Sublime Truth (Part 1)

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe

I The Critiqueof Judgement, Immanuel Kant cites two examples of statements of the highest sublimity-examples that are said to be mostsublime, absolutely sublime. The first instance is in the General Remark which closes the Analytic of the Sublime. Kant is in the process of positing that the sublime "must in every case have reference to our way of thinking, i.e., to maxims directed to giving the intellectual side of our nature and the ideas of reason supremacy over sensibility." He continues: We have no reason to fear that the feeling of the sublime will suffer from an abstract [abgezogen: reserved, withdrawn, restrictive] mode of presentation like this, which is altogether negative as to what is sensuous. For though the imagination no doubt finds nothing beyond the sensible world to which it can lay hold, still this thrusting aside of the sensible barriers gives it a feeling of being unbounded; and that removal is thus a presentation of the infinite. As such it can never be
? 1991 by Cultural Critique. 0882-4371 (Spring 1991). All rights reserved.

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Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe

anything more than a negative presentation-but still it expands the soul. Perhaps there is no more sublime passage in the Jewish Law than the commandment: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven or on earth, or under the earth, etc. This commandment can alone explain the enthusiasm which the Jewish people, in their moral period, felt for their religion when comparing themselves with others, or the pride inspired by Mohammedanism. (127) The second (and last) instance is in Paragraph 49, which concerns genius, the sublime artist-the sublime itself. This time it is in a note, and like the previous example it is concerned with what Kant calls sublime "thoughts." Kant writes: Perhaps there has never been a more sublime utterance, or a thought more sublimely expressed, than the well-known inscription upon the Temple of Isis (Mother Nature): 'I am all that is, and that was, and that shall be, and no mortal hath raised the veil from before my face.' Segner [a contemporary of Kant] made use of this idea in a suggestive vignette on the frontispiece of his Natural Philosophy, in order to inspire his pupil at the threshold of that temple into which he was about to lead him, with such a holy awe as would dispose his mind to serious attention. (179) Before outlining my reasons for relating these two examples, it is necessary to linger for a moment on the context of this last note. In the third Critique, Paragraph 49 ("The Faculties of the Mind which Constitute Genius") is central to the determination and thus to the possibility not only of a sublime affect or emotion, but of sublime art. Kant here defines what he calls an artwork's "soul," its "animating principle in the mind." This is always, or almost always, the logic of the sublime: its soul is its supplement or surplus of life, exceeding what one could call mere "technique." The soul is understood literally as that which animates: a poem, a statement, a discourse, even a conversation. Now this principle, writes Kant, "is nothing else than the faculty of presenting aesthetic ideas," that is, the faculty of presenting those representations of the imagination which "induce much thought" (the ex-

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pression, as we know, is taken directly from Longinus, On the Sublime),"yet without the possibility of any definite thought whatever, i.e., concept,being adequate to it, and which language, consequently, can never get quite on level terms with or render completely intelligible." Unlike rational ideas, these "thoughts" are pure intuitions without concepts. Yet like rational ideas, "they at least strain after something lying out beyond the confines of expesince the imaginarience." Their aim is thus precisely metaphysical, tion "(as a productive faculty of cognition) is a powerful agent for creating, as it were, a second nature out of the material supplied to it by actual nature" (Kant 175-76, emphasis added). Kant is faithful to tradition here: according to Longinus, the play of the sublime is always the presentation of the metaphysical as such. And it is this very fidelity which allows Kant to say that "it is in fact precisely in the poetic art that the faculty of aesthetic ideas can show itself to full advantage" (177). Poetry would thus be the old topos that owes nothing, or sublime art par excellence-an to the presumed "rhetorical" origin of this tradition. very little, These aesthetic Ideas are obviously from "sensible forms." Kant calls them aesthetic attributes, to differentiate them from logical attributes: they are attributes "of an object, the concept of which, as an- idea of reason, cannot be adequately presented." Thus the eagle of Jupiter, "with the lightning in its claws," and the peacock, the "supreme queen of the sky," are used in order to represent the sublimity and majesty of creation. These attributes tell us nothing about creation itself, but they "provoke more thought than admits of expression in a concept determined by words." Poetry and eloquence owe to these attributes "the soul that animates their works," and, in another hyperbolic formulation, they "give the imagination an impetus to bring more thought into play in the matter ... than allows of being brought within the embrace of a concept" (177-78). This in effect sums up the classical notion of the sublime. On this subject, naturally, Kant illustrates his proposition with two examples. These examples will be summed up by the infinitely more sublime example of the inscription on the Temple of Isis. Now it so happens that these two examples (and it is these that I will address, as if compelled by a sort of magnetic attraction which

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe

must have a reason of its own) are both comparisons where the sun, either rising or setting, acts as the comparer or the compared. The first example is well known: it is Frederick the Great's poem ("Ainsi l'Astre du jour, au bout de sa carriere")' where the great king, Kant says, "kindles in this way his rational idea of a cosmopolitan sentiment ... with the help of an attribute which the imagination (in remembering all the pleasures of a fair summer's day that is over and gone-a memory whose pleasures are suggested by a serene evening) annexes to that representation" (Kant 178). The second example, where the comparison is reversed (in terms of the relation between the sensible and the suprasensible), is a poem by a certain Withof, a professor of morals, eloquence, and medicine at Duisburg: "the sun arose, as out of virtue rises peace" (Kant 178). It is known since Jacques Derrida's "White Mythology" that a sort of heliotropismstructures the language in which philosophy, from its very beginning, understands its object, the metaphysical. Thus to see it at work on the sublime should not surprise us at all. I nevertheless question whether this heliotropism (or more generally, this naive phototropism of philosophy) is as homogeneous and univocal as it seems. Or as simple. I wonder whether, under certain circumstances, there is not something else involved in the tropes of light, brilliance, brightness, and resplendence, something quite different from the metaphysical assumption of vision and the undivided coercion of theory. Perhaps it is necessary to raise another question about this light, to reexamine closely this whole philosophical "lighting system." I will only broach this question very allusively here, yet it is important to keep in mind the heliotropic context of this second example taken (less arbitrarily than it may seem) from Kant's text. Thus we have Moses and Isis. The two utterances that so impressed Kant surely do not say the same thing. Beyond their different presentations, however, there are certain affinities between them. In both cases, for example, the sublime utterance is a divine utterance: it is a God which speaks. He does not, however, speak directly in either statement, despite their grammatical appearances. God does not speak

