The Splendor of Creation: Kant, Nietzsche, Lacan
Alenka Zupančič 1999 UMBRA
In his Critique of Judgment, Kant approaches the question of the beautiful in four steps, with four paradoxical definitions, which all revolve around the “signifier of the lack” — the word WITHOUT or DEVOID OF.
Beauty is a
- “liking without interest,”
- “universality without concept,”
- “purposiveness without purpose,” and
- “necessity without concept.”
Kant’s basic operation in these definitions consists in what one might call essential subtraction: in each of the definitions quoted above, Kant deprives the first notion exactly of that which is considered to be its essential characterization.
Is it not the essence of every liking or pleasure (Wolhgefallen) that it is bound with interest? Is it not the essence of universality and of necessity that they are based on concepts? Is it not the essence of purposiveness that it has a purpose? The beautiful thus becomes the quality of something organized around a central void, and it is this very void which somehow dictates its organization.
“Purposiveness without purpose,” for example, does not simply refer to something that, while having no purpose, nevertheless strikes us as if (the famous Kantian als ob) it had one.
The question is not simply that of the comparison or resemblance, and the opposition is not that of the appearance of a purpose versus the actual absence of any purpose.
The mystery of the beautiful does not reside in the question, “How can something that has no purpose produce such a striking effect of purposiveness?”
The point is rather that the absence of the purpose in the “center” and the purposiveness of what is organized around this central absence are intrinsically connected.
It is not that we detect some purposiveness in spite of the absence of any purpose; that is, it is not that the relation between the two elements is that of contradiction, but rather the relation is that of a specific form of mutual sustaining.
What we called essential subtraction can be expressed even better in terms of extimité, defined by Lacan as the “excluded interior,” as something which is “excluded in the interior.”
This is precisely what Kantian definitions aim at: the beauty names the effect of this excluded interior. Where the excluded dimension remains included as excluded, it is via its exclusion that it becomes operative as the organizing power of its “surroundings.”
It is quite remarkable that in his discussion of art in relation to the question of sublimation, Lacan accentuates almost the same structure as Kant.
He stresses that in every form of sublimation, emptiness (or void) is determinative, although not in the same way. Religion consists of avoiding this void, whereas science and/or philosophy take an attitude of unbelief towards it.
As for art, “all art is characterized by a certain mode of organization around this emptiness.”
(Of course, the emptiness at stake is not just any kind of emptiness or void, but precisely “that excluded interior which . . . is thus excluded in the interior.”
The other name for this void or emptiness is das Ding, the Thing.