Aesthetics at Large: Volume 1: Art, Ethics, Politics 9780226546872

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Aesthetics at Large

Aesthetics at Large

Volume 1 A rt, Et h ics, Poli t ic s

Thierry de Duve The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2018 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2018 Printed in the United States of America 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18    1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­54656-­8 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­54673-­5 (paper) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­54687-­2 (e-­book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226546872.001.0001 Chapters 1 and 5 first published as “Do Artists Speak on Behalf of All of Us?” The Life and Death of Images, ed. Diarmuid Costello and Dominic Willsdon (London: Tate, 2008). © Tate 2008. Text reproduced by permission of the Tate Trustees. Chapter 6 first published as “Aesthetics as the Transcendental Ground of Democracy,” Critical Inquiry 42, no. 1 (Autumn 2015). © 2015 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Chapter 7 first published in Art and Aesthetics After Adorno, Anthony J. Cascardi, ed., (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). Used by permission of the publisher. Chapter 9 first published in Rediscovering Aesthetics, Transdisciplinary Voices from Art History, Philosophy, and Art Practice, ed. Francis Halsall, Julia Jansen, Tony O’Connor (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). © 2009 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Duve, Thierry de, author. Title: Aesthetics at large / Thierry de Duve. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018– | Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: Volume 1. Art, ethics, politics. Identifiers: LCCN 2018030677  |  ISBN 9780226546568 (v.1 : cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226546735 (v.1 :pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226546872 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Art—Philosophy.  |  Aesthetics. | Kant, Immanuel, 1724–1804. Kritik der Urteilskraft. Classification: LCC N66 .D88 2018  |  DDC 700.1—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018030677 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Dear Reader  / 1

Pa rt I: The “K a nt a fter Duch a mp” A pproac h 1 Overture: Why Kant Got It Right  / 15 2 From Beaux-­Arts to Art-­in-­General: A Bit of History  / 27 3 The Post-­Duchamp Condition: Remarks on Four Usages of the Word Art  / 39 4 The Idea of Art and the Ethics of the Museum: A Candid Theory  / 53 5 Do Artists Speak on Behalf of All of Us?  / 67 6 Le sens de la famille: Aesthetics as the Transcendental Ground of Democracy  / 91 7 Resisting Adorno, Revamping Kant  / 107

Pa rt II: Close a nd Not So Close R e a d ings 8 Conceptual Art in Light of Kant’s Antinomy of Taste  / 141 9 Kant’s “Free Play” in Light of Minimal Art  / 163 10 A Transcendental Chicken-­and-­Egg Dilemma  / 179 11 Reflecting on Reflection  / 199 Notes  / 211   Index of Proper Names  / 235 Index of Concepts  / 239

Dear Reader,

Behold the campaign button on the cover of this book. It gives away that the author is a militant, eager to share his conviction that Kant got it right. Kant is of course Immanuel Kant, the great eighteenth-­century philosopher from Königsberg, whose three Critiques crowned the Enlightenment and inaugurated a new era in philosophy. Now what is it that the author is convinced Kant got right? The title of this book, Aesthetics at Large, offers a succinct answer: whereas other parts of his philosophical system, and the pretension to achieve a complete system, did not withstand the test of time unscathed, Kant’s thoughts on aesthetics are as relevant today as they were in 1790. To this claim the book’s subtitle, Art, Ethics, Politics, adds the suggestion that Kant is a good guide when it comes to exploring the relation of art to ethics and politics. Or so I was convinced until election night. I thought I had put the final stop to my manuscript and was reading it one last time before sending it to the University of Chicago Press when, four nights ago, on November 8, 2016, we, the American people (I’m a newly minted US citizen who voted for the first time) elected a frighteningly incompetent, racist, misogynous, probably psychotic, and populist demagogue as our forty-­fifth president. It is too soon to tell whether, by some miracle of his Dr. Jekyll–­Mr. Hyde temperament and opportunistic flair, Donald Trump will rise to the task or, at least, whether the administration he will assemble will restrain his most dangerous impulses. And it is beyond my competence to make predictions or even to analyze why we—­and by this “we” I mean we academics, we liberal intellectuals, writers and artists, we pundits of the serious press—­failed to see the earthquake coming. But as I try to recover from the shock, I must ask myself whether the discrepancy between the “we” I identify with (the educated elite) and the “we” I belong to by choice (the American people) trivializes—­or indeed nullifies—­the manuscript I was ready, a week ago, to deliver to the University of Chicago Press. Being a book on aesthetics, it is not directly on politics, but it has the

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word politics in its title. I cannot see it published simply pretending that nothing happened. My political convictions are those of a European social democrat: liberal, not radical, progressive, but not leftist. They have not changed, as much as Trump’s election revolts me. Although my gut feeling cried out to President Obama that he should refuse to step down, publicly disavow his successor, or at least warn the country of the dangers to come, I came around, and I am in awe before the gracious way he acknowledged Trump’s victory and started the transition process. That was a great lesson in ethics and politics: respect for the Constitution must prevail, in spite of the very real risk that an unscrupulous autocrat had used democracy to destroy democracy. The thousands and thousands of protesters marching against Trump these days exercise their constitutional right to free expression; I joined them in Washington Square yesterday. The placard stating “Not My President” that many were carrying is an understandable outcry of disgust, but unfortunately, it is both a delusion and a venial sin against the Constitution. For the truth is that Trump is our president-­elect, and we elected him. There can be no individual withdrawal from this “we,” which is precisely why so many of us feel not only desperate but also betrayed and sullied. Populism turned out to be an insidious poison in this election. The results, so far, indicate that numerous millennials, Latinos, even women, in and out of the Rust Belt, succumbed to its siren song. I am particularly sad for the millennials—­the generation of my students—­for they and their children will pay the price. I am angry at those of my scholar peers who, draping themselves in the tunic of public intellectuals, were irresponsibly self-­indulgent in calling for a third-­party vote or holding a lesser-­of-­two-­evils vote in contempt: they typically favored theoretical righteousness over practical efficiency. And I have more than ambivalent feelings toward Bernie Sanders. His relentless campaign against unbridled capitalism and in favor of social justice and economic equality was right, timely, and just. He was the candidate of choice for the majority of the youth, and he would have been mine in the primaries if he hadn’t named the movement he launched a revolution. In both parties, the primaries opposed a revolutionary to the candidate or candidates of the establishment. Predictably, Sanders, who was calling for a revolution from within the Democratic Party, was disavowed at the party’s convention in favor of the establishment’s champion. He ought to have known that in the United States, revolution is a dirty word—­except, of course, for the young people he courted and whom I’d say no one should blame for being susceptible to romantic enthusiasm. It is Sanders who must be blamed for having spurred it; he doesn’t have the excuse of youth. I’m not saying he was defeated in the primaries merely because

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of a careless choice of words; he had real entrenched forces barring him. All the same, the tragic irony of his campaign is that his “revolution” was only nominally one and should therefore never have borne that name. He did not exhort his partisans to overthrow the government and burn the Constitution; he only asked them to implement his purported revolution with their votes in due respect for the legality of the electoral process. Not Sanders but rather Trump is the real revolutionary. He was smart enough to never even utter the word, but when, at the end of his third debate with Hillary Clinton, he reserved the right to challenge the results of the election should he lose, he declared his willingness to deny the legitimacy of the electoral process, to trample the Constitution, and to seize quasi-­dictatorial power with the mob’s backing. If this is not a revolution—­and one, for lack of a better word, of the fascist kind—­then what is it? Months before Trump won this indeed rigged election (see Paul Krugman’s column in the New York Times of November 7), I was telling my friends, just in case, that the most timely piece of literature these days was Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. In retrospect, I’d say everybody should read or reread it—­with ash in their mouth. As I am writing this, I realize that Kant, whose guidance I sought throughout this book, continues to guide me in my clumsy posttraumatic reflections. There are two things in Kant that I believe can help us think in the present crisis. One is his aversion for revolutions, the other his distrust of enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is an emotion, and emotions are likely to be bad counselors of reason. And revolutions are illegitimate because if they were not, they would imply a self-­contradictory right to rebel. However, in spite of his stiff legalism, Kant had sympathy for the American and the French Revolutions, both of which he witnessed from afar. In The Contest of Faculties (1798), he wrote the most astounding comment on both enthusiasm and revolutions. Asking himself whether there is a priori ground for believing in the progress and moral improvement of the human race, he looked for an event that would indicate that humanity is the author of its own improvement and therefore not only progresses but has always been progressing. And he found that event in the French Revolution—­with two important caveats. The event is not the Revolution itself but enthusiasm for the Revolution; and it is not the enthusiasm of the actors of the Revolution but rather of its spectators. Throughout Europe countless people, many of whom would stand to lose from the Revolution, nevertheless felt a wish to participate in it verging on enthusiasm (eine Theilnehmung dem Wunsche nach, die nahe an Enthusiasm grenzt) and manifested their sympathy publicly and without regard for their own interest. Kant read that fact as the sure sign of a moral disposition in humankind and thus of the reality of its progress. He called this sign historical—­the sign that

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history moves in the right direction. Marxists who, much later, spoke of the sens de l’histoire were right; their only mistake, but a tragic one, was to endow a mere sign with the ineluctability of a physical cause. Progress is real: this is Kant’s fundamental political lesson, an antidote to both utopia and defeatism. He does not say that progress is constant, though; that would be childish idealism. There are periods of regression in history, and they can be long and dreary. The sense we have these days that civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, and the “rights” of our planet have been rolled back at least fifty years is depressing enough. But we should find the energy to fight back in Kant’s dismissal of the thesis according to which periods of progress and periods of regression alternate in a zero sum game and never get to prove that humanity is headed toward moral improvement and political progress. Kant’s proof of the contrary is fragile—­it is no more than a sign—­and this book does everything to underscore that fragility. One way it does this is by paying attention to negative historical signs (see especially chapter 7, the “Adorno chapter”), signs attesting negatively that humanity is—­or must be—­heading for progress. There is no more blatantly negative historical sign than the enthusiasm displayed by Trump’s supporters on election night and since. Please, ignore the obscenity of it all and allow me to play the devil’s advocate for a second. “True enthusiasm,” Kant admits (and remember, he doesn’t hold enthusiasm in high esteem, suspicious as he is that enthusiasm is Schwärmerei), “is always directed towards the ideal, particularly towards that which is purely moral (such as the concept of right), and it cannot be coupled with selfish interests.”1 In other terms, enthusiasm is a utopian passion. Trump voters, no doubt, had an ideal in mind, however ill conceived, and their dreamworld is a utopia, however warped. Let’s even grant (some of ) them the conviction that they were acting for the common good, morally, and beyond their selfish interests. But they count as actors of the Trump revolution: their enthusiasm doesn’t prove anything. I don’t see public display of enthusiasm in its spectators, nationally and internationally, except in the likes of Stephen Bannon, Viktor Orbán, or Marine Le Pen—­who also count as actors of a Trump or Trump-­like revolution. For Kant, more than enthusiasm itself it is the publicity of its display that signals a progressive disposition in the spectators of a revolution. The shame that prevented countless Trump voters from announcing their intentions publicly—­and which allegedly distorted the polls in the process—­is a strong negative historical sign. An even stronger and much more frightening negative sign is, only four days after the elections, the unabashed public display of racist and sexist invectives that Trump’s legitimation has unleashed, normalized,

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and “mainstreamed.” The hatred and resentment that fuel them cannot be called enthusiasm. I find no solace but I do find intellectual guidance in those two negative signs. They not only prove that fighting everything Trump represents is fighting for progress (that goes without saying) but they are also the sign that Kant’s remarks on enthusiasm and revolutions are relevant. I have no doubt that he did a bit of introspection when he read the enthusiasm of the French Revolution’s spectators correctly. Turning to the enthusiasm of the revolutionaries on the other side of the fence in this election—­the young “Bernie or Bust” utopianists—­I, too, only need a bit of introspection to recognize in it true passion for equality and justice. But asking myself whether they were actors or spectators, I must come to the sad conclusion that they were actors in the revolution they didn’t want. Rarely has not voting or casting a symbolic ballot for an independent candidate been so irresponsible. As they mature, these young enthusiasts will have to look back on their reckless behavior and ponder whether youth and ignorance of history had been extenuating factors. My heart is broken because, as a teacher—­that is, a member not only of the educated but also the educating elite—­I find myself since three days ago looking at my students in dismay, wondering, “Did s/he or didn’t s/he?” Here is a piece of news for them to meditate on: in an op-­ed in today’s—­yes, today’s—­New York Times candidly (I can’t believe cynically) titled “Where the Democrats Go from Here,” Bernie Sanders offered his services to Donald Trump with these words: “I will keep an open mind to see what ideas Mr. Trump offers and when and how we can work together.” Not “if,” but “when and how,” after which Sanders proceeded, in the most contradictory manner, to promise that he “will also provide a series of reforms to reinvigorate the Democratic Party.” This should sober up the “Feel the Bern” enthusiasts who let their emotions overrule their reason and who are now even more discombobulated by the results of the elections. Would that they understood that the rhetoric of revolution Bernie irresponsibly wielded was hijacked by his populist opponent while his own populism got the better of him—­and of them. Meanwhile let’s not forget, hope against hope, that in spite of populism left and right, Hillary won the popular vote. There are several chapters in the first part of this book that the shocking results of the elections made me want to modify—­a temptation I must resist. I hope that, in all its horror, the Trump election will alert the reader to the various negative historical signs the book emphasizes. Chapter 7 (the “Adorno chapter”) is the most explicit in that respect. Chapter 6 (the “sens de la famille chapter”) would benefit from reflections on Trump’s own sens de la famille (Melania, Ivanka, Donald Jr., and the others) and

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the tribalism of it all. Chapter 5, “Do Artists Speak on Behalf of All of Us,” must now be understood in light of the obscenity of the “us” having elected as the highest-­ranking representative of the American people a man who is blatantly unable to practice what Kant called “the maxim of a broad-­minded way of thinking.” And chapter 3 puts a face—­an ugly face—­on the confusion between the empirical and the transcendental this book on aesthetics is denouncing throughout. Physical beauty doesn’t always mirror a virtuous soul—­if it were the case this book would not exist—­but physical ugliness is often enough the sign of moral depravity. New York, November 12, 2016 Aesthetics at Large is a book on aesthetics, but it is not only on aesthetics, as testified by its subtitle, Art, Ethics, Politics. My vehemently political incipit notwithstanding, it matters that art, ethics, and politics appear in this order, with politics in third position. Where Kant’s guidance is precious is in the notion that the aesthetic is not an isolated and self-­contained realm of experience but provides a unique and special passageway to the ethical and thence to the political domains. Foreign to me is the belief that art is autonomous in the sense of being cut off from morality and politics, but equally foreign is the desire that art be subservient to moral injunctions or political agendas. I never ask how works of art can advance a moral or political cause, but I often ask myself why the experience of true works of art opens onto the idea of a better and more just world. Kant has some answers to that question. His political writings offer a few; but the plat de résistance is in the Critique of (the Power of) Judgment (1790), his third and last Critique, after the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and the Critique of Practical Reason (1788). Although the focus of Aesthetics at Large is on art, Kant’s theory of art receives virtually no attention here. Everything important Kant has to say about the beautiful and the sublime pertains to nature. With the exception of his reflections on genius, the sections of the third Critique dealing with art are mainly of historical interest. It is not just that Kant’s artistic culture was rather poor or that he could not have foreseen the development of modern art. It is also that the art world has changed beyond recognition since Kant’s time. Kant knew his way around the schöne Künste, the fine arts. He had no idea that some day the fine arts system would collapse and make way for art in general—­indeed, art at large. He would have been absolutely lost before Kasimir Malevich’s Black Square or any of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades. Speaking of those: readers of my previous book, Kant after Duchamp, know that the method I advocate to update the third Critique is to read it replacing the word beautiful with the word art. I

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shall argue here again for that replacement. But except for a few elliptical allusions to them, I reserve for the second volume of Aesthetics at Large the theoretical analysis and the historical explanation of the transfer of responsibility, from natural beauty to art as such, that has occurred since Kant’s time and has made this textual replacement mandatory. The book has two parts. The first, titled “The ‘Kant after Duchamp’ Approach,” expands on the content of Kant after Duchamp and applies the substitution of art for beauty to a number of issues, all revolving around the idea of sensus communis, its aesthetic “origin,” and its implications for humanity as an ethical and political community. The second, titled “Close and Not So Close Readings,” does exactly what the title says: it zeros in on a few crucial and problematic passages of the Critique of Judgment and ventures an interpretation. Wherever I could, I did my best to write with a minimum of philosophical jargon so as to address not just an audience of Kant specialists but also a wider readership interested in aesthetics, art theory, and their relevance to modern and contemporary art practices. It is for the benefit of that wider audience that I wish to preempt a potential misunderstanding right away. It concerns Kant’s technical usage of the term transcendental. I realized how big the risk of that misunderstanding was when I heard a friend speak casually of the transcendental experience she had when visiting an exhibition that had deeply impressed her. To my Kant-­attuned ears, this was a contradiction in terms: an experience cannot be transcendental; conversely, what must be called transcendental is not accessible through experience; “empirical” and “transcendental” are mutually exclusive denominations. My friend, I soon realized, was in excellent company. Speaking of American abstract painters as performing a “metaphysical act” whereas, according to him, their European counterparts performed a “transcendental act,” Barnett Newman wrote, “To put it philosophically, the European is concerned with the transcendence of objects while the American is concerned with the reality of the transcendental experience.”2 Pace Newman, to the “transcendental experience,” his phrasing adds a level of confusion between transcendental and transcendence—­another contradiction in terms to my Kant-­attuned ears. Naturally, I knew of the school of transcendentalism in American philosophy, traced back to Ralph Waldo Emerson. But I was only vaguely aware of how much Emersonian transcendentalism had trickled down into everyday language and threatened to tinge my readers’ understanding of transcendental as I use it. Kant’s and Emerson’s brands of transcendentalism are not just different from each other; they are quasi contraries. Although in his famous essay The Transcendentalist, Emerson claimed an affiliation to Kant, it is as if he had picked the wrong Immanuel. His definition of transcendentalism as the Saturnalia or excess of Faith, his

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opinion that the Transcendentalist believes in miracles and in ecstasy, and his claim that nature is transcendental owe more to Emanuel Swedenborg than to Kant. Kant would not have hesitated to call such statements Schwärmereien—­delusions, most often the illusion that one can access the supersensible through the senses. In the first Critique, Kant called “transcendental” all a priori concepts and ideas, meaning concepts and ideas that obtain before, beyond, or independently of sensory experience. This applies to the results of all a priori judgments that yield necessary and universal knowledge but also, as became clearer to Kant with the third Critique, to the outcome of movements of the mind that claim necessity and universal validity yet never yield knowledge: movements such as reflective judgments, which posit things that can be thought and thought about but cannot be known. The gist of Emerson’s philosophy—­and its utopian appeal—­was that he fantasized that he had arrived at some sound knowledge whereas he had merely wished it into existence, propelled by his irresistible idealism and longing for natural goodness. He may have become an atheist, but he could not stop yearning for a benevolent God. Kant, by contrast, may have remained a sincere believer in God, but the intellectual discipline he imposed on himself forced him to think as if God did not exist. The Kant whose guidance this book seeks is much more skeptical than the one traditionally presented. As I shall argue in the second volume of Aesthetics at Large, tentatively subtitled Art, Politics, Nature, the Critique of Teleological Judgment (the second part of the Critique of Judgment) all but does away with the idea that the universe needs a creator, benevolent or not. When one allows the “Kant after Duchamp” approach to update teleological judgment by calling on modern science, all residual need for what Kant called Physicotheology vanishes. (The last chapter of the present volume, “Reflecting on Reflection,” is a first step toward that update.) This has consequences for the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (the first part of the Critique of Judgment), which are the focus of the present volume. Its main question is, what trust can we have in sensus communis in a radically disenchanted world? Indeed, rethinking sensus communis is the task I felt Kant after Duchamp had failed to address—­perhaps didn’t even see properly. That task grew in importance over the years, and its difficulty accounts for the painstaking procrastination this book endured. Books are linear but their content is not. Even run-­of-­the-­mill novels, with their plots and chronological narratives, contain descriptions and character analyses that are, so to speak, perpendicular to the time line. In great novels, in poetry and philosophy, in scientific treatises, these perpendiculars deepen and proliferate to form the multidimensional sedimentation of meaning we take home as we turn the last page. I had an inkling that the

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meaning I was yearning to discover was complex and multidimensional, but I had no method or strategy to pursue it. I had to rely on problem-­ raising insights, which I resolved to follow to the (sometimes bitter) end. It’s a trial-­and-­error process for which I have only a clumsy metaphorical image: I tend to see the object on my workbench as a huge jigsaw puzzle, some pieces of which are theoretical, some historical and art-­historical. (The present book contains none of the historical and art-­historical pieces, only allusions to them.3) I don’t know how many pieces the puzzle consists of, what its outer borders are, or what shape the individual pieces have, only that the whole must be coherent and that all pieces need to be chiseled so that their contours fit those of adjacent ones. Indeed, the puzzle was not conceived and fabricated by some company for me to put it back together. I must work the way jigsaw puzzle fans work, but in the dark, at times groping quasi-­ blindly for the connecting piece, at times looking for the straightedged outer contours, at times gaining distance and trying to grasp a sense of the whole. I will probably never get a completely satisfactory sense of the whole, but I cannot defer publication any longer. It is time to release the pieces of the puzzle that I think are compatible with one another and await the criticism of my peers. A short notice at the beginning of each chapter indicates whether it has been issued before the present publication—­ sometimes in several versions and in various languages—­testaments to the difficulties I experienced. There are so many people I would like to thank that I will certainly forget several. I beg their pardon in advance. And I must in retrospect, and alas too late, beg the pardon of Jean-­François Lyotard, whom I neglected to acknowledge in Kant after Duchamp—­an unforgivable slip given that it was he who led me to read Kant seriously. In the 1970s, showing interest in Kant was quasi-­taboo in certain circles: Hegel, yes; Marx, yes; Nietzsche, yes; but Kant? One evening, toward the end of the decade, Lyotard and I were having dinner in a Brussels restaurant when he took me completely by surprise telling me that he had a passion for Kant—­a passion hinted at by none of his published books at the time. I began to understand what he meant three years later, when Le Différend appeared. His Kant and mine are as different as can be—­he focused on the Analytic of the Sublime, I focus on the Analytic and Dialectic of the Beautiful—­but without his encouragement, I would probably never have dared plunge into Kant’s arduous writings let alone go public with my interpretive endeavors. I received over the many years it took to bring this book to fruition more careful critical attention than I deserved from another philosopher, my good friend Herman Parret, professor emeritus from the University

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of Leuven, who has reviewed the book’s manuscript and offered many invaluable comments. I also received occasional support and friendly criticism from Howard Caygill, the late Jean-­Pierre Cometti, Diarmuid Costello, Paul Crowther, James Elkins, Aleš Erjavec, José António Fernandes Dias, Glória Ferreira, Christel Fricke, Véronique Goudinoux, Stian Grøgaard, Gregg Horowitz, John Hyman, Claude Imbert, Geeta Kapur, Robert Kudielka, Bente Larsen, W. J. T. Mitchell, Parul Mukherji, Jean-­ Luc Nancy, Peter Osborne, the late Marie-­Claire Ropars, Sônia Salzstein, Kavita Singh, Carole Talon-­Hugon, Jeff Wall, Sven-­Olov Wallenstein, and my friend Morten Kyndrup, who invited me several times to debate my ideas with students and colleagues at the University of Aarhus and at the Institute of Advanced Studies he created in the same town. As is well known, continental philosophy is an unloved child in most US philosophy departments and an unruly brat, welcome in “comp lit” and cultural studies departments for reasons that are not always purely academic. I am therefore all the more indebted to the late Arthur Danto, Joseph Margolis, Marjorie Perloff, and Kenneth Reinhard—­none of them Kant fans—­for having engaged with me in insightful conversations or written exchanges. Michael Kelly and Anthony Cascardi must also be singled out, the former for having invited me to contribute a Kant entry to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics and the latter for having insisted I should write on Adorno in spite of my lack of in-­depth knowledge of and mixed feelings toward the intimidating author of Aesthetic Theory. I would be ungrateful if I didn’t thank the anonymous readers of the manuscript as well as the many people who have given shelter to earlier variants of some of this book’s chapters in their journals and publications. Most will see their name appear in the short notice preceding each chapter. Although researching the art-­historical pieces of my jigsaw puzzle was the official reason why I had the good fortune of being granted fellowships at all three tempels of scholarship in art history, the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), in Washington, DC, I confess that I used some of my time there to make sure the philosophical pieces of the puzzle would fit into the whole. The peace of mind one enjoys in these havens of research, the company of distinguished scholars, and the pleasure of having whole libraries at one’s fingertips are privileges I shall never forget and for which I always feel obliged.4 Last but not least, my deepest gratitude goes to Susan Bielstein, executive editor at the University of Chicago Press, whose faith in this book never faltered in spite of the long years of its gestation. May she be blessed

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for her patience and confidence. My dear wife, Lisa Blas, surrounds me daily with love and happiness and surprises me each time I visit her studio with exciting opportunities to confront and discuss our aesthetic judgments. Thanks for existing, Lisa.

Pa r t I

The “Kant after Duchamp” Approach

Excerpted and adapted from “Do Artists Speak on Behalf of All of Us?,” in The Life and Death of Images: Ethics and Aesthetics, ed. Diarmuid Costello and Dominic Willsdon (London: Tate, 2008).

1

Overture W h y K a n t G o t I t R ig h t

The reader of Kant cannot fail to wonder how the critical thinker could ever establish conditions of thought that are a priori. With what instruments can he formulate the conditions of legitimacy of judgments when he is not yet supposed to have any at his disposal? How, in short, can he judge properly “before”’ knowing what judging properly is, and in order to know what it might be? ­J e a n-­Fr a nçois Lyota r d1

This book finds its point of departure in a straightforward claim and a blindly mechanical reading method. The claim, already made in Kant after Duchamp, is that the sentence “This is art,” with which readymades are baptized and countless other works made in the wake of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades are appreciated, is an aesthetic judgment in the Kantian sense. The reading method is an invitation to reread Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment mentally substituting the word art for every occurrence of the word beauty and to ask oneself whether anything essential would be changed to Kant’s approach. I dare say there is something mechanical and stupid in such a systematic substitution. And there is something as mechanical and stupid in the rationale behind it, the quasi interchangeability of artist and viewer in front of readymades. Technically, their position is identical: neither artist nor viewer has made the objects; the artist has merely challenged the viewers to approve or disapprove the claim that they should be seen as art. Beauty is irrelevant and has no saying in either the artist’s or the viewers’ decision. Now, why would readers of Kant want to reread the Critique of Judgment substituting art for beauty simply because one twentieth century artist has made beauty irrelevant to the appreciation of a handful of objects constituting only a small part of his oeuvre? The substitution is compelling only for readers of Kant who are convinced that (1) Duchamp’s ready-

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mades are serious landmarks of modern art and cannot just be dismissed as hoaxes or far-­out experiments; (2) calling an object by the name “art” is exercising one’s aesthetic judgment about it; and (3) Kant’s account of aesthetic judgments is the best ever given. Were I the only reader of Kant with that triple conviction, two facts would still remain: if Duchamp’s readymades had not had a tremendous impact on art and had not been taken seriously by a significant number of art critics, historians, and theorists, the question of whether the baptism “This is art” is an aesthetic judgment might never have arisen. And if Duchamp had not been the messenger of a reality that reaches way beyond his agency as author of the readymades, no one convinced that Kant’s account of aesthetic judgments is the best would have to reread the third Critique with the substitution of art for beauty in mind. Duchamp’s “message” pertains to a sea change in the institution of art: the readymades have brought us the news that we have moved from the Beaux-­Arts system to the “Art-­in-­General” system, that is, from a closed set of art conventions within which to an open cluster of art conventions about which aesthetic appreciation is asked to pronounce. I shall say a word about Duchamp’s “message” in the next chapter, but otherwise I shall not elaborate on it in this book. My aim is to argue and complexify the book’s premise, which this overture addresses and which consists in a twofold thesis: (1) when it comes to understanding what aesthetic judgments are, how they operate, what they do to us, and what is at stake when we utter them, Kant “got it right”; and (2) historical changes since Kant’s time have made some crucial shifts of emphasis necessary in our reading of Kant—­shifts that, however, do not weaken the validity of the Critique of Judgment. By claiming that Kant “got it right,” I mean that Kant’s understanding of what humans do when they experience the world aesthetically, and of what this means and implies for them, is the most accurate and profound ever arrived at. Such a claim may seem strange to philosophers, who tend to read the work of their colleagues, especially a colleague as systematic as Kant, for its own coherence and consistency on the one hand and for its place in the history of philosophy on the other but not for the truth it begets once and for all. To some extent, I approach Kant as if he were a scientist rather than a philosopher. I consider his account of aesthetic judgments a discovery that all theorists of aesthetics coming after him should adopt and then build on. Just as Newton or Einstein marked points of no return for physics, or Darwin for biology, so did Kant for aesthetics.

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Ms. A and Mr. B Quarrel over a Rose I’ll try to explain Kant’s discovery in the simplest terms. Imagine two people—­let’s call them Ms. A and Mr. B—­coming upon a rose. Ms. A exclaims, “Oh! What a beautiful rose.” Mr. B replies, “Are you out of your mind? I’ve never seen a rose so ugly.” Kant witnesses the scene. As it happens, he agrees with Ms. A, for he takes pleasure in the experience of looking at the rose—­and thus you might think his conclusion is in line with his gut reaction: Ms. A is right, Mr. B is wrong. But that’s not what Kant concludes. Asking himself how he knows that the rose is beautiful, he realizes that he feels it: the rose’s beauty literally coincides with his pleasure in contemplating it. Reflecting on his state of mind, he corrects his immediate gut reaction. Since feelings are personal and subjective, therefore varying from individual to individual, culture to culture, epoch to epoch, social class to social class, the feeling of beauty is not an objective property of the rose and is thus not an object of knowledge in the manner of two plus two equals four. Now you would expect Kant to conclude that Ms. A, Mr. B, and himself were all wrong in ascribing beauty or ugliness to the rose as if it were a fact. Shouldn’t we have admitted to the subjectivity of our judgment rather than authoritatively ascribing the rose an objective predicate? Shouldn’t we have said “I like (or dislike) this rose,” “This rose pleases (or displeases) me,” or “I find this rose beautiful (or ugly)”? But that’s not what Kant concludes, either. He now wonders why all three protagonists, himself included, spontaneously reached for a formula that “objectified” their subjective feeling. Expanding on the trio’s usage of words, he reflects on the fact that people in general tend to speak of beauty and ugliness as if these were objective properties of the things deemed beautiful or ugly, whereas they ought to know, like himself, that their only access to these properties is their subjective feeling. There must be some reason for such widespread a mistake, Kant ponders. And this is what leads him to conclude that in spite of their blatant disagreement, Ms. A and Mr. B were both right in claiming so-­called objective validity for their judgments. Why is that? Kant just discovered that what the phrase “this rose is beautiful (or ugly)” actually does is not ascribe objective beauty (or ugliness) to the rose; rather, it imputes to the other—­all others—­the feeling of pleasure (or pain) that one feels in oneself. Whether it is Ms. A claiming that the rose is beautiful or Mr. B claiming that it is ugly, their disagreement amounts to rightly shouting at each other, even if they do it politely: “you ought to feel the way I feel. You ought to agree with me.” To say that people rightly claim universal approval for their aesthetic judgments when all it takes is one exception to prove them wrong

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is to say that this call on all others’ capacity for agreeing by dint of feeling is legitimate. This is what Kant understood better than anyone before or anyone since. Three points are worth emphasizing here. The first is that every aesthetic experience, in Kant’s terms, every pure judgment of taste, contains an ought addressed to someone. This is not the case with judgments about what Kant calls “the agreeable,” which deal with merely personal preferences and where disagreements are not an issue. Ms. A addresses Mr. B and vice versa. Obviously, they don’t only address each other. They would have had the same aesthetic experience in front of the rose if nobody had been present. They would not have expressed it out loud, but they would still have addressed their silent “this rose is beautiful (or ugly)” to an implicit “you.” The phrase is not addressed to anyone in particular, but it has an addressee. Let’s say that the grammatical structure of an aesthetic judgment is something like “this is beautiful, isn’t it?” The addressee is indeterminate, and thus universal; the implicit “you” refers to anyone and everyone. Conclusion 1: aesthetic judgments imply a universal address. The second point worth emphasizing is that aesthetic judgments are not logical, they are based on feeling. Feelings are subjective and involuntary—­you might say egotistic (my feeling is mine, not someone else’s) and automatic (I can’t help but feel what I feel). Pleasure and pain certainly correspond to and perhaps epitomize this general definition of feelings. Both agreeableness and beauty yield pleasure. The former is content with being merely egotistic, whereas the latter claims universal assent. And it does so automatically, that is, involuntarily. Conclusion 2: a true or pure aesthetic judgment is a call for agreement by dint of feeling involuntarily addressed to all. The third point worth emphasizing is that this call for agreement holds true for both Ms. A and Mr. B despite their disagreement. Ugliness, too, claims universal assent. When Mr. B claims the rose is ugly, he invokes his dissatisfaction, displeasure, or pain in looking at the rose in the name of what he thinks is his excellent taste in roses; he nevertheless claims that Ms. A, or indeed anyone and everyone, ought to agree with him: Ms. A should know better and not derive pleasure from such a mediocre example. Conclusion 3: what is ultimately at stake in an aesthetic judgment is neither the rose’s beauty nor the feeling it arouses; it is the agreement. Needless to say, Kant did not reach these conclusions watching two people quarreling over the beauty of a rose. He never even uttered them in the words I used. Yet I believe that my short account of Kant’s discovery is compatible with most other accounts, say, those popularized in philosophy classes, although it differs from them on crucial points. (1) Those accounts rarely set the stage of a quarrel. They talk about beauty’s claim to

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universality and conveniently silence the fact that ugliness makes the same claim.2 (2) They never present Kant as someone who has aesthetic experiences and can’t help but take sides in aesthetic quarrels; they present him as a cool and impartial philosopher who reflects on aesthetic judgment in general from within his ivory tower. As a result, though they underline that the judgment of taste is reflective rather than determining, they seem not to notice that Kant’s reflection throughout the book is a long and elaborate intellectual translation of what every single aesthetic judgment actually does. In other words, they don’t take full measure of why the Critique of Judgment is a critique and not a theory: it is in exercising your reflective judgment that you understand what a reflective judgment is.3 (3) While recognizing that beauty is not an objective property but rather a subjective feeling, they justify the right of this feeling to claim universal assent with arguments such as disinterestedness, free play of imagination and understanding, purposiveness without purpose, or exemplary necessity;4 they rarely put the emphasis on the demand addressed to others as such. (4) When noting that the aesthetic judgment is imputing to all others the feeling of pleasure that one feels in oneself, they emphasize the theoretical necessity of endowing all human beings with the faculty of taste while distracting attention from its counterpart, the quasi-­ethical obligation of endowing all human beings with the faculty of agreeing. Such accounts are correct. What they emphasize is in Kant’s text, and you will pardon me, I hope, for not citing chapter and verse here in order to prove that all my reading of the text does is shift emphasis a little bit. The faculty of taste is not important in itself. It is important inasmuch as it testifies to a universally shared faculty of agreeing, which Kant calls sensus communis.

Sensus communis Kant’s sensus communis is not ordinary common sense, it is common sentiment: shared or shareable feeling, and the faculty thereof; a common ability for having feelings in common; a communality or communicability of affects, implying a transcendental definition of humankind as a community united by a universally shared ability for sharing feelings universally. There is no proof that sensus communis exists as a fact, though. What exists as a fact is that we say such things as “this rose is beautiful,” that we say them by dint of feeling, and that we claim universal assent for these feelings, whether we know it or not. Of course (witness Mr. B’s response), humanity as a whole will never agree on the rose’s beauty. But that’s not required for the phrase “this rose is beautiful” to be legitimate

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(I’m not saying “true,” I’m saying “legitimate”). All I need is to make the supposition that my feeling is shareable by all. And that’s what I suppose, indeed. That’s what we all suppose, Ms. A, Mr. B, you and I, everyone, when we make aesthetic judgments. The implied “you ought to feel the way I feel” is what justifies me in my claim, you in yours, and all our fellow human beings in theirs, even though there is not a hope in the world for universal agreement among us. War is the rule, peace and love are the exception. But Kant feels it is his duty as a philosopher to grant all humans the faculty of agreeing and to theorize it correctly. Either taste is this faculty or signals it. Kant hesitates between these two theorizations, but in the end he decides it doesn’t matter. What matters is that regardless of whether sensus communis exists as a fact, we ought to suppose that it exists at least as an idea. The standard reading of the third Critique sees the theoretical necessity of this supposition clearly but in my view pays insufficient attention to the quasi-­moral obligation that might “explain how it is that the feeling in the judgment of taste is expected of everyone as if it were a duty.”5 The reading I propose underlines Kant’s skepticism as to whether sensus communis is a natural endowment of the human species—­ say, an instinct—­or whether it is merely an idea, but one we cannot do without. Here I must cite chapter and verse: This indeterminate norm of a common sense [Kant here means sensus communis] is actually presupposed by us, as is shown by our claim to lay down judgements of taste. Whether there is in fact such a common sense, as a constitutive principle of the possibility of experience, or whether a higher principle of reason makes it only into a regulative principle for producing in us a common sense for higher purposes; whether, therefore, taste is an original and natural faculty or only the idea of an artificial one yet to be acquired, so that a judgement of taste with its assumption of a universal assent in fact is only a requirement of reason for producing such harmony of sentiment; whether the ought, i.e. the objective necessity of the confluence of the feeling of any one man with that of every other, only signifies the possibility of arriving at this accord, and the judgement of taste only affords an example of the application of this principle—­these questions we have neither the wish nor the power to investigate as yet.6

This is from section 22. When, in section 38, Kant finally returns to the postponed questions, his deduction of the judgment of taste (and in Kant deduction means legitimation without proof ) is itself a reflective and regulative use of judgment, which is why Kant, apparently to his own surprise, finds it easy.

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This deduction is so easy, because it is not necessary for it to justify any objective reality of a concept; for beauty is not a concept of the object, and the judgment of taste is not a judgment of cognition. It asserts only that we are justified in presupposing universally in every human being the same subjective conditions of the power of judgment that we find in ourselves.7

I read this passage as the best indication that it is the claim to universality that signals disinterestedness, the free play of the faculties, purposiveness without purpose, or exemplary necessity, and not vice versa.8 This finds confirmation in aesthetic experience. Not in a special pleasure that would distinguish the feeling of the beautiful from the “mere” feeling of the agreeable and that would indeed be shareable by all, but in the fact that we feel strongly about the so-­called objectivity of our aesthetic judgments. Such feelings show themselves best, sometimes violently, in cases of aesthetic disagreement with someone we love or respect. Children are good guides: they sometimes break a friendship over their favorite color. As adults, we have learned that colors are a matter of the agreeable, and we rarely fight over the beauty of a rose. But when it comes to art . . . just check with your feelings when you tour the galleries: with the intensity of your enthusiasm and the dismay you feel when your enthusiasm is not shared; with your fear of the judgment of others concerning your taste when they are people whose judgment you respect; with your embarrassment, shame, or exasperation when you listen to a gallery owner praise a work you find despicable; with the way a truly innovative work, for which you are not yet ready, throws your very sense of art off balance. Check for yourself, and you’ll see what I mean. Kant has once and for all fathomed the depth of aesthetic disagreements among humans: they are tantamount to a denial of the other party’s humanity. Hence his conviction that sensus communis—­ultimately the faculty of living in peace with our fellow men—­ ought to be postulated even in the absence of theoretically demonstrable empathy in the human species. The amazing thing is that he grasped that an issue of such magnitude—­are we capable of living in peace?—­was at stake in a sentence so anodyne as “this rose is beautiful.” When replaced by “this thing is art,” the cultural and political implications of his thinking on aesthetics begin to reveal themselves in their full depth.

The “Kant after Duchamp” Approach This leads me to my second point, the historical changes since Kant’s time. The replacement of “this is beautiful” with “this is art” is not mine.

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1. Carl Andre, Equivalent VIII, 1966. Firebricks, 5″ × 27″ × 90.25″ / 127 × 686 × 2,292 mm. Tate Modern, London. Art © Carl Andre/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

Nor is the replacement of a rose (a natural object) with a thing (a human artifact). Both were forced on us by the historical development of modernity in all domains, including the scientific, the political, and the artistic. Beauty in nature was for Kant the place where hope in the ethical destiny of the human species was put to the test. It no longer is, for reasons too complex to go into here.9 Art (I’m not saying beauty in art, I’m saying art, period) is now this place. The social function of art—­if art has a function, and if it can be called social—­is to testify that humans ought to be living in harmony with each other when everything demonstrates that they can’t. Imagine Ms. A and Mr. B quarreling not over the beauty of a rose this time but over some controversial piece of contemporary art—­for example, Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII, the famous 120 bricks bought some years ago by the Tate Gallery for a sum Fleet Street deemed to take an extravagant toll on the taxpayer’s money. Ms. A exclaims, admiringly, “Ah! This is art!” Mr. B counters: “You’re out of your mind, it’s nothing!” Their verdicts are cast in the binary form that has become paradigmatic whenever a work of art, such as Duchamp’s Fountain, rather than begging viewers to appreciate its qualities within the conventions of a medium, asks them to decide on its sheer admissibility into the domain of art altogether. Need I recall that Andre’s Equivalent VIII is made of ready-­made bricks? That the bricks are simply laid down in rows and columns without mortar or anything else that would assemble them into a unitary and finished whole? And that

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this particular arrangement is just one combination out of eight, all said to be equivalent, that is, of equal value? Carl Andre is a sculptor, not an “artist-­at-­large.” Yet his art is as much a part of the reception history of Duchamp’s readymades in the sixties as it is an expansion on the tradition initiated by Brancusi. Mr. B is familiar with Brancusi, in whose work he perceives beauty. But he sees neither beauty nor talent nor even craftsmanship in a pile of bricks. “This is not a piece of sculpture” is his verdict. Given that it is not a painting, a poem, or a piece of music either, then it is not art. You might say that Mr. B is insufficiently informed, that he hasn’t followed recent trends in art, or that he has yet to acknowledge receipt of Duchamp’s readymades. A crash course in the art of the 1960s might change his mind. Mr. B is infuriated by such paternalism. There are rooms at Tate Modern that he visits with pleasure. It is not that he is ill informed; he flatly refuses to acknowledge receipt of Duchamp’s readymades on behalf of what he is convinced is his superior taste in matters of art. In his view, being a public gallery funded with taxpayers’ money, the Tate ought to exhibit only works worthy of the name—­things conveying a sense of the human in art with which he can empathize, things eliciting universally shareable feelings rather than conjuring intellectual speculations on the limits of art that only snobs enjoy. Mr. B wants art to call on sensus communis. Ms. A is neither a snob nor an intellectual who enjoys speculating on the limits of art. Nor does she align art worthy of the name with “superior taste,” which she regards as the taste of people who think they are superior. She, too, has her favorite rooms at the Tate. She is proud that British museums are free. She feels that a part of her taxes is given back to her as pleasure—­and not just pleasure: some of the works really stretch the limit, she believes. Those are the most thought provoking, and she loves that. Some works are ugly or even verge on the disgusting, but she fights her negative gut feelings and forces herself to keep looking. She never thought these works pronounced a taboo on more traditional aesthetic qualities. She loves Brancusi and senses the beauty of his work. She doesn’t know that Carl Andre once claimed to have laid Brancusi’s Endless Column flat on the ground, but she instinctively feels the relevance of sculpture renouncing verticality. Ms. A is interested in the time she lives in; it is a time that has little place for idealistic élans and should be ashamed of monuments that rush skyward. She appreciates the humble, everyday quality of Andre’s piece, its simpleness and lack of craftsmanship. She even chuckles at the thought that she could have made it herself. Ms. A is a democrat, and she, too, wants art to call on sensus communis. Is it not clear that all that was said above concerning judgments of taste in front of a rose remains when art is at stake rather than natural

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beauty? Kant’s account of aesthetic experience and its consequences for sensus communis remains as valid as ever. We need look no further for an adequate aesthetic “theory.” Still, the shift from beauty (whether in nature or art) to art, period, has made a new reading of the third Critique necessary. The shift in question may be summarized by saying that the naked phrase “this thing is art” has become the canonical expression of the modern aesthetic judgment, replacing “this painting (statue, poem, piece of music, etc.) is beautiful (sublime, good, great, fantastic, super, cool, what have you)” in all cases where assessing the quality of the work entails first pronouncing on its liminal comparability with existing art. Taking stock of this replacement and investigating its consequences makes for what I call the “Kant after Duchamp” approach to aesthetics. Some 125 years separate Kant’s Critique of Judgment from Duchamp’s first readymades, and somewhere in the middle (around Courbet and Manet), the phenomenon known as modernism or the avant-­garde came into being. It took some fifty more years after Duchamp’s first readymades for the latest trends in modernist or avant-­garde art to acknowledge receipt of them. Then new questions arose: are we still modernists? Has the avant-­garde not failed? Are judgments of taste not obsolete or irrelevant? Must not the theory of art dispense with aesthetics?