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through his own voice: rather his word is reported, inscribed in Tables, or upon a temple. Finally, in both cases the utterances are concerned with the nonrepresentation of God. God calls "himself" unpresentable, either in the form of a prohibition against representing him (himself included in this general interdiction against representation), or else in the form of a declaration of the impossibility of representation (I am unrevealable) which is perhaps only a more subtle, if not more threatening, form of prohibition. It goes without saying that these affinities are more than merely formal. Despite their differences, both statements depend upon the same narrative content, which states that a God is unpresentable. We are thus given, in Kantian terms (and certainly also in pre-Kantian terms, since as early as Longinus this is said in many different ways), the canonical definition of the sublime: the sublime is the presentation of the unpresentable or, more exactly, to use Jean-Francois Lyotard's formula, the sublime is the presentation that there is something unpresentable (81, translation modified). Between these two utterances, however, there exists a great difference: they do not use the same metaphor. The questions they both pose are certainly the questions of presentation and the limits of presentation: not everything presents itself. But in the first case presentation is considered beginning with the figure, form, or image-the "graven image," to use biblical terms. If there is a question, it is broached (and can only be broached) with a problematizing of the act of engraving the "graven image," and consequently (as Nancy has shown [103]) a problematizing of limits and nonlimits. (The fact that it also opens in classical fashion with the problem of representation, in the sense of reproduction and imitation, is probably only a consequence. I will return to this.) In the second case, on the other hand, presentation is considered as unveiling rather than as reproduction. And that, perhaps, changes everything.

II
That perhaps changes everything. This is at least my working hypothesis. I should announce from the start that I have formed

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this hypothesis based on Martin Heidegger's definition of aesthetics, though not without a certain reticence, not without questioning this definition, not without believing in the necessity of determining its rigor or stability, at least on this point. When in 1935-36 Heidegger undertook to deconstruct aesthetics, either directly (in "The Origin of the Work of Art") or indirectly (in his first course on Nietzsche: "The Will to Power as Art" [hereafter cited as Nietzsche]), he took "aesthetics" in its broadest sense, meaning the entire philosophy of art since Plato and Aristotle. The chapter in Nietzsche entitled "Six Basic Developments in the History of Aesthetics" is perfectly clear in this regard: The name "aesthetics," meaning meditation on art and the beautiful, is recent. It arises in the eighteenth century. But the matter which the word so aptly names, the manner of inquiry into art and the beautiful on the basis of the state of feeling in enjoyers and producers, is old, as old as meditation on art and the beautiful in Western thought. Philosophical meditation on the essence of art and the beautiful even begins as aesthetics. (79) It is such a determination of aesthetics which leads Heidegger's toward an interrogation of the work itself, in its deconstruction essence. This, too, could not be clearer: The magnificent art of Greece remains without a corresponding thoughtful and conceptual reflection upon it, such reflection should not necessarily have the sense of an aesthetics.... Aesthetics begins with the Greeks only at the moment when their great art, and the great philosophy that followed along with it, come at an end. At that time, during the age of Plato and Aristotle, in connection with the organization of philosophy as a whole, those basic concepts are formed which mark off the boundaries for all future inquiry into art. (80, translation modified) For Heidegger, then, "aesthetics" designates the metaphysical (Platonic and post-Platonic, including Nietzschean) understanding of art and the beautiful. Now how exactly are these basic

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and, up to now, determinant concepts about art formed? Here is what Heidegger states: One of those basic notions is the conceptual pair hyle-morphe, matter-form. The distinction has its origin in materia-forma, the conception of beings founded by Plato, the conception of beings with regard to their outer appearance: eidos, idea. Where beings are apprehended as beings, and distinguished from other beings, in view of their outer appearance, the demarcation and arrangement of beings in terms of outer and inner limits enters on the scene. But what limits is form, what is limited is matter. Whatevercomes into view as soon as the work of art is experienced as a self-showing according to is its eidos,as phainesthai, now subsumed under these definitions. The ekphanestaton, what properly shows itself and is of most radiant [Schein] all, is the beautiful. By way of the idea, the work of art comes to appear in the designation of the
beautiful as ekphanestaton.(80)

The operation that Heidegger performs here is, I believe, relatively unique and contains at least a few surprises. It is understandable that the conceptual couple of form and matter derives from the predetermination of being, in its beingness, as eidos. From the moment when being is conceived as aspect or figure (that is to say, conceived beginning with its shape or contour, its delimitation), it is necessarily divided into limiter and limited. Does this mean, for all that, that the phainesthai itself (the selfshowing and appearance of being, its being-visible and beingluminous) derives from such a predetermination? Does this mean that, were it not for Plato, appearance would not depend on an eidetic understanding of being? All the same, it was not Plato who "invented" phainesthai, the determination of presence by appearance. On the contrary, what Plato invented, what he has given to philosophy (and to aesthetics), is the determination that being appears "according to its eidos,"as Heidegger is right in pointing out. The initial gesture of philosophy (and aesthetics) is the eidetic subjugation of phainesthai and not the "phantic" seizure of presence (if I may be allowed the neologism). If this were not so, what would be phenomenology's purpose in considering the fate of metaphysics? It is thus difficult to maintain that the Platonic defi-

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is nition of the beautiful by ekphanestaton simply Platonic, or that "by way of the idea, the work of art comes to appear in the desigAll nation of the beautiful as ekphanestaton." that one can say without doubt is that Plato definitively introduced the eidetic overdetermination of ekphanestaton.2 This sort of coup de force on the part of Heidegger would easily pass unnoticed if, at the same time, Heidegger's own proposed definition of the beautiful, which entails a "great leap backwards" within (and out of) aesthetics, did not in turn refer to ekphanestaton-and this, against all expectations. For the time being, I have taken Heidegger's definition out of context, which by itself is very "illuminating": "Thus in the work it Self-conis truth, not only something true, that is at work.... is illuminated [gelichtet].Light of this kind joins in its cealing being shining [sein Scheinen] to and into the work. This shining [das Scheinen],joined in the work, is the beautiful. Beautyis the means by whichtruthas unconcealedness ("Origin" 56, displaysitself in its essence" translation modified). This passage certainly uses a lot of light. But it is less the motif of light and clearing (Licht,Lichten,Lichtung, etc.) which is decisive in itself, but the way in which this motif gives a wealth of semantic density to Scheinen, to appearing-the same density given to the Greek phainesthai: to glitter and to shine, to display itself with lustre, to appear.3 It is this density that Heidegger relies on when, in considering the work of art and the beautiful, he calls forth Scheinen and treats it phenomenologically. Under these conditions, then, what is the meaning of the coup de force and operation that Heidegger performs? There is perhaps an indicator, and an occasion for conjecture, in the fate that Heidegger reserves for Kant. In the course of his recapitulation of the history of aesthetics, Kant's name is never pronounced. Likewise, it is noteworthy that Heidegger makes no allusion to the problematic of the sublime: "sublime" is a word which does not belong in Heidegger's vocabulary, even if the concept-and the thing itself-is everywhere present (isn't it in the name of "greatness"?). The fact that Kant does not appear in Heidegger's history, a history which simply wants to be "indicative," does not signify that Kant is insignificant in the unfolding of aesthetics, or that one should reserve for him a place outside of it. On the contrary, Heidegger frequently leaves traces of and allusions to the third

