James Zeigler

Modern Language Association, 2001

Panel #307: De Manian Inheritance

December 28

So it seems that we regard the beautiful as the exhibition of an indeterminate concept of the understanding, and the sublime as the exhibition of an indeterminate concept of reason. – Kant, The Critique of Judgment, #23

Location, Location, Location: Arendt and de Man on Kant’s Political Property

I. Introduction

This paper juxtaposes Paul de Man and Hannah Arendt’s interpretations of Kant’s Critique of Judgment with attention to how they share an interest in the political legacy of his aesthetic theory and how they each tend to move things around once they step inside the architecture of the critical philosophy.[1] I’ll suggest that what is significant in their readings can be best exhibited by a description of where in Kant’s critical philosophy they situate their work and how their excursions fail to leave his architectonic undisturbed. As my title is intended to advertise, for Arendt and de Man’s readings of Kant, location proves to be everything. In this hurried tour of the listings in my title, I will refer to de Man’s essays on Kant included in the posthumous Aesthetic Ideology along with Arendt’s late work, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. But most of what I say will be staged within and between Kant’s Analytics of the beautiful and of the sublime from the first part of the Critique of Judgment.

This setting should surprise no one intent on recognizing that the double burden of this third Critique is to establish the a priori conditions of possibility for the faculty of judgment and to ground the entire critical philosophy, reconciling the Critique of Pure Reason’s examination of understanding in the sensible realm with the Critique of Practical Reason’s treatment of the free exercise of reason in the realm of the supersensible. Kant explains that at stake in the success of the aesthetic is the transition “from our way of thinking in terms of principles of nature to our way of thinking in terms of principles of freedom” (CJ, p. 15). As Arendt's and de Man’s discussions of Kant proceed they each find ways to remind us of the shape of his critical philosophy and the third Critique’s decisive position within it. Arendt rehearses the questions that Kant considers the proper business of philosophy: the first Critique’s ‘what can I know?’ From the second, ‘what ought I to do?’ And, the third Critique’s ‘what can I hope for?’ De Man’s essays refer more frequently to the terms of Kant’s faculties. The job of the Critique of Judgment is to reconcile the faculties of understanding and reason through the exercise of imagination. Kant, himself, uses the term “architectonic” to describe the organization of his project and, in a passage I’ve selected as an epigraph, parses the beautiful and the sublime in their particular contributions to the third Critique’s bridgework. He writes: “So it seems that we regard the beautiful as the exhibition of an indeterminate concept of the understanding, and the sublime as the exhibition of an indeterminate concept of reason” (CJ, #23). The beautiful mediates between the third and first Critiques while the sublime is suspended between the third and the second.[2]

Like other post-structuralists, de Man concentrates his reading on the Analytic of the Sublime, identifying within it both the failure of the aesthetic category to sustain the critical project and an excessive analytical rigor that proves exemplary for the practice of ideology critique.[3] Arendt, on the other hand, in her emphasis on the Analytic of the Beautiful, sees in Kant’s third critique the implications of a fourth: a critique of politics.[4] For those familiar with the tone and tenor of de Man’s Kant essays, especially the transcribed lecture Kant and Schiller, these respective topographical commitments to the sublime and the beautiful may lead you to anticipate that the opposition de Man v. Arendt will here be appended to de Man’s list of pairs that begins with Kant v. Schiller, includes Nietzsche v. Schopenhauer and Derrida v. Heidegger, and, in which, the first name signals Kantian “excessive rigor” against the second figure’s Schillerian “aesthetic ideology.”[5] Arendt, in her relative neglect of the sublime in favor of the beautiful and in her confidence that the operation of taste is constitutive of community, would appear to have what de Man considers Schillerian reading habits, the habit of evaluating linguistic forms as natural phenomena.[6] At first our tour will do little to dissuade us from these easy analogies, but by the end I’ll attempt to do better by Arendt, training our vision over that expanse of Kant that she, different from de Man, elects to read: the Critique of Judgment’s neglected second half, the Critique of Teleological Judgment.

