The Most Sublime of All Laws. The Strange Resurgence of A Kantian Motif in Contemporary Image Politics

The Most Sublime of All Laws: The Strange Resurgence of a Kantian Motif in Contemporary
Image Politics
Author(s): Emmanuel Alloa
Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 41, No. 2 (Winter 2015), pp. 367-389
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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The Most Sublime of All Laws: The Strange

Resurgence of a Kantian Motif in Contemporary
Image Politics
Emmanuel Alloa
1. Forbidden Representation
Thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven image (Exod. 20:4). The
second commandment from the Tables of Law, referred to in Exodus, is
quoted prominently by Immanuel Kant, but not, as one might imagine, in
his Critique of Religion; the reference to the biblical commandment is
found in the Critique of the Power of Judgment.1 While in the Critique of
Religion Kant argues against any kind of commandment imposed by religion or any other revealed faith,2 here, in the context of a discussion of the
concept of the sublime, he surprisingly quotes the second of the Mosaic
commandments, presenting it as the consummate exemplification of what
the sublime purportedly is. Having concluded his analytics of the sublime,
Kant adds a General Remark which reads as follows: Perhaps there is no
more sublime passage in the Jewish Book of the Law than the commandThis text was first presented in the framework of the IKKM lectures at the BauhausUniversitt Weimar in November 2012.
Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
1. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, in The Cambridge Edition of the
Works of Immanuel Kant, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, ed. Guyer (Cambridge, 2000),
p. 156, hereafter abbreviated CPJ; see Kant, Allgemeine Anmerkung zur Exposition der
sthetischen reflektierenden Urteile, Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790), Werke, ed. Wilhelm
Weischedel, 6 vols. (Wiesbaden, 195664), 5:274 (A 123, B 124).
2. See Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, trans. George di Giovanni, in
Religion and Rational Theology, trans. and ed. Allen Wood and Di Giovanni (Cambridge, 1996),
hereafter abbreviated R; see Kant, Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloen Vernunft
(Knigsberg, 1793).
Critical Inquiry 41 (Winter 2015)
2015 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/15/4102-0001$10.00. All rights reserved.
367

368
Emmanuel Alloa / A Kantian Motif in Image Politics
ment Thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven image (CPJ, p. 156).
The trope of the unrepresentablephilosophically formulated in a context
where the aesthetical shifts towards the ethical and its characteristic
moralization of the aesthetic experienced an unparalleled renaissance
in the late twentieth century. In the wake of the experiences of mass
destruction and particularly of genocidal extermination, the moral argument concerning the prohibition of representation achieved a completely new form of authoritysecular but no less constraining.
Although other traumatic events of the twentieth century have also
given rise to certain rhetorics of unrepresentability, it is beyond doubt that
the experience of the Holocaust established unrepresentability as an irrevocable element of public discourse. While Pablo Picassos Guernica can
still be regarded as a forceful depiction of the tragic shelling of the Basque
town of Guernica by the German air force, one would be hard pressed to
find an artwork that is generally taken to represent the entirety of the
Shoah. While the Nazi perpetrators invoked aneedless to say, profoundly pervertedKantian ethics to justify their deeds, and Adolf Eichmann even gave a definition of the categorical imperative during his trial in
Jerusalem,3 Kants argument for the negative sublime and a secular version
of the unrepresentable was now called upon. At present, the tropes of the
3. This argument has been repeated often. See prominently Joshua Halberstam, From
Kant to Auschwitz, Social Theory and Practice 14 (Spring 1988): 4154. However, the oftinvoked Eichmann is not a good example of Nazi officials blindly claiming Kantian
justification. As Hannah Arendt relates in Eichmann in Jerusalem, at his trial in 1961, he indeed
affirmed that he had read Kants Critique of Practical Reason and provided a fairly accurate
definition of the categorical imperative in front of the judges. But Eichmann then proceeded
to explain that from the moment he was charged with carrying out the Final Solution he
had ceased to live according to Kantian principles, that he had known it, and that he had
consoled himself with the thought that he no longer was master of his own deeds, that he
was unable to change anything. What he failed to point out in court was that . . . he had
not simply dismissed the Kantian formula as no longer applicable, he had distorted it to
read: Act as if the principle of your actions were the same as that of the legislator or of the
law of the landor, in Hans Franks formulation of the categorical imperative in the Third
Reich, which Eichmann might have known: Act in such a way that the Fuhrer, if he knew
your action, would approve it.
E M M A N U E L A L L O A is assistant professor in philosophy at the University of St.

Gallen. He acts as senior research fellow at the National Center of Competence
in Research (NCCR) Iconic Criticism in Basel and as codirector of the research
network Dynamis of the Image at the Colle`ge dEtudes Mondiales, Paris. He is
the author of Das durchscheinende Bild: Konturen einer medialen Phnomenologie
(2011) and The Resistance of the Sensible (forthcoming). He currently is working
on a book project, The Testimonial Image: The Belatedness of the Real.

Critical Inquiry / Winter 2015
unspeakable, of the unthinkable, and of the unimaginable are inseparable

(to say the least) from official politics of memory and are central in the
rhetoric of influential books like Daniel Goldhagens Willing Executioners.
Moreover, public debates such as that on the Memorial to the Murdered
Jews of Europe in Berlin testify that the argument pervades disputes about
the possibility of artistic responses to the Holocaust. If we are to follow
Jacques Rancie`re, the category of the unrepresentable constitutes the central category of the ethical turn in aesthetic reflection.4 As such, it is inseparable from a certain discourse of power, foras W. J. T. Mitchell has
pointed outto declare that something is unrepresentable (God, the
Shoah, or any other possible event or thing) is at the same time to declare
oneself the representative of it.5
Yet the emergence of this argument did not wait for a culture increasingly harried by the public institutionalization of memory and the liturgy
of the unspeakable. From the onset, the gulf between the event and its
possible representation has been described by survivors struggling for adequate words. Robert Antelme writes in 1957 that during the first days after
returning from Dachau, the survivors wanted nothing but to speak:
with us we brought back our memory of our experience, an experience that was still very much alive, and we felt a frantic desire to describe it such as it had been. As of those first days, however, we saw
that it was impossible to bridge the gap we discovered opening up
between the words at our disposal and that experience which, in the
case of most of us, was still going forward within our bodies. How
were we to resign ourselves to not trying to explain how we had got to
the state we were in? For we were yet in that state. And even so it was
impossible. No sooner would we begin to tell our story than we
would be choking over it. And then, even to us, what we had to tell
would start to seem unimaginable.6
In the opening lines of the foreword to The Human Race, his autobiographical account of his experiences in the concentration camp, Antelme
(Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil [New York, 1965], p.
136).
4. Jacques Rancie`re, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge,
2009), p. 123.
5. See W. J. T. Mitchell, The Unspeakable and the Unimaginable, Cloning Terror: The
War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (Chicago, 2001), p. 63.
6. Robert Antelme, The Human Race, trans. Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler (1957;
Marlboro, Vt., 1992), p. 3.

