10.13135/2036-542X/7794
The main purpose of this work is to present and argue ontological and political significance of the concept of the sublime analyzing Kant's aesthetics exposed in his Third Critique. In the first part of the paper we will lay stress upon the temporal structure of the Kantian sublime. In order to see how notion of the sublime reflects the radical reversal in the structure of time, we will lean on Deleuze's reflections on Kant and raise the following question: is not the experience of the sublime based upon reflection of the form of the subject, namely, the form of its inner sense - time? In the second part of this work more political issues will come forward through Slavoj Zizek's interpretation of Kant and Alain Badiou's work on revolutionary historical riots. The political actuality of the sublime is expressed in the following question: Can revision of the aesthetics of the sublime give an important contribution to the political theory of emancipation?
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Kant's Aesthetics of the Sublime and Politics of Emancipatory Temporality
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                                                         trópos • anno VI • numero 1 • 2013 — ISBN 978-88-548-6308-8
                                                          DOI 10.4399/97888548630889 — pag. 133–151 (giugno 2013)




                             Kant’s Aesthetics of the Sublime
                   and Politics of Emancipatory Temporality
                                                                                  S H
                                                                           Università di Torino



   : The main purpose of this work is to present and argue ontological and
      political significance of the concept of the sublime analyzing Kant’s aesthetics
      exposed in his Third Critique. In the first part of the paper we will lay stress upon
      the temporal structure of the Kantian sublime. In order to see how notion of
      the sublime reflects the radical reversal in the structure of time, we will lean
      on Deleuze’s reflections on Kant and raise the following question: is not the
      experience of the sublime based upon reflection of the form of the subject,
      namely, the form of its inner sense — time? In the second part of this work
      more political issues will come forward through Slavoj Žižek’s interpretation
      of Kant and Alain Badiou’s work on revolutionary historical riots. The political
      actuality of the sublime is expressed in the following question: Can revision of the
      aesthetics of the sublime give an important contribution to the political theory of
      emancipation?

   : Sublime, Temporality, Imagination, Emancipation, Event.




. “Time is out of joint” — Kant with Hamlet

In his lectures on Kant of March–April , although in a lateral and more
indirect way, Deleuze sets forth the relation between the sublime and tempo-
rality. The Shakespearean formula “Time is out of joint”, used by Deleuze,
offers a very fruitful line of interpretation of the Kantian philosophical reversal.
In Deleuze’s view this formula, taken from Hamlet’s words pronounced after
fatal encounter with his father’s ghost, indicates in a most peculiar way the
radical shift in the general conceptualization of time. The proximity between
Shakespeare and Kant is not poetical or literary coincidence of two different
authors; it is a matter of metaphorical intimation of the modern sense of time
contained in those words of Hamlet which should be depersonalized, that
is, deprived of its author in order to be understood as a formula. Deleuze
interprets time as unhinged and “out of joint” in terms of subordinate and
independent formal time. Kant’s Copernican reversal consists exactly in the

                                                                                                              
     Saša Hrnjez


passage from time, which is subordinated to the ontological movement of
nature, to time as pure, linear and empty form “liberated” from cyclic cur-
vatures and natural dynamics of the world. With Kant time is no longer the
measure of such dynamics, but its formal condition, that is to say, movement
became subordinated to time as its transcendental framework. Time which
has been subordinated to the cosmo–ontological movement of nature is just
an expression of ancient cosmology where periodical motions of the spheres
were the hinge or the real joint of the world and time was only the measure
of it, as Aristotle’s assertion from the Physics points out: “Time is the number
of movement” . Instead of being the number of movement, subordinated to
the axis of nature in its cyclic motions, with Kant time becomes criterion of
movement, namely, its formal condition. It is “out of joint” since emancipated
from the fixed point of reference. Temporal succession is not joined to the
astronomical motions of the heavenly bodies, and hereby ceases to be just a
measure of something external to itself. The Kantian autonomized, internal-
ized and emancipated time, however, has not become the essentialist entity or
some kind of alternative natural structure, but the subjective formal condition
of possibility of all phenomena, which is at the same time the condition of
impossibility of the subjectivity as substance. Time that becomes the subjec-
tive form of all sensible experience precludes the subject itself from being
substantialized. Time out of joint, as Deleuze notes, is the enemy within
subjectivity which in turn cannot be understood as substance or some kind
of Cartesian res cogitans, but only as the formal apparatus of the conditions of
synthesis determined by time.
    The first step, therefore, is to take into consideration this shift from time
subordinated to movement to movement subordinated to time. If we call
to mind the fact that ancient cosmology always qualified as beautiful the
harmonic order of the spheres and their natural cyclic passages, then we can
conclude that time in such order was also the measure of beauty, subordinated
to the beauty of cosmo–ontological harmonia. The passage from this ancient
vision of time as an image of eternity to the Kantian conceptualization of
formal, linear and pure time, actually provides the passage from the category
of beauty to the category of sublimity. Formalized and empty time has lost
its cyclical form becoming a pure straight line so that “the beginning and the
end no longer rhyme” (Hölderlin) , that is, the beginning and the end does
not fall anymore at the same point of circle; and only such kind of temporality
can bear the character of something which is sublime. This character of the