Epilogue Ms. A and Mr. B are at the Tate Modern quarreling over Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII. Kant witnesses the scene. Ms. A nods in approval: “Ah! This is art!” Mr. B shouts back, “You’re out of your mind, it’s nothing!” Kant feels on Mr. B’s side, this time. Being broad minded, he does his best to see things from Ms. A’s vantage point, but nothing doing. As far as he is concerned, the thing on the floor is just a pile of bricks abandoned by some construction workers. Kant humbly insists in his effort, swallows his embarrassment, notices that there is a label on the wall naming the author. He tries to put himself in the shoes of this Carl Andre whom Ms. A is ready to call an artist. He cannot fail to ascribe the form of the ridiculous thing he’s looking at to the decisions this Carl Andre has invested in the work—­if it is a work. The thing is definitely man made, but it’s not beautiful, it doesn’t represent anything, and the so-­called artist has not even touched the material it’s made from. Anybody could have done this, Kant thinks. It looks so casual, so forlorn, so goddamn unmade, as if it had fallen from the sky. In entering the Tate, Kant was expecting depictions of roses, horses, people, and so on. He doesn’t feel at all ready for 120 bricks claiming the name of art and intimating that he should side with Ms. A.

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Claiming? Intimating? What is this strange sentiment verging on obligation that Kant feels growing in himself, competing with his puzzlement, his embarrassment, and his growing anger? What is this even stranger feeling of exhilaration he senses as he starts to reflect? Kant was about to leave the room with a shrug, but the bricks are beckoning.

The “Kant after Duchamp” approach stems from the fact that art-­historical interpretation of “post-­Duchamp” art is impossible without the ontological question “What is art?” being raised at some point. Conversely, it makes reflecting philosophically and transhistorically about art irrelevant without the proper knowledge of the history that led to the “post-­Duchamp” condition. The present chapter provides a succinct historical explanation of how we got there, in part based on six articles I published in Artforum between October 2013 and April 2014, of which the revised and expanded version will form the first part of my forthcoming book, Duchamp’s Telegram.

2

From Beaux-­Arts to Art-­in-­General A Bi t of H i s t or y

The art community feels Duchamp’s presence and his absence. He has changed the condition of being here. Jasper Joh ns1

Not every theory of art is an aesthetic theory, and not every aesthetic theory is a theory of art. For Alexander Baumgarten, who coined the term aesthetics in the modern sense, the object of aesthetics was sensory cognition, the supreme form of which consisted in the appreciation of natural or artistic beauty conceived as perfection. His 1750 book Aesthetica did not isolate art as a privileged, autonomous terrain of exercise for taste. For G. M. F. Hegel, whose lectures on aesthetics were gathered by his students after his death, art was on the contrary the quasi-­exclusive domain of aesthetics, while taste and appreciation took a back seat vis-­à-­ vis interpretation and historical destiny. For Kant, who, chronologically, occupies a middle position, the judgment of taste was the proper object of aesthetics and its terrain of exercise was essentially nature; aesthetic judgments on art could never be pure because the rules and conventions of art making could be brought under concepts, whereas natural beauty was impervious to conceptualization. Because the “Kant after Duchamp” approach commands us to read Kant’s Critique of Judgment mentally substituting the word art for every occurrence of the word beauty, it retains from Kant the emphasis on aesthetic judgment while shifting the object of the judgment from beautiful nature to works of art. That shift is neither gratuitous nor an artifact of the “Kant after Duchamp” approach; it presupposes that, in the lapse of time between Kant and Duchamp, a historic transfer of aesthetic “responsi-

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bility” has occurred from nature to art. That transfer is so important that I shall devote two chapters of the second volume of Aesthetics at Large to it. For now, what matters is that the aesthetic theory the “Kant after Duchamp” approach attempts to construct is coterminous with a theory of art. It is not concerned with the aesthetic appreciation of nature. And since at the core of the theory the judging of art as art is at stake—­with art taking the place of beautiful, or sublime, or good, and so forth—­the theory cannot be a theory in any dogmatic sense; it is, rather, an aesthetic critique of art in due faithfulness to Kant. That critique’s only axiom is the claim that the sentence “This is art,” with which readymades and other candidates to art status are baptized, is an aesthetic judgment. This axiomatic claim implies that the terrain of art sees its borders traced anew with every such baptism and is thus never delimitated beforehand. The “Kant after Duchamp” approach does not possess and does not seek to possess an a priori concept of art, although at some point the problem of its “deduction” will have to be raised. Concepts of art are empirical and contingent on historical usage. But we must start somewhere, and the question “what’s in a name?” is not a bad starting point. More often than not, it’s a question prompted by the arrival of new names. When, in the 1960s, people began to talk of interdisciplinary trends in art, using terms such as mixed media, intermedia, and multimedia, the primary focus was on finding a place for the new and quite diverse practices that could not be assigned to the traditional categories of painting and sculpture. Those new names, as well as the terms assemblage, happening, event, performance, or installation, which acquired artistic meaning in that decade, were merely descriptive. A more serious theoretical debate on the definition of the word art was simultaneously taking shape around Fluxus, minimal art, and conceptual art, a debate in which the growing influence of Marcel Duchamp on the sixties’ generation of artists and the impact of the readymade on artistic theories were palpable. By the end of the decade the debate had reached academia. Philosophers who rarely set foot inside a gallery began to question the concept of art, exemplified by borderline cases that were either real, such as readymades and found objects, or imaginary, such as the eight identical red monochromes bearing different titles that Arthur Danto (who did visit galleries regularly) wittily proposed at the beginning of his book The Transfiguration of the Commonplace.2 During the eighties, my own work on the genealogy of the readymades led me to study the relationship of painting in particular to art in general and to develop an aesthetic theory of art as proper name, the result of the unexpected meeting of Duchamp with Kant.3 What motivated me at the time was the mixture of excitement and anxiety produced by the radical openness of art (in the singular) that

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resulted from the blurring or the downright denial of the boundaries between the arts (in the plural). As I wrote on the back cover of Au nom de l’art: One should never cease to marvel at, or worry about, the fact that it is nowadays considered perfectly legitimate for anyone to be an artist without being a painter, or a writer, a musician, a sculptor, a film maker, and so on. Would modernity have invented art in general?4

The Problem with “Art” (in General) As I was using it then, the term art in general, or art in the generic sense of the word, was ambiguous. It seemed to refer to a new category of art practices that were neither painting nor sculpture, music, literature, film, and so forth and which also escaped the new names assemblage, happening, event, performance, or installation—­practices yielding objects that were either art or nothing. Readymades had once been such objects and in a way they still were, yet the culture had assimilated them by treating them as a category of art objects in their own right. It took me some time before I realized that with art in general I did not so much have a category of objects in mind as the situation that had produced the need for a concept of art so wide that it seemed able to assimilate all imaginable objects and techniques. I was too embedded in that situation, too much part of the art world, too much “in the know” to see the larger picture that framed my own questions. The word art in the contemporary sense, as it is indeed used by people in the know, is a word that conveys a very specific historical awareness. Art, in the singular and distinct from the arts, in the plural, is an outcome of the history of the visual or plastic arts. What today is called the art world or, more pointedly, the artworld, is a loose social milieu composed of visual artists, gallerists, art critics, collectors, museum goers, and so on. It is not the world of writers, literary critics, or professors of literature; nor is it the world of musical interpreters, composers, or opera buffs. It is not even, simply, the world of painters, sculptors, and other visual artists and their aficionados. It is a world that uses the word art, in the singular and without qualifier, to refer to a range of creative activities that certainly comprise painting and sculpture but also occasionally include a poetry reading (in a gallery or an artist’s loft), a stage performance (but not on Broadway), or a sound piece (say, at Times Square5). However, the art status of these latter activities, and the status as artists of their practitioners, owes virtually nothing to the history of literature, theater, or music and

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almost everything to developments within the history of painting. The fact that these developments often appeared as a critique of and a move away from painting doesn’t belie their roots in painting’s specific history, quite to the contrary. A few examples: performance art did not stem from the theater; it appeared at the confluence of modern dance and minimal art; installation art did not stem from sculpture; it, too, grew out of minimal art; and minimal art came about as a hybrid of sculpture and painting, with painting having the leading role because its status was more problematized.6 Though they abandoned painting, most minimal artists started out as painters, and this holds true for several conceptual artists as well. One might say that all postminimal and postconceptual artists are—­in a sense that is not individual and biographical but rather historical and theoretical—­ex-­painters. The sixties and seventies saw the mutation of innumerable painters into artists. When some photographers became artists, too—­not art photographers but artists who do photography—­they were riding on the painters’ coattails. Although this transition toward art in the generic sense is a phenomenon of the sixties and seventies, important historical precedents prepared painters to play a major role in it: it is painters, not sculptors, who invented abstract art; the art of construction and assemblage of the late 1910s grew out of papiers collés, a spin-­off of cubist painting; in view of the sheer quality of their sculpture, it is clear that the painters Matisse and Degas did more for the advent of modern sculpture than many a contemporary sculptor; and one of Rodin’s greatest innovations was the painterly light sensitivity of his surfaces, as David Smith and Anthony Caro would later remember. (Look at Caro’s bronze nudes, not just at his steel rod and beam constructions.) The primacy of painting in the history of modern art is heavily overdetermined, with ideological roots that reach as far back as the paragone contests of the Renaissance, if not the Byzantine Bilderstreit. Yet I believe ideological overdetermination is in the end irrelevant to the matter at hand. Primacy is not supremacy. If all postminimal and postconceptual artists are in a sense ex-­painters, it is because, of all media and art forms, painting alone was the locus of the passage I called, in Kant after Duchamp, the passage from the specific (painting) to the generic (art).7

The Passage from the Specific to the Generic My first book, Pictorial Nominalism, was subtitled On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade, a passage I considered as the paradigmatic instance of the passage from the specific to the generic. I was

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seeking to understand Duchamp’s agency in the advent of what I already called, at the time, art in general. It mattered to me that Duchamp was a (perhaps failed) cubist painter when he abandoned painting in the fall of 1912 and, a few months later, assembled his first readymade, Bicycle Wheel. Contrary to conventional wisdom, which sees in the readymades a radical break, I interpreted them (in particular the 1916 comb, Peigne, with its pun on the subjunctive of the verb peindre, to paint) as signaling Duchamp’s ambivalent, melancholic, but also incredibly lucid transition from the specific art of painting to the generic, “conceptual” art practice he was later credited for having pioneered. However personal Duchamp’s transition was, it enacted a rite of passage that proved in the long run to concern all visual artists because it carried the news that the culture as a whole had moved from the fine arts system where, in order to be art, any given object had to belong a priori to one of the established art forms and genres to a new system, in which we still live, where art can be made from anything whatever. I may occasionally use the term art in general the way I did in the eighties, to designate practices and works that resist specific classification and are therefore apt to illustrate this “anything goes” condition. But to refer to that condition itself, I shall use the term Art-­in-­General (capitalized and hyphenated). Behind and beyond Duchamp’s personal transition from the specific art of painting to the generic art of readymades lies a generalization (notice that I don’t call it a liberation) of which, I am now convinced, Duchamp was merely the brilliant messenger. In theory, that generalization could have occurred from within poetry or music or any other established art form. Things just didn’t happen that way. Luigi Russolo’s The Art of Noise could have operated the transition from music, specifically, to a new art form called Noise, or Sound at Large, or simply Art. It didn’t succeed—­we still consider music as an art, not as art at large, and we confine The Art of Noise to a special niche called, well, The Art of Noise. Moreover, Russolo was a painter, another sign that the relevant passage was the one that went from painting to art even if it had to transit through the art of noise. John Cage was more successful than Russolo, but then perhaps in spite of himself (I doubt that he sought the generalization from music to art). Is 4′ 33″ art or music? Those who call it music call it art as well; those who refuse to call it music (I’ve personally heard Iannis Xenakis do so) don’t necessarily refuse to call it art. They thus inadvertently open a new category: sounds and silences that are not music but are nonetheless art; a piano recital that doesn’t answer to the definition of a recital while borrowing its decorum; a musical performance whose performativity is exacerbated by the pianist not performing any music; a score that gestures toward the conventions of classical music (4′ 33″ borrows its three-­movement structure from the sonata form) but

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whose place in the history of musical composition is less secure than its place in the Pantheon of art.8 It is hard to tell whether John Cage would have composed 4′ 33″ if he hadn’t befriended Robert Rauschenberg—­or Marcel Duchamp, for that matter.9 Whether contemporary artists qualify as practitioners of what we artworld members, we people in the know—­but also an ever-­growing public—­call art, without qualifier, art at large or art in general, is a question that depends on the awareness those artists have, or not, of living in “the post-­Duchamp condition.” There is probably not one serious artist since the sixties who doesn’t have that awareness. As Jasper Johns wrote in his obituary of Duchamp (cited in the epigraph to this chapter): “The art community feels Duchamp’s presence and his absence. He has changed the condition of being here.” No doubt Johns felt that way. And no doubt Duchamp did change the condition of being part of the art community in the fifties, sixties, and seventies: through his work, or what was known of it; through his discreet presence in the community and the aura of mystery and aloofness he had the knack to project; and perhaps even more through the proselytism of his admirers and the quasi-­religious zeal they put in relaying every piece of gossip that circulated about him. Whether the notion of influence accounts for all this mostly indirect myth construction is doubtful. Certainly a genuine post-­Duchamp condition cannot be construed on the basis of a notion that vague. In my view, “influence” registers a post-­Duchamp condition fabricated in circular fashion from Duchamp’s reputation, which is returned to him as an echo and amplified to the point of creating the illusion that a single artist has changed all the rules of the game. Unless we break that vicious circle, we shall not arrive at a proper understanding of the otherwise problematic, indeed preposterous notion of a post-­Duchamp condition. And yet I believe there is such a thing. It has everything to do with how we understand the change from the fine arts to the Art-­in-­General system.

The Passage from the Beaux-­Arts to the Art-­in-­General System I should say a word about that change and about what it means to call it a change from a pre-­to a post-­Duchamp condition.10 We are dealing with institutions and their respective aesthetic regimes. The nineteenth-­century French institution of the Beaux-­Arts—­a powerful state apparatus that included the Ministère, the École, and the Académie des Beaux-­Arts—­ collapsed in the 1880s, and soon thereafter the fine arts system died about everywhere in Europe. The keystone of the French Beaux-­Arts system had

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been its annual Salon and, more precisely, the discretionary yes-­or-­no power thanks to which the Salon jury controlled the careers of artists throughout their lives. Among other events, the creation in 1884 of the Société des artistes indépendants signaled the end of the Beaux-­Arts system and the advent of the Art-­in-­General system—­though totally unbeknownst to all protagonists involved. The change was political and did not at first affect the aesthetic regime of the fine arts, which continued to regulate the practice of artists until at least the outbreak of World War I. The novelty was that artists could now lead their professional lives independently of the state, which therefore was no longer able to protect and control access to the professions of painter or sculptor. Anyone could proclaim himself an artist. The statutes of the Société des artistes indépendants had no other criterion for membership than the annual paying of a modest fee; and the Société’s Salons were not juried, so anything a member submitted (but submit is no longer the right word) was automatically accepted and shown. Commercial galleries, which had been slowly developing since the late seventeenth century in the shadow of the Salon, suddenly thrived on the ruins of the Beaux-­Arts system. There, too, anybody could try his or her luck as an artist, with or without a Rome Prize or a state-­awarded medal, with or without the proper academic schooling. Sooner or later someone would observe the sea change that had quietly transformed the institution of the visual arts and draw the logical conclusion regarding the aesthetic regime of the new system: if self-­proclaimed artists could try their luck on the art market, if anybody could be a member at the Indépendants and show whatever they wanted, then whether what they actually showed qualified as painting or sculpture had become a matter of a priori presumption sanctioned by a posteriori judgment. Anything and everything had become a plausible candidate to art status. All artistic conventions had de facto dissolved, and all aesthetic boundaries had exploded not because innovative artists had transgressed them but because the state apparatus formerly capable of deciding who was and who was not legitimately a painter or a sculptor had lost its jurisdiction over those conventions and boundaries in losing its power over the artists.

Duchamp’s Message Duchamp, who drew that conclusion, did not arrive at it through such a cool reasoning. As a young man he had the bitter experience of witnessing how the Indépendants betrayed their “no jury” principle: whatever a member “submitted” was supposed to be shown, and he was a member since 1911. And yet at the following year’s Salon des indépendants, he saw

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his first ambitious foray into cubism, a painting titled Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2, being censored by the hanging committee of the cubist room despite his brothers’ intercession. Deeply hurt, he took a secret revenge five years later in New York at the expense of a group of American artists eager to free themselves of the tutelage of the National Academy of Design. He advised them to create an artists’ society modeled after the French Indépendants, and he proceeded to test whether they, too, would betray their principles. At the first show of the newly incorporated Society of Independent Artists in April 1917, he presented them pseudonymously with a men’s urinal titled Fountain and signed R. Mutt. Of course they did betray their principles: Fountain was whisked away and never shown. Duchamp elegantly saw to it that no scandal would tarnish the reputation of the young society by waiting till the exhibition was over to publish—­and very confidentially, in the little magazine The Blind Man, of which he and a couple of friends were the editors—­an editorial titled “The Richard Mutt Case,” facing a photo of a urinal lying on its side and triply captioned, “Fountain by R. Mutt,” “Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz,” and “THE EXHIBIT REFUSED BY THE INDEPENDENTS.” With that photo, Duchamp put a message in the mail and then waited until the time was ripe for its arrival.

2. Double page from The Blind Man no. 2 (May 1917). Facsimile edition. New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017. Illustration at left © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York 2018.

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Not before the 1940s, when Duchamp issued—­and again, very confidentially—­the Boîte-­en-­Valise, a box containing miniature replicas of most of his works, including Fountain, did he openly acknowledge paternity of R. Mutt’s urinal. And not before his first major retrospective, at the Pasadena Art (now Norton Simon) Museum, in 1963, did Fountain reach an art world audience larger than the handful of au courant critics, artists, and collector friends who were his devotees. But within a year or two, replicas of Fountain were on the market, and one of them even landed in a museum; the darned urinal was hailed by some and dismissed by others as the epitome of avant-­gardist art; and it had become a paradigm of art making that fueled the thoughts of many among the most advanced young artists of the times. The message Duchamp put in the mail in 1917 had arrived. It was immediately interpreted by the myriad artists and critics who acknowledged receipt of it as meaning, in the words of Fluxus artist George Brecht, “anything can be art and anyone can do it.”11

High Modernism as a Transition and Incubation Period To focus on symbolic dates, and taking with more than a grain of salt the labeling of whole eras with one artist’s proper name, I’d say that the post-­Duchamp era starts in 1964 in the wake of the Pasadena retrospective and that the pre-­Duchamp era ends in 1884, with the first Salon des indépendants. The eighty-­year gap between those dates can be described as a latency period between the moments the fine arts system crumbled and the Art-­in-­General system came into full effect. As art historians of the period know very well, those eighty years coincide with the undisputed reign of high modernism—­from Cézanne and Seurat (who was one of the founders of the Indépendants) to Picasso and Matisse to the inventors of abstract painting, Mondrian, Malevich, Kupka, Delaunay, and so on, to Wols, Pollock, Kelly, Hartung, Jorn, and many others who established modernist painting as the main idiom of the postwar era, to Newman, Rothko, Still, and Reinhardt—­after whom ambitious abstract painting started having to justify itself in the face of the new “anything goes” enfranchisement of the pop and Fluxus generations. Those eighty years of latency were a period in which intuitive, untheorized awareness of the transition under way gave the artists most sensitive to their time an extraordinary sense of liberty that incited them to experiment with forms, media, styles, and techniques as never before. They weren’t too sure to whom or what they owed their liberty (actually, to the demise of the Beaux-­Arts system), and so they were free to fantasize that they were

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the sole authors of their own liberation and that by pursuing abstract art they had ushered in a new aesthetic regime that subverted the Beaux-­Arts system from within and declared its bankruptcy.

Acknowledging Receipt of Duchamp’s Message The generation of artists that came right after the abstract expressionist and color field painters—­say, the generation of Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni, or Robert Rauschenberg—­saw things very differently. It is often said that they reacted against the heroic subject position of their elders. This may be true subjectively, but it’s an Oedipal explanation that doesn’t fully satisfy me. I prefer to see a different mechanism at work behind the brash assertiveness of their art. Their first move was not to kill the father but rather to empower themselves by acknowledging receipt of Duchamp’s message: anything can be art, whether it’s a monochrome painting or a monotone symphony (Klein), an achrome painting or a living sculpture (Manzoni), a combine painting or a 3-­D assemblage (Rauschenberg). Note that all three artists enacted a rite of passage very similar to that of Duchamp when he switched from painting to readymades. For them as for Duchamp, art in general was the illegitimate offspring of painting, necessarily indebted to painting’s supposed demise. For them and their whole generation, the bankruptcy of the Beaux-­Arts system was a given (étant donné, an apt Duchampian expression under the aegis of which to put their work), and the unproblematic existence of the Art-­in-­General system was another given, which they wholeheartedly embraced. While Rauschenberg claimed Duchamp’s legacy openly and Manzoni mischievously, and Klein denied being indebted to any artist before him, all three gleefully celebrated the liberating sense they had that all boundaries had dissolved. To acknowledge receipt of Duchamp’s message was also—­I realize it now—­what I had done in 1989 with my blurb on the back cover of Au nom de l’art. The “Kant after Duchamp” approach to aesthetics and art theory is rooted in that acknowledgment of receipt. To my question at the time, “Would modernity have invented art in general?” I now give the following answer: modernity, in the restricted sense of “the heyday of high modernism,” was the transition period from the fine arts to the Art-­in-­General system as well as the incubation period for a new aesthetic regime, which I’ll call art-­in-­general, hyphenated and lowercased, to distinguish it from both the Art-­in-­General system as an institution and from the seemingly new genre of art exemplified by readymades and found objects, which, in the eighties, I had called art in general (not hyphenated). Whether the new system and the new regime should be deemed postmodern is to me

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a matter of mere symptomatic import.12 Symptomatic indeed is that the term postmodern was coined to mark a break with modernity, assimilated to high modernism, obliviously of the fact that in the larger sense, modernity as an era is of course not restricted to those eighty years of transition and incubation. Modernity as an era is a longue durée “dispositif ” to which a variety of birthdates can be given. My choice is the eighteenth century, the century of the Enlightenment and of Kant. And as a blanket term for historical forces that have left no aspect of life untouched—­whether political, religious, scientific, technological, or cultural at large—­modernity is of course not restricted to the domain of art. The passage from the fine arts to the Art-­in-­General system is the product of many such forces. It would be a gross mistake—­though one often made in the name of “influence”—­to see Duchamp as the cause, the initiator, the author, or the agent of that passage, as if such a sea change were in reach of an individual. Duchamp was merely its messenger, the whistle-­blower. This is not to diminish his merit or, least of all, to deny the disruptive suddenness of his intervention in the course of the history of styles and art movements. To bring to light the truth of a situation that has changed independently of one’s own agency can create an event with more transformative power than that change itself, for those who, as Alain Badiou would say, pledge fidelity to that event.13 For many artists from the generation of Klein, Manzoni, and Rauschenberg on, especially for those who came too late to have known Duchamp personally, the acknowledgment of receipt of his message had the force of a pledge of fidelity to the event of that message’s arrival, a force a lot more energetic, active, and creative than what the concept of influence, which is supposed to imply the passivity of the influenced vis-­à-­vis the influent, accounts for. Looking at the eighty years (1884–­ 1964) that coincide with the heyday of high modernism as a transition and incubation period obviously calls for some rewriting of art history. No revision of the canon is needed, but some renewal of the art historian’s toolbox will be, from a standpoint that is neither modern nor postmodern but rather “post-­Duchamp” in the sense here outlined. I hope that a new generation of art historians will soon undertake that task.

Several tentative versions of this text initially written in French have been published, first in Dutch, “De toestand na Duchamp: Opmerkingen over enkele kwalificaties van het woord ‘kunst,” and English, “The Post-­Duchamp Deal: Remarks on a Few Specifications of the Word ‘Art,’” both in A-­Prior 6 (Brussels, fall 2001), then in French, “La nouvelle donne: Remarques sur quelques qualifications du mot ‘art,’” Figures de l’art 10 (Paris, January 2006), and Spanish, “La nueva situación o las cuatro calificaciones de la palabra ‘arte,’” Ramona 76 (Buenos Aires, November 2007), then in English again, “The Post-­Duchamp Deal: Remarks on a Few Specifications of the Word ‘Art,’” Filozofski Vestnik 28, no. 2 (Ljubljana, 2007), and in French again, “La nouvelle donne: Remarques sur quelques qualifications du mot ‘art,’” in Juger l’art ?, ed. Christophe Genin, Claire Leroux, and Agnès Lontrade (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2009). The present version displays a few crucial shifts in interpretation.

3

The Post-­Duchamp Condition R e m a r k s on Fou r U s ag e s of t h e Wor d A r t

This book is not an art history book, it is a book on aesthetics. But it is anchored to art-­historical facts and contingent on a precise time frame like few books on aesthetics are. The art-­historical facts it is anchored to have to do with the sending, the reception, and the content of “Duchamp’s Telegram.” The longue durée time frame it is contingent on is modernity as dating from the Enlightenment. Now this book is not really looking at art in the larger context of modernity; it is looking at the larger context using art as a revealer. My interpretive method—­to reread Kant’s Critique of Judgment replacing the word beauty with the word art—­is only partly an attempt to understand the aesthetic regime of the Art-­in-­General system. That attempt is the object of the present chapter. By the end of the chapter it will be clear, I hope, that aesthetics as I conceive of it, in due faithfulness to Kant, is anything but a self-­centered, “autonomous” discipline that concerns itself with natural beauty or artistic quality in total disconnection from issues more “real” and less “symbolic” than beauty or art. But for now I must concentrate on interpreting the difference between the post-­Duchamp condition and the fine arts system. This leads me to try to conceptualize four different and concomitant usages of the word art—­terminological proposals that, if adopted, might take the “Kant after Duchamp” approach to aesthetics to the next level.

Art-­in-­General The post-­Duchamp condition, as sketched out in the previous chapter, has allowed for new art practices to emerge that can avail themselves of anything whatever—­any material, any subject matter, any technique. This availability characterizes the apparently infinitely liberal aesthetic regime of art-­in-­general (hyphenated) under which all art practices, including

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conventional ones (and not just the unclassifiable ones I called art in general, not hyphenated), are appraised. Let the term Art-­in-­General (hyphenated and capitalized) refer to the situation underlying art-­in-­general, namely, the a priori possibility that anything can be art. Art-­in-­General is in certain respects an empty concept, for it contains only potential, not actual works of art; it is, however, a historically datable concept that names the condition in which we consciously find ourselves following the reception of Duchamp’s readymades by the art of the sixties and their subsequent legitimation by art history and art museums. Art-­in-­General is therefore neither a medium nor a genre nor a style. It doesn’t get added to the established media such as painting or sculpture; it is not a new genre distinct from the traditional ones such as landscape or the nude; it doesn’t represent a stylistic category identifiable by some common feature, such as the “isms” that abounded in the twentieth century. On the contrary, painting and sculpture, the landscape and the nude, and all the “isms” of the twentieth century are part and parcel of Art-­in-­General since Art-­ in-­General excludes none of the established art forms while also potentially including every possible thing that has material existence. Indeed, the content I give to this expression is that it is now technically possible, aesthetically permitted, and institutionally legitimate to make art from anything and everything. Art-­in-­General is the name for the new deal or the new condition that has become established in the post-­Duchamp era. It replaces the old generic term Fine Arts (Beaux-­Arts, Schöne Künste, Bellas Artes, etc.), which ruled over the art world before Duchamp. The difference between the post-­Duchamp condition and the fine arts system is blatantly obvious. Both Art-­in-­General (as the institution wherein anything can be art) and art-­in-­general (as the aesthetic regime obeyed by the making and the appreciation of art within the system) have absolutely no limits, whereas the fine arts system is limited by internal and external boundaries that regulate the aesthetic regime under which the system operates. Internal boundaries, by virtue of the fact that the system includes and juxtaposes painting, sculpture, architecture, drawing, printmaking, and so on, and keeps them separate from each other as well as from the other arts, such as literature, music, or theater; and external boundaries, because the system excludes all those things that, being neither painting nor literature nor music, and so on, cannot possibly belong to the category of “art.” Incidentally, the category of “art,” in the singular, does not exist in the fine arts system apart from the individual arts. Though it is perfectly possible for a nineteenth-­century person, standing before a painting she considers successful, to declare “Ah! That is art!” her exclamation simply expresses her aesthetic appreciation without, however, placing the picture in a category to which it did not belong before her favorable verdict.

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Clearly, objects such as a bicycle wheel, a snow shovel, and a urinal are excluded a priori from the fine arts because it is impossible to assign them to one of the arts in particular. They don’t respect the conventions of any of them and hence cannot be compared with the products of any of them. On the other hand, the worst nineteenth-­century picture has its a priori place within the fine arts because it respects a certain number of conventions according to which it may be established, without any further trial, that the picture is comparable with other painted pictures and thus belongs to the specific art of painting. The internal and external boundaries of the fine arts are coextensive: they set a multiplicity of well-­defined artistic practices in opposition to the vast domain of what is not art. This is why, when the question arose of legitimating works initially judged impossible to include in any of the fine arts, the “category” of non-­art was produced to accommodate them. When the notion of “art” in the singular—­of art, period, or art, as such—­was first mentioned outside the individual arts, it was with an appellation that negated it. Non-­art was the paradoxical name given to the kind of works that proved incomparable with works belonging to any of the fine arts yet could not simply be dismissed.1 A corollary of this is that although non-­art is a crucial modality of art-­in-­general as an aesthetic regime, it has no place in Art-­in-­General as an institution.

Art as Such I have just introduced a new term: art as such, or art, period. This is not at all the same thing as Art-­in-­General. The example of our nineteenth-­ century person standing in front of a painting she considers successful and exclaiming “Ah! That is art!” will help us define what I mean by art as such. In her exclamation, the word art expresses an aesthetic appreciation, that is, the feeling that the painting in question really deserves to be called a work of art beyond its merely nominal belonging to the art of painting. By “feeling,” I mean something more complex than simply sentiment, affect, or emotion; I mean an intuition, a “sense,” or, precisely, a “feel” resulting from a consultation with oneself that does not follow a path of logical, intellectual reasoning. Art as such doesn’t further describe or qualify the “art feeling” it expresses. Definitely no feeling is expressed by Art-­in-­General, which names a situation—­to repeat, the condition in which we find ourselves at least since Duchamp’s readymades have shown that art can be made from anything whatever. When the utterance of the person in our example or the more sober phrase “This is art” is applied precisely to the historical case of the readymades rather than to a nineteenth-­century painting, a new element is introduced: in addition to

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expressing the appreciation resulting from an aesthetic experience, art as such reclassifies the designated object. Indeed, it is by means of the phrase “This is art” that the readymades became art. Not being comparable with works belonging to any of the fine arts, they could not be called good or bad art without being called art first or by the same token—­art, period. When faced with a borderline case such as that of the readymades, it is no longer possible to make the distinction between art in the classificatory sense and art in the evaluative sense, to use George Dickie’s terminology.2 The same holds true for many things, including some works in traditional media, which artists submit to our appreciation from within the conditions of Art-­in-­General. It is simply clearer in the case of art authorized by the readymades or having otherwise broken its ties with painting, sculpture, or any other of the fine arts. The phrase “This is art,” with which we express our feeling that this is art indeed, is a baptism, hence, the little theory proposed in Kant after Duchamp that the word art (art as such) is a proper name, not a concept. Proper names have no meaning, only referents. Or even when they have meanings (to a Western ear, a person called Christian Carpenter would have “meaningful” first and last names), their meanings are irrelevant, for proper names are used to designate individuals rather than signify their “properties.” When an object—­any object whatsoever—­is plucked from the great no-­man’s-­land of Art-­in-­General and yields an aesthetic judgment—­especially the kind of judgment that attaches positive value to the object’s negation of existing art or, better said, the kind of judgment that recognizes artistic quality in the object’s relative incomparability with existing art—­this object, in being dubbed “art,” gets called by a name that, like proper names, only refers to things and doesn’t have any fixed or determinable meaning aside from the subjective aesthetic significance attached to the experience. When exclaiming, “This is art,” you express yourself with a word that is not fit for expression but that has referents acting as a basis for comparison. The feeling of dealing with art that you express in this way remains inaccessible to others, perhaps even to yourself as well, because what you refer to with the word art is equally inaccessible to others and to some extent to yourself, too. You are neither fully in control of your feelings nor in conscious possession of all the things the word art designates for you. Like all proper names (and common nouns alike), the word art acts as an index finger enabling you to point at something in its absence; in other words, without having to show it. And you don’t show the art you refer to when saying “This is art” any more than you display the feeling of having to do with art that makes you utter the phrase in the first place. You don’t fully visualize the referents of “art” either. “This is art” in fact contains two index fingers: the word

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this, a mobile designator that refers to the work under discussion, displays it, and moves from work to work; and the word art, a “rigid designator” (following Saul Kripke’s theory of proper names),3 which doesn’t display anything and which points toward . . . art altogether.

Art Altogether We just encountered yet another expression, art altogether, by which I (provisionally) mean everything referred to by the word art in the phrase “This is art” when used to express an aesthetic judgment. This might seem a little odd, for we don’t consciously point a finger at things when uttering the word art. (It’s the word this that points a finger at something.) We think, rather, that we apply evaluative criteria to the “this” we consider artistic. But the fact is that aesthetic judgments are comparative (even when they try to compare incomparable things or, as is the case when true aesthetic rapture seizes us, when they surrender before the absolutely incomparable).4 Our so-­called criteria have been forged by all the aesthetic experiences accumulated as a result of looking at works of art throughout our lives. Our artistic culture varies in richness and sophistication depending on the quantity, diversity, and intensity of these experiences. Rather than criteria, this accumulated culture generates in us expectations—­what classical aesthetics termed a taste. We make judgments according to these expectations, which means that when we are presented with a candidate for art, we compare this object spontaneously, even unconsciously, with works of art we already know. More precisely, we compare our subjective experience of the object we are looking at with the memory of a large number of similar experiences we have had in the past of the works of art we have learned to appreciate. If we then give expression to our aesthetic judgment by saying “This is art,” it is easy to see that the word this designates the object under consideration while the word art designates the collection of objects already labeled with the word art in the layers of aesthetic experience deposited in our memories and acting as a basis for comparison. The content of art altogether is thus an imaginary collection of works of art varying from individual to individual and defined extensionally, not intensionally. This means that like all collections, art altogether is made of things and not of meanings. For each of us, our private collection has shaped and colored our acquaintance with art precisely by setting personal standards of comparison; meanings accrue as our collection gets richer and more sophisticated. When we judge that a given thing extracted from the a priori reservoir of Art-­in-­General is indeed art, we are, so to speak, scanning our personal art collection for comparable

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things and basing our verdict on the outcome of the comparison. It is all too clear that because art altogether varies from individual to individual, from culture to culture, from social class to social class, from epoch to epoch, it does not at all deserve its name. For this to be the case we would have to imagine an ideal art lover whose taste and firsthand acquaintance with art have been shaped by contact with the entire artistic heritage of humankind and would form the absolute (as opposed to relative) comparative benchmark against which all candidates to the title of art are approved or refused entry into the common artistic patrimony. At this stage, I hope to have raised strong objections regarding any person’s self-­proclaimed right, on the basis of his or her personal culture and subjective experiences, to approve or refuse entry of a given thing into the common artistic patrimony. The question of authority—­and of the legitimacy of that authority—­is at the core of the issue of aesthetic judgment under the post-­Duchamp condition, as we all know if we are familiar with today’s art world and with the institutional critique exerted on it by a great deal of the art practices born from conceptual art. As these issues of authority and legitimacy are far too complex to be seriously addressed here, I propose an imaginary scenario in which they are resolved in the following manner. Let’s imagine that the ideal, universal art lover exists. This person would have shaped her taste in contact with the entirety of the human artistic patrimony. She alone would warrant its legitimacy because it is only for her that art altogether would deserve its name. Let’s further imagine that it is empirically possible to gather art altogether, say, in André Malraux’s “Museum without Walls” or in some other global Museum with or without walls but with a capital M.5 Finally, let’s suppose that humanity, following democratic consultation, has appointed our ideal art lover chief curator of this Museum, where all the things in the world she personally deems worthy of the name art would have found their home. This single individual would implement humankind’s supreme aesthetic tribunal and would be the only person with the legitimate authority to utter the liminal aesthetic judgment that enters any given thing into the common artistic patrimony. All artists in the world would come to lay down before her what they have created, and she would decide: “This is art” or “This is not art.” She and she alone would perform the baptism. Well, in this person, art as such would express the comparability in terms of felt content—­in other words, of aesthetic quality—­of the present candidate to art with all the things gathered by art altogether across all mediums, cultures, times, and places. One work at a time, she would judge that the content of the feeling elicited by this is partaking of the purported globally human significance of the universal art collection that’s entrusted to her.

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She would thereby express both the comparability of the works of art among themselves, formally, and the shareability of their elicited feelings among themselves, subjectively. The term I use for this universal mapping of art felt (intensionally: art as such) onto art referred to (extensionally: art altogether) is art itself.

Art Itself I admit that my imaginary scenario is disingenuous. Its interest lies in the personification of the art institution as if it were one and unanimous—­ obviously something that is implied by the fantasy of the Museum with a capital M. How to conceive of this personification critically is a crucial matter, which I hope my little conceit will hint at.6 Each time the Museum collects a new piece, it acknowledges that “this is art.” Conversely, each time it considers that this deserves to be called art, it declares its view that the candidate has crossed the threshold of admissibility into the world art collection. Whether this is great or even good art is not necessarily at stake. The question the Museum has to settle when it collects is that of aesthetic comparability. Is this qualitatively comparable with (which doesn’t mean equal to) a significant sample of all the things humanity has hitherto called art? If yes, this will be allowed to enter the world’s art patrimony and will be displayed to the Museum’s visitors on behalf of the comparative test it successfully passed, which is to say, on behalf of the felt congruence of art as such with the gist of the purported common aesthetic experience yielded by all the works included in art altogether. At that particular moment, the Museum is legitimately acting in the name of art itself. What, for Pete’s sake, is art itself? The true metaphysical essence of art? Sheer idealist ideology, that’s what it is! Such objections are welcome. They are also fragile, because in demystifying the Museum with a capital M they leave no other option than delegitimating the museums with a small m, as they actually exist. In fact, art itself is an idea and nothing more. It is the idea of art, or art as idea, either way. The mapping of art as such (feelings) onto art altogether (things) can only be an idea. I would add for the benefit of philosophers that it is an idea in the Kantian sense, not in the Platonic or, much more important for the fate of aesthetics today, in the Hegelian sense. Such an idea supposes, postulates, demands that in each of the objects that have successfully passed the test, there exists a core quality that each shares with all the others, albeit a quality that can neither be conceptualized nor demonstrated. It is not even, properly speaking, a quality in the sense of an objective or “objectal” property. It is a quality

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only inasmuch as the Museum claims to attach to all the works composing art altogether some je ne sais quoi of the felt content expressed case by case by art as such as if, conversely, the feelings attached to each of the cases the Museum collects as art as such were expressing a core quality shared universally by all the works of art in the world. Idealist philosophers of art tend to confuse art itself with the essence of art, drawing all manner of objections from materialist thinkers aimed at denouncing art itself as essentialist ideology. They make the same confusion. But art itself is not the mysterious essential quality that all works of art in the world have in common; it is merely the idea that all works of art in the world must have something in common, ought to have something in common. Art itself names the idea, the mere idea, of universal comparability among works of art even in the absence of any visible or conceptual common properties, thus, in the absence of demonstrably common aesthetic predicates. The idea that all works of art in the world must have something in common has been regulating aesthetic judgments on art all along, and it is the cornerstone of every humanist view on art and culture. But the idea that all works of art in the world ought to have something in common—­the idea that must translates as ought—­is new, modern, and made mandatory by the switch from the fine arts system to the Art-­in-­General system and the radical doubt this switch has cast on the humanist view. (The alternative, it should be clear, is to proclaim that post-­Duchamp art has severed all ties with the past and that a brand-­new concept of art has erased the whole of world art history before Duchamp. Do I need to underline the absurdity—­not to mention the hubris—­of such a thesis?) The scandal in Duchamp’s infamous urinal, which signaled the switch from the fine arts to the Art-­in-­General system, is that it was absolutely not comparable to anything encompassed by art altogether in 1917. Fountain performed a sort of thought experiment, replacing the uncertainty of universal comparability among works of art with the certainty of their incomparability. No matter what culture, what taste, what art tradition the members of the hanging committee of the New York Independents might have consulted at the time, R. Mutt compelled them either to dismiss Fountain out of hand or submit it to a comparative test actually pitting it against the entire artistic heritage of humankind. Such confrontation, given the finitude of the taste and culture of the committee—­or of any of us—­is an empirical impossibility with which only the ideal art lover of my little fiction takes exception. She would have been the only person with a basis for comparison broad enough—­indeed, actually universal—­to be able to judge in all confidence whether Fountain was art. And she would have judged that Fountain was not art because, in the fine arts system and under the fine arts regime that still seemed to hold sway in 1917, it could not have

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been art. I find it very significant that Malraux, who was not far from fantasizing that he possessed our ideal art lover’s universal culture, didn’t admit Fountain into his Musée imaginaire, whereas he made a case for the art of the “insane” and the “barbarians.”7 Perhaps he tried and bumped against an object his aesthetic reading method—­expansion to world art of the Western fine arts regime—­could not assimilate. This is all the more remarkable in that his classic survey of world art was predicated on the comparison of works of art across time and space made possible by their photographic reproducibility—­according to Walter Benjamin, whom Malraux had read, the very ruin of classical aesthetics.8 If Malraux had made room for Fountain in the Museum without Walls, he would have had to admit that it is not true that all works of art in the world have something in common. Either the necessity of supposing, postulating, and demanding that they do should be thrown on the ash heap of history (and Les voix du silence with it), or that necessity is no longer a theoretical requisite; it is now verging on ethical obligation. To the art-­historical switch from the fine arts system to the Art-­in-­General system there corresponds a switch in aesthetics from a confident, precritical and theoretical idea of art itself to a skeptical, quasi-­ethical and post-­Duchampian one. Whether it is antihumanist, posthumanist, or humanist in a new sense is an open question. All that remains to bring the above remarks full circle is to link the post-­ Duchampian (quasi-­ethical) idea of art itself to the post-­Duchampian (theoretical) concept of Art-­in-­General. You will agree that my disingenuous imaginary scenario is at once exciting and worrying—­which brings me back to the mixed feelings I had at the time of writing the back cover for Au nom de l’art.9 It is easy to see why it is worrying. Since the ideal is not of this world and desire for power is what it is, it is better not to invest the monopoly of aesthetic judgment—­or of anything else, for that matter—­in a single individual. Put yourself in the artists’ shoes. Who would voluntarily submit his or her work to such a dictator of taste, regardless of whether she has been democratically elected? But for the same reasons, I don’t believe that we need fear my scenario becoming reality despite the recurring fantasy in some people’s minds of the Imaginary Museum with a capital M and despite it being true that the art institution has annoying monopolistic tendencies. It is the exciting aspect of the conceit that deserves reflection. One can only marvel at such a spontaneous agreement of humankind resulting in the democratic election as chief curator of the global Museum of a person capable of representing all humans without exception in spite of their innumerable differences and conflicts. There is only one explanation to her having won the election: humanity as a whole must have perceived that this person not only possessed an exhaustive, encyclopedic, firsthand knowledge of the global artistic heritage but also had

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an astonishing degree of empathy with human beings in all the diversity of their subjectivities; their aesthetic experiences; their tastes, cultures, levels of education, and economic standings; their national, linguistic, ethnic, and gender identities; and their social backgrounds. Such is the way she earned her unbelievable power position in the art world: her authority is legitimate because it is grounded in her representativity vis-­à-­vis the human species.10 She got elected because she was capable of representing all human beings individually in terms of their most personal and intimate traits. If this person existed, it would not occur to her to reject an artist’s offering without submitting it to a universal comparative test, a test that, given the catholicity of her taste, would be both ideally open and ideally severe. Our universal art lover would examine the totality of the things proposed to her without the slightest prejudice yet would allow only those things into the Museum that incarnate art altogether and thus authentically express the gist of our common humanity. And her judgments would be just because her prodigious power of empathy would enable her to slip by turns into the shoes of every human on the planet, espouse their taste and comprehend their cultures in all their diversity from within, while identifying with what all humans the world over have in common. But this is not all. In order to imagine the democratic election by the whole of humanity of such an exceptional individual, we would have to imagine a humanity as exceptional as that individual: a humanity cultivated beyond belief, totally impervious to demagogy, and incredibly sensitive to the properly human qualities of the candidates. If my little conceit were to be possible in this world, everyone would have the same empathy for his or her fellow men as the chief curator of the global Museum. Heaven on earth, no less. But then, why she rather than me? She is no better delegate of the human species than anyone. Why resort to representative democracy as election process and call on representativity as the seat of legitimacy? Anyone and everyone would be chief curator of the global Museum and, faced with any would-­be work of art, have the power to say, “This is art” or “This is not art,” period. Art as such. In short, if my fictional scenario were of this world, anything and everything would have the potential to be art because anyone and everyone would be free to so decide and would decide in full consciousness of the human implications at stake. With this we return to the new deal, for in our post-­Duchamp art world, anyone and everyone indeed enjoys this freedom, though of course not in full consciousness of the human implications at stake. This is not because my little fiction magically became reality and because we are now endowed with a prodigious empathy for our fellow humans. It is because the thought experiment incarnated by Fountain has had for result to show

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that only our ideal, nonexistent art lover was in a position to categorically reject a candidate to the name of art. Only she, whom I construed to have intimate acquaintance with the totality of art altogether, would have been in a position to declare with absolute certainty that Fountain was not comparable with anything artistic. Only she would have mastered the one judgment that makes comparative judgments absolute: the negative judgment, “this cannot be art.” Although it is reasonable to assume that in 1917, a urinal was not comparable with anything artistic, this remains to be proved and will never be. The most comprehensive basis for comparison will never be exhaustive enough to allow our ideal, nonexistent art lover to conclude the thought experiment to our full satisfaction, because even an ideal art lover cannot have an infinite art collection. And so she, the supercurator of the globalized Museum with or without wall but with a capital M, is no better off than the rest of us. Anyone and everyone is a legitimate judge of art, and as a result anything and everything is potentially art in principle. Not only technically and aesthetically, but also institutionally. This, may I remind you, is precisely the definition I gave of Art-­in-­General. Obviously there is a gulf between principles and reality, a gulf that is the terrain for all the power struggles that exist in the art world as in the rest of the world, for commercial competition in the art market, for every possible ideological dispute about art, and for a wide variety of tastes and artistic institutions. All this is part of the healthy life of democracy and should not result in our preference for the ideal over the real. What is crucial to recognize is that the difference between principles and reality, and hence between art itself and Art-­in-­General, is not the difference between the ideal and the real but rather the difference between the transcendental and the empirical. See Kant on this subject. It is because of this difference that the coincidence of art as such with art altogether is an idea and nothing else—­I mean, ought to remain an idea, ought to be thought of as being no more than what Kant called a regulative idea: the idea in the name of which real art museums with a small m present their collections. Lastly, it is the same difference between the transcendental and the empirical that ensures that art itself not be conflated with Art-­in-­General. If this were the case, everything would indeed be art, and art would collapse into the “anything whatever,” as some ultraconservative opponents of contemporary art contend.

