陰性崇高：以精神分析閱讀安·卡森的《解創造》

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(1)Master’s Thesis Department of English National Taiwan Normal University. The Feminine Sublime: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Anne Carson’s Decreation. Advisor: Dr. Aaron Deveson. Advisee: Pei-ju Wu 103 July, 2014. 7.

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(3) Abstract This thesis aims to explore Anne Carson’s notion of the Sublime in Decreation. Reading the book through a psychoanalytical lens, I would like to argue that Carson leads us to see the fantasy of Kantain Sublime, to traverse the fantasy and ultimately to establish the feminine Sublime as the annihilation of the self. The thesis consists of five chapters. The introduction provides a brief description of Carson’s publishing career and the content of Decreation. The goal of the first chapter is to explore the history of the Sublime scholarship and to examine how Carson, in the essay “Foam,” combines different notions of the Sublime into one main concept: the self-annihilation. Chapter Two analyzes the suite of poems “Sublimes” on the basis of Lacanian psychoanalysis. In my reading of “Ode to the Sublime,” Monica Vitti’s desire for everything demonstrates the aftermath of acquiring the experience of the Kantian Sublime: the Kantian subject is under the control of superegoic moral law. Carson portrays Vitti as a Sublime object in Kant’s gaze in the poem “Kant’s Question about Monica Vitti.” In the structure of the poem, the shift of lines indicates the possibility of traversing the fantasy of the Kantian Sublime, as the fictional Kant realizes that Vitti as the Sublime object is not what he has been led to believe. In the third chapter, by resorting to Lacan’s formulas of sexuation, I attempt to examine the presence of the feminine subject as “not-all:” she is not only the subject of Kantian Sublime under the category of the phallus but also the subject of the Other jouissance. In the essay “Decreation,” the act of writing the ecstatic experience of the Other jouissance in relation to God brings the dissolution of the self, a fatal destruction of the subject caused by the death drive in an attempt to reach the real. In addition to the potential destruction, the death drive also points to the recreation in the symbolic. !. ii!.

(4) order, echoing the title of the book “Decreation:” “to undo the creature in us” (167). This chapter ends with the poem “Gnosticism I,” which shows the process of decreation as a journey of self-questioning and self-struggling. This painful experience adds a new perspective to the discourse of the feminine Sublime. The conclusion reiterates that the psychoanalytic reading of Decreation allows us to see how Carson reinterprets the notion of the Sublime and brings a new perspective in discourse of the feminine Sublime. Keywords Anne Carson, Decreation, the Sublime, psychoanalysis, fantasy, superego, gaze, the Other jouissance. !. iii!.

(5) Acknowledgement First of all, I would like to express my ardent gratitude to my advisor, Professor Aaron Deveson, who has shown great and warm concern about every step that I have taken in the writing process. To have Professor Deveson as my thesis advisor is one of my invaluable experiences in the graduate studies. Without his specialized knowledge, generous guidance, limitless patience and cautious correction, I would not have been able to finish this challenging project. I would also like to thank two examiners of the oral defense, Professor Han-yu Huang and Professor Hung-chiung Li. Professor Huang’s seminar on Žižek heralded me to the world of psychoanalysis and inspired my further studies in psychoanalysis. I cannot thank him enough for his insightful comments and precious suggestions in the process of writing this thesis and in the oral defense. Professor Li, a passionate and prudent scholar, is one of the significant people who have inspired me to study English literature. I am also grateful for his penetrating advices in the oral defense. In my journey of academic studies and thesis writing, my friends are my pillars of strength and support. My heartfelt gratitude goes to Megan Chen and Kevin Chiu, who have always stayed by my side in those melancholic days. Their truest friendship is one of the most beautiful things in my life. Words can never express my appreciation to these two dearest friends. Thanks also to my juniors and flatmates, Yu-shin Chang and Literature Huang, for their warm accompany and cheerful words. My greatest debt is to my family. I thank my father, mother, brother, sister and my boyfriend, Yen-wei Chang. During these years of study, your love and support have helped me go through many difficult times and have made me a stronger person. This thesis is dedicated to you, my loved ones.. !. iv!.

(6) Table of Contents Introduction. 1. Chapter 1: A Brief History of the Sublime Scholarship. 9. I. A Brief History of the Sublime. 9. II. The Feminine Sublime. 29. III. Anne Carson on the Sublime. 33. Chapter 2: The Fantasy of the Kantian Sublime in “Sublimes”. 39. I. The Theoretical Framework of the Lacanian Psychoanalysis. 39. II. The Fantasy of the Kantian Sublime in “Sublimes”: the Superegoic Moral Law. 51. III. Traversing the Fantasy of the Kantian Sublime: Kant’s Gaze. 59. Chapter 3: The Feminine Subject and the Feminine Sublime. 67. I. The Masculine Structure and the Feminine Structure: Lacan on Sexuality and the Other Jouissance. 67. II. The Feminine Subject of the Other Jouissance in “Mia Moglie” and “Decreation”. 74. III. The Feminine Sublime: the Self-annihilation. 82. Conclusion. 92. Works Cited. 95. !. v!.

(7) ! Introduction Anne Carson has become a figure of such internationally established renown, “inciting both envy and admiration” in the world of contemporary poetry (Merkin 1), that it is possible to forget that it was only after until Carson published her fifth book, the award-wining Autobiography of Red (1998), that she received anything resembling widespread critical attention. This was the book that arrived plastered with plaudits from such eminences as Susan Sontag, Michael Ondaatje, Alice Munro, and the canon-maker himself, Harold Bloom, who recommended Carson as “'a disciplined version of Gertrude Stein” (Merkin 1). Much of the excitement around her work may be thought to have something to do with her special relationship with literary and cultural history. Over the course of a 25-year publishing career described by one prominent critic as “unclassifiable” and “genre-defying” (Burt 2), Anne Carson has produced essays, fiction, non-fiction and prose poetry alongside more conventional examples of “poetry.” Ian Rae argues that her ability to blur conventional generic boundaries puts her in long literary tradition of poets turning into novelists in Canada, her home country (3). If blending of genres is her signature form of expression, another recurrent motif is the classical or historical frame of reference. Carson’s deep interest in and allusions to ancient Greek literature strongly recall H.D’s use of various characters borrowed from mythology. We can also find Sylvia Plath’s sharp tone and Robert Lowell’s confessional voice in the way Carson conveys her sentiment through autobiographical stories with vivid images. Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera is a particularly masterful blurring and subversion of literary forms, combing as it does biographical stories told partly through her mother, an essay subtitled “A Praise of Sleep” and discoursing on. !. 1!.

(8) ! Virginia Woolf and Homer, and the use of guns. To a great extent, that is prefigured in the book’s epigraph— “I love a poetical kinde of a march, by friskes, skips and jumps” which is Montaigne in Florio’s 1633 translation. The book explores various issues in different genres yet with one major theme emerging as a paradoxical center—namely, the inherently Sublime theme of her decentered creation of the self. The title of the volume comes from a French philosopher Simone Weil, who describes it as “to undo the creature in us.” Decreation is a collection imagined as the redefining writing in different genres, including lyric pomes, four essays, an opera libretto, a screenplay, an oratorio (a narrative on a religious theme), and a “shot list,” basically des/constructing its title and subtitle at the same time. The sense of decenterness permeates in her four essays with a contrasting perspective on the Sublime in each as well as in poems that exemplify her own discourses of the Sublime. For instance, the essay titled “Foam (Essay with Rhapsody): On the Sublime” precedes two groups of poems “Sublimes” and “Gnosticisms.” From a structural point of view, the book, like the self to which it is intimately related, is thoroughly decentered. When it comes to the theme of the Sublime, James Pollock argues that “Carson has always been a writer in the Romantic tradition of the Sublime,” even if Carson’s poetic style has been regarded as avant-garde (1). “With the soul of a Romantic,” he writes, Carson manifests “the sublime annihilation or decreation of the self” in a metaphor of the sun (2). Pollock points to the eighteenth-century roots of the sublime experience of nature dealt with in Carson’s third essay “Totality: The Colour of Eclipse” while insisting that the overriding concern of the book with a rhetoric of self-annihilation makes an implicit reference to Kant’s concept of thing-in-itself. While Pollock places this book in the central dimension of the Sublime, other critics. !. 2!.