     . Quoted       in:   Gilles      Deleuze,       Second   Lesson   on    Kant,      //,
http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/sommaire.html
     . See also: G. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, New York: Columbia University Press, , p.
.
                Kant’s Aesthetics of the Sublime and Politics of Emancipatory Temporality       


sublime should be considered in real Kantian sense: something absolutely
huge and incomprehensible which cannot be grasped in one unified repre-
sentation. Just like Borges’ labyrinth — to which Deleuze refers in order
to emphasize that straight line of time is not its simplification in terms of
predictability, but a vertiginous openness of real labyrinth — time in itself
becomes non–symmetrical, non–numerical, where the before and the after
are not coincidental, and “something is always elusive” . Such temporality
can be neither beautiful nor the measure of something beautiful. It opens the
horizon of sublimity and its relation to the very form of subjectivity.
     Another consequence of the Kantian reversal of the conception of time,
which now ceases to be subordinated and gains independence and a formal
character, touches on the problem of limit. According to Deleuze’s inter-
pretation, in the entire classical metaphysics limit was thought as external
limitation, as obstacle and resistance. Spatial matter, for example, limits the
thought and the spiritual realm from outside. In other words, thought refers
to something outside thought which is irreducible to thought itself, because
it is totally other to thought, the radical alterity which restricts it. Cartesian
metaphysics is perhaps the most clear and distinct example of this position
according to which the Otherness of thought is deemed to be something
external: because thinking substance and extended substance are exterior and
irreducible to each other, the main problem becomes finding the true point of
their unity (God from Descartes’ point of view). With the Kantian formaliza-
tion of time, whereby time gets out of joint, limit is not considered an external
limitation, but the internal flaw and fissure within the transcendental subject.
The circular form of the ancient cosmological time can be viewed as a geo-
metrical representation of the beautiful and harmonic definition/delimitation
of the world, and every transgression of this metaphysical limitation, as the
ancient Greek tragedies show, is destined to fail for destabilized order must
be recuperated. The circular time corresponds to the circle of temporary
destabilization and the consequent restoration of harmony. Nonetheless, in
Kant — and Deleuze, following Hölderlin’s studies, shows that this shift
in the notion of time has been already carried out by Sophocles’ tragedy,
which expressed the modern sense of time — we have un–curved time which
does not limit and encompass the harmonic world order. We could also say
that time becomes the horizon which allows for the movement, the passage
toward an asymptotic limit which always remain elusive and unattainable.
The long wandering of Oedipus is the expression of such un–curved time:
time as pure straight line. And in more philosophical terms we can assert

    . G. Deleuze, Preface. On Four Poetic Formulas which Might Summarize the Kantian Philosophy in: G.
Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy, London: The Athlone Presse, , p. vii.
    . G. Deleuze, Second Lesson on Kant, //, http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/sommaire.html
     Saša Hrnjez


that external limitation is substituted by an internal split and disharmonious
heterogeneity of subjectivity itself. The other of thought (space–matter in
classical philosophy) becomes the other within thought: time. Time traverses
the subject, splits it in two and marks its dual structure, its heterogeneity (viz.
sensibility and understanding, spontaneity and receptivity). Deleuze insists a
lot on this fundamental change consisting in the interiorization of limit that
ceases to be external material–corporal or spatial obstacle and assumes tempo-
ral meaning. In that sense time plays the role of the “interior enemy” which
operates within subjectivity and works against it “as if there was in thought
something impossible to think” . Such impossibility inherent to subjectivity
is directly connected to the experience of the sublime, which is fundamentally
the experience of limit and the impossibility of representations, the case of the
failed synthesis. Therefore, the theory of the sublime is not a mere appendix,
as Kant himself claims , or some secondary and less important aesthetical
problematization. Furthermore, the question of the sublime is not only the
aesthetic question, but one of the keystones of the whole Kantian system
which deals with its main problem — the possibility of synthesis. It means, in
other words, that Kant’s aesthetics provides a further answer to his principal
and inaugural question: how are a priori synthetic judgments possible?


. Temporal conflictuality of the imagination in the experience of the
   sublime

In order to examine the temporal value of the sublime (and the sublime mean-
ing of temporality as well) it is necessary to analyze Kant’s paragraphs from
his Critique of the Power of Judgment. We can interpret the tension between
apprehension (Auffassung) and aesthetic comprehension (Zusammenfassung)
in the mathematical sublime as a fundamentally temporal tension between
the tendency to the infinite succession and the instantaneous grasping of
totality. Reason (Vernunft) gives the imagination the task of representing the
absolute totality of intuitions in one instant. In the successive apprehension
of intuitions the imagination goes on to the infinity, but as the progressive
movement from one sensuous part to the other one proceeds, the applica-
tion of the rational Idea of totality becomes more and more difficult, until it
reaches the point of its real impossibility. This happens when we find our-
selves before some absolutely immense object of perception, like the calm
ocean or the starry sky. Our apprehension is moving from one intuition to

    . G. Deleuze, Second Lesson on Kant, cit.
    . Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, edited by Paul Guyer, translated by Paul Guyer
and Eric Mathews, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, , §, p..
                  Kant’s Aesthetics of the Sublime and Politics of Emancipatory Temporality              


another one, but at the moment when the imagination needs to comprehend
and encompass the entire successive series of sensory intuitions in one single
perceptive representation, it then faces its own limits and lack. There is no
time to carry out and complete the operation of comprehension, because
every new intuition in a temporal progress precludes the reproduction of
what has been apprehended before it. Kant writes regarding the observation
of a pyramid: “the eye requires some time to complete its apprehension. . .
but during this time the former always partly fades before the imagination has
taken in the latter” . It seems that the lack of time is inscribed in the synthetic
operation of the imagination as its transcendental condition. The imagination
is temporally limited, traversed by the line of time, and its failure to satisfy the
claims of Reason is actually the failure to schematize (temporalize) something
that is beyond time, i.e. the Idea of Reason. In aesthetic estimation, where a
quantity is intuitively and immediately grasped in order to be used as the
unity of measure, the imagination — unlike its function in the constitution of
the objects of experience — operates without categories of the understanding,
that is to say in terms of the First Critique: without synthesis of recognition
in concepts. The imagination is now directly under the influence of Reason
and therefore also holistic and totalizing endeavor to grasp the unity in an
instant, which finishes unsuccessfully. Such negative experience produces the
sentiment of perturbation and irritating inadequacy between faculties (imagi-
nation and reason). Kant shows that the imagination is the victim of Reason
that commits violence, forcing imagination to do something of which it is
not capable, that is, to represent the irrepresentable, to encompass the infinite
and to construct a whole. But this violence of Reason toward the imagination
is actually just the other side of the violence inherent to the imagination itself.

     . Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, cit., §, p..
     . We will leave aside the question whether the aesthetic comprehension shall be taken as a
synthetical operation stricto sensu or not. It is clear that the aesthetic comprehension of imagination
cannot be the synthesis in the sense of the activity of the constitution of the objects of experience
under discursive concepts, and actually such synthesis is what Kant calls comprehensio logica. But the
pre–discursive, more fundamental operation of grasping the unity, called aesthetic comprehension, we
will continue to define synthetical, as a synthesis without concepts, analogously to the Kant’s term
“schematism without a concept”. It should be noticed that Kant does not indeed use the term synthesis
when discussing aesthetic comprehension. Cfr. Rudolf A. Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in
Kant, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, .
     . It is important to bear in mind that this aesthetic estimation is the basis for the mathematical
estimation, which is actually the estimation by means of concepts, through the conceptual synthesis.
This Kant’s insight can serve as an argument for the thesis that the Critique of the Power of Judgment is the
basis of the Critique of Pure Reason. The mathematical sublime does not refer only to the immeasurable
and absolutely huge, but to an immeasurable absolute measure as well, and this latter acts as the
fundament for each relative measure or measured relation between magnitudes. The comprehensio
aeshetica, as an instantaneous grasping of intuitive measure, in other words, precedes and underlies the
objective synthesis. It is some kind of pre–synthetical construction, the transcendental conditioning of
what Kant calls the synopsis of the manifold, or the synthesis of apprehension of the first Critique.
      Saša Hrnjez


This is exactly the moment of Kant’s great “aesthetic contribution” to his
theory of transcendental synthesis exposed in the first Critique where the
imagination has a conciliatory and mediatory role consisting in the produc-
ing of schemata in order to realize the passage from the categories of the
understanding to the intuitions of sensibility. Without this concretization and
application of intellectual concepts to sensibility by means of schemata no
experience and cognition could be possible. Now, in the Critique of the Power
of Judgment we have everything but this irenic and conciliatory imagination
that operates without disruptions in the service of the understanding and its
theoretical interest to constitute empirical objects. “Free play of the faculties”
conceals the potential conflict which actually emerges in the sublime, where
an accord is reached only through a discord. Moreover, confronting itself with
Reason, the imagination turns reflexively on itself and discovers its violent
kernel which is invisible from the point of view of the Critique of Pure Reason.
    In the first Critique Kant proposes the famous triple synthesis: synthesis
of apprehension in intuition, synthesis of reproduction in imagination, syn-
thesis of recognition in concepts. The second type, synthesis of reproduction,
commits a violent act, for it stops the natural flow of time, that is, the succes-
sion of discrete intuitions in apprehension. In order to reproduce and retain
the previous elements and partial representations and to synthesize them
under one perception, the imagination needs to counteract the extensive
time–continuum in apprehension. This act is comparable to the “regress
of the imagination” from the third Critique: “. . . the comprehension in one
moment of that which is successively apprehended, is a regression, which
in turn cancels the time–condition in the progression of the imagination
and makes simultaneity intuitable. It is thus (since temporal succession is
a condition of inner sense and of an intuition) a subjective movement of
the imagination, by which it does violence to the inner sense . . . ” . Briefly,
in order to synthesize detached intuitions and grasp all of them as coexis-
tent within a totality, the imagination needs to go against the natural, linear
course of time (this is what Kant means by canceling the time–condition )
and in that way it does violence to inner sense (this inner sense in Kant is
nothing but time as the universal form of interiority and hence of every
representation ). In the first Critique this violent deviation in the relation
between subjective faculties was suppressed by the systematic determination
of the understanding which guides the imagination. Only with the aesthetic

    . Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, cit., §, p..
    . Cfr. R. A. Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant, cit.
    . “ Form of interiority means not only that time is internal to us, but that our interiority constantly
divides us from ourselves, splits us in two: a splitting in two which never runs its course, since time has
no end.”, G. Deleuze, Preface. On four poetic formulas which might summarize the Kantian philosophy, cit., p.
ix.
             Kant’s Aesthetics of the Sublime and Politics of Emancipatory Temporality   


discourse of the third Critique does that which was covered up in the first
Critique emerge on the surface: every sensuous unity is in some sense a result
of the violence of the imagination which imposes the synthetic aggregation
to a manifold and suppresses the irreversible extension of time in order to
reproduce previous intuitions. The synthesis is not a “natural” operation, but
rather an intervention. This could be envisaged only when the imagination
liberates itself from the guidance of the understanding and experiences in
turn the violence of the reason which requires absolute totality as the only
acceptable measure of things. Since the synthesis of reproduction from the
first Critique stays under the general logical (or mathematical) construction of
experience, where the synthesis of recognition in concepts plays a key role,
the “regress” of the imagination in reproduction is shown to be insignificant,
because in some way the conceptual unity of a manifold has recuperated the
linear time–order through schematism. The aesthetic imagination, which
does not reproduce representations, but comprehends the whole in an instant
and “makes simultaneity intuitable”, has a reflective and not determinant or
constitutive role. It is the subjective inner state of the free and disordered
relation between faculties that is at issue here. The violence done to inner
sense, or what Kant calls subjective movement, actually opens up the per-
spective of the abyss of the subjectivity itself. We can use here the Deleuzian
interpretation of time as interior limit and inner enemy and say that tension
between the imagination and its temporal conditioning is a clear consequence
of the radically changed temporal structure defined as “time out of joint”.
The pure experience of this “disjointedness” corresponds to the experience
of the sublime constituted through perception of chaos, disarray, devasta-
tion and cruelty in nature. In the sublime, besides the power of Reason, the
imagination encounters also the power of Time. The disastrous outcome,
that the imagination is not able to comprehend the absolutely great in an
instant is proof that the imagination could not stop or control the flow of
time. The inherent limit of the imagination takes also the meaning of the
superiority of time which discloses itself as a true absolute greatness, that
abyss in which imagination fears to lose itself. The annihilation or canceling
of the time–condition — if we pay attention to the word which Kant uses
(aufhebt) — is the negation of the successive mathematical order of time that
ultimately affirms its most profound, abyssal structure which traverses the
subject. Could we say, referring to Kant’s distinction between extensive and
intensive magnitudes, that time is annihilated as the extensive and affirmed
as the intensive magnitude?
    If in the first Critique we have gotten to know the imagination as a con-
structive mediatory faculty of the Bildung, producing the schemata (defined
by Kant as Zeitbestimmungen) as function of the intellectual unification of
synthesis of the manifold, in the third Critique we see that the form of time
       Saša Hrnjez