369
370
already jumps forward in time and gestures toward the end of the narrative. What is yet to be told, the survivor quickly realizes, progressively takes
on the character of the unimaginable. The word is italicized, as if to indicate that it does not belong to the narrator but is instead somehow taken
over as a metaleptic quote.
Indeed, at the end of the narrative, the explanation for this wording is
provided: When the American soldiers who liberate the camp listen to the
first accounts given by the detainees, their first reactions are frightful and
unimaginable. But soon after, says Antelme, the soldiers grew tired of
listening to the innumerable accounts and simply repeat their judgment.
Frightful, yes frightful, the detainees confirm, in the same tone of voice.
Yet an unbridgeable gap has opened up between the survivors and their
liberators, a gap, as Sarah Kofman comments, that the words frightful
or unimaginable uttered by the American could not bridge, since their
effect was to suggest to the detainee that he had been understood, that with
just a few words, the other had been able to grasp everything and to form,
about the unknowable and untransmissible, a definite and reassuring opinion.7 The detainee has no choice but to submit to the apparent consensus, as
Antelme concludes pithily: unimaginable, its a word that doesnt divide,
doesnt restrict. The most convenient word. When you walk around with
this word as your shield, this word for emptiness, your step becomes better
assured, more resolute, your conscience pulls itself together.8 This passage exemplifies as few others do how the notion of the unimaginable
could develop such a magnetic appeal that no one, not even the victims,
could resist its pull. To pretend that it is imaginable, that it can be told,
would be to relativize its devastating, overwhelming character and to betray the memory of those who have not survived. The survivor is caught in
a double bind, which is one of the paradoxes of the witness: he has to speak,
and to speak infinitely, and, at the same time, he cannot speak without
betrayal; the words are knotted, for there is no possible way that they
would be understood.9 Ultimately, he surrenders to the only possible solution: to endorse the imposed qualification, the discourse of the unimaginable, an action that of course also puts an end to any discourse.
Despite these lucid remarks about its ambivalence, the category of the
unrepresentable has become a key reference point of aesthetic debate, and
quite often those very authorssuch as Antelme, Primo Levi, Imre Kertesz, and Jorge Semprunwho have not surrendered to silence but have
7. Sarah Kofman, Smothered Words, trans. Madeleine Dobie (Evanston, Ill., 1998), pp. 3738.
8. Antelme, The Human Race, pp. 28990.
9. See Kofman, Smothered Words, p. 39.

written extensive accounts of their experiences are invoked to justify it. As

Georges Perec notes in an early text on the effects of Antelmes The Human
Race: Everywhere, we are invited to feel the mystery, the unexplainable.
The inexpressible is a value. The unsayable is a dogma.10
Yet the clearest connection between the principle of the unimaginable
and the biblical prohibition of representation has notoriously been put
forward by the French filmmaker and author of arguably the most important film about the Holocaust (Shoah, 1986), Claude Lanzmann. Lanzmanns crusade against all attempts to visualize the Holocaust reached a
climax with Steven Spielbergs 1994 narrative movie Schindlers List, to
which Lanzmann responded with a hard-hitting article entitled Holocaust, the Impossible Representation: The Holocaust is first and foremost unique in that it builds around itself, in a circle of flames, the
boundary not to be crossed, because a certain absolute of horror cannot be
communicated: to pretend to cross it is to become guilty of the most serious transgression. Fiction is a transgression, I feel deeply that there is a
prohibition of representation.11 Trying to represent the Holocaust is inevitably bound to fail and also means to vulgarly give in to the scopic
drive.12 Lanzmann continues: I truly thought, with humility and pride,
that there was a before and an after Shoah, and that after Shoah a certain
number of things could no longer be done. Now Spielberg has done them
(H, p. 400).
Lanzmanns sentence is significant, for it deliberately plays on the synonymy between the event and the film about it, between the Shoah and
Lanzmanns film of the same name. Nevertheless, not only does the filmmaker claim moral authority over the possible ways of addressing the Holocaust, he also alleges the right to rule on any attempt of its relativization
through comparison. When Shoah was screened in Chinese in Nanjing in
2004 and the audience related its topic to the experiences of the massacre of
Nanjing committed during World War II, Lanzmann strictly forbade any
such comparison and condemned the attempt of the Chinese translator to
find an adequate rendering of the word Shoah.13 He recalls how on another
occasion, when asked to explain the meaning of the word, he had said he
didnt know what the word meant. But we will have to translate it, his
10. Georges Perec, Robert Antelme ou la verite de la literature (1963), in L.G.: Une
Aventure des annees soixante (Paris, 1992), p. 111.
11. Claude Lanzmann, Holocauste, la representation impossible (sur La Liste de
Schindler) (1994), La Tombe du Divin Plongeur (Paris, 2012), p. 399 ; hereafter abbreviated H.
12. Lanzmann, Le Monument contre larchive? interview by Daniel Bougnoux et al., Les
Cahiers de Mediologie 11 (2001): 278.
13. See Pierre Haski, Nankin sous le choc de Shoah, Liberation, 29 Sept. 2004, p. 7.

371
372
interlocutor replied, no one will understand,Thats precisely what I

want, that nobody understands, Lanzmann retorted.14 There is an obscenity, he adds, of the very project of understanding.15 Just as with
Kants sublime, what is at stake here infinitely exceeds the human capacity
to grasp it. (If we could grasp the infinitely exceeding, it would of course no
longer be infinite, as Rene Descartes already underlined).16
Let us summarize. Lanzmann, who does not deny a certain monotheistic genealogy and considers his iconoclasm justified by the Jewish
Talmud,17 advocates a triple prohibition: a prohibition of comparison, a
prohibition of explanation, and a prohibition of representation. Like any law,
Lanzmanns laws are injunctions and cannot be justified further without
relativizing them. Radicalism, says Lanzmann, cannot be divided. No
why?, but no answer either to the question about the refusal of the why,
lest one reinscribes oneself into the mentioned obscenity.18 Lanzmanns
argument is cunning, no doubt; from the onset, the question why? is declared to be obscene, and hence anyone asking why it is obscene is found
guilty of a double obscenity.
I shall not venture further into the discussion of Lanzmanns position at
this point, nor will I list any further examples of the many voices invoking
the trope of unrepresentability. My issue is rather to consider the pertinence of Jacques Rancie`res claim that the category of the unrepresentable
is at the core of the so-called ethical turn, to examine its different modes of
rhetorical instantiation, and to see if those arguments are useful enough to
analyze them critically, in both the works of Rancie`re and those of JeanLuc Nancy and Georges Didi-Huberman. The last part of the essay will ask
whether the reference to Kant is justified and whether the claim of the
unrepresentability of certain events made in the name of a certain
interpretation of Kant is not in fact a Kant heavily influenced by a later,
namely Hegelian, reading. As I will try to show, it is G. W. F. Hegels
definition of the sublime as a substantial unity that fatally foreshadows the contemporary understanding of unrepresentability as the quality of a specific object.19
14. Lanzmann, Ce mot de Shoah (2005), La Tombe du Divin Plongeur, p. 364.
15. Lanzmann, The Obscenity of Understanding: An Evening with Claude Lanzmann, in
Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore, 1995), p. 205.
16. See Rene Descartes, letter to Mersenne, 15 Apr. 1630, Correspondence, trans. John
Cottingham et al., vol. 3 of The Philosophical Writings of Rene Descartes (Cambridge, 1991), p. 23.
17. Lanzmann, Shoah est une oeuvre talmudique: Le Talmud interdit la representation,
interview with a journalist of the newspaper Liberation, 29 June 1987, p. 17.
18. Lanzmann, Hier ist kein Warum (1988), in Bernard Cuau et al., Au sujet de Shoah:
Le Film de Claude Lanzmann (Paris, 1990), p. 279.
19. This phrase from Hegels Aesthetics will be discussed at a later point in the essay.

