The Splendor of Creation: Kant, Nietzsche, Lacan
Alenka Zupančič 1999 UMBRA
Previously we took the example of “purposiveness without purpose,” which might be slightly misleading since we encounter the same term (purpose) on both sides. A better example is that of “pleasure without interest,” or, in another translation, “liking devoid of all interest,” which will help us to clarify in detail how this “interior exclusion” actually works and what its consequences are.
The notion of “pleasure devoid of all interest” also has the advantage of becoming, since Nietzsche’s critique, the emblem of the Kantian conception of the beautiful and the topos of contemporary philosophical debate concerning the notion of the beautiful (and of art in general). […]
But what exactly does the formula “pleasure devoid of all interest” aim at?
Kant calls the pleasure that is still linked with interest (or need) “agreeableness.” If I declare an object to be agreeable, this judgment “arouses a desire for objects of that kind.” This does not mean that with the next stage, the stage of the beautiful, or “devoid of all interest,” this desire disappears — the point is that it becomes irrelevant.
Let us clarify this with one of Kant’s own examples, the “green meadows.”
- The first stage is the objective stage: the green color of the meadows belongs to objective sensation. “Meadows are green” is an objective judgment.
- The second stage is the subjective stage: the color’s agreeableness belongs to subjective sensation, to feeling: “I like green meadows” is a subjective judgment, which also means, “I would like to see green meadows as often as possible.” This is a “yes” to the object (green meadows) which is supposed to gratify us (Kant’s term).
- The third stage is a “yes,” not to the color, but to the feeling of the agreeable itself, a “yes” not to the object that gratifies us but to the gratification itself, i.e. a “yes” to the previous “yes.”
Here it is the feeling itself, the sensation that becomes the object (of judgment). “Green meadows are beautiful” is a judgment of taste, an aesthetic judgment, which is neither “objective” nor “subjective.” This judgment could be called “acephalous” or “headless,” since the “I,” the “head” of the judgment is replaced, not with some impersonal objective neutrality as in statements of the type “the meadows are green,” but with the most intimate part of the subject (how the subject feels itself affected by a given representation as object).
“Devoid of all interest” means precisely that we no longer refer to the existence of the object (green meadows), but only to the pleasure that it gives us.
Life must involve passion (engagement, zeal, enthusiasm, interest), but this passion must always be accompanied by an additional “yes”—to it, otherwise it can only lead to nihilism. This “yes” cannot be but detached from the object, since it refers to the passion itself.
The great effort of Nietzsche’s philosophy is to think and articulate the two together. “Yes” to the “yes” cannot be the final stage in the sense that it would suffice in itself. Alone, it is no longer a “yes” to a “yes,” but just plain “yes”—the “ee-ahh,” the donkey’s sound of inane, empty enjoyment.
But how exactly does this couple function? We know that any real involvement excludes simultaneous contemplation of it.
And yet they must be somehow simultaneous, they must always walk in a pair (i.e. constitute one subjective figure), otherwise we would not be dealing with the “affirmation of affirmation,” but with two different types of affirmation.
The figure that corresponds to this criterion is the figure of creation — or, in other terms, the figure of sublimation.
The creation is never a creation of one thing, but always the creation of two things that go together: the something and the void, or, in Lacan’s terms, the object and the Thing.
This is the point of Lacan’s insisting on the notion of creation ex nihilo, and of his famous example of the vase: the vase is what creates the void, the emptiness inside it.
The arch-gesture of art is to give form to the nothing.
Creation is not something that is situated in the (given) space or that occupies a certain space, it is the very creation of the space as such.
With every creation, a new space gets created.
Another way of putting this would be to say that every creation has the structure of a veil. It operates as a veil that creates a “beyond,” announces it, and makes it almost palpable in the very tissue of the veil.