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Critique,and clearly marks the insufficiency of Kantian categories with regard to the question of the essence of art.4 The absence of Kant signifies simply that Kant does not mark a moment in the history of aesthetics or, if you prefer, that he merely belongs within the unfolding of modern aesthetics, of the aesthetics that Hegel completed and perfected as he simultaneously traced its entire closure, the closure of the philosophy of art in its entirety.5 However, and almost at the same time, Heidegger singles out Kant,6 as if one could read Kant (and Schiller) as having something to say about the essence of art and the beautiful-even in the language of aesthetics which they share, but which secretly exceeds the limits of aesthetics from within. This occurs in Nietzsche where Heidegger undertakes a defense of Kant against Nietzsche's violent and repeated accusations (107-14). Nietzsche's charges aim at the notion of "disinterested pleasure." Heidegger's defense is to try to clarify misunderstanding and misinterpretation. Not only is Nietzsche the victim of a Schopenhauerian reading of Kant, not only is he wrong and struck with a rare weakness (disinterest is read as indifference, and thus the suspension of will), but he does not understand the essence of interest, the desire for appropriation which always obliges one to take and represent the object of interest "with a view to something else." Nietzsche does not understand that disinterest is letting the object be and occur, "letting ... the object produce itself by itself, purely as it is in itself, in its own stature and worth." With regard to the beautiful, this suggests a behavior that Kant calls "unconstrained favoring" [die freie Gunst] by which, says Heidegger, "we must freely grant to what encounters us'as such its way to be; we must allow and bestow upon it what belongs to it and what it brings to us" (Nietzsche 109, translation modified). In sum, Nietzsche's misunderstanding revolves around the fact that disinterest (or unconstrained favoring), far from dismissing the object in indifference, on the contrary opens the possibility of relating to it in its essence. This is why Heidegger can say (and here his operation becomes truly unique, since he proposes almost his own definition of the beautiful): The misinterpretation of "interest"leads to the erroneous opinion that with the exclusion of interest every essential rela-

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tion to the object is suppressed. The opposite is the case. Preciselyby means of the "devoid of interest"[dasohneInteresse]the essential relation to the object itself comes into play. The misinterpretationfails to see that now for the first time the object comes to the fore [zumVorschein as Kommt] pure and that such coming forward into appearance [dieses object
is in-den-Vorschein-Kommen] the beautiful. The word "beautifore [Das Wort 'schin' meint das Erscheinen im Schein solchen Vorscheins].(Nietzsche 110)

ful" means appearing into the radianceof such coming to the

As we know, Heidegger in general leaves little to chance. Thus we should understand, first, that Kant is closest to the determination of the essence of the beautiful, that is, to a non-aesthetic, non-eidetic determination of the beautiful; and second, that only Scheinen, properly considered (that is, in a Greek sense), permits us to accede to this essence. This understanding of Kant does not prohibit Heidegger from having other reservations about him. But it is striking to see at what point the language that he uses here is consonant with certain major propositions in "The Origin of the Work of Art." For example, with regard to "unconstrained favoring": "is not such unconstrained favoring rather [if it is not misinterpreted in the way of Schopenhauer] the supreme effort of our essential nature, the liberation of our selves for the release [Freigabe] of what has proper worth in itself, only in order that we may have it purely?" (Nietzsche109). Or as well with regard to the "pleasure of reflection" (Lust der Reflexion): "Kant's interpretation of aesthetic behavior as 'pleasure of reflection' propels us toward a basic state of human being in which man for the first time arrives at the well-grounded fullness of his essence. It is the state that Schiller conceives of as the condition of the possibility of man's existence as historical, as grounding history" (113). Read in this manner (in other words with and against Nietzsche, but also with the complicity of Schiller), Kant is not concerned with aesthetics. In Kant we find an understanding of the beautiful which is more archaic than philosophical (although this is not to say that it is older: it is, on the contrary, a future event, an understandingto be achieved). And this understanding is captured
in one word: Scheinen.

Heidegger's complex treatment of ekphanestaton, and of

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Kant's determination of the beautiful, finds its justification in the almost insurmountable difficulty which Heidegger encounters in seeking to define aesthetics. This difficulty, as we know, carries a name: Hegel. As he expressly states in the "Epilogue" to "The Origin of the Work of Art,"7 Heidegger doubts that we can free ourselves from Hegel's verdict concerning the end or death of art. After having considered Hegel's principal propositions on art (in his Aesthetics)to be "something passe," Heidegger adds: The judgment that Hegel passes in these statements cannot be evaded by pointing out that since Hegel's lectures in aesthetics were given for the last time during the winter of 182829 at the University of Berlin, we have seen the rise of many new art works and new art movements. Hegel never meant to deny this possibility.But the question remains: is art still an essential and necessaryway in which that truth happens which is decisive for our historical existence, or is art no longer of this character?If, however, it is such no longer, then there remains the question why this is so. The truth of Hegel's judgment has not yet been decided; for behind this verdict there stands Westernthought since the Greeks. This thought corresponds to a truth of being that has already happened. Decision upon the judgment will be made, when it is made, from and about this truth of what is. Until then the judgment remains in force. But for that very reason it is necessary to question whether the truth that the judgment declares is final and conclusive and what follows if it is. (80, translationmodified) Thus Heidegger subscribes to Hegel's verdict. More exactly (from the point of view of the completion of metaphysics in Hegel's Aesthetics,considered "the most comprehensive reflection beon the nature of art that the West possesses-comprehensive cause it stems from metaphysics" ["Origin" 79]), Heidegger recognizes the truth and necessity of this verdict. Hegel completed (acheve)aesthetics as the science that sanctions and pronounces the end of art, an end which enables aesthetics itself to become a science. But it is a science, in the Hegelian sense, which emerges based on a "truth of beings that has already happened." This is
why nothing in principle prevents ajudgment, unless it is the "last judgment," from being pronounced over the Hegelian closure