Kant versus Hegel I realize that in opening the Kantian can of worms, I’m also opening Pandora’s box. In the hope of launching a debate, I should tell the strategic

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reasons for my choice of words when I decided after some hesitation to call the congruence of art as such with art altogether by the name of art itself—­in French, l’art en soi, and in German, Kunst an sich. There is no trace of Kunst an sich, or of Schönheit an sich, in Kant’s third Critique. I am aware of assigning the Ding an sich from the first Critique the reflective function of a regulative idea that becomes clear in Kant’s mind only with the third. A discussion might ensue as to how to conceive faithfulness to Kant. Meanwhile, what is strategic in this choice of words is its deliberate anti-­Hegelianism. If it were not for its Kantian overtones, Kunst an sich, especially in view of my little conceit involving the concentration of all aesthetic judgments in the hands of one supercurator of the Museum with a capital M, could be read as heralding the typically Hegelian moment when the phrase “This is art” is uttered by the Spirit of the World become absolute. This moment is that of the end of art. Now, as we have seen, Kunst an sich is the idea of the congruence of art as such with art altogether. Art as such expresses the subjective, felt content of the word art in the sentence “This is art,” and art altogether designates the universal gathering of the objective referents of the same word. Kantianism sees the congruence of both as the mapping of feelings onto an empirical set of things via the idea of a communality of feelings (sensus communis) that respects the heterogeneity of both domains. Defining art in its material existence as “das sinnliche Scheinen der Idee” (the sensible appearance of the idea),11 Hegelianism assumes a dialectical passageway between these heterogeneous domains. It considers the referents of art altogether as an “embodiment of aboutness” (to rephrase Hegel’s formula in Arthur Danto’s terms) and aligns them according to a historical telos inexorably leading to the realization of art itself by way of the progressive sublation (Aufhebung) of art altogether’s objective spirit by the Absolute Spirit. According to both the Kantian and the Hegelian views, art altogether refers to everything humankind has called art in the course of its history and keeps calling art. But from the Hegelian point of view of this Absolute Spirit, it would be a closed set to which nothing new can be added conceptually. Artists may well continue to produce works; the concept of art has reached its completeness. This is what is implied by Hegel’s notion of the end of art and, I suspect, by Arthur Danto’s “art beyond the pale of history” or by Hans Belting’s “end of art history” as well.12 My remarks are meant to offer an alternative to their views, one that both acknowledges that art is inevitably appreciated by comparison with previous art and yet leaves room for true artistic innovation, for the surprise of incomparability. As a regulative idea, art (art itself) is neither an accomplished concept nor a thing of the past. As a collection of things, art (art altogether) is neither a closed set nor a basis for comparison, having

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become an absolute benchmark. As the expression of aesthetic judgments claiming universal validity, art (art as such) is not immune to contamination by the most idiosyncratic preferences coming from all cultures and all niches of society; quite to the contrary, that’s what it’s made of. And as the condition our present-­day culture finds itself in, art (Art-­in-­General) is the widest-­open situation imaginable, from which there is or should be no retreat in the foreseeable future.

Lecture delivered at the “Ideals and Ideology” conference on museums, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, April 1998, subsequently slightly altered. Unpublished in English; published in German, Danish, and Dutch translations: “Die Ethik des Museums nach Duchamp: Eine naïve Theorie,” Auszüge aus der Mitschrift des Symposiums “Zukunft Ehrenhof ” (Düsseldorf, December 1998); “Museets etik efter Duchamp, En naiv teori,” Kunsten og Vaerket, Aestetikstudier VI (Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 1999); “Museumethiek na Broodthaers: een naïve theorie,” De Witte Raaf 91 (May-­June 2001).

4

The Idea of Art and the Ethics of the Museum A C a n di d T h e or y

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—­neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—­that’s all.” ­L ew is Ca r roll, Through the Looking Glass

Remember the wisdom in the nursery rhyme? All the King’s horses and all the King’s men . . . And the crash that shook the forest from end to end as healthy, commonsensical little Alice walked away from Humpty Dumpty? Since I am responsible for having borrowed the words pictorial nominalism from a note in Marcel Duchamp’s White Box to title a book, let me start with a disclaimer. Never did I think or believe, nor did I insinuate that Duchamp thought or believed, that “a nominalist view of language which holds that words lack fixed ontological essences that are their meanings” automatically leads to the conclusion that “meanings rather, are seen to be created by convention alone, arbitrary, and hence manipulable.”1 It’s the words hence manipulable I object to most in that sentence by art critic Thomas McEvilley, who shows his own Humpty Dumpty manipulative usage of words when, in the next sentence in the same article, he calls on the authority of Saussure and Wittgenstein to justify his nominalist view and, a little further, goes on to say If words (such as ‘art’) lack rigid essences, if they are, rather, empty variables that can be converted to different uses, then usage is the only ground of meaning in language. To be this or that is simply to be called

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this or that. To be art is to be called art, by the people who supposedly are in charge of the world—­artists, critics, curators, art historians, and so on. There is no appeal from the foundation of usage, no higher court on the issue. If something (anything) is presented as art by an artist and contextualized as art within the system then it is art, and there is nothing anybody can do about it.2

There is a lot you can do about it, starting with not letting yourself be intimidated by “the people who supposedly are in charge.” Here is, for example, what Brydon Smith, Max Dean, Ron Martin, and myself did when Smith, then chief curator for modern art at Canada’s National Gallery, asked us some thirty years ago to help him install the Duchamp room, which was to contain eight readymades from the Schwarz edition of replicas. We collectively decided to deinstitutionalize the works as much as possible: no pedestals, no Plexiglas cases, no labels on the wall, and a hanging meant to reboost the readymades’ provocative capacity to raise the question, “What the hell is this doing in a museum?” As a result, the snow shovel was shown just leaning against the wall—­mind you, in Canada a snow shovel is a very useful object. Perhaps we were simply taking McEvilley at his word: “The process of universalizing the art context goes back at least as far as Duchamp’s showing of readymades.”3 But in retrospect what I think this anecdote demonstrates is that in matters of aesthetics, the response to pseudotheory is real ethics. When a curator in charge of the treasures (and Duchamp’s snow shovel is a treasure) collected by a national museum is willing to risk submitting them to the test of the “reciprocal readymade” (“Use a Rembrandt as an ironing board”), then he demonstrates that he is agreeing with McEvilley that “to be art is to be called art, by the people who supposedly are in charge of the world—­artists, critics, curators, art historians, and so on” if and only if “and so on” includes anybody and everybody. He also demonstrates then that it is not true that “there is no appeal from the foundation of usage, no higher court on the issue.” Ask the guy who sooner or later will walk away with the snow shovel. As honestly and straightforwardly as I can, here is a hopefully refreshing view of the modern, Western idea of art, which is of course that of its autonomy. Though in a sense this idea is infinitely older than the modern era and most probably not restricted to the Western world, it came into full bloom with the creation and development of the museums of art, when certain things, already called art, were severed from their magical, religious, political, social, or otherwise functional usages and stored in specialized public spaces devoted to disinterested contemplation and aesthetic enjoyment. Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, a century

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3. Lynne Cohen, View of the Duchamp room at the National Gallery of Canada, 1987. Estate of Lynne Cohen.

or so after the museums’ creation, it gradually became explicit that the works of artists—­art in the making, things not called art yet—­had the museum as their sole final destination. Then the awareness emerged that the autonomy of a work of art—­its capacity to preside over its own destiny—­ had been rephrased as the autonymy of the work of art—­its capacity to call itself art. A work that lands in a museum of art is by definition a work of museum quality, and museum quality speaking for itself, it is as if the work bestowed on itself the title of work of art in the sovereign manner of a Napoleon grabbing the crown from the pope’s hands to put it on his own head. With the advent of Duchamp’s readymade, the identity of art’s autonomy and art’s autonymy was cruelly mocked and made ironically blatant, since nothing confers a utilitarian object such as a snow shovel the autonomy of a work of art aside from its nomination as art. Then, with the readymades’ co-­optation by museums of art, something else and more perverse emerged: if museums are simultaneously devoted to sanctioning the autonomy of things already called art and the sole destination for things claiming the name of art but not called art yet, then the so-­called autonymy or capacity for self-­nomination of works of art boils down to the purely institutional power that the naming procedure presupposes.

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4. Marcel Broodthaers, double page from Der Adler vom Oligozän bis heute, exhibition catalog, vol. 1. Düsseldorf, Kunsthalle, 1972. Left, © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2018. Right, © 2018 C. Herscovici / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

The question becomes, who has it? And the practice of art becomes a war game of sorts played among artists and museum people. Someone is an artist if he or she succeeds through an appropriate strategy to see his or her work co-­opted by the museum of art, the single rule of the game being that a museum is one of art if it contains art, and that anything a museum of art contains is thereby art. This tautology parodically describes the triumph of art’s autonomy and/or its ridiculous collapse into circular art world games. Marcel Broodthaers, who is the first post-­Duchamp artist to have perfectly understood the pathological nature of this vicious circle and the moral tragedy it entails for artists and art lovers of true ambition, broke the circle by posing as a museum director. In September 1968, he founded the fictitious Musée d’art moderne, Département des aigles, Section XIXe Siècle at his home address, rue de la Pépinière, in Brussels. He subsequently exhibited several other sections of the Musée d’art moderne in various places. In 1972, at the Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf, he exhibited the Section des figures of said museum, subtitled The Eagle from the Oligocene to the Present. The show comprised about three hundred objects representing eagles—­some acknowledged works of art, some not—­all

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accompanied by a label stating, in three languages, “This is not a work of art.” In the catalog, Broodthaers specified that these labels “illustrate an idea of Marcel Duchamp and René Magritte,” which he in turn illustrated by juxtaposing on two facing pages the photograph of Duchamp’s Fountain and a reproduction of Magritte’s La Trahison des Images. Basing myself on an analysis of Broodthaers’s Düsseldorf installation, I tend to read his understanding of the post-­Duchamp art condition as follows: any object whatsoever, a urinal for example, provided it is presented as art by a museum of art, comes as automatically accompanied by an invisible label stating “This is a work of art” as an image (re)presenting a pipe comes accompanied by an invisible label stating “This is a pipe.”4 Magritte’s canvas acts as a (re)presentational device for the pipe in the same way the base under Duchamp’s Fountain acts as a presentational device for the urinal. In other words, it acts like invisible quotation marks around “This is a pipe,” similar to the invisible quotation marks you would immediately understand to be wrapped around the word “Socrates” if I told you “Socrates has eight letters”—­a sentence wherein the name of the philosopher is made to stand for itself and is thus rendered autonymous.5 Hence, to make the invisible visible, the negating sentence underneath both Magritte’s pipe and Broodthaers’s eagles. Broodthaers’s fictitious museum is the starting point for the new, deliberately candid theory of the museum that I want to propose here. In a nutshell: museums of art are public institutions whose main functions are to collect and preserve objects called by the name of art and to present them in the name of art. Therein lies the legitimate claim to art’s autonomy. Let me now sketch out this theory in ten points. (1) Museums are basically storage rooms with a public access. Preservation and presentation are the museums’ main functions. The post-­ Broodthaers view holds that presentation is the key word. Indeed, I shall argue that the art museum’s ethical and political legitimacy for collection and preservation stems from its task of presentation and not the other way around. To present something is to answer the question “What thing?” with a quasi sentence composed of three deictics, three pointers: “this, here, now.” Various presentation conventions and devices—­such as frames, bases, vitrines, spotlights, or the white walls of the exhibition room—­have the same function as “this, here, now.” Such presentation devices are in no way peculiar to museums of art. You find them in art galleries, Salons and Kunsthallen, which do not collect. You also find them in other museums as well as in shop windows, department stores, commercial fairs, information stands, amusement parks, and displays of all sorts, not to forget private homes. Peculiar to art museums and galleries is that the things they present are presented as art, which in turn means as samples or examples of the general category “art.” Such samples or

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examples are called works of art. The ostensive quasi sentence is thus completed: “This, here, now, is a work of art.” Or, shorter (the here and now being implicit with the utterance of the sentence): “This is a work of art.” Or, even shorter (if the sample quality of works of art is implicit, too): “This is art.” (2) Every given thing that has found its way into a museum or a gallery of art bears an invisible label stating “This is a work of art.” The label is a citation, that is, the sentence “This is a work of art” is in quotation marks. The quotation marks are no more visible than the ones framing the word “Socrates” in the sentence “Socrates has eight letters,” and no less visible than the canvas (re)presenting the pipe in Magritte’s La Trahison des Images. Their function is to make the “work of art” in the sentence autonymous and thus appear autonomous. They lend the works displayed in the art museum the capacity of presenting themselves as art, autonomously, as if they were endowed with their own free will and spoke “I am art” autonymously. In truth, they intimate the presence of a subject of enunciation uttering the sentence “This is art” who is being quoted by the museum institution. When a museum presents something as art, it is as if it said, “Here and now is a case of ‘this is art.’” In the museum’s mouth, to speak metaphorically, “This is art” is not performative, and it is not itself a judgment, it is a quoted judgment: “It has been proclaimed that this is art.” The museum does not say who is being quoted, that is, who performed the proclamation. This means that the museum doesn’t claim the power and declines the responsibility of making the thing in question into art. However, as a museum of art and not of something else, the museum has a responsibility that it cannot decline and a power that it cannot fail to claim: those of presenting the things it labels “This is a work of art” in the name of art. (3) To present something in the name of art is to act as if one were mandated by art itself to address this thing, here and now quoted as being art, to the viewer. But art itself does not exist in the way the things called art exist. There is no way to point at art itself by way of the three deictics: this, here, now. Art itself is the object of an idea. To say that museums present things in the name of art is to say that they act on behalf of that idea. When the museum presents something in the name of art, it addresses each of us personally, as if it said, “I am asking you to confirm that this thing, which I present to you here and now as being cited as art, deserves to be called art indeed.” Or shorter, “‘This is (a work of ) art,’ isn’t it?” Or longer, “Please remove those quotation marks and take charge of the sentence ‘This is (a work of ) art’ yourself.” If you do so, “This is (a work of ) art” then expresses your judgment, and you are baptizing, or rebaptizing, this thing, here, by the name of art. The result of that judgment or

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that baptism is that you have now entered the presented thing into your personal imaginary art collection. (4) Notice that we have now moved from presentation to collection via your personal experience and judgment. The candid theory argues that when the museum presents something in the name of art, it begs you to enter this thing, here, into your personal collection the way the museum has entered it into the public collection. I am of course not talking about purchase, donation, or bequest. I am talking about the judgment that makes museum officials decide to purchase this instead of that and accept or refuse donations and bequests. The candid theory also argues that in this transfer of power and responsibility from the institution to the viewer lies the ethical legitimacy of the museum as an institution whose apparently primary function is to collect and preserve things called art. In making this argument, I purposively call attention to its circularity, for I never defined the way museums enter things into their collections. I simply assumed that museum officials judge exactly as you do. So the argument, in fact, goes the other way around: when the museum entered this thing, here, into the public collection, it did it the way you are entering it now into your personal collection. (5) What way? As I said, through a judgment expressing itself as a baptism. As a viewer presented with objects bearing an invisible label stating “This is art,” you cannot help but experience these objects with regard to what the label states, namely, a claim to museum quality. You cannot help but liking them or disliking them, being moved or unmoved by them, feeling intellectually aroused or numbed by them. In one word, you cannot help but judge them aesthetically with whatever taste and culture life has equipped you with. And since they are being presented to you quoted as being art, you cannot help but judge them in reference to art—­that is, in comparison with whatever art you are acquainted with. The presentation of something in the name of art carries an invitation to judge it in reference to art that the mere presentation of something as art does not carry. (Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson, shown in an exhibition on the history of surgery, would definitely not lose its art status, yet it would not be shown in the name of art because it would not invite evaluative comparison with other works of art.) Whether you say it out loud or not, the outcome of your judgment takes the shape of “This is art” (good art, bad art, interesting art, boring art, whatever) or “This is not art” (meaning “This doesn’t even deserve to be called art.”) We are back to McEvilley’s nominalist theory: to be art is to be called art. Only now you are responsible for the calling, and not just “the people who supposedly are in charge of the world—­artists, critics, curators, art historians, and so on.” It is now as if the individual viewer were in charge of the museum’s collection in

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spite of the obvious fact that the collection precedes the viewer’s judgment in time. It is as if your personal judgment, when you baptize the presented thing by the name of art, had been the legitimate source of the cited judgment that the museum addressed to you in the name of art. The peculiar circularity in which the art museum finds its ethical legitimacy is nothing but the reflexivity of aesthetic judgment.6 (6) I said above (see point 3) that to present something in the name of art is to act as if one was mandated by art itself to beg that the thing in question, quoted as being art, be confirmed in its art status. The question is now that of the mandate. Art itself, I said, does not exist in the way the things called art exist. It is the object of an idea. Such an idea is by necessity indeterminate and indemonstrable. What it would amount to if it were determinate and demonstrable would be something like the common denominator of all the things called art. Though this common denominator is a mere idea, the things themselves can, in principle, be gathered and presented. Let’s call the virtual gathering of all existing works of art in the world art altogether. This would amount to something like the museum of all art museums, the collection of all art collections—­with one crucial proviso resulting from the previous point. Since it is now as if the individual viewer were in charge of the museum’s collection, art altogether is not the outcome of some mechanical summation of the catalogs of all art museums in the world. It is a collection arrived at as if it had been gathered by one single person, the addressee of each “‘This is art,’ isn’t it?” whose personal judgment actual museums solicit. So, for the museum to act as if it were mandated by art itself is to present its collection in the name of the collection of all art collections as if it were the personal collection of every singular museum visitor. (7) Until now I have been personifying the museum. I said such things as “the museum presents,” and “it is as if [the museum] said.” But museums are not persons; they are institutions run by persons. Public institutions, whose personnel are not mandated by art itself but by the state, the city, the nation, or by a private foundation serving a public interest, that is, ultimately, by the People.7 As professionals with a specific expertise in art, museum directors, curators, and conservators are entitled and encouraged to feel mandated by art itself; yet as servants of a public institution, what they are actually paid to do is collect and preserve things called art on behalf of the People and present them to the public. The political legitimacy of museums and museum persons lies in a certain equation among four terms, two of which are ideas, the other two empirical realities. The People—­like the nation, the republic, or humankind—­is an idea, as is art itself, and the actual population that is called the public and whose virtual final count would include anyone and everyone is an

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empirical reality in the same sense as the collection of all collections I called art altogether, whose final count is equally virtual. The equation articulating those four terms is the following: art altogether stands to art itself as the public stands to the People. Or, otherwise said, art altogether’s relationship to the public stands for art itself ’s relationship to the People. Still otherwise, the public is responsible for the collections gathered by the art museums of this world in the way the People stands to warrant the idea of art itself. This is what humanists mean when they say that art is the collective property of humankind. Where I believe humanists err is that they ground the publicity of the museum on its patrimonial character. They argue that since humanity possesses this collective treasure called art, actual men and women deserve to have access to it. I argue in the opposite direction: provided that men and women have access to the treasure and are free to put its art status on trial at any given moment, its maintenance in publicly sponsored repositories is justified. Presentation—­or publicity—­legitimates collection—­or patrimony. The proper ethics of art museums rest on the distinction between their two tasks of collection and presentation, and the political legitimacy of their collections rests on presentation, not the other way around. (8) I said earlier (see point 4) that when the museum presents something in the name of art, it begs you to enter this thing, here, into your personal collection the way the museum has entered it into the public collection. Here also I personified the museum. But when I claimed that this identity of ways was in effect explained in reverse, by the fact that the museum entered this thing, here, into the public collection the way you are entering it now into your personal collection, I refrained from personifying the museum any further: I said that museum officials judge exactly as you do. I meant that as individuals in charge of purchasing works of art, they judge aesthetically.8 Only when this identity of ways is seen clearly does the difference in mandates come to the fore. When they collect, museum officials are mandated by the People; when they exhibit, they act as if mandated by art itself. In other words, museums present things in the name of art and collect things in the name of the public good, or in the name of that public good that is called culture. As an individual, you are not mandated by anyone and you are under no obligation of feeling mandated by anything broader than yourself. It remains that in giving the object that the museum presents as art the name art yourself (i.e., in removing the quotation marks around “This is art” yourself ), you endorse the fact that the thing in question was presented to you in the name of art. And as soon as you have endorsed that fact, it is as if you had reentered the thing into the public collection and restored the quotation marks around “This is art” by including yourself in the people the museum quotes. As

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if you said, “It is being said that this is art. I agree.” At that moment, you approve of the thing’s autonomy/autonymy as art. By the same token, you legitimate the museum as an institution because your voice is now one of the many that the museum relays. (9) It is time to recall the modern–­and perhaps not so modern—­ Western—­and perhaps not so Western—­definition of the autonomy of a work of art that I invoked in my introduction. I defined it as the work’s capacity to preside over its own destiny, which is literally what autonomy means. Of course, I was skeptical. I knew that the idea—­the ideology—­of art’s autonomy was perhaps nothing but an effect of the creation and development of the museums of art as storage rooms for things already called art. And how could I not have been aware of the fact that once museums were in existence, they were bound to become the sole final destination for things claiming the name of art but not called art yet, and that from then on, the autonomy of a work of art was bound to be rephrased as its autonymy. I defined the latter as the work’s capacity to call itself art, which is, again, a strict definition of autonymy. Yet here, too, I was skeptical. Taking my clues from Duchamp, I knew to what extent a mere thing depended on its institutional framework to be perceived as art. And taking further clues from Broodthaers’s critique of the post-­Duchamp art world, I knew how inevitable any mere thing’s art status was once it had been sanctioned by an art museum. Inevitable, that is, if you adhere to McEvilley’s Humpty Dumpty nominalism. I quote him again: “If something (anything) is presented as art by an artist and contextualized as art within the system then it is art, and there is nothing anybody can do about it.” But if you take your clues from Broodthaers—­who definitely plays Alice to McEvilley’s Humpty Dumpty—­there is nothing that’s inevitable except the crash that shakes the forest from end to end as Humpty Dumpty falls off his wall. When Broodthaers, as an artist, assumed the guise of a museum director, he took it on himself to fulfill only one of the two roles of a museum director: presentation. He very explicitly left collection to other, real museum directors: printed on the cover of the Düsseldorf catalog is the complete list of the public collections from which he borrowed most of the three hundred objects depicting an eagle that he showed. Broodthaers seized his freedom as an artist to incarnate the museum’s autonomy. But he respected the ethics of the museum. Collected, works of art are not autonomous. They are merely presented as autonomous. And of course it is not desirable that art be autonomous in the sense of being cut off from life, whether private or public. True, countless things were severed from their private, social, religious, political, or otherwise functional contexts when they were stored away in museums. But it is with them as with all things past: their original context is lost and they must be recontextualized by the

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historians’ work. Their being preserved is the best guarantee against the autonomy of oblivion. When I attempted to justify both the autonomy and the autonymy of art, it was not on the side of collection but only on that of presentation. It is still desirable that art be presented as autonomous, and the candid theory I defend here is obviously a plea for the maintenance of a certain kind of museums where things are quoted as having been called by the name of art and are presented in the name of art. (10) (By way of provisional conclusion, or perhaps coda.) The candid theory, you realize, puts the museum’s legitimacy into the hands of the public at large. It subjects museum officials to the verdict of the crowd when they put up exhibitions and simultaneously encourages them to trust their expertise when they build up a collection. Am I telling them that they should exhibit Norman Rockwell while they collect Bruce Nauman?9 I am not a museum person, and I am not out to tell museum persons what they should do. Most of them already feel that they have to live with such a split-­personality syndrome. I want to share some reflections on the ethics of the museum with anyone interested. They are risky. Indeed, the candid theory seeks to find legitimation there, where it hurts: in presentation, and at a time in history when museums of art, having already found their slot in the leisure industry, are precisely putting the emphasis on a constant renewal of their presentational strategies and risk forsaking their patrimonial role. Exhibition designers are becoming more important than curators these days, and curators more important than artists, while deaccessioning has become the order of the day. Is the candid theory not an irresponsible one? Much less so, I would contend, than the nominalist and circular theories that give all power to the institution but fail to raise the question of the institution’s legitimacy—­or do so in order to delegitimate the museum altogether precisely on account of the absolute power it is supposed to have. Actually, the candid theory is an attempt to escape the double bind felt by many radical intellectuals in the art world who are led to practice a quasi-­schizophrenic double language when the institution they criticize from within is threatened from without. From within their institutional critique, they denounce the autonomy of the art institution as being an obsolete humanist ideology, the better to find themselves defending it with humanist arguments when conservative politicians claim a right of intrusion into their autonomous domain and, claiming to speak in the name of the people—­with a small p—­seek to deprive museum officials and artists of their freedom of expression.10 The real threat comes not so much from institutional art theories and nominalist aesthetics nor even from circular co-­optation within the art world. The real threat is that museums of art, as we know them, will soon cease to exist—­by which I don’t mean that Marinetti’s slogan, “Burn the

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5. Lynne Cohen, View of the Duchamp room at the National Gallery of Canada, 1987. Estate of Lynne Cohen.

museums,” has the slightest chance of being put in practice, but instead that the museums’ full transformation into theme parks run for profit by the private sector is just around the corner. The candid theory acknowledges the true cultural vulnerability of present-­day museums, threatened by corporate takeover on the one hand and by the demise of their old humanistic legitimation on the other. It is precisely because it is too easy for the corporate trustees of museums to appropriate the old humanist legitimation in order to press for Norman Rockwell blockbusters that it is urgent for all of us genuinely concerned with art’s future to secure a future for art’s past based on another kind of legitimation. It is neither humanistic in the old sense nor antihumanistic. It is risky, I agree. It is debatable, and I offer it for debate.

In October 2004, the Tate Modern organized a debate between myself and Howard Caygill, the renowned author of (among other books) Art of Judgement (London: Blackwell, 1989) and editor of A Kant Dictionary (London: Blackwell, 1995). These circumstances account for the direct mode of address to Howard Caygill my text momentarily shifts into. Excerpted, adapted, and expanded from “Do Artists Speak on Behalf of All of Us?” in The Life and Death of Images: Ethics and Aesthetics, ed. Diarmuid Costello and Dominic Willsdon (London: Tate, 2008). See chapter 1 for the first part.

5

Do Artists Speak on Behalf of All of Us?

To a person of my generation, who grew up in Europe in the 1950s to witness the triumph of abstract art in both its geometric and tachiste incarnations, and later assimilated yet another triumph, that of American abstract expressionism,1 the comeback of representation in the discourse on art since the mideighties felt like a betrayal. Bred in the naive conviction that throughout the century abstract art had been intrinsically progressive and figurative art intrinsically retardataire, I had been shocked by the arrival of pop art and, a decade later, hyperrealism. I adjusted by shifting my attention to the relation of painting to photography. Photography’s invention had traumatized many nineteenth-­century painters and provoked the most advanced of them to react by mimicking, in their own body at work, the indexical functioning of the light-­sensitive surface. It was Monet competing with the speed of the photograph as it captured the fleeting light of dawn falling on the Rouen cathedral. It was Cézanne comparing the painter’s brain to a photoplate plunged in the immanent knowledge of a bath of developer. It was Seurat mechanizing his hand and digitizing the image in a way similar to the Lumière brothers’ autochrome process of color photography. It was Duchamp registering that a photograph was a ready-­made painting or drawing and inferring the consequences. And, to cut a long story short, it was Andy Warhol proclaiming, “I want to be a machine.” With this or similar rationales and such condensed narratives, it was a cinch to make photo-­realism acceptable and to endorse conceptual art’s reliance on the photograph as the naturally progressive thing to do. Important was that by moving from the iconic to the indexical, I and others in my generation were able to inscribe figurative practices in the general critique of representation that we had been taught was not only the essence of modern art but also the essence of progressive politics in art. With the Peirceian notion of the index, we felt equipped—­I say “we”

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for I was really not alone in this, with such brilliant traveling companions as Roland Barthes, Rosalind Krauss, Hubert Damisch, and Douglas Crimp—­to consider that the most significant contemporary art practices, including some figurative ones—­witness the “Pictures” generation—­were pursuing the radical critique of representation that we identified with modernism and that no brand of postmodernism should betray lest it lose its claim on political progressivism. And then came identity politics. I mean identity politics as consciousness-­raising activism soon to become an artistic genre. It started in the mideighties with the AIDS crisis and the need to address the shocking fact that the HIV retrovirus singled out certain individuals only. Who remembers the quadruple H: Haitians, homosexuals, hemophiliacs, and heroin addicts? In 1982–­1983, the jumbling together of such heterogeneous categories, buttressed by statistically significant medical evidence, upset every received definition of what constitutes an identity. It is another shocking fact that Haitians were swiftly forgotten and that hemophiliacs and heroin addicts were left on the roadside while homosexuals were fortunately able to organize. They claimed their difference and, in so doing, retroactively reinforced the identitarian claims of other, broader, but similarly marginalized groups extending to women and African Americans. In Europe, where it was not so much the AIDS crisis as the failed assimilation of the immigrant population that created anxiety around identity, the issue was called multiculturalism. On the ideological front, England embraced it and France resisted it, while in both countries de facto quasi apartheid made their dispute a moot point. Whatever complex, long-­term effects multiculturalism and/or identity politics have had on European and American society at large, they had a precise and quite sudden impact on the art world on both sides of the Atlantic: they put representation back on the agenda—­no longer as a concept subjected to criticism and deconstruction but as a positive, affirmative concept to be embraced by whoever had progressive ideas and goals. The 1993 Whitney Biennial was a landmark in that respect. I was not happy then, and I am still not happy with this comeback of representation. Of course, this is not to say that I wish to revert to the old-­fashioned and definitely naive belief that by being critical of representation, abstract art was automatically more progressive than figurative art. Looking back on both my juvenile convictions and the return of representation in the eighties and nineties, I realized at some point that what bothered me in that return was that it was in fact the return of representativity. Identity politics as a genre of artmaking transformed artists into standard-­bearers for a group and their works into tokens of whatever identity that group wished to project. I also realized that what

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had been precious and politically progressive in the modernist critique of representation was precisely that it was a critique of representativity, even though it did not succeed in theorizing itself in those terms. The iconic or figurative sense of the word representation obliterated its political, “parliamentary” sense and barred access to the way modernism had criticized the latter, with means, however, that were not themselves political but rather aesthetic. The present essay is an attempt to harness the “Kant after Duchamp” approach to the working out of some untheorized potentialities of modernism as critique of representativity. What modernism, from Manet on, radically questioned but did not destroy was the tacit and largely imaginary social contract, dating from the foundation of academies, according to which artists with aspirations to high art were expected—­and expecting!—­to make works from within and on behalf of the cultivated class they were addressing. I call this fantasized social contract the imaginary congruence of mandate and address. When academies were created, as early as the sixteenth century, it was with the help of a strong ideological rationale that argued for the inherent nobility of painters as intellectual practitioners of a liberal art. As soon as they regrouped in academies, court painters, who thought of themselves as noblemen amid noblemen but who were objectively craftsmen and servants, were allowed to collectively fantasize that they had become legitimate representatives of the class they were in fact serving. They were performing that class’s representation, in both senses of the word: they portrayed it and they were its cultural deputies, displaying the rituals, pageants, trappings, and values of the court to the court with the populace watching in awe.2 Modernism, which is best summarized as the pursuit of high art under adverse conditions—­among which, as T. J. Clark once put it, “the lack of an adequate ruling class to address”3—­inherited from the court art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries this fantasized congruence of mandate and address. It was a poisoned legacy, fraught with contradictions. Though no longer court artists, painters and sculptors with the ambition to pursue and equal the high art of the past struggled with the injunction to identify with an aristocratic constituency that was now by and large missing and replaced by a mostly philistine bourgeoisie. They sometimes reacted by forging alliances with the oppressed classes, whether it’s Courbet and the Paris Commune in 1871 or El Lissitsky and the Bolsheviks in 1920. But such alliances—­which may account for the difference art historians see between modernism and the avant-­garde—­were temporary, local, tactical, contrived, problematic, and tainted by wishful idealism. They also confirm that the essential thing in the legacy of court art, shared by modernism and the avant-­garde alike but unbeknownst to both, was

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the congruence of mandate and address. The avant-­garde artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries put the emphasis on the particular class or group they declared themselves addressing and mandated by—­ and in that sense, identity politics as a genre of artmaking is an avant-­ garde—­and neglected to focus on the congruence of mandate and address per se. Without paying any more attention to it, the modernist artists of the same period did not relinquish that imaginary social contract; rather, they universalized it. Instead of imagining themselves mandated by the aristocracy to address the aristocracy or by the proletariat to address the proletariat, they imagined themselves mandated by humanity to address humanity. Kandinsky fantasizing that he had invented a new universal language called Malerei (Painting) is exemplary. In the process, the great proponents of high modernism abandoned or deconstructed representation, understood as figuration. They left the implicit critique of representativity, which was their actual achievement, untheorized, except occasionally by recourse to equally untheorized bland humanism and trite universalism.

Formalism versus Multiculturalism It is modernism’s association with formalism that we need to start from if we want to begin theorizing the universalized congruence of mandate and address that modernism upheld but left untheorized. The reason is that formalism foregrounds aesthetics: it is a mode of interpretation of art that begins and ends in judgments of taste. It doesn’t matter whether formalism understands taste in Kantian terms, for one doesn’t need a theory to exercise one’s taste, and formalism is sheer practice. One of its best proponents, Clement Greenberg, approved Kant’s Critique of Judgment often, although in at least one instance, as we shall see, he disavowed Kant openly. For my part I shall assume, here as elsewhere in this book, that Kant “got it right.” And I emphasize that what Kant got right is the legitimacy of any pure or true aesthetic judgment’s claim to universal validity. This does not entail that I espouse formalism: I am simply content for the time being with noting, historically, that modernism and formalism often went hand in hand, as was the case in the writings of Greenberg. Postmodernism, in part born from a radical critique of those writings, has by now spawned a number of interpretations, one of them being its association with multiculturalism and identity politics. Modernism and formalism are tied to the claim of universality built into aesthetic judgments understood in Kantian terms. Postmodernism and multiculturalism do away with that claim and are declaratively anti-­Kantian. For the last thirty years,

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the voice of their proponents has been speaking much louder than that of the formalists. Current art criticism considers the vexed question of universality in art with great suspicion and often meets it with strong, politically motivated distrust in the legitimacy of artists to represent humanity as a whole and to speak in its name. Such preposterous claims are hegemonic, ethnocentric, colonialist, sexist, and entail the same abuse of power that is encountered wherever the Western, white, male, heterosexual worldview seeks to prevail in the name of “mankind.” Granted. For some time, multiculturalism was deemed by many the best alternative to universalism in art and art politics. Advocates of multiculturalism do not deny artists the right to represent a community, only the right to represent us all. Even the most radical relativists in matters of art and culture are careful not to lapse into total subjectivism or solipsism. They understand identity and representation in collective terms—­collective as opposed to both individual and universal. A great deal of the art of the nineties and an even greater deal of the discourse in support of it was about group identity and group representation. Sooner or later, though, this discourse was bound to face difficulties, not least the ghettoization of group identities. I have not encountered a sincere advocate of multiculturalism or identity politics who refuses to admit that all humans have something in common and that art, if it is any good, addresses that something beyond and across cultural particularities. What the sincere multiculturalist argues is that although perhaps true, such blanket humanism is useless and serves to cover up differences, contradictions, and conflicts in the real world. Granted, again. But the difficulties do not evaporate just because some embarrassing words have been made taboo. It may be better to work out the difficulties and reclaim the embarrassing words; better to see the canonical self-­interpretation of modernism in new terms so as to throw new light on the postmodernist reaction; better to read in modernism, rather than a critique of representation, an unresolved crisis of representativity affecting the claim artists may have had to legitimately represent us all—­if that’s what they claimed. In a nutshell, I believe the multiculturalist discourse to be mistaken in making universalism the target of its critique when it should be representativity. Signs are appearing here and there that I am not alone in believing this. Here is one example, taken from the September 2004 issue of Artforum: “The desires, possibilities, and deferred dreams of the black community as expressed through the work: the Message. But those desires, possibilities, and deferred dreams present a difficulty. Message, formulated in this way, equals a kind of restraint, a Bantustan policed from both sides of the fence.”4 The last phrase is an eloquent paraphrase of the ghetto I mentioned a minute ago, while “the Message” clearly means representation. The quote

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is from Glenn Ligon on David Hammons (one African American artist on another), or rather, on the problems arising from making Hammons’s work speak for the community he belongs to and supposedly represents simply because it is not the dominant community. Ligon goes on, this time about Lorna Simpson’s work (another African American artist, and a woman, too): “‘What does this have to do with us?’ Black bodies, yes, but apparently not ‘black’ enough, because these bodies refuse to ‘represent.’ They remain mute, which is not even a representation of silencing, but a theatre of refusal, a thwarting of legibility.”5 Ligon is a good writer, and his choice of words is to the point. Lorna Simpson’s photos are representations in the sense that photography is not an abstract art and that the photos contain figures. They are not representations inasmuch as those figures are “black bodies” that “refuse to ‘represent’” and “remain mute,” that is, bodies that refuse to stand for the black community’s identity and to speak in its name. There are other such examples. I have made my point if it is clear that in Glenn Ligon’s article, representation is no longer the master concept it was in the nineties, that it has become problematic, and that the problem with representation lies not in its association with figuration (as opposed to abstraction) but rather in the representativity the concept implies. When Ligon writes “a thwarting of legibility,” you might want to read “a thwarting of legitimacy.” David Hammons and Lorna Simpson go out of their way to let us know that they are not mandated by the African American community to speak on its behalf—­I mean, to make sculptures or photographs on its behalf, which in turn means to produce things embodying their aesthetic decisions on its behalf. Yet making aesthetic decisions is clearly what they do. Works of art are, partly but decisively, embodiments of aesthetic judgments evaluated by way of aesthetic judgments. Hammons and Simpson’s works, like all genuine works of art, are the outcome of myriad aesthetic decisions resulting in the final decision that declares the thing the artist was working on a work of art, that is, finished, ready to be exhibited and subjected to the judgment of others. Of all others, of an indeterminate other. Proponents of identity politics as a genre of artmaking are likely to retort that aesthetic decisions are much less decisive than ideological and political ones. They argue that claiming the autonomy of aesthetic decisions is a typically conservative prejudice and that it is ideological precisely in denying that it is ideological. Consequently, they claim their own aesthetic decisions as being counterideological. I don’t dispute the ideological nature of aesthetic decisions inasmuch as ideology is the realm of the unthought, the unargued, or the involuntary. But this is not what the proponents of identity politics as an art genre mean: their ideological

6. David Hammons. In the Hood, 1993. Athletic sweatshirt hood with wire. 23″ × 10″ × 5″ / 58.5 × 25.5 × 12.75 cm. Collection Connie and Jack Tilton, New York.

7. Glenn Ligon, Study for Negro Sunshine #26, 2010. Oil stick, coal dust, and gesso on paper, 12″ × 9″ / 30.5 × 22.8 cm. © Glenn Ligon. Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, and Thomas Dane Gallery, London.