(9) ! have pointed out that Carson’s particular gendered perspective on this philosophical material deserves special consideration. Dan Disney avers that Carson subverts the traditional/masculine Sublime experience by means of recuperation of the feminine Sublime as part of a fairly radical form of self-disembodiment (25-27). He further proposes the idea of self-as-other should be understood as being crucial to an understanding of this book, as Carson obscures the boundary between self and reality through “self-erasure,” and “a form of perhaps supra-sensible Platonic reality may be apprehended” (27). The discussion on Carson’s representation of the Sublime experience reflects the long history of the Sublime scholarship. And yet the discussion of her idea about the Sublime will not be completed without a properly fleshed-out account of its psychoanalytic dimensions. Carson’s critics seem to have willfully avoided confronting the extent to which Lacanian psychoanalytic examinations of the Sublime have a bearing on Carson’s text. Carson’s critics also fail to include the suite of poems “Sublime” as part of their reading of Carson’s feminine Sublime. In addition to the central idea of the selfannihilation that her critics have noticed, what these critics ignore is Carson’s attempt to challenge the Kantian Sublime in her search of the feminine Sublime. These interpretive problems ask for a re-consideration of Carson’s reading of the history of the Sublime and indicate that there is a need to re-interpret Decreation from different analytic perspective. In some of the poems in “Sublimes,” Carson explores the experience of the Kantian Sublime, and presents Monica Vitti, an Italian actress, as the subject who “embodies the Sublime” (Aitken 21). Drawing on three movies featuring Vitti, Carson portrays the Vitti’s feelings of isolation and mental condition in the light of the Kantian Sublime. The Lacanian psychoanalytical approach allows us to unveil the cause of her action and desire after her acquisition of the feeling of. !. 3!.

(10) ! the Kantian Sublime. Moreover, Vitti is presented not only as a Sublime subject but also as a Sublime object in the gaze of Kant. In contrast to the previous discourse of the Sublime, which mainly deals with the subjective and internal feelings, Lacan emphasizes the status of object in the experience of the Sublime, which sheds light on the relationship between Vitti as a Sublime object and Kant as a Sublime subject in “Kant’s Question about Monica Vitti.” Taking the psychoanalytic approach also allows us to read the relationship between the self-annihilation and the ecstatic condition in the encounter with God in the essay “Decreation,” as critics also fail to adequately discuss this relationship and only focus on the representation of the selfannihilation. Through a psychoanalytical lens, this thesis intends to explore a new critical reading of Carson’s view on the notion of the Sublime. This thesis consists of three chapters. In Chapter one, “A Brief History of the Sublime Scholarship,” I will first introduce the history of the Sublime, the discourse of the feminine Sublime and how Carson plays off the notion of the conventional Sublime and adopts the notion of self-annihilation in the experience of the feminine Sublime in the essay “Foam.” The history of the Sublime begins with Dionysius Longinus’ On the Sublime. Around the first century AD, Longinus writes the first treatise on the Sublime experience with the emphasis on the effect of speech upon people’s mind. In the eighteenth century, Burke’s Enquiry plays a role of the turning point in the theorization of the Sublime, for he defines that the Sublime comes from terror and threat and is capable of arousing the feeling of pain. Burke’s focus on the psychological aspect of the spectator has great influence on Kant’s work, yet what distinguishes Kant from Burke is Kant’s theorization of the faculty of the mind. The experience of the Kantian Sublime arises from the triumph of reason over imagination, for imagination fails to establish a form of an object in our mind; therefore, the object. !. 4!.

(11) ! of the Kantian Sublime is formless. The rationality inherent in the Kantian Sublime is often characterized with masculine quality, whereas the beautiful is associated with the feminine. The gendered characterization continues in the discourse of the Romantic Sublime. Writing in the wake of Kant, the Romantic poets strive to reinstate the importance of imagination and stress the failure of language in the feelings of the Sublime. The unrepresentable presence in the experience of the Sublime is Lyotard’s main contention in his works. The indeterminate nature of the postmodern Sublime distinguishes itself from the Kantian Sublime, which is submitted to faculty of reason. Despite being inarticulable, language is the best way to put forward the postmodern Sublime, for words exists before the mind. The association with language in the postmodern Sublime demonstrates the essential relationship between the Sublime object and language in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Lacan proposes that sublimation is achieved by the elevation of an object to the place of the Thing, the replacement of the ever-lost das Ding. The Sublimity of the elevated object is often described as inhuman or horrifying, as in the example of a lady in the poetry of courtly love. Lacan’s interpretation of Antigone explicates the Sublime effect of Antigone’s splendor, which points to the inaccessible dimension of the real, a place beyond pleasure principle. The attempt to reach das Ding as the kernel of the real is forbidden by the superego. Superego is considered to be the birthplace of the experience of the Kantian Sublime, invoked by the destructive power of nature “within me” (Zupančič 154-56). Some feminists from 1970s onward question Kant’s logic behind this rational subject, while others propose a relationship of intersubjectivity or even annihilation of the self in the experience of the feminine Sublime. In the essay “Foam,” Carson leads us to navigate the history of the Sublime and asserts that the experience of the Sublime brings self-annihilation, bearing the traces of the discourse of the. !. 5!.

(12) ! feminine Sublime. In Chapter Two, “The Fantasy of the Kantian Sublime in ‘Sublimes,’ ” I will discuss the formation of the fantasy of and the traversing of the Kantian Sublime with the poems of “Sublimes” through a psychoanalytical lens. In “Ode to the Sublime by Monica Vitti,” Vitti is presented as neurotic patient who wants everything, which tortures her with the alternation between pleasure and pain. The mixed feeling inside her is jouissance, which she desperately desires so much that she has to go to “a clinic for people who want everything” (Carson 66). While desiring for everything, she also fights with it with a feeling of “undaunted,” and this undauntedness is presented in another poem entitled “And Reason Remains Undaunted.” This poem mainly deals with the supremacy of reason over nature, and reason remains undaunted in front of the force of nature. This undauntedness points to the courage against nature, namely, in Kant’s terms, the feeling of respect. Zupančič arugues that, from a Lacanaian psychoanalytical perspective, the feeling of respect is associated with the superegoic moral law that watches and speaks to us (146). Zupančič’s elaboration on the logic and superego and the Kantian Sublime sheds light on Vitti’s desire and resistance against everything as the Sublime. In the experience of the Sublime, Vitti acquires jouissance, a result of the deadly attempt to transgress the real. The function of superego is to prohibit such an attempt, which paradoxically strengthens the desire of jouissance. The logic behind the Kantian Sublime is akin to the mechanism of the superego— the subject is protected from the immediate danger. The nature of the Kantian Sublime points to the structure of fantasy, and the Kantian subject is under the control of the superegoic moral law. Vitti is commanded by the superego to enjoy everything. In addition to being depicted as a subject of the Kantian Sublime, Viiti becomes a Sublime object under Kant’s gaze in the poem “Kant’s Question.” With. !. 6!.