2. The Unrepresentable: Between Normative Prescription and

Logical Impossibility (Nancy)
Let us begin with the claim that unrepresentability is related to a moralizing stance. First of all, it has to be said that the trope of unrepresentability is certainly much older than any possible ethical turn. Or, to stick to
Rancie`res terminology: It seems as if unrepresentability has been an even
more prominent issue within the representational regime than within an
ethical regime. As a matter of fact, the epistemological implications of the
concept of representation have been dependent on the notion of the unrepresentable, and it can even be asserted that to a certain extent the redefinition of the notion of representation is a direct result of a
confrontation with the issue of unrepresentability.
In his Sixth Meditation, Descartes writes that there are objects our imagination cannot represent adequately, such as a chiliagon, a polygon with
one thousand sides.20 Is a chiliagon therefore unrepresentable? Only if
representation amounts solely to imaginative intuition. On the other
hand, we can quite easily conceive of a polygon with a thousand sides
conceptually, even without intuitive content. As a result, the notion of
representation has to be extended to encompass intellective representation
also; the chiliagon is thus not unrepresentable, it is only unrepresentable
intuitively. But here again, the question arises: is it true that we cannot
imagine a thousand-sided object? And is this due to our limited imagination, while an algorithm could instantly produce a technical drawing of a
thousand-sided object? To what extent is it really accurate to say that there
can be no image of a chiliagon? As one could argue along with Roderick
Chisholm, a picture of a speckled hen may contain thousands of speckles
my eye could never count, and yet I see a speckled hen.21 In brief: Within an
epistemological framework, the issue of unrepresentability concerns logical possibilities or impossibilities.
How does an epistemological category become an ethical one? In
Kantian terminology, this happens when we move from Nichtsein to
Nichtsollen in English: from what cannot be to what ought not to be.
Any kind of ethics, it goes without saying, only makes sense where a
given situation might also be different. However catastrophic both Hiroshima and Fukushima may beas Nancy argues in his book LEquivalence des
20. See Descartes, Meditation Six: Concerning the Existence of Material Things, and the
Real Distinction between Mind and Body, Meditations, Objections, and Replies, trans. and ed.
Roger Ariew and Donald Cress (Indianapolis, 2006), p. 40.
21. See Roderick Chisholm, The Problem of the Speckled Hen, Mind 51 (Oct. 1942):
36873.

373
374
catastrophes22no ethical claim can be addressed to a tsunami, any more

than to the earthquake of Lisbon of 1755 that so utterly unsettled Kant.
What does it entail, therefore, to claim that Auschwitz cannot be represented? In Forbidden Representation, Nancy ponders the implications
of the dictum of the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz and, beyond
that, about the possibility of representation of and after Auschwitz.23 Is
poetry after Auschwitz impossible because poetry has lost its legitimacy as
a literary genre and is being replaced by testimony, the only new literary
genre, as Elie Wiesel once affirmed, invented by our age?24 Is poetry after
Auschwitz impossible because there can be no poetry about Auschwitz?
The dictum seems to hesitate between fact and claim, between observation
and plea.
It is incontrovertible that there has been poetry after Auschwitz and even
poetry about Auschwitz. The shift of trope from the assertion of a definite
impossibility (poetry as poetry can no longer be written) to a normative
claim (poetry about Auschwitz should not be written as it would be barbaric) and to its later reversal (poetry after Auschwitz is admissible and
even necessary, as Theodor Adorno seems to imply in 1966, when he concedes that his earlier affirmation might have been wrong: perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream)25
showsto say the leasthow ambivalent the question is.
It may well be that, to a large extent, the ubiquitous presence of the
trope of unrepresentability in todays moral debates is owed to the systematic blurring of logical limits and normative demands. The Lanzmann case
is emblematic of this blurring. He even goes as far as to say that the images
of corpses seen in Alain Resnaiss Nuit et brouillard are not images of the
extermination, for they are simply victims of typhus in a concentration
camp, which would allow for the conclusion: Of the extermination
camps, there is no image.26 When the example of the motion picture film
shot by a German officer in Latvia in 1941 showing Einsatzgruppen mass
killings is brought up, he adds, it is nothing.27 And what about the wis22. See Jean-Luc Nancy, LEquivalence des catastrophes (apre`s Fukushima) (Paris, 2012).
23. See Nancy, Forbidden Representation, trans. Sarah Clift, The Ground of the Image,
trans. Jeff Ford and Clift (New York, 2005), pp. 2750; hereafter abbreviated FR.
24. If the Greeks invented tragedy, the Romans the epistle, and the Renaissance the
sonnet, our generation invented a new literature, that of testimony (Elie Wiesel, The
Holocaust as Literary Inspiration, in Wiesel et al., Dimensions of the Holocaust [Evanston, Ill.,
1977], p. 9).
25. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York, 1973), p. 362.
26. Haski, Nankin sous le choc de Shoah, p. 7.
27. Lanzmann, Le Lieu et la parole, interview by Marc Chevrie and Herve Le Roux, Au
sujet de Shoah, p. 297.