undermines the imagination from within, so what happens is an inherent
conflict between these two. In a certain sense, the experience of the sublime is
the plausible consequence of the mode in which Kant grounds the synthesis
in his first Critique. To put time as the general condition of synthesis, the
form of interiority and all representations, and, on the other hand, posit it
as a bridge which connects the heterogeneous aspects of the same subject
(receptivity and spontaneity), means actually to build the whole construction
of the transcendental synthesis on a very precarious terrain. What Kant’s
aesthetics, and the experience of the sublime particularly, shows us is the
fragility of synthesis as such . Deleuze insists a lot on this chaotic, precarious,
“aesthetical” territory of the entire Kantian transcendental construction. In
the text What is Philosophy Deleuze and Guattari describe Kant’s third Critique
as an unrestrained work of old age. Deleuze also writes: “It will be the Cri-
tique of Judgment, in his last book, as if to the extent that he aged, he became
aware of the catastrophe” . We could only add that the fragility of synthesis,
brought to light in the catastrophic failure to synthesize the absolutely huge
and the absolutely powerful, is a result of the inherent heterogeneity within
the subjectivity and its incessant inner tension which tracks the line of time.
    The experience of the sublime, indeed, is an important lesson on the
antagonism in the very core of subjectivity itself. The antagonism between
the imagination and reason reveals the antagonism within the imagination
itself, that is, the conflict with its temporal conditioning. Or rather we can
ask: are these two antagonisms (imagination versus reason and synthesis
of imagination versus temporal succession) actually one and the same con-
flict? Is not disagreement with Reason and its compulsory pretension to the
unconditioned totality just a projection of the radical ambiguity within the
imagination itself?
    The main point of Kant’s theory of the sublime arrives at the moment in
which the imagination and reason, in an interesting dialectic overturn, reach
a mutual agreement on the basis of their discord. What is the basis of this
harmony between two faculties that seemed totally irreconcilable? The imagi-
nation, brought to its ultimate limits, recognizes Reason as the superior faculty
of the supersensible, in such manner that it recognizes the supersensible as
its own destination (übersinnlichen Bestimmung). In other words, imagination
through negative experience, tension and pain, discovers its transcendental
origin and common root with Reason. The imagination is not capable of rep-
resenting the supersensible Idea, however it represents this very incapability
and its own insufficiency. Through such privative self–reflexive experience of
proper insufficiency, the imagination enters in harmony with the faculty of

      . Deleuze, Fourth Lesson on Kant, //, cit.
      . Deleuze, Third Lesson on Kant, //, cit.
                  Kant’s Aesthetics of the Sublime and Politics of Emancipatory Temporality             


the supersensible, since it recognizes the supersensible as the origin of all our
faculties; the origin which it cannot represent, but only indicate. However,
Kant begins his discourse on the sublime with the assertion that apprehension
tends towards infinity, as an infinite temporal succession of sensuous parts in
intuition. In other words, it means that the supersensible Idea of infinity is
already present at the pre–discursive level of the sensible apprehension, and
as such it is constitutive for the synthesis of imagination. The confrontation
with Reason serves to explicate this transcendental presence of the infinite
in all our faculties and to discover their “point of concentration”, that is, the
supersensible unity of all our faculties .
     It is very important to stress that the sublime for Kant is not a quality of
the object. And when we judge a phenomenon as sublime it is only improper
use of the category of the sublime. Even the category of the beautiful is not
objective, but reflective: what is beautiful cannot be determined objectively,
derived from some concept of the object or made dependent upon the
immediate relation with the object in terms of the pleasantness. Nonetheless,
in the judgment of the beautiful we express ourselves as if the object judged
is beautiful in itself and as if it is created purposively for us. For Kant, the
beautiful lies in the reflection upon the form of the object and the feeling
of pleasure is aroused with reference to the concrete form of an object, as
if its purposiveness were based on some definite concept. In the case of the
sublime it seems that the “as if term” fades away and we do not have that
type of subjective purposiveness, immediate pleasure and harmony between
objects in nature and our faculties, as we have it clearly in the experience
of the beautiful. What we have in the sublime is more likely some kind of
projection of our inner disposition, so the purposiveness must regard the
form of the subject and not that of the object. Kant defines the sublime as
“disposition of the mind” , “a movement of the mind connected with the
judging” or simply, the use that the faculty of judgment makes of some
objects, and not the object itself. Instead of prescribing a definition to the
sublime objects Kant, when he wants to be more precise, uses the expressions
such as “the object serves for the presentation of a sublimity that can be found
in the mind” . In fact, what is sublime in the experience of the sublime is the
very subject of the experience, who discovers the potency of the noumenal.
Therefore, if in the beautiful the subject reflects the form of an object, could
we conclude that in the sublime what is reflected is the form of the subject?