II First Location: de Man’s Sublime

While all three Kant essays in Aesthetic Ideology indicate the distinction between an interrogation of the limits of the category of the aesthetic and Schiller’s valorization of the aesthetic as a “unifying category, as a model for education, as a model even for the state” (KS, 130), Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant best elucidates what de Man means by “excessive rigor” and accounts for the Analytic of the Sublime as the event of the critical philosophy. De Man concludes that “the critique of the aesthetic ends up, in Kant, in a formal materialism that runs counter to all values and characteristics associated with aesthetic experience” (83). Attendant on this conclusion is the realization that the sublime is of crucial importance, despite the fact that Kant dismisses it as “not nearly so important or rich in consequences as the concept of the beautiful” and further describes it as a “mere appendix” to the Critique. “It turns out,” de Man argues, “that this outer appendage … instead of informing us, like the beautiful, about the teleology of nature, [it] informs us about the teleology of our own faculties, more specifically about the relationship between imagination and reason” (73). De Man reverses Kant’s own estimation, elevating the sublime over the beautiful in importance relative to the design of the critiques because the beautiful, in its reliance on an empirical moment, remains metaphysical while the sublime aspires to be transcendental.[7] The stated ambition of the transcendental critical philosophy is to prepare for metaphysics through the exhaustive excavation of its conditions of possibility.[8] De Man arrives at his conclusion about the aesthetic through a meticulous step-by-step procedure across Kant’s successive analyses of the mathematical and dynamic sublimes, finding in the first a phenomenology of reading and in the second a “story” of sacrifice. After pointing out a couple features of these two accounts, I’ll turn briefly to a third and final significant rhetorical move in de Man’s essay: the exhibition of what he calls Kant’s “materialism.”

He represents the analysis of the mathematical sublime as a phenomenology of reading because, according to Kant, while we can apprehend the sublime, we cannot comprehend it. The sublime is the “absolute magnitude,” of such dimension as to defy comparison. Though the mathematical analysis engages its quantitative mode, the sublime’s evasion of measure proves it is closer to “extension” than to the realm of number. De Man writes:

Apprehension proceeds successively as a syntagmatic consecutive motion along an axis, and it can proceed ad infinitum without difficulty. Comprehension, however, which is a paradigmatic totalization of the apprehended trajectory grows increasingly difficult as the space covered by apprehension grows larger. The model reminds one of a simple phenomenology of reading, in which we have to make constant syntheses to comprehend the successive unfolding of the text: the eye moves horizontally in succession whereas the mind has to combine vertically the cumulative understanding… (77).

Any instance of synthesis produces a whole that proves instantly to be partial; imagination fails to accommodate the sublime and that failure seems to necessitate additional analyses. But the ensuing analysis of the dynamic sublime, which has no corresponding section in the Analytic of the Beautiful, is less a response to this necessity – indeed, it is barely justified in its own right -- than an alternate route through the sublime, a passage on the sublime’s modality instead of its quantity. Rather than attempting, as in the mathematical, to ground his analysis in what proves to be a linguistic principle – enounced by each instance of partial totalization – Kant’s accounting for the dynamic sublime recurs to old-fashioned story-telling. The section on the dynamic sees the principle figures of the sublime’s analysis described in different roles and movements, but it does not pose a solution to the disrepair of the section on the mathematical. Instead, in dramatic fashion, it repeats its failure.