senschaftliche Dokumentarfilm G.K. from 194142, which, according to the

script, was to show a gassing procedure in detail?28 Lanzmanns answer can
be anticipated:
Had I found an existing filma secret film, since it was strictly forbiddenfilmed by a member of the SS and showing how 3000 Jews,
men, women, children die together, asphyxiated in a gas chamber of
the Krematorium II of Auschwitz, had I found such a thing, then not
only would I not have shown it, I would have destroyed it. I cannot
say why. It goes without saying [ca va de soi]. [H, p. 399]
There can be no image of exterminationthe statement seems to imply
but even if there were one, there should not be any. The prohibition of
representation will be enforced through iconoclastic violence, if necessary,
as if to reinforce the prescriptions incontestable nature. What ought not to
be cannot be. C
a va de soi. It goes without saying. The claim of unrepresentability itself needs no justification; it is itself unsayable, whichto
speak with Giorgio Agambenis equivalent to the silent adoration of the
arcanum put forward by the theology of glorification: euphemein, to adoring in silence, as one does with a god.29
3. The Unrepresentable as Property of the Object (Rancie`re)

Nancys observation that the discourse of the unrepresentable rests on a
deliberate confusion of fact and value, of description and prescription, is
taken up by Rancie`re and radicalized even further. In Are Some Things
Unrepresentable? Rancie`re asks what it would mean to say that there are
things or events that are constitutively unrepresentable.30 To declare that
any given object is unrepresentable by artistic means, says Rancie`re, may
mean sensibly different things. Indeed, the claim of the unrepresentability
of the Holocaust differs from Edmund Burke asserting that John Miltons
description of Lucifer in Paradise Lost is unrepresentable in painting or
28. The film, which was never completed but for which Hermann Schweninger said he had
taken pictures from the outside window of the gas chamber of the Euthanasie-Anstalt
Sonnenstein near Dresden, was meant to be shown to medical personnel in the context of the
euthanasia project T4 directed at mentally ill patients (a direct connection to the Final Solution
could not be established). See Karl-Heinz Roth, Filmpropaganda fur die Vernichtung der
Geisteskranken im Dritten Reich, in Reform und Gewissen: Euthanasie im Dienste des
Fortschritts, ed. Gtz Aly et al., 2 vols. (Berlin, 1985), 2:183. See also Michel Burleigh, Death and
Deliverance: Euthanasia in Germany 1900 1945 (Cambridge, 1994), p. 202.
29. Giorgio Agamben, The Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans.
Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York, 1999), pp. 3233.
30. See Rancie`re, Sil y a de lirrepresentable? Genre Humain 36 (2001): 81102; trans.
Gregory Elliott under the title Are Some Things Unrepresentable? The Future of the Image
(London, 2007), pp. 10938; hereafter abbreviated A.

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376
that Virgils Laocoon from the Aeneid is unrepresentable in sculpture.31

Beyond the ancient argument that poetry is superior to the visual arts
because it can confine itself to invoking where visual arts have to show, what
is at stake in the case of the representation of genocidal events is a certain
extraordinary status of the event itself. Unlike the argument of media specificity and their respective limits in representation, which entails that there
are better or worse, more adequate or less appropriate ways of showing
something, unrepresentability is now turned into a characteristic qualifying an object or an event as such.
The proof that unrepresentability has to be considered an intrinsic
quality can be measured by those artistic attempts that do not acknowledge
it: whoever wants to make images of the unrepresentable horror, Rancie`re paraphrases the argument, will be punished for it by the aesthetic
mediocrity of the product.32 But the argument is flawed. This aesthetic
mediocrity does not prove that the event is unrepresentable as such; it
merely shows the inadequacy of the representation. While unrepresentability can be held to be a categorical quality, inadequacy is clearly a relative
one. If a representation is inadequate, it raises the question of whether
there can be better ones. This is why Rancie`re goes on arguing that the
assertion of unrepresentability is not so much a total iconoclasm as a claim
that what is to be represented should be represented in a certain form, with
a certain language appropriate to its exceptionality. This, in turn, only
expresses a paradoxical nostalgia for a regime in which objects can have a
corresponding particular form in which they are expressed; this desire
however rests on the problematic equation of antirepresentative art and
the art of the unrepresentable, which places a whole regime of art under
the sign of holy terror (A, p. 137).
Even the allegation that the Holocaust has brought about a new
negativeaesthetics is questioned by Rancie`re. While the paratactic writing of Levi or Antelme, made up of a concatenation of splintered fragments
of perception, was taken as the only possible mode of testimony befitting
the experience of dehumanization, this style of linking small observations and sensations was arguably already one of the major features of
the nineteenth-century literary revolution. The short notations at the
beginning of Antelmes book LEspe`ce humaine, describing the latrines and
setting the scene of the camp at Buchenwald, answer to the same pattern as
the description of Emma Bovarys farmyard.33 It is precisely the attempt to
31. See Rancie`re, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, p. 123.
32. Rancie`re, Chronicles of Consensual Times, trans. Corcoran (London, 2010), p. 41.
33. Rancie`re, The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes, New Left Review 14 (Mar.Apr.
2002): 150.

correlate a certain moral claim about history to a specific aesthetic genealogy of antirepresentationalism, such as that which Gerard Wajcman
undertakes in LObjet du sie`cle,34 that exemplifies all the internal contradictions of the trope of unrepresentability, hence anti-representative
art is constitutively an art without unrepresentable things. In and of
itself the event neither prescribes nor proscribes any specific artistic
means; it is only an issue of relative or comparative unrepresentability, of adaptation of the means and ends of representation. Against all
kinds of speculative hyperbole, Rancie`re advocates aesthetic sobriety.
Nothing is unrepresentable as a property of the event. There are simply
choices (A, pp. 137, 130, 129).
Lanzmanns film Shoah is a good example of the fact that no artwork
can avoid a certain process of selection of what will and what will not be
shown. Although Lanzmanns film certainly avoids fictional reconstruction, it cannot avoid construction. Historians have shown that the empty
clearing of Chelmno on which Simon Srebnik stands and speaks was not as
wide as it appears in the film. The director thus used a wide-angle lens to
underscore the discrepancy between the scenes described in Srebniks testimony and the peaceful appearance of the site today. Like every filmmaker, Lanzmann makes images; like every artist he makes choices; it is
these that will be judged. If one knows what one wants to representi.e.,
in the case of Claude Lanzmann, the reality of the incredible, the equivalence of the real and the incrediblethere is no property of the event that
proscribes representation (A, p. 129).
4. Challenging Representation (Nancy, Didi-Huberman)

Although convergent on many points, the approaches of Nancy and
Didi-Huberman diverge slightly from Rancie`res. While they agree on
the critique of unrepresentability as the property of an event and criticize the normative conclusions drawn from it, they tend to grant the
trope of unrepresentability a certain heuristic importance in the attempt to understand what representation is. For any iconoclastic dismissal of representation cannot but highlight that which it tries to negate;
no one has attracted as much attention to the issue of the power of images
as the Byzantine iconoclasts.35 To what extent does any new reiteration of
the prohibition of imagesin its characteristic ambiguity between constative and normativeconfirm, not the end of representation by any means,
34. See Gerard Wajcman, LObjet du sie`cle (Lagrasse, 1998).
35. Ive developed this argument more in detail in Alloa, Visual Studies in Byzantium: A
Pictorial Turn Avant la Letter, Journal of Visual Culture 12 (Apr. 2013): 329.