    . Cfr. Gilles Deleuze, l’idée de genèse dans l’esthétique de Kant, in: Revue d’Esthétique, n. ():
–.
    . Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, cit., §, p. .
    . Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, cit., §, p..
    . Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, cit., §, p..
     Saša Hrnjez


The sublime is a self–reflection of the subject which, in the encounter with
the certain natural phenomena such as calm immense oceans, starry sky or
storms and volcanic eruptions, reaches the awareness of its own supersensible
nature in the form of the Ideas of Reason. If we take into consideration that
the form of the subject, namely, the form of its interiority is time, for time
is the universal condition of all phenomena and the constitutive framework
for every representation that necessarily belongs to our inner state , then
self–reflection of the form of the subject necessarily includes its temporal
dimension. Time underlies the way in which representations are collocated
in our mind, that is to say, time as pure intuition, or subjective a priori form
of our inner sense regards the pure relationality between representations in
terms of succession, simultaneity, or permanence . Because of this universal
and relational character time is pure irrepresentable interiority which cannot
be perceived immediately, but nonetheless acts as the ground of all possible
experience. Analogously to the exhibition of the irrepresentable Ideas of the
reason, what comes forward in the experience of the sublime is an exhibition
of the temporal core of subjectivity.


. The revolutionary event of emancipation and the sublime

We saw that the experience of the sublime depends directly upon the new
character of time opened by the Kantian subject (or better to say: opened in
the Kantian subject). Slavoj Žižek in his interpretation of Kant’s imagination
argues that the experience of the sublime marks the moment of a radical rup-
ture and interruption in the linear temporal order . Such order is constituted
by the schematism as a function of the application of the discursive categories
to sensible experience. The subject’s synthesis counteracts the natural flow
of sensations and “produces” the time as order of numerical succession .
Turning back to the issue of the violence of the imagination and its “regress”,
it means that even before the synthesis of reproduction in the imagination we
have one more originary intervention in time, which together with the syn-
thesis of apprehension, “constructs” the continuity of time as the numerical
series of discrete moments, the sum of separate items, what is in accordance

    . “All presentations, whether or not they have outer things as their objects [. . . ] belong to our
inner state; and this inner state is subject to the formal condition of inner intuition, and hence to the
condition of time”. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Indianapolis: Hackett, , B.
    . Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, cit., B and B.
    . Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish subject, London–New York: Verso, .
    . Cfr. “Therefore number is nothing other than the unity in the synthesis of the manifold of a
homogeneous intuition as such, a unity that arises because I myself produce time in apprehending the
intuition”, Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, cit., A .
                 Kant’s Aesthetics of the Sublime and Politics of Emancipatory Temporality          


with Kant’s analysis of extensive magnitudes . What is “attacked” by this first
synthesis in apprehension is the indivisible natural continuity of time which
becomes distinguished in itself, so we are able to represent a manifold . All
these interventions in and against time (firstly, against its presupposed natural
indivisible flow, and then against its discrete irreversible continuity) remain
nevertheless within the main structure of the theoretical determinant judg-
ment, offered by the first Critique, which has the linear temporal order as a
basis. This temporal order is also that which allows imagination to schematize
the categories and contribute to the constitution of the object of experience,
as Kant’s doctrine of schematism demonstrates. According to Žižek, such
schematized time is a homogenized time in which nothing really new can
emerge, because it provides a framework for the repetitive experience ruled
by necessary laws. This experience designates the scientific methodic truth
for which the Critique of Pure Reason offers transcendental grounding, while
Kant’s third Critique opens the space for extra–methodic truth . This space
is what Kant in the Introduction for his third Critique defines as territory
without domain . The territory without domain suspends mechanism of
the schematism and “control” over the particular by means of universal laws
thereby the subject of that territory reflects, in an aesthetic experience, the
uniqueness of the event as exhibition of the freedom through subversion in
the schematic order of time. The experience of the sublime is the experience
of something non–ordinary and extra–ordinary, felt like an event ex nihilo.
At the level of objective experience and cognition nothing can be created ex
nihilo since the principle of causality, as a category of understanding, requires a
previous state of conditions which necessarily produce an effect, following the
schemata of temporal succession. However, since the sublime is a matter of
subjective experience and “movement of the mind”, the fact that we feel some
phenomenon as event — unexpected, unpredicted, compelling or transfixing
— produces a rupture in the homogeneous order of schematized time. Such
an event has a meaning of the liberation and emancipation from previous
conditions, because something new “cannot be accounted for by reference
to the pre–existing network of circumstances” . This liberation from blind
causality concerns our transcendental freedom, and our moral supersensible
     . Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, cit., B–B.
     . “Every intuition contains a manifold. Yet this manifold would not be presented as such if the
mind did not in the sequence of impressions following one another distinguish time.” (Kant, Critique of
Pure Reason, cit., A) and: “Apprehension of the manifold of appearances is always successive . . . the
manifold of appearances is always produced in the mind successively.” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason,
cit., B/A)
     . Gaetano Chiurazzi, Al di là del dominio. Il problema della Critica del Giudizio come problema
ermeneutico, in:  Jahre Wahrheit und Methode, ed. R. Dottori, LIT, , pp.–.
     . Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, cit., p..
     . S. Žižek, The Ticklish subject, cit., p..
     Saša Hrnjez