The drama of the dynamic is a story of sacrifice. Its characters are the personified faculties of imagination and reason. Unable to accommodate the sublime, the terrified (Verwunderung, shocked amazement) imagination surrenders itself to reason. With reason in control the terror transforms into tranquility (Bewunderung, admiration). Lost in the transformation is the integrity of the imagination. The interference of the moral faculty of the second Critique, reason, may handle the sublime but its emergence signals the failure of the imagination to enable judgment between reason and understanding. Instead, in this sacrifice the imagination serves reason and is redeemed only by its ability to affirm reason’s necessity. And how is the sublime handled? Not through analysis, but through a dramatic narrative. De Man writes:

We are clearly not dealing with mental categories but with tropes, and the story Kant tells us is an allegorical tale… It is the story of an exchange, of a negotiation in which powers are lost and gained in an economy of sacrifice and recuperation…. Such personified scenes of consciousness are easily identified: they are not actually descriptions of mental functions but descriptions of tropological transformations… For the second time in this text … we have come upon a passage that, under the guise of being a philosophical argument, is in fact determined by linguistic structures that are not within the author’s control (87).

Alongside de Man’s comprehensive account of reading in the mathematical sublime this narrative analysis of the dynamic closes the book on the absolute priority of the imagination within the Critique of Judgment. Rather than reconcile reason to understanding, the imagination in the face of the sublime relies on reason for its own sake. And from one sublime section to the next a system of tropes passes out of its logic into a performance. It is this movement from cognition – the attempt to comprehend, even what can only be apprehended – into something else, such as a narrative that resists any epistemological examination, that de Man regards as an event, here the event of the critical philosophy. In Kant and Schiller he calls such a passage an ‘occurrence’ and explains that it is brought about by way of an epistemological critique of trope. In Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant, however, de Man makes an additional move, arriving at the second operative term of the title, “materiality,” by considering the series of spatial images, the “material vision,” Kant introduces just after the presentation of imagination’s sacrifice.

These readings of the mathematical and dynamic sublime as I’ve represented them so far certainly press on features of Kant’s text that he himself did not acknowledge as especially significant, but they are mostly faithful to the form of that text. In his concluding rhetorical turn de Man moves things around a bit in order to demonstrate what he calls Kant’s “materialism.” This portion of de Man’s essay, amounting to the last three or so pages, is impressively dense and too complex to navigate here. Instead, I’ll simply announce its claim and images in summary fashion, borrowing from Jonathan Loesberg’s discussion of the passage in his review of Aesthetic Ideology. In the wake of the dynamic sublime’s drama Kant offers a succession of natural images to remind us that aesthetic judgments must be pure, entirely devoid of purposeful concepts. If we call the starry sky sublime, we cannot base this on concepts of inhabited worlds. We must consider it a “vast vault.” For our judgment of the ocean the same rule applies. Kant even compares this poetic vision of oceans and stars removed from their geographical contexts to an aesthetic vision of the body, in which we cannot allow the purpose for which a man has all his limbs to interfere with our aesthetic judgment. De Man responds to this passage in two ways. First, he recalls a competing image of the architectonic from near the end of the first Critique. That figure, different from the starry skies and sea of the Third, is described as an organic unity. De Man wonders what has become of this “Aristotelian,” teleological architectonic when we arrive at the perspective of the aesthetic judgment. His explanation constitutes his second response as he describes the architectonics of natural space and the human body at the end of the Analytic of the Sublime to be disarticulated from all purpose. Using Kant’s own example, de Man declares that we must consider our limbs in the way that the primitive man would consider the house, entirely severed from any purpose or use. With these images of severed limbs and isolated spaces, de Man suggests that with the sublime we are far from the integration of the subject’s faculties and, further, that we are far from the organic unity depicted in the first Critique. He re-traces his steps through the entire critical project, redescribing its trajectory from an organic to a “lifeless” – Loesberg’s word – architectonic, and even insinuates a resemblance between the course of his reading and the reception history of Kant’s aesthetics:

From the phenomenality of the aesthetic (which is always based on an adequacy of the mind to its physical object, based on what is referred to, in the definition of the sublime, as the concrete representation of ideas – Darstellung der Ideen) we have moved to the pure materiality of Augenschein, of aesthetic vision. From the organic, asserted as architectonic principle in the Critique of Pure Reason, to the phenomenological, the rational cognition of incarnate ideas, which the best part of the Kant interpretation in the nineteenth and twentieth century will single out, we have reached, in the final analysis, a materialism that, in the tradition of the reception of the third Critique, is seldom or never perceived (88).

