The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference

Christine Battersby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134753796
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

Christine Battersby is a leading thinker in the field of philosophy, gender studies and visual and literary aesthetics. In this important new work, she undertakes an exploration of the nature of the sublime, one of the most important topics in contemporary debates about modernity, politics and art.

Through a compelling examination of terror, transcendence and the 'other' in key European philosophers and writers, Battersby articulates a radical 'female sublime'. A central feature of The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference is its engagement with recent debates around '9/11', race and Islam. Battersby shows how, since the eighteenth century, the pleasures of the sublime have been described in terms of the transcendence of terror. Linked to the 'feminine', the sublime was closed off to flesh-and-blood women, to 'Orientals' and to other supposedly 'inferior' human types. Engaging with Kant, Burke, the German Romantics, Nietzsche, Derrida, Lyotard, Irigaray and Arendt, as well as with women writers and artists, Battersby traces the history of these exclusions, while finding resources within the history of western culture for thinking human differences afresh

The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference is essential reading for students of continental philosophy, gender studies, aesthetics, literary theory, visual culture, and race and social theory.

1

A Terrible Prospect

The pleasurable shudder at the sublime has been with us since the late seventeenth century: its focus, intensity and character repeatedly transformed by changing theories and by political and cultural events. The sublime was overwhelming; breath-taking; awe-inspiring; tremendous; terrifying; unrepresentable; revolutionary. But the word was also slippery, denoting a concept that was subject to metamorphosis and flux. Many nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophers and theorists (especially those belonging to a post-Hegelian tradition) picked out as the most salient characteristic of sublimity the failure of the understanding and reason to capture the infinity that it invoked. Eighteenth-century writers, by contrast, tended to emphasise the way that pleasure mixed with terror in the experience of the sublime. Between these two traditions we find Immanuel Kant, writing at the end of the eighteenth century, who described the sublime in terms of the encounter between an ‘I’ and that which has the capacity to annihilate it completely. For Kant and many of the Romantics, the ‘I’ is the victor in this (ennobling) conflict; but for others like Arthur Schopenhauer writing in the middle years of the nineteenth century or Jean-François Lyotard theorising at the end of the twentieth century, the delights of the sublime involve a surrender or displacement of the ego.

In the philosophical frameworks of empiricism and idealism as they developed during the course of the eighteenth century, the term ‘sublime’ came to refer to a quasi-aesthetic response to nature, to a work of art or to a political or historical event that produces a kind of shock to the human spectator or auditor. In the experience of the sublime the audience or observer was said to derive pleasure from being (temporarily or potentially) overwhelmed by an object or an entity that seemed infinite or vast, powerful or terrible, exceeding the capacities of the human to imaginatively grasp or understand it. Breaking with conscious control and individual personality or preferences, the pleasurein-pain that was integral to the sublime seemed to take man temporarily beyond the human; but the pleasure was generated by the object—not by a god or by the divine—and opened up a kind of split within the subject before consciousness and reason re-established control. Kant’s is one of the most important voices in the history of the sublime, decisively influencing the Romantics and other later modern and postmodern thinkers. For nineteenthand twentieth-century philosophers and artists, the destabilisation to the I produced by the sublime was often more than momentary.

Indeed, it was this emphasis on an affect that bypassed conscious reflection and control that was so important to modernist artists as they theorised a response to colour and abstract form in terms of an ‘absolute’ that became associated with the ‘sublime’. The Expressionists, the Futurists, the Surrealists and the Vorticists were amongst the many types of twentieth-century artists who drew on the language and imagery of the sublime to suggest that modernist art derives its energy neither from classical beauty nor from the tastes or preferences of the individualised subject, but from a kind of power that stems from ‘modern life’ in which space, time and objects have been reconfigured into vortexes, planes, surfaces, colours, patterns of dissonance and speed. Although often refusing the technical label of the ‘sublime’, modernist European artists and theorists deployed the conceptual framework of sublimity when, like Kasimir Malevich writing in 1916, they advocated a variety of diverse ways to energise art whilst simultaneously ‘spitting’ on the ‘altar’ of beauty and the past ‘idols’ of art (Harrison and Wood 1992: 169). The concept of the sublime was also integral to the changing notion of the avant-garde as mainstream modernism switched its allegiances from Paris to New York at the close of the Second World War when Abstract Expressionist painters like Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still explicitly appropriated the language of the sublime for a specifically American and anti-Romantic project to revolutionise art (Guilbaut 1983; Beckley 2001: 8; Golding 2002: 201ff.). As we will see, towards the end of the twentieth century Lyotard’s ‘postmodern sublime’ picked up—and reworked—a tension inherent in the very notion of the avant-garde inherited from modernist visual artists, especially Barnett Newman.