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moves are deliberate, voluntary, programmatic; they must be if they are to serve a political cause. The point is not whether or not aesthetic judgments are voluntarily or involuntarily ideological. The point is whether or not they claim universal assent. Ideological statements don’t make such claims, especially if they are overtly political and seek the victory of one party over another. Only when they aim at convincing reticent others and leave them room for free response do ideological statements approach the status of aesthetic judgments. We’re entering the gray zone where the most interesting and compelling political art is situated, the zone where aesthetic decisions are not entirely subservient to political goals, the zone where propaganda art can be of great quality—­witness John Heartfield. In such art, aesthetic decisions have the last word, however oriented by political intentions they may be. And they have the last word precisely because they beg the approval of others, of an indeterminate and thus universal other. If Kant was right, as I am convinced he was, this means that genuine works of art contain a universal address. Does this suffice to make the work itself universal, that is, to ensure that, through the work, the artist is speaking in anyone and everyone’s name? Do artists legitimately speak on behalf of humanity in their work? In other words, is the congruence of mandate and address, which modernism inherited from court art and universalized, irredeemably tied up with representativity? The answer to this question hinges on the relationship between the universal address involuntarily or automatically contained in every true aesthetic judgment6 and the universal mandate whereby modernist artists allegedly speak on behalf of humanity; in other words, on the relationship between the “all of you addressees” of the work and the “all of us humans” in whose name the artist can—­or cannot—­be said to have made the work. Either mandate is the ground for address or address is the ground for mandate; such is our alternative.7 If you take mandate to be the ground for address, you are in tune both with the traditional humanist view that lies behind modernism and with the standard reading of Kant: you are emphasizing the theoretical necessity of endowing all human beings with the faculty of taste. All humans do not have talent or genius but if all humans have taste, then taste is the name of the mandate artists have received from human nature to create the works that the rest of humanity desires but cannot bring forth itself. And so all humans must have taste. Taste is simply a requirement of the theory that has the mandate given artists by humanity justify that they address humanity and not just a particular constituency. If, on the other hand, you take address to be the ground for mandate, you are in tune with the reading of Kant I am advocating throughout this book: you are emphasizing the quasi-­ethical obligation of endowing all human beings

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with the faculty of agreeing by dint of feeling, which Kant called sensus communis. Taste and sensus communis may be one and the same faculty, but the shift of emphasis changes the theoretical “must” of the standard reading into a quasi-­ethical “ought”: in claiming universal assent, each single aesthetic judgment embodied in a work of art tells humans—­all humans, an indeterminate human—­that they ought to agree about the work on account of the shareability of their feelings. Such demand addressed to all others is only legitimate if all others are capable of agreeing, and so they must have that capacity. This “must” is no longer simply a requirement of the theory, it is a quasi “ought”: should humans not be naturally equipped with the faculty of agreeing by dint of feeling called sensus communis, it would be their cultural obligation to produce in themselves that capacity.8 Since there is no way of knowing whether or not sensus communis is the natural equipment of humanity, mandate cannot be the ground for address. Humanity would have to form one aesthetic community before artists could be called its true representatives. Empirical proof that all humans are able to share their feelings universally would be a prerequisite. Only then would humans be entitled to mandate artists to paint pictures, compose music, or write poetry on their behalf. Although Kant at times entertains the hope that a more educated, cultivated, and refined state of civilization might bring humanity closer to such an ideal, his philosophical argument does not at all rest on that hope. That humans ought to be endowed with sensus communis remains a transcendental requirement and never becomes even the dream of an empirical reality projected into some remote future. Now, if you doubt the validity of the standard reading and conclude that Kant is wrong or obsolete, you will strongly contest the theory that artists have received a mandate from humanity or from human nature; you will declare taste irrelevant to the making and the perceiving of art as art; and you will disqualify art’s claim to universality. Whoever claims to be making “universal” art is a bloated buffoon draped in the hegemonic, ethnocentric, colonialist, and sexist pretensions that the multiculturalist worldview intends to deflate and destroy. But if you doubt the validity of the standard reading and espouse the reading that I am defending, if you opt for the second branch of the alternative and declare that address is the ground for mandate, then a very different picture emerges. Whereas in the standard reading, the risk of a lack of legitimacy is borne by the artist, in the reading I propose it is borne by humanity or, at any rate, by humanity under humanist assumptions. Nothing proves that humanity is endowed with the faculty of agreeing. Humanism assumes that it is, but the truth is merely that humanity ought to be so endowed. “Address is the ground for mandate” means that artists assume responsibility for this ‘ought’ without

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any guarantee that humanity will back them up. The legitimacy that allows artists to speak on behalf of all of us results from their address to all of us. Kandinsky was justifying abstract art mainly to his own eyes with his claim to have invented a new universal language called Malerei. His book On the Spiritual in Art tells of his scruples and hesitations: he clearly needed a justifying discourse in order to muster the courage to abandon figuration. But his bombastic theorization has little to do with what he and the other pioneers of abstract painting actually did: they threw the rules of mimesis overboard so as to make their aesthetic decisions nakedly conspicuous, as it were, and infinitely more vulnerable to the judgment of the viewers than when they hid behind the alibi of representation. And aesthetic decisions, as we know from Kant, contain a universal address. Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich all wrote lofty manifestos and were quite confident that they were in effect mandated by humanity. They belong to a bygone era. Most artists I know—­and I venture to say, probably all living artists—­would burst into laughter at the suggestion that they are mandated by humanity. Some also deny that they address the whole of humanity. Yet if asked whether they have a determinate addressee in mind when they work, they are likely to answer negatively. Most artists cherish the indeterminacy of their public. And since to address anyone is potentially to address everyone, addressing everyone is what they do, whether they know it or not. Those who are content with catering to a particular taste or a particular group are simply not ambitious enough. It is ironic, given they are archenemies, that both multiculturalism and formalism defend the first branch of the alternative: mandate is the ground for address. Multiculturalism (or identity politics) sees no problem therein provided the mandate is not universal: for the convinced multiculturalist, artists being spokespersons for a particular group is far less contentious than artists claiming to speak for humanity. But because multiculturalism denies art’s claim to universality and because the address contained in aesthetic judgments is inevitably universal, multiculturalism is bound to redirect its critique toward aesthetics as such. If the nineties were the decade of the return of the real—­that is, of representation—­ they were clearly prepared by the eighties, which were the decade of the anti-­aesthetic.9 But you can’t help aesthetic decisions being the stuff that genuine works of art, good or bad, are made of. It is no surprise that ghettoization of group identities ensued, for identity politics tends to restrict both mandate and address to particular, nonuniversalizable groups. What we risk having is black art addressing the black community, gay art addressing the gay community, feminist art addressing women only, and so on. That said, there must be some valid reasons for the otherwise weak and problematic position of the multiculturalists and postmodernists of

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anti-­aesthetic persuasion, or identity politics would not have enjoyed the success that made it seem for a time the best alternative to universalism in art and art politics. As already evoked, difficulties do not evaporate simply by making embarrassing words taboo. Recognizing the valid reasons for multiculturalism and the anti-­aesthetic will lead us to the most delicate shift of emphasis required to update Kant’s third Critique. We will have to part company with Kant, at least momentarily. But where? The strange collusion between multiculturalism and formalism regarding their choice of the first branch of the alternative may provide us with a clue. Formalism, too, makes mandate the ground for address provided that this time mandate is universal. Whether we are talking about the aesthetic experience of art lovers or the aesthetic decisions of artists, it is their representativity vis-­à-­vis humanity as a whole, which, according to formalism, legitimates their claim to universal approval. What does the most prominent advocate of formalism have to say on this topic? In “Seminar II,” Clement Greenberg declares, In esthetic experience you more or less distance yourself from [your]self. You become as “objective” as you do when reasoning, which likewise requires distancing from the private self. And in both cases the degree of objectivity depends on the extent of the distancing. The greater—­or “purer”—­the distancing, the stricter, which is to say the more accurate, your taste or your reasoning becomes. To become more objective in the sense just given means to become more impersonal. But the pejorative associations of “impersonal” are excluded here. Here, in becoming more impersonal, you become more like other human beings—­at least in principle—­and therefore more of a representative human being, one who can more adequately represent the species.10

No doubt Greenberg’s unabashed confidence in the objectivity of his own taste, and thus his own representativity, betrays itself at its best in this passage. We must definitely part with both Greenberg and Kant here, but not before dissociating ourselves from the many readers of Greenberg who take him to be an orthodox Kantian and forget his bold claim in “Can Taste Be Objective?”: “I realize that I take my life in my hands when I dare to say that I’ve seen something better than Kant did.”11 For Chrissake, what did Greenberg think he saw better than Kant? Kant believed in the objectivity of taste as a principle or potential, and he postulated his belief on what he called a sensus communis, a sense or faculty that all human beings exercised similarly in aesthetic experience.

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What he failed to show was how this universal faculty could be invoked to settle disagreements of taste.12

When Greenberg speaks of settling disagreements of taste, he means deciding who is right and who is wrong in an aesthetic dispute, not solving the antinomy of taste.13 His is a severe misreading of Kant, and one that has harmed the discipline of aesthetics enormously, because it was long taken for granted by readers of Greenberg only too happy to throw the baby out with the bath water and spare themselves the difficulties of reading Kant seriously. Kant never “believed” in the objectivity of taste, and sensus communis is not a “faculty that all human beings exercised similarly in aesthetic experience”; it is merely the transcendental idea of such a faculty. An incurable empiricist, Greenberg not only refutes Kant on the basis of experience, he also lends him an empiricist reading of his own transcendentalism, which is properly aberrant. But let that be. Greenberg was an art critic, not a philosopher, and I still admire the risks he took venturing onto the philosopher’s terrain because I share some of his motivations. Aesthetics for aesthetics’ sake interests me no more than it did Greenberg; what interests me is the impact aesthetic theories have on the art world and the endeavor to arrive at the best possible theory—­by which I mean the one most truthful to experience and most respectful of the freedom of art practice. This is why I think the articulation of the transcendental and the empirical deserves the most careful attention. In this respect, Greenberg may have been closer to Kant than his preposterous claims in “Can Taste Be Objective?” make it appear, and this forces us to fine-­tune where, exactly, we need to part company with Kant. Greenberg’s “distancing from the private self ” dovetails with the Kantian motif of disinterestedness, and his striving for impersonality corresponds to Kant’s maxim of a “broad-­minded way of thinking” from section 40: to “set [oneself ] apart from the subjective private conditions of the judgment . . . and [to] reflect on [one’s] own judgment from a universal standpoint (which [one] can only determine by putting [one]self into the standpoint of others).”14 This is where we must part company with Kant. Not because such an endeavor is scandalous in itself or simply beyond our reach, nor because it smacks of enlightened condescendence and privilege, although that’s obvious. No, the reason why we must part company with Kant exactly here is that the issue of “whether taste is an original and natural faculty, or only the idea of one that is yet to be acquired”15 is here made to hinge on our actual capacity of putting ourselves in other people’s shoes. With the maxim of a “broad-­minded way of thinking,” Kant invests his hopes in the wrong articulation of the transcendental and the empirical. Perhaps I have been too hard on Greenberg in accusing him of an empiri-

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cist reading of Kant’s transcendentalism. For in the passage where his text comes closest to Greenberg’s reading, Kant himself waxes dangerously empirical: We must take sensus communis to mean the idea of a sense shared by all of us, i.e., a power to judge that in reflecting takes a priori account of everyone else’s apprehension, in order as it were to compare our own judgment with human reason in general and thus escape the illusion that arises from the ease of mistaking subjective and private conditions for objective ones [ . . . ]. Now we do this as follows: we compare our judgment not so much with the actual as rather with the merely possible judgments of others, and thus put ourselves in the position of everyone else, merely by abstracting from the limitations that may attach to our own judging; and this in turn we accomplish by leaving out as much as possible whatever is matter, i.e., sensation, and by paying attention solely to the formal features of what we apprehend.16

If you are looking for a passage in Kant on which to base your rejection of Greenberg’s formalism, this is it. Formalism is indeed the embarrassing legacy of the third Critique. How to salvage Kant from his own formalism without destroying the whole edifice is the question that must be answered before I can repeat my conviction that Kant got it right and claim that, in spite of the huge crisis of representativity brought about by modernity, artists do legitimately speak on behalf of all of us.

The Wisdom of Everyday Language Formalism has now been added to the embarrassing words universalism and humanism. Let’s leave them behind for the time being and consult everyday language instead. In order to encompass the whole human species, everyday language has three expressions, all of which have interesting properties, not least that they are utterly Kantian in postulating the species’s common humanity without defining it in any way. Those expressions are “anyone and everyone,” “all of us,” and “you and me.” All three avoid content-­driven definitions of what makes all humans human (the big, embarrassing words) and replace them by deictics. Deictics (demonstratives, pronouns, adverbs of time and space, etc.) are empty, purely formal words devoid of matter or sensation that move with the circumstances of their uttering. They can be said, in Kantian terms, to constitute the schematism of all speaking beings. If we follow Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason, we learn that schematism gives humans an

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inborn articulation of the transcendental and the empirical in matters of perception, an incarnation, as it were, of pure imagination in the medium of time.17 However, this incarnation is not enacted, and schemata remain abstract, until some concrete perception triggers the process. It’s similar with deictics: they are linguistic schemata. They remain formal and a priori until they are accompanied by a second, empirically embodied deictic. If I say “this” without pointing at something, you will not know what I’m talking about. With our attention focused on the pointing finger—­that is, the second deictic—­we can turn to the three expressions everyday language uses to replace the big, embarrassing words with their small, vernacular, democratic, and lighthearted equivalents—­to wit, replace humanity and universality with “anyone and everyone,” “all of us,” or “you and me”—­and see whether they do not rescue the big words, formalism included, from the bad name they deserved as long as they depended on representativity. The expressions “anyone and everyone” and its variant “anybody and everybody” have quite interesting features. They equate “every” with “any” and bypass representativity in favor of embodiment in the case of “anybody and everybody,” in favor of singleness in the case of “anyone and everyone.” Neither “every” nor “any” are deictics strictly speaking, but they are a priori in the same way deictics are. Both are empty and formal, poised on the threshold of the empirical world, in need of a second deictic to become incarnated—­whether it is the counting finger that attempts to number “every” or the designating finger that points at “any,” thereby changing “any” into “this.” Using “everybody” and “anybody” interchangeably puts the burden of invoking what the sum total of “bodies” supposedly shares on the act of singling out one “body” at random. Randomness, that is, the absence of criteria for the selection, short-­circuits representativity, disqualifying it as the key to universality. In turn, using “anyone” and “everyone” interchangeably implies that singularity is the key to universality and its true content. The interchangeability of “any” and “every” postulates that what makes humans human is, precisely, that they are not interchangeable. Humans have in common that they are unique. Everyday language is spontaneously humanistic here, and its humanism is of the Kantian, transcendental kind. “All of us” is humanistic in another, equally Kantian sense. “All of us”’ postulates that the human species is not an amorphous mass (an aggregate, Kant would say) but that it forms an “us.” It is capable of assuming the first person plural. “First person” means that the pronoun we, like I, designates the speaker, and “plural” means that the speaker is not alone. “We” ranges from “we two” to “we all.” Save in exceptional and disquieting cases, where a group speaks in a single voice, the speaker who says “we”

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sets him-­or herself up as spokesperson. By what right? Has the speaker been appointed to speak for the others, and in their name? Is the speaker a legitimate delegate of the group—­or the species, if the group extends to all? “All of us” and “we all,” it seems, have smuggled in through the back door the representativity that “anyone and everyone” had chased through the front. Does assuming the first person plural, we, inevitably mean presuming to be representative? Does everyday language vindicate Greenberg’s reading of Kant? For an answer, let us consult the linguist Émile Benveniste, who devoted a lot of attention to pronouns. According to Benveniste, there truly exists neither first nor second person plural. Only the third person, which Benveniste defines as the nonperson, admits a plural. When it comes to the pronouns we and you, the grammatical plural, he writes, is a factor of illimitation, not of multiplication.18 From a Kantian point of view, it must be recognized that Benveniste chose his words well: as opposed to multiplication, illimitation allows only a transcendental, not an empirical, reading, for humanity as a concept cannot be numbered. In the empirical world, the speaker who says “we” remains alone (unless the speaker has been formally mandated to represent a group). The plural “we”—­a fortiori the universal “we all”—­ does not entail that a plurality of human beings speaks in unison but only that one man or woman speaks in the voice of what Benveniste calls an “expanded I.” The universal “we all” is thus an “I” expanded to the whole of humanity, an unlimited “I” who, addressing humanity, makes it speak as if with a single voice. Artists would thus be entitled to say “we” with their work since they would be speaking as an “expanded I” who lends his or her voice to all of us. Kant would approve: the voice of the unlimited “I” that speaks in, or responds to, an artist’s aesthetic decisions is the allgemeine Stimme whose Einstimmung every aesthetic judgment claims.19 But this approving Kant is the Kant of the standard reading, the Kant for whom sensus communis is simply a requirement of the theory that has the mandate artists have received from humanity justify that they address humanity. Benveniste’s “expanded I” transcendentally presupposes that mandate is the ground for address and follows the maxim of a “broad-­ minded way of thinking” in its empirical effort to universalize its point of view. This Kant is also Greenberg’s: the speaker who assumes the “expanded I” speaks with the impersonal voice that makes him or her “more of a representative human being, one who can more adequately represent the species.” In order to seek an alternative to Benveniste’s approach to “all of us,” one that would free us from the standard or the Greenbergian reading of the third Critique, we must turn to “you and me,” the most remarkable of the expressions of which everyday language has availed itself in order

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to encompass the species in its shared humanity. “You and me” is commonly used to signify “all of us,” even when the “you” is understood as singular. How come? The pronoun we can be broken down in two ways: it either stands for “she and I” (“he and I,” “they and I”) or for “you and I.” Linguists call the former “we” exclusive and the latter inclusive, but this is misleading; in most cases both exclude as much as they include. In and by itself, the pronoun we doesn’t say whether it is exclusive or inclusive any more than it says who its members are. Let’s talk in examples and enlist our friend Howard Caygill here—­shall we agree on this, Howard? Did you notice? I just switched from the exclusive to the inclusive “we” in the same sentence and changed alliances by the same token. I spoke of our friend Howard, addressing you, the audience, including you in my putative friendship with Howard, thereby excluding you from the “we” as if you were absent or not listening. Gosh, I just did it again. Good thing I swiveled my head. I meant “we,” the audience, and “you,” Howard. In addressing you, I am thereby excluding them. I mean “them,” the audience, which is therefore no longer an audience—­witnesses, at most. We’d better stop trying to explain deictics with the help of deictics—­they move too quickly—­or we’ll find ourselves in conundrums worthy of Alice in Wonderland. Take a “we” of two consisting of Howard and Thierry. It is exclusive when Thierry addresses the audience and inclusive when he addresses Howard, and in both cases it is violent. We are all—­and here I mean “all of us humans”—­capable of assuming the first person plural simply because language has made the pronoun we available to us as speaking beings. But we rarely assume responsibility for the violence exercised by the speaker who utters the first person plural on the people that person excludes—­or includes, for there can be as much violence in inclusion as in exclusion. Think for example of the rhetorical “we” used by academics. It typically hides the logic of its violence by immersing the individual voice of the author in a supposedly unanimous community of virtual peers, the better to induce forced agreement in the actual community of peers that the author, masquerading as a “we,” actually addresses as an “I.” Whether we recognize it or not, violence and exclusion always accompany the assumption of the first person plural. Why, then, has everyday language availed itself of “you and me” to translate “all of us” and to signify the potential unanimity that “all of us” seems to promise? Is there some logical reason justifying the optimistic naïveté of everyday language? Obviously, “you and me” doesn’t always signify “all of us.” Just a minute ago it referred to Howard and Thierry. So why does it sometimes signify “all of us”? And how is it capable of alleviating the inherent violence of the “us”? The answer, once more, is that everyday language is spontaneously Kantian in yet a third sense: it

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practices reflective judgment. It doesn’t deduce from “you and me” that the whole human species is thereby designated—­that would be absurd. It reflects on the fact that if the whole human species were to be designated by means of the first person plural, it could only be by a “we” that has the form of a “you and me,’ not of a “they and me.” The condition of universality is negative and purely formal: a “we” that is broken down into “they and me” cannot possibly refer to us all, because it leaves out at least one individual, the addressee (except if the addressee is not human).20 Everyday language is not saying that all it takes is one outcast for humanism not to be universal (as I wrote too hastily and a tad too sentimentally in Voici).21 What everyday language is saying is that for the inclusive “we-­you and me” to be truly inclusive, to be devoid of violence and innocent of exclusion, it must be universal, it ought to be universal. That’s not much, and it’s of little help in the world of human relations, the world of the economy, or the political world. But it might help explain why we have art.

Why We Have Art Since the universally inclusive “we” consists of “you and I,” and since the “I” is by necessity an individual, it must be the “you” that is universal. When it signifies “all of us,” “you and me” implies a universal addressee and therefore contains a universal address. Just like aesthetic judgments. A refreshing way of putting this would be to say that everyday language is a spontaneous artist. Its use of “you and me” to mean “all of us” is one of its most poetic, beautiful, and profound tropes. In voiding the “we all” of its violence, “you and me” suggests that though the question of whether all we humans are endowed with sensus communis will never be settled, everyday language postulates that we are so endowed. Incidentally, the notion of everyday language as spontaneous artist confirms that sensus communis is not common sense. Common sense is the presumption of a faculty of agreeing cognitively that every nonskeptical philosophy must make, and it is not by chance a postulate familiar to “ordinary language philosophers.” Sensus communis is the faculty of agreeing not cognitively but by dint of mere feeling (a feeling, however, deemed universally shareable because it borrows its “state of mind” from cognition in general).22 According to Kant, to postulate that sensus communis exists is what aesthetic decisions do, whether they are the artist’s or the viewer’s. The universal address contained in every pure judgment of taste indicates and justifies that the aesthetic judge speaks on behalf of a universal “we,” a “you and me” that translates as “all of us.” Aesthetic judgments, being based on feelings, are involuntary. Their

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claim to universal approval is therefore equally involuntary. Kant expressed this with the somewhat clumsy notion of disinterestedness—­a notion that never fails to raise scandal in the anti-­aesthetic camp because it appears to posit an idealized subject detached from all worldly interests such as (top of the list) sexual desire and political sympathies. With this clumsy word Kant avoided raising a far greater scandal, one that must have been on his mind given what he wrote in section 59 about beauty as symbol of morality: the fact that aesthetic judgments are irresponsible. Being involuntary, they have no merit in claiming universal assent. Thus, they have no merit either in endowing all humans with the faculty of agreeing. Why then call the postulation of this endowment a quasi-­ethical obligation? Why claim that address is the ground for mandate? Why say that “you and me”’ legitimates “all of us” and not the other way around? Everyday language in its immanent wisdom is once again our best guide. It not only uses “you and me” to signify “all of us,” it does so even when the “you” is understood to be singular. And here again, it proves its ability for exercising reflective judgment. A universal “you and me” of two would be a contradiction in terms if everyday language did not thereby intimate that it is the illimitation of you, the individual addressee, that legitimates me, the individual speaker, in uttering the universal “we-­you and me.” Whoever assumes the universal inclusive first person plural signals that he or she is irresponsibly speaking on behalf of all of us and begs the addressee to endorse this irresponsibility in his or her own name. Such a universal “we-­you and me” has currency only in art. Such irresponsibility is legitimate only in art. Everywhere else—­in economics, politics, culture, and human relations at large—­to behave responsibly is to take others into account or to act only with their mandate; claiming the universal “we-­you and me” is usurpation and abuse of power. Not so in art. A genuine work of art utters the universal “we-­you and me” legitimately. It is such a “we-­you and me,” its incarnation. Every aesthetic decision embedded and embodied in a work of art—­for example, every brush stroke in a painting, especially the last one—­is the act of an “I” who addresses an unlimited you and begs its approval. The “I” is not unlimited; artists are not required to practice the maxim of a “broad-­minded way of thinking”; no more than anyone do they have the right—­and less than anyone the duty—­to be “more of a representative human being, one who can more adequately represent the species” (Greenberg). On the contrary, the more singular and idiosyncratic artists are, the more they are artists. Their chance of constructing a “we” with their addressees—­of signing an aesthetic pact with them, of building a virtual community with them based on a singular aesthetic agreement—­hinges on their addressees’ willingness to allow the involuntariness of their own appreciation

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to surrender to the aesthetic decisions embedded and embodied in the artist’s work. It is then the chance of the addressee—­the individual addressee—­to countersign the pact and confirm his or her belonging to the virtual, or rather, transcendental aesthetic community of which the work demands the existence. How do I know whether the work’s addressee is the unlimited you? How do I, the work’s recipient, know that the “you” in “you and me” is universal? How do I know that the work I am facing contains a universal address? I don’t know this. But if I am sensitive to art, especially if I am receptive to all the signs of openness and indeterminacy in the artist’s decisions, I feel their involuntary address to all, and I judge by dint of that feeling. Is it pleasure? Is it the feeling of beauty? Not necessarily. All feelings are admissible, including embarrassment, anger, and even disgust, which Kant deemed incompatible with judgments of taste. If I am sensitive to art, there is not one feeling that I can exclude from the gamut of feelings resulting in my feeling that the thing I am looking at is art—­least of all those feelings that put my trust in sensus communis in jeopardy, the ones I summed up, in Kant after Duchamp, as the feeling of dissent, the sentiment of dissentiment.23 I must discard sensus communis understood as a universally shared ability for sharing feelings unless it shares the bad feelings as well as the good ones. What, then, is the decisive feeling? How do I know whether the thing I am looking at has succeeded in transferring to me the irresponsibility, or freedom, that only art affords? I have no other way of knowing whether a work of art addresses all of us than the feeling that it addresses me personally. I want to call that feeling the feeling of having been touched. However, introspection on the way great works of art have touched me has taught me something else. Mixed with the feeling that the work addresses me personally, there is the very different feeling that the work exceeds the demand inevitably implied by “addressedness.” Expressed feelings demand acknowledgment: there is no “I love you” that doesn’t demand love in return. Works of art are no exception: they beg to be loved or—­ shall we say in more neutral terms—­appreciated. Yet great works of art don’t care; they shout “Love me or leave me.” Mixed with the traces of the artist’s intentions, what touches me in a great work—­and triggers the “disinterestedness” of my aesthetic response—­is that je ne sais quoi that tells a touching from a merely impressive work and that the French tongue beautifully expresses with the word maladresse. Just as in life it is often that element of maladroitness—­that which is mal adressé, sent to the wrong address—­in what a person intentionally addresses us that makes us find her touching, so in a great work of art the feeling that the work addresses me personally is accompanied by the contrary feeling that it addresses no

8. Roni Horn, Portrait of an Image (with Isabelle Huppert), 2005. Fifty photographs 15″ × 12.5″ / 38.1 × 31.8 cm each, detail. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. © Roni Horn.

9. Roni Horn, Portrait of an Image (with Isabelle Huppert). 2005, Fifty photographs 15″ × 12.5″ / 38.1 × 31.8 cm each. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. © Roni Horn. Photo: Genevieve Hanson.

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one, that it is not addressed at all, or that it addresses an indeterminate other, an X of whom I know nothing except that it is not me. That mix of feelings is the true sign of the unlimited you. What universalizes my aesthetic judgment in front of a great and touching work of art is the maladresse in the address—­and I mean these words in all their extension: the clumsiness in dexterity, the unwilled in the intention, the natural in the artifice, the unreasonable in reason, the unconscious in consciousness, the slip of the tongue in addressed speech, the desire in the demand—­the “without purpose” in the purposiveness, Kant would say. If the work in front of me succeeds in triggering that particular mix of feelings in me, then I can say not only that I am touched but also that I would be touched, whoever I would be. At that moment, I have become truly impersonal: I am anyone and everyone, all of us, you and me. And the work I am contemplating speaks on our behalf.24

Published in Critical Inquiry 42, no. 1 (Fall 2015). Written and published in French as “Le jugement esthétique, fondement transcendantal de la démocratie?” in Du chaos social à l’ordre moral, ed. Agnès Tricoire (Bordeaux: Le bord de l’eau, 2004); republished under the same title in Noesis 11, Art et Politique, ed. Carole Talon-­ Hugon (2007). Translated by the author and considerably augmented for the present edition. Presented as keynote addresss at the Together Apart conference, University of Sydney, July 2012.

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Le sens de la famille A e s t h e t ic s a s t h e T r a ns c e n de n ta l G rou n d of De mo c r ac y

So far the claim I made for Kant’s account of the aesthetic judgment is that it is correct. The replacement of “this is beautiful” by “this is art” merely updates the Critique of Judgment for post-­Duchampian times. But Kant did not write the Critique of Judgment as a treatise on aesthetics. Only the first half of the book deals with beauty and the sublime and concerns aesthetic judgment. The second half, which was more important in Kant’s eyes, deals with purposiveness in nature and concerns teleological judgment. Because the aesthetic provides a model for the teleological (both judgments are reflecting), the realm of taste is anything but self-­enclosed. Kant sees the least aesthetic experience as opening onto the question of whether humanity’s natural vocation, if it has one, coincides with its ethical destination, which the Critique of Practical Reason had defined as the earthly realization of the highest good (virtue merged with happiness). We know from the Critique of Pure Reason that this realization is not incompatible with the laws of nature, but that’s all. We don’t know—­and this is what the Critique of Judgment is supposed to settle—­whether in realizing the highest good on earth we humans would accomplish the will of nature, or stated in modern political terms, whether perfect democracy is the natural destiny of the human species (and thus whether there is reason for hope in progress). The far from perfect democracy we live in produced the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). The very first sentence of the preamble to the UDHR states, “Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”1 Let’s pause here and notice the postulate that was surreptitiously slipped into that first sentence: to be a human being is to be a member of the human family; it

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10. Edward Steichen (curator), The Family of Man, exhibition, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1955. Photo © Ezra Stoller / Esto.

is as such members that we humans should recognize in each other our “inherent dignity” and our “equal and inalienable rights.” The preamble’s postulate has some intuitive appeal, yet it remains no more than a postulate, that is, an indemonstrable hypothesis deemed legitimate because it is necessary to whatever is going to be built on that base. One might fear, therefore—­but must one fear it?—­that the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world remains itself unfounded. In her preface to my copy of the UDHR, Franca Sciuto, former president of Amnesty International, repeats the same postulate, and then again in the very first sentence: “All of us belong to one family—­the human family.”2 Granted that the word family is here clearly a metaphor, it substitutes a biological concept alluding to the human species for a political idea alluding to the human kind. You would have to climb the ladder of Darwinian evolution back to the mitochondrial Eve to see that the Family of Man—­to cite the title of a famous photo exhibition staged by Edward Steichen at MoMA in 1955—­be rooted in biological kinship, something that was certainly not on the mind of those who drafted the UDHR. Postulating that humanity is an extended family is not particularly reas-

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suring. Think of the curse of the Atrides, of Cain and Abel, of parricide and incest. Think of Ken Loach’s Family Life (1971), of André Gide’s “Families, I hate you,”3 of Sigmund Freud’s “family romance.”4 Think of all ethnic wars. The family of man is more likely to resemble Atreus’s descendancy than a family where (to quote Kant) virtue merges with happiness or where (to quote the UDHR) freedom, justice, and peace reign. It is easy to be sarcastic vis-­à-­vis the perhaps naive humanism of the UDHR; it is a lot more difficult to come up with a “foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world” other than “the inherent dignity and . . . the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family.” Before we throw the baby out with the bathwater, we might be well inspired to pay close attention to the familialism (as Deleuze and Guattari would say) of the UDHR’s postulate, for behind this postulate hides a string of other ones: that the highest good of ideal democracy potentially resides, or ought to reside, in our belonging to one huge family; that the family institution is, or ought to be, based on benevolent feelings; that kinship is, or ought to be, the naturally tender and respectful bond founding free and just political communities; that our dignity and rights are, or ought to be, ultimately grounded in our nature; that our nature is, or ought to be, fundamentally ethical; that therefore perfect democracy is, or ought to be, the natural destiny of the human species—­Kant’s teleological ordeal. Pardon me for the repeated hesitation between “is” and “ought to be.” The preamble’s phrasing is only justified if families are in essence good, so they must be good; but they cannot be proclaimed good by fiat; they ought to be good even when they are not. On the face of it, that hesitation seems to vitiate human-­rights rhetoric, as if our only choice were between angelic endorsement of its familialism and a cynical antihumanism that risks thwarting all recourse to the human rights in the political combat. How do we escape the dilemma? In fact, the hesitation I insinuated into the UDHR’s postulate does not result from my skepticism—­real as it is—­vis-­à-­vis the natural goodness of families as the potential residence of the highest good. What commands it is the heterogeneity of the political and the biological domains, a gap bridged by the preamble’s metaphoric usage of the word family. Biology knows of no ought, and pure realpolitik would be tyranny; in other words, ethics is foreign to the laws of nature, while politics without ethics is by definition undemocratic. The metaphor of the human family throws a bridge over the abyss between nature and ethics by making it mandatory to find a middle ground that neither confuses them nor reduces the one to the other. That middle ground is the feeling of belonging to humanity, as it procures the individual who experiences it an immediate apprehension of humanity’s oneness and unity, delusive as it might be. Common examples

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of that feeling range from the joy of being immersed in a festive crowd to the enthusiasm of being swept forth by a just revolution; from the elation prompted by a new life coming into the world to the compassion for perfect strangers that manifests itself spontaneously in natural or political disasters; from the awareness of being all embarked on the same boat to the perhaps fleeting but strong bond that ensues; from ecstatic discovery of the art and culture of foreign countries to empathy and solidarity for people in distress living on the other side of the planet; from identification with the meek and downtrodden to the militant embracing of their revolt and combat for dignity. Those feelings all coalesce into the sense of belonging to one group whose cohesion ultimately resides in the unity of the species. Without ever mentioning it, let alone theorizing it, the preamble to the UDHR makes an intuitive appeal to that feeling, for it alone justifies calling humanity a family whose goodness is rightly claimed, if only as an ought. Family ties are indeed the only ones to be naturally affective while forming a social institution. They are the bridge we were looking for, having one pillar in the natural, animal world of instincts and one in the cultural, political world of institutions. Moreover, the Atrides notwithstanding, the presence of an affective cement to the family institution invariably sees positive value attached to it, as if to endorse and bring into the open the hidden postulate of the UDHR: kinship is, or ought to be, a naturally benevolent bond. What the French call le sens de la famille is a positive sense not contradicted at all (quite the opposite) by the fact that families are sometimes torn apart, for more often than not it is love as much as hatred that tears them apart. Medea cherished her children and her husband, yet she killed the former to punish the latter. It seems impossible not to postulate that the family institution is intrinsically good in spite of the overwhelming empirical evidence to the contrary. Taking stock of that impossibility allows us to rephrase our initial discomfort with the familialism of the UDHR and to find a way out of our dilemma: does not that sense of belonging that with a touch of humor we might call a sens de la famille, expanded to the whole of humanity, motivate the metaphor of the family to carry the hope that freedom, justice, and peace are within the reach of modern democracies? In using metaphorical kinship—­that is, the idea that family ties induce or ought to induce benevolent feelings—­to bridge the gap between the human species as biological concept and humankind as political idea, the postulate contained in the preamble of the UDHR is performing an operation akin, indeed identical, to that of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. It is intimating that the sense of belonging to humanity might justify the use of the biological metaphor of the family to signify the seat of the

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sovereign good after which humans should strive. Indeed, such a sense of belonging may have been what Kant had in mind under the name of sensus communis, a notion that didn’t come under his pen until he tackled the judgment of taste—­that very reflective judgment which would become the model for the teleological judgment in the second half of the third Critique. As both a realistic observer of the world, profoundly pessimistic with regard to human nature and its prospects of moral progress, and a critical philosopher eager to put metaphysics on firm ground, Kant sought to establish the separate jurisdictions of the human mind over the domain of nature founded in causality on the one hand and the domain of moral freedom founded in finality or purposiveness (will) on the other. This he achieved in the first two Critiques. The aim of the third, the Critique of Judgment, was to throw a bridge over the abyss between the first two without seeking to fill the abyss. Without amalgamating the legislations of nature (Critique of Pure Reason) and freedom (Critique of Practical Reason), the idea of sensus communis throws such a bridge. This particular common sense (sensus communis aestheticus), not to be confused with the conventional wisdom the words common sense conjure up (sensus communis logicus), is affective and not cognitive in nature. Whereas in sections 20–­22 of the third Critique Kant sees it as the presupposition of an “ideal norm” under which all judgments of taste operate, in section 40 he goes as far as identifying it with taste itself—­the faculty of taste, taste as innate capacity.5 Kant knows as well as anyone that like everything that depends on socioeconomic factors, education, and ideology, taste—­practiced taste, that is—­follows the various fault lines that determine every other social divide: birth, rank, race, sex (we would say class, ethnicity, gender), and so forth. The feeling of beauty in front of this rose, or the feeling of art in front of that work, are as socially determined as anything else and therefore, of course, never universally shared. Empirically, one dissenting voice is enough to prove that they are not. If I am justified to claim universal assent for my judgment of taste (and, according to Kant, I am), it is not empirically but transcendentally, at the level of the a priori conditions founding my aesthetic experience as well as anybody else’s, and regarding any object as well as the one in front of me. What my claim means is that I cannot fail to suppose that my neighbor is endowed with the same faculty of judging as the one whose presence in me my own pleasure signals. Even and especially if she uses her taste differently, she uses it freely, a fact I cannot fail to read as signaling the possibility for her feeling to agree with mine without being constrained to it. My neighbor disagrees with me but she belongs, she must belong, to the family. I don’t have the choice of thinking otherwise, for denying her taste would be denying her sensus

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communis, which in turn is tantamount to denying her humanity. The characterization of sensus communis as gemeinschaftlicher Sinn underlines its communal dimension and all but defines it as the sense of membership in the human race. For sensus communis is not merely widespread (gemein), it is universal (allgemein).6 It can variously be described as a sensibility for the “common to all” that all have in common; as the faculty that makes affects and feelings communicable, or shareable, across cultural differences (the German word is mitteilbar, “divisible with”); as a capacity both inter-­and intrasubjective, for it is both the aptitude for the common, common to all subjects, and the putting in common of the individual subject’s aptitudes; thus, as consent and consensus, peace with oneself, with others and with the world; and as a talent, a natural gift for seeking and finding agreement among all. It is the sense of the universal family and the universal sense of the family, a sens de la famille extended to all and shared by all. The French Revolution called it fraternité. Sensus communis is all this, but whether we are naturally endowed with it is highly doubtful. Nothing proves that we are equipped with an instinctive, biological, genetically transmitted solidarity with the species as a whole. We occasionally feel empathy of that sort; we may think that our deepest nature speaks in those circumstances; thus we reassure ourselves that our disposition is fundamentally good, but with what degree of certainty? Do we possess sensus communis or do we fancy that we do? Do we not merely moan that we should possess it, that nature should have endowed us with it? The signs of spontaneous empathy for humankind are numerous, but countless are the signs pointing in the opposite direction. Are humans in the natural state inclined to live in peace or perpetually at war? The choice is Rousseau versus Hobbes, two great minds who, however, neglected the fact that a thousand signs do not amount to a single proof, something that Kant was careful never to forget. When he asks whether “taste [or sensus communis] is an original and natural faculty or only the idea of an artificial one yet to be acquired,”7 he is not balancing between Rousseau and Hobbes. It is a fact that we humans have the idea of sensus communis. Translated in the UDHR’s terms, the fact is that we use the metaphor of the human family. Kant reads this neither as indication, let alone proof, of the actual existence in us of sensus communis nor as mere illusion and self-­delusion. He reads it as the sign that this idea is mandatory, as both a theoretical requisite and an ethical obligation—­the former because of the latter, as the French Revolution’s fraternité strongly suggests. The idea that we ought to work at acquiring an artificial sens de la famille, the idea that culture and civilization ought to provide us with it when nature has failed to do so, makes it mandatory to suppose that nature has nonetheless predisposed us for this acquisition. The chances are that

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sensus communis is merely an idea, but one we cannot relinquish lest we could not even think of ourselves as being human. It is the transcendental idea that should reconcile humanity’s natural vocation, if it has one, with its ethical destination. We might call it the postulate of aesthetic reason. Postulates cannot be demonstrated. Nothing in the empirical world will ever prove their truth or their falseness. They are ideas of reason, and ideas of reason are not concepts of the understanding: they posit things-­ in-­themselves that are thinkable yet unknowable. If the human mind, when asking itself what constitutes its own humanity, had access to the thing-­ in-­itself, die Menschheit an sich; if we knew whether the human and the humane in us coincide de jure even when de facto they don’t; if we could be absolutely certain that the sense of the universal family Kant calls sensus communis is itself universally shared; then the exercise of taste (aesthetic appreciation, apprehension, evaluation, judgment, experience—­let us here hold these words as equivalent) would be the foundation of democracy, of perfect, direct, empathic democracy, short-­circuiting the hazards and the distortions induced in our far from perfect democracies by the necessity of relying on institutions and their representativity. Humans would elect beautiful beings as their leaders, and they would be beautiful inside, morally beautiful. The community of humans would rest on the shared feeling of harmony among them. The distinction once drawn by Ferdinand Tönnies between community—­Gemeinschaft (glued together by affect, belief, and tribal bonds)—­and collectivity—­Gesellschaft (held together by laws, institutions, and division of labor)—­would lose its raison d’être.8 The family of man would be both naturally and legally founded via the feeling of belonging to it. Human society would have affective or sentimental bases, that is, aesthetic ones. The only true art would be the art of living. The good and the beautiful would be one. Of course, Kant never believed in the perfect overlap of the good with the beautiful. Why otherwise would he have stated, in section 59 of the Critique of Judgment, that the beautiful was the symbol of the morally good?9 And why should we be less skeptical than Kant? We very rarely elect leaders who are beautiful in and out, and then never unanimously. Harmony of sentiment is not at all required in a democracy; its operating mode is organized dissent. And the human mind pondering over its own humanity has no access to the thing-­in-­itself, die Menschheit an sich. Postulates never convert into hypotheses some theory or some practice is then asked to prove; transcendental ideas are merely ideas, yet necessary and mandatory ones. On the issue of sensus communis, Kant was radically agnostic. Unlike many subsequent thinkers deluded by revolutionary hopes, Kant was not a utopianist. He no more believed that the reign of sensus communis—­read naturally fraternal democracy—­would be realized

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in some future state of emancipated humankind than he believed in its advent in the here and now. In our times of disenchantment with failed revolutions and their artistic programs, Kant is a formidable guide who helps us put the aesthetic and the political in their proper place while acknowledging their interdependency. Perhaps starting with Schiller, the moderns’ only sin is to have betrayed Kant’s steadfast resolve in the face of disenchantment in favor of fantasies of redemptive aesthetic-­political programs that silenced their anxiety. How many utopianists and writers, from Saint-­Simon to Plekhanov to Marcuse, how many progressive art movements, from the Arts and Crafts to the Bauhaus to situationism, have promised that once the aesthetic apprehension of the world they cultivated for themselves would be shared by the majority, it would bring forth a better, more just, more livable, and more democratic social and political order? If they had succeeded, there would be no practical reason to complain and no theoretical reason to try to think in less flawed terms. But they failed. Hence, my recourse to a more consistent and less dogmatic philosopher. Not only does Kant not promise us anything in the kind of an aesthetically conceived political Arcadia, he also warns us against the confusion of the transcendental with the empirical-­ideal such promises entail. Unlike the many “aesthetical utopianists” who assigned art the practical task of bringing society closer to the ideal republic of their dreams, Kant knew that an ideal republic is an idea of reason composed of other such ideas, namely, “freedom, justice and peace in the world” (to quote the UDHR again), and that none of these ideas is constitutive; all are regulative. Political, not artistic, practice is given the responsibility of striving to implement the ideal Republic under the guidance of those regulative ideas. Art’s worldly function is to testify to the deployment of this responsibility in the merely symbolic, “irresponsible” realm of the aesthetic. This is not to say that art is politically innocent or, for that matter, politically impotent. What anyone interested in the proper articulation of art and politics can learn from Kant concerns the subtle but crucial displacement imprinted on the empirical-­ideal by the consideration of the transcendental. For he teaches us something unbelievably precious: that aesthetic apprehension of the world—­any such apprehension, the one you approve as well as the one you loathe—­counts as the transcendental but by no means empirical foundation of the democratic polis. The community made possible a priori by the postulate of sensus communis is not the empirical-­ideal republic we might project in an imaginary, perfect world. It is real democracy both as it exists and as it ought to be strived for and worked toward in the far from perfect world we live in. Of course, it is democracy as thing-­in-­itself, not as empirical reality; yet the

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virtual community it constitutes is aesthetic and, as such, actually, not just potentially, incarnated in the empirical world. The aesthetic is that one very special domain of human experience, which, although grounded in sensation and feeling and not proceeding from volition at all, opens a reflective access to ideas of practical reason, not least to the political idea of democracy. What is this idea, as it is accessed by aesthetic experience? Jacques Rancière has argued that the primordial meaning of the word democracy boils down to “anarchic government, one based on nothing other than the absence of every title to govern.”10 He reminds us that when Plato, in Laws, listed the titles to govern founding various forms of government—­to be the oldest, the best, the richest, the strongest, or the wisest—­he added yet another title, “which is awarded by lot, and is dear to the Gods and a token of good fortune: he on whom the lot falls is a ruler, and he who fails in obtaining the lot goes away and is the subject; and this we affirm to be quite just.”11 Plato was alluding to the reform through which Cleisthenes is said to have founded the Athenian democracy: within limits, and for a limited duration, the ruler was chosen at random: any and every citizen could thus expect to be called in some day for the highest office. This seems very far from and not relevant at all to our modern democracies, but it is the rule in the “irresponsible” world of aesthetics. When Rancière comments that “good government is the government of those who do not desire to govern,” he points at something that may be a naive utopia in the political world but describes aesthetic disinterestedness to a T.12 Each time I, you, or any of us utter a true aesthetic judgment, one that involuntarily claims universal assent, we incarnate a transcendental world ruler in matters of taste who has no desire to rule. For true and free aesthetic judgment only sets in when appeal to the others’ sensus communis takes the place of possession of the rules of good taste, codified aesthetic criteria, or the experts’ expertise. True and free aesthetic judgment proclaims that anyone’s taste is equally entitled to prevail as one’s own, which is why one’s own is entitled to speak for all. Interestingly enough, Plato himself unwittingly placed the transcendental foundation of democracy in the aesthetic realm, as he maintained that democracy began when the laws of music ceased to be obeyed. Plato was not a supporter of democracy; for him, unlimited democracy was already a degenerate form of government. That he should have made artistic lawlessness responsible for the degeneracy of the Athenian state is therefore all the more indicative of the transcendental truth he hit on. It is ironic how easily one recognizes in Plato’s complaint the arguments rehearsed ad nauseam in every reactionary lament against contemporary art: that genres and mediums are no longer stable and get challenged and

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mixed; that “vulgar and lawless innovation” has unraveled tradition; that dubious licentious works are being produced; that the society of the spectacle (Plato’s word is theatrocracy) has corrupted the public; that artists who may be men of genius but are ignorant “of what is just and lawful in music” flatter the multitude and “make them fancy that they can judge for themselves about melody and song”; and that from “the universal conceit of omniscience and general lawlessness” in matters of art, “freedom came following afterwards” in all matters.13 Where Plato states a fear, we need only record a fact, and where Plato fantasizes a historical origin, we need only place a transcendental plane to see my thesis confirmed: democracy finds its a priori foundation in the principial equality of anyone’s aesthetic judgment—­and this, since the very birth of democracy, in Greece, at the beginning of the sixth century BC. Indeed, in order to entrust the government of the city to a lottery, Cleisthenes must have postulated that every Athenian citizen was endowed with an innate sense of the common good capable of regulating his conduct as a ruler.14 And if, as Plato thought, democracy began with anarchy in matters of music, every Athenian citizen would have been justified to demand that his musical taste, being as legitimate as anyone’s, rule over that of his fellow citizens. Sensus communis, the postulate of aesthetic reason, has been the transcendental ground for democracy at least since Athens. Rancière insists on two important tenets of democracy: that it is not just one form of government among several but “the very principle of politics, the principle that institutes politics in founding ‘good’ government on its own absence of foundation”;15 and that the government of the unentitled anybody represents the most radical rupture from all titles to govern past or present, particularly from those based on filiation, whether ancestry, patriarchy, tribalism, divine origin, the authority of the name-­of-­the-­father, the ideology of the chosen people, and so on. Taken together, those two tenets apparently undermine the twin theses I am defending: that democracy—­or the political, as Rancière has it—­is not devoid of foundation, albeit a transcendental one, which I claim is aesthetic; and that sensus communis, the postulation of which enacts the foundational moment, translates as universal and universally shared sens de la famille, a sense that necessarily involves filiation. But the undermining is only apparent and due to the fact that Rancière does not distinguish the transcendental and the empirical. He probably thinks that the distinction is dated and outdated, or that the conception of man as “empirico-­transcendental doublet,” in which Michel Foucault used to see the anthropological postulate of modernity, no longer commands our postmodern existences.16 This is in my view the great mistake of his oth-