In this passage, rather than mark the disarticulation of the sublime at the midpoint of a bridge stretched between the first and second Critiques, de Man writes a narrative of decline, as if the movement from the first to the third unveiled, finally, the material as opposed to the conceptual bases for sense and for thought.

III Second Location: Arendt’s Beautiful

Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, delivered at the New School in 1970, concentrates a reading of a prospective critique of politics around the figure of aesthetic judgment in the Analytic of the Beautiful. It is arguably the best indication of the direction of the unfinished third part of her final work, The Life of the Mind. Its volumes on Thinking, Willing, and Judging, correspond to the design of Kant’s project and the third installment – of which only the title page remained in Arendt’s typewriter at the time of her death – was, like its example, intended to reconcile the project’s three pieces. As Ronald Beiner explains, Arendt takes from Kant’s third the basics of her formulation of politics as public engagement in the “space of appearance”: the concepts of communication, intersubjective agreement, and shared judgment (112). Recalling that before he ‘discovered’ the critical philosophy and devoted 10 years to the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant had planned to publish a “Critique of Moral Taste,” Arendt begins her treatment of the prospective critique of politics by restoring the intentions of the early text. She broadens the scope of reflective aesthetic judgment to include moral and political decisions. It is important at this point to recall that Kant distinguishes between determinant and reflective judgments. The former are guided by general concepts or rules under which particular considerations are subsumed. Reflective judgments, such as any judgment of the beautiful, begin with the particular without the benefit of an external principle of decision. While the propriety of determinant judgments is measured against pre-existing truths, reflective judgments of the beautiful are validated through an appeal to the sensus communis. This is the appeal and key insight of Kant’s aesthetic theory for Arendt’s politics. Setting her own political writings against what she regards as the Western philosophical tradition’s anti-political tyranny of truth, Arendt champions opinion. For all the systematic tendencies in her work – think only of her tireless crafting of distinctions – she attempts to theorize a politics prepared to respond to contingent events. The lesson for this politics she attributes to Kant is that judgments are always made in company with others.

Though her understanding of sensus communis may appear at first glance to be consistent with Kant’s, her modification of “moral” taste leads her to revise somewhat the universal character of disinterested judgments of beauty. Kant writes:

… by the name sensus communis is to be understood the idea of a public sense, i.e. a critical faculty which in its reflective act takes into account (a priori) of the mode or representation of everyone else, in order, as it were, to weight its judgment with the collective reason of mankind, and thereby avoid the illusion arising from subjective and personal conditions which could be readily taken for objective… This is accomplished by the weighing of judgment, not so much with actual, as rather with the merely possible, judgments of others, and by putting ourselves in the position of everyone else.

This “as if” exercise of putting ourselves in the position of others is what Arendt calls “expanded mentality” or the capacity of one’s imagination to “go visiting.”[10] And while the sensus communis provides the basis for the universal validity of aesthetic judgments of the beautiful, as opposed to the merely useful or agreeable, it does so by developing from a historically locatable example, such as a rose, a possible ahistorical agreement.[11] Arendt’s overview of Kant’s taste in The Crisis in Culture, an essay from the volume Between Past and Future that anticipates her Kant lectures, instead locates the validity operation of aesthetic judgment historically:

And this enlarged way of thinking, which as judgment knows how to transcend its own individual limitations, on the other hand, cannot function in strict isolation of solitude; it needs the presence of others… As logic, to be sound, depends on the presence of the self, so judgment, to be valid, depends on the presence of others. Hence judgment is endowed with a certain specific validity but is never universally valid. Its claims to validity can never extend further than the others in whose place the judging person has put himself for his considerations (220-221).