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"from and about this truth of what is." It is moreover just such a judgment that Heidegger endeavors to articulate throughout "The Origin of the Work of Art." Here Heidegger's position is double and necessarily double. Heidegger gives to Hegel with one hand what he takes away with the other. Despite Heidegger's prudence and difficulty, it is clear what he takes away from Hegel: his definitively philosophical or metaphysical point of view, a point to which I will return. What Heidegger gives to Hegel, on the other hand, is completely surprising. It is nothing less than this: first, there is doubtless a very
profound political complicity here: art ceases to be "great"-and

ceases to be itself, if ever it was itself-from the moment when it ceases to constitute or establish the possibility of a fundamental existence, a Being-People. From then on, Hegel says, art ceases to be religion. From then on, Heidegger says, it ceases to have a historical telos. In Nietzsche, this is how Heidegger translates Hegel: Parallel to the elaboration of aesthetics [here referred to in the modern sense] and to the efforts to clarifyand ground the aesthetic state, another decisive process unfolds within the history of art. In their historicalemergence and being, great art and its works are great because they accomplisha decisive task in man'shistoricalexistence [Dasein]: they make manifest, in the way appropriate to works, what beings as a whole are, preserving such manifestationin the work. Art and its works are necessary only as an itinerary and sojourn for man in which the truth of beings as a whole, i.e., the unconditioned, the absolute, opens itself up to him. What makes art great is not only and not in the first place the high quality of what is created. Rather, art is great because it constitutesan 'absolute need'.... Concurrent with the formation of an aestheticsand of the aesthetic relation to art is the decadence [Verfall] great art of in modern times, great in the designated sense. Such decadence does not result from the fact that the 'quality' is poorer and the style less imposing; it is rather that art loses its essence, its immediate relation to the basic task of representabsolute definitively as such in the realm of historical man.
(Nietzsche83-84, translation modified) ing [darstellen] the absolute, and of establishing [stellen] the

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The philosophico-political complicity is so strong that, after having remarked that "the Hegelian achievement of aesthetics derives its greatness from the fact that it recognizes and gives utterance to the end of great art as such" (Nietzsche84, translation modified), Heidegger responds (for Hegel) to the objection by what could be called the "survival" of art. He writes: Hegel never wished to deny the possibility that also in the future individual works of art would originate and be esteemed. The fact of such individual works, which exist as works only for the enjoyment of a few sectors of the populadoes tion [Volksschlicten], not speak against Hegel but for him. It is proof that art has lost its power to be the absolute,has lost its absolute power. (Nietzsche 85) And, second, there is a direct consequence to this complicity: art and reflection upon art are mutually exclusive. As soon as a theory, science, or knowledge of art appears, "great art comes to an end" (Nietzsche84). This is the fundamental axiom upon which Hegel's entire Introduction to his Aestheticsrests. It is an axiom symbolized by the figure of Schiller, a "man endowed both with a great artistic sense and a profound philosophical spirit" who, in sacrificing his art to science, "could only pay tribute to his epoch." It is the same axiom, or perhaps even the same naivete, which underlies all of Heidegger's meditation: great art is absolutely prior to all conceptual and thoughtful "reflection" (Besinnung). "Conceptual" is considered here in its proper philosophical sense: there is obviously no question of imparting an aesthetic, in the sense of a theory of production and reception, even for fifthcentury Greeks. And if I use the word "naivete," it is because it is hard to see how one can dissociate art from a thought, if not from thought itself. Heidegger was the first, of course, to recognize and affirm this, even if by peremptorily glossing over the details. The allusion to the essence of techne is nonetheless perfectly transparent: The lack of such a simultaneous reflection or meditation on great art does not imply that Greek art was only "lived,"that braced the Greeks wallowedin a murkybrew of "experiences" neither concepts nor knowledge. It was their good fortune by

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that the Greeks had no "livedexperiences."On the contrary, they had such an originallymature and luminous knowledge, such a passion for knowledge, that in their luminous state of (Nietzsche 80) knowing they had no need of "aesthetics." In affirming that art "is far from being the most elevated mode of expression of truth" or that "people registered their highest ideas in art," yet not in "the element of thought," Hegel is in general infinitely more coherent. Yet it is precisely this coherence that Heidegger refuses (except in "The Origin of the Work of Art," where the commentary on Holderlin is still on aesthetics). And it is such a refusal that makes his operation so difficult. This explains, in any case, Heidegger's very surprising reworking of Hegel's version of the birth of aesthetics (or of the death of great art). Since for Heidegger the end, telos, or destiny of art is truth (but is it different for Hegel?), there are two ends or two "deaths" of art: one which arose at the end of the fifth century B.C. and saw the birth of philosophy itself;8 the other which was concurrent with the development of aesthetics itself, which Hegel completed. It is true here that Hegel is simultaneously thought of, truth of art first, as one who maintained a hold on the metaphysical and the end of art (thereby confounding any misunderstanding of Nietzsche's "reversal," or of the laborious nineteenth-century attempts, such as Wagner's,9 to reconstruct or reconstitute great art), and, second, as one who allowed a vast and overarching vision of aesthetics (beginning with an end of the more "archaic"art and of an entirely other interpretation of truth) to enclose him within the field of aesthetics, within the philosophy of art. Thus the Heideggerean closure of aesthetics overflows the Hegelian closure, since Heidegger understands the "truth of being" beginning with the truth traced by Hegel. Thus a decision has been made-if it can be madethe truth of being itself. Now what is this truth? Nietzregarding sche and "The Origin of the Work of Art"10leave no doubt on this subject: it is the eidetic truth of being, from which proceeds all aesthetic conceptuality, including its modern version. Since the beginning of philosophy, by means of a faulty interpretation of

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techne (falsely interpreted as know-how, reduced to productive activity),"l there has been a complicity between the eidetic conception of being and the interpretation of art based on the creator and the connoisseur, not on the work itself. From this fact, the entire problem rests in knowing if there is a more "archaic" determination of being than its eidetic one. If the answer lies in Scheinen, in phainesthai, and if the debate with Hegel requires a reevaluation of Kant and Schiller, this means two things (and this is the result of the entire operation): First, Kant is obviously included within the Hegelian closure of aesthetics. This is so less because the third Critique presents itself as a theory of taste than because the problematic of the beautiful and the sublime are still considered in terms of eidetic presentation, in terms of the imagination. And second, this conversely means that Kant overflows the limits of this closure. This is so because the third Critique'ssubjectivism can be extracted (with Schiller's help) from the terrain of "subjectivity" (the "pleasure of reflection" is a sign of the historical essence of man), and also (and most importantly) because the understanding of the essence of the beautiful by Scheinen is a complete rupture with the eidetic conception of art.12

III
"A complete rupture" might be saying too much. But after all, according to Heidegger, a Kantian abandonment of aesthetics (though not in the form of a renouncement and even less as an explicit denunciation) requires that Kant avoid aesthetics just when he seems to subscribe to it in every way. Beneath Nietzsche's emphatic and unjust vociferations, one can hear (again with the acute attention of Schiller) how the third Critiqueresounds with an entirely other voice, a voice that is already fundamentally incapable of articulating the language of aesthetics or of supporting its entire discourse.13 This abandonment, this manner of secretly letting go of aesthetics, precedes Hegel's closure of aesthetics. This is in part its enigma: it is from within aesthetics itself, and before its completion, that an opening has been created, a sort of invisible enclave, a "pocket of resistance" to Science's imperial and