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erwise pertinent endeavor to articulate “the politics of aesthetics” to “the aesthetics of politics” around a principle of dissensus that expresses itself equally in artistic innovation and in political protest: both are interventions in the visible and the sayable that upset the existing “sharing of the sensorium” (my translation of Rancière’s partage du sensible).17 Dissensus stands opposed to consensus, but it is unclear what comes first—­whether dissensus is “a division inserted in common sense” or whether consensus is “the annulment of dissensus as separation of the sensible from itself.”18 Does Rancière postulate the tautology consensus communis as the a priori presupposition without which dissensus would simply be the war of all against all, or does he postulate the oxymoron dissensus communis (he actually writes “dissensual ‘commonsense’”19) as the transcendental background against which consensus is nothing but policed distribution of the sensible reflecting the status quo? He seems never to decide whether le partage du sensible is an a priori condition or a historical reality. I think he sees it as both, and I agree inasmuch as I have no difficulty reading sedimented historical determinations in most of the instances where Kant presupposes transcendental conditions of possibility. But if for Rancière sensus communis is at stake in the sharing of the sensorium, then I must disagree: as the idea of a faculty supposedly common to all humans, sensus communis has to refer to a natural and thus transhistorical endowment. As the postulate of aesthetic reason, sensus communis is a transcendental idea, that is, in my reading, merely an idea, yet a foundational one. The standard reading of Kant espouses Kant’s own hope that transcendental foundation be the establishment of some apodictic truth. However, what the Kant of the third Critique must have realized, though perhaps not fully admitted, is that a truth arrived at reflectively cannot possibly be apodictic, and that all philosophical truths are arrived at reflectively. Some readers of Kant conclude from there that the third Critique invalidates the first, which in turn nullifies the pretension of the third to bridge the first two, and that Kant, judged by his own standards, failed all the way.20 I prefer to think that Kant’s so-­called failure is precisely what makes him our contemporary. To remain with the issue under discussion here, Kant would have acknowledged that democracy is founded “on its own absence of foundation” (as Rancière puts it) because a transcendental foundation is foundational only reflectively, by that sort of feedback of the mind that goes from “there ought to be” to “therefore there is.”21 A house is seen as standing firm on the ground; without solid foundations, it would collapse; therefore, it ought to have foundations, even though I shall never know it for sure: a typically Kantian reasoning. It is the fragility of Kant’s critical edifice, the way it asks us to take responsibility for it, which is its

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strength today. Clearly, the Critique of Judgment failed to settle the question of whether in realizing the highest good on earth we humans would accomplish the will of nature. Darwin transformed into solid knowledge what Kant already considered the only intellectually honest attitude vis-­ à-­vis nature, namely, that there is no will of nature, except reflectively, as a manner of speech. In the century following Kant, the claims of the teleological judgment have been severely curtailed, ultimately leaving the whole construction of the three Critiques to rest, like a pyramid that stands on its tip, on the claim to universality of anyone’s aesthetic judgment. The precarious, disproportionate responsibility granted the “irresponsible” realm of the aesthetic not only makes Kant infinitely endearing to anyone convinced that art matters way beyond mere issues of taste, but it also makes him utterly relevant to the times we live in: when all political certainties have been shaken and all grand narratives have lost their credibility, aesthetics may be the road to go to reinvent the political. Rancière is definitely on that road. His pinpointing the Athenian ruler’s random election as breaking point from all forms of power legitimated by filiation apparently contradicts my thesis that democracy is transcendentally founded on the postulation of a sensus communis described as sens de la famille. Politics begin where biology ends, Rancière argues, and rightly so. However, how the emancipation of legitimate power from hereditary tribal authority should be conceived and where one is to place the breaking point are open questions. I would place it inside the history of the concept of filiation—­more precisely, of fatherhood, which is nowhere a simply biological concept—­ rather than conceive it as a break from filiation altogether, as Rancière does.22 But that is not at issue here. At issue is whether the generalized sens de la famille postulated both by Kant and by the UDHR denies the separation of the political and the biological. I’d say not at all. The idea of humankind forming one huge family is, on the contrary, breaking with all empirical genealogies. Clans, tribes, families are by definition never universal. The recently conquered possibility of climbing back the ladder of Darwinian evolution to the mitochondrial Eve has certainly given the notion of the human family stunning empirical reality, and yet it leaves the transcendentalism of Kant’s sensus communis intact. An idea of (practical) reason and a concept of (theoretical) understanding may have the same referent, but the heterogeneity between them remains. In the end, the translation in political terms of Kant’s radical agnosticism regarding the sensus communis means that the democratic ideal remains unfounded. Kant might have regretted this—­so let it be—­but what we can learn from democracy’s lack of grounding is both devoid of regrets and unbelievably

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precious: it is because the political is radically deprived of any sort of empirical-­ideal foundation that it has transcendental business with art. With art? Kant might have recognized that the earthly implementation of the highest good has transcendental business with the beautiful in art but not with art as such. In other words, he could not have anticipated the “Kant after Duchamp” approach. Inasmuch as he granted the fine arts the capacity to mediate between the subjective realm of pure aesthetic judgments and the social realm of institutionalized art forms, he made room for artificial beauty beside the natural kind. And inasmuch as he defined the fine arts as the arts of genius, he was able to grant artistic beauty similar transcendental claims as he did the beauty of nature. The passage from the fine arts system to the Art-­in-­General system heralded by the post-­Duchamp condition has transferred those claims to art as such—­ the name I give to whatever artistic quality the aesthetic judgment “This is art” recognizes.23 Obscure as they remain, the reasons why the domain of human activity and social practice we call art has acquired unprecedented closeness to the political during the two centuries that separate us from Kant must have something to do with the fact that those two centuries saw the advent of modern, parliamentary democracies. Winston Churchill’s quip that democracy is the worst form of government except all others means that democracy is, till further notice, the least inefficient earthly realization of the highest good by political means. Rancière’s identifying democracy with “the political” acknowledges this. The UDHR does not mention democracy by name when it redefines Kant’s highest good (the merging of virtue with happiness) as the pursuit of freedom, justice, and peace in the world. But when it claims that that pursuit’s foundation is the “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family,” it certainly aims at a democratic definition of the political. It also surreptitiously slips in the familialist postulate I set out to investigate at the beginning of this essay. I stated that if one could be certain that the sense of the universal family existed and was universally shared, aesthetic judgment (experience, appreciation, apprehension, evaluation—­I still hold those expressions as equivalents) would be the empirical foundation of democracy. Humans would elect beautiful beings as their leaders, and these would be beautiful inside, morally beautiful. The human community would rest on the commonality of its feelings; the only true art would be the art of living; the good and the beautiful would be one. Well, it is precisely because the good and the beautiful are not one that art is necessary and vital to modern democracies. This has been recognized at least since Winckel-

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mann’s worship of the Greek miracle, but it has often been misinterpreted. The bourgeois view considers that art is necessary and vital because it compensates for the divorce between the good and the beautiful, the revolutionary view because it promises their reconciliation. The former suffers from resignation, the latter from delusion; taken together, they have woven the fabric of modernity since the reception of Kant’s third Critique in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution. But Kant’s lesson is quite different: art is necessary and vital to democracy because it is both correct that the good and the beautiful are not one and just that they should not be one. It is theoretically correct because of unsurpassable human limitations: we do not have the faculty of intuiting ideas of reason; we are not equipped with the capacity of unifying sensible beauty with the moral good (which is why the power of judgment does not legislate over an autonomous domain). And it is ethically just for the same reason: ethics must acknowledge human finitude even though it does not compromise with it. If this hadn’t been the case, the third Critique wouldn’t have been necessary. Thus, if art has a function in society, it is neither to offer democracy, conceived as bourgeois parliamentary system, a surface embellishment compensating for its flaws nor to furnish democracy, essentialized as “the political,” with an empirical-­ideal foundation rooted in a utopian vision of the future; it is to carry hic et nunc the empirical testimony of democracy’s transcendental foundation in sensus communis. The recognition of human finitude confines the sens de la famille to the transcendental realm of mere ideas that are nonetheless theoretically necessary and ethically mandatory. As history has proven again and again, when the hubris that denies human finitude is given a political loudspeaker, democracy is under threat. Among modern philosophers, Kant is in my view the only one to warn us that such hubris feeds on the confusion between the empirical and the transcendental. Nothing is more dangerous to democracy than wanting to found actual citizenship on the sens de la famille, society on community, Gesellschaft on Gemeinschaft, for such foundation entails the worst confusion between the empirical and the transcendental. Each time this has been attempted, the results have shown that the family circle closed down on the tribe, the race of the pure, the Blut und Boden, the biologically proved filiation, the “true men,” and that it excluded all others from the human family. And more than one of these attempts—­the Nazi one above all—­willfully confused the political with the aesthetic and the aesthetic with the biological. There is no more monstrous confusion of the empirical and the transcendental than the one that resulted in the Aryan people as a work of art kneaded by its Führer artist.24 Kant, who knows no worse enemy than such confusion, maintains a strict separation between the

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political and the aesthetic. Ever the skeptical pessimist, he even keeps the political separated from ethics. Ethics has to do with the maxims of will. Aesthetics has to do with feelings. And politics, the art of governing, has in the last instance to do with what Kant calls the techniques of nature. And yet Kant articulates the three registers: he links the political to ethics via the Doctrine of Right, ethics to art via the theory of beauty as symbol of morality, and aesthetics to the techniques of nature via the judgment of taste as model of the teleological judgment. The horizon offered by the community of reasonable beings—­Kant’s very unromantic expression for the human family—­would not even be thinkable without this triple articulation, nor would the latter be thinkable without the feeling of belonging to humanity intervening in the bridging. The preamble of the UDHR never states that it is the bridge that connects the human species as biological concept with humankind as political concept via the idea of the sense of belonging to humanity, which legitimates the usage of the family metaphor to refer to humanity as a whole. The preamble seems to take this sense for granted, notwithstanding the Atrides, Gide’s “Families, I hate you,” and all ethnic wars. Neither does it state that one of the most intriguing signs that we possess this idea is the fact that people use sentences such as “this is beautiful” or “this is art” to express their personal feeling while demanding that it be shared by all. But the UDHR itself recognizes that sign when, under article 27, it counts the right of everyone to enjoy the arts among the fundamental human rights that need to be cherished and protected.

Published in Art and Aesthetics after Adorno, ed. Anthony J. Cascardi, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).

7

Resisting Adorno, Revamping Kant

Anyone fully able to grasp why Haydn doubles the violins with a flute in piano might well get an intuitive glimpse into why, thousands of years ago, men gave up eating uncooked grain and began to bake bread, or why they started to smooth and polish their tools. Th eodor W. A dor no1

There are many such stunning remarks in Adorno: highly insightful shortcuts in time demanding commensurate short-­circuits in the reader’s brain connections. They combine, or rather jostle, precise technical and philological knowledge of a given art form (here music) with bold bird’s-­eye views of the fate of humankind mediated by strong political consciousness of history, especially of the economic overdetermination of the period in which the philosopher and his readers live. Lifted from a paragraph that starts “As a bourgeois art music is young,” the lines of my epigraph are inserted in a thorough discussion of Wagner’s original talent for orchestration as a “victory of reification in instrumental practice,” leading Adorno to conclude that “Wagner’s oeuvre comes close to the consumer goods of the nineteenth century which knew no greater ambition than to conceal every sign of the work that went into them.”2 Lines such as these show Adorno at his best: clever, witty, fast, pugnacious, and flamboyant—­ and a true writer, to boot. They make you want to embrace his writing wholesale and, by the same token, they make critique of his thinking very difficult. Resisting Adorno (my title, I’m afraid, gives my intention away) does not get easier when we read on, but for reasons quite different, if not opposite: Works of art owe their existence to the division of labour in society, the

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separation of physical and mental labour. At the same time, they have their own roots in existence; their medium is not pure mind, but the mind that enters into reality and, by virtue of such movement, is able to maintain the unity of what is divided. It is this contradiction that forces works of art to make us forget that they have been made. The claim implicit in their existence and hence, too, the claim that existence has a meaning, is the more convincing, the less they contain to remind us that they have been made, and that they owe their being to something external to themselves, namely to a mental process. Art that is no longer able to perpetrate this deception with good conscience has implicitly destroyed the only element in which it can thrive.3

No doubt the reader who has the famous first line of Aesthetic Theory in mind—­“It is self-­evident that nothing concerning art is self-­evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist”4—­will read this paragraph as a statement of Adorno’s most intimate convictions and anxieties. The last sentence, in particular, all but betrays his profound desperation in the face of a world he sees as no longer capable of sustaining the, for him, fundamental illusion that makes works of art appear as sui generis entities, autonomous and as if unmade. It is no longer style and flamboyance that jump from the page but rather ponderous gloom. The paragraph is also typically obscure. But the gloom and the obscurity, even the despair, are magnets as powerful as wit and brilliance for the committed Adorno reader. Buttressed by his immense culture and his aristocratic sense of self, they account for the unique pathos—­you might call it the pain of contradictions lived and thought through—­that tinges Adorno’s writings in general. That pathos is irresistible; so much does it testify to the depth of his concerns, to the seriousness of his thoughts and, above all, to the lucidity at all costs that drives him. You are never left in doubt that art and culture matter to Adorno, moreover, that they matter because the course of the world matters, what he often names, in rather heavy terms, the totality. Fiat ars, pereat mundus is not an Adornian utterance. There is perhaps a measure of dandyish masochism in his writing, but not a trace of decadence. The pain is the price of compassion, the gloom is the mood the greatest mass murder ever perpetrated in the history of humankind—­the destruction of the European Jews—­commands: “The need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject.”5 Because Adorno’s pathos is not personal and subjective, because it is out there in the world and affects you objectively, its dark seduction is very hard to resist. If you care for the world yourself, then the pain that transpires behind Adorno’s professorial authority and critical

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consciousness is likely to move you in a much more profound and durable manner than the pyrotechnics of a style capable of linking violins doubled by a flute in Haydn to primitive human beings baking bread for the first time. Of course, you might quibble with the content of the paragraph even if its tone bewitches you. You might voice your surprise at such a distinguished reader of Marx invoking the technical “separation of physical and mental labour” in lieu of the social “division of labour in society.” But then you would easily find a dozen quotes elsewhere in Adorno’s writings that show you how aware he was that art owes its existence not to the “separation of physical and mental labour” but to the brutal fact that while one man composes music or poetry, another (wo)man has to bake his bread. My favorite one, from Minima moralia, is devoid neither of the witty and insightful historical shortcuts nor of the gloom demonstrated by the paragraph on which I am commenting: The existence of bread factories, turning the prayer that we be given our daily bread into a mere metaphor and an avowal of desperation, argues more strongly against the possibility of Christianity than all the enlightened critiques of the life of Jesus.6

Granted, those lines are not directly about art and the social division of labor, but (if this is an excuse) they are about bread and the labor that industrially produced bread conceals. They also give a glimpse of Adorno’s complicated relationship to Messianism ( Jewish and Christian)—­ something highly relevant to the relationship to art and to history our paragraph displays. To come back to it, the twist may well be that Adorno chooses to acknowledge the division of labor in terms of the separation of body and mind only because he wants to stress the paradox of the “mental process” that gives birth to works of art as being external to them. But here we run into serious translation problems. The word rendered as “mental process” (and as “mind” in the second sentence) is actually Geist, a word with quite a pedigree in German philosophy. Its Hegelian origin would have been blatant had the translator rendered it as “spirit.” But he seems to have systematically eclipsed the Hegelian overtones of the whole paragraph, making it perhaps not more obscure than it is but obscure in a way that betrays its author. We will need another translation: Works of art owe their existence-­in-­the-­world [Dasein] to the division of labor in society, the separation of physical and mental labor. By the same token, however, they themselves appear as in-­the-­world; their medium is not pure spirit existing for itself but the spirit that retreats into worldly

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existence [Existenz] and, by the force of such movement, lays a claim on the unity of what is separated. This contradiction forces works of art to make us forget that they are made: the claim their existence-­in-­the-­world stakes, and hence the claim that existence itself is meaningful, is the more convincing the less something in them warns us that they have been fabricated, that they owe their existence to spirit as something external to themselves. Art that is no longer able to achieve this deception with good conscience—­indeed its very principle—­has dissolved the only element in which it can realize itself.7

The gloom is still there; the anxiety as to the fate of art is still there; the fear that Dasein itself, not just the existence of art but existence per se, in other words human life, has lost its meaning, is still there. But I hope this translation makes it a bit clearer how much all that pessimism is dressed up in Hegelian garb. To read under Adorno’s pen that the medium of works of art is not “pure spirit existing for itself ” is already utterly surprising. Does Adorno need to remind us that in art, spirit has material existence? Has he not accustomed us to consider the medium in its materiality and its technical specificity, first and foremost? What we witness here is Adorno presenting a Hegelian argument the better to push the anti-­Hegelian counterargument according to which works of art “owe their existence to spirit as something external to themselves.” For Hegel, spirit was the internal medium of art, phenomenal existence the external, and when he saw their final synthesis achieved in the wake of romantic art, it was to the benefit of spirit. For the postromantic Adorno, even that ultimate stage of spirit is but a particular moment of its history. The unification of matter and spirit is claimed rather than achieved, and then at the cost of a regressive movement of spirit retreating, recoiling, taking refuge, as it were, in the material existence of the artwork’s medium. Here Adorno concludes, “This contradiction forces works of art to make us forget that they are made.” In other words, this unresolved battle of forces compels us to look at works of art as though they were not artifacts but rather products of nature. And when that battle is lost, as the last sentence dramatically announces, then art’s very survival is under threat. The view that art should look like nature while we know that it is the product of spirit is so foreign to Hegel that dialectical negation of Hegel fails to account for its appearance under Adorno’s pen. It is a typically Kantian view, however: “Nature, we say, is beautiful if it also looks like art; and art can be called beautiful only if we are conscious that it is art while yet it looks to us like nature.”8 I wonder whether Adorno’s particular brand of pathos does not result partly from his being perpetually torn between the two greatest among his predecessors in the history of German philos-

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ophy, Kant and Hegel. This is not to say that Schopenhauer and Nietzsche do not loom large in his work as well, but traveling back and forth between these two thinkers and Hegel is feasible, whereas reconciling Kant and Hegel is not—­except perhaps via Schelling, but this would mean walking the romantic route, something Adorno avoids like the plague. That Adorno’s pathos results from the clash between his unrelenting longing for reconciliation and his acute awareness that reconciliation in an irreconciled world is either a lie or an impossibility is palpable everywhere in his writings. That “the pain of contradictions lived and thought through,” as I called his pathos, might result, in part, from his attempt to reconcile Kant’s critical with Hegel’s speculative philosophies surfaces more sporadically, but where it does, it signals how impossible a task Adorno has set himself. What would such reconciliation entail?

Reconciliation Versöhnung is a key word in Adorno, one with complex meanings and several realms of application, and it is a dialectical word, which is to say that it necessarily implies its own negation. It resonates with the word utopia in the political realm and with the word redemption in the religious one, and it carries the connotation of “promise” as ceaselessly betrayed and yet still waiting to be fulfilled. It is the word in which Adorno’s hope and despair become one—­no wonder it is also the most laden with pathos. For example, “Dialectics serves the end of reconciliation,” and also, “The agony of dialectics is the world’s agony raised to the level of concept.”9 To start with the easiest to grasp, one layer of meaning in Adorno’s usage of reconciliation is the practical, social, or historical meaning of cease-­fire, armistice among enemies, the taming of class and other struggles, and the state of peace obtained thereby. Such a peace is always, by necessity, provisional, never durable and therefore not much more than a truce, yet renouncing it would mean renouncing every hope of a pacified world. A second layer of meaning has reconciliation refer to the more profound and in principle more durable peace that history would make with itself if it could make up for past tragedies and catastrophes, if their victims could be vindicated once and for all without calling for revenge in their turn; in short, if the process of history itself could be brought to a halt. This would be the true redemption, and no investment in progress is thinkable without positing it on the horizon, but since it calls on a teleological notion of history implying the abolition of history, it is self-­contradictory and bound to fail. For example, “Utopia—­the yet-­to-­exist—­is [ . . . ] the imaginary reparation of the catastrophe of world history; it is freedom

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that, under the spell of necessity, did not and may never come to be.”10 A third layer of meaning touches on the even broader reconciliation of the sphere of human life with the global sphere encompassing all life, that is, with the order of natural phenomena, natural beings, and natural laws. This ultimate utopia must be recognized as beyond the realizable, while its promises—­those made by the beauty of nature, in particular—­cannot be forgotten without humanity’s presence in the natural world becoming meaningless. Traversing these various layers of meaning, there runs the philosophical plane where reconciliation is defined as the dialectical uniting of opposites that resolves a contradiction; for Adorno, as for Hegel and Marx, contradictions are not just logical and formal, and they don’t obey Aristotle’s principle of excluded third; they are real, concrete ordeals embodied in worldly events, disputes, and struggles; they are the engine of history. But unlike Marx, whose materialist upturning of Hegel consists in putting the historical development of the relationships of production in lieu of the progressive unfolding of absolute spirit, Adorno articulates his critique of Hegel around a different kind of materialism: the radical refusal of synthesis, of sublation, of what Lyotard has called “result.”11 It is not only that contradictions cannot be solved; it is that they ought to remain unsolved. Their irresolvableness makes them vulnerable to further contradictions and thus keeps open the possibility of reconciliation as a potential. In the same way that Messianism requires the arrival of the Messiah to be perpetually postponed, so every momentary reconciliation requires the unity of the opposites to be in turn denied in the name of truly accomplished reconciliation. For example, “If the utopia of art were fulfilled, it would be art’s temporal end.”12 Oxymoric Wahrheitsgehalt is, I believe, the main thrust of Adorno’s highly contradictory notion of Versöhnung as it applies, exemplarily, to works of art: The most intimate contradiction within works of art, the most threatening and fruitful, is that they are irreconcilable by way of reconciliation, while actually their constitutive irreconcilability at the same time cuts them off from reconciliation.13

Adorno’s ambition, however, doesn’t stop with the anti-­Hegelian Hegelianism his project of a humanity (ir)reconciled with itself entails. For a philosopher of his background and caliber, the ultimate reconciliation must be the reconciliation of the practical and the theoretical—­in Kant’s terms, of ethics and nature; in Hegel’s terms, of spirit and the world—­all this on Adorno’s terms, that is, as irreconcilable reconciliation. To play Hegel against himself will not suffice here. Must Kant not be played against

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himself too? Should a “negative” Hegel not be played against a “negative” Kant? And would that not amount to the true dialectical Versöhnung of Hegel with Kant? If transcendental idealism was the solution for Kant and dialectics the solution for Hegel, we might have a glimpse of the enormity of the task Adorno set himself: to somehow combine negative dialectics with transcendental materialism. The latter expression is not Adorno’s but what its strategy might consist in is relatively clear: wherever Kant presupposes innate universal conditions of possibility, refer to sedimented history and ingrained social habits instead. Adorno does this systematically in the chapter of Negative Dialectics devoted to Kant. One superb example is the passage where he criticizes Kant for making the will the transcendental seat of freedom by saying that freedom is freedom of the will only insofar as men have the will to seek freedom.14 Another is the passage in Dialectic of Enlightenment where he and Horkheimer pretend that Kant’s transcendental schematism, this “hidden art in the depths of the human soul,” has been mechanized by the culture industry.15 I doubt that Adorno ever explicitly put the ultimate reconciliation of the practical and the theoretical on his agenda, but he was highly aware that Kant’s Critique of Judgment was an attempt at precisely such a reconciliation (though of course not on his terms): the bridging of the domains of the first and the second Critiques via the third, the making compatible of the laws of nature with the moral law via the reflecting judgment. He therefore knew the centrality of aesthetics for any such attempt, and thus of the realm of pleasure and pain—­not just pleasure and pain theorized by a philosopher but experienced by this philosopher. (Indeed, “suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject.” And there is not much talk of pleasure in Adorno.) Given the central place aesthetics had for his philosophy in general, it is hard to imagine Adorno failing to reflect consciously on his own pain and not objectifying the scars left by the cultural issues that mattered to him. He never wrote on art and culture without engaging his own appreciation, and he never lost sight of the larger picture, convinced as he was that art’s autonomy was precisely what allowed it not to be cut off from the world at large—­a conviction shared by both Hegel and Kant, albeit on mutually incompatible premises.16 Adorno made his home in these incompatibilities. His aesthetic theory is fraught with Hegelian readings of Kantian issues (never the other way around, of course): solvable antinomies interpreted as irresolvable contradictions, ideas of reason recast as moments of spirit, ethical imperatives rewritten as historical programs, and so on. I am tempted to read the particular brand of pathos the Aesthetic Theory yields as the symptom of the willfully impossible reconciliation of Kant and Hegel. And I want to resist the pathos and its appeal not only because I made my choice between

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Kant and Hegel long ago and don’t dream of reconciling them but also because I see no way for the skeptic to engage critically and respectfully with Adorno’s thought other than to start by reading his pathos as the symptomatic outcome neither of his character nor of the state of the world but of his way of thinking. Indeed, negative dialectics is a way of thinking that you either embrace or reject but with which you cannot enter into discussion. If you embrace it, you cannot even settle an argument you might have with yourself. There is no arguing with someone who claims that aesthetic experience is “possibility promised by its impossibility,” or that although the utopian figure of art “is compelled toward absolute negativity, it is precisely by virtue of this negativity that it is not absolutely negative,” or that “a noncontradictory theory of the history of art is not to be conceived: the essence of its history is contradictory in itself.”17 Where do you start if you don’t agree? Where is your possibility to contradict a theory that makes of contradiction a nonfalsifiable motto? How do you wriggle out of the ensuing double bind? What do you make of the conundrum of the passage where Adorno claims that philosophy’s task is to interpret art “in order to say what [art] is unable to say, whereas art is only able to say it by not saying it”?18 Pardon? This is no longer dialectics, negative or other; it is self-­contradiction run amok. Better laugh it off than whine with Adorno, I’d say. To quote that passage out of context was a bit unfair. And to laugh Adorno’s pathos away may turn out to be a symptom of its own. Consider this, one of the concluding lines of Aesthetic Theory: “It would be preferable that in some better times art vanish altogether than that it forget the suffering that is its expression and in which form finds its substance.”19 Would you dare laugh that off and risk passing for a philistine who wants art to paint the world rosy and pink? From Grünewald’s Issenheim altarpiece to Picasso’s Guernica, from Shakespeare’s Macbeth to Beckett’s Endgame (which Adorno wrote about and held in high esteem), would you deny that human suffering is the stuff great works of art are made of? You may laugh with Beckett, because you would be laughing at the ridiculousness of laughing, but you won’t laugh at Beckett.20 So you won’t laugh at Adorno either, when he prefers to see art vanish rather than have it forget the suffering of humankind. And yet the pathos of that line! Are you willing to suffer with Adorno? Will you accept the sacrifice of art against the certainty of “some better times”? I, for one, shall not. I simply do not entertain, even remotely, the hope that some future day the world might be peaceful enough—­harmonious, beautiful, reconciled enough—­to allow for the vanishing of art into uselessness (which says something about what I think is the usefulness of art). I find such hope naive and futile if not dangerous. Thus I shall refuse to share in the pathos that wants me to

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suffer either way, whether it is from a life without art in an otherwise happy world or from the “damaged life” of the existing world with art as solace.21 Yet I can’t honestly shut my ears to the intimation that makes Adorno’s pathos so hard to resist: am I therefore devoid of empathy for my fellow men? Have I abandoned all hope in a better world? Have I sold out to “affirmation”? And, accessorily: have I not misunderstood Adorno? Did he not write that line as a warning because he refused the alternative it offered? Has he not consistently written against art as solace? Was he really that naive, to believe in a future, perfect world? Why then does the word Versöhnung under his pen mean the contrary of its dictionary definition? Is the truth-­value of his thinking not of practical nature? Was he not, like good old Marx, philosophizing in order to change the world rather than interpret it?

Affirmation All these questions may boil down to this: what is it, signaled by Adorno’s particular brand of pathos, that makes the intimation that if you don’t espouse his negative dialectics you fall into affirmative ideology so strong? Affirmation is another key word in Adorno, and somehow a pendant to Versöhnung, because it is the Frankfurt School’s word for false and premature reconciliation.22 It has a practical and a theoretical side, and practice prevails, in accordance with the motto of changing the world rather than interpreting it. In theory, “affirmation” refers to every discourse, such as positivism, that silences the negative, the dark, the inassimilable, or the contradictory nature of the real. In practice, “affirmation” designates reconciliation with the world as it is, submission to so-­called reality, moral resignation, political defeatism, and approval of the status quo in general. No one with progressive ideas—­and I’d add, no decent intellectual—­wants to be accused of endorsing such reconciliation. But precisely herein lies the catch-­22 that makes Adorno’s pathos irresistibly communicative: if you are a progressive in practice, you must agree with me in theory, the pathos implies; and if you disagree with me in theory, then you betray progressive politics in practice, and you are a traitor to the cause. Adorno must have had this debate with himself many times and, in my view, he succumbed to its double bind. Hence the irritating fatalism of his all-­ encompassing (shall I risk the word totalitarian?) reconciliation project. Self-­contradictory as this project is, and ought to be, in order not to be totalitarian, it betrays a self-­defeating obsession with the totality. Adorno is never satisfied with a partial or temporary or local reconciliation. Unless the totality is redeemed, redemption is illegitimate, untrue, and fraudu-

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lent. Since, however, no one but the most naive optimist will place bets on global redemption, what remains is global despair in the name of global redemption. Again, “dialectics serves the end of reconciliation,” and “the agony of dialectics is the world’s (my emphasis) agony raised to the level of concept.” For the totality should not be redeemed: “It lies in the definition of negative dialectics that it will not come to rest in itself, as if it were total. This is its form of hope.”23 If hope, then despair; if despair, then hope: opting for the fragment in the name of totality is the only move desperate hope (that oxymoron!) allows. The Schlegel brothers already had a glimpse of this, and Adorno is definitely their heir. How disappointing, in a sense, and yet perfectly explicable it is to realize that Adorno’s “micrological” politics perhaps amount to no more than his own redemption from his obsession with the whole: “Micrology is the place where metaphysics finds a haven from totality.”24 Maybe, maybe not. Certainly, micrology was the wishful solution to Adorno’s own contradictions. Adorno has, it seems to me, inherited in spite of himself the worst from Hegel: the notion that total, absolute realization of spirit in the actual world accomplishes the ineluctable process of history itself. The fact that he no longer dares to call it progress only adds to the pathos. Philosophers who abide so rigorously by the consequences of their own thinking processes that they systematically think against themselves are undoubtedly courageous, and I know no philosopher who does that more courageously than Adorno. (Bourdieu is also in that category, and in his writings, too, the pathos is palpable.25) When that sort of courage is combined with great intellectual powers, immense erudition, infallible intuition of the issues that count, and keen artistic judgment, it commands the greatest respect and admiration. All this I want to salute in Adorno. I also deeply sympathize with “the pain of contradictions lived and thought through” that is as endearing in the man as it is frustrating in his writings. But when all is said and done, I must confess that Adorno doesn’t do much for me; he rarely helps me think. Neither does the philosophical tradition to which he belongs, starting with the romantics: the whole string of German poets and philosophers after Kant who led his legacy astray. I said earlier that I made my choice between Kant and Hegel long ago (in favor of Kant, it goes without saying), which is roughly to say that I opted for transcendentalism against dialectics. By “transcendentalism” I mean criticism in Kant’s sense. It need not be idealistic; as Adorno surmised, transcendental materialism is perfectly conceivable. As for dialectics, whether idealist or materialist, affirmative or negative, it is, in my view, wishful thinking; it articulates theory with practice by way of a vicious circle that wants correct theory to found just practice while just practice proves the theory correct. Worse, and how paradoxically ironic: dialecti-

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cal thinking wants to make the irreconcilable reconcilable (all the while acknowledging its irreconcilability, the better to prescribe its reconcilability, and so on, in circles) because it refuses to reconcile itself with the irreconcilable. (Notice that reconciliation with the irreconcilable, in other words, with the fact that there are irresolvable contradictions, contains no contradiction.) Hegel refused to bow before the most absolute of all irreconcilabilities, that between the finite and the infinite; in so doing, he refused to reconcile metaphysics with human finitude—­precisely Kant’s landmark achievement. What Kant established once and for all, and Hegel stubbornly refused, is the possibility of a philosophy radically compatible with modern science, that is, definitively godless. Dialectics is the quixotic refuge of theology, even in Adorno (to say nothing of Walter Benjamin) and, to that extent, it needs the Dulcinea of a reenchanted world to long for and windmills such as reification to fight against. The superiority of transcendentalism over dialectics is blatant provided it is not confused with its “affirmative” derivatives such as logical positivism, based on a very un-­Kantian acceptance of the division of labor among the mental faculties. Hegel railed against the nascent positivism of his time, which he accused of ratiocination, that is, of defective thought confined in the narrow limits of the understanding. Transcendentalism in Kant’s sense is not at all reducible to that sort of “affirmative” thinking. It does not forbid reason (practical as well as theoretical) to venture beyond the limits of understanding, as long as reason knows that there is nothing to know beyond those limits. Kant’s Ding an sich is and remains the most formidable antidote to the speculative temptation that seized German philosophers and poets beginning with the first reception of the Critique of Judgment in the 1790s. Far from embodying this profound metaphysical essence mysteriously lodged in the heart of things it is still too often taken to be, the thing-­in-­itself is a conceit that carries the imperative Thou shalt not pretend to know the unknowable (reconcile the irreconcilable, synthesize the unsynthesizable, present the unpresentable, and so on). Let the thing-­in-­itself rest; it is a mere heuristic supposition we, finite minds, need in order to think properly. Hegel is of course the most monumental of German philosophers to have maniacally refused to let the thing-­in-­ itself rest and to have sought to raise it to the self-­consciousness of the thing-­for-­itself, but he is far from alone. One senses the same panic before Kant’s epistemological imperative in Heidegger’s obsession with the ontic-­ontological distinction. I wonder, sometimes, why Adorno fell under Hegel’s spell, he who so cruelly and gaily (no pathos, there) dissected the pretensions of Heidegger’s “jargon of authenticity.”26 Perhaps Hegel’s impressive posterity, in Marx and beyond, prevented Adorno from realizing that his statement “Philosophy which once seemed outmoded is now

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alive because the moment of its realization has been missed”27 was better applied to Kant than to Hegel.

Ugliness I am aware of how bluntly I state my position. I make no apologies, except that I humbly admit lacking the intellectual equipment (not to mention the time and patience) needed to back my perhaps outrageous views on dialectics with the proper scholarly work; those views are more a matter of Wahlverwandschaften than of scientificity. For sure, I don’t feel alone in the family of antidialectical thinkers. Minds much greater than mine—­not least Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze—­belong to it. As for my declared preference for Kant over Hegel, it goes back a long way, at least to the 1980s, to my days at the Collège de philosophie, where I would listen to Jean-­François Lyotard and Pierre-­Jean Labarrière dueling over the timely relevance of both philosophers. As Kant’s champion, Lyotard won the duel for me, even though “my” Kant was from the outset quite different from his. In a nutshell, Lyotard, who must be credited with having initiated a “postmodern” return to Kant—­actually, to a revamped Kant that would have been unrecognizable to the neo-­Kantians of yore—­funnels every possible philosophical issue, from aesthetics to politics, through the Analytic of the Sublime.28 My “Kant after Duchamp” approach to aesthetics bypasses the sublime altogether. Its reading strategy addresses the Analytic of the Beautiful, mentally replaces every occurrence of beauty with art, and assumes that the sentence “This is art” is the paradigmatic formula of a modern aesthetic judgment in the truest Kantian sense. I mention this here only because, to an Adornian reader, the Analytic of the Beautiful, and by inference my own conception of art, must appear unbearably affirmative; only the Analytic of the Sublime makes room for negativity and contradiction. To stay with Adorno, I think it needs to be stressed that he held (not surprisingly) a complex and ambiguous position vis-­à-­vis the Kantian sublime, which he deemed at once complicit with domination and a protest against it.29 And he knew from experience, as I do also, that under the conditions of the culture industry the sublime turns to kitsch. He allowed his experience and taste to shape his theory to some extent, as I think one should, in spite of the risks involved. Philippe Lacoue-­Labarthe has reproached Adorno for having missed the properly philosophical sublimity of Schoenberg’s Moses and Aaron. 30 Perhaps it was Adorno’s aesthetic distaste for the sublime that made him deaf to it. Whatever the case, I would hope that my own distaste for the sublime has not made me deaf or blind

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to negativity and contradiction in aesthetic matters. On the contrary, my interpretation of Kant, which I admit often implies reading between the lines and sometimes against the grain, consistently stresses the particular negativity that resides in aesthetic disagreement. I seek to give ugliness and even disgust the voice that academic readings of the Analytic of the Beautiful silence. Critics of Kant who are under the impression that the said Analytic opens onto classical, harmonious, “affirmative” aesthetics only never imagine Kant in the midst of an aesthetic quarrel.31 They are in my opinion victims of Kant’s social conformism. In aesthetics as well as in politics, Kant was reluctant to let opposition speak openly and, therefore, minimized the role dissent must have played, even against his will, in his own writings. Hence the polished, too polished, look the Analytic of the Beautiful projects. Beauty occupies center stage while ugliness coyly remains in the shadow, to the extent that for some readers, it is as if negative aesthetic judgments in the realm of beauty were for Kant a contradiction in terms and thus impossible.32 To witness the birth of an aesthetic of ugliness, some argue, we would have to wait for Karl Rosenkranz, who was seen as a Hegelian and, as such, was supposedly able to grant contradiction a nonformal, concrete role.33 I disagree: there is room for negative aesthetic judgments in Kant, if only because it is all too obvious that without the freedom to say “This is ugly,” “This is beautiful” would not be a judgment at all. But I also have more technical reasons to disagree. As Kant insisted, the pain occasioned by ugliness is not to be confused with the repulsion caused by disgust.34 The argument that has ugliness forbid disinterestedness makes that confusion and fails to see that when something is pronounced ugly, it is so relative to the standard of beauty that the thing in question should have met. The more serious argument that has ugliness contradict the harmonious free play of the faculties suffers from another confusion, that between logical contradiction and real opposition. Isn’t it ironic that Hegelians proudly think they are ahead of Kant when they promote precisely this confusion to the rank of “dialectics” whereas, in fact, even the precritical Kant had already set out to undo it?35 In a short essay dated 1763 that has apparently no bearing on aesthetics, Kant speaks of pleasure and displeasure—­the very feelings he would later see yielded by beauty and ugliness, respectively—­not as concepts in logical contradiction to one another but as opposite sensations susceptible to quantitative measurement on a continuous scale.36 A letter contains both good and bad news; our pleasure in reading the good news is, say, rated 5, and the displeasure in reading the bad news, 3: we are left with 2 units of pleasure. We may smile at the naïveté of such protobehaviorist apprehension of feelings; it is not their measurability that matters, it is the

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fact that Kant proposes an articulation of the positive and the negative that results from an actual opposition of forces distinct from the logical, Aristotelian principle of contradiction. I cannot help but see in Kant’s proposal an anticipated alternative to dialectics and its confusions. For it does what dialectics does: give oppositional negation an active, productive, “political” function while avoiding the confusion with linguistic negation dialectics suffers from. Psychologically speaking, pleasure is definitely a positive feeling, Kant notes. Displeasure, he then argues, can be called negative pleasure yet is a positive sensation in the sense that it is positively a sensation rather than the cancellation of sensation it would be if negative pleasure had been a mere contradiction in terms. And he adds that, similarly, “aversion can be called a negative desire, hate a negative love, ugliness a negative beauty, blame a negative praise.”37 Though Kant does not adduce the argument of the “negative magnitudes” in the third Critique, the question of its applicability therein has great consequences for the question of whether or not the Analytic of the Beautiful is “affirmative.” If the positiveness of negative pleasure is read into the Analytic, as I am convinced is legitimate, then to say that ugliness negates the harmony of the faculties is not enough; ugliness positively generates the conflict of the faculties.38 The notion of the harmony of the faculties is introduced in section 9 of the Critique of Judgment, perhaps the most obscure and frustrating passage in the Analytic of the Beautiful, inasmuch as Kant promises there “the key to the critique of taste” and then fails to deliver. Section 9 raises the question of “whether in the judgment of taste the feeling of pleasure precedes the judging of the object or the latter precedes the former.”39 Kant knows that the judging must precede the pleasure, for otherwise we would deal with mere agreeableness in sensation and not with a pure judgment about beauty; but he is unable to demonstrate it, and soon the initial question gets rephrased in terms of alleged differences between pleasures. In order not to be reducible to mere pleasure of the senses, the pleasure yielded by a pure judgment of taste must be of a different kind. Kant then fancies that this pleasure inheres in the “state of mind in the free play of the imagination and the understanding (so far as they agree with each other as is requisite for a cognition in general).”40 Without addressing here in full the considerable difficulties of section 9, let us ask ourselves how we are to conceive of this “free play.”41 And let us formulate the issue in terms that Adorno might endorse: let us consider that rather than expressing natural, innate conditions, the suppositions about the human mind that constitute the transcendental subject transpose social and historically dated ones. Let us envisage the relationship of

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imagination and understanding as resulting from the division of labor—­ technical and social—­among the mental faculties, even if this implies anthropomorphizing them. Imagination, one of whose tasks is to unify the raw sense data registered by sensibility into coherent gestalts or images, presents understanding with, say, a rose, and asks, “what is this?”42 Understanding, one of whose tasks is to subsume images under concepts thanks to its innate schematism, answers, “a rose.” Imagination bows and then asks, “what color is it?” and understanding, which possesses a conceptual definition of color (e.g., wavelength) and also has as its mandate to perform logical operations on concepts, answers with the predicate, “red.” Imagination bows again. In all such dialogues, understanding is the master; it knows and gives answers; it is the superior faculty. Like a servant at the master’s dinner table, imagination is content with presenting the dishes and begs for understanding’s approval; it is the lower faculty. There is no more conflict between them than there is between the orders of society: harmony reigns when everybody stays in their assigned places. But now imagination asks understanding whether the rose is beautiful, and understanding is obliged to respond, “I don’t know; beauty is not a concept, it is a matter of feeling, and I am not technically outfitted to deal with feelings.” There are three possible scenarios here. In the first, the rose is neither beautiful nor ugly, and our two faculties split with a shrug of indifference. Understanding goes back to the business he knows (let’s gender the faculties, in accordance with the social order of Kant’s time), and imagination consults with her own servant, sensibility. The latter tells her that her sensors for inner sensations register nothing: either this particular rose leaves her totally cold (indifference) or it triggers as much pleasure as displeasure, and their opposed forces compensate and neutralize each other (equilibrium). In the second scenario, the rose is objectively beautiful,43 and something unusual happens: imagination is not satisfied with understanding’s avowal of ignorance, and she presses him to try harder. Having received sensibility’s report testifying to an intense pleasure, she won’t take “I don’t know” for an answer, and she provokes understanding. She admits that unlike him she doesn’t master concepts, but she relies on sensibility’s gut feelings to back her claims and to empower her. Understanding is surprised and excited by such effrontery and, although the rules of the game are not his, accepts imagination’s challenge to play with her. She in turn feels flattered by her master’s dismissal of courtly etiquette, and this prompts her to more audacities: she is happy to play a game nobody can win. Though at first he resisted, understanding, too, is now happy to indulge. He challenges imagination to convince him, by the sheer energy of her own conviction, that the rose is beautiful even though he still has no concept of the beautiful under which to subsume the