destination, as Kantian sublime shows. The morality as the Law of Reason,
which particularly intervenes in the dynamic sublime, is nothing but the
emergence of our intrinsic freedom which breaks with natural causality and
the linear order of time. “We are dealing here with another temporality, the
temporality of freedom, of a radical rupture in the chain of (natural and/or
social) causality” . In this break we have to search for political significance
and emancipatory character of the sublime. Is not a revolution, the sublime
experience of disruption felt like something historically new? Are the popular
uprisings, civil riots, and social revolts the sublime openings of the histor-
ical new, of the unexpected, something “absolutely huge” and “absolutely
powerful” with unpredictable consequences? Following Žižek we can ask:
when does the experience of the sublime occur in politics? His answer is:
when people ”risk freedom” against their immediate interests, profits and
calculations in terms of costs and benefits, and when the impossible, due to
the new temporal order, becomes possible.
    The relation between Kant’s sublime and political revolutions is not only
conceptual but historical as well. Kant’s Third Critique is the work which has
been written in the political atmosphere of the French Revolution, published
in the . Is not the ambiguous character of the sublime (attractive and
repulsive at the same time) an aesthetic translation of Kant’s impressions and
political attitude toward French Revolution ? The harmony in disagreement
should represent superiority of the subject of Revolution, who finally finds
rational satisfaction and subjective purposiveness in violence and terror. What
is also interesting to notice is that another important name in the aesthetics
of the sublime, Edmund Burke, is also the author of the famous conservative
critique of the French Revolution . Can differences between Kant’s and
Burke’s sublime be an indication of their political differences with regard to
the revolutionary events? To answer this question it is necessary to examine
political implications of the notion of the sublime.
    Alain Badiou in his recent book The Rebirth of History, distinguishing im-
mediate, latent and historical uprisings, sets out a theoretical framework for
the current and future reawakenings of History, under the form of mass
upheavals and riots against existent political and social order, whereby pre-
viously excluded people, the inexistent, mount the stage of history, become
visible and — due to the subjective energy of the moment — open a whole
series of unexpected and, until that time, unimaginable emancipatory con-
sequences. Badiou therefore develops the concept of Event which makes
   . S. Žižek, The Ticklish subject, cit., p.
   . Cfr. S. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, .
   . Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful,
Oxford University Press, ., and E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Penguin Classics,
.
                Kant’s Aesthetics of the Sublime and Politics of Emancipatory Temporality   


possible “the restitution of inexistent”  and sets free a truth in the form of a
new, previously unknown political possibility. In this study Badiou makes a
few allusions to Kant; when he elaborates the question of intensification of
subjectivity, as the constitutive factor of a historical uprising, he identifies such
intensification with the concept of enthusiasm recognized already by Kant,
and moreover, recognized by him exactly as the sublime feeling . Badiou
does not aim to establish any interpretative connection with Kant’s aesthetics
of the sublime, but we are convinced that such relation is a fruitful way for
further analysis and philosophical reflection, since Badiou’s considerations on
the reawakening of History coincide to a great extent with Kant’s discourse
on the sublime. Analogously to the sublime which confirms the power of
the Idea of Reason and discloses our supersensible destination, a historical
uprising for Badiou is only that event where the power of an Idea will take
root and confirm itself. Here is not the place to elaborate on the difference
between Kant’s and Badiou’s concept of Idea, and its debt to the platonic
tradition, but it is obvious that what connects the sublime with the rebirth
of history is the exhibition of the Idea, of the infinite, of the irrepresentable,
through the moment of rupture and through the unforseen emergence of
something New. Badiou disavows riots that have only negative, violent and
anarchic character deprived of any enduring truth. The accord with an Idea
is needed in order to have a truly historical Event which opens the new
emancipatory possibilities important for the collective destiny of mankind.
The universal aspect emerges from the struggle and conflict, from violent
rupture in the causal order that introduces a new temporality. However,
like in the painful experience of the sublime, negativity is a way in which
Idea exhibits itself. For Kant this negativity, that is, awareness of the irrep-
resentability and impossibility of Idea, is the only possible way in which it
can manifest itself (as Darstellung and not as Vorstellung). In order to carry
out this negative exhibition of the infinite, the schematized order of time
must be abandoned and suspended. Here arises another interesting point of
contact between Badiou’s notion of historical event and Kant’s sublime which
puts forward the actuality of the aesthetical experience in the framework
of political theory and also confirms our line of interpretation that passes
through the problem of temporality in the structure of the sublime. Badiou
claims that “the invention of time” is necessary for establishing a continuity
of revolutionary Event when its initial force peters out. Very similar to Žižek’s
analysis of the Kantian sublime, Badiou puts the entire philosophical analysis
of the rebirth of History in terms of a new and old–mainstream temporality.

   . Alain Badiou, The Rebirth of History, London–New York: Verso, , p. .
   . Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, cit., pp. –.
   . A. Badiou, The Rebirth of History, cit., p..
        Saša Hrnjez


Organization or discipline of the Event which wants to preserve and in some
sense institutionalize the new possibilities brought up by massive uprising
is actually “the transformation of evental power into temporality” . This
new temporality is, according to Badiou, regarded as outside time, in the sense
that it cannot be inscribed into the order of time prescribed by the previ-
ous world. The Event–historical riot made an irremediable break in time,
against its causal linearity and predictability, subverting the relation between
possibility and impossibility (what seemed impossible within one temporal
order now after the rupture is possible), and after that “the invention of time”
stabilizes the new coordinates in terms of new continuity. Is not this break
in time exactly what happens in the experience of the sublime? Moreover, is
not Badiou’s “invention of time”, by means of which outside–time happened
in the historical Event needs to create its new temporality, that is, a new
temporal order of continuity through the organization and elaboration of
the gained political results, similar to the gesture which Kant’s ascribes to
the genius? The genius in some way unifies the sublime and the beautiful,
in other words, he/she unifies the event of his/her infinite inspiration and
creation of new matter with the process of form–giving and harmonization,
in order to make communicable his/her creation . If we want to remain on
the same line, discovery of the aesthetic Idea by genius would be analogous
to the exhibition of the political Idea in a massive popular uprising, while
genius’ composing of his/her artwork would be analogous to the political
organization of the historical revolutionary movement which translates itself
into some political body and institutional coordinates. Without the second
moment — the moment of forming, organization and conceptualization —
the artwork would be just an incomprehensible, incommunicable personal
vision, as the storm and volcanic eruption of a political event would be just a
nihilistic and violent episode of history. The emancipatory character of the
sublime, hence, lies in its temporal rupture which opens a new horizon of
great and universal impact, but this openness will remain counterproductive,
or even destructive, if accord between historical imagination and political
intellect is lacking — the accord which gives a form and consistency in order
to make a revolutionary political event a model for others to follow.