(13) ! her question of the gaze, Vitti challenges Kant’s gaze and establishes her own existence. In the later part of the poem, the shift of line order indicates the switch of perspective, which leads Kant to discover his dissatisfaction of his gaze and the possibility of traversing the fantasy. The last line, “off into this more difficult dawn,” suggests that both Vitii and Kant walks into the daylight together and traverses the fantasy of the Kantian Sublime. In the last chapter, “The Feminine Subject and the Feminine Sublime,” I will investigate the trace of the feminine Sublime in the vein of Lacan’s formulas of sexuation. The poem, “Mia Moglie,” presents the feminine subject as “not all” with the phallic jouisacne and the Other jouissance. In the intriguing structure of the poem, the unrhymed couplets shows Vitti as subject of the Kantian Sublime, succumbing to the moral superegoic moral law, as well as the barred woman chasing the object a in the hope of finding the primary wholeness; the presentation of the italicized lines creates an effect of rejecting the presence of the Kantian Sublime by singling out each word from lines of Sappho’s “”Fragment 31.” The poem, “Fragment 31,” portrays the subject of the Other jouissance in a condition of ecstasy, in which she is thrown outside the center of the self, and the feminine subject experience a status of “poverty” of words, a sign of standing outside the symbolic order (162). Adopting the theme of the decentered self in “Fragment 31,” Carson establishes a counterposition against the masculine/Kantian Sublime. The experience of self-erasure in “Mia Moglie” and “Fragment 31” bears the traces of the self-annihilation in the discourse of the feminine Sublime. The theme of the self-annihilation continues to be the main focus in the essay “Decreation,” which presents Carson’s attempt of capturing the feminine subjects’ inarticulable experiences with God. In the relationship with God, the feminine subjects experience the Other jouissance, a condition of ecstasy. The act of. !. 7!.

(14) ! writing the experience of the Other jouissance brings the annihilation of the self, since the attempt to the reach the Other jouissance in the dimension of the real results in the threat of the death drive. Destruction is not the only function of death drive, and it also means to create out of nothing. The logic of death drive echoes the title of the book “Decreation:” “to undo the creature in us” (167). Citing Sahppho’s “kletic” hymn, Carson compares the process of decreating the self to that of the invocation of God (178). The process of “decreation” begins with a depressing struggle and ends with God’s arrival that brings inspiration to writers. For writers who summon Divine Being, it’s hard to tell God’s arrival, because inspiration given by God flows too quickly through the mind. In the moment of inspiration, the self is annihilated in the process of “decreation.” The poem “Gnosticism I” is one of Carson’s attempts to describe the moment of “decreation,” and it demonstrates that the annihilation of the self as the feminine Sublime is the journey of self-questioning and self-struggling.. !. 8!.

(15) ! Chapter One A Brief History of the Sublime Scholarship I. A Brief History of the Sublime •. Longinus’ On the Sublime It’s widely believed that, around the first century AD, the Greek critic. Dionysius Longinus initiated the first theoretical discussion of the Sublime in Peri Hupsos or On the Sublime. Emphasizing the rhetorical concept of writing and speech, the treatise argues that the Sublime literature or political speech aims at persuading people with the power of language (Shaw 12). As a state of feeling, the Sublime somehow eludes definition, yet its great effect is clearly stated in the book: it produces a feeling of ecstasy or transport in the hearers. The influence of the Sublime is so powerful and irresistible that every hearer has to surrender, for it shatters and overwhelms everything “like a thunderbolt, and at once displays the power of the orator in all its plenitude” (Longinus 43). Immediately intoxicated and ravished on hearing an oration, the audience is captivated rather than given access to any reason or logic. For Longinus, the audience’s minds are hit by a Sublime stoke, when the Sublime dwells in the highest point of a giant flow, and “as mad flames leap / Wildwasting from hill unto hill in the folds of a forest deep” (Longinus 65). Nevertheless, Longinus’ admirations for grandeur and human passions do not mean a restoration of “aesthetic primitivism” (Shaw 15). Geniuses or great minds are not wild but noble, cultivated, and “free from low and ignoble thoughts” (Longinus 61). Sublimity in noble minds occurs as a refined and enlightened rhetorical power to the full extent of what audience can feel. Thus, the enthralling effect of the Sublime is a result of a harmonious language, which is instilled by nature in man and tempts the soul itself. !. 9!.

(16) ! rather than the hearing (Longinus 143). The harmony of language allures and prompts the audience to forget themselves in the encounter with the elevated emotion and for that moment they are transported to an agreeable state: they are so pleased that there is no need to question what is generally admitted in the speech. For Longinus, the mastery over minds seems to be a consensus. Yet, this unbalanced relationship between an orator and an audience shows the nature of domination and a kind of involuntary violence in Longinus’s Sublime when hearers are carried along unconsciously (Ashifield and de Bolla, 178). The Longinian Sublime is undoubtedly a discourse of power, a power that strives for an unifying effect achieved by accumulation of words. This powerful feeling that takes over listeners’ senses is beyond description and, according to Longinus, unteachable, since “Sublimity is the echo of a great soul” (61). Only geniuses or great minds can give an electric shock with rhetorical excellence, creating intensified effect of sublimity. It would appear that the Sublime is a product of nature. Yet, as Longinus argues, “nature is the original and vital underlying principle in all cases, but system [of writing] can define limits and fitting seasons, and can also contribute the safest rules for use and practice” (45). Longinus describes many devices that could be employed to induce the Sublime, including hyperbole, comparison, similes, and metaphor (Shaw 14). While in thrall to these linguistic devices, hearers may be naturally stirred up to a state of awe, rapture, elevation and other Sublime feelings. Also as a kind of art, the verbal power channeled from human speech helps contour nature where hearers’ feelings arise. It is in this debate on the relationship between nature and art that Longinus differs from Horace(65-68 BCE), a critic and a poet, and Longinus wrote his treatise as a response to that poet’s Art Poetica. For Horace, the rules of “decorum” must keep a tight rein. !. 10!.

(17) ! on great thoughts either from the talented or the untalented, and art is “a systematic knowledge of theory and technique” (Leitch 122) The difference between Longinus and Horace lies in the fact that the former attempts to capture the state of feeling responding to art, while the latter emphasizes the formality of it. However, there is one idea on which Longinus agrees with Horace: the unity in the arts, which is equivalent to composition as in one of the sources of the Sublime. The importance of composition lies in its integration of the other four as a whole, for Longinus indicates: “sublimity is. . . a contribution made by a multitude (Longinus 147). A classist at heart, Longinus equates the Sublime with a harmonious unity, and carries this idea throughout this book, especially in his reading of Homer and Sappho. Yet, in order to put his Sublime style into effect, Longinus explicitly conflates Homer’s lines from different chapters and interprets Sappho’s poems as a representation of harmony in spite of apparent disparity (Auerbach 225-26, Freeman, 14). The experience of fragmentation in Sappho’s poems is one of Carson’s attempts to reinstate in Decreation as a part of her reconsideration of Longinus’ view on sublimity and Sappho.. •. Edmund Burke on the Sublime and the Beautiful Longinus’s emphasis on the effect of intensity on people’s minds and the idea. of grandeur in the Sublime experience comes to be a source of the following theorizations of the Sublime. In the eighteenth century, a turning point of the discussion on the Sublime appears with the Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, with the purpose of clarifying the distinction between the Sublime and the beautiful. As a follower of empiricism, Burke contends that evidence of “senses” is the center of our perception. !. 11!.