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gigantic encircling. Of course the stakes are immense: in the balance is nothing less than the historical possibility of great art, nothing less than the future possibility of art itself. Now such an abandonment is perhaps (for this is my hypothesis) precisely what Kant arrives at in his reflections on the sublime-or at least from a certain conception of the sublime. The concept of the sublime, indeed, does not entirely interest Heidegger (nor Kant and Schiller, for that matter)-a total silence which, as always with Heidegger, signifies that it is "inessential." For good reason, the justification for such a silence has been ignored. Given the model of other Heideggerean operations, however, I believe that it is not too difficult to imagine such a justification. The concept of the sublime, for example, is a backward idea, born in the bosom of the Hellenists, not really an authentically Greek concept, but contaminated by Latin. It is even partially Judaic and Christian (ho Hupsos, the Most-High, as the God of the Bible has been called since the first diaspora into Greek territory). It is also a concept that derives from rhetoric: it does not enter modern philosophy except via French poetics or English aesthetics. In reality it constitutes a minor tradition. As a concept of excess, it itself attests to an overflowing, a beyond-beauty, an exhaustion of the sense of the beautiful. There is thus no chance that it will be claimed by aesthetics strictosensu. Despite the impression it gives off, it is a weak notion, precisely without greatness. But there are also relatively external reasons for philosophy's ignorance of the sublime, two of which seem to me to be arguably more decisive. First, the sublime has been constructed since Longinus according to the supremely metaphysical distinction, inherited from Platonism, between sensible and suprasensible. As one can see even in Kant, the sublime is purely and simply the translation of this distinction into the ethico-aesthetic field (or even the theologico-aesthetic field). Second, since the sublime has been defined negatively in relation to the beautiful, it offers nothing more (as a motif of excess) nor anything less (as a motif of the unpresentable) than what is essentially offered by the concept of the beautiful, upon which it always depends. In effect it offers nothing other: it is simply a counter-concept of the beautiful. All this is to say, in sum, that Heidegger could subscribe to

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Hegel's version of the sublime: the sublime is only the first degree of the beautiful. Heidegger moreover does subscribe to it, if only indirectly, when he relates Nietzsche's aesthetics (the aesthetics of the reversal of aesthetics, Nietzsche's anti-aesthetics) to the celebrated sentence of Rilke's First Elegy ("For the beautiful is nothing but the beginning of the terrible"), where one can decipher without too much difficulty Rilke's definition of the sublime (Rilke 3, translation modified).'4 There could thus be no better way to designate the sublime's dependence on the beautiful, and there probably could be no better way to continue to subscribe philosophically to the point of view of "the most comprehensive reflection on the nature of art that the West possesses" (Heidegger, "Origin" 79). Hegel, at bottom, maintains a hold on the metaphysical truth of the sublime. The reason for this is very simple: from the moment when the idea of the beautiful is defined as the figural adequation between (spiritual) content and (sensible) form-this is the Ideal of art-and from the moment when adequation (or "conciliation," as Hegel's Aestheticsterms it) is posited as the very reason for philosophy and for the Spirit, the sublime (the inadequation between form and spiritual content) is inevitably conceived as a moment which precedes the moment of the beautiful, .of true art itself. This is why the sublime, which Hegel places in symbolic art, is not yet a part of art. (In the extreme case, for Hegel it is only in the Jewish moment of art, the interdiction.) Now such a definition by between the sensible and the suprasensthe adequation (homoiosis) ible and by the spiritual conformity of the Gestaltpresupposes an eidetic determination of being. Very explicitly, this is where the truth of art lies (Hegel, Aesthetics1: 38 and passim). And in effect it is on the basis of this determination, and only on this basis, that Hegel conceives of the relation between the beautiful and the sublime. Take the following example from his Lectureson the Philosophyof Religion: Sublimity is the relation of God to the natural world. We cannot call the infinite Subject sublime: for it is absolute in and for itself; it is holy. The idea of sublimityfirst comes in in connection with the manifestationand relation of this infinite Subject to the world, when the world is thought of as a man-

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ifestation of the Subject, though as a manifestation which is not affirmative,or as one which, while it is indeed affirmative, in has yet its main characteristic this, that what is natural,what is of the world, is negated as inadequate to express the Subject, and is known as such. Sublimityis therefore this particularappearing and manifestation of God in the world, and it may be defined thus. This act of manifestation shows itself at the same time as to sublime, as superior [erhaben] this manifestationin reality. In the Religion of Beauty [Greekart] there is a reconciliation of the signification with the material and sensuous elenal way.This external mode is a symbol of what is inner, and this inner something is completelyknownin its external form. Sublimity on the other hand directly destroys reality,the matter and materialwhich belongs to it. In His manifestation God directly distinguishes Himself from it, so that it is expressly known to be inadequate to manifest Him. (2: 187, translationmodified; hereafter cited as Religion) It is clear that this is a "dialectical" understanding of the sublime. It is in no way, however, the "dialectical version" or the "dialecticization" of the sublime. This is not "Hegel's" version of the sublime but nothing otherthan the truthof the sublime.Within this truth the sublime has always been conceived beginning with the beautiful, itself interpreted based on an eidetic conception of being. Hegel is at bottom content with the assurance that, if the essence of a manifestation or presentation is its (delimited and finite) form, and if the sublime is and always was conceived as the manifestation or presentation of the infinite (whatever name it is given), then in its very structure the sublime is contradictory. From the speculative point of view, it is the contradiction par excellence, a contradiction that art, revealed religion, and philosophy (Science) must "reconcile." In the formula of the Aesthetics, this is why the manifestation of the infinite negates manifestation itself: this is not only the metaphysical truth of the sublime, it is equally the sublime truth of metaphysics. It is this figure, this original oxymoron, which has been the paramount figure of the sublime since Longinus, a figure one can see reemerging everywhere in Hegel's discourse on the sublime.15 The truth of the sublime is thus dialectical. It is the dialectic.
ment .... The spiritual manifests itself entirely in this exter-