Jean-Luc Nancy has claimed that ‘there is no contemporary thought of art and its end which does not, in one manner or other, pay tribute to the thought of the sublime’ (Nancy 1993: 26). Analogously, Lyotard finds the ‘frame of contemporary aesthetics and aesthetic commentary, built by pre-romanticism and Romanticism’ to be ‘completely dominated by (and subordinate to) the idea of the sublime’ (Lyotard 1986: 8). Thus Lyotard insists that it is ‘indispensable to go back through the Analytic of the Sublime from Kant’s Critique of Judgement in order to get an idea of what is at stake in modernism, in what are called the avant-gardes in painting or in music’ (Lyotard 1988a: 135). Even if one were to agree with Mark Cheetham (2001: 102) and say that Nancy and Lyotard are offering over-exaggerated and ‘historically inaccurate’ claims, it is clear that the question of the sublime has resonance for philosophers, art historians and cultural critics writing today—so much so that the postmodern feminist critic Meaghan Morris has reacted with (ironic) terror to the reemergence of the sublime in late twentieth-century debates: ‘a new Sublime: what a terrible prospect!’ (Morris 1988: 214).

Morris’ ambivalent response to the sublime is symptomatic, since the links between the sublime, terror and human transcendence might lead one to elaborate on Nancy’s claim and add: ‘there is no representation of modern political terror which does not, in one manner or other, touch on the idea of the sublime’. Some of these links will be explored in Chapters 2 and 10; but we should not be surprised that the politics and aesthetics of a ‘new’ sublime might cause anxiety. But the imagery and language of the sublime is also not so easily escaped, even when—as artist and critic Anthony Haden-Guest puts it—‘We seem, in fact, more comfortable with work that sidles into the Sublime, as if accidentally’ (Haden-Guest 2001: 53).

Published in America in 2001—but written prior to the events of September 11th—Haden-Guest reminds us how the imagery of the sublime did, even then, make visual artists and art critics uneasy. He writes at a moment at which all varieties of the sublime—Romantic, modernist, postmodern—seemed outdated to the fashionable New York art world who were advocating a return to ‘extreme’ and ‘uncontrollable beauty’ and hence to a mode of aesthetic pleasure which has often been theorised as antithetical to the sublime (Beckley and Shapiro 1998; Gilbert-Rolfe 1999). But if the sublime could only be approached obliquely (and slightly ironically) in up-market art journals and catalogues, those mounting marketing campaigns seem much more direct. A flyer advertising a new and ‘awesome’ computer opens with a headline that shouts ‘SUBLIME’ in large capitals, and continues by quoting a review of the product in Computer Buyer, April 2002:

‘a truly sublime experience’, even we were surprised to hear one of our computers being talked of in such terms, but Computer Buyer magazine . . . went on to say, ‘every single feature is pretty much the biggest, fastest or most luxurious you could possibly want’.

What this particular advertisement picks out as the relevant characteristics of the new and ‘sublime’ computer is its extravagant power and its excessiveness to human imagination, desires or needs. Historically, the pleasures of the sublime were linked to an encounter with something tremendous: an infinite; something indefinitely great, grand or boundless; a longed-for absolute. Starting out as a term within rhetoric, the effect of the sublime was described in terms of a kind of overwhelming compulsion and a reaction so powerful and so inexplicable as to appear irresistible. If the computer marketing team does not know this history, it is nevertheless still employing the term ‘sublime’ in ways that directly link with this past.

The history of the concept of the sublime is complex, and is generally traced back to Nicolas Boileau’s 1674 French translation of a fragmentary ancient text on stylistic greatness in spoken speech. The Greek treatise had been entitled Peri Hypsous (About Elevation) and was written by an unknown author (conventionally, but probably not accurately, called Longinus) some time between the first and third centuries CE. The author is clearly immersed in Greek culture; but the treatise is addressed to a Roman friend, and includes a single quotation from Genesis as well as mention of the Jews (Longinus 1957: 14). The author’s apparent familiarity with the philosophy of the Alexandrian Hebrew philosopher, Philo Judaeus (born about 20 BCE), has led some scholars to speculate that ‘Longinus’ also lived in Greco-Roman Egypt.