(18) ! of the world (14). “All the natural powers in man,” Burke suggests in the newly added introduction in the fourth edition, “which I know, that are conversant about external objects, are the Senses; the Imagination; the Judgment. And first with regard to the senses” (14). The insistence on the senses establishes the trajectory in Burke’s analysis, and his empiricist argument of the treatise cuts off the association with the divinity, which is characteristic of the source of Longinian Sublime (Shaw 49). Although based on the philosophy of empiricism, Burke’s Enquiry still shows traces of Longinus’s On the Sublime. Burke compares the intensified effect of “what Longinus has observed of glorying and sense of inward greatness” to a representation of human beings’ competition and ambition, for readers is filled with a sense the selftriumph when reading or hearing passages from great poets and orators (Burke 50). Moreover, Burke further associates the Sublime with terror. The Sublime, for Burke, is the intensest and most passionate emotion that the mind is able to feel (39). The feeling induced by magnificence and the Sublime in nature is astonishment, “a state of soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror” (Burke 57). Burke gives the first rank to astonishment in the effect of the Sublime, superior to admiration, reverence and respect. The source of the Sublime is whatever is terrible, cable of exciting the ideas of pain and danger, or functions in a way similar to terror (Burke 39). Burke strongly believes that the ideas of pain resulting from fatigue, suffering, or anxiety are more powerful than those that operate through pleasure. Apart from fear or terror, no other feelings can snatch away the ability to reason or act from the mind, since terror or fear itself is the fear of death or pain (Burke 57). Thus, the Sublime involves the preservation of the self and is naturally the fiercest of all feelings (Burke 38). Yet, a pleasurable experience might still be a result of the encounter with pain or danger. When danger or pain draws too near, they. !. 12!.

(19) ! produce pure terror instead of any form of delight; yet, at a certain distance, they may be delightful with some modification (Burke 40). As long as actual danger is kept within a certain distance from the self, a sense of delight may still be possible to be acquired in the Sublime terror. Another source of the Sublime is infinity, which tends to “fill the mind with sort of delightful horror” (Burke 73). As Burke asserts, this is the most genuine effect of the Sublime. Human beings cannot perceive anything infinite with actual eyes, yet the failure of perception somehow produces the same effect of infinity. Our imagination meets no boundary of any definite number or limit, if a large object continues to expand (Burke 73). Our pleasure derived from this experience also grows along with the encounter with infinity, since danger does not press near the self while dilating somewhere beyond perception. This truest test of the Sublime, Burke indicates, also shows how human beings are deceived visually to take delight in the infinity (Burke 73). The delight of the Sublime is not to be confused with the pleasure in the beautiful. For Burke, the beautiful is a social quality, which gives out a sense of joy and pleasure when being watched (Burke 42). We like to be near or even be bonded with beautiful things, for they have sentiments of tenderness. Unlike the Sublime terror with certain pressing distance, the beautiful inspires people to enter willingly into a relation with them. Burke specifies unthreatening characteristics of the beautiful in comparison with those of the Sublime. Beautiful objects are comparatively small, smooth, polished, crooked, light, and delicate, whereas the Sublime ones should be vast in size, rugged, negligent, straight, gloomy, and solid (Burke 123). They are of stark contrast in their nature; one is based on terror and pain and the other on pleasure. Burke’s meditations on this pair are frequently associated with the norm of masculine and feminine. Delicacy and weakness is at their highest in. !. 13!.

(20) ! females, as Burke claims that blushing and modesty is less powerful and much more amiable (109). Males are not amiable because of such virtues as courage and wisdom that cause admiration and ultimately produce terror (Burke 110). Burke first distinguishes the beautiful from the Sublime with respect to associating these with the feminine and the masculine in aesthetic expression, and this gender system can be found in Kant’s work that sees the male as the rational subject and the female as nature. •. Kant on the Sublime and the Beautiful In the “Analytic of the Sublime,” the German Idealist philosopher Immanuel. Kant addresses the conceptual problems of the Sublime, and his philosophical treatment with the Sublime experience forms the centerpiece of his Critique of Judgment, bridging and summing up the a trilogy of work including the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical reason. The affinity with Burke’s enquiry into the comparison between the Sublime and the beautiful can be found in the “Analytic of the Sublime,” yet what distinguishes Kant from Burke and other Sublime scholars is that Kant conceives the analysis of the Sublime as connected with the faculty of understanding and reason. Understanding is a faculty of establishing concepts or rules. “[T]hrough the understanding’s organization of sensible intuitions that we are able to distinguish particular objects and events, and…relate these to one another on the basis of universally valid causal laws” (Crowther 30). Reason functions as knowledge that determines whether an object and its concepts conform to the formal condition of truth. The specific function of reason “is to formulate ‘principles,’ that are concepts which seek to systematize and unify other sets of concepts” (Crowther 31). While we are provided with the objective framework of our. !. 14!.

(21) ! knowledge of the world by understanding, reason demands the highest degree of systemization and unity. Following Burke’s distinction between the Sublime and the beautiful, Kant further points out that the significant difference between the beautiful and the Sublime lies in the form of object and the subject’s psychological reaction. When people find an object beautiful, for Kant, its form is within boundaries and limits of representation; on the other hand, there is no form or boundary in the Sublime object (Critique of Judgment 101-2). The formless object of the Kantian Sublime follows Burke’s notion of the infinity as a source of Sublimity. For Kant, the Sublime experience occurs when the scale of space and time that exceeds our ability to think, and results in a negative pleasure, implying an “outrage to our powers of comprehension” (Shaw 78). The mind is alternately attracted and repelled when faced with the Sublime objects, while it is simply attracted to beautiful ones. The beautiful “carries with it a feeling of the furtherance of life,” whereas the Sublime is generated by a blockage of vital power followed by a more powerful leakage (Critique of Judgment 102). The fact that beautiful objects have a straightforward appeal to our mind lies in the purposiveness in its form, “pre-adapted to our Judgment” (Kant 103). In other words, the pleasure we find in the beautiful is brought about by an object’s form, and then its beautiful form leads to a agreement of cognitive faculties based on “the reflective judgment’s a priori principle of natural finality” (Critique of Judgment 82). In contrast, a formless Sublime object contravenes the purpose of our judgment and violently disturbs the faculty of imagination (Critique of Judgment 103). The more violent an object does to the imagination, the more Sublime it is. The real Sublime, as Kant continues, is not contained in any sensible form but can only be found in the mind. It is the inadequacy of form unfit for reason that arouses the. !. 15!.

(22) ! feeling of the Sublime (Critique of Judgment 103). The idea of determining sublimity is already in the mind so that a feeling of the Sublime can be incited. Thus, compared with the beautiful, the Sublime feeling is much more subjective, since it is “merely in ourselves and in our attitude of thought which introduces sublimity into the presentation of nature” (Critique of Judgment 104). When the rules of judgment are applied to a Sublime object, “a movement” stirs in the mind, causing disturbance to the judgment (Critique of Judgment 105). A placid contemplation, however, is maintained by the presupposition of taste in the face of a beautiful object. For Kant, the Sublime quality is unrepresentable and beyond description and the exceeding magnitude points to a further investigation of its nature. Kant distinguishes two different types of the Sublime experience, which he terms as the mathematical and the dynamical Sublime. In the mathematical Sublime, the object is of spatial and temporal magnitude that exceeds our sensible faculty; thus imagination is unable to estimate it. With the dynamical Sublime, a sense of fear is incited when the subject confronts the powerful and mighty object. Starting his analysis by defining the Sublime as “what is great beyond all comparison,” Kant explains that mathematical sublimity is impossible to be measured by any standard outside itself. (Critique of Judgment 106). The magnitude of the Sublime object is itself alone, and, therefore, it is greater in comparison with everything else in nature. In Kant’s words, the Sublime is “only in our ideas” (Critique of Judgment 109). If everything is infinitely small compared with the Sublime, Kant’s concept of the infinity appears, for example, in an attempt to gauge the Milky Way with one’s body (Shaw 81). Its immensity might be measured, in the beginning, with the distance from the earth to the sun, yet one’s imagination will necessarily fail in the end as a result of the intervention of reason. Reason, as Kant suggests, demands for a presentation of. !. 16!.