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but rather that its question remains wide open? In his essay La Representation interdite, translated as Forbidden Representation, Nancy suggests that the prohibition (linterdit) has in fact to be understood as the
challenged or questioned representation (la representation interdite),
for in French, the expression etre interdit also means to be dumbfounded, disconcerted, or taken aback (which in turn alludes back to
the interdictum of Roman law, which survives in modern judicial systems
as interlocutory injunction: the arbiter going between two conflicting parties and pronouncing an arrest, a suspension of opposing claims until the
trial can be set. The interdictio would thus stand, in Nancys eyes, for that
which intervenes in the discourse and brings it to a halt, leaving it bereft of
its certainties) (see FR, p. 38).
The question for Nancy is thus: What became of representation itself at
Auschwitz? (FR, p. 34). If the argument that there cannot be any representation amounts to saying that there can be no adequate representation, what does that say about the concept of representation? At this point,
Nancy suggests an interesting aspect: the re- of representation should not
be understood as repetitive but rather as intensive (or, to be more precise,
in the manner the initially iterative value of the prefix re- was progressively
transformed into an intensive or, as it is called in linguistics, frequentative
value). Representation is more than a subordinate, vicarious presentation;
it isthus Nancythe reinstantiation of presence for a certain gaze, a
directed presentation of presence, supplemented with a specific interpretation of what is to be seen. Consequently, representation does not present something without exposing its value or sense (FR, p. 36). To
summarize: Representation is presentation plus signification of what it presents. For Nancy, it is this indissociable linking of representation to significationrepresentation as the added value of presencethat explains that
the so-called crisis of representation is, first of all, a crisis of meaning.
The notion of signification implied in the order of representation is a
notion of complete signification without any lack. According to Nancy,
repraesentatio would be the Latin equivalent of the Greek hypokeimenon,
the ability to subsume something signifiedfully and thoroughlyunder
the order of conceptuality. However, the assumption of the completeness
or saturation of the signified rests on an initial dichotomy. Unlike the
representing entity, the represented thing is full and determined, but at the
price of being absent, invisible, and intellectual.
Two scenarios open up: either to completely cut off this realm and
prohibit any attempt to bring it into presence through representation (this
would correspond to the iconoclast option) or to deny the dichotomy and
try to completely transfer the full and saturated signification into presence

(this would correspond to totalitarian ideology). This second alternative is

best illustrated, says Nancy, by what he eventually called, along with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, the ideology of national-aestheticism,36 that is, the
complete transferral of signification into ostentative real presence and the
annihilation of anything that could ruin the saturation of this presence:
The Aryan body is an idea identical to a presence, or it is the presence of
an idea without remainder (FR, p. 39).37 The ideology of the Volkskrper, according to Nancy, is the instantiation of a purely present idea
through the annihilation of that which supposedly impedes its full realization. The exhaustive bringing-into-presence of the idea is correlated to an
exhaustion of everything that supposedly threatens its completion. This
also entails, however, that, not only must this remainder be annihilated,
but also the remains of this annihilation itself, which would otherwise act
as a reminder that the annihilation was not complete.
This is the point where Didi-Hubermans argument in Images in Spite of
All comes in. The prohibition of representation is not only a possible ethical stance in response to the Holocaust; it was one of the operative principles of it. In The Drowned and the Saved, Levi recalls the cynical words
with which the detainees were welcomed upon their arrival at Auschwitz:
none of you will be left to bear witness, but even if someone were to
survive, the world will not believe him. . . . Even if some proof should
remain and some of you survive, people will say that the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed.38
No traces were meant to be left, and the signs at the entrances of certain
camps reading Fotografieren verboten! confirm the strict ban laid on any
photographic documentation within the camp and of the process of extermination39 (incidentally, a ban that was by no means specific to the extermination of the European Jews but was operative in the Armenian
genocide, the genocidal project of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and
others). The totalitarian dimension of genocide hence seems to imply a
double extermination. As Didi-Huberman puts it, the Endlsung involves
an annihilation enacted twice: the total destruction of the Jews and the
destruction of all traces of this destruction (see I, p. 21).
36. See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political,
trans. Chris Turner (Oxford, 1990), chap. 7 as well as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Nazi
Myth, trans. Brian Holmes, Critical Inquiry 16 (Winter 1990): 291312.
37. See also Nancy, Un Souffle, Rue Descartes 15 (1997): 14.
38. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York, 1989),
pp. 1112.
39. See Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, trans.
Shane B. Lillis (Chicago, 2008), p. 23; hereafter abbreviated I.

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In the controversy that followed the exhibition Photographies des

camps de concentration et dextermination Nazi organized by Clement
Cheroux,40 Gerard Wajcman in a way reiterated Lanzmanns argument of
unrepresentability as a property of the event when he said that it was by
virtue of this double extermination that it has to be acknowledged that
there are no images of the Holocaust. As Wajcman puts it, the irrepresentable exists.41 Once again, the interdiction of representationthe fact
that there ought to be no images of itdid not mean that there never were
any images. The four photographs secretly taken by the members of the
Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando in August 1944, which constitute
the core of Didi-Hubermans Images in Spite of All, testify of the sometimes
desperate attempts to represent in spite of all, in spite of the totalizing
ambition of the prohibition of representation operational within the concentrationary system: The four photographs snatched from Auschwitz by
members of the Sonderkommando were also, therefore, four refutations
snatched from a world that the Nazis wanted to obfuscate, to leave wordless and imageless (I, p. 20). By contrast, one can only say that these
images are nothing (ca nest rien) if one embraces a totalizing concept of
images.
Didi-Hubermans meticulous and scrupulous lesson on the representation or nonrepresentation of the Shoah hence opens out into a more
general reflection on what representation is. The trope of unrepresentability prohibits any reflection on representation and on its inherent limits,
for it either postulates the image as something total (and thus unattainable) or as nothing (and thus dismissible). Howeverand the photos of
the Sonderkommando exemplify this aspectit is in the very inadequacy of representation, when the experience is made up of a rift between
what shows and what is shown, that it becomes clear: The image is neither
all (as Wajcman secretly fears) nor nothing (as he assumes peremptorily)
(I, p. 65); it neither reveals everything nor simply veils what really is and
hence amounts to nothing. Very often, says Didi-Huberman, either too
much or too little is expected of images, either because they are treated as
mere evidence among millions of further documents, and thus the specifically visual evidence (in the sense of evidentia) is dismissed, or because too
much is asked of them, that is to act as proofs, to say it all. As a matter of
fact, however, the image is neither nothing, nor one, nor all (I, p. 121). By
both drawing on and transforming Jacques Lacans notion of the not-all
40. See the catalogue that includes Didi-Hubermans essay Images malgre tout, Memoire
des camps: Photographies des camps de concentration et dextermination nazis (19331999), ed.
Clement Cheroux (exhibition catalogue, Hotel de Sully, Paris, 2001), pp. 21941.
41. Gerard Wajcman, De la croyance photographique, Les Temps Modernes 613 (2001): 47.