The later Kant lectures repeat this argument and add to it references to letters of Kant’s which she claims show his interest in a notion of “impartiality” different from the third Critique’s idea of disinterestedness. The difference between impartiality and disinterestedness would seem to follow from one’s understanding of what is meant by “possible judgments.” Arendt’s “as if” thought exercise requires that we judge having considered the positions possible within a finite, pluralist community. Kant’s “possible” would seem to suggest an even more demanding enlargement of mentality.[12]

As Bernard Flynn argues in an essay on Arendt’s appropriation of Kant, the strict Kantian reading of disinterest in the instance of aesthetic judgment sees my own judgment become “merely possible” along with everyone else’s. The empirical, contingent subject of decision is rendered universal. Flynn maintains that Arendt’s “judge” labors under a “softer” claim for universality, as if the perspectives of everybody else were taken into consideration before “I” realized a judgment of my own. The minimal cognitive dimension of receiving and then deliberating with myself over the examples of others suggests that Arendt’s “judging” would be more hermeneutic and historical than universal.[13] The figure she elects as her own example of reflective judgment confirms this historical orientation. Throughout the 13 lectures she distinguishes between the spectator and the actor. Spectators, different from actors, make an event like the French Revolution world-historical. Less important than the idea that these onlookers can view and record momentous events is her counter-intuitive claim for the priority of spectators over actors. Spectators communicate events to the sensus communis, the space of appearance that is the possibility of any politics free from the administrative modes of total governance to which all of Arendt’s post-war work responds.

IV Third Location: Arendt’s Sublime

It is also through the figure of the spectator that Arendt considers the sublime. Based on de Man’s lesson on the sublime we should imagine that its occurrence would pose a threat to the perspective of the spectator as the exemplary figure of judgment. It is imagination, after all, which Arendt defines as the “faculty of making present what is absent,” and that provides for the operation of reflective judgment. But in the experience of the sublime the faculty of imagination fails to make present anything for judgment other than the very experience of its terrifying limit.

In the very few references to the sublime in her work, Arendt cites the Analytic of the Sublime just once. The passage is taken from the first part of the section on the dynamic sublime and concerns the sublimity of war. In Arendt’s text, the passage reads:

[W]hat is that which is, even to the savage, an object of the greatest admiration? It is a man who shrinks from nothing, who fears nothing, and therefore does not yield to danger…. Even in the most highly civilized state this peculiar veneration for the soldier remains… because even [here] it is recognized that his mind is unsubdued by danger. Hence … in the comparison of a statesman and a general, the aesthetical judgment decides for the latter. War itself… has something sublime in it…. On the other hand, a long peace generally brings about a predominant commercial spirit and, along with it, low selfishness, cowardice, and effeminacy, and debases the disposition of the people (ctd., 53, from Kant #28).

Typical of her references to the sublime in the lectures, in this passage she is primarily talking about something else. She goes on to identify two contradictions in Kant’s treatment of historical events such as war. First, how can Kant elsewhere require that all preserve “perpetual peace” and here praise war for the discipline it lends those nations which engage in it? This she resolves easily enough by reference to what in addition to acts of valor is affirmative in war: its relationship to world-historical progress. She finds in Kant repeated notions of the necessity of war, catastrophes, and even plain evil for the production of “culture” (26). Though this understanding of progress situates particular calamities within a providential history, this history is of little avail to the individual. This is the second, more difficult contradiction between “progress” and “human dignity.” Arendt maintains that Kant’s insistence that historical progress be regarded as providential, even when immediate events appear bleak, is an affront to the dignity of human autonomy. In other words, the sublimity of war leads her to reflect on a conflict between natural necessity and free reason. But this conflict, though occasioned by the sublime, is not found in the disintegration of the faculties in either the failure of comprehension or the sacrifice of imagination. It is located in the third Critique’s second half.