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If in a certain way the sublime is the excess of the beautiful, it is so only by default, so that in effect the beautiful is the "sublation" and truth of the sublime. The sublime is the incompletion of the beautiful, it is the beautiful seeking to complete itself. And in this reversal of the aesthetic discourse which attaches the beautiful to the sublime, philosophical discussion of the sublime in turn finds its completion. When Hegel says of Moses "down there" that he only has the value of a "messenger" (Religion 188), he speaks the truth that Kant attempted to elaborate under the name of "negative" or "restrictive" presentation. He speaks the truth of Kant's interpretation of the prohibition against (re)presentation. Under the metaphysical pathos of excess and overflow, Hegel would quite simply expel this naivete: the definition of the sublime will not remain negative. For this reason, the essence of the sublime is nothing other than the beautiful. One could easily verify this in practically every "classical" interpretation of the sublime, including Burke's. But one could verify this most emblematically by following the figure of Moses as it enters into art and into aesthetic discourse as an example of "great art." When, for example (and it is an important example), Freud undertakes to clarify what is in his eyes the "enigma" of Michelangelo's Moses, he must submit despite himself to a dialectic of the sublime to such an extent that, faced with the difficulty of his undertaking, he is forced to renounce his task and leave Moses as an enigma. This text has often been called weak and deceptive with regard to its analytical problem. It has even been justly deciphered as the trace of an ill-conceived idea or of an original assay into psychoanalysis.'6 But what has been less noticed is the precision and rigor with which Freud's essay inscribes itself into the tradition of the aesthetics of the sublime. This is an absolutely Schillerean text, and the solution to the enigma, if there is a solution, lies entirely in the concept of dignity, which for Schiller is the "expression in the world of phenomenon" of "spiritual liberty," defined as "mastery over the instincts by moral force" (216, translation modified). One can easily recognize the codified lexicon and thematics of the sublime in what Freud hears in these words: Michelangelohas placed a different Moses on the tomb of the Pope, one superior to the historicalor traditional Moses. He

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has modified the theme of the broken Tables; he does not let Moses break them in his wrath, but makes him be influenced by the danger that they will be broken and makes him calm that wrath, or at any rate prevent it from becoming an act. In this way he has added something new and more than human to the figure of Moses; so that the giant frame with its tremendous physical power becomes only a concrete expression of the highest mental achievement that is possible in a man, that of struggling successfully against an inward passion for the sake of a cause to which he has devoted himself. (Freud 233) This solution is obviously not a real solution. Already Schiller had proposed the notion of "sensible signs" of the suprasensible, in order to get around the obstacle of this "negative presentanotion which continued to guide Freud in his study. tion"-a Schiller, however, never avoids a certain dialecticization: "To consider this rigorously: the moral force in man is susceptible to no representation, for the super-sensible can never be rendered sensible; but it can be represented indirectly to the mind by sensible signs, and this is actually the case with dignity in the human condition" (217, translation modified). This does not prevent Schiller from finding (even if it is with Winckelmann's help) an example of a work of art which allows him to uncover the battle between the sensible and the suprasensible. It is, by chance, a work of monumental stature, Lessing's renowned Laokoon:17 Suppose that we see a man a prey to the most poignant affection, manifested by movements of the first kind, by quite involuntary movements. His veins swell, his muscles contract convulsively, his voice is stifled, his chest is raised and projects, whilst the lower portion of the torso is sunken and compressed; but at the same time the voluntary movements are soft, the features of the face free, and serenity beams forth from the brow and in the look. If man were only a physical being, all his traits, being determined only by one and the same principle, would be in unison one with the other, and would have a similar expression. Here, for example, they would unite in expressing exclusively suffering; but as those traits which express calmness are mixed up with those which express suffering, and as similar causes do not produce op-

Sublime Truth posite effects, we must recognize in this contradictionof traits the presence and the action of a moral force, independent of the passive affections, and superior to the impressions beneath which we see sensuous nature give way.And this is why

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calmness under suffering, in which properly consists dignity, becomes-indirectly, it is true, and by means of reasoning-a

representation of the pure intelligence which is in man, and an expression of his moral liberty. (Schiller 218, translation modified)

Now we can see where the difficulty arises. Sublimity is visible in the "contradiction of traits," which immediately signify and present "calmness under suffering." But under the circumstances, the contradiction is perfectly adequate to what it is required to present: a conflict between sensible and suprasensible, between freedom and a "strong interest" in "the powers of desire" (suffering is but one effect among many). This is purely and simply the realm of the beautiful. This is what motivates Freud when, by substituting anger for sorrow, he adapts this description to fit his account. Yet he is faced with one aggravating circumstance: the figure of Moses is itself the speaker and representative of the prohibition against representation. "Moses" is the "graven image" which portrays calmed wrath faced with the spectacle of idolatry, with a cult of a graven image. The fact that Freud remains silent about this paradox18 (that he pays no attention to this strange seam which both joins the representation and the represented with, and divides them from, the very fact that there is a representation) is a sign not of Freud's blindness nor of a "slip" but of an unease: what is at stake here from the aesthetic point of view is the possibility or impossibility of art. In a movement which justly can be called sublime, Moses obeys his destiny, his spiritual mission, and gets angry. But anger, like instinct, is not exactly sublime, and above all (for this is the true difficulty facing Freud), Michelangelo's project, his "intention," as Freud calls it, his attempt to represent the (sublime) hatred of representation, must be taken into account. Freud never reconciles himself to this solution. For him, either Moses masters his anger, which would conform to Schiller's definition of sublimity,19 or the Mosaic Tables (which Moses holds in extremisunder

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his arms) signify in Hegelian fashion that the beautiful is the essence of the sublime. This is why Freud, faced with the power of such a contradiction, resigns himself and leaves the issue undecided. But this resignation itself is submitted to the (aesthetic) logic of adequation, in this case to the criterion of success. Freud confesses that with Michelangelo we are at the limit of art-or at least at the limit of a certain idea of art: I cannot say whether it is reasonableto credit Michelangeloan artistin whose works there is so much thought strivingfor expression-with such an elementary want of precision, and especiallywhether this can be assumed in regard to the striking and singular features of the statue under discussion.And finally we may be allowedto point out, in all modesty,that the artist is no less responsible than his interpreters for the obscuritywhich surrounds his work. In his creations Michelangelo has often enough gone to the utmost limit of what is expressible in art; and perhaps in his statue of Moses he has not completely succeeded, if his purpose was to make the passage of a violent gust of passion visible in the signs left behind it in the ensuing calm. (236) The difficulty here20 rests with this: the prohibition against representation-an iconoclastic prescription, as Goux terms it-is a meta-sublime enunciation. It is spoken in sublime fashion, in the absolute simplicity of a negative prescription. It is sublimity itself, the incommensurability of the sensible with the metaphysical (the Idea, God). From the moment when it ceases to be the pure "messenger" of this enunciation, from the moment when it breaches the very statement it articulates and becomes a figure, Moses emblematizes the aporia inherent in the eidetic conception of the sublime, and of art, in the sense of "great art." Thus, with a small amount of simplification, one could say that the figure of Moses reveals one of two things from within its contradiction: (1) Hegel is right. Even in its negativity, the Mosaic Law is in effect sublime, in that it articulates the essence of sublimity. That is, its negative presentation signifies the negation of presentation. No art, in the Platonic-Hegelian sense, can escape this. A priori and a posteriori, Hegel maintains a hold on the truth of the sublime: from Michel-