(23) ! totality in order to estimate the form of an object (Critique of Judgment 109). In other words, the estimation of reason shows the infinitude of the universe, which ultimately leads to the vain attempt of imagination to comprehend the magnitude of a shapeless object. Between the conflict of reason and imagination arises a feeling of pain and a pleasure in the Sublime (Critique of Judgment 119-20). The act of imagination is violent to the internal sense, as it “annihilates the condition of time;” through imagination, the violence is regarded as “purposive in reference to the whole determination of the mind” (emphais italics, Critique of Judgment 122). The feeling of pain is represented as purposive, although the Sublime as pain is simultaneously related to the faculty of aesthetical judgment (Critique of Judgment 122). Pain, “the necessary extension of imagination,” is the medium through which a pleasure can be received in the object as the Sublime (Critique of Judgment 123). It is only through displeasure that the pleasure in the Sublime object is possible. The dynamical Sublime is associated with fear in the confrontation with the overwhelming might of nature, yet a sense of resistance is aroused against the object that excites fear. At the sight of an erupting volcano, for instance, we are inevitably attracted to it as long as we are watching it in a safe distance. The more dangerous and threatening the fearful object kept away at far distance is, the more appealing it is. Kant’s notion of safety distance apparently bears the traces of the Burkean Sublime, which is aroused when danger is kept at a distance. Similarly, in the dynamical Sublime, the self is protected from the forceful object of nature. The idea of “selfpreservation” reveals human’s “superiority over nature” and independence from it under the operation of our rational faulty (Critique of Judgment 125). Human beings fear the almightiness of nature and feel comparatively small, but reason in the mind calls up courage against any possible domination of nature. Therefore, the delight of. !. 17!.

(24) ! the dynamical Sublime comes from our sense of security and the intervention of reason that Kant regards as “the destination of our faculty” (Critique of Judgment 126). A savage who shuns and fears nothing, and takes deliberate consideration and action in face of violent nature, exhibits the greatest extent of sublimity, for his mind does not yield to any form of peril. Rationality prevails over nature; thus the Kantian Sublime is within us rather in nature, which is counter to Burke’s conception of the Sublime in nature. As often couched in sexual terms, the Kantian Sublime and the Burkean Sublime constantly both regard the beautiful as the female and the Sublime as the male. In Burke, the beautiful is of pleasing quality, which is to be found from “the mother’s fondness,” while the Sublime depends on the fear for greatness, associated with “the authority of a father” (111). The masculine quality and realm are key attributes of the Sublime, as made clear in Burke’s citing of John Milton’s Paradise Lost where the Sublime’s gloomy obscurity is “[f]ierce as ten furies; terrible as hell / And shook a deadly dart. What seemed his head / the likeness of a kingly crown had on” (Burke 59-60). Not only is it embodied by a father figure, the Sublime also celebrates the monarchs and the revolutions of kingdoms because of their magnitude and greatness of confusion (Burke 62). This kind of obscurity in the Sublime is best conveyed through poetry rather than other forms of art (Burke 61). It comes as no surprise that Burke continues a conventional distinction between “masculine intellect” and “feminine matter” (Shaw 59). The beautiful is described as an aspect of nature and excluded from the masculine artistic representation. The gendered nature of aesthetic fields remains unshaken in Kant’s Third Critique. In his account, the beautiful we experience is the result of the harmony between imagination and understanding, while the Sublime as “non-natural power, our freedom from physical. !. 18!.

(25) ! determinism,” is a product after the conflict between the imagination and the reason (Mattick 295). For Kant, the association of the Sublime with male’s intellectual creation and the beautiful with the feminine is already conceived in his earlier work Observation on The Feelings of the Beautiful and the Sublime, which largely draws on Burke’s work and “reworks its general themes in a less physiological engaged dereliction, that the full expression of the gendered entanglements of the two notions is realized” (Mann 25). Kant elaborates the analogical relationship between sexual difference and aesthetic feelings, and further specifies the activities involved in the Sublime that denies access to women. If a beautiful female attempts to pursue knowledge or Greek classics, such is the nobility of the Sublime, she “might as well even have a beard” (Kant, Observation 78). An aged woman can finally seek Sublimity as her beauty is defeated by flying times, and be educated first by her husband (Kant, Observation 92). The manly quality is prescriptively inherent in the Sublime, only reserved for and proper to the male. In nineteenth-century thought, gendered categorization is prominent and Kant’s explicit dichotomization of the notions of the beautiful and the Sublime is deeply entangled with the characterization and the norms of masculinity and femininity. •. The Romantic Sublime The strong relation that Burke and Kant established between the Sublime and. the beautiful is later adopted by the Romantic and Idealist male writers in the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of nineteenth century. Writing in the wake of Kant, the German Idealist poets and philosophers, F.W.J von Schelling and Friederich Schlegel, emphasize not so much the victory of reason as the failure of imagination (Shaw 90). With the limitation of imagination, writers strive to protect its importance and possibility of connecting the realm of nature with that of mind in !. 19!.

(26) ! artistic representation. To the artist, “nature…is merely the imperfect reflection of a world that exists not outside but within him” (Simpson 228). Art, especially poetry, allows us to unite all the distinct realms of mind and nature and to grasp the concept of the Sublime. British Romantic poets such as Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats also defend the significance of imagination (Shaw 93). The relation between poetry and imagination is again the recurrent theme in British Romanticism. As Coleridge puts it, “The grandest efforts of poetry are where imagination is called forth…and creating what is again rejected; the result being what the poet wishes to impress, namely the substitution of a Sublime feeling of the unimaginable for a mere image” (qtd. in Shaw 98). At the limit of language, the poet lets his imagination run beyond the chains of meaningful words and presents the unimaginable thing with Sublime feelings. The mind is set free when language is unable to function properly, a point on which Coleridge most agrees with Kant (Shaw 113). The Sublime, for Coleridge, is a way of “elevation,” which is aroused when the mind runs into the restriction of “sense” and “understanding” (qtd.in Shaw 98). Romantic poetry provides a creative space that bridges the blocked faculties for the mind to be lifted when the failure of language coincides with it. The writing in the wake of or against the Kantian Sublime does not stop in the Romantic period but continues into the era of postmodern philosophy’s reexamination of the Kantian Sublime. •. The Postmodern Sublime Postmodernism from the 1940s onward holds a different and skeptical attitude. towards the fact that reason is a higher faculty over imagination, which has long been worshipped by the Kantian followers. Sharing the concept of the Kantian Sublime as the “formlessness,” the French theorist Jean-François Lyotard claims that postmodern !. 20!.