When the sublime comes up in her lectures Arendt changes the subject, directing her attention to another theme and carrying her reading out of the Critique of the Aesthetic Judgment into other texts. In pointing to the contradiction of progress and dignity she would appear to have her own account of how the critical project fails to ground itself in the third Critique. Alongside de Man’s vision of Kant’s materialism, we could place her speculation that the “teleological principle” of the second half of the Critique of Judgment, when attributed to history as Kant allows, undermines the dignity of reason and fails to resolve the opposition of necessity and freedom. But rather than demonstrate the disarticulation of autonomy, or the sublime, or even the faculty of judgment, Arendt accommodates this disjunction and the sublime for her own political designs by again “changing the subject.” This time, by “changing the subject,” I mean that she changes not topic, but the proper ‘subject’ of the critical philosophy. In a move reminiscent of Kant’s own table of faculties from the introduction to the third Critique, Arendt details an alternative organization of three “subject positions” for the entire critical project. (See appendix). Attributing the first and second Critiques to Man, a reasonable, autonomous being, she divides the third Critique between the aesthetic and the teleological, affiliating the sensus communis with the former and the human species with the latter. Rather than attempt to reconcile Kant’s critical philosophy on its own terms, as de Man does (even as he demonstrates that the subject’s faculties can only be integrated around a vertiginous absence), Arendt differentiates Kant’s subjects. Doing so, she not only moves things around, she includes what Kant omits from his table: a place for the teleological judgment. She further preserves the space of the aesthetic by isolating its subject, the sensus communis, from the other sections of the project, a move that describes the venue for what she considers political freedom: the perpetual conversation of shared opinion joined to prudent deliberation. These two realms of judgment, the aesthetic and the teleological, though distinct from reason and understanding, are mediated by her figure of the spectator. This spectator manages to open one impartial eye to aesthetics and politics while training another according to the heuristic of the teleological principle: attributing providence to history in order to formulate judgments. This double vision requires of the spectator an imagination ready for anything. In the short essay Imagination Arendt expresses her extreme confidence in that faculty.[14] She declares, “the imagination is the condition of all knowledge.” And this is perhaps why the sublime finally goes missing from her design; in Kant, no amount of imagination prepares for the sublime and it exemplifies nothing.

---------------------------------------

Kant’s Table of Faculties from the 2nd Introduction to the Critique of Judgment

All the Mental Powers	Cognitive Powers	A Priori Principles	Application to
Cognitive power	Understanding	Lawfulness	Nature
Feeling of pleasure and displeasure	Judgment	Purposiveness	Art
Power of desire	Reason	Final purpose	Freedom

Arendt’s summary of the various perspectives of the affairs of “men” in Kant’s Critiques

To summarize: Human species = Mankind = part of nature = subject to “history,” nature’s ruse = to be considered under the idea of “end,” teleological judgment: second part of Critique of Judgment.

Man = reasonable being, subject to the laws of practical reason which he gives to himself, autonomous, an end in himself, belonging to a Geisterreich, realm of intelligible beings = Critique of Practical Reason and Critique of Pure Reason.

Men = earthbound creatures, living in communities, endowed with common sense, sensus communis, a community sense; not autonomous, needing each other’s company even for thinking (“freedom of the pen”) = first part of the Critique of Judgment: aesthetic judgment (Lectures, pp. 26-27).

---------------------------------------

Works Cited

Arendt, Hannah. The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Political Significance. Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Viking Press, 1968.

-----. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Ronald Beiner, ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

Beiner, Ronald. Hannah Arendt on Judging. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Hannah Arendt. Beiner, ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982: (89-156).

Benhabib, Seyla. Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics. New York: Routledge, 1992.

De Man, Paul. Aesthetic Ideology. Andrzej Warminski, ed. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

-----. The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Derrida, Jacques. Parergon. The Truth in Painting. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod, trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987: (16-147).

Flynn, Bernard. Arendt’s Appropriation of Kant’s Theory of Judgment. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology. 19.2 (May 1988): 128-140.

Heidegger, Martin. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Richard Taft, trans. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990.

Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgment. Werner S. Pluhar, trans. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1987.

Loesberg, Jonathan. Materialism and Aesthetics: Paul de Man’s Aesthetic Ideology. Diacritics. 27.4 (1998): 87-108.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Interest of the Sublime. Of the Sublime: Presence in Question. Jeffrey Librett, trans. Albany: SUNY Press, 1993: (109-132).