Almost lost in antiquity, 11 manuscripts of Peri Hypsous survive, with the tenth-century Paris codex accepted as the oldest and most complete. The first printed edition was that of Francisco Robertello in Basel in 1554, with an influential Latin translation appearing under the title De Sublimi Genere Dicendi (Of the Sublime in Types of Speech) in Venice in 1555 (Macksey 1997; Saint Girons 1998). The emphasis on spoken language was underplayed in Boileau’s French translation of 1674 which was entitled simply Du Sublime (Of the Sublime), but in the Greek text hypsous is a stylistic category, and concerns a type of speech which has such ‘irresistible’ strength that it induces astonishment (ekplexis) and overpowers and transports the hearer. Longinus links this state of elevated transport to the inspired author, and to texts that are themselves ‘frenzied’, with the ‘strong and inspired’ impact transmitted directly to the audience from the animated author and text.

Amongst texts on rhetoric, Longinus’ treatise is unusual. Conventionally, rhetoric was portrayed as occupying itself with the techniques of convincing and persuading an audience. It was the ‘fourth part of logic’, and operated either via an appeal to the reason or understanding (producing conviction) or by operating on the specific passions or character of the individual auditor (persuasion). Thus Longinus’ apparent concern to produce an emotional affect which is non-individualised is distinctive. So also is his neglect of the classical divisions between the ‘High’, ‘Middle’ and ‘Plain’ styles analysed in exhaustive detail by other Greek and Latin writers on eloquence. Instead, Longinus explores the means whereby an audience might be elevated (gain hypsous) or attain ‘ekstasis’ (meaning, literally, to ‘stand outside’ oneself). The mysterious nature of this transport was further emphasised in Boileau’s French translation through appeal to an obscure quality—a ‘je-ne-sais-quoi’—as the causal origin of the power that ‘sublime’ speeches or texts exercised on the spell-bound audience. The overall sense of mystery was also intensified by Boileau’s adoption of the French term ‘sublime’ to replace ‘hypsous’. As we will see in Chapter 6, this word had rich alchemical connotations and was linked to the purification or sublimation of matter through the process of heating. These associations would be exploited by the German Romantic writers and by Nietzsche and Freud in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The complex and highly problematic gender politics of this usage will also become apparent, and in Chapter 9 we will see Nietzsche deliberately exploiting the language of ‘sublimation’ as he seeks to reconfigure the sublime and render it more material.

Other more technical uses of the term ‘sublime’ in the seventeenth century included usage in architecture and the building trades where it was employed in relation to chimneys and lintels. In both alchemy and architecture the Latin word sublimis is in play, in particular ‘sub’ denoting ‘under’ or ‘up to’ and limin meaning ‘threshold’. It is, however, the conventions of rhetoric that Boileau is primarily drawing on in his translation of Longinus. Thus, in other Latin, French and English texts on rhetoric reference had also been made to a ‘sublime style’, but in ways that were completely at odds with the analysis of hypsous provided by Longinus. The non-Longinian ‘sublime’ style was a synonym for the so-called ‘high’ or ‘lofty’ style deemed suitable to describe ‘the heroical and mighty actions of kings’ (as A. Day puts it in the ‘English Secretorie’ of 1586). This could not have been more different from Longinian hypsous which fits more with the so-called ‘low’ or ‘plain’ style than with this highly flowery and grandiloquent mode of address. However, as we will see, connotations of kingly power and also of masculinity would be carried over from the old-fashioned ‘sublime style’ to the modern concept of the sublime. Thus, for example, in Edward Benlowes’ Theophilia (1652) we find an explicit linking between ‘Sublime poets’ and ‘the masculine and refined pleasures of the understanding’ which ‘transcend the feminine and sensual of the eye’. As we will see, analogous gendered metaphors can be found in both Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant.