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rose. And so the game goes on, yielding a particularly felicitous harmony between the two partners, a harmony made of liberté, égalité, fraternité. The passage in The Conflict of the Faculties where Kant rejoices at the enthusiasm of the spectators (not of the actors) of the French Revolution is well known.44 Why do they, aristocrats among them, whose class interest should align them with the ancien régime, embrace the revolution? Noting the fact, Kant sees in it a sign—­not more than a sign but a sign, nevertheless—­that political progress and faith in the presence of a “moral disposition in the human race” are not vain words.45 His attitude vis-­à-­ vis the mutual excitement that imagination and understanding trigger in each other is exactly of the same order, political implications included. I would not be surprised if the (pre-­Terror) events of the Revolution, strictly contemporaneous with the writing of the third Critique, proved to have provided Kant with a Leitfaden for his reflections on the free play of the faculties in section 9. The way the Schiller of the Letters shows he has read the third Critique no doubt encourages speculation along such lines. In aesthetic experience, and only there, the social hierarchies of the ancien régime cease to rule over the faculties of the mind. Imagination and understanding are able to play with each other freely because they are on equal footing; now that they are free and equal, fraternal love reigns in their midst: such is the harmony that translates as the particular pleasure only beauty yields. Just as Kant has read the enthusiasm of the French Revolution’s spectators as a sign of political progress, so he reads the harmony of the faculties in the experience of beauty as a sign, too. A sign of what? Of the universal shareability of the pleasure dispensed by beauty, which is itself a sign. A sign of what? Of the presence in all humans of the faculty of taste, which is also a sign, this time of the presence in them of the universally shared faculty of agreeing by dint of feeling, which Kant calls sensus communis. Kant’s unique discovery, indeed his unsurpassable contribution to aesthetics, is to have understood that by making positive judgments about beauty, human beings suppose their humanity to reside in their claimed common ability for having feelings in common. Call it universal empathy, if you want. The pleasure beauty yields is not the egotistic pleasure of the senses, it must be the joy one has in sharing one’s pleasure with anyone and everyone. Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” put to music by Beethoven in his ninth symphony, exactly transcribes Kant’s exhilarating discovery of the sensus communis. Or does it? Does it not rather—­much more soberly put—­transcribe the romantic, euphoric moment in the reception history of Kant’s discovery, a moment that gleefully ignored Kant’s prudence and skepticism (testified to by the words suppose, claimed, must be, in the sentences above)? Adorno’s reading of Kant definitely belongs to a dysphoric moment in that same

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history—­a moment I don’t believe we have left or will be leaving any time soon. Not that I see an even darker future than did Adorno; I simply think our historical moment has prepared us to unearth the negativity hidden in Kant’s text and to bring it to the surface. Not to be inclined to confuse moments in the reception history of philosophical discoveries with dialectical moments in the (Hegelian) history of spirit is an advantage in this respect. As I gradually realize, Kant gives me the means to accompany Adorno and to accept being led by him while addressing my resistance to his Hegelianism only. The pathos in “empathy” is a key provided we use it to open doors other than Adorno’s psychology or idiosyncratic way of thinking. Empathy—­in Worringer’s or Lipps’s sense—­is most of the time not understood as the propensity to share in someone else’s pleasure. It is the inclination or the willingness to share in someone else’s pain. In light of this, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” sounds utterly idealistic and Kant’s sensus communis more than a trifle too “affirmative.” Not pleasure, so much, but pain is the sign in aesthetic experience that Kant ought to have been attentive to. I take this to be the gist of Adorno’s admonition to Kant, which his particular brand of pathos signals over and over again. Pain, not pleasure, is the only sure sign indicating that all human beings must be endowed with sensus communis. When Adorno’s reading is stripped of the temptation to have Hegel fill in for Kant’s shortcomings, the theoretical must implied by Kant’s skepticism (a müssen for theory) comes closer and closer to a practical ought (a sollen for practice). Such transfer is in any case implied by Adorno’s credo, as it assigns pain the universalizing function pleasure had for Kant. Should one stake one’s hope for a reconciled humanity on aesthetic experience, that is, on art and culture, as Adorno definitely did, then one had better invest that hope in universal compassion than in universal joy. Let pathos—­“a pathos that even the radically pathos-­alien work is unable to slough off ”—­be the aesthetic bond that unites the human species.46 Let expression in art “lend a voice to suffering.”47 Indeed, for Adorno, “expression is scarcely to be conceived except as the expression of suffering.” He even adds that “joy has proven inimical to expression, perhaps because it has yet to exist”—­which gives a measure of his historical pessimism.48 Expressionism is one art-­historical name (realism is the other) of the moment when the expression of suffering was allowed to negate the idealism of classical aesthetics. And as Adorno knew, both expressionism and realism have always been associated with the controversial yet in the end positive assessment of ugliness. It is not certain that Kant would have understood the positiveness of that assessment, but he would have agreed that the feeling ugliness in art stems from

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is suffering, for it is the feeling ugliness yields. He called it pain or, more timidly, displeasure, but there is no doubt in my mind that he conceived of it not merely as a lack of pleasure (a logical negation) but as an active and positive force of negation making pleasure difficult or impossible. This brings us back to our rose, and to our third, not yet envisioned scenario: the rose is objectively ugly.49 Kant does not address the issue of ugliness explicitly in section 9 of the Critique of Judgment nor anywhere else. But his problem with it is clearly the same as his problem with beauty: in order not to be reducible to mere displeasure of the senses, the pain occasioned by a negative judgment of taste must be of a different kind. There is no reason to believe that Kant went another route than with beauty, so we may surmise that the pain in question also involves imagination and understanding, but this time “so far as they” do not “agree with each other as is requisite for a cognition in general.”50 Cognition is antagonized. The technical and social division of labor among the mental faculties remains, but free play is out of the question. Insurrection of the lower faculties is the order of the day. When imagination presents understanding with the rose and asks him if it is ugly, “I don’t know” is understanding’s reply, for ugliness is no more a concept than beauty and it is equally a matter of feeling. Here again, imagination won’t take “I don’t know” for an answer, but this time she is met with downright rebuttal. Not only has her effrontery not won her understanding’s sympathy at all, it has succeeded in irritating him considerably. Understanding knows his own rules, and since he is the master, he is willing to abide by his rules but not by someone else’s—­ least of all by those of a female servant twice ranking lower in the social order! His irritation makes him phrase his response maladroitly: instead of humbly admitting that he is not technically outfitted to deal with feelings, he barks back “Feelings are irrelevant, as far as I (the master) am concerned.” This of course infuriates imagination: the message she has received from sensibility spoke of such an intense unpleasantness that, as far as she is concerned, there is no doubt that feelings are relevant—­ and no doubt either that the rose is ugly. Her conviction grows, and so does her revolt: she is no longer asking understanding for confirmation of sensibility’s gut feelings; she wants the master to acknowledge her own intuitive certainty. Understanding is impressed but doesn’t budge. Though he won’t admit it, he is not indifferent to such convincing display of conviction, but since the only rules he recognizes are the rules of cognition, he mistakes imagination’s certainty for some mysterious feminine access to a truth that is refused to him. Now he goes after that truth. He questions imagination; he interrogates her. She is only too glad

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to oblige him, for she has seen in his demand her opportunity to seize power. Sensing this, and not ready to surrender his towering master’s status, understanding freezes into an authoritarian posture. And so on and so forth. The game, or the conflict, goes on and on without ever resolving in the happiness of both parties. In a bitter stalemate, at best. Marx was certainly not as disinterested a spectator as Kant when confronted with the revolutions and counterrevolutions of his time. He was also a lot less conservative. If he had witnessed the quarrel of imagination and understanding over ugliness, he, too, might have read it as a sign and, like Kant with the French Revolution, as a sign of political progress—­progress spelled “class struggle,” though, not “disinterestedness.” He would have given the conflict of the faculties a reading as positive as Kant’s reading of their harmony in spite of the negativity of the feelings involved. And he would have had a good reason for this: when conducted consciously under the direction of the Communist Party, class struggle unfolds on behalf of classless society; the proletariat is a social class only as long as its ongoing struggle against the bourgeoisie prevents it from standing for humanity reconciled; the conflict is pursued in the name of the harmony it will eventually bring about; war is waged for the sake of its termination; negativity is legitimated by the ultimately positive, even affirmative, goal to be attained. And so on. Adorno can’t afford, won’t afford, Marx’s optimism. He is writing his Aesthetic Theory with Stalin’s ghost looking over his shoulder; with the crushed Budapest insurrection in memory; with the Berlin wall facing him; with the knowledge of Marx’s utopia having become a totalitarian nightmare; and still more intolerable, with the awareness that there is no more redress for Auschwitz ever to be expected from the self-­righteous antifascism stemming from the Eastern bloc than from the amnesia reigning in Wirtschaftswunder West Germany. Historical contradictions have no happy ending in negative dialectics. Yet as desperate an answer to Marx as it may be, negative dialectics preserves an important aspect of Marx’s handling of contradictions—­and one, interestingly enough, that does not appear to be dialectical: its “in the name of ” structure. It is in the name of totality that micrology opts for the fragment; in the name of global redemption that global desperation takes over; in the name of truly accomplished reconciliation that momentary reconciliations are denounced as false and premature; in the name of beauty and harmony that ugliness and dissonance were given the leading role in virtually every significant modern art movement (not just in realism and expressionism). Adorno found precious something that the Marxist art theorists who instrumentalized art (Lukács is Adorno’s favorite foil) were only too eager to sacrifice: the intuition that the autonomy of truly ambitious art, its radicalism, its abstraction, its so-­called

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formalism, its active deskilling, have a lot to do with this “in the name of ” handling of contradictions. The failure of art for art’s sake was not that the artists in that movement were making art in the name of art; it was that they failed to understand that they had to make antiart in the name of art. (Gautier not “getting” Manet would be to the point.) The art for art’s sake artists conceived of art’s autonomy as a closed territory fearfully cleansed of all inner conflict and fenced off from the “totality.” They did not see, as Adorno did, and how exemplarily, that only the art that willfully lets the dirt and the violence of the “totality” contaminate its autonomy truly establishes that autonomy. When Adorno writes, “For the sake of reconciliation, authentic works must blot out every trace of reconciliation in memory,” he is close to Marx.51 He is also closer to Kant than he might think. To resolve contradictions by coping with them instead, in the name of their resolution, is not exclusive to Adorno’s negative dialectics or to Marx’s dialectical materialism. It is also what dialectics in Kant’s sense—­that is, the resolution of antinomies—­does. In section 57 of the third Critique, located in the part titled “The Dialectic of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment,” the antinomy of taste gets resolved when the concept on which our aesthetic judgments ought to be based, and which is missing, is shown to be nothing but the regulative idea in the name of which each one of our aesthetic judgments speaks: the idea of a supersensible substratum of humanity, where we are “to seek the unifying point of all our faculties.”52 To anthropomorphize the faculties of the mind when reading Kant, as I did, is not the most orthodox interpretive strategy. Yet it has the useful effect of historicizing and socializing the transcendental subject. Instead of the solipsistic, sovereign entity it is often taken to be, the transcendental subject is better described as a society of faculties analogous to a society of human beings, with its historical existence and its unresolved conflicts.53 (I think Hegel saw this in Kant and used it against him.) The cognitive faculties are the product of the technical and social division of labor; they are gendered; they entertain relationships of production with each other; they can play freely or enter into conflicts with one another; they ought to be living in peace and harmony, and they don’t. They don’t, empirically—­there is enough evidence of that—­and they don’t transcendentally, either. The supersensible substratum where we are “to seek the unifying point of all our faculties” is an idea, a mere idea. Orthodox, classical or otherwise “affirmative” readings of the third Critique—­possibly including Kant’s own, inasmuch as he hoped to give the third Critique the level of apodicticity he thought he had given the first—­tend to take the unity and the harmony of the subject’s faculties for granted. (They do this with a vengeance if they are incorporated in a critique meant to dis-

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miss Kant’s transcendental subject.) By the same token, they take sensus communis—­the intersubjective extension of the subject’s faculties—­to be a factual reality: humans are naturally endowed with the mutual empathy that makes them recognize their common humanity in all others. Such orthodox, “affirmative” readings also focus on beauty and leave the negativity of ugliness aside or simply expel it from Kant’s aesthetics. When their biases are corrected, when the issue of ugliness is raised from within the third Critique and allowed to occupy center stage, when suffering, the negative feeling ugliness yields, is assessed positively, when the conflict of the faculties, of which the feeling of ugliness is the sign, is granted a place in aesthetic theory, then the violence reigning among humans comes to the fore and casts doubt on the factual reality of sensus communis; then the harmony of the subject’s faculties can no more be taken for granted than harmony among humans. The faculties’ unity is not given; it may or may not, some day, be the outcome of their reconciliation, but there is no guarantee whatsoever that history is moving that way. Human history is no more teleologically oriented than natural evolution—­a salutary antidote to the false hopes of progress as historical determinism, be they Hegelian, Marxist, or even Darwinian in inspiration. Just as the Enlightenment’s ideal of emancipation, seen through Kantian eyes, was not a project but rather a maxim,54 so peace among the faculties of the mind is not a goal humanity will achieve when it has grown wiser; it must forever be conceived as nothing more and nothing less than a hic et nunc requirement of reason: a müssen for theory and a sollen for practice. Between Kant’s time and ours, Adorno implicitly warns us, the cursor has moved a long way in the direction of the sollen, because in the meantime we have been forced to think that sensus communis is definitely not a natural endowment of humankind and therefore must be an idea, a mere regulative idea: we have had to come to terms with the “fact” that we humans are not graced with the faculty of spontaneously empathizing with the human in us all—­not an easy thing to swallow.

The Fact of Auschwitz What demonstrates this lack of empathy to be a “fact” has a name, and that name is Auschwitz. Kant had left the question of sensus communis open. In one of the rare passages in the third Critique where he allows himself to muse on the future, he asks himself “whether there is in fact such a common sense, [ . . . ] or whether a yet higher principle of reason only makes it into a regulative principle for us first to produce a common sense in ourselves for higher ends, thus whether taste is an original and

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natural faculty, or only the idea of one that is yet to be acquired,” and he leaves the answer pending.55 Rightly or wrongly, Adorno understood that Auschwitz definitively closed Kant’s question with a negative answer: sensus communis is a chimera; the sad truth is that humans are wolves to one another. My understanding of Adorno’s famous statement, that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, is that he takes it to be a fact that sensus communis is not a fact. He reads the Nazis philosophically, as having experimentally demonstrated that humanity does not and cannot form a community of feelings. The Nazis made one exception to the unity of the human race when they decided to physically eliminate the Jewish People, and in so doing they proved that they, not the Jews, were the true exception. They exempted themselves from having to share in the common definition of what makes humans human, thereby proving that empathy does not extend to the whole of humanity; such is the fact the name Auschwitz stands for. Of course, Adorno doesn’t speak in terms of sensus communis. He once again takes the Hegelian road rather than the Kantian and falls prey to its historical determinism. He sees in Auschwitz the intolerable ultimate step in the progress of reification, reached when people are exterminated “administratively,” not as individuals but as specimens. Auschwitz spells for him “the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism.” The extent to which he is aware that Auschwitz also spells the final stage of his negative dialectics, the stage where he can no longer escape its philosophical impasse, is hard to tell. But he knows himself to be engulfed in a Hegelian nightmare where the absolute realization of spirit has turned into its absolute reification. The passage in Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft (1951) where the ban on poetry after Auschwitz is pronounced is also where this Hegelian nightmare appears. It is worth quoting in full: The more total society is, the more reified is spirit and the more paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own. Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism: to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric, and this corrodes even the recognition of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. As long as it remains by itself in self-­satisfied contemplation, critical spirit has not yet risen to [the challenge of] absolute reification, which presupposed the progress of spirit as one of its elements and is now preparing to absorb it entirely. 56

The last sentence is telling. I had to add the word challenge to convey what Adorno meant at the cost of suppressing the stunning and no doubt deliberate stylistic effect that produced an unbearable proximity between

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the evil of absolute reification and the elevated task critical spirit must accomplish so as to be on the level: “Der absoluten Verdinglichung [ . . . ] ist der kritische Geist nicht gewachsen.”57 Such proximity leaves no room for the kind of negation of negation that denies its inevitable inversion into positivity, which negative dialectics typically requires. As Lyotard has argued, when Adorno makes of the name Auschwitz a “model” for negative dialectics (1966) and thus suggests that it puts an end to the affirmative kind only, he creates for himself the philosophical aporia I called a Hegelian nightmare, and which Lyotard pinpointed as “the wound of nihilism, not an accidental wound but an absolutely philosophical one.”58 Adorno’s pathos here verges on the sublime: “Thought honors itself by defending what is damned as nihilism,” he pompously writes at the end of a splendid paragraph where he salutes Beckett for being the only writer to have, in his literary work (Dichtung: poetry in the widest sense), reacted adequately to the situation of the concentration camps.59 I don’t know what I admire most in this passage: whether it is the Beckettian somersault—­if sublime, then ridiculous; if ridiculous, then sublime—­with which Adorno extricates himself from the double bind Lyotard called the “rule of immanent derivation that defines negative dialectics—­if p, then non-­p; if non-­p, then p”60—­or whether it is his offhand recognition that poetry after Auschwitz is possible after all. He has admitted a few pages before and, not by chance, a paragraph or so after having mentioned Beckett’s Endgame for the first time, that “it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems.”61 But he has retracted a few pages down the road: “Auschwitz demonstrated irrefutably that culture had failed.” And, a little further, “All post-­Auschwitz culture, including its urgent critique, is garbage.”62 Obviously, he is utterly reluctant to amend his outrageous claim of fifteen years earlier even as he is resting his case on the work of the one great writer who he admits has proved him wrong. His embarrassment is enough of an indication, I think, that what is at stake is not whether poetry, the other arts, and culture at large have become barbaric after the unnamable. Adorno knows that it’s the other way round: Auschwitz is one name of the unnamable63 because it names that, in the name of which it is impossible, without being barbaric, to write poetry, to make art, or otherwise to speak publicly. Yet he doesn’t reach for the “in the name of ” argument. He focuses on the ultimate dialectical reversal that makes it a duty for poetry, or for art, or for “critical spirit,” to rise to the level of obscenity of the unnamable—­witness, in Endgame, the abjection of Hamm’s parents having to live in garbage cans64—­and he leaves unattended the nondialectical reversal that justifies the abjection in question: that poetry be written, or art be made, in the name of “Auschwitz never again.” What this “never

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11. Germaine de France and Georges Adet in Samuel Beckett’s Fin de Partie, directed by Roger Blin, Studio des Champs-­Elysées, Paris, 1957. © Roger Pic / BnF / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris. Reproduction: BHVP / Parisienne de Photographie.

again” formulates is not dialectical: a negation it is, but a negation that doesn’t pair up with what it negates. Even negative dialectical fusion of the contraries (whatever that means) is here impossible: the abominable event happened; the command “never again” forbids but is impotent to prevent its happening again. And it is a positive command, in spite of its negative phrasing, which is why it affirms Auschwitz in a transhistorical, essentially philosophical way. As an imperative, it makes of Auschwitz a fact—­in Kant’s Latinized German, Faktum—­the fact that sensus communis is not a fact. There is more than a play on words in my resorting to italics here. I think that Adorno has had a keen intuition of this fact (italicized) but that he failed to theorize adequately its difference from a fact (roman) in the empirical sense. Should we succeed in theorizing that difference, we might find the transcendentalist’s way out of the dialectician’s Hegelian nightmare. Or, to borrow Lyotard’s words, we might avoid the “wound of nihilism,” possibly the deepest and most hidden source of Adorno’s pathos. It’s worth trying. Kant’s resorting to Latin is often indicative of some paradoxical play with usual terms. Just as sensus communis doesn’t refer to common sense in

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the commonsensical sense—­indeed, it means common sentiment, not common understanding—­so Kant’s usage of Faktum instead of Fakt or Tatsache indicates that he intends it to mean something different from fact in the factual, demonstrable sense. The word Faktum appears in the Critique of Practical Reason, where it refers to moral conscience and to nothing else.65 It is a fact—­an undeniable, immediately intuitive though indemonstrable fact—­that moral law is given to us from no one knows where, and this fact is enough to call us to our supersensible destiny, which is to realize the highest good in the sensible world. Is this task within our reach given that there are few illusions to be entertained regarding humankind’s morality? Is implementation of morally good deeds in the sensible world even possible given that free moral action as such produces no tangible proof of its efficiency? Ever the pessimist, Kant writes, “We are fortunate, if only we can be sufficiently assured that there is no proof of its impossibility.”66 Still, is there something that mediates between the arid sphere of morality, where only the categorical imperative rules, and the earthly sphere where we finite beings made of flesh and blood—­as much as we yearn and may strive for the highest good—­are prone to letting the penchants of our fallible human nature dictate our behavior? In less dramatic and more philosophical terms, is there a mediating ground between ethical conduct (the domain of the second Critique) and the world ruled by the laws of natural sciences (the domain of the first) to give us hope that the realization of the highest good in the sensible world is at least not impossible? Even though no feelings are admitted as the ground of moral conduct except respect, feelings such as pleasure and happiness definitely partake in the highest good and are morally compatible with it. Given that feelings can on the other hand be accounted for by psychology, physiology, and the natural sciences in general, couldn’t the sphere of feelings, if not directly then at least analogically, provide this mediating ground? This becomes the great question of the Critique of Judgment, with the realm of aesthetic experience standing as the paradigm for the sphere of feelings at large. Kant reads the call on universal agreement issued by every judgment of taste as the sign that we presuppose in others the same faculty of agreeing by dint of feeling that we sense in ourselves. The issue now is whether that faculty—­call it in Kant’s Latin sensus communis or, in plain English, universally shared empathy for our fellow men—­is our natural endowment; whether or not it exists, in fact (roman). The Critique of Judgment leaves the issue open. To quote Kant again, “Whether there is in fact such a common sense [ . . . ] or whether [it is] only [an] idea [ . . . ] that is yet to be acquired [ . . . ], this we would not and cannot yet investigate here.”67 It is possible to read the whole Critique of the Teleological Judgment as the investigation Kant postponed in the just-­

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quoted section 22, but the issue doesn’t get settled there, either. Sensus communis is definitely an idea, but whether it is also a natural propensity with which we come equipped—­something like an instinct—­Kant doesn’t know. We ought to know, I understand Adorno to reply: Auschwitz reveals the fact (roman) that we are not so equipped. It is my contention that fact, here, should have been italicized, in accordance with Kant’s Faktum. To take the cold shower—­of our not being equipped with sensus communis—­for a fact, in the sense of a nonfalsifiable certainty, under the pretext that it took the ultraviolent form of Auschwitz, is the incomprehensible mistake Adorno and Horkheimer made in Dialectic of Enlightenment and that I believe had huge consequences for Adorno’s subsequent books, Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory. That mistake drove Adorno and Horkheimer to conceive the extreme, and in my view fundamentally flawed, theory that totalitarianism, and Nazism in particular, were the logical outcome of Kant’s rationalism. In the chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment titled “Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality,” the caricaturing of Kant as obsessively systematic and prototypically bourgeois and the reduction of science to the most mindless positivism are so gross that they don’t even deserve comment. On the other hand, the pairing of Kant with the Marquis de Sade in that same chapter, although improperly theorized,68 is the most insightful acknowledgment I know of that Auschwitz names the fact—­in Kant’s sense of Faktum—­that sensus communis is not a fact, in the empirical, verifiable sense. Unfortunately, Horkheimer and Adorno misrepresent Kant’s Faktum and, therefore, mistake fact for fact: Kant, to be sure, had so purified the moral law within the self of any heteronymous belief that respect, despite his assurances, could be no more than a psychological fact of nature, as the starry sky above the self was a physical one. “A fact of reason,” he called it.69

The authors’ conflation of a fact of reason with a fact of nature—­a heresy for Kant, as it should be for anyone—­is crucial to the poetry-­after-­ Auschwitz issue and beyond, to the question of whether a Kantian, more particularly, the “Kant after Duchamp” approach to aesthetics, is able to respond to a negativity of the magnitude of Auschwitz without simply putting a ban on all art practice. Does Auschwitz name a fact of reason or a fact of nature? What is intuitively right in Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s take on the issue is that the answer is both. What is wrong is that this is no license to conflate and confound the two, not even dialectically. The fact of nature (in Kant’s sense of nature) is that Auschwitz happened; the gas chambers were real. The fact of reason is that Auschwitz ought never

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have happened. The moral law, Kant’s Faktum, should never have allowed it to happen, which is why the moral law now reads “Auschwitz never again.” No new law is thereby uttered: “Auschwitz never again” is the law, Kant’s one and only categorical imperative, historicized under its new, post-­Shoah name.70 By conflating Auschwitz as a fact of nature (i.e., of history) and Auschwitz as negatively naming the moral law, Horkheimer and Adorno feign to understand Kant as upholding the theory that the moral law is deducible from the laws of nature (I can’t imagine this to be feasible without a measure of disingenuousness).71 They might have been better (or more honestly) inspired to keep in mind the “as if ” reasoning with which Kant articulated the relation between the moral law and the laws of nature, for example, in the second formulation of the categorical imperative: Ask yourself whether, if the action you propose were to take place by a law of nature, of which you were yourself a part, you could indeed regard it as possible for your will.72

This formulation gives us the exact understanding of the relation Kant’s Faktum has vis-­à-­vis the notion of fact in the empirical sense. Kant proposes to the hesitant ethical subject a simple test: if the action you project to accomplish were to be the outcome of a natural law (such as Newton’s law of universal gravity, always on Kant’s mind when he thinks of nature) rather than the result of your free will, would you still approve of it? If the answer is no, then your action is immoral. Transposed to the issue of whether sensus communis is a fact of nature, the test yields a theoretical lesson. If the relationships you have with other human beings were to obey your natural instincts and nothing else, could you still call them ethical? The answer would be yes if you were sure that all your instincts are charitable, good, and respectful of others—­quite an improbable event. And it would definitely be no if you were sure that all your sentiments vis-­à-­vis others are like those of the wolf for the lamb, also an unlikely event if, like the rest of us, you have affectionate feelings at least for the ones close to you. The practical maxim Kant would draw from this test is: Don’t trust your feelings in ethical matters; they are sometimes good and sometimes bad, but they offer no a priori certainty because they are not universalizable; let the cold and impartial inner voice of the categorical imperative dictate your conduct. Never mind if we don’t have a superego that weighs every single ethical action against the inevitability of the laws of nature. We don’t need to espouse Kant’s moral rigorism to grasp the implications the test’s theoretical lesson has in store for the Critique of Judgment: if it were an established

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fact of nature that all of us humans are endowed with sensus communis, then our good feelings—­I mean, the feelings that make us feel good, those we revel in when we are happy, those signaled to us by the free play of our faculties in aesthetic pleasure, and perhaps those we spontaneously share with our loved ones—­would be universalizable, in fact. This in turn means that we would realize the highest good in the sensible world simply by following our natural inclinations. And if by any chance it were an established fact of nature that we humans are not equipped with sensus communis, then none of our good, pleasurable feelings would be universalizable. Egotism, jouissance and self-­interest—­Horkheimer and Adorno speak of self-­preservation—­would be ruling all human relations. The chances are that the only universalizable feelings would be negative feelings: fear and distrust of others, anger and aggressiveness, a sense of generalized competition that sees in anyone a potential enemy, a paranoid defense of one’s identity, all sorts of ideologically motivated hatreds and hate-­fueled ideologies. The aesthetic culture produced by a humanity really (i.e., in fact) driven by such feelings would be a Babel of stolen pleasures and a sea of grievances among competing rackets for whom destroying the art and culture of “the other” is more vital than producing an art and culture of one’s own—­a fairly good definition of barbarism.73 Notwithstanding Adorno’s constant insistence that Dialectic of Enlightenment was “the joint work of Horkheimer and myself, to the extent that every sentence belongs to us both,” this was hardly the case.74 Evidence from the posthumous papers of both coauthors as well as the testimonies of Gretel Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, and Rolf Tiedemann indicate that Horkheimer wrote most if not all of the chapter I am discussing here, “the Sade chapter,” as Habermas calls it.75 If this is true, then it was Horkheimer’s insight to bring in Sade, and Adorno must have applauded; he might even have pardoned Horkheimer for crassly oversimplifying and distorting Kant in exchange for a peek into the Philosophy in the Bedroom that gave him an anticipated glimpse into his own future negative dialectics. As is shown by the record of their discussions in the immediate postwar years, when they were finalizing the manuscript and projecting a second volume on dialectics, Adorno already had a much darker vision of enlightened rationalism than did Horkheimer. “Reason is its own sickness,” he replied to his colleague when the latter called on what remained of “healthy reason” in his effort to “rescue the Enlightenment.”76 The barbarism of all post-­Auschwitz culture was already on Adorno’s mind, and it was the barbarism of the kind of humanity driven by mutual hate I described earlier, the barbarism of a world where we would be certain, apodictically certain, that humanity is not endowed with sensus communis. It is definitely to Horkheimer’s credit to have intuited that the world of Sade,

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or of the sadist, is, or rather ought to be, such a world. But Horkheimer made the mistake of confusing is with ought (fact with fact again), and so he congratulated Sade—­whom he saluted as the most intransigent critic of Kant while casting Kant as the epitome of the bourgeois thinker—­for having unveiled self-­preservation and material interest as the real founding ground of “the respect without which civilization cannot exist.”77 And he missed the true import of Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom totally. For a philosophy it is: not an empirical rebuttal of Kant’s morals or a genealogy à la Nietzsche but rather a thought experiment in inverted Kantianism, perversely but rigorously faithful to the original. How much more to the point than Horkheimer’s pitting of Sade against Kant is Lacan’s pairing of Kant with Sade: Philosophy in the Bedroom came eight years after the Critique of Practical Reason. If, after showing that the former is consistent with the latter, I can demonstrate that the former completes the latter, I shall be able to claim that it yields the truth of the Critique.78

Alas, the sadist complains, the world where only egotism and jouissance rule is not a fact. It is our moral task to bring it to existence: “Yet another effort, Frenchmen.” Still too much benevolence, compassion, and weakness of heart render ethical relations impure. Let us sweep all that sentimentality away, espouse Kant’s rigorism, and clear the air for the cold and impartial inner voice. And to make sure that this task, unlike the achievement of the highest good in the sensible world, is not impossible, let us invert Kant’s categorical imperative. Instead of calling it a duty for everyone never to make use of anyone else as a means to an end, let us call it a right for everyone always to use and abuse anyone else as a means to one’s own ends no matter how wicked.79 Let us create a world where “delight in evil” is the highest good. Lacan writes, If one eliminates from morality every element of sentiment, if one removes or invalidates all guidance to be found in sentiment, then in the final analysis the Sadian world is conceivable—­even if it is its inversion, its caricature—­as one of the possible forms of the world governed by a radical ethics, by the Kantian ethics as elaborated in 1788.80

Kant’s test has shown that whether sensus communis exists or not is undecidable, and though Sade agrees, he doesn’t like the idea. In fact, Sade seems to have seen through the lines of the not yet written third Critique something Kant himself was reluctant to see: that, if it was a theoretical necessity to postulate that sensus communis exists, it was also a

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quasi-­moral obligation to make that postulate; and that the less plausible the postulate’s factual reality was, the more the cursor of the quasi-­moral obligation had to move in the direction of the moral tout court. Sade’s thought experiment in inverted Kantianism pushes the cursor all the way in the direction of the moral—­of the morally evil, that is. The sadist calls it a moral obligation to make the theoretical postulate that sensus communis does not exist and follows through with the corresponding practical maxim: one ought to make sure that it does not exist; one ought to suppress all love, compassion, and sympathy—­all shareable feelings—­ from one’s conduct. It is left to us, readers of Sade, to redress the inverted Kantianism where it must be redressed: only in the practical maxim. The theoretical postulate remains the Sadian one: that sensus communis does not exist. This is how I read Horkheimer’s insight in the “Sade chapter” of Dialectic of Enlightenment. It is as much an insight into the deepest historical sources of Adorno’s pathos as it is into the meaning of the Philosophy in the Bedroom. Horkheimer—­and Adorno with him for, after all, he cosigned the text—­are wrong when they see in Sade a dialectical critic of Kant; the inversion Sade imprints on Kant is not dialectical. But they are right on target when they virtually suggest that Sade has written “poetry after Auschwitz” long before Auschwitz. Through the divin marquis, literature has risen to the level of obscenity of the unnamable. Perhaps Sade did worse, too, and, unlike Beckett, could afford to speak in the name of the unnamable without being barbaric because, even in those days of Terror, the unnamable was still unthinkable. It was left to Pasolini’s film Salò; or, the 120 Days of Sodom to unpack the full sadistic barbarism of the unthinkable having become a fact and to redress the “in-­the-­name-­of ” procedure. What kind of aesthetic theory the post-­Auschwitz world requires will of course not be settled today. Adorno raised the question for everyone working in the field, and though he has not made our task easier, we are all in his debt. The work that remains to be done is enormous. I hope to have convinced at least a fraction of my readers that looking toward Kant for help is far from absurd or obsolete and less aporetic than turning toward Hegel. To bring this essay to a close, I want to return to the quotation with which I began: Works of art [ . . . ] appear as in-­the-­world; their medium is not pure spirit existing for itself but the spirit that retreats into worldly existence and, by the force of such movement, lays a claim on the unity of what is separated. This contradiction forces works of art to make us forget that they are made: the claim their existence-­in-­the-­world stakes, and hence

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the claim that existence itself is meaningful, is the more convincing, the less something in them warns us that they have been fabricated, that they owe their existence to spirit as something external to themselves. Art that is no longer able to achieve this deception with good conscience—­indeed its very principle—­has dissolved the only element in which it can realize itself.81

What to do with the ominous last sentence that threatens art in its very existence? Should there be room in a post-­Auschwitz aesthetic theory for “art that is no longer able to achieve this deception with good conscience”? Should the theory then accommodate art that has lost “its very principle”—­art that is only nominally art but lacks the conviction? Or is art worthy of the name still obliged to “achieve this deception,” albeit with bad conscience? If the former, why hold on to the word art? If the latter, how to escape the pathos of repressed guilt? In reading that passage when I embarked on the writing of this essay, I wondered why Adorno had inserted the typically Kantian view that art should look like nature while we know that it is art, in an otherwise typically Hegelian argument, and I saw in this a symptom of his struggle with both philosophers. Now I realize that in selecting that passage, I must have had an inkling of a more profound question: why was Adorno essentially right when he made the view that art should appear as if unmade the touchstone of the judgment that decides whether something deserves to be called art or not? The long answer would involve making deep excursions into transcendental materialism as the result of the modern disenchantment of the world and explaining why the romantic path that led from Kant to Hegel via Schelling missed it. The place to start would be Kant’s theory of genius and its nonromantic update.82 The short (much too short) answer is this: Kant’s God died at Auschwitz for the third time. The God of the first Critique died right there, in the fourth antinomy. Modern biology, Darwinism, cybernetics killed the God of the third Critique. The God who gets annihilated at Auschwitz is the God of the second Critique, God as postulate of practical reason. As I said earlier, not an easy thing to swallow, even a century after Nietzsche. At stake is an issue as old or, I should say, as young as modernity. (What, indeed, are two hundred years compared with the one hundred thousand that separate us from the first tombs containing traces of red ochre, possibly the most ancient manifestation of aesthetic and religious behavior?). Is a truly secular art possible? Will art survive the demise of religion? Adorno never tackled the question head-­on because he shared with his friend Benjamin the modernist conviction that politics have displaced religion once and for all—­not their best insight in view of the over-

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whelming confusion of politics and religion that is recently threatening us from all sides.83 Today’s doxa notwithstanding, I think that art’s autonomy from religion—­and whether it is thinkable, whether it is viable at all—­was Adorno’s unacknowledged concern when he doubted the right of art to exist.84 If I may say so, my “Kant after Duchamp” approach to the theory of art is an attempt to construct that autonomy intellectually. It rests on the conviction that the unsurpassable lesson Kant had learned from his philosophical investigation of the beautiful in nature has been transferred to the domain of art. “This artifact is art” replacing “This fruit of nature is beautiful” as the canonical utterance of a modern aesthetic judgment expresses this transfer. Until recently, I was content with attributing the need of that transfer to the death of the God of the first and third Critiques. In an essay published a few years ago, paraphrasing Kant’s double reflexive loop—­“Nature is beautiful, if at the same time it looks like art; and art can only be called beautiful if we are aware that it is art and yet it looks to us like nature”85—­I wrote, In simple words: beauty in nature arises when we look at nature as if it were God-­made, and beauty in art arises when we look at artifacts as if nobody had made them. No matter what creationists and religious fundamentalists believe, it is no longer possible to look at nature as if it were God-­made. The question is whether we can still look at man-­made things as though nobody had made them. The answer is not: yes, we can; it is: yes, we must. A strange “must” on the verge of “ought,” as if poised between müssen and sollen. A quasi-­ethical obligation to endow all humans with the faculty of agreeing, that overshadows the theoretical necessity to endow all humans with the faculty of taste.86

Barack Obama was to me an unknown name then. I find my “yes we can / yes we must” quip pleasantly uncanny in view of his election and its economic context, but that’s an aside. I was thinking ahead of myself then, not fully realizing, as I do better today, that the reason serious art is invested with unprecedented ethical gravity goes far beyond the intellectual solitude the modern disenchantment of the world has thrown us into. It has everything to do with the monsters the dreadful twentieth century has engendered and the moral abandonment that ensued. May the transcendentalist live and think through the contradictions of our time with less pain than the dialectician and face the future with more energetic optimism. But forget that the cursor has definitely moved all the way into the direction of the sollen he may not.

Pa r t I I

Close and Not So Close Readings

Partially excerpted from the middle chapter of Au nom de l’art (Paris: Minuit, 1989), titled “Kant (d)’après Duchamp” (translation Jane Marie Todd), reworked and expanded. The rephrasing of Kant’s antinomy of taste as the antinomy of art is quasi-­identical to the one offered in chapter 5 of Kant after Duchamp. So is, with one correction, the solution to the antinomy. This material is included here with additions that put the original text in perspective so that the general argument of the “Kant after Duchamp” approach would be accessible to readers unfamiliar with Kant after Duchamp.

8

Conceptual Art in Light of Kant’s Antinomy of Taste

The function of art, as a question, was first raised by Marcel Duchamp. In fact it is Marcel Duchamp whom we can credit with giving art its own identity. . . . With the unassisted Ready-­made, art changed its focus from the form of the language to what was being said. Which means that it changed the nature of art from a question of morphology to a question of function. This change—­one from “appearance” to “conception”—­was the beginning of “modern” art and the beginning of “conceptual” art. All art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually. Joseph Kosu th1

When, in the 1980s, I landed on the “Kant after Duchamp” hypothesis, I thought that what needed to be addressed first was the absurdity of the claim, made on account of one or other brand of postmodernism, according to which after Duchamp’s readymades the very concept of art had been changed beyond recognition. Issues of beauty or quality were pronounced irrelevant to art status; what mattered was what a given work had succeeded in adding to, or subtracting from, the concept of art. The advent of conceptual art was supposed to signal that change, and it was presented as a major epistemological turn—­something I never believed and never subscribed to. What the advent of conceptual art did, though, was put us before an alternative I dare say I saw clearly at the time: either the word art has kept its transcultural and transhistorical significance, or we should drop it when speaking of the contemporary. And why not drop it? As the growth and success of cultural studies since the eighties has shown, there is a lot to be learned from the study of cultural practices once we stop holding them accountable to the word art. But meanwhile we are talking about art—­or at least I am.

