uncertain; and these disputes are managed with the greatest warmth, as if every thing was certain. Amidst all this bustle ’tis not reason, which carries the prize, but eloquence; and no man needs despair of gaining proselytes to the most extravagant hypothesis, who has art enough to represent it in any favourable colours. The victory is not gained by the men at arms, who manage the pike and the sword; but by the trumpeters, drummers, and musicians of the army. (41-42)
The fact that Hume’s serio-comic portrait of the “present imperfect condition of the sciences,” especially in its emphasis on the “proselytes” rhetoric secures for even “the most extravagant hypothesis,” can apply so readily to the recent and contemporary discourse of the sublime speaks to the deeper issues I am trying to broach.
8. For Kant’s source, Hume, “The Sceptic,” 163; for Hume’s, Pope, “Essay on Criticism,” lines 9-10: “’Tis with our Judgments as our Watches, none / Go just alike, yet each believes his own.”
9. For a demonstration of this point, see my review of Marshall, esp. 187-89.
10. The phrase is Lévinas’s. For characteristic analyses of our relation to the Other (the capital is symptomatic), see Totalité et infini [Time and Infinity] and Le Temps et l’Autre [Time and the Other]. The phrase is not specifically designed for the sublime, but rather for our relation to God and other people (autrui). Still, that Lévinas’s conception of the Other is a cognate of the sublime will become apparent shortly, as will its vulnerability to the polemic I develop later with reference to the modern tradition of sublimity as a whole.
11. On contemporary treatments of the Dutch, see Schama, 257-88. See too Kant’s remarks in the Observations: “A Dutchman is of an orderly and diligent disposition and, as he looks solely to the useful, he has little feeling for what in the finer understanding is beautiful and sublime. A great man signifies exactly the same to him as a rich man, by a friend he means a correspondent, and a visit that makes him no profit is very boring to him. He contrasts as much with a Frenchman as with an Englishman, and in a way he is a German become very phlegmatic” (105).
12. La Rochefoucauld, maxime 136: “There are people who would never have been in love if they had no heard other people talk about love.” (75) All translations from French are my own.
13. The ambiguity informs historical use of the word “specious” itself, whose modern sense takes time separating itself from the prior meaning of having a “persuasive,” “favorable,” or “attractive” (but not necessarily false or misleading) appearance. Gibbon, e.g., invariably uses it in the latter sense—though, in keeping with his ironic view of human conduct, the very fact of offering a favorable or flattering appearance invites skepticism. In a typical example, discussing what he regards as the nefarious collusion of the emperor Constantine and the early Christian Church, Gibbon speaks of the churchly allegorization of the Sybilline verses in Virgil’s fourth eclogue as “sublime predictions” of the Christian revelation: “if a more splendid, and indeed specious, interpretation of the fourth ecologue contributed to the conversion of the first Christian emperor, Virgil may deserve to be ranked among the most successful missionaries of the Gospel” (The Decline and Fall, 1.297).
14. On the specifically political problem of “mastery” (and so of “greatness”) Peri hypsous raises, see Hertz, chap. 1, “A Reading of Longinus,” and Lamb. For a comparable reading of ancient stoicism in the mode of Senecan sublimity, see Braden. Chap. 1 argues that, especially in its Senecan version, stoicism pursues, in the mode of wisdom, the project of world domination the emperor (and again later, the absolutist monarch) forecloses in the political sphere. The Sage accordingly constitutes a rival to, and so double for, his egomaniacal overlord—whence the decompensating anger that drives Senecan tragedy, expressing the universal will-to-power thwarted by the imperial status quo. Thus, in its very sublimity, Senecan stoicism exhibits the commingled ambition and resentment Nietzsche as well as Freud would lead us to suspect.
15. Most of Boileau’s output consists of verse satires and epistles whose horizons are almost entirely bound by literary feuds and friendships with contemporaries. Meanwhile, Boileau’s career reached its apogee with his appointment as historiographe du Roi in 1677. As such, his functions were those of a court propagandist trading in the false sublime of unstinting praise of his absolutist patron. The one great exception is the late Satire XII, “Sur l’équivoque,” on figures of equivocation, and for a start puns, which mounts a last-ditch defense of the classical cultural order he had served so punctiliously (if wittily) throughout his career against the triumphant “moderns” who were in the process of relegating it to irrelevancy. Though beginning as an attack on off-color punning of the sort fashionable (and already satirized) in his youth, “Sur l’équivoque” winds up presenting a history of humanity since the Fall whose theme is the invincibly equivocal nature of language itself, and so of all human judgment, forever condemned to succumb to diabolical misstatement, misrepresentation, and misconstruction. The result is something approaching the sublime, comparable in this to the climax of Pope’s Dunciad or the satirical Jean de La Bruyère’s turn in “Des esprits forts” (“Of Freethinkers, or Wits”), the final section of Les Caractères, to a Pascalian picture of humanity’s miserable littleness in the awe-inspiring perspective of God’s universe.
