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Presenting the Unpresentable: Jean-François Lyotard’s Kantian Art-Sublime

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2021

Rachel Zuckert
Rachel Zuckert*
Affiliation:
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA
*
Email: r-zuckert@northwestern.edu
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Abstract

This article reconstructs Jean-François Lyotard’s theory of the sublime in contemporary art, focusing on his claim that such art ‘presents’ the unpresentable, and tracing its origins in Kant’s account of the sublime. I propose that Lyotard identifies a difficulty concerning Kant’s account: to understand why the disparate elements in the experience of the sublime (idea of reason, sensible representation) should be synthesized to form that experience. Lyotard recasts this difficulty as a pragmatic problem for artistic practice – how to ‘testify’ to the absolute in a non-absolute, sensibly perceivable object (the artwork) – that can be understood to drive avant-garde artistic experimentation.

Keywords

KantLyotardsublimemodernismmodern paintingabstract paintingabstract expressionismidea of reasonimaginationrepresentation
Type
Article
Information
Kantian Review , Volume 26 , Special Issue 4: Special Issue on Kant and Contemporary Art , December 2021 , pp. 549 - 565
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Kantian Review

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