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Clement Greenberg once said that he was grateful to Duchamp for having demonstrated with his readymades “what an unexceptional, unhonorific status art as such—­that is, esthetic experience—­really has.”2 I couldn’t disagree more. If Duchamp did anything by inventing the readymade, it was to highlight the honor bestowed on the name art in times that saw the collapse of the European fine arts system and had not yet witnessed the arrival of the Art-­in-­General system, let alone the planetary leveling of cultural differences that globalization has turned into a new international style. But Greenberg was right in equating “art as such” with aesthetic experience. He must have entailed (but did not openly recognize) that readymades get baptized “art” through an aesthetic judgment. The “Kant after Duchamp” approach rests on this conviction with only the additional one that whatever is meant by aesthetic judgment has to be understood in Kant’s terms. What I emphasize today is the issue of sensus communis. Back in the eighties, when my main concern was to refute the claim to a radical break made on behalf of conceptualism in art, relying on Kant led me straight to the antinomy of taste, the core of the Dialectic of Aesthetic Judgment, and to the post-­Duchamp rephrasing of that antinomy, which the need to address the claims of conceptual art had made necessary. Here is, in Kant’s words, the antinomy in question: Thesis. The judgment of taste is not based upon concepts, for otherwise it would be possible to dispute about it (decide by means of proofs). Antithesis. The judgment of taste is based on concepts, for otherwise, despite its variety, it would not even be possible to argue about it (to lay claim to the necessary assent of others to this judgment).3 In order to apply to a readymade, Kant’s formulation must be modified on one point that is glaringly obvious: we must suppose that the sentence issuing an aesthetic judgment is no longer necessarily “This is beautiful” or something similar, which is the formula for the judgment of taste; it can also be “This is art,” the sentence through which readymades are produced (in both senses of the word) as works of art. Thus we are invited to reread the third Critique, and in the first place the antinomy of taste, replacing the word beautiful with the word art, and see what the result would be. Here it is, then: Thesis. The sentence “This is art” is not based on concepts, for otherwise we would be able to demonstrate probatively what is art and what is not. Antithesis. The sentence “This is art” is based on concepts, for otherwise

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we would not even bother to quarrel about what is art—­and about what art is. Or, in a more compact and general formulation, Thesis. Art is not a concept. Antithesis. Art is a concept. How does Kant resolve the antinomy of taste? The thesis should say that the judgment of taste is not based on determinate concepts; but in the antithesis, it should say that the judgment of taste is still based on some, although indeterminate concept (namely, of the supersensible substratum of appearances); and then there would be no conflict between them.4

Or again, But now all contradiction vanishes if I say that the judgment of taste is based on a concept [ . . . ], from which, however, nothing can be cognized and proved with regard to the object, because it is in itself indeterminable and unfit for cognition; yet at the same time by means of this very concept it acquires validity for everyone [ . . . ], because its determining ground may lie in the concept of that which can be regarded as the supersensible substratum of humanity.5

There is no reason to climb to some Platonic heaven of ideas to find that indeterminate concept which is nevertheless the determining ground for the judgment of taste—­a concept of “the supersensible substratum of humanity” on the side of the judging subjects and of “a supersensible substratum of appearances” on the side of the objects judged. For that concept is only a requirement of reason similar to those that allow us to think that nature is intelligible (Critique of Pure Reason) or that morality is free (Critique of Practical Reason), a “subjective ground” that we must presuppose in every human being lest taste and its claim to universal assent remain unthinkable.6 At whatever stage we find ourselves in the search for foundations, the claim to a principle seems to prove that principle. Kant constantly thrusts aside the question of establishing its constitutive validity in favor of a merely regulative or reflective treatment. Hence, that principle is not different from the faculty of judgment itself:

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The antinomy that has here been set out and whose riddle has been solved is based on the correct concept of taste as, namely, a merely reflecting power of aesthetic judgment; and the two apparently conflicting fundamental propositions would here be united with each other insofar as both can be true, which is also sufficient.”7

Taste is the faculty to judge the beautiful, whether natural or artistic. If we replace the word “beautiful” in Kant with the word “art,” we find ourselves impelled to formulate the hypothesis of a faculty for assessing/ making art that would take the place of taste. It is to this hypothesis that the readymade leads, since it virtually erases the distinction between making art and estimating its quality. Vis-­à-­vis a readymade, the artist is not technically in a position different from the viewer. The artist selects a ready-­made object, presents it to the viewer in a context suggesting that it should be named “art,” and the viewer judges whether it deserves to be so named. By judging positively, the viewer approves the calling of the object by the name of art demanded by the artist. Anyone can select a readymade; it requires no apprenticeship, no technical mastery, no knowledge of rules and conventions. The artist is a viewer among viewers, without specific expertise. Making a work of art and assessing its quality are one selfsame act. This could obviously not have been the case for Kant, and not just because readymades were then inconceivable. Kant had no determinate concept of beauty, natural or artistic, and therefore none either of beautiful (or fine) art, in the singular. His apprehension of art in the singular was mediated through recognized concepts for the fine arts, in the plural, based on technical know-­how and obedience to rules, conventions, and traditions. (Hence artistic beauty is never “pure.”) But Kant was aware that if the artists’ talent consisted solely of technical skill and mastery of the rules, their art would be without soul (Geist). It would lack that “animating principle of the mind [im Gemüte]” that activates the free play of imagination and understanding. In the end, art would produce little more than “adherent beauty” and lack “free beauty.” Hence, Kant resorted to the notion of genius, which he defined as “the talent (natural gift) that gives the rule to art,”8 in order to account for the production of art, which, unlike its contemplation, he knew to be beyond the exercise of taste: “Judging beautiful objects to be such requires taste; but fine art itself, i.e. production of such objects, requires genius.”9

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Aesthetic Ideas Duchamp’s readymades would not be in every museum of modern art if they had not been recognized as works of genius. They are either that or nothing. Duchamp may have demonstrated no particular skill or talent but he proved to have genius when he invented the idea of the readymade and proceeded to select a handful of manufactured objects incarnating that idea. But for all the genius that makes him the author of both the (idea of the) readymade and all his (individual) readymades, Duchamp remains a viewer among viewers, perforce exercising his taste.10 We should take with a grain of salt his insistence that the choice of a readymade “was based on a reaction of visual indifference with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste . . . in fact a complete anesthesia.”11 Such a state of mind is impossible to achieve. The interesting thing is that Duchamp seems to have equated genius with this impossibility of avoiding taste. Asked by Denis de Rougemont to define genius, he replied, “l’impossibilité du fer.”12 When the pun on fer/faire (iron/making) is read in connection to his equation of making with choosing (more about that equation a little later), the novelty of his invention—­I should say, its incredible insight, the true stroke of genius that raises the idea of the readymade to the rank of theoretical model for works of art in general—­leaps to the fore: “taste” and “genius” are forced to become one by the fact that judging and producing art are condensed into one and the same act, deemed impossible. To select a readymade is to perform a choice whose maxim is the striving for “complete anesthesia” mitigated—­in fact, instigated—­by the very awareness of its impossibility. Because Kant explains “genius in terms of the faculty of aesthetic ideas,”13 we must assume that this explanation is also valid for taste, that is, the faculty of reflective aesthetic judgment, once it is exercised on the case of a readymade. Readymades prompt us to imagine a hypothetical faculty for assessing/ making art that conflates taste and genius. Before we ask ourselves what that faculty might be, we must understand exactly what Kant means by “aesthetic idea”: Ideas, in the broadest sense, are presentations referred to an object according to a certain principle (subjective or objective) but are such that they can still never become cognition of an object.14

Allow me to interject that, therefore, ideas are not concepts: concepts are cognized and ideas are not; the idea of art should not be confused with

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a purported concept of art. The above general definition of ideas points in the direction of the thesis in the antinomy of art (art is not a concept). Kant goes on: There are two kinds of ideas. One of these is referred to an intuition, according to a merely subjective principle of the mutual harmony of the cognitive powers (imagination and understanding); and these ideas are called aesthetic. The other kind is referred to a concept, according to an objective principle, but these ideas still can never yield cognition of the object; they are called ideas of reason.15

Allow me to interject again that ideas of reason are concepts, if you want, but unlike concepts of the understanding, unknowable concepts. They belong in the realm of the supersensible or the noumenal, as things-­in-­ themselves. The above passage points in the direction of the antithesis in the antinomy (art is a concept) while also hinting at its resolution. Kant continues: An aesthetic idea cannot become cognition because it is an intuition (of the imagination) for which an adequate concept can never be found. [Incidentally, in Kant’s vocabulary the word intuition—­if it is empirical—­ means “percept”; it doesn’t mean “insight” or “hunch” or anything like that.] An idea of reason can never become cognition, because it contains a concept (of the supersensible) for which no adequate intuition can ever be given.16

To reread Kant’s Critique of Judgment with one of Duchamp’s readymades in mind, replacing “This is beautiful” with “This is art,” is thus to view the word art as pinned to an object presenting the perceptible aesthetic idea of the readymade, and referring to art as unperceivable idea of reason. Whether snow shovel, bottle rack, or urinal, a readymade is a visible product of the artist’s imagination that falls under no readily available logical category. Under what kind of concept does an object fall that is mass produced and yet is presented as the unique creation of an individual? An object that is utilitarian yet whose usage is suspended? An object that no artist has made with his own hands yet claims the status of work of art? There have been endless debates on the concept of readymades, and nobody has been able to pin it down. What everyone senses, however, is that readymades—­in Kant’s terms, the aesthetic idea of the readymade as incarnated in this or that particular readymade—­call on the broader, indeed, universal idea of art itself—­in Kant’s terms, art as idea of reason.17 Concretely: when he made readymades public, intimating that

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they should go by the name of art, Duchamp did not attribute the concept of art to them: that is only an illusion created by the predicative form of the sentence, “This is art.” Rather, he presented readymades to the viewers’ appreciation in the name of the idea of art—­of art itself. Kant would say that Duchamp showed readymades as “examples of a universal rule that we are unable to state.”18 The viewers, in turn, if they judge, and they must, do not subsume a sensible perception under a concept, a category, a schema, or a logical predicate that Duchamp provided for them; rather, they seize the opportunity offered to their imagination “to spread over a multitude of kindred presentations that arouse more thought than can be expressed in a concept determined by words.”19 As the reception history of Duchamp’s readymades amply shows, numerous were the viewers—­many artists among them—­who seized that opportunity and made the word art stand for its own virtually infinite expansion. “If a urinal is art, anything can be art,” was the inference most often made by the artists and critics of the sixties and seventies who absorbed the impact of Duchamp’s readymades and concluded from there that a paradigm shift had occurred: taste was deemed obsolete so far as the naming of something as art was concerned; the relevant and supposedly new demand was that art “arouse more thought than can be expressed in a concept determined by words.” Precisely that demand is what the unfortunate appellation “conceptual art” was meant to convey. (Unfortunate for obvious reasons: art is not a concept in the determinate sense; “idea art” would have been a better name if only “idea” had been understood in the Kantian sense, a reading I have alas never come across in the literature on the subject.)20 A lot of confusion surrounds the usage of concept and idea in connection with conceptual art, but it would be an unfair oversimplification to maintain that conceptual artists erred because they upheld only the antithesis in the antinomy of art (art is a concept) and dismissed the thesis (art is not a concept). It is a lot more fruitful to view their endeavor as an array of fascinating but still, in my opinion, failed attempts at solving the antinomy. One such attempt surfaces in Sol LeWitt’s symptomatic struggle with concept and idea in his “Paragraphs” and “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” probably the most cogent manifestos for the movement.21 His ninth Sentence states, The concept and idea are different. The former implies a general direction while the latter is the components. Ideas implement the concept.22

What LeWitt calls “the concept” is what I, enlisting Kant, call art itself, art as idea of reason. It implies a general direction, indeed. What LeWitt calls “ideas,” which he conceives as the component and implementation of the

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concept, is what Kant and I would call aesthetic ideas. They indeed implement art itself singularly, case by case, in each individual work of art. The difference LeWitt makes between concept and idea is relevant, but only fully meaningful if it is renamed the difference between idea of reason and aesthetic idea: “concept” is an unfortunate appellation in both cases. If you pardon LeWitt that mistake, then you also make sense of his best known and most controversial assertion, the first of his Sentences: “Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.”23 In view of the wrongheaded assimilation of conceptualism with “theory-­based practice” that became fashionable later in the reception history of conceptual art, this is a remarkable assertion. LeWitt is not saying that conceptual artists are irrational. He calls them mystics, an appellation I find problematic and most pertinent at the same time. To my mind, LeWitt makes a compelling statement about genius, which, as we remember, Kant defined as the faculty of aesthetic ideas—­ideas that are “conclusions that logic cannot reach” but which are not necessarily ineffable or entirely beyond comprehension. Their content in fact exceeds what can be discursively conceptualized, and that is why they prompt the imagination of sensitive viewers “to spread over a multitude of kindred presentations.” What is true of the viewers’ imagination is especially true if the viewers are artists. There is to me a moving paradox in the “linguistic turn” taken by conceptual art—­a paradox admirably palpable in the work of Lawrence Weiner—­and it is its usage of words to “arouse more thought than can be expressed in a concept determined by words.” Words are readymades; writers choose their words, they do not make them; and writers are readers. “The work gains its sculptural qualities by being read, not by being written,” Weiner has said.24 The birth of the reader is, as Roland Barthes reminds us, the other side of the “death of the author”—­a theme often applied both to the readymades and to conceptual art.25 Authorship and what Weiner calls receivership have merged.26 Sol LeWitt, who only occasionally worked with words, was probably closer than Weiner to Duchamp’s conception of the artist as a “mediumistic being.”27 It is in truly Duchampian manner that he concluded, in the twenty-­fifth of his Sentences, The artist may not necessarily understand his own art. His perception is neither better nor worse than that of others.28

Like Duchamp and Weiner, LeWitt was a viewer among viewers, a reader among readers, a radical aesthetic democrat. And like Duchamp, who said of the readymade, “I took the thing out of the earth and onto the planet of aesthetics,”29 LeWitt was an aristocrat protecting the honor of

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the name art. If that name is to have any value beyond the merely nominal and institutional status it confers to the objects so named, “This is art” must be an aesthetic judgment in the strictest Kantian sense, but a judgment that reflectively conflates “taste” and “genius.” Once you have judged that the sentence “This is art” is such a judgment, then you have accessed a theoretical model—­or rather, a critical model, again, in the strictest Kantian sense—­with general validity.30 (Let me repeat here my conviction that reading the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, after Duchamp or not, constantly requires reflectively judging whether Kant “got it right,” and this on the basis of one’s experience as an aesthetic judge.) It no longer matters whether “This is art” applies to a readymade, to works of modern art, to works of the past, or indeed to any virtual candidate to art status: it names a “this” with a name that is not a concept in reference to an idea that is not accessible to the senses. “Art does not exist. It declares itself,” said Harold Rosenberg.31 Like human rights, of which it may be the symbol. Or like love. The antinomy of the after-­Duchamp aesthetic judgment is solved if we write it as follows: Thesis. The sentence “This is art” is not based on the concept of art; it expresses the feeling of art. Antithesis. The sentence “This is art” is based on the concept of art; it postulates the idea of art.32 The feeling of art mentioned in the thesis is simply the feeling that this is art, the feeling that the object I am judging aesthetically is comparable in quality with what I have learned to appreciate as art. Kant would see that feeling as resulting from the mutual arousal of imagination and understanding and as arousing in turn “more thought than can be expressed in a concept determined by words.” The idea of art mentioned in the antithesis is art itself, the idea of art’s universal comparability, in the name of which comparative aesthetic judgments are prompted. The feeling of art claims universal assent and therefore opens onto the idea of art itself: thesis and antithesis are mutually compatible, consistent with Kant and Duchamp, and congruent with modernity, that is, with the historical space marked off by the names Kant and Duchamp.

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The “Postmodern” Conundrum and the Idea of Art as Proper Name But the same antinomy, in its more compact and more general formulation, as given earlier, can be written and resolved in a slightly different way, which suggests that it is no longer altogether congruent with modernity: Thesis. Art is not a concept; it is a proper name. Antithesis. Art is a concept; it is an idea. When I came upon that formula, in 1982, I was rather proud of having cracked a tough nut with the theory of art as proper name. I had arrived at it intuitively, taking my clues from Duchamp’s “pictorial nominalism” but not really knowing whether I should borrow my conception of nominalism from Pierre Abélard, William of Ockham, or Nelson Goodman until Jean-­François Lyotard told me, “You’re not a nominalist, you’re a nominativist,” and advised me to read Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity.33 So I read Kripke, found in Naming and Necessity what I needed, learned to conceive of proper names as “rigid designators,” treated the word art as one such designator, and even had a chance of asking Kripke in person whether he endorsed my theory. He did, and that was it; I never gave the theory another thought; it had done its work. Then, in one of the most thoughtful reviews Kant after Duchamp received, Barry Schwabsky leveled a serious objection against the theory: how could I maintain that aesthetic judgments are comparative, and simultaneously claim that we baptize “art” things we value aesthetically the way parents give a child its first name? It was all too obvious that parents didn’t christen their newborns this or that because the baby resembled someone they knew. Comparison had no business in the attribution of proper names—­point well taken.34 I might have answered Schwabsky’s objection by invoking Kripke’s theory in more detail: when Kripke claims that names of colors, measures, natural kinds, and substances, such as gold, are rigid designators, it is precisely on the basis of samples being compared with a paradigm sample acting as standard of comparison. Kripke doesn’t deny that the name “gold” is synonymous with “the chemical element having atomic number 79” and that, therefore, it can be read as a definite description in the Frege-­Russell sense; what Kripke has in mind is that the pawn broker who examines a putative gold ring is not verifying the atomic number of its metal in order to determine its substance and value; he compares it with rings in his possession that he trusts are made of bona fide gold. The word gold is a rigid designator because it is used comparatively to fix a

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reference, not to express a meaning, be it the scientific definition of gold. The word art, I argued in Kant after Duchamp, behaves similarly: when you show your appreciation of something by saying, “This is art,” you are referring to all the other things equally designated by you, in other circumstances, by use of the same phrase; with the word “art,” you are pointing a finger at all the things that make up your critical collection, your personal, imaginary museum. In calling this thing art, you are not giving out its meaning; you are relating it to everything else you call art. You don’t subsume it under a concept; you don’t justify it by means of a definition; you refer it to all the other things you have judged through a like procedure, in other times and other places.35

Schwabsky’s objection, it seems to me, addresses the clumsily didactic analogies with first names I admit having made but not the issue of comparison, which is what I would emphasize in Kripke’s theory today. Yet I revived Schwabsky’s objection because I’d like to amend the first chapter of Kant after Duchamp on a more important point. I still uphold the theory of art as proper name, in the Kripkean sense of rigid designator. The thesis in the antinomy of the after-­Duchamp aesthetic judgment still reads “Art is not a concept; it is a proper name.” But the antithesis, “Art is a concept; it is an idea,” originally read “Art is a concept, it is the Idea of art as proper name.”36 I now find this formula confusing, and the confusion stems from the struggle I had at the time with the modern/postmodern dilemma—­a struggle epitomized by the past tense in the title of that first chapter, “Art Was a Proper Name.” What I meant by the idea of art as proper name had in fact little to do with proper names in the usual sense but everything to do with the comparability issue. That idea was the plausibility of accepting as comparable with existing art things resisting such comparison: As your acquaintance with art builds up, this plausibility at once increases and narrows. It increases because the broader your collection, the greater the probability that you will accept into it things which could not possibly have been art to you previously. And it narrows because as your exposure to art augments, so does the intensity level of the feelings, the quantity of surprise, the richness and density of experience, that you expect to be conveyed by works of art. That you would grow to love a work whose medium, form, style, or subject matter seem unrelated to art becomes more and more plausible, while it becomes less and less plausible that you would be satisfied with it if it did not match the quality of the feelings art usually gives you. This plausibility, more or less rationalized, interpreted in various degrees, constitutes your idea of art.37

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Or constitutes, as I wrote a little further down, “the regulative idea of your judgment”; or, still, “the idea of art that summons the thing to appear.”38 I would no longer call this idea the idea of art as proper name but rather the idea in the name of which the candidate to your art judgment is summoned to appear. The conundrum I was not able to solve satisfactorily at the time of Kant after Duchamp was the second-­degree reflexivity seemingly implied by what I felt to be the postmodern injunction to judge in the name of an idea that was none other than the modern concept of art as proper name, or rigid designator. I meant that the idea regulating a postmodern aesthetic judgment was none other than the concept (the theory) according to which, in modernism, the word art behaved like a rigid designator. If comparability is essential to the theory of rigid designators, I was not all in all wrong. Still, I would have been better advised to remember Greenberg’s contention that second-­degree reflexivity is not possible in aesthetic experience. After having claimed, in one of his Seminars, “That any and everything can be experienced aesthetically amounts to saying that experience in general, presumably all experience, can double back on itself,” Greenberg added, But there’s one kind of experience that can’t double back on itself, and that’s aesthetic experience itself. If it could that would mean receiving aesthetic judgments of aesthetic judgments, which can’t be done. . . . You would have to separate a judgment from its object or occasion in order to experience the judgment aesthetically, the judgment all by itself; if you couldn’t effect this separation you would simply be duplicating or trying to duplicate the original experience of that judgment.39

Quite ironically, I am not far from believing today that the conundrum I was trying to solve theoretically in the eighties had some practical counterpart in the contemporary endeavors of more than one “appropriation” artist: is Sherrie Levine’s rephotograph of an Edward Weston photo not begging for a second-­degree aesthetic experience to be had in duplicated form in the name of a first-­degree experience no longer innocently available? Surely Levine is, together with others from the “Pictures” generation, one of the artists who are perceived as having negotiated the modern/postmodern transition in the most exemplary manner. Her achievement was not foreign to the way I felt the need to negotiate that transition myself by trying to differentiate the two formulations of the resolution of the antinomy of art I had arrived at. I saw in the first one a modern and in the second, more condensed one, a postmodern interpretation of the “Kant after Duchamp” hypothesis. Today I am no

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longer much interested in the modern/postmodern divide as such, which I think merely yields pleasant paradoxes.40 What still interests me is that it points at much deeper paradoxes having to do with the legitimate claim of theory to transhistorical validity and the no less legitimate claim of history to theoretical paradigm shifts. Rereading Kant after (in accordance with) Duchamp, by which I mean collapsing taste into genius or genius into taste because updating Kant’s aesthetics seems to require it, is not exactly the same thing as rereading Kant after (posteriorly to) Duchamp, by which I mean mechanically replacing the word “beautiful” with the word “art” in Kant’s text because the reception history of the readymades seems to impose it. When reformulated in accordance with Duchamp, Kant’s notion of taste has become taste/genius; it declares that it is a rational requirement of theory to maintain that anyone is endowed, de jure if not de facto, with the faculty of making art. Indeed, since taste postulates that it is universally shared, so genius must postulate the same thing—­at least if readymades are to be taken seriously. The word—­the modern word—­that conflates taste and genius is creativity. From a “postmodern” viewpoint, that word is a myth. When reread posteriorly to Duchamp, Kant’s updated notion of taste/genius merely declares that it is a rational requirement of history to notice that, in its heyday, modernism presupposed a faculty, called creativity, shared by humanity as a whole. Joseph Beuys was its last, flamboyant prophet. He saw in creativity the human faculty par excellence. He believed in the natural, egalitarian distribution of the creative force in humankind and was therefore convinced that all human beings were artists, if only potentially. And he made it the social task of professional artists to liberate that potential in all.

Taste and Genius Conflated Readymades should have sobered Beuys: they are not the fruit of an outpouring of creativity. Let’s recall that they apparently conflate taste and genius because they erase the distinction between making and appreciating art: artist and viewer are on equal footing not because it has been discovered that all human beings are creative by nature and that their creativity could be unleashed if only society would not repress it, but for a rather pedestrian, stupid, and at any rate non-­utopian reason: neither artist nor viewer is the maker of the object. Or is it that both are? Or that the viewer is forced into the maker’s position because the maker assumes that of the viewer? In one of the many interviews he gave during the last decade of his life, Duchamp explained,

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The word “art,” etymologically speaking, means to make, simply to make. Now what is making? Making something is choosing a tube of blue, a tube of red, putting some of it on the palette, and always choosing the quality of the blue, the quality of the red, and always choosing the place to put it on the canvas, it’s always choosing. So in order to choose, you can use tubes of paint, you can use brushes, but you can also use a ready-­made object.  .  .  . Choice is the main thing, even in normal painting.41

To take readymades seriously is to take Duchamp at his word when he offers tongue-­in-­cheek explanations for them. In this particular interview, he insinuates that readymades are not as different as one might think from “normal painting.” In normal painting choices are made, in this or that order: what support, what format, what medium, what subject? And then: where to put the first brush stroke that will destroy the virginity of the blank canvas? And when to put down the last brush stroke that will avoid destroying the canvas with one touch too many? With the last touch of the brush (drip from the can, squeeze from the tube, scrape of the palette knife, throw of the sponge, caress of the squeegee, squirt of the spray gun, etc.), its maker becomes the first viewer of the finished painting. There is at this particular moment no theoretical difference between the painter’s aesthetic judgment and the viewer’s. Technique no longer matters. The temporal difference—­Duchamp’s word is retard—­between the judgment of the painter as first viewer and that of all subsequent viewers does not erase their fundamental identity on the aesthetic level: “Ce sont les regardeurs qui font les tableaux.”42 The painter’s decision to call the canvas finished begs approval from the public; and the public’s appraisal begs approval from a later public. Think of the talent scout who discovers the canvas and mentions it to a curator, who includes it in a group show, where it attracts the attention of a critic, who praises it to a dealer, and so on. Once this or a similar jurisprudential chain has started, there is no telling where or when it will stop. Of course, every artist desires that it never stop: so do artists hope to achieve immortality. At the particular moment when the difference between artist and viewer melts into air, the difference between a painter and an artist who chooses a readymade evaporates, too. Readymades are works of art that condense all the artist’s decisions into one single choice. As such, they throw retroactive light on the nature of any artist’s aesthetic decisions at any stage in the creative process. Does not every brush stroke (drip from the can, squeeze from the tube, scrape of the palette knife, etc.) count as both the first and the last? The first with regard to all the preceding ones, which it erases or corrects; and the last until the next one decides that it

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was not the last, after all? Look at the twenty-­two photographs Matisse took of the various stages of his Pink Nude (1935, Baltimore Museum of Art)43: each stage is both arrival and departure point; each has the definitive authority of a finished canvas and the fragility of a first ébauche. Now, Matisse was one great modernist experimenter who not only redid his canvas over and over but also reinvented the rules he gave himself in the process. No painter before modernism could afford his freedom: rules and conventions had to have attained an astonishing degree of uncertainty before painters felt allowed—­or compelled—­to invent and reinvent their own rules and could treat each brush stroke (drip from the can, squeeze from the tube, etc.) as if it were at once the first and the last. A brush stroke that is at once first and last and produces its own rule condenses “genius” and “taste” into an intricate compound of intentionality and receptivity that has perhaps no precedent before modernism. Watch Pollock’s moves over the canvas on the floor: they are definitely intentional, even willful, yet they leave a lot to chance and gravity and are guided by reflex-­like proprioceptive reactions of the painter’s body. It is not as if Pollock’s genius supplied random, instinctive impulses, and as if his taste managed the pauses in which he took distance and judged the result. Such division of labor between genius and taste no longer holds, in modernism (if it ever did). Uncannily enough, it is Duchamp, the cubist painter who abandoned painting in favor of readymades but seemed to consider readymades as some kind of abnormal painting, who described the modernist condensation of genius and taste best, when he called its result “the personal ‘art coefficient’ contained in the work”: The personal ‘art coefficient’ is like an arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed.44

Would Kant have been able to acknowledge this modernist division of labor between genius and taste? I strongly doubt it. Kant could not possibly have recognized a painting in Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm or a sculpture in Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII. Even Cézanne would have shaken his head in disbelief before a Pollock, and Rodin burst into laughter before a Carl Andre. But by the time Greenberg could write, “a stretched or tacked-­up canvas already exists as a picture—­though not necessarily as a successful one,” all the rules and conventions of painting except “flatness and the delimitation of flatness” had dissolved, and every artist was left to invent and reinvent his or her own rules.45 By that time—­1962—­the painter who would present an untouched, stretched, or tacked-­up canvas as a picture would simply have chosen . . . a readymade bought straight from the artist’s supply store.

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Conceptual Art’s Aporia: Art Itself as Medium Readymades are not only works of art that condense all the artist’s decisions into one single choice; they are also objects claiming to be art without belonging to any of the individual arts. In this respect, it is highly relevant that no artist ever did the blank canvas and that Duchamp carefully refrained from producing specifically pictorial readymades, such as the tube of paint.46 The readymades he chose were vernacular objects that didn’t partake in any recognized art form and which, once viewed as art, seemed to have isolated taste/genius from skill and talent, purified art from all “ingredients” other than the ideational content that makes art art, and raised the question of the ontological difference between works of art and mere things—­without, however, making the idea of art itself any more intelligible than in Kant’s time. Then as now, art itself—­the “essence” or “nature” of art, what is common to all individual art forms and to all singular works of art—­was not a concept of the understanding but only an idea of reason. Now as then, viewers sensitive to art sense or believe they sense the presence of that idea in individual works of art because, in fact, the works are aesthetic ideas: contrary to ideas of reason, which are neither felt nor cognized, aesthetic ideas are incarnated in the sensible realm and are therefore capable of being felt and, to a certain extent, recognized. The big change Duchamp’s readymades have brought about by not belonging to any of the individual arts is to have suppressed the conventional mediation between art as idea of reason and works of art as aesthetic ideas: readymades obey none of the conventions of any art form. With that mediation gone, it was inevitable that the ontological question “What is art?” would be raised. There was no need in Kant’s time to raise that question, no need to problematize art itself because critical reflection on art was always mediated by the rules and conventions of the individual art forms—­what we call today, for good reasons, the medium. The idea of art itself only gets problematized when that mediation vanishes, which seems indeed to be the case with Duchamp and his posterity. As some contend, the readymades have ushered in a postmedium era.47 Whether postmedium is the right word is open to discussion. What remains in my view is that the readymades, or rather one of them, Fountain, announced the collapse of the fine arts system and the advent of the Art-­in-­General system, in which anything can be art with or without belonging to any recognized art medium. In chapter 3, I characterized that system as the post-­Duchamp condition because of the delay—­the retard—­in the arrival of Duchamp’s announcement: it was broadcast in 1917 but it was received only in the sixties, when Duchamp’s reputation and influence began to

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surpass Picasso’s. And it was received most significantly by the generation that invented conceptual art. I am aware that no single conceptual artist can be made to speak for the movement as a whole. The existence of a strictly conceptual movement outside the Art & Language group is even doubtful.48 Lawrence Weiner is a luminary of conceptualism in the minds of many, yet he denies the appellation.49 I personally don’t see Dan Graham and Marcel Broodthaers as conceptual artists. And Sol LeWitt, who may have coined the term, was a minimalist. Yet the very success of the label “conceptual art” to refer to a generation of artists, all emerging in the sixties, some associated with Fluxus or John Cage, others fiercely independent of all art affiliation but committed to political change, is a sign that all the artists who willy-­ nilly bore that label shared some fundamental concerns cutting across individual differences and rivalries. With the historical distance we now have, we might say (although I wouldn’t) that this generation created a new medium, for which the label “conceptual art” was a convenient generic name and therefore stuck. But in its own day, conceptual art—­or its most abstract branch—­sought to do away with the medium altogether. The most radically conceptual artists ambitioned to pick up the question of art itself where they thought Duchamp’s readymades had left it: as an injunction to think through the concept of art at large, outside the traditional art forms or media of painting and sculpture. In the process, they yielded to the temptation of seeking to present art as idea of reason directly, without the mediation of aesthetic ideas. They failed—­ideas of reason are not presentable—­and though they failed intelligently, the result was that they sent a good deal of art practice and theory into the dead end of “the anti-­aesthetic” for forty years.50 For all the talk about the “dematerialization of the art object” that conceptualism spawned in its early days, the artists could not avoid communicating their ideas visually.51 So they went out of their way to insure that these were not aesthetic ideas but rather “information” or “documentation.” When Seth Siegelaub explains that at the end of the fifties, when painting and sculpture were still unquestioned art media, “the art and the presentation of the art were identical,” he misses the duality of the idea of reason and the aesthetic idea and reinforces, if only as a foil, the formalist conviction that form is content and content is form.52 And when, speaking of the new conceptual art that, like everybody else, he believes to be truly antiformalist, he adds, “But here you have a situation where the presentation of the art and the art are not the same thing,” he acknowledges that art as idea of reason must be mediated by some visual experience.53 What he promotes in conceptual art is that this visual experience is one contrived so as to

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12. Robert Barry, Inert Gas Series / Helium, Neon, Argon, Krypton, Xenon / From a Measured Volume to Indefinite Expansion, 1969. Courtesy and copyright Robert Barry.

wrench any possible aesthetic feeling from the art content of the work. But we only need recall how much the artists of that generation succumbed to the McLuhanesque fascination for the look of “information”—­from grainy television to IBM punch cards to the Telex machine’s awkward typeface—­to realize how unavoidable aesthetic feeling is, even in response to visuals that are supposed to be taken in as mere “documentation.” The best works of true conceptual art do not shun aesthetic responses; they present the impossibility of escaping presentation. They are a form of the contemporary sublime in that sense, and what Lyotard said of the sublime applies to them: though it is impossible to present the unpresentable, it is possible to present that there is such a thing as the unpresentable.54 This is precisely what some aesthetic ideas do in their relation to ideas of reason—­think of Barnett Newman. The most convincing works of conceptual art are aesthetic ideas, no more and no less than paintings and sculptures. In the end, all conceptual artists recognized the need to incarnate the idea, be it in a medium as disincarnated as the invisible gases released into the atmosphere in Robert Barry’s 1969 Inert Gas Series / Helium, Neon, Argon, Krypton, Xenon / From a Measured Volume to Indefinite Expansion.55 No one would pretend that, thanks to Barry, krypton and xenon have

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become an art medium the way papiers collés have become an art medium thanks to Picasso and Braque. Inert gases did not start a tradition. Yet their ethereal materiality is undoubtedly the medium of a concept, the incarnation of a chemical truth: there exists in nature a group of gases that chemists call rare, noble, and inert (group 18 in the periodic table): they are insipid, harmless, invisible and odorless, and do not react with other chemicals. Now the content of Barry’s work, as art, is clearly not this chemical concept. To say that it is the presentation of this concept through the act of releasing inert gases into the atmosphere is closer to the truth. But neither inert gases nor chemical concepts really have anything to do with art. The proper way to give artistic meaning to the work is to treat the incarnated presentation of the concept of inert gas as a stand-­in for an idea of art—­presumably Barry’s idea of art, or the idea of art that he wants us to explore. Reflecting on that stand-­in prompts the release of a series of analogies, of which the release of a series of gases is itself an analogy: that just like krypton or xenon, art is rare, noble, and inert; that for “inert” one should read “autonomous,” the gases’ lack of chemical reactivity being an analogue for art’s independence from other human practices; that the “measured volume” of the canister that contained the gases before their release is analogous to the confined gallery space that contained art before Barry and others of his generation took to the land; that releasing the gas from the canister is like liberating art from the institution; that once so freed, art, like krypton or xenon, goes into “indefinite expansion”; and finally, that the idea of art in the name of which Barry released rare gases is meant to incite our imagination “to spread over a multitude of kindred presentations that arouse more thought than can be expressed in a concept determined by words.” Surely the evocation of political liberty is one such thought. Only after our imagination has wandered along these or similar lines are we rewarded with the feeling that Barry’s piece is art. Thesis. The sentence “This is art” is not based on the concept of art; it expresses the feeling of art. Antithesis. The sentence “This is art” is based on the concept of art; it postulates the idea of art. It is not the business of works of art to be theoretical demonstrations, so I shall refrain from claiming that Barry’s Inert Gas Series proves the correctness of the “Kant after Duchamp” hypothesis. Readers may choose to integrate, or not, my reflections on Kant’s updated antinomy of taste into the wanderings of their imagination, taking Barry’s Inert Gas Series or their own choice of a work of conceptual art as their springboard. It is unfortunate that the debate on conceptual art has until now too often

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revolved around the writings of Joseph Kosuth and the Art & Language group, who did think that works of art were theoretical demonstrations or that theoretical demonstrations could be art. Those writings are prodigiously interesting symptoms of the creative misreading that met the arrival of Duchamp’s announcement in the sixties. As such, they deserve thorough critical attention.56 But when Kosuth claims, “All art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually,”57 his parentheses unwittingly emphasize the contradiction between “after” and “in nature.” To pretend, as Kosuth does, “in fact it is Marcel Duchamp whom we can credit with giving art its own identity,” is to make the transcultural and transhistorical significance of the word art depend on a historically contingent revelation, as if Duchamp was its Messiah. My errancies in the quagmires of the modern/postmodern divide have taught me something more modest and definitely more secular: that the legitimate claim of art theory to transhistorical validity should be made compatible with the no less legitimate claim of art history to theoretical paradigm shifts. That compatibility is the ultimate test to which the “Kant after Duchamp” hypothesis should be submitted.

First draft written for a seminar I ran at MIT (Cambridge, MA) in 1994; delivered in June 2004 at the Moderna Museet, in Stockholm, as a contribution to a conference titled “Limits of Aesthetics; Kant and Contemporary Art.” Published first in Swedish as “Kants ‘fria spel . . .’ in den minimalistiska konstens ljus,” Site (November 2004); then in English as “Kant’s ‘Free Play’ in Light of Minimal Art,” in Estetikk, Sansing, erkjennelse og verk, ed. Bente Larsen (Lund: Unipub, 2006); reprinted in Rediscovering Aesthetics: Transdisciplinary Voices from Art History, Philosophy, and Art Practice, ed. Francis Halsall, Julia Jansen, and Tony O’Connor (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); published in Portuguese, as “O ‘livre jogo’ de Kant à luz da arte minimalista,” in Criação e Critica: Seminários Internacionais Museu Vale, ed. Gloria Ferreira and Fernando Pessoa (Vitória, Brazil: Museu Vale, 2009).

9

Kant’s “Free Play” in Light of Minimal Art

In section 9 of the Critique of Judgment, Kant asks himself “whether in a judgment of taste the feeling of pleasure precedes the judging of the object or the judging precedes the pleasure,” adding that “the solution of this problem”—­a sort of transcendental “chicken-­and-­egg” dilemma, if you want—­“is the key to the critique of taste and hence deserves full attention.”1 Yet though he seems to offer a clear-­cut solution (the judging precedes the pleasure), actually, he doesn’t solve the problem at all. He begins by ruling out the idea that the pleasure comes first, on the ground that this would betray an interest in the object, thereby ruining the legitimacy of that kind of pleasure’s claim to go beyond mere agreeableness in sensation and be grounded in its own universal shareability. And he merely states, over and over again and without making it clear whether this is a requirement of theory or something akin to a moral obligation, that the pleasure in question must be of a different kind, one that accompanies the mental state that we experience in the free play between our imagination and our understanding “insofar as they harmonize with each other as required for cognition in general.”2 I have no intention of embarking here on a close reading of what may be one of the most obscure and frustrating passages in the third Critique.3 Let me simply jump on the ambiguity of the sentence, “Now this merely subjective (aesthetic) judging of the object . . . precedes the pleasure in it, and is the ground of this pleasure in the harmony of the faculties of cognition,”4 to notice that the initial “chicken-­and-­egg” dilemma now seems to have been transformed into the problem of distinguishing between “the pleasure in [the object]” and “[the] pleasure in the harmony of the faculties of cognition.” It can be argued, empirically, that pleasure is pleasure and that I have no way of telling apart the pleasure that I take from looking at the object and the pleasure that I feel from sensing in myself some

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harmony or free play between my imagination and my understanding. Obviously, Kant at once conflates and distinguishes them, because the solution to the riddle requires that the ground for the aesthetic judgment be universal and not because he feels in himself two different kinds of pleasure when he judges aesthetically. He does not proceed from his own experience but from his reflective activity as a transcendental philosopher. And yet, a page or so into the section that supposedly holds the key to the critique of taste, Kant postpones discussion of the transcendental question and, meanwhile, asks an utterly empirical one, namely, “how we become conscious, in a judgment of taste, of a reciprocal subjective harmony between the cognitive powers: is it aesthetically, through mere inner sense and sensation? or is it intellectually, through consciousness of the intentional activity by which we bring these powers into play?”5 His answer is unequivocal, this time: “that unity in the relation [between the cognitive powers] in the subject can reveal itself only through sensation.”6 This essay takes permission from Kant’s unequivocal answer to try to put it to an empirical test. By the same token, I shall place Kant’s aesthetics into a certain context dating from the 1960s, precisely the context in which it was declared irrelevant in light of the development of the most advanced art movements of the times, minimal and conceptual art. Those were the days when Kantianism seemed to be on the side of the formalist and modernist artists and critics, while the antiformalist and soon to be called postmodernist artists and critics upheld a rather vigorous anti-­Kantianism, the days when an artist such as Don Judd could declare, “a work of art needs only to be interesting,”7 implying that it doesn’t need to yield pleasure and be judged aesthetically in order to be appreciated as art, and when, in the opposite camp, a critic such as Clement Greenberg could say, “I’d rather go into the reasons my own experience offers for agreeing with [Kant],” the better to dismiss Kant’s transcendental “chicken-­and-­egg” problem as a merely empirical one: “if the judgment of taste precedes the pleasure, it’s in order to give the pleasure. And the pleasure re-­gives the judgment.”8 To this day, the prevailing or orthodox reading of the critical debates of the sixties pits the two camps against each other as if each had its own objects as well as theories. Kantian aesthetics would apply to modernist painting, whereas the new anti-­aesthetic and postmodern art theory would apply to minimal and conceptual art. Works in the latter camp are simply supposed to have made the kind of experience Kant had in mind, if not impossible, at least irrelevant as far as its evaluation as art is concerned. This is what I would like to test. To repeat: according to Kant, we become conscious of the free play of our cognitive powers through sensation, not intellectually. “This sensation . . . is the quickening of the two powers (imagination and understanding) to an activity that is inde-

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terminate but . . . nonetheless accordant: the activity required for cognition in general.”9 We may call it pleasure or, perhaps better, excitement (“quickening,” Belebung, in the German text); it is a surge of the vital force, a sensation of liveliness that finds its occasion in the object and its cause in itself as a bodily experience. An inner cause triggered by an outer occasion yields it: my heart starts beating faster and I am all excited; the object I am beholding makes me feel intelligent; it is as if the object increased my knowledge, although I would be at pains trying to say what knowledge; I therefore tend to ascribe “life” and “intelligence” to the object itself; and so on. In other words, I get a sense that my intelligence is actively involved in my pleasure-­judgment or in my judgment-­pleasure (Greenberg’s “chicken-­and-­egg”), even though my pleasure is but a subjective feeling, and even though my intelligence does not get hold of any concept. This is the kind of experience of “free play” I intend to test at the hand of two examples, one in each camp. My modernist example is the (perhaps mythical) anecdote of Wassily Kandinsky entering his studio sometime around 1910 and discovering, in the dim light of the evening, one of his own figurative canvases on its side.10 He recalls having had an intense aesthetic experience (one of pleasure but even more so, one of utter excitement), because, not recognizing the work, he was struck by its astonishing abstract beauty. This experience, he wrote in retrospect, triggered his switch to nonfigurative painting. For a fleeting moment, Kandinsky, stunned by the beauty of the canvas, does not understand that it is one of his own works. The canvas, standing on its side, he does not recognize the landscape in it. What was conceptual and intentional in his work has momentarily vanished, leaving him with a sense of “purposiveness without purpose,” or with a cognitiveness from which all cognition or recognition has retreated. He knows that he has painted a landscape, yet this knowledge gets momentarily forgotten in what he now sees as a pure product of his imagination. And the excitement he feels is one of liberation—­the very liberation he will later invoke to justify his switch to abstract art. I believe this example to be paradigmatic of what Kant had in mind when he spoke of the free play of imagination and understanding in aesthetic experience. Disinterestedness is here guaranteed by Kandinsky’s surprise and the fact that he approaches his own work as if it were the work of someone else, or even a product of nature. He is unable to subsume one of his own paintings under the concept of painting, yet his feeling is not frustration. It is an intense, life-­enhancing feeling of beauty triggered by the object and setting in motion an equally intense cognitive activity. He seems to intuit that his feeling is as universally communicable as is cognition in general, at the very moment when cognition fails him. He suddenly feels freed of

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13. Robert Morris, Untitled (Three L-­Beams), 1969 refabrication of a 1965 original. Painted plywood, three units, each 96″ × 96″ × 24″ / 243.8 × 243.8 × 61 cm. Collection Leo Castelli Gallery.

the duties of figuration, and in this freedom he will later ground his claim to have invented a new universal language called Malerei. A language, and thus a means of communication, whose communicability, however, is not based on concepts but rather on feelings.11 My “postmodern” example, Robert Morris’s Untitled (Three L-­Beams) of 1965, is a lot more conceptual than anything Kandinsky ever produced. Let us examine whether it invalidates Kantian aesthetics altogether, as postmodernism maintains, or whether it does not offer us another model of how the interplay of imagination and understanding operates, a model that forces us to displace, or amend, or update Kantian aesthetics and, in so doing, deepen our understanding of its implications. What is very much to the point and may explain the antiformalists’ conviction that Kantian aesthetics doesn’t apply is that instead of being retrospective, this model is generative. It has generated the work in the artist’s mind as much as it accounts for the viewer’s experience. Perhaps it can be said to take the interplay of imagination and understanding as its very subject matter, in a typically late-­modernist, self-­referential way. Imagination, one might say, is not the right word when it comes to the early work of Robert Morris, an artist who, like his other fellow minimalists, favored banal, unimaginative

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geometric shapes, gestalts about which all the information is exhausted at a glance.12 But unlike some of the conceptual art that would follow, Morris’s minimalist pieces need to be seen, perceived, experienced in real time and space. They even emphasize the “reality” or literalness of this time and space, presenting, as it were, time as duration and space as a function of gravity.13 In Kant, imagination is precisely the faculty of presentation. It can be productive or reproductive, invent or simply register a representation. In the latter case imagination is simply another word for perception. It schematizes and synthesizes raw sense data; it unifies the manifold of empirical experience into a gestalt, which it presents to the understanding. Let us now describe the experience of Robert Morris’s Three L-­Beams in terms of the Kantian faculties and decompose it into a number of moments, alternating perception or sensation and conception or interpretation, that is, imagination and understanding. These moments, it seems to me, are by necessity chronological, but let that not distract us. Their order may represent a variation on Greenberg’s empirical “chicken-­and-­egg” problem. I don’t pretend at all that it represents a solution to Kant’s dilemma, which is transcendental, not empirical, de jure, not de facto. 1. Perception. We are looking at the piece, without further ado, taking it in, at a glance. The faculty involved is imagination. What the experience yields is a feeling or a sensation of variety, difference, and discontinuity. If it were expressed by way of language (it doesn’t need to be), it would be through a sentence such as, “Oh, it’s striking how these three volumes look and feel different. In the one lying on its side, I feel gravity pulling it downward; in the one standing erect, I feel sculpture’s struggle against gravity; in the one poised on its edges, I feel a precarious balance between gravity and the desire to escape its downward pull, as in dance.” 2. Cognition. We are still looking at the piece, now registering what it is we are actually seeing. The faculty involved is the understanding. What the experience yields is knowledge, the recognition of sameness, of identity. That recognition is empirical and conceptual, since it subsumes three different perceptions or images under one and the same concept, namely, “this L-­shaped form.” It automatically expresses itself through language (although it doesn’t need to do so out loud): “Oh, I realize that these three volumes are identical.” 3. Sensation. We are not only looking at the piece, we linger on, as if in an effort to rescue moment 1 from moment 2 and make Kandinsky’s fleeting loss of recognition last. What is involved is the free play of imagination and understanding, that is, of my perception and my cognition of the piece. Free play, really? Why the effort, then? Is it not, rather, contrived by the artist? The sensation I now get is not one of excitement

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and exhilarating freedom, as in Kandinsky’s enraptured experience; it is one of contradiction between what I saw and felt in moment 1 and what I know from moment 2. If it were uttered in language (it doesn’t need to be), it would express itself with a sentence such as, “Oh, my perception and my cognition of the piece do not coincide. What I see is not what I know, what I know is not what I see.” Perception and cognition are at odds with each other. Kant would have to conclude that imagination and understanding are not in harmony. The relation between the two faculties is only felt as free inasmuch as the feeling yielded by the perceived images cannot be accounted for by the concept of identical volumes, but it is also felt as forced or contrived and certainly not as liberating. The feeling to be gotten from this free yet contrived interplay is a slight discontent or irritation rather than sheer pleasure. 4. Judgment. We are contemplating the piece. The faculty involved is taste, the faculty of aesthetic judgment. Its outcome, as always, takes the form of a linguistic utterance, whether explicit or tacit: “Morris’s Three L-­Beams is a good (or a bad) piece.” But taste, according to Kant, is not a separate and autonomous faculty the way sensibility, understanding, or practical reason are separate faculties. It is a passageway among the faculties and, where beauty is concerned, a bridge between imagination and understanding. Hence the “free play.” Taste is the faculty of feeling this free play and of reflecting on it so as to conceive of this very feeling as a sign of its own universal shareability. In other words, moment 4 is the ground, or the as if ground, for moment 3. It precedes or, to stay closer to Kant in section 9, it must precede moment 3, not temporally but transcendentally. Or so it would if the sensation gained from moment 3 had been free play. But in this case it wasn’t. Instead of harmony between the cognitive powers, moment 3 yielded disharmony and conflict. What then with moment 4? There are two and apparently only two possibilities at this point. The first is to stay within the confines of a strict application of Kantian aesthetics and to declare Morris’s piece bad—­meaning ugly—­because it doesn’t satisfy the so-­called criterion of harmony. Such a rationale for their negative verdict was often ascribed to the “formalist” critics, Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried most famous among them, by their adversaries, who embraced the second possibility: to declare Kantian aesthetics irrelevant. Taste simply doesn’t apply where the artist has deliberately broken with Kandinsky’s modernism by making the latter’s after-­the-­fact model into a generative one. Aesthetic judgment has lost its grasp on the work where the artist has taken the interplay of imagination and understanding as the self-­referential subject matter of his piece. If you insisted on judging it aesthetically, you would have to admit that Morris’s piece is at best a parody of Kandinsky’s epiphany. Better shunt moment 4 and jump to moment 5.