. Conclusion — toward a renewed aesthetics of the sublime

One can object here that this interpretation of Kant’s sublime is not valid
since Kant’s aesthetics is predominantly based upon reflection of the natural

      . A. Badiou, The Rebirth of History, cit., p..
      . Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgmen, cit., § and §.
                  Kant’s Aesthetics of the Sublime and Politics of Emancipatory Temporality         


phenomena (the sky, sees, oceans, stormy clouds, mountain precipices, etc)
and therefore we are not allowed to make a similar passage from nature
to history, applying the reflective judgment to political and social events.
Another critique could be that the sublime refers to a single person, to the
modern individual subject in all its “robinsonade” and solitude before nature
and outside society (Kant himself says that there is something sublime in
separation from all society ), so that the sentiment of the sublime is in some
way a–political, and regards only the ambiguous relation between individual
and the world of nature. We will respond to these possible objections through
three different elucidations.
    Firstly, the way in which Kant conceives aesthetic reflection implies the
overcoming of the naturalness and immediate dependence on natural causality.
According to the main postulates of German Idealism, reflection is always
self–reflection, so even when we reflect the form of an object of nature,
judging it, for instance, as beautiful, what is at stake is the free relation between
our faculties and our relation with the nature. In the experience of the sublime
particularly, the naturality is overcome by the victory of the supersensible
moral vocation of the noumenal subject, which confirms the superiority and
independence from nature. Nature is regarded “as paling into insignificance
beside the Ideas of Reason” . The argument that the sublime is restricted to
natural phenomena is therefore narrow, because nature in Kantian aesthetics
of the sublime serves as a mirror of our own sublimity — the enlarging
mirror in which our reflection becomes magnified.
    Secondly, even the relation between man and nature has been changed
since Kant’s epoch. Due to a complete Entzauberung of the world, the techno-
logical and scientific development of mankind that put nature under human
control, and made visible and accessible even the most distant and most un-
usual places on the Earth, nature certainly has lost its overwhelming, almost
divine impact on man that challenged him to a heroic duel with nature. More
humanized, that is, more subjected to man’s power, nature has become less
hostile. The gaze of the wanderer above the sea of fog from the famous
Caspar Friedrich’s painting today, at the beginning of the st century, will be
definitely different. If sublimity before nature is eclipsed, it does not mean
that sublimity as such has lost its meaning. Is then the sublime dislocated
from nature to history, and to politics also ? The aesthetics of the sublime
in the th century can be viewed as a reaction to the prevailing mechanistic
approach to nature at that time , so the only way to escape this determin-

   .   Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, cit., § , p..
   .   Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, cit., § , p..
   .   Remo Bodei, Paesaggi sublimi. Gli uomini davanti alla natura selvaggia, Milano: Bompiani, .
   .   Pierre Hadot, Le voil d’Isis, Essai sur l’historie de l’idee de nature, Paris: Gallimard, .
     Saša Hrnjez


istic vision, which follows the model of the perfect clock mechanism, was
to offer another approach to nature, that of the reflective judgment. This
analogy actually condenses the intentions of this work in which we propose
a re–examination of the aesthetics of the sublime as a potential contribution
to the political theory of emancipation. Nowadays the deterministic model
is transposed from nature to a social reality that has succumbed to the logic
of capital and managerial techne, so it becomes necessary to oppose another,
alternative model of sociality (what is needed today is perhaps some kind
of the Heisenbergian indeterminacy principle in the social realm). In that
process the aesthetics of the sublime can have an emancipatory role in the
similar way it did in Kant’s epoch .
    Thirdly, it is almost impossible to disregard the echo of the epoch of
Revolutions in Kant’s work. One note from the Critique of the Power of Judgment,
published during the second year of the French Revolution, seems to refer
explicitly to this great event of ”fundamental transformation of great people
into the state” Moreover, is not revolution in an other Kant’s text, namely,
The Conflict of the Faculties, defined in terms of the unity between nature and
freedom, which is exactly the program of his third Critique? In this late work
of Kant, written in the  when the French revolution had already showed
its atrocities and dramatic outcomes, he notes that even if ”the revolution
of a gifted people which we have seen unfolding in our day” brings misery
and atrocities, nonetheless it finds “in the hearts of all spectators (who are
not engaged in this game themselves) wishful participation that borders
closely on enthusiasm, the very expression of which is fraught with danger” .
The similarity between this description and the analysis of the sublime is
obvious. The sympathy of the spectator for the revolution has cause in our
moral disposition like the sublime, which recompenses, through the negative
pleasure, the anguished breakdown of the imagination by elevating (erheben)
us to the most profound realization of our rational nature articulated in the
moral Law and the Idea of humanity. Revolution is moral because it is “the
acknowledged duty of the human soul, concerning mankind as a whole” ,
and as such it signifies the realization of morality in history through the will
of the people who strain to give themselves autonomously the constitution
as morally good in itself. Kant’s views on the French Revolution are not