(le pas-tout), Didi-Huberman coins the concept of the in spite of all.

What has to be understood, he concludes, is that images will always be
inadequate to any possible use made of them. The categorical confusion
consists in taking what is merely a use value for an ontological status
(I, p. 69); the inadequacy is that of a process, not a quality of an object. This
in turn brings Didi-Hubermans argument very close to that of Kant in the
third Critique and its notion of inadequacy (Unangemessenheit) in experiencing the sublime.
5. Probing the Limits of Representation with Kant

The General Remark that follows the analytic of the sublime in the
Critique of the Power of Judgment contains the aforementioned, surprising
reference to the second commandment of the Tables of Law: Perhaps
there is no more sublime passage in the Jewish Book of the Law than the
commandment Thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven image.
How are we to understand this sentence from a Kantian perspective? At
first it must indeed disconcert, when one thinks of Kants remarks about
books of law. In the treatise on the Conflict of Faculties, the higher faculties
(theology, jurisprudence, and medicine) are opposed to the inferior faculty (philosophy). All higher faculties, Kant affirms, are based upon writings containing statutes that stem from the whimsical decree of a higher
authority.42 The authority of such laws or statutes thus does not derive
from the authority of reason but from an external power: the biblical
theologian (as a member of a higher faculty) draws his teachings not from
reason but from the Bible; the professor of law gets his, not from natural
law, but from the law of the land; and the professor of medicine does not
draw his method of therapy as practiced on the public from the physiology of
the human body but from medical regulations (CF, p. 35). As is well
known, Kants critical endeavor consists of disassembling any heteronomous claims and having a philosophy that mercilessly strips from the
foreign government all the shiny plumes. As the inferior faculty, philosophy must reject any statutes enforced by foreign powers, as it deals with
teachings which are not adopted as directives by order of a superior
[welche nicht auf den Befehl eines Obern zur Richtschnur genommen warden] (CF, p. 43; trans. mod.).
It would be erroneous, however, to understand Kants critique of religion as an overall rejection of it, just as it would be improper to suppose
Kant questions authority as such; Kant does not reject all authority, only
42. Kant, The Conflict of Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor (New York, 1979), p. 33; trans.
mod.; hereafter abbreviated CF. See Kant, Der Streit der Fakultten (1798), vol. 6 of Werke.

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382
foreign authority. In the wake of heteronomous foreign authorities, Kants

ethics aims at singling out the only valid one: the authority of reason. The
reasonable will is autonomous by means of its capacity for giving itself its
own law, which is defined exclusively by its formneither by its application nor by its contentas a moral law.
Neverthelessand this is the whole point of Kants treatise on Religion
within the Boundaries of Mere Reason it may happen that certain historically instituted laws (which are rooted in religious revelation and have a
historical tradition) and moral laws (which are rooted in reasoning) coincide.
As a result, the difference between autonomy and heteronomy, which one
might have thought to define the opposition of philosophy and theology,
shifts to an internal difference within religion (to be more accurate, to a difference between what Kant calls a religion of faith and a religion of
reason).
It is not that the religion of faith is being subordinated to reason as such,
as the title Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloen Vernunft might
erroneously suggest, but rather that the revealed religion is described as a
wider circle containing another circle with a smaller radius, the principles
of which are compatible with reason. This metaphor of the two concentric
circles, which Kant himself draws on (see R, p. 40), gives rise to a new
distinction that is crucial for understanding the prohibition of images: the
difference between statutary law and moral law. While the law of pure
morality requires no application of foreign force in order to be observed,
since its observation derives from the noncoercive coercion of understanding, the statutary law is doubly dependent on an external power. It
depends on the constituting power of an arbitrary legislator, whose reasons are impenetrable, and it hinges on the applying power that guarantees
the application and the observation of the statutes.
In this context, Kants ambivalent interpretation of the Jewish Decalogue is telling. On the one hand, he sees in the blind following of those ten
laws he calls coercive laws (Zwangsgesetze) the highest form of arbitrary,
statutary religiosity, the justification of which lies in a historically singular
revelation and which is reliant on a state-religious constitution for its implementation (see R, p. 163n). On the other hand, the Decalogue contains
the core of the moral understanding of the law, according to Kant, just as
revealed religions already concentrically contain rational religion. Consequently, the second commandment should not be understood as a Kanon,
but as an Organon, not as a revealed content of the law, but as a vehicle or
a medium of what the law is.43
43. On the distinction between Kanon and Organon, see CF, pp. 6163. See also in Religion

What is significant for our purpose here is that according to Kant something invisible exists that does not necessarily have to have the character of
a sacred mystery. Kant criticizes the religions based on faith for presupposing something like an arcanum that every believer knows but cannot
tell of beyond him- or herself. Kant objects that while the form according to
which any principle has to be shapedsuch as the principle of human
freedommust be universally intuitive and shared, its reason is impenetrable for the individual (Kant speaks of the inscrutability of the idea of
freedom [CPJ, p. 156]). A comment on Religion within the Boundaries of
Mere Reason contains the following instructive sentence: But as regards
what transcends the senses . . . we see nothing of it . . . apart from its law
(though this is enough by itself) (R, p. 190n; trans. mod.).
Kants interpretation of the Old Testament prohibition of images thus
amounts to saying that beneath the statutary, normative proscription lies a
logical, categorical impossibility. It is not that representing suprasensory
principles through images is prohibited; rather, it is fundamentally impossible to find any positive representation.
I am stressing positive here, as Kant nevertheless thinks that another
(precarious because negative) form of presentation of this invisible is possible. Of this suprasensorial we see nothing, writes Kant, apart from its
law, adding though this is enough by itself. What cannot be fathomed is
not merely invisible; it reveals itself negatively, as the pure law of its own
unrepresentability, as a purely formal how with no intuitive what. The laws
governing what lies beyond sensorial intuition are the laws of experience.
They strictly amount to the terms in which that which cannot appear as
sensory content presents itself to experience. The principles of unrepresentability thus do not lie in some ineffable absolute realm; they
coincide with the principles of experience as such and its limits. Nothing is unrepresentableone could summarizebecause unrepresentability is no thing; it is not a quality of an object but a determination of
experience defined through its constitutive limits.
Accordingly, when the third Critique speaks of negativity, this negativity does not concern something beyond presentation; it is rather the presentation itself that becomes negative. Kant characterizes this presentation
as abstract, but in its most basic etymological sense. This abstract presentation [abgezogene Darstellungsart], . . . becomes entirely negative in
regard to the sensible (CPJ, p. 156). Therefore, presentation does not give
within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, where the statutary law is described as that of a religion
which can contain only the means to its promotion and propagation (R, p. 138).