16. The disjunction of seeing and doing that the sublime enjoins finds an echo in Marshall’s analysis of Fanny Price’s quandary in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, where the cult of “real feeling” associated with a taste for the sublime risks leaving Austen’s heroine powerless to act for the sake of true love (chap. 3). But also note La Rochefoucauld’s maxim 216: “Perfect valor would be to do without witnesses what one would be capable of doing before everbody.” In challenging a sharp distinction between seeing and doing, this admonition undermines our Kantian examples in two ways: by reminding us that what strikes us as sublime is quite possibly an artifact of our presence as witnesses, inspiring what we wrongly perceive as self-forgetful sacrifice; and by reminding us of the Lacanian Gaze under which all of us live in our own eyes, such that we are always playing to some sort of crowd. Consider in this light another of Kant’s examples of the sublime, a poem by Frederick the Great in which that monarch accustoms himself to the thought of his mortality by reimagining it as his last gift to his people:
Oui, finissons sans trouble, et mourons sans regrets,
En laissant l’Univers comblé de nos bienfaits.
Ainsi l’Astre du jour, au bout de sa carrière,
Répand sur l’horizon une douce lumière,
Et les derniers rayons qu’il darde dans les airs
Sont ses derniers soupirs qu’il donne à l’Univers.
(“Yes, let us end untroubled, and die without regrets,
Leaving the World brim-full with our benefactions.
Thus the Star of day, come to the end of its career,
Pours out its sweet light across the horizon,
And the last rays that it shotots through the air
Are its last sighs, its parting gifts to the World.”) (Kant, Critique of Judgment, 184)
The problem of course is that, once we know that Frederick himself wrote these lines, it is hard to shut our ears to the plangent undertone of sentimental self-pity. What the loyal Kant sees as sublime, no doubt in part because he drew parallels between the great king’s labors for his subjects and his own heroic exertions on behalf of philosophical truth, turns out to look rather more like kitsch.
17. I am reminded here, by contrast, of the closing words of Sartre’s autobiographical Les mots (Words). Sartre tells us that he was the son of an Alsatian Protestant who, having rejected his own father’s desire to make him a pastor, nevertheless “kept all his life the taste for the sublime and devoted his zeal to manufacturing pompous circumstances out of small events” (3-4). He accordingly did the next best thing and became a teacher of German. Loyal to his father at least in this, Sartre himself developed a taste for the sublime in the form of the “impossible Redemption” from the passion inutile (the useless passion) of mere unjustified existence, a pursuit that made a writer of him. Approaching now the end of his life, Sartre feels that he has at last shaken off the search for Calvinist Justification inherited from his ancestors: “atheism is a cruel enterprise that demands great stamina: I believe I have conducted it right to the end” (210-11). The question is, now that he has done it, what is left? “If I store the impossible Redemption back in the prop room, what remains? A man, made by all other men, and who is worth any of them, and whom anyone is worth” (213).
18. For a classic study, the more noteworthy for extending to Marx the neo-Marxist critique he first unleashes on Kant, see Eagleton. Also see Kauffman. I share Kauffman’s interest in acknowledging how, for all his shortcomings, Kant got things right in a way subsequent criticism of his work makes hard to understand.
19. The sublime shapes Das Kapital throughout: why else open the book with the commodity, an alienated fetish that fixes our fascinated eyes on its status as a synecdochic token of the immense system of relations of production, exchange, class, and force that, in engendering it, leaves this transcendental clue to its own operations and the false consciousness to which it exposes us? In the Communist Manifesto, meanwhile, the “critical-utopian” perspective with which the text closes opens on the entire world as well as the future, projecting us to the kind of limits of conception, imagination, and understanding Kant associates with the sublime. Eagleton, chap. 8, “The Marxist Sublime,” and Kaufman tease out the ironies involved.
20. I am thinking especially here of Derrida’s deeply misguided (and conspicuously metaphysical) critique of Austin, “signature événement contexte.”
21. I am indebted for this angle on Shelley’s novel to J. Jennifer Jones’s account of the Creature’s efforts to make his creator “hear [his] tale” and so acknowledge his existence and rights.
22. For the true story behind Benjamin’s fable, see Standage. The historical machine, assembled by the Austrian civil servant Wolfgang von Kempelen, differs in important ways from Benjamin’s description. For one thing, there was no illusion of transparency, simply an effort to make the inside of the machine look empty, concealing the compartment in which Kempelen’s confederate hid. More significantly, there was no hunchback of the kind Benjamin imagines: the players Kempelen and his successors used were perfectly ordinary in every respect save for their mastery of chess. The hunchback is thus entirely Benjamin’s invention and should be interpreted in that light.
23. See too Agamben’s book-length commentary-cum-extrapolation, Infancy and History.
24. As attested in particular by the homely personal anecdotes lacing its epilogue in the form of an appendix on “Ideology Today,” the subject with which he first broke into print, Žižek’s The Puppet and the Dwarf tries to get to something like the position embraced here by expounding what he calls the “perversely” materialist “core” of Christianity. However, as the fact that his own Lacanian version of critical materialism obliges him to regard this as somehow, precisely, perverse already suggests, the best he can manage is to make what he had obviously hoped would be the more down-to-earth vision of religion and materialism alike look as messianically high-strung and abstract as everything he writes against.