   . It could be interesting to call our attention to one Hölderlin’s letter, addressed to his brother
Karl, in which he writes that Kant’s philosophy is the only possible because it plays an important
(we can say: emancipatory) role by saving the Germans from their timorous obtuseness. F. Hölderlin,
Sämtliche Werke und Briefe,  voll., ed. M. Knaupp, München–Wien; Hanser Verlag, vol. , –, pp.
–.
    . Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, cit., p. .
   . Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, New York: Abaris Books, , p. .
    . Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, cit., p..
                 Kant’s Aesthetics of the Sublime and Politics of Emancipatory Temporality           


moralizing, because he saw the  as an application of Pure Practical Reason,
as the Event of the morality of the Right. And conversely, since he sees the
Revolution as an ethical moment to be realized in history, Kant’s ethics is not
to be regarded as a “military” rigid moralism. In some way, the experience of
the sublime demonstrates the true ontological character of Kant’s ethics.
    Those very enthusiastic tones from Kant’s text written in the , in
which he, interestingly, did not condemn the Jacobin’s terror, but rather talks
about enthusiasm and moral sympathy in spite of atrocity, serve some authors
with the argument in favor of Kant’s revolutionary intentions often hidden
by an art of ambiguous and contradictory writing, necessary in the times
of censorship . French philosopher André Tosel articulates Kant’s political
antinomy, which is nothing but a symptom of the real historical antinomy
in the period of crisis, in these terms : the Event of the Right, through
revolution as a historical symbol of the Idea of freedom and justice, does not
use the instruments of the right, that is to say, does not respect the actual
legal order and status quo of the institutionalized right. The Event of the
Right is always an illegal violent reaction to the violence of the authority
which is grounded in the valid legislation and the current systems of rules.
Therefore, the revolutionary Event of the Right necessarily counteracts the
fact of the right. This antinomy could be resolved if we take the meaning of
the concept of “right” differently when we speak about the Event and when
we speak about the fact or legality . However, the sense of this dramatic
antinomy is that the state of the Right (or the Idea of Reason) cannot be
enacted through the legal instruments of the right. The zero–point, the initial
pre–legal situation of a new political and social organization, which should be
more in harmony with the Idea of Reason, is not a juridical fact agreeable
with the actual state of things, but a disorder, disarray, rupture with all its
temporal implications that we have already elucidated with the example of
the sublime. The origin of legality is “illegal”, chaotic and violent — sublime.
The new, “evental” violence in name of Reason collides with the old, “ancien
régime“ violence which acquired the form of the natural course of things,
despotism of status quo in name of Nature, objectivism and self–proclaimed
realism. Does this conflict between two violent transgressions, constitutive

    . Could not we take all those Kant’s quoted words from The Conflict of the Faculties as an example
of the reflective aesthetic judgment?
    . Domenico Losurdo, Autocensura e compromesso nel pensiero politico di Kant, Napoli: Bibliopolis,
.
    . André Tosel, Kant révolutionnaire, Paris: PUF, .
    . The Event of the Right refers to the right as an effect of the Idea of Reason concerning our
moral supersensible vocation and the striving for freedom (because of that the term is written with
capital letter). The fact of the right has meaning of legality and juridical system of the rules in force.
Therefore, we use these two different meanings of the same term “right”.
     Saša Hrnjez


for the realization of the Idea of Right, remind us of the violence and collision
inherent in the sublime where imagination which violates inner sense is in
turn violated by the pretensions of Reason to represent the Idea? Only the
victory of Reason can establish the peaceful harmony between the faculties,
in the same way as only the victory of a revolutionary cause can legitimate
new political and social state.
    Furthermore, this relation between two orders, between the Event and
the fact, between the sublime irruption of freedom and the conventional
continuity of statu quo, introduces thus a new perspective for the interpreta-
tion of the sublime with regard to sensus communis, another crucial concept
of Kant’s aesthetics. If the sublime finds its profound (political) meaning in
the “domination of the rebellion”, as an emancipatory authentic act oriented
against the regime of facticity, then sensus communis, as horizon of intersubjec-
tive communicability authorized by current social rules, is always threatened
by the potential rupture of the sublime. On the other hand, the sublime is
constitutive for common sense, as its “illegal” origin and the instance which
can always question the common logos of communicability. But the sublime
event, as we have already noted, in order to produce far–reaching conse-
quences with an universal and “objective” impact, has to find its proper sensus
communis, its own language. All this generates some kind of hermeneutical
circle between the sublime and common sense. The sublime is “the founding
act” of common sense, and at the same time the sublime threatens current
common sense, but nonethlesss the sublime requires it as its horizon of
communicability.
    Philosophical hermeneutics has usually neglected the question of the sub-
lime moving its attention instead toward the questions of common sense,
taste and beauty. Hans Georg Gadamer in his rehabilitation of the humanistic
tradition re–interprets exactly these concepts in order to offer an alternative
model of the knowledge for the humanities . In doing so he develops a
certain historical–philological genesis of the concept of common sense, re-
ferring principally to Giambattista Vico. Gadamer’s analysis shows that sensus
communis has its origin in the Latin rhetoric tradition with moral and political
connotations close to the Aristotle’s phronesis. For Gadamer common sense is
the sense which constitutes the community and social life. What is interesting
is that the sublime also comes from the rhetoric and literary tradition and
from its very beginning had a significant political and social value. But this
category remains nonetheless of no particular interest to Gadamer; even

    . Cfr. Hans Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, Tübingen: J.C.B.Mohr, .
    . The example is the famous treatise on the sublime from the ancient times, Perì hýpsous, ascribed
to an unknown author named Pseudo–Longinus, published in . by an Italian Renaissance humanist,
Francesco Robortello.
                 Kant’s Aesthetics of the Sublime and Politics of Emancipatory Temporality        


when he critically examines Kant’s aesthetics, the reference to the notion of
the sublime is marginal .
    On the other hand, interpretations of Kant’s aesthetics that intend to
ground political philosophy upon the category of sensus communis have already
been suggested during the th century by different authors . We tried here
to put forward the notion of the sublime as a truly political category, and the
keystone of Kant’s project of transcendental synthesis. The aesthetic theory
of the sublime, hence, brings to light its “sublime actuality”.

                                                                           sasa.hrnjez@unito.it




   . Cfr. Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, .