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384
in to unrepresentability. As Jean-Francois Lyotard stressed in his Lessons

on the Analytic of the Sublime,44 even the nonpresentation remains a
presentation, albeitin Kants termsa merely negative presentation
(CPJ, p. 156). Within presentation, there is a withdrawal. Yet, what is subtracted or abstracted here is not absolute in the sense that it is isolated (as
Hegel later has it); what defies our full grasp is that which withstands
representation within representation.
A tension persists between the imagination striving to provide the concept with its corresponding image45 and the experience of an intrinsic limit
within presentation that prevents full adequation. It may be worth remembering that the experience of Entgrenzung, that is, the undoing of limitations which happens in the face of the sublime, is at once an experience of
stern limitation and of resistance (sublimity hence being defined as that
which pleases immediately through its resistance [Widerstand] to the interest of the senses [CPJ, p. 150]). The experience of resistance is vital to
Kants system of thought, as it is only through this experience that the
inadequacy of all presentation may be intuited.
Kant further avails himself of the concept of resistance to keep other
attitudes toward images at a distance. One is the unconditional truth in
the transcending power of imagesthe fancy he calls the visionary
rapture of imagination, which believes itself able to see something
beyond all bounds of sensibility; in the Religions-Schrift, this is termed
religious delusion (see R, pp. 19094). But the alternative attitude is
criticized even more severely: the belief that images are fully adequate
and can themselves substitute for the critical use of the intellect. Quite
often, governments feed the subject with images and childish devices
since by being merely passive, he can more easily be dealt with (CPJ,
p. 156). This passage should not be read as yet another opposition
between autonomy and heteronomy; what is at stake here is rather how
the experience of limits that are arbitrarily set for him impedes the
subject in experiencing his own constitutive limits (CPJ, p. 156). By
contrast, the sublime, rather than being that which connects with
something supposedly lying beyond, stands for an experience sub limine, beneath the threshold or of the threshold.
Beyond the opposition between the visionary rapture that attempts to
visualize the unrepresentable on the one hand (CPJ, p. 156), and the heteronomy of an imposed fetish-faith, which enforces a mechanical repe44. See Jean-Francois Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth
Rottenberg (Stanford, Calif., 1994), pp. 14758.
45. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781), Werke, 2:18 (A140/B); Critique of Pure Reason,
trans. Paul Guyer and Allen A. Wood (Cambridge, 1998), p. 273.

tition of arbitrary forms in the name of one principle on the other (R, p.
198), beyond the opposition of a transcendent thing-as-such and a purely
immanent presence, Kant gestures at a concept of presentation (exhibitio)
in which the rules of presentation themselves come to the fore. Such a
concept of presentation implies a Copernican turn. Attention has shifted
from the content or the what of representation to the form or the how of
representation (corroborated by the fact that judgments of the sublime are
not determinative but reflective). To rephrase this: When Kant invokes the
biblical commandment of nonrepresentation, this says far more about presentation than about anything allegedly unrepresentable per se. Beyond Kant,
one could probably argue that the inadequacy invoked here for the experience of the sublime is hardly restricted to the sublime but that it concerns
any given sensible presentationthat which Edmund Husserl will later
call the inadequacy46 or the radical incompleteness of any perceptive
experience.47
6. From Abstraction to Absolution: Specters of Hegel

Our return to Kant in the previous section was not intended as a mere
hermeneutic exercise, which would be quite dispensable as such, especially
in the wake of the many comprehensive interpretations that have been
given of the Kantian analytics of the sublime. Rather, we returned to it
because it was on the grounds of Kantian analytics that one of the most
significant debates on the trope of unrepresentability arose, which
forms the topic of this last section. We started by recalling Rancie`res
claim that the ethical turn in aesthetics and politics hinges centrally on
the category of the unrepresentable. Not content with stating that claim,
Rancie`re also links it closely with the idea of the postmodern and Lyotards
reappraisal of the sublime. Beyond the public discourses of the unimaginable, it is Lyotards postmodern thinking that is primarily responsible
according to Rancie`refor philosophically legitimizing the trope of
unrepresentability, ubiquitous today, and bringing about the blurring of
fact and norm characteristic of terror.
In order to bolster this strong claim, Rancie`re moves on to the grounds
on which Lyotard himself developed his idea of the unpresentable: Kants
analytic of the sublime. Rancie`re tries to demonstrate from this that Lyotard is not actually moving away from a logic of totalization, as he claims,
but towards it, insofar as his reading of Kant is in fact overshadowed by a
46. Edmund Husserl, Erste Philosophie, ed. Rudolf Boehm, vol. 8 of Husserliana (The
Hague, 1950), p. 44.
47. Husserl, Ding und Raum, vol. 16 of Husserliana, p. 51.

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Hegelian specter. In what follows, Rancie`res grievances will be examined

successively, and it will be shown that while he most definitely makes an
important point about the Hegelian shift Lyotard undertakes when aestheticizing the sublime, he proves to subscribe even more strongly to the
tradition of Hegelian dialectics himself, hastily identifying the unrepresentable with the unthinkable and thus missing the incommensurability
between the intuitive and the conceptual that was indeed the crucial point
in Lyotards own Kant reading.
But lets proceed step by step. In an essay that he considers a counterreading of Kant, Rancie`re first of all reminds us how, in order to outline
his ethics of the differend, Lyotard introduces the issue of art into the
sublime where Kant had deliberately kept it out. How to allude to the fact
that there is something that cannot be accounted for, to bear witness to the
fact that there is something that does not fit into the picture? For Lyotard,
this awareness of the untotalizable remainder explains why in the twentieth century, the arts have not had the beautiful as their main concern, but
something which has to do with the sublime.48 According to Lyotard,
Kant himself had led the way when he cites the commandment, Thou
shalt not make graven images (Exodus), as the most sublime passage in the
Bible, in that it forbids all presentation of the Absolute. Little needs to be
added to those observations to outline an aesthetic of sublime paintings.49
In fact, howeveras Rancie`re rightly emphasizesmuch still needs to be
added, as from a Kantian viewpoint, the very idea of an art of the sublime
would seem contradictory.50 Indeed, if the feeling of the sublime arises
while standing in front of St. Peters in Rome or in front of the pyramids of
Giza, the feeling does not point either to Michelangelos art or to that of an
Egyptian architect, as it is not the property of any determined object: the
sublime must not be shown in products of art (e.g., buildings, columns,
etc.), where a human end determines the form as well as the magnitude,
nor in natural things whose concept already brings with it a determinate end
(e.g., animals of a known natural determination) (CPJ, p. 136).
When Lyotard now considers that the unpresentable has the nature of a
thing, that it is even The Thing, to adopt Lacanian terminology, and that
there could be something like an art specific to it, he is already following
Hegels aestheticization and reification of the sublime, as Rancie`re appro48. Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel
Bowlby (Stanford, Calif., 1991), p. 135.
49. Lyotard, Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism? The Postmodern
Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1984),
p. 78.
50. Rancie`re, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, p. 89.