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angelo to Schoenberg, the figure of Moses symbolically marks the impossibility of great "modern" (or "romantic," in Hegel's terms) art. This is moreover what condemns art, in its aspiration to be great, to exhaust itself in the presentation of its own impossibility, and to be opposed to all forms of figurality; or (2) Art is essentially not a matter of eidetic presentation: perhaps this is what Schiller struggled to say when he spoke of "sensible signs" and "indirect presentation." But all the same, if art is certainly presentation(how could we define it otherwise?), what else does it present but essentially a form or a figure? More generally, what would be a noneidetic presentation of being? What could be at stake in a presentation if it is not of the order of eidos, of the appearance, aspect, or view? It is this question of presentation (and not of representation, at least in the sense given it by the philosophy of art) which (re)appeared in Kant for the first time since the beginning of philosophy. This is precisely the question which rumbles beneath his transcendental aesthetic, a rumbling which disturbs philosophical discourse when it confronts the problem of art. I like to think that this question is summed up in the mysterious formula inscribed on the Temple of Isis: "I am all that is, and that was, and that shall be, and no mortal hath raised the veil from before my face"-a second case, then, of absolute sublimity. Translated by David Kuchta Part 2 of this article will appear in an upcoming issue.

Notes
1. "Thus the star of day at the end of its career" (Kant 178). See in particular Derrida's treatment of this passage in "Economimesis" in Mimesis desarticulations and translated by Richard Klein in Diacritics. 2. Elsewhere, Heidegger's design itself follows this course. For example: "it cannot be denied that the interpretation of being as idea results from the basic experience of being as physis. It is, as we say, a necessary consequence of the essence of being as emerging appearance [als des aufgehenden Scheinens]. And herein there is no departure, not to mention a falling-off, from the beginning. No, that is true. But if the essential consequenceis exalted to the level of the essence itself and takes the place of the essence, what then? Then we have a falling-off, which must in turn produce strange consequences. And that is what happened. The crux of the matter is not that physis should have been charac-

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terized as idea but that the idea should have become the sole and decisive interpretation of being" (Introductionto Metaphysics182, translation modified). 3. See Pontevia, 14-19. 4. In "The Origin of the Work of Art," this is essentially true for "The Imagination as a Faculty of the Soul" (deriving the essence of Lichtung undoubtedly does not permit us to think of it with "sufficient import") and for beauty defined simply as an object of pleasure (81). Derrida has remarked on the proximity of this reserve with Hegelian reserve: for Hegel as for Heidegger the third Critique "remained a theory of subjectivity and of judgment." See Derrida, "The Parergon" in The Truthin Painting, 37-82. 5. The two moments which followed, those of Wagner and Nietzsche, are obviously included in this closure. 6. And with him Schiller: "Schiller alone grasped some essentials in relation to Kant's doctrine of the beautiful" (Nietzsche 108). 7. The same text, in an earlier version, contains the essential ingredients of the fourth of the "Six Basic Developments in the History of Aesthetics" in Nietzsche, 84-85. 8. But in the name of great art, Hegel as well accepts the "Golden Age of the Late Middle Ages." It is true that Heidegger himself accepts the Bamberg Cathedral and even, most likely, Diirer. See "The Origin of the Work of Art," 41 and 70. 9. Heidegger's treatment of Wagner is insupportable. In 1936, the meaning of such a condemnation should have escaped no one. Despite everything else, Wagner's enterprise was understood in its principle, that is, in its "efforts focusing on art and its essential role in existence": beyond its simply summary aspect, the complete art work has the merit of being "a celebration of the national community, it should be the religion" (Nietzsche,87, 86). What saves Wagner, in other words, is his artistico-political project. What condemns him is that this project is only aesthetico-political(in which form he deservedly presided over the national-socialist project itself). This is the narrowest possible path between Hegel (religion) and post-Romanticism (the community [Gemeinschaft]of the people). 10. Even in the enormous energy expended in abstracting the concept of Gestalt from its Hegelian overdetermination. I refer the reader to the work on the opening-enlightening rift (Riss) by which the work of art can define itself in some way as the arche-inscriptionof the conflict (the discord or differend) between earth and world (phusis and techne, encryption and unveiling, reserve and clearing), a conflict which is the truth, the labor where the Aristotelian concept of mimesisis fundamentally elaborated, and where Heidegger attempts to uncover a determination of the figure or stature (Gestalt)prior to the eidetic understanding of being as such. That the word Gestaltcannot be avoided and that the work of art in this context is expressly conceived beginning with the Ge-Stell (a word which later in Heidegger's work would come to signify the essence of technology), indicates rather precisely at what point this labor is precarious (which is not at all to say that this is upon an eventual eidetic overdetermination of the thematics of the rift and of the trace). See "The Origin of the Work of Art," 63 and passim. 11. And no longer understood according to its initial greatness, as knowledge. After having once again narrated the decline of this initial understanding, Heidegger notes in passing that "it suffices to know that the distinction of 'matter

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and form' sprang from the area of manufacture of tools or utensils, that it was not originally acquired in the realm of art in the narrower sense . .. but that it was merely transferred and applied to this realm" (Nietzsche 82). The eidetic determination of being is simultaneous with the laborious interpretation of techne. From this it is probably self-explanatory that all of Heidegger's effort since his Nietzschean engagement with the fundamental ontology of the aestheticopolitical project of Nazism consists in abstracting technefrom Einbilden, from the formation and imagination by which Heidegger considered, beginning with a Being and Time, the transcendence of Dasein as Weltbildung: formation (or imagination) of the world. In this sense (to paraphrase one of his formulas), the Riss (the arche-rift) of "The Origin of the Work of Art" is the negative, in the photographic sense, of the Bild of VomWesendes Grundes.What is importunate is the Kantian schematization, that is, the transcendental imagination conceived as techne. Whence the attempt, in "The Origin of the Work of Art," to relate the essence of techne with language, myth, and poetry (Sprache,Sage, Dichtung). The essence of art is Dichtung since Dichtung testifies that art is not simply the imagination of being. It is a revelation of being, which is quite different. 12. This is clearly shown by Escoubas's interpretation of Kant. 13. This is not above all to say that there is no such thing as a Kantian aesthetics. I am here constrained to object to Nancy's argument: "it is aesthetics, as a regional philosophical discipline, which is rejected by a conception of art seized by the sublime. Kant is the first to accede to aesthetics at the heart of what one could call a 'first philosophy': but he is also, and for the very same reason, the first to exclude aesthetics from the domain of philosophy. Hence we could say that there is no such thing as a Kantian aesthetics. And since Kant, there has not been a conception of art (or of the beautiful) which has not rejected aesthetics, or which has interrogated in art anything other than art" (78). However, I am not at all sure that since Kant there has been no conception of art "which has not rejected aesthetics, or which has interrogated in art anything other than art": Schiller or Hegel, for example, never rejected aesthetics for an instant, and even Nietzsche's counter-aesthetics, his "virile" aesthetics (that is, aesthetics from the point of view of the creator), is by definition an aesthetics. This is to say that "to interrogate in art nothing other than art" is not perhaps a sufficient criterion: the more Hegel regarded art as the presentation of truth (of the Idea, the Spirit, the Absolute), the more he affirmed the "auto-telos" of art, and the more he dedicated aesthetics to the understanding of art in its essence. The movement is without doubt equivocal if, by the very logic of its essence, art is not explicitly in this manner understood but by its end (its telos and completion). But this is also, for Hegel, the enabling condition for all aesthetics. I do not contest Nancy's contention that "it is aesthetics, as a regional philosophical discipline, which is rejected by a conception of art seized by the sublime"-especially when with Hegel one can hardly speak of a "conception of art seized by the sublime." I believe however that things are a little less simple. For Kant, in any case, such a rejection, if it took place, is internal to aesthetics itself. Certainly Kant's appropriation of Baumgarten, in order to designate a first philosophy, is not indifferent to it-especially contrasted with Hegel's resigned and feeble gesture, for lack of anything better and considering its dominant usage, to title his science and philosophy of art "Aesthetics." But Kant's gesture, if it is not indifferent, is made with regard to the shock which it provokes within so-called first philosophy, that is, within ontology. Considering the object of the