Boileau’s translation of Longinus generated a kind of mania for a more simple style that produces its effect by means of a magical and ineffable je-ne-sais-quoi that transforms language and also its audience. After 1674 and throughout most of the eighteenth century, re-translations of Longinus followed by the score: not only into English, but also into most other European languages. Most followed Boileau and left out any reference to ‘Types of Speech’ (Genere Dicendi) from the title of the treatise, so that gradually the scope of the sublime was broadened out to include not only speeches, but also images and events—especially as depicted on the stage. By 1721 Tamworth Reresby was equating the sublime with ‘the marvellous’ and with that ‘which produces a certain admiration mixed with wonder and surprise’ (Reresby 1721: 43). Even earlier, in 1701 and 1704, John Dennis, the English critic and actor-manager, had explicated the sublime in terms of ‘enthusiastic’ passions that were based on an imitation of nature and then further excited by the subject matter and the poetic technique, specifically claiming that ‘ideas producing terror, contribute extremely to the sublime’ (Dennis 1701: 32–34; 1704: 37).

Dennis claims that ‘the sublime does not so properly persuade us, as it ravishes us and transports us, and produces in us a certain admiration, mingled with astonishment and surprise’. Never without passion, ‘it gives a noble vigour to a discourse, an invincible force, which commits a pleasing rape on the very soul of the reader’ (Dennis 1704: 37). Dennis’ sublime thus produces an emotional and imaginative effect that seems to bypass the three traditional (Aristotelian) routes for convincing or persuading an audience by rhetorical means: via an appeal to the reason; through reliance on the specificity of the character of the speaker; by playing on the particularity of the emotions or beliefs of the subject who is being addressed (Aristotle c. 350 BCE; Ijsseling 1976). Although for Dennis the sublime always does involve ‘passion’, the passion involved is not the ‘ordinary passions’ of the individual subject. These are set to one side; instead, ‘like the artillery of Jove’, the ‘united force of a writer’ takes over the reader and ‘thunders, blazes, and strikes at once’, generating a specific set of ‘enthusiastic’ passions that are both violent and irresistible (Dennis 1704: 37).

For Dennis, these enthusiastic passions are linked to a particular set of ‘terrible’ and ‘wonderful’ ideas, including ‘gods, dæmons, hell, spirits and souls of men, miracles, prodigies, enchantments, witchcrafts, thunder, tempests, raging seas, inundations, torrents, earthquakes, volcanoes, monsters, serpents, lions, tigers, fire, war, pestilence, famine, &c.’ (38). What is important about this set of imaginary and real objects is, according to Dennis, the capacity of each of them for generating ‘religious terror’, an emotion that is said to be distinguished both from ordinary terror and from fear. Ordinary terror is different from fear in that it is ‘more sudden’, ‘less gradual’ and involves an element of surprise in the way it registers ‘an approaching evil, threatening destruction or very great trouble’; by contrast, ‘great enthusiastic terror’ is mixed with wonder and borders on astonishment. It is this religious terror that is characteristic of the sublime on Dennis’ model, with the degree of terror generated made dependent on the more ‘powerful’ the object is that induces the terror, and the more likely that object is to hurt the subject—so the greatest, most sublime idea becomes ‘the idea of an angry god’ (36).

As a playwright and stage manager, Dennis was reputedly the inventor of the sound effect of ‘stage thunder’ as a dramatic means of evoking the sublime. He was also so taken by the ‘sublime’ that he earned himself the nickname ‘Sir Tremendous Longinus’ through the mockery of John Gay, Alexander Pope and other members of the Scriblerus Club. For all his excesses, in terms of the developing history of the sublime Dennis’ treatment of the Longinian sublime is symptomatic since, at least until Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), the aesthetic of the sublime would be torn between several competing tendencies that we find in Dennis: first, the sublime is defined in terms of a particular set of objects or properties that generate enthusiastic terror; second, there is a tendency to assert that whatever generates great and intense terror is also sublime; third, a distinction is made between ‘ordinary’ passions and those elevated passions that are characteristic of the sublime; and fourth, the sublime is linked with the religious, the numinous, the non-human and the superhuman. This is already an unstable mix, and Dennis compounds this by linking the sublime to ‘spirit, or genius in poetry’ (Dennis 1701: 33). Importantly, in Germany as well as in Britain, the language of the ‘sublime’ was deployed to explain how Shakespeare and other ‘natural geniuses’ could produce such a powerful effect on an audience, despite breaking the rules of neoclassica...