priately points out. As a matter of fact, in his Aesthetics, Hegel substantially

transforms the abstract character of (or within) experience into the
property of an object considered as absolute and connects it with an art
that bridges incommensurability by means of symbolization. Rather than
conceiving the sublime as that which no longer coincides with its representation, Hegel situates the sublime at a very low level, before beauty, as a
stage of art where content and form do not coincide yet. As a consequence,
the sublime is summarized as the attempt to express the infinite, without
finding in the sphere of phenomena an object which proves adequate for
this representation. Such an infinite is something superior to any expression of the sensible and stands in contrast to the totality of appearance
in the mode of a substantial unity.51
For this reason, Hegel concludes, we need not place [sublimity] in the
pure subjectivity of the mind and its Ideas of Reason; on the contrary, we
must grasp it as grounded in the one absolute substance [der einen absoluten Substanz] qua the content which is to be represented (A, 1:363). The
nature of this absolute substance, characterized as the thinking, absolute,
non-sensuous One [denkende, absolute, sinnlichkeitslose Eine] (A, 1:429),52
isthus Hegelthat which is best exemplified by Hebrew poetry (A,
1:364). It cancels the positive immanence of the Absolute in its created
phenomena and puts the one substance explicitly apart (A, 1:364).
While Lyotard had famously claimed that it was dialectical reason that
foreshadowed twentieth-century extermination, insofar as extermination
is only the endpoint of the process of dialectics concerned with cancelling
any alterity from its core,53 Rancie`re now convicts him of still being unwillingly Hegelian when identifying the sublime with the Thing and deducing claims about the art it would supposedly require. Or, if Lyotard is
not a dialectician right away, he is at least a negative dialectician, in the
fashion of Adorno (with whom Lyotard always refused to be associated).54
But while trying to demonstrate that Lyotards Kant is biased by Hege51. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford,
1975), 1:363; trans. mod.; hereafter abbreviated A. See Hegel, Vorlesungen uber die sthetik I, vol.
13 of Werke (Frankfurt am Main, 1986), p. 467.
52. See Hegel, Vorlesungen uber die sthetik II, vol. 14 of Werke, p. 15.
53. See Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van den Abbeele
(Minneapolis, 1988), pp. 9097.
54. In fact, Adorno also made reference to the Judaic prohibition of images when trying to
explain what negative dialectics are. While classical dialectics express the nonidentical by means
of identification, a negative dialectics, which tries to resist the reifying tendencing of positive
dialectics, has no other solution than to observe extreme loyalty to the prohibition of images
[uerste Treue zum Bilderverbot], far beyond what this once originally meant (Adorno,
Reason and Revelation, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. W. Henry
Pickford [New York, 2005], p. 142).

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lian dialectics, Rancie`re surreptitiously assumes a dialecticians standpoint

without even noticing it, thereby missing one of the perhaps most radical
aspects of Lyotards reading of the Kantian sublime. Why so? Let us go
back to Rancie`res criticism that Lyotard posits a correlation between the
fact that something nonpresentable comes to the fore in the feeling of the
sublime and the necessity of a sublime art. This criticism is certainly justified from a Kantian perspective, but from the onset Rancie`res argument
never was about a right or a misguided interpretation of Kant. From this
correlation however, so he seems to imply, all other conclusions automatically derive:
The unpresentable paradoxically becomes the ultimate form in which
three speculative postulates are preserved: the idea of a correspondence between the form and the content of art; the idea of a total intelligibility of the forms of human experience, including the most
extreme; and, finally, the idea of a correspondence between the explanatory reason of events and the formative reason of art. [A, p.
136]
But only a true dialectician can believe that one automatically arrives at the
ultimate Aufhebung in the intelligible concept by initially stating that
there is sublime art in the historical. Rancie`re affirms that by positing
an unthinkable, Lyotard has himself yielded to the principle of a
complete rationalization (A, p. 134). This would probably hold true,
and Rancie`re would have a good point in affirming that the discourse
of the unthinkable-unrepresentable annuls itself (A, p. 135), except
for one fact: Lyotard never used the word unthinkable. Not only is he
always very cautious in keeping the two apart (what is unpresentable is
by no means unthinkable; on the contrary, it is quite thinkable, from the
mathematical sublime to the rational planning of the extermination of the
European Jews); from Lyotards (Kantian) perspective, equating the unthinkable and the unrepresentable very much appears to be the ultimate
Hegelian operation.
As a matter of fact, when casting another glance at Hegels Lectures on
Aesthetics, one cannot but notice the strange parallel between the lowest
and the highest stage, between the symbolic and the conceptual. As mentioned above, Hegel attributes to the sublime a very specific location
within the architecture of his aesthetics. It corresponds to the early, symbolic form of art. The idea of divinity inspiring Egyptian art cannot hit
upon any adequate image and thus renounces its presentation, substituting a symbol for its image. Thanks to its conceptual nature, the symbol
bridges the gulf that would otherwise be insuperable. In a way, this chapter

anticipates the ultimate stage of the dialectical odyssey through art. The
symbolic intervenes not only where the idea does not have a sensible appearance yet but also at the end of the dialectical process, where the external appearance is no longer needed, as its content has been fully interiorized
in the form of the concept. What seemed to be bad infinity is now turned
into good infinity; the unthinkable has received its highest form of determination. Rancie`re is absolutely right when showing that the discourse of
the unthinkable and that of the fully thinkable are symmetricaland in
the wake of the contemporary, quasi-theological discourse of unrepresentability a reminder of its authoritarian (if not terrorist) structure is, alas,
necessary. But this concernsto use Kants terminologyonly the Kanon. To
reflect on unpresentability in terms of an Organon is to highlight that within
the event of sensible presentation is something that cannot be reduced to the
order of the concept. In this sense, it would certainly be a bit too rash (and
rationally self-confident) to affirm that representation is merely a question of
choice.

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The Most Sublime of All Laws. The Strange Resurgence of A Kantian Motif in Contemporary Image Politics

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The Most Sublime of All Laws. The Strange Resurgence of A Kantian Motif in Contemporary Image Politics

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The Most Sublime of All Laws: The Strange Resurgence of a Kantian Motif in Contemporary

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