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first part of the third Critique,it is rather indifferent: a theory of the judgment of taste is plainly what in the eighteenth century was called an aesthetic. The title (the name) has nothing to do with the subject (the concept). Moreover the Analytic of the Beautiful, like that of the Sublime, falls under the heading of the "Analytic of Aesthetic Judgment," and thus within the "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment." These faculties are not for nothing a theory of the pleasure received from the beautiful object or from the sublime affect (or emotion). There is thus certainly a complete and systematic Kantian aesthetics. In sum, I would not speak of a "rejection" of aesthetics, but of an upheaval of aesthetics: the sublime engulfs the aesthetic, swallows it whole. I would add, however, that aesthetics collapses before the very touch of the sublime, but only in this sense of the sublime. An entire conception of the sublime as the excess of the beautiful, such as Burke's, can easily accommodate aesthetics. is 14. The terrible [das Schreckliche] traditionally another word for the sublime, as for example it is in Burke. It comes from perhaps its first aesthetic usage in Vasari, who was searching for a word to describe the great works of Michelangelo (Moses in particular). It is also borrowed from the tradition begun by Longinus. 15. Thus for example Hegel condenses his interpretation of the (sublime) relation that Genesis establishes between God and his creation as "God is powerful in the weak." 16. See Goux, "Moise, Freud, la prescription iconoclaste" in Les Iconoclastes. 17. This description is inspired by Winckelmann's analysis of Laokoon, which Schiller cites in his essay "The Pathetic." For reasons which relate to the problem of the internal economy of "On Grace and Dignity," Schiller does not present this description as a work of art. Schiller, nevertheless, returns in a note to his other essays, "The Pathetic" and "On the Sublime." 18. This is a key word and perhaps the major concept in the theory of the sublime since Longinus. "What men admire is always the paradoxical [toparadoxon]" (Longinus, Paragraph XXXV, translation modified; hereafter cited by paragraph number). 19. But, once again, this is simply a matter of adequation: what represents the representation, what figures the figure is the (sublime) renunciation of all hostility toward figuration. In the clearest opposition to Jewish (Mosaic) sublimity, Moses is a grandiose and beautiful homage to the eidetic determination of art. 20. But one can find it elsewhere as well: this is the essential, not accidental, incompleteness in Schoenberg's Moses and Aaron. This, it seems to me, is the second exemplary case of what happens when the figure of Moses is taken up by art under the aegis of aesthetic discourse. It is a manifest defeat. But perhaps Schoenberg's battle against the "opera form" is sublime in its own right. This is what one is led to believe during Straub's film version, in the way in which, by using the simple form of a spoken dialogue, it integrates the book of the third act which, contrary to the first two acts, Schoenberg wrote independently from the music. This immense rupture which opens one of the most singular (if not the most unique) scenes from modern tragedy, opens a new episode in modern tragedy, oscillating as it does between (sacred) oratorio and tragedy, as in a didactic (that is, philosophical) poem-Kant's three modes of "the presentation of the sublime, so far as [this presentation] belongs to fine art" (Kant 190). I will try to discuss this elsewhere.

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Works Cited
Derrida, Jacques. "Economimesis." Mimesis desarticulations.Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1975. 55-93. "Economimesis." Trans. Richard Klein. Diacritics (Summer 1981): 3-25. "The Parergon." The Truthin Painting. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. 15-147. . "White Mythology." Margins of Philosophy.Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. 207-71. Escoubas, Eliane. "Kant ou la simplicite sublime." Poesie 32 (1985): 112-25. Freud, Sigmund. "The Moses of Michelangelo." Vol. XIII of The StandardEdition of the CompletePsychological Worksof Sigmund Freud. 24 vols. Trans. James Strachey et al. London: Hogarth, 1953. 211-36. Goux, Jean-Joseph. Les Iconoclastes.Paris: Le Seuil, 1973. Lectureson Fine Art. Trans. T. M. Knox. 2 vols. Oxford: Hegel, G. W. F. Aesthetics: Clarendon, 1975. . Lectureson the Philosophyof Religion. Trans. E. B. Speirs and J. B. Sanderson. London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1895. Heidegger, Martin. An Introductionto Metaphysics.Trans. Ralph Manheim. New Haven: Yale UP, 1959. . "The Origin of the Work of Art." Poetry,Language, Thought.Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper Colophon, 1971. 17-87. .The Will to Power as Art. Trans. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper, 1979. Vol. 1 of Nietzsche. 4 vols. 1979-1984. Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgement. Trans. J. C. Meredith. Oxford: Clarendon, 1980. Longinus. On the Sublime. Trans. H. L. Havell. New York: Dutton, 1963. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The PostmodernCondition:A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Nancy, Jean-Luc. "L'Offrande sublime." Poesie 30 (1984): 76-103. Pontevia, Jean-Marie. Tout a peut-etre commencepar la beaute. Bordeaux, Fra.: William Blake, 1985. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duino Elegies. Trans. C. F. MacIntyre. Berkeley: U of California P, 1961. Schiller, Friedrich. "On Grace and Dignity." Aestheticaland Philosophical Essays. New York: The Publishers Plate Renting Co., n.d. 82-96. "On the Sublime." Aestheticaland PhilosophicalEssays. 135-49. "The Pathetic." Aestheticaland PhilosophicalEssays. 149-75.