(27) ! culture “remains inexplicable without the incommensurability of reality” (The Postmodern Condition 79). Lyotard argues that postmodern aesthetics “puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself,” rather than only revealing the missing content as in modern art (The Postmodern Condition 81). Postmodernism rejects the pleasure of a perfect form but seeks to uncover “a stronger sense of the unpresentable” (The Postmodern Condition 81). In “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,” the impossibility of representation of a Sublime object is associated with the concept of here and now, when Lyotard comments on Barnett Baruch Newman’s first three sculptures Here I, Here II. Here III, a painting entitled Not Over There, Here, two paintings entitled Now, two others entitled Be, and an essay “The Sublime is Now.” Newman’s notion of “now” points to “the feeling that might happen: the nothingness now” (Lyotard, “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde” 198). So what happens between “now” and the Sublime? The sense of indeterminacy threatens to kindle the Sublime, a mixture of pleasure and pain that marks impending death. This painful situation is, in Burke’s word, terror. “What is terrifying is that the It happens that does not happen, that it stops happening” (original emphasis, Lyotard, “The Sublime and the AvantGarde” 204). It is also linked with the privation of language and of life, and all the things in life will come to an end in a blink of an eye. “One feels that it is possible that soon nothing more will take place” (Lyotard, “Newman” 245). The Sublime feeling is evoked by the risk of losing everything, and at the same time the mind is struck with astonishment, then made inoperative. Art provides a space where the mind is kept at a distance from the immobilizing menace and “is returned to the agitated zone between life and death” (Lyotard, “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde” 205). Standing on the boundary between artistic space and imminent nothingness, the mind feels the Sublime in artwork, especially in poetry. Siding with Burke on this genre,. !. 21!.

(28) ! Lyotard considers the arts of language in poetry to be free from the classical rule of imitation and to incite intensified feelings without being visible. The poetic force is formless, and the shocking combination of words is “the evidence of (something) happening, rather nothing, suspended privation” (Lyotard, “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde” 205). Poets attempt to present the unrepresentable and to capture the impossibility with language. We know “something” unimaginable happens, but “what” happens exactly? The classification between the “something” and the “what” happens is the foundation of Lyotard’s theory of the event. As Simon Malpas explains, when we are able to say “what happens,” we already fill the Sublime experience or event with certain category of knowledge or discourse in mind and hence close up its possibility of changing (101). On the other hand, “ ‘something happens’ calls for a receptivity to the event itself” (Malpas 101). In this case, we are open to the event, as no pre-given rules will fit into the Sublime experience. This open reaction allows the event to be unrepresentable and to resist any form of representation, and it responds with openness to challenges from established modes of representation. The Sublimity “consists in the perception of an instant in which something happens to which we called to respond without knowing in advance the genre in which to respond” (Malpas 101). When a Sublime event occurs, as simple as a poem, no pre-established discourse can adequately respond to its indeterminate nature. This is the postmodern Sublime, with open judgment and the specificity of the event, which is where Lyotard is different form Kant, who, in the “Analytic of the Sublime,” “submits the Sublime to the discipline of reason, which always arrives, belatedly as it were, to pronounce its judgment” (Shaw 124). In “After the Sublime: The State of Aesthetics,” Lyotard focuses on the relation between “matter” and “form” on the issues of the aesthetics of the Sublime.. !. 22!.

(29) ! In the long history of Western art, the idea of art has been understood in the debate between matter and form. By way of discussing Kant again, Lyotard observes that the concept of form underlies the beautiful, since form “is thought of as the act of giving a figure to material power” and is capable of synthesizing data intelligible to understanding (Lyotard, Inhuman 138-39). On the contrary, in the Sublime experience, matter is conceived of as “an indeterminate state of reality” and as occurrence “at the price of suspending these active powers of the mind…for at least ‘an instant’” (Lyotard, Inhuman 139-40). As Lyotard points out, Sublime matter is immaterial and unstable, and “does not turn towards the mind;” instead, “it turns towards a thing” (Inhuman 142). The thing, Lyotard argues, does not wait to be finalized and appeal to the mind. Likewise, matter of the Sublime experience does not require the mind, and it only “sits ‘before’ questioning and answer ‘outside’ them’” (Lyotard, Inhuman 142). The Sublime exists as unrepresentable presence to the mind, eluding the mind’s grasp. Words are the only way to put forward matter, because “[w]ords ‘say,’ sound, touch, always ‘before’ thought (Inhuman 142). Although being unable to be grasped in the mind, the Sublime matter is caught up in the net of language, which, in Lyotard’s view, exists before the mind. Lyotard fails to explain that what the Sublime thing really is and leaves it in an “indeterminate” status, yet its association with language shows the indispensible relationship between the Sublime object and language in Lacanian psychoanalysis. •. Sublimation in Psychoanalysis Lacan engages with the concept of sublimation mainly in Ethics of. Psychoanalysis. He takes up Freud’s emphasis on social recognition in the process of sublimation, since sublimation creates socially valued objects towards which the drives are channeled (Lacan, Ethics 107). Central to the concept of sublimation, this !. 23!.

(30) ! object, Lacan suggests, involve the change of value from an ordinary object to das Ding. Lacan’s thoughts on the dynamics between das Ding and sublimity start with his questions about his interpretation of Sophocles’ play Antigone and Melanie Klein’s case study.1 Lacan argues that sublimation is not realized through the recovery of the mother’s body but rather achieved by the elevation of an object to “the dignity of the Thing” (Lacan, Ethics 118). The price of entering into the symbolic order is giving up the fantasy of unity with the mother, and hence, in order to feel the completeness again in the world of words, das Ding as the lost object must be relentlessly refound and must always return as something else (Lacan, Ethics 118). The elevated object is the replacement of das Ding, a thing and a lure that prompts the subject to circle around the ever-lost das Ding. The elevated object therefore becomes “the Thing” (Laccan, Ethics 119). For example, some people collect empty matchboxes apparently not for use but as a hobby, which shows the “thingness” of match boxes (Lacan, Ethics 114). The collection of matchboxes is one of the simplest forms of sublimation, as Lacan suggests, involving a personal satisfaction without demanding from others (Ethics 114). Yet, sublimation is not a substitutive satisfaction nor replacement of signifiers. What sublimation brings is a substitution of emptiness. The question of das Ding as a hole in the real lies in, let us recall, the subject’s sacrifice of going into the Symbolic, and it is impossible to register das Ding in the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1!The case is about a woman tortured from recurring depression and always feeling an empty space inside her that would never be filled. The walls of the woman’s house were covered with the paintings of her brother-in-law, and then the in-law sells one of the paintings, leaving an empty space on the wall. This particular vacancy triggers the attacks of depression. To fill up the empty space comes to be her way of recovery. She starts to paint a painting in imitation of her brother-in-law’s style with enthusiasm, and, as a result, her work is so surprisingly mature that the in-law refuses to be convinced. The skillful painting seems to be the thing to fill up the hole on the wall and inside her heart. The painting’s subject matter is a series of images from advanced age to “the image of her own mother at the height of her beauty” (Lacan, Ethics 117). For Klein, this case confirms her theory that the mother’s body is the thing to be found so as to fill the vacant space, and pinpoints the phases of sublimation. Klein places the mother’s body on the position of das Ding in order to illustrate the act of filling up the hole, and her intriguing account is questioned by Lacan owing to the fact that the imaginary image of the mother is rooted out upon the entry into the symbolic order (Ethics 106).!. !. 24!.