-----. Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime. Elizabeth Rottenberg, trans. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994.

—————————

[1] Aesthetic Ideology, in which de Man’s most extended treatments of Kant appear, is generally regarded as his entry into an explicitly political project. Arendt, who always insisted that she was a political theorist rather than a philosopher, considered Kant’s late political writings to be “play with ideas.” She turns to the Critique of Judgment in order to examine the prospective critique of politics within it.

[2] The division of the Analytic of the Sublime into mathematical and dynamic affiliates each of its parts with the understanding and with reason, respectively. Kant writes, “But since we like the sublime this agitation is to be judged subjectively purposive, and so the imagination will refer this agitation either to the cognitive power or to the power of desire, but in both cases the purposiveness of the given presentation will be judged only with regard to these powers without any purpose or interest. This first kind of agitation is mathematical, the second a dynamical” (#24, 101).

[3] Among post-structural accounts, Lyotard’s has proven most formative for his work in general. In a statement typical of post-structural interpretations of the sublime’s place in the critical system, he succinctly explains why the Analytic of the Sublime marks a failure. He writes: “By focusing on the interest of the feeling of the sublime, one touches a raw nerve of the ‘organism’ of the faculties. The analysis of the beautiful still allows one to hope that the subject will ground itself as the unity of the faculties and that the accord between real objects and the authentic destiny of this subject – the Idea of nature – will be legitimated. But even if it is nothing but a ‘simple appendix’ (CJ, #23), the Analytic of the Sublime – like a meteor careening into the work devoted to this double edification – appears to put an end to those hopes. And it is the interest of the feeling of the sublime that detonates, as it were, this disappointment” (Interest, 109).

[4] Though the sublime is consistently of “crucial importance” to post-structural accounts, Lyotard and Derrida do both address the beautiful. For Lyotard, like Arendt, an interest in the “communicability” of taste informs his politicization of Kant’s aesthetics. Derrida’s entry into the beautiful is less important for his work at large. In Parergon, an essay most committed to the sublime, he calls into question the apparent link between the understanding and the imagination: “The frame of this analytic of the beautiful, with its four moments, is thus furnished by the transcendental analytic, for the sole and bad reason that the imagination, the essential resource of the relation to beauty, is perhaps linked to the understanding, that there is perhaps and still … some understanding in there” (71).

[5] In Kant and Schiller de Man writes, “Now, we see one instance of this by looking at the way in which Schiller reinscribes Kant in the tropological system of aesthetics, which, as we saw, Kant had in a sense disarticulated, Kant had taken apart. I don’t know what expression to use – you cannot say ‘go beyond’ – he had interrupted, disrupted, disarticulated the project of articulation which the aesthetic – which he had undertaken and which he found himself by the rigor of his own discourse to break down under the power of his own critical epistemological discourse. A terrifying moment, in a sense – terrifying for Kant, since the entire enterprise of philosophy is involved in it, and was in that way threatened. Kant didn’t notice at that moment…” (134). De Man goes on to speculate about the “nightmares” of Kant in the Konigsberg winters.

[6] Recall de Man’s well-known definition of ideology from The Resistance to Theory: “What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism. It follows that, more than any other mode of inquiry, including economics, the linguistics of literariness is a powerful and indispensable tool in the unmasking of ideological aberrations, as well as a determining factor in accounting for their occurrence” (11).

[7] In a passage that defines the sublime as absent any empirical element, Kant writes, “For what is sublime, in the proper meaning of the term, cannot be contained in any sensible form but concerns only ideas of reason, which, though they cannot be exhibited adequately, are aroused and called to mind by this very inadequacy, which can be exhibited in sensibility. Thus the vast ocean heaved up by storms cannot be called sublime… (CJ, #23).

[8] “Transcendental philosophy is always the critical philosophy of metaphysics” (de Man, 71).

[9] Arendt writes, “To think with an enlarged mentality means that one trains one’s imagination to go visiting” (LK, 43).

[10] In Parergon, Derrida clarifies the complexity of the exemplary product of taste which, because independent of any concept, is given historically but is only valid insofar as it signals “a structural and universal principle of accord, which is absolutely ahistorical” (109).

[11] Many have compared Arendt’s version of Kant’s reflective aesthetic judgment of the beautiful to Aristotle’s phronesis, or prudence. That she makes the comparison herself in her lectures confirms that her “judgment” departs from Kant’s on the subject of universality. Phronesis is a hermeneutic operation presented by Aristotle, and later by Gadamer, in terms of its contingent historical character.

[12] Benhabib: “It may be that Arendt’s attempt to bring together the Aristotelian concern with particulars in practical matters with a principled, universalist moral standpoint is not simply confusing but contains an insight very much worth developing. Arendt’s incomplete doctrine of judgment, by weakening the opposition between contextual elements and a universalist morality, could help us see through some false fronts in contemporary moral and political theory” (Situating the Self, 124).

[13] Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy includes Imagination in an appendix. This short essay seems strongly influenced by Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. The organizing claim, and image, of that volume is that the revised, second edition of Critique of Pure Reason manifests a lack of resolve on Kant’s part. Between the first and second editions, Kant changes his presentation of the “imagination” relative to sense and understanding. Heidegger describes this revision as Kant arriving at a precipice, looking into the abyss, and backing away, unwilling to pursue the ontological implications of his thinking. Heidegger explains the significance of the revision: “If, however, in the second edition, the transcendental power of imagination is deleted as a particular grounding faculty and if its function is taken over by the understanding as mere spontaneity, then the possibility of grasping pure sensibility and pure thinking with regard to their unity in a finite, human reason diminished, as does even the possibility of making it into a problem. However, because the transcendental power of imagination, on the grounds of its indissoluble, original structure, opens up the possibility of the laying of a ground for ontological knowledge, and thereby for metaphysics, then for this reason the first edition remains closer to the innermost thrust of the problematic of a laying of the ground for metaphysics. With reference to this most central question of the whole work, therefore, it [the first edition] deserves a fundamental priority over the second. All reinterpretation [Umdeutung] of the pure power of imagination as a function of pure thinking – a re-interpretation which “German Idealism” even accentuated subsequent to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason – misunderstands its specific essence” (137-138). Arendt’s Imagination is absent this complaint, but only because she presents Kant’s “imagination” as if the revision never took place. Her “imagination” is represented as the innate receptivity that precedes sense and understanding, rather than as a “function” of thinking. I append this sketch of Heidegger’s thesis and Arendt’s agreement because it marks one place where a more direct engagement between de Man and Arendt might be invented. In the discussion transcribed at the conclusion of Kant and Schiller, Peter Fenves asks de Man to explain the analogy between Kant/Schiller and Derrida/Heidegger. He suggests tentatively that if you “read Heidegger with certain aspects of Derrida, or with Kant, for that matter – and the place to go would be the book on Kant – that one would see that the concept of the imagination there, that what happens in Heidegger’s interpretation of imagination in Kant is not all that different from Schiller’s pattern of the imagination. Though of course the justification is not pragmatic, but ontological – but that doesn’t make it necessarily unpragmatic” (162). The critique of Heidegger, and by association Arendt, promised here is quite clear, however preliminary. What would prove interesting in its elaboration would be the different status of “ontology” in the work of Heidegger and Arendt. She may share his formulation of Kant’s “imagination,” but she is elsewhere quite critical of the way his fundamental ontology is organized around the analysis of Dasein. What is Existenz Philosophy? (1946) issues an explicit challenge to Heidegger’s ontology and valorizes Jaspers as the first thinker in the Existenz tradition to depart finally from “egoism.” Arendt’s own “ontology,” and she denies that she makes claims of that order, is arguably a “political” one, meaning that her apparently practical claims for the exchange of opinion are grounded in a plural sociality constitutive and constituted by human natality.