(31) ! Symbolic. Das Ding is strange to the Symbolic, leaving a hole around which the symbolic system circles. This notion of das Ding as unpresentable void and the Thing as signifier leads us to the relation between the subject and the pleasure principle. This process of sublimation is inseparable from the formation of a sense of a distance between the object and the Thing, and in this gap the space of the drives is opened up. At this point, Lacan revisits Freud’s notion of the pleasure principle, which targets on evading unpleasure and acquiring pleasure (Evans 148). Lacan points out that the pleasure principle controls the quest for the object and forces unceasing “detours” which keeps the distance between the lost object and the subject (Ethics 58). In other words, it is the pleasure principle that keeps the subject circling around the void, taking the subject from one signifier to the other in order to avoid the deadly encounter with the Thing. An archetypal case of sublimation is courtly love.2 In the relationship of courtly love, the Lady, the feminine object, is created to be desired and worshipped, and, in other words, elevated to the place of the Thing. Lacan cites an example of a troubadour poem by Arnaud Daniel in which a Lady commands her knight to put his mouth to her genital area as a trial of his worthiness of his love. The Lady in courtly love is described not as a real person with concrete features but as a horrifying and “inhuman partner,” and, in all the troubadour poems, the addressee seems to be the same person (Lacan, Ethics 149-50). Always described in the same way, “in this poetic field the feminine object is emptied of all real substance” (Lacan, Ethics 149). The Lady is the radical Other that incommensurably requests any form of service from her servant, putting her loyal pursuer through intolerable ordeals. This capricious and traumatic Other designates the place of das Ding, the Thing, where its !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 2. In medieval Europe, courtly love is a convention that a knight expresses his unconsummated love for his lady, which comes to be a theme extensively employed in European literature of the time.. !. 25!.

(32) ! emptiness resists symbolization. The idealized Lady embodies the deadly void, “a machine which utters meaningless demands and at random” (Žižek, Metastases 90). How knights obediently and willingly serves her master Lady incapable of empathy can therefore be regarded as a demonstration of the narcissistic function. The ideally exalted feminine object deprived of real substance functions as a mirror on to which “the subject’s ideal is projected” (Lacan, Ethics 151). The knight finds his ideal ego, a perceptually perfect unity of the self, in the machine-like Lady. In courtly love, the Lady as the Thing is an anamorphic image, a distorted surface that reflects the idealization and exaltation of a love object. It is because of the inaccessibility of the Lady that troubadours endeavors to sing the praises of her depersonalized beauty. This beloved object of courtly love “surrounded and isolated by a barrier” (Lacan, Ethics 149) marks the nature of sublimation with her relationship with the Thing. The art of courtly love is, inevitably in this sense, circling around the cold-hearted Lady qua the Thing, the dazzlingly Sublime object with a grim smile. Lacan’s focus on the Sublime reemerges later in the closing chapters in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis with his close reading of Antigone.3 Instead of looking at the antagonism between national interest and familial love, Lacan unravels the mystery of aesthetic qualities and desire through the image and story of Antigone. As Lacan suggests, Antigone has “unbearable splendor” and “a quality that both attracts us and startles us, in the sense of intimidates us; this terrible, self-willed victim disturbs us” !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 3!The play by Sophocles portrays the aftermath of Oedipus’s self-exile: Eteocles and Polyneices, two sons born of the incestuous relationship with his mother, kill each other in a battle for the throne of Thebes. Creon, the new ruler, issues an edict that Etecoles will be honored and sanctified by holy rites, while Polyneices will lie unburied in battle field in public shame for his act of rebellion. The lone survivors of Oedipus’s line,and Ismene, have a conflict of opinion over the burial of Polyneices. In defiance of Creon’s decree, Antigone decides to bury her bother after Ismene’s refusal of assistance for fear of death penalty. After Creon’s soldiers discover Antigone’s deed and brings her to Creon, Antigone is sent to a jail where she will commit suicide. This tragedy turns on the conflict between two value systems: the moral law supported by the Theban King and the divine law demonstrated in the love of Antigone for her deceased sibling.!. ! !. 26!.

(33) ! (Ethics 247). Lacan observes that the Antigone’s moving beauty is “something that causes the Chorus to lose its head, as it tells us itself, makes the just appear unjust, and makes the Chorus transgress all limits, including casting aside any respect it might have for the edicts of the city” (Ethics 281). Here Lacan does not point out the sublimity of Antigone but allude to the Sublime effect of the moving side of the beauty. It is the effect of her beauty that, Lacan continues, “causes all critical judgment to vacillate, stops analysis, and plunges the different forms involved into a certain confusion or, rather, an essential blindness” (Ethics 281). What blinds the Chorus or us as readers or audience from rational thinking is Antigone’s pure desire for death that has been demonstrated from the beginning of this play. At the limit between life and death, Antigone’s fascinating beauty glows as she reveals to us the forbidden dimension, the real, which is yet forever blurry because of the radiating beauty. Beauty, Lacan, argues, is strangely and ambiguously related to desire, and, with the effect of the beauty, desire is suspended, lowered, disarmed, and even stopped (Ethics 238). The function of the beautiful is to make desire safer through the structure of fantasy. The beautiful involves an inaccessible dimension, das Ding, which is kept away from the subject. In other words, beauty serves as the last frontier of das Ding in relation to desire. The play, for Lacan, reveals Antigone’s insistence on the irreplaceability of her brother, Polyneices. For Antigone, there is only one Polyneices, Lacan argues, “the ineffaceable character” occupying a position securely in the signifying chain, to which she unyieldingly hold on till her death (Ethics 279). Only when Plynices’s name is registered on the tomb can his entire being be conceived in the symbolic world. It is Antigone’s belief that put her on this fatal limit zone of language, which sheds light on how exactly language weaves the longitude and latitude of one’s life.. !. 27!.

(34) ! Her beauty clings to this limit where appears the break between language and the subject, the ex nihilo that enables humans to fabricate signifiers, and the split between the subject of the enunciation and of the statement that allows the subject to use language. Moreover, she mistakenly situates herself in the place of the Other, on the limit of the laws of the gods (Lacan, Ethics 278). She leads herself towards the fatal limit she establishes with her desire, and even goes beyond the border that no mortal can cross. She refuses to sublimate her desire and insists on reaching the bitter end where only the deadly thing, das Ding, awaits her. Thus, Antigone becomes the Sublime object by occupying the place of das Ding, and her beauty is then unveiled. Antigone’s splendor marks the dimension of the forbidden Real, where das Ding is inaccessible and beyond the pleasure principle. Driven by the pleasure principle, the attempt to reach das Ding is a transgression, which brings the painful pleasure, jouissance. The search of jouissance is deadly and points to the path of death, and the transgression of jouissance is prohibited by the superego that regulates the subject with the Law. The paradox lies in the fact that the more the superego prohibits, the more the subject wants the fatal enjoyment. The prohibition of the Law highlights the jouissance that always transgresses. With the relation between jouissance and superego, Lacan associates the imperative nature of superego with the Kantian categorical imperative (Evans 201). The superego is the Law of the Other that commands the subject to enjoy. Alenka Zupančič considers the superego as the birthplace of the feeling of the Sublime, which is evoked by the destructive power of nature “within me” (154-56). The disastrous force within me is closely related to the mechanism of superego, which, Zupančič suggests, allows us to differentiate the beautiful and the Sublime through a Lacanian psychoanalytical lens. Because of its “purposiveness without purpose,” the !. 28!.

(35) ! beautiful as “natural formation” offers us the general picture of the knowledge of nature. While the beautiful is a sense-ful form, the Sublime is a senseless form (original emphasis, Zupančič 157). The sublime is formless, emerging as “pure excess, as the eruption of an inexplicable ‘jouissance’” (Zupančič 157). The sublime, in other words, points to the dimension where “Nature enjoys,” whereas the beautiful is characterized as “Nature Knows” (original emphasis, Zupančič 157). Zupančič continues by asserting the fact that the Sublime is fascinating and captivating for the subject lies in the jouissance of the Other, which serves no real purpose. This definition further explicates the two types of the Sublime in relation to Kantian moral agency: the dynamic Sublime, brought forth by the violence of nature, displays the inexorability and mortality of Kantian moral law, while the mathematically Sublime, emphasizing spatial and temporal magnitude, reveals the aspect of the endless task inflicted on the subject of moral law. (Zupančič 157) This dimension of infinity of moral law purports the fantasy of the subject’s unceasing torture, which presents the body of the Kantian rational being as the Sublime body (Zupančič 157-8). Zupančič asserts that watching the devastating force of nature at a safe distance gives the sense of the Sublime, which is Kant’s fundamental fantasy (158). The sense of safety also makes the subject passive and constrained by the enjoyment of the Law. Kant’s logic behind this inert rational subject also becomes a target of criticism for some feminists, who propose the feminine Sublime against the traditional Sublime. II. The Feminine Sublime The gendered mechanism and classification in the history of the Sublime since the mid-eighteenth century have been questioned and challenged by some feminists. !. 29!.

(36) ! from the 1970s onward, and those critics delve into questions of femininity and sublimity with various aims. The discussion on the misogynist Sublime starts with Luce Irigaray’s 1974 “Paradox a Priori.” Irigaray argues that the Kantian Sublime presents the rules of representation constructed by the male and that the relationship with nature is sacrificed because of the faculty of understanding (204). The Kantian subject emerging in the Sublime experience operates as a Euro-masculine subject, whose relationship with others is the relationship with himself, and the encounter with formidable nature ultimately leads to “a securely sovereign subject (Mann 33-34). Irigaray points out that this symmetrical difference of the masculine subject is never fully analyzed, since the subject treats nature as a mirror, upon which he only sees his reflection through reason as a replacement of imagination (210). In The Phenomenal Woman, Christine Battersby argues that Kant’s critical writings refuse women the Sublime which is associated with higher moral action and reveals that Kant’s theories of the Sublime is based on sexual difference (64-65). This bias predicated on sexual binaries is shown, Battersby points out, in Kant’s suggestion that women escape physical danger for her own safety — or rather for safety of the womb — in order to give birth to the human species’ next generation (65). In “Toward a Female Sublime,” Patricia Yaeger observes that the Romantic Sublime is “a masculine mode of writing and relationship”(192), and considers the feminine Sublime—her use of this phrase is the earliest that I am aware of— as the “pre-Oedipal sublime4,” which “engenders a zone where self-empowerment and intersubjective bliss entertain one another in an atmosphere free of paranoia” (205). The Romanticists as followers of Kant present, Yaeger argues, “the old-fashioned !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 4!Yaeger offers a revision of the Oedipal Sublime proposed by Weiskel in “The Logic of Terror.” In this essay, through a Freudian lens, Weiskel argues that Burk’s fear of pain and Kant’s dominant faculty of reason are associated with “castration anxiety” and “Oedipus Complex” (93) !!!. !. 30!.

(37) ! sublime of domination, the vertical Sublime which insists on aggrandizing the masculine self over others” (191). Unlike the masculine Sublime, the feminine Sublime as “the horizontal Sublime” seeks a harmonious relationship with others and “spreads itself out into multiplicity” (Yaeger 191). This horizontal feminine Sublime indicates a relationship with others in a more peaceful and respectful attitude. The relationship of intersubjectivity in the feminine Sublime recurs in Barbara Freeman’s The Feminine Sublime, the first book to have attempted a thorough examination of the tradition of the masculine Sublime from Longinus, Burke and Kant from a feminist perspective. One of Freeman’s main contentions is that these male key thinkers “exclude an otherness that … is gendered as feminine” (3), and the aim of The Feminine Sublime is “to demonstrate the dominant ideology of misogyny that haunts canonical theories of the Sublime and to suggest another mode of envisioning it” (7). Freeman proposes that the experience of the feminine Sublime involves the subject’s position in relation to an otherness “that is excessive and unrepresentable” (3). Her use of the term “feminine” is employed not to “a specifically feminine subjectivity or mode of expression, but rather to that which calls such categories into questions” (9). Indicating a position of refusal to accept the patriarchal and masculinist system and order, the subject of the feminine Sublime from Freeman’s perspective is inevitably represented as female, Maxwell argues (9). In her 2001 The Female Sublime from Milton to Swinburne, Maxwell, unlike Freeman, proposes a gender-specific connotation of the term “ feminine” and “female” by examining the feminization of the Victorian male poets and the poet’s relation to a “disfiguring sublime, imagined as an aggressive female force which feminizes the male in an act that simultaneously deprives and energizes him” (1-9). Maxwell’s. !. 31!.

(38) ! analysis of poetic feminization of male poets through poetic tradition establishes the Sublime as a feminine force, through which the male poets like Milton are impelled towards self-feminization in order to gain vision. The male poets’ compulsion to attain vision comes after “a form of disfiguration,” a sacrifice akin to a symbolic castration (Maxwell 1-2). Maxwell suggests that the disfigured and feminized male identities make poets great writers, in that the effect of feminization given by the feminine Sublime often marks an aggressive and penetrating force in poems (7). Although mainly focusing on male poets, Maxwell emphasizes that femininity is crucial for the symbolically castrated male poets and female poets who also feel “ a bond of sisterly sympathy” (7). Encountering and dominated by the female force of the feminine Sublime, the male poetic subjects do undergo the rapture or pleasure (Maxwell 8). Maxwell declares that she takes more “aggressive aspects of the Sublime,” when she compares her own version of the Sublime with Patricia Yaeger’s and Anne Moller’s, the latter being “gentle domesticated or communitarian, essentially ‘nicer’ than the supposed masculine sublime”; it is closer to the notion of the feminine beautiful that Burke and Kant propose (8-9). In addition to the feminized poetic images, female physical bodies are also a source of discussion of the experience of the Sublime. Sheila Lintott in 2003 “Sublime Hunger: A Consideration of Eating Disorder Beyond Beauty” attempts to alter the mistaken notion accepted by the public that patients with anorexia are pathologically influenced by the social standard of beauty and thinness, and Lintott argues that the desire manifested by patients suffering from an eating-disorder represents a quest for the Kantian Sublime by means of controlling their bodies through extreme dieting. By defeating the hunger for food that brings pleasure, “the eating-disordered rejects the dominance of nature over her physical self . . . The. !. 32!.

(39) ! dominance of the self over nature is the crusade of the anorectic and bulimic” (Lintott 75). For the eating-disordered who have trouble identifying herself with her body, her body is regarded as “other,” which can be overcome and dominated (Lintott 75). The will power she possessed to deny food and undergo tremendous suffering of her body manifests the triumph feeling of self-control, which is what the Kantian subject feels in negative pleasure brought by the experience of the Sublime. The case of eating disorder illustrates the end of reason as the ultimate judgment: a dying body or even death. Taking up notion of intersubjectivity from previous feminists such as Yeager and Freeman, Joanna Zynliska in her 2001 work proposes that her version of the feminine Sublime embraces the excess confined in Burke’s and Kant’s work and it does not “capitalize the difference in order to enhance modern selfhood with its feeding institution and economies; instead, it constitutes an ethical moment in which an absolute and indescribable otherness is welcomed” (4). What defines “an ethical character” of the feminine Sublime is the possible encounter with “the alterity of the other” in a moment of wonder as one opposed to Burke’s view of the Sublime in which fear is the primary force, which excludes others and therefore differences (5). The feminine Sublime, she suggests “does not domesticate the object that might a source of threat. Instead, it accepts the relationship of pleasure and pain, or life and death, and the potential dispersal of the self” (2). Unlike the dominating and controlling self in the traditional Sublime, the self in the experience of the feminine Sublime is annihilated or dissolved. From Irrigaray to Zynliska, these theorists offer distinctive prospective in the formation of the discourse of the feminine Sublime, to which my readings of Carson is greatly indebted. III. Anne Carson on the Sublime !. 33!.