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5. Interpretation. We may or may not be looking at the piece. The faculty involved is understanding. What the experience yields is nothing, for this moment is not concerned with the experience any longer. It is concerned with reflecting on the experiences from moments 1 and 2 and their noncoincidence, that is to say, on the sensation or feeling of discontent and contrivance experienced in moment 3. This can be done in the absence of the work; yet, to have experienced the work is a prerequisite. Interpretation must express itself through language (although, again, it doesn’t need to do so out loud). The sentence it would use is the same as in moment 3: “My perception and my cognition of the piece do not coincide.” But this sentence would not express a feeling; this time, it would reflect on this feeling and interpret it self-­referentially, so as to conclude: “This is what the work is about.” Expressed in terms that emphasize difference, contradiction and negation, the work’s aboutness or subject matter constitutes whatever knowledge of the work we have gained through the whole process. 1

2

3

4

5

Moment

Perception

Cognition

Sensation

Judgment

Interpretation

Faculty

Imagination

Understanding

Free (or contrived) play imagination/understanding

Taste

Understanding

Yielding

Feeling of difference

Knowledge of sameness

Feeling of contradiction moments ½

Contradiction reflected upon (feelingly)

Contradiction reflected upon (intellectually)

Utterance

3 volumes look and feel different

3 volumes are identical

Perception and cognition do not coincide

This is a good (bad) piece

Perception and cognition do not coincide = what the work is about

Moment 5 is equally accessible to a formalist critic as it is to his antiformalist opponent. Both might even come up with the same interpretation of Morris’s piece, their divergence in appreciation notwithstanding. What matters for the time being is that the antiformalist bypasses moment 4 (aesthetic judgment) and is interested in developing a discourse on the meaning of the piece that is not at all concerned anymore with aesthetic quality. Appreciation follows implicitly from the discourse’s level of interest. But this is not the last word of the formalist/antiformalist quarrel, part of the difficulty of assessing both positions properly having to do with the fact that it is essential to the antiformalist or postmodernist discourse

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to include a representation of the discourse of its adversaries acting as a foil. Since Greenberg and Fried notoriously rejected minimal art, it is assumed by their critics that they would declare Morris’s piece bad—­ meaning unsatisfactory—­because it doesn’t satisfy the so-­called criterion of harmony. This or a similar judgment is ascribed to them, moreover, in the order that Kantian aesthetics indeed assumes: from moment 3 to moment 4, at which stage they are reproached for not taking into account the meaning of the piece obtained in moment 5 and for missing the point of postmodernism altogether. Whether this is a fair representation of the formalist position remains to be seen. I guess it has by now become clear that I myself set out to speak in defense, if not of formalism as such (whatever that means), at least of the continued validity of Kantian aesthetics. The toughest and therefore the best place to test this validity is in the interpretive discourse of its detractors. Lest I, too, be accused of constructing a representation of my opponent acting as a foil, I shall have recourse to an actual reading of Robert Morris’s Three L-­Beams by one of the major proponents of the antiformalist or postmodernist discourse. I am speaking of no less than Rosalind Krauss, who, at a particularly crucial moment of her intellectual career, embedded a discussion of Morris’s three L-­shaped volumes in a text that takes as its explicit subject the cultural change involved in the passage from modernism to postmodernism and the abandonment of a formalist model in favor of a structuralist one. The text in question is an article on the architect Peter Eisenman, dated 1980 (but written in June 1977) and titled “Death of a Hermeneutic Phantom: Materialization of the Sign in the Work of Peter Eisenman.”14 Basically rehearsing what she wrote on Morris’s piece in Passages on Modern Sculpture,15 Krauss makes it stand for an exemplary symbol of the paradigm shift she and the culture are going through. Her reading of the piece, once cast in the five moments I have isolated above, will help us understand some of the implications for Kantian aesthetics of the postmodernists’ avowed anti-­Kantianism. First, Krauss presents what she says is the “standard analysis” of this work, to be found in Marcia Tucker’s book on Robert Morris:16 Given the fact that one [of the Ls’] is up-­ended, the second is lying on its side, and the third is poised on its two ends, [Tucker’s] analysis proposes that the meaning of the work addresses the way the viewer can mentally correlate the three forms, seeing each as a physical instance of a single master idea.17

Second, Krauss proceeds to contradict this “standard analysis” with her own, which she presents as the objective meaning of the piece:

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Actually, the meaning of this work by Morris is quite different from the one suggested above. Morris is surely calling on us to see that in our experience those forms are not the same. For their placement visually alters each of the forms, thickening the lower element of the up-­ended unit, or bowing the sides of the one poised on its ends. Thus no matter how clearly we might understand that the three Ls are identical (in structure and dimension), it is impossible to see them as the same. Therefore, Morris seems to be saying, the “facts” of the objects’ similarity belong to a logic that exists prior to experience; because at the moment of experience, or in experience, the Ls defeat this logic and are “different.”18

Third, Krauss offers her own reading of the contradiction between logic and experience. The text continues: Their “sameness” belongs only to an ideal structure—­an inner being that we cannot see. Their difference belongs to their exterior—­to the point at which they surface into the public world of our experience. The “difference” is their sculptural meaning.19

And finally, Krauss theorizes this “difference” as an embodiment of the passage from modernism to postmodernism and aligns the latter with an attack on Kant: It is because of this fact that one would want to place this work of Morris’s within a post-­modernist tradition. Because what this sculpture is rejecting is the notion of the perceiver as the privileged subject who confers significance on reality by recourse to a set of ideal meanings of which he is himself the generator. It refuses, that is, to allow the work to appear as the manifestation of a transcendental object in some kind of reciprocal relationship to its viewer/reader, understood as a transcendental ego or subject.20

Now, let us recast this text into the five moments which I have outlined above. When Krauss dismisses the “standard analysis” prompted by Marcia Tucker, it is as if she reproached Tucker for staying with moment 2, or conflating moment 2 and moment 5 into a single (and single-­minded) interpretive moment. Krauss, by contrast, sees the necessity of a plurality of moments in the experience and interpretation of the piece and adequately starts from moment 1. She beautifully describes her experience in phenomenological terms, as an optical illusion of sorts. The surprise effect of the piece, and her own feeling of having been jolted out of her expectations, belong to the subtext of her comments. Then, very symptomatically,

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she jumps over moment 2, and though it is there by implication, in what appears to be an account of moment 3, she denies its empirical reality: “Thus no matter how clearly we might understand that the three Ls are identical . . . , it is impossible to see them as the same.” This is a startling assertion, for she must have seen that they were the same. Even if the optical illusion generated by the beams had been so strong that she had to measure them in order to verify their sameness, it would still have been through an empirical experience that she would have gained cognitive access to what she calls “a logic that exists prior to experience.” Her shunting of moment 2 (empirical knowledge) is the pretext she needs for her shunning of moment 4 (aesthetic judgment). Nowhere does she state an opinion as to whether the piece is good or successful as art. Only by implication do we surmise that, since it gave her so much food for thought, it must be a good piece. As if the appreciation of Morris’s art exhausted itself in the overtly anti-­Kantian meaning she ascribes the piece, she conflates moments 3 and 5. Indeed, she reads moment 3 (Kant’s moment of free play between imagination and understanding, or our moment of contrived interplay between perception and cognition) as if it pitted the phenomenological difference sensed in experience against das Ding an sich—­in her terms: a transcendental object on which the perceiver as transcendental ego or subject confers significance by recourse to a set of ideal meanings of which he is himself the generator. Kant is not mentioned by name, but all the buzzwords of pop-­Kantianism are there. Krauss’s Kant is a caricature of Kant, a Kant who has not gone beyond the first Critique and acts as a foil for her own position. And yet Krauss’s phrasing, meanings of which he [the subject] is himself the generator, symptomatically points at a real problem Three L-­Beams by Robert Morris poses to Kantian aesthetics. Let us recall that when Kant asked “how we become conscious, in a judgment of taste, of a reciprocal subjective harmony between the cognitive powers: is it aesthetically, through mere inner sense and sensation? or is it intellectually, through consciousness of the intentional activity by which we bring these powers into play?” his answer had been, unequivocally, through sensation. In the case of Morris’s piece, this spells only half the truth—­the truth contained in our sensation from moment 3. The other half is, to paraphrase Kant, that we become conscious of a reciprocal subjective disharmony between the cognitive powers through consciousness of the intentional activity by which the artist brought these powers into play. Krauss is wrong in claiming that the sameness of the three L-­beams “belong[s] to a logic that exists prior to experience,” understood as transcendental, a priori logic, but she would be right if she had meant a logic that exists prior to our experience, as viewers, for the simple reason that our experience was planned by the artist and that one feels

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it. The sense of contrivance attached to the felt conflict of the faculties in moment 3 is the result of Morris’s intention. As I said, Morris made Kandinsky’s retrospective model into a generative one. Therein, and not in the dismissal of Kantian aesthetics, lies the alleged break with tradition that makes Krauss speak of postmodernism. What minimal art has done to the early modernism of someone like Kandinsky is that it forbids the innocent viewer, who judges Morris’s piece aesthetically by proceeding from moment 3 to moment 4. Krauss has perhaps good reasons to avoid judging aesthetically, for though I’m sure she would gladly admit that the L-­beams are a parody of Kandinsky’s epiphany, I’m not so sure if she wouldn’t fear to see the parody backfire as boring didacticism. Just imagine Kandinsky performing it himself. What kind of “free play” would you experience if Kandinsky had made an installation piece reproducing the famous liberating canvas three times over, and had showed it once upright hanging on the wall, once lying flat on the floor, and once leaning on its side prompted between wall and floor? Clement Greenberg had a term for art that elicits that kind of contrived “free play.” He called it concocted art. Minimal art was first on the list, an embarrassing verdict for anyone who has not stopped looking at contemporary art with an open mind. Concocted is a mean word, but that’s not what’s most embarrassing about it. More embarrassing is that Greenberg applied it as a blanket term to minimal art at large. “Roses in general are beautiful” is not an aesthetic judgment, Kant reminds us; it is a logical judgment based on many aesthetic comparisons.21 I try not to allow myself such generalizations, least of all when recent art is concerned. But I cannot end this essay without having told what I think of Three L-­Beams by Robert Morris. My verdict is that it is a very interesting piece—­interesting in Don Judd’s sense—­and that this is its limit. It is too didactic a work. It has no secret, it explains itself away. In other words, it exhausts itself in moment 5 (interpretation). Moment 4 (judgment) is either redundant or beside the point. The strategy employed by Morris to make three identical volumes feel different is far less elegant and far less effective in its aesthetic outcome than, say, Rodin’s strategy in the Three Shades topping his Gates of Hell, a work that is similarly composed of three identical casts arranged in such a way that they look and feel different, and manage to sustain that feeling no matter how long you look at them and how well you know that they are actually identical.22 Facing Three L-­Beams, by contrast, it is hard to sustain the feeling gotten from moment 1 once moment 2 is reached, which is why moment 3 is short-­lived and quickly gives way to moment 5, which is why the work is didactic, which is why it doesn’t quite succeed as art. My judgment, I realize, has a formalist ring to it. Michael Fried might

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14. Auguste Rodin (1840–­1917), The Three Shades, 1902–4. Bronze, 74.25″ × 71″ × 30″ / 188.6 × 180.3 × 76.2 cm. © Vanni Archive / Art Resource, NY.

have uttered it, with virtually the same explanation. It is thus all the more vulnerable to the counterargument of the antiformalists. Now, they might say, aren’t you unwittingly playing into the hands of Rosalind Krauss when claiming that moment 4 is either redundant or beside the point? Aren’t you admitting that minimal art, and Morris’s piece in particular, have made aesthetic judgment irrelevant? What are you doing, then? Are you mourning the innocent viewer? Are you, like Michael Fried, regretting the presentness and grace of truly modernist sculpture?23 And are you not, on

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15. Bruce Nauman, Untitled (Model for Trench, Shaft and Tunnel), 1978, Fiberglass and polyester resin, 9′10.12″ × 9′10.12″ × 10′ 9.85″ / 300 × 300 × 330 cm. Courtesy Raussmüller Collection.

this basis, rejecting minimalism wholesale because it forbids you to proceed innocently from moment 3 to moment 4, that is, from the pleasure in the harmony of your cognitive powers to the judgment that presupposes the same harmony in all viewers? How can you be so nostalgic of harmonious, Apollonian art after all you have said about disharmony, conflict, and contradiction in your account of moment 3? Are you naive or perverse? Neither. Or both, if you want. How to recover naïveté from perversity is the great challenge of so-­called antiformalist or postmodernist art. There are a number of works by Bruce Nauman that Greenberg would have deemed concocted and that I think are masterpieces of precisely that kind of recovery—­just to show you that I am not rejecting anything wholesale. And you will agree that Nauman’s work elicits just as much—­if not a lot more—­disharmony, conflict, and contradiction as Morris’s. You seem to have missed my point about moment 4 being either redundant or beside the point. Unlike Krauss, I said this as a judgment, not as an interpretation. And I said it as a judgment about an interpretation: hers, but not only hers; mine as well, or yours, the one that is inevitably imposed on

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all of us by what “Morris is surely calling on us to see,” as Krauss said: my perception and my cognition of the piece do not coincide; this is what the work is about. To put things simply: my aesthetic judgment (moment 4) is a protest against the artist’s—­or the critic’s, for that matter—­authoritarian manipulation of difference, contradiction, and negation as ultimate meanings (moment 5). It is not at all a denial of the relevance of difference, contradiction, and negation as feelings had from moment 3. It just happens that in the case of Morris’s Three L-­Beams, my feeling disagrees as to how to interpret the meaning of the disharmony among the cognitive powers elicited by the piece. A lot remains to be said about this feeling before the disharmony in question gets positively integrated by Kantian aesthetics, which is, I believe, the real challenge art since minimalism poses to theory. Meanwhile, one thing should be clear: the formalist straw man constructed by the antiformalists and postmodernists is a chimera. Aesthetic judgment does not simply proceed from moment 3 to moment 4. Moment 4 includes moment 5 and pertains to it; it drags it along and is posterior to it. Today’s sophisticated art lover has learned to deal with a multilayered experience of art where judgment is not the outcome of one single epiphany but rather alternates feelings about meanings and meanings about feelings, and this, as many times as there are layers of self-­referentiality in the work. But feeling always has the last word. Such a feeling is aesthetic, which means that it is no more than a feeling, arrived at involuntarily, but also that for this feeling I claim universal validity. I don’t have to account for that. Please judge for yourselves.

First delivered in March 2004 as a lecture in the doctoral seminar titled “L’art sans sujet,” run by the late Marie-­Claire Ropars at Université Paris 8. Original version published as “L’œuf et la poule: Remarques sur le supposé hypokeimenon de l’expérience esthétique,” in L’art sans sujet? (Paris: Presses universitaires de Vincennes, 2009). Translated and expanded by the author.

10

A Transcendental Chicken-­and-­Egg Dilemma

In proposing “Art without subject?” (but with question mark) as the topic of the present seminar, Marie-­Claire Ropars cleverly insinuated two things she sees entangled (and I think rightly so) but that leave me quite embarrassed: that there might be art without subject matter, without content; and that there might be art without an artist to make it, without author. Pace Roland Barthes, the question mark must be ironic. I don’t think Professor Ropars believes any more than I that art devoid of content or author makes much sense. Hers is a philosophy seminar, so she must have meant something more philosophical. I’ll take the bait, if only to wiggle out of my embarrassment. I won’t talk of the subject of art in the art-­historical sense of subject matter. I’ll take the subject of art to mean the subject of aesthetic experience in Kant’s sense.1 But in order to signify “subject,” I choose the old, Aristotelian expression hypokeimenon (usually translated as “substance”) so as to underline in Greek what the Latin sub-­jectum also implies but which the banality of the English subject makes us forget: the idea of a substratum, an underlying ground, a platform, or a plateau, a carrying surface. The interesting thing, which might vindicate the title of our seminar, is that when it comes to the Kantian subject, this carrying surface must be transcendental—­that is, nonexistent as substance: a hypokeimenon without ousia. The transcendental subject of aesthetic experience doesn’t need to see its existence proved any more than Lautréamont’s dissection table of surrealist fame, allowing the encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine. It suffices to postulate the idea of such a subject, the idea of a place where the faculties of the soul “meet” and entertain relations of collaboration, conflict, or free play with one another. Free play is the relationship the faculties of understanding and imagination are supposed to have with each other in the exercise of one’s taste.

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Kant introduces this expression in section 9 of the Critique of Judgment. I cannot promise you that in two hours we will have a clearer notion of what Kant intended with the platform where the faculties of the soul meet, if a platform there is. What I want to do with you, so as to clear out the terrain and give Marie-­Claire Ropars’s question a Kantian twist, is a close reading with merely heuristic ambitions of section 9—­probably the most obscure section in the third Critique. There Kant asks himself whether when we make judgments of taste our pleasure grounds the judging or the judging grounds the pleasure: a sort of transcendental “chicken-­and-­egg” dilemma, if you want. Kant opens the paragraph stating that “the solution of this problem is the key to the critique of taste and hence deserves full attention,” and closes it addressing the “lesser question” of whether we become conscious of the free play of our faculties aesthetically or intellectually, after having postponed the solution to the key problem indefinitely.2 I presume that you have some acquaintance with the third Critique and that you prepared for this seminar by rereading section 9, which is rather short. We shall not read it in its entirety nor quote it in the order of Kant’s writing; we shall try to accompany Kant in the movement of his thought and start by reading literally the promise apparently made in the first sentence, “the solution of this problem is the key to the critique of taste,” as well as the section’s title, “Investigation of the Question Whether in a Judgment of Taste the Feeling of Pleasure Precedes the Judging of the Object or the Judging Precedes the Pleasure.”3 The question to be investigated thus presents itself as a “chicken-­and-­egg” dilemma of a special kind insofar as it is transcendental. When Kant writes “precedes,” he does not speak of causation or succession in time; he raises a quid juris question. Dilemmas formulated like this are typical of Kant. One might even say that every question that demands a transcendental deduction takes the shape of a “chicken-­and-­egg” dilemma. In section 13 of the first Critique (“Transition to the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories”), Kant writes, There are only two possible cases in which synthetic representation and its objects can come together, necessarily relate to each other, and, as it were, meet each other: Either if the object alone makes the representation possible, or if the representation alone makes the object possible.4

And when, in the second Critique, Kant proceeds to expose the antinomy of practical reason, he writes, Consequently, either the desire for happiness must be the motive to maxims of virtue or the maxim of virtue must be the efficient cause of happiness.5

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In the third Critique, the dilemma is unequivocally solved to the benefit of the second branch of the alternative: throughout section 9, Kant argues that the judging precedes and grounds the pleasure, or rather, that such must be the case. His solution is therefore unequivocal merely in appearance: he feels the need to turn the problem around in all directions while nonetheless preserving its “chicken-­and-­egg” structure. Central to the matter is the introduction of a new notion, one that appears only here in Kant’s oeuvre: that of the free play of imagination and understanding. To this notion Kant attaches the question of the aesthetic judgment’s universality or universal validity. (Indeed, we have reached the point of the Analytic of the Beautiful that deals with the “Second Moment of a Judgment of Taste, as to Its Quantity,” a quantity which aesthetic judgment demands to be universal.6) Even though the initial dilemma—­either “if pleasure then judgment” or “if judgment then pleasure”—­is apparently resolved, it soon appears to repeat itself in a new phrasing: either “if free play then universality” or “if universality then free play.” Does the free play of the faculties that I feel in myself found the universal communicability—­ better, shareability (Mitteilbarkeit)—­of my pleasure, or is it the other way around? First, let us notice that the pleasure in question cannot be the sensual pleasure I get from the object: For that kind of pleasure would be none other than mere agreeableness in the sensation, so that by its very nature it could have only private validity, because it would depend directly on the presentation by which the object is given.7

The only pleasure that is allowed to claim universal shareability is thus the one I derive from the free play of my faculties. But its relation to judgment is not without ambiguity: Now this merely subjective (aesthetic) judging of the object . . . precedes the pleasure in it, and is the ground of this pleasure in the harmony of the faculties of cognition.8

This is a strange sentence, where the two pleasures, the pleasure in the object and the pleasure in the harmony of the faculties of cognition, are at once distinguished and conflated. Conflated inasmuch as both are perforce empirical and can perhaps not be differentiated through experience, and distinguished inasmuch as only the second is entitled to claim universality. De jure, the second comes first. Have we now discovered the transcendental egg making the empirical chicken possible, or are we dealing with an egg as empirical as the chicken, an egg that is still lacking

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a priori foundation? In other words, is it enough to say that the pleasure to be had from the free play precedes the pleasure taken from the object, or do both pleasures still require to be founded in the act of judging? In that case, what in the judging makes it foundational? Kant goes on: But on that universality of the subjective conditions of the judging of objects alone is this universal subjective validity of satisfaction, which we attach to the presentation of the object that we call beautiful, grounded.9

A minute ago, we seemingly had to do with one pleasure grounded on another; now we are dealing with one universality grounded on another. It seems that “this universal subjective validity of satisfaction” rests “on that universality of the subjective conditions of the judging.” On the universality of what conditions, precisely? Kant has already warned us in section 8 that the universality of the judging is a mere claim to universality, which still awaits legitimation; consequently, for the time being it cannot serve as a ground. Kant writes, Thus it is the universal shareability of the state of mind in the given presentation which, as the subjective condition of the judgment of taste, must serve as its ground and have the pleasure in the object as a consequence.10

The answer is unambiguous (if universality, then pleasure) only if we remake the conflation I noted a little while ago. Indeed, in the just-­quoted sentence, it is not the pleasure inherent in the free play of my faculties that is the consequence of “the universal shareability of the state of mind” (more about the “state of mind” in a minute) but rather the pleasure in the object. Now, for this latter pleasure to be universalizable is self-­contradictory, as has been demonstrated at the very beginning of the section: If the pleasure in the given object came first, and our judgment of taste were to attribute only the pleasure’s universal communicability to the presentation of the object, then this procedure would be self-­ contradictory.11

Trying to avoid conflating the two kinds of pleasure is to no avail: we are running in circles again, and we will never know whether the universality at the foundation of the judgment of taste grounds the free play or results from the free play. We shall escape the “chicken-­and-­egg” dilemma only if we can show that this is not a problem of synthetic judgment and that the universality in question is that of the free play. In other words, is it an an-

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alytic property of the free play of the faculties to be universally shareable? The problem gets complicated by the introduction of a new notion, made necessary by the fact that aesthetic judgments operate without concept, that of a state of mind, the German name of which is Gemütszustand, which accompanies and expresses the free play of imagination and understanding. The word Gemüt is rich in ambiguous connotations referring both to the realm of will and to that of emotions but usually excluding conceptual intelligence or Verstand.12 I shall not try to unravel these connotations (Kant doesn’t), for the decisive argument, which will tell us whether the universality is, analytically, that of the free play, paradoxically goes in the direction of Verstand. It is the argument of cognition in general: Now if the determining ground of the judgment on this universal communicability of the representation is to be conceived of merely subjectively, namely without a concept of the object, it can be nothing other than the state of mind that is encountered in the relation of the powers of representation to each other insofar as they relate a given representation to cognition in general.13

Or, still, The subjective universal communicability of the kind of representation in a judgment of taste, since it is supposed to occur without presupposing a determining concept, can be nothing other than the state of mind in the free play of the imagination and the understanding (so far as they agree with each other as is requisite for a cognition in general).14

Thus, it appears that it is indeed an analytic property of the free play of the faculties to be universally shareable so far as they agree with each other. But this is tautological: in section 9, free play of the faculties means their agreement or harmony, and vice versa.15 As a result, the responsibility of the demonstration sees itself shifted to this elusive state of mind, or Gemütszustand, “that we find in the relation between the presentational powers” and that “must be a feeling, accompanying the given presentation, of a free play of the presentational powers.”16 It is of this Gemütszustand that Kant says both that it is “the determining ground of the judgment on this universal communicability” (note that the judgment pertains to the communicability) and that it is that “subjective universal communicability” itself (leaving unanswered the question of what its ground might be if is to be judged upon). As if this new formulation of the transcendental chicken-­and egg dilemma were not complicated enough, Kant adds that the feeling he calls Gemütszustand implies a relation to cognition in

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general.17 Feelings and cognition do not mix in Kant; they are heterogeneous. How, then, do feelings relate to cognition? Apparently they do so tautegorically,18 via the Gemütszustand in question, which now reads as an (unexplained) simultaneously affective and quasi-­cognitive state of mind informing the mind of the state it is in.19 One thing is certain: Nothing, however, can be communicated universally except cognition, as well as presentation insofar as it pertains to cognition; for presentation is objective only insofar as it pertains to cognition, and only through this does it have a universal reference point with which everyone’s presentational power is compelled to agree.20

We are here reassured that cognition is universally communicable, but what about the relation to cognition that is now the center of Kant’s focus? What about the Gemütszustand that signals the relation in question?21 When Kant writes that “everyone’s presentational power is compelled to agree,” he has in mind the agreement of human understandings among themselves, not the agreement of imagination and understanding in the individual human being. Yet it is the latter agreement that is implied by the relation to cognition at stake in aesthetic judgment, a relation about which we have thus learned nothing new, except that it yields (or consists in, or results from—­always our “chicken-­and-­egg” dilemma) a state of mind whose status is highly ambiguous. Perhaps I am splitting hairs trying to extract from the text—­very elliptical on this matter—­more than the text contains. So we might be content with the way most commentators understand Kant’s argument: since cognition is universally communicable, so must be the state of mind that accompanies every cognitive act. Indeed, For we are conscious that this subjective relation suitable for cognition in general must hold just as much for everyone, and hence be just as universally communicable, as any determinate cognition, since cognition always rests on that relation as its subjective condition.22

Why split hairs? The consciousness of the agreement of my faculties and the feeling of pleasure it yields simply go together and are shareable by all, just as all knowledge is, even if in this case no determinate knowledge is produced. This is what Kant seems to mean in section 21, when he infers from the communicability of knowledge that of the harmony of the faculties, which cognitive acts put in mutual relations, and from there, the feeling of this harmony, the Gemütszustand that signals it: If cognitions are to be able to be communicated, then the mental state,

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i.e., the attunement of the cognitive powers that is required for cognition in general . . . must also be universally communicable. [ . . . ] Now since this attunement itself must be capable of being universally communicated, hence also the feeling of it.23

So, the universal agreement of human understandings among themselves would have as its basis the attunement of imagination and understanding in the individual human being, rewarded by a premium of pleasure. I was wrong splitting hairs. Such an attunement, of course, is the rule in the operation called subsumption. Imagination presents something to the understanding, and the latter subsumes that something under a concept. A harmonious accord of both faculties results, which yields satisfaction, that is, pleasure. But in section 9 Kant never mentions subsumption, and rightly so, for it is clear that in the absence of concept, the accord, the harmony, the attunement, or the free play of imagination and understanding subsumes nothing: The cognitive powers brought into play by this presentation are in free play, because no determinate concept restricts them to a particular rule of cognition.24

If the accord of faculties is not the same in free play as in subsumption, then it is really insufficient to maintain that since cognition is universally communicable, so must be the state of mind that accompanies the cognitive act. It is therefore not certain at all that this argument succeeded in analytically pulling us out of the vicious circle, and I was right to split hairs. The text’s ellipses and the ambiguities of the word Gemüt account for the impression Kant gives that he “wraps up,” as if that went without saying, the feeling of pleasure accompanying the cognitive act in the intellection wherein this act consists: since understanding is (as Descartes maintained, and Kant agrees) a common sense undoubtedly shared by all, so is the pleasure to exert one’s understanding; there is no need to prove that. And so similarly for the pleasure to exert one’s aesthetic judgment, a pleasure inherent in the Gemütszustand expressing the feeling of the free play, which is therefore equally shareable by all because it relates to cognition. That impression is misleading. Kant would solve with a petitio principii the question of the heterogeneity of the cognitive and the affective realms, whose bridging must justify that the feeling of pleasure and pain necessitates a transcendental deduction. Since this is precisely the great question the third Critique sets out to resolve, the question the key to which Kant has announced section 9 would seek to give, we cannot be satisfied by this petitio principii, and neither can we think it satisfied

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Kant. Another interpretation offers itself, which Kant doesn’t develop in section 9 but which he seems to put forward in section 35. It would imply jumping, so to speak, to a metatheoretical level. Granted that it is impossible to analytically demonstrate that the feeling of the free play of the faculties is universally shareable, what about the concept of free play? Could it be that when I become conscious of the free play of my faculties thanks to the state of mind expressing it, my understanding accesses the conceptualization of its play with my imagination, as if my judgment proceeded to a metatheoretical leap? It is not impossible to read section 35 as if Kant indeed proceeded there to such a leap. The subjective condition of all judgments is the faculty for judging itself, or the power of judgment. This . . . requires the agreement of two powers of representation: namely, the imagination [ . . . ] and the understanding [ . . . ]. Now since no concept of the object is here the ground of the judgment, it can consist only in the subsumption of the imagination itself [ . . . ] under the condition that the understanding in general advance from intuitions to concepts . . . and taste, as a subjective power of judgment, contains a principle of subsumption, not of intuitions under concepts, but of the faculty of intuitions or presentations (i.e., of the imagination) under the faculty of concepts (i.e., the understanding), insofar as the former in its freedom is in harmony with the latter in its lawfulness.25

What exactly does this mean? What would the subsumption of a faculty under another entail? Paul Guyer has offered this comment: This idea of the subsumption of the faculty of imagination under the faculty of understanding is not transparent, since the only conception of subsumption that Kant uses elsewhere in his works is that of the subsumption of a manifold under a determinate concept, whether a manifold of empirical intuitions under an empirical concept or a manifold of specific concepts under some more generic concept.26

Moreover, what becomes of the free play in the relation of both faculties in aesthetic judgment if the understanding keeps the mastery and sovereignty over imagination it enjoys in subsumption? What happens to the freedom of their playful relationship if all lawfulness remains on the side of understanding and all freedom on the side of imagination—­a freedom, incidentally, that consists only in the fact that imagination schematizes without concept? Is aesthetic judgment nothing but a higher-­level schematism, a metaschematism where the schemata of the categories are replaced by some enigmatic schemata of the faculties? I shall refrain from

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venturing onto this terrain for fear of entering the vexed debate about the interpretation of schematism, this “hidden art in the depths of the human soul, whose true operations we can divine from nature and lay unveiled before our eyes only with difficulty.”27 I don’t want to be forced to reinterpret the section of the first Critique on the “Analogies of experience,” where for the first time Kant speaks of regulative as opposed to constitutive principles, the matrix of the opposition between reflective and determining judgment he would introduce in the third Critique.28 Suffice it to say that I find this passage from section 35 as obscure and unsatisfying as section 9—­and all the more unsatisfying that subsumption is an operation of the determining judgment and that aesthetic judgment is reflective. By pretending that the judgment of taste subsumes one faculty under another one, Kant dangerously suggests that taste is nothing but a metaschematism of faculties, thereby risking to erase the specificity of the reflective judgment, which he had vigorously underlined in both the first and the second introductions: The reflecting power of judgment thus proceeds . . . not schematically, but technically, not as it were merely mechanically, like an instrument, but artistically.29

In section 9, Kant has not yet introduced the notion of reflecting judgment. He may have more than an inkling that therein lies the key to the question section 9 asks; he may also have decided that for the reflecting judgment to make its entrance, it has to wait for the next section, where the third Moment of the Analytic of the Beautiful begins.30 Perhaps this is why he suddenly gives up: When we call something beautiful, the pleasure that we feel is expected of everyone else in the judgment of taste as necessary, just as if it were to be regarded as a property of the object that is determined in it in accordance with concepts; but beauty is nothing by itself, without relation to the feeling of the subject. However, we must reserve the discussion of this question until we have answered another: how and whether aesthetic judgments a priori are possible.31

The question whose discussion Kant reserves for later formulates as the antinomy of taste, and the question he says must be answered first leads to the deduction. Those are in fact two phrasings, the first dialectical, the second analytical, of the question of which the first sentence of section 9 seemed to promise the hic et nunc resolution. Both get indefinitely postponed, since Kant goes on:

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At present we still have to deal with a lesser question, namely how we become conscious, in a judgment of taste, of a reciprocal subjective harmony between the cognitive powers: is it aesthetically, through mere inner sense and sensation? or is it intellectually, through consciousness of the intentional activity by which we bring these powers into play?32

What happens here is an abrupt, surprising, and utterly disappointing slippage from a transcendental to an empirical question, which, however, is obviously the same. Kant tries to unravel the ambiguities of the Gemütszustand that, a page or so before, signaled to me that the feeling I had of the free play of my faculties had to do with cognition in general. But whereas he had until now entrusted the Gemütszustand with a transcendental function (to be “the determining ground of the judgment” and its “subjective universal communicability”), the matter is now to decide empirically whether this at once affective and quasi-­cognitive state of mind manifests itself intellectually or through sensation. The answer, this time, is immediate and not ambiguous at all: “Thus that subjective unity of the relation can make itself known only through sensation.”33 Let us thus follow Kant and remain on the empirical level. We should then ask ourselves what this sensation would be if it should signal another one. Indeed: I am looking at a rose and I judge it beautiful. I gain pleasure from the experience. That pleasure is of course a sensation. What signals to me that it is not the mere pleasure of sensation but the pleasure I feel due to the free play of my faculties—­which is perforce also a sensation? A third sensation? A sensation of the difference between sensation number one and sensation number two (between agreeableness and beauty)? So far as I know, metasensations do not exist, and if they existed they would still have to be sensations, too. Were we to embark on an absurd infinite regress of sensations and metasensations, we would land in aporias worse than the metaschematism of faculties. What in fact sensation number two must signal to me is that sensation number one, the one I express with my judgment “this rose is beautiful,” is justified in its claim to universality. Either Kant now says the contrary of what he has been hammering throughout the section, which was that sensation number two precedes and grounds sensation number one because in the exercise of pure taste, judgment precedes and grounds sensation, period, or else the solution he gives to the “lesser question” does nothing but bring us back to the enigma of the main question. This is indeed the case. Kant brings us back to our starting point: whether sensation number one, two, or n, the sensation that animates both faculties (the imagination and the understanding) to an activity that

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is indeterminate but yet . . . in unison . . . , is the sensation whose universal communicability is postulated by the judgment of taste.34

The answer to the “lesser question” was not only “through sensation” but “through [that] sensation whose universal communicability is postulated by the judgment of taste.” And here is our initial “chicken-­and-­egg” dilemma again: is it the indeterminate activity of both faculties, which made itself known to me through sensation, that grounds the universal shareability of my judgment of taste, or is it the other way around? Stand reassured, we shall not retravel the whole circuit where Kant proposes a short circuit by saying that the relevant animating sensation is “the sensation whose universal communicability is postulated by the judgment of taste.” In other words, it is the chicken inasmuch as it supposes the egg and it is the egg inasmuch as it requires the chicken. After such Ha-­ha Erlebnis, our choice, ladies and gentlemen, is between utter disillusionment or a big laugh: Oh no! Was it that simple? Let us go straight to the remark closing section 38, with which the deduction of judgments of taste is concluded: What makes this deduction so easy is that it does not need to justify the objective reality of a concept; for beauty is not a concept of an object, and a judgment of taste is not a cognitive judgment. All it asserts is that we are justified in presupposing universally in all people the same subjective conditions of the power of judgment that we find in ourselves; apart from this it asserts only that we have subsumed the given object correctly under these conditions.35

Let us leave aside the subsumption that reappears in the last sentence. I believe that Guyer’s aforementioned reservations about the hypothetical subsumption of one faculty under another also apply to the subsumption of an object under “the subjective conditions of the power of judgment.” In section 39, which immediately follows the above remark, Kant returns to the issue of the “communicability of a sensation” only to conclude that, after all, “the pleasure we take in the beautiful . . . is a pleasure of mere reflection.”36 Isn’t that extraordinary? Marvel springs by surprise from disappointment. In section 9, Kant is forced to stop before an insurmountable problem. He writes another hundred pages that are not the easiest, and when he has finally solved the problem and arrived at the long-­awaited deduction, he declares that it was easy, “so easy.” It was as easy—­that is to say, as vain—­to deduce the a priori legitimacy of the judgment of taste

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as it is to try to solve any empirical “chicken-­and-­egg” dilemma. Typical Kant: a Kant who admits, all the while hiding it from himself in the name of his “system,” that it is empirically that the empirical opens up onto the transcendental. The mysteries with which he surrounds schematism in the first Critique are cut from the same cloth. And so, too, the brilliant invention of the opposition between regulative and constitutive, and later, the notion of regulative idea. After having pompously announced, in the opening line of section 9, that “the solution of this problem is the key to the critique of taste,” and thus having led us to believe that he would deliver the said key here and now, Kant interrupts himself and forfeits the task because he already knows that he must push the theorization of the reflective judgment to the third Moment of the Analytic of the Beautiful. He is not ready yet to simply say that the pleasure we take in the free play of our faculties is “a pleasure of mere reflection.” Kant will attack this “Third Moment of Judgments of Taste, as to the Relation of Purposes That Is Taken into Consideration in Them” as soon as he is done with section 9 and the “lesser question” he has substituted for the main question, pretending not to see that they are one and the same. This didn’t prevent him from exerting his reflective judgment throughout section 9, as he did throughout the three Critiques, if not before. This he doesn’t say, he cannot say. The key he is seeking, and which he will seek till the last line of the Analytic of the Beautiful, is a demonstration of the legitimacy of the judgment of taste as apodictic as that of the categories. If he is seeking it in this way as if he hadn’t found it already it is because, for the sake of the architectonic, he obstinately models the four moments of his demonstration on the table of logical functions (thus, indirectly on the table of categories), as if he had forgotten or wanted us to forget (it is at times very difficult to decide) that he had warned us in the first Critique that he would use the table of categories as a mere Leitfaden (guiding thread) for his reflection.37 I must say and repeat that I find marvelous Kant’s real or feigned blindness vis-­à-­vis his enterprise. It explains why the Analytic is, in truth, not an Analytic: it is four times the Dialectic, thesis and antithesis ceaselessly alternated under the light successively thrown by the four Moments the table of categories dictates. It is above all what makes us reread the third Critique a hundred times with the renewed impression of having been made intelligent by our reading while not really having learned anything we didn’t already know. The time has now come for me to apologize for such an arduous explanation. You understand that my reading of section 9 was so laborious because I forbade myself to read it with the reflective judgment in mind. I played the game of apodicticity: to seek the ground, the foundation. To build the

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fundaments before the ground floor and the ground floor before the upper stories. To seek to demonstrate. To aim for proof and not settling for signs. To say once and for all whether, de jure, the chicken precedes the egg or the egg the chicken. It is impossible: Kant’s text (and this is true for all Kant) demands a reflecting reader and a reflective reading. When, in the third Moment of the Analytic of the Beautiful, Kant extracts from “merely the purposiveness of the form” (bloß die Zweckmäßigkeit der Form) “the mere form of purposiveness” (die bloße Form der Zweckmäßigkeit), he shows us the reflecting judgment in action.38 In aesthetic matters, signs have proof value while proof is mere sign; the abstract, conceptual form of purposiveness reflects itself in the empirically perceptible apparent purposiveness of the beautiful form; we must content ourselves with reflexivity; we can content ourselves with reflexivity, and this is why the deduction was “so easy.” The way to understand reflective judgment is by exerting it; its exercise in the empirical opens access to the transcendental. Nowhere is this truer than in section 9.39 The transcendental idea onto which the reflective judgment opens empirically is the idea of sensus communis. It is an idea on its transcendental face and a Gemütszustand on its empirical face. The pleasure I take in the attunement of my faculties playing freely with one another signals to me that this sensus communis is—­or rather must be—­the condition of universal shareability of cognition in general: Now since this attunement itself must be capable of being universally communicated, hence also the feeling of it [ . . . ], but since the universal communicability of a feeling presupposes a common sense, the latter must be able to be assumed with good reason . . . as the necessary condition of the universal communicability of our cognition.40

When Kant speaks of “the necessary condition of the universal communicability of our cognition” as a paraphrase of sensus communis, he doesn’t use cognition (Erkenntnis) to refer to the understanding; he clearly uses the word in the larger and looser sense he theorized in both introductions to the third Critique, where all “capacities of the soul” are assimilated to cognitive faculties, generally speaking. But sensus communis is more specific. It must definitely be regarded as a common sense (Gemeinsinn), yet one that is essentially different from the common understanding [gemeiner Verstand] that is sometimes also called common sense [ . . . ], since the latter judges not by feeling but always by concepts, although commonly only in the form of obscurely represented principles.41

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Sensus communis being a common sense that judges by dint of feeling, it does not judge by “obscurely represented” concepts; it is heterogeneous to the realm of concepts altogether. (Such is the gist of Kant’s critique of Baumgarten.) Sensus communis must be postulated as common sentiment, that is, as an aptitude for having feelings in common, as a capacity for sharing affects universally. It is the idea of the harmonious Mitteilbarkeit (shareability) of feelings across all members of the human race, an affective universality grounded in the fact “that we are justified in presupposing universally in all people the same subjective conditions of the power of judgment that we find in ourselves.” Identified with taste itself, sensus communis thus names that very special faculty of agreeing that is based on the common feeling of belonging to the community defined by precisely this feeling. If you don’t intuitively feel (I’m emphasizing both intuitively and feel) that what I just stated contains not the least circular reasoning but rather a demonstration of how reflecting judgment is operating, then you are not human. I beg your pardon for the violence of the short circuit, but I can’t help it: it is precisely that short circuit that the third Critique asks us to understand—­and to perform. To understand, for otherwise we wouldn’t understand either why we express personal feelings with phrases claiming universal assent such as “This is beautiful” or “This is art.” And to perform, for if we didn’t we would renounce the idea that humans are endowed with an affectively determined faculty of agreeing—­an idea whose reality is far from being demonstrated but that we cannot relinquish lest the word human loses all meaning. Allow me to slow down that short circuit and to decompose its steps so as to show you the ascending movement of the mind the reflective judgment sets in motion. It doesn’t require the subsumption of one faculty under another any more than it implies infinite regress into metasensations. Since the transcendental idea of the sensus communis is not sustained by any empirical proof of its incarnation in reality, what are the signs of its existence, at least as idea? Kant sees them in the fact that we judge aesthetically, claiming universal assent for our judgments. But dissent in matters of taste is not only possible, as the condition for our freedom of judgment, it is also very real: people do not agree on what they deem beautiful. Kant could have stopped here and snubbed people for their unjustified claim to the objectivity of their judgments of taste, but that is not what he does. He takes their claim seriously and reads in it a sign, the first sign, of the sensus communis. For in saying “This is beautiful,” whereas I should have been content to say that I find this beautiful, I did not, in spite of all appearances, claim objectivity for my judgment. Rather, I claimed universal shareability for it. What I wanted to say, perhaps unwittingly, is “Everybody ought to find this beautiful.” Here comes the second sign, a

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notch higher in Kant’s reflection: why should we take that claim seriously in spite of its constant refutation by the reality of aesthetic disagreements? Why is aesthetic judgment justified in claiming universal assent for what is after all a merely personal feeling? Kant’s answer is, because it forces us to suppose that we, the people, all humans, are endowed with the faculty of aesthetic judgment. And here comes the third sign, still a notch higher: this faculty’s existence cannot be demonstrated any more than the validity of every single aesthetic judgment. In turn, it forces us to suppose that we all have in us this potential community of affects Kant calls sensus communis, which in the end is nothing but the faculty of universally agreeing by dint of feeling. Even though war and disagreement are the rule in this world, every single aesthetic judgment makes this undaunted claim: This indeterminate norm of a common sense [read sensus communis] is really presupposed by us; our presumption in making judgments of taste proves that. Whether there is in fact such a common sense, as a constitutive principle of the possibility of experience, or whether a yet higher principle of reason only makes it into a regulative principle for us first to produce a common sense in ourselves for higher ends, thus whether taste is an original and natural faculty, or only the idea of one that is yet to be acquired and is artificial, so that a judgment of taste, with its expectation of a universal assent, is in fact only a demand of reason to produce such unanimity in the manner of sensing, and whether the “should,” i.e., the objective necessity of the confluence of the feeling of everyone with that of each, signifies only the possibility of coming to agreement about this, and the judgment of taste only provides an example of the application of this principle—­this we would not and cannot yet investigate here.42

This is from section 22, which ends once more in disappointment, deflation, and indefinite postponement of the question. When Kant finally picks it up in section 40, titled “On Taste as a Kind of Sensus Communis,” it is in order to write: If one could assume that the mere universal communicability of his feeling must in itself already involve an interest for us (which, however, one is not justified in inferring from the constitution of a merely reflective power of judgment), then one would be able to explain how it is that the feeling in the judgment of taste is expected of everyone as if it were a duty.43

As if it were a duty. I must tell you what interpretive hypothesis guides my reading of the third Critique. I think that, in the Analytic of the Beautiful

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and without waiting for that of the Sublime, the task of bridging the domains of jurisdiction of the first two Critiques, nature and freedom (the famous Übergang), is bestowed on a curious amphiboly of the concept of duty that subreptitiously calls on practical reason from within the free play of imagination and understanding. It is sometimes difficult to decide clearly whether the words must, should, ought express purely theoretical necessities or quasi-­moral injunctions: they often appear to be simultaneously a müssen for theory and a sollen for practice. Let us go over some of the quotations I have made: Thus it is the universal shareability of the state of mind . . . which, as the subjective condition of the judgment of taste, must [muß] serve as its ground and have the pleasure in the object as a consequence.44 For we are conscious that this subjective relation suitable for cognition in general must [müsse] . . . be just as universally communicable, as any determinate cognition.45 But if cognitions are to be able to be communicated, then the mental state . . . must [muß] also be universally communicable. . . . Now since this attunement itself must [muß] be capable of being universally communicated, hence also the feeling of it.46

With great unanimity, Kant scholars read in these “musts” a purely theoretical requirement, and it is fair to assume that Kant indeed intended them to convey theoretical necessities only, not moral obligations: an aesthetic theory that does not postulate as a fact that judgment precedes pleasure is, as Allison writes, self-­defeating; therefore, the theory must make that postulate (müssen in all instances above). Because Kant scholars’ main intent is to understand Kant’s thought, taking guidance in its putative consistency, they do not envisage that the theory might be defeated because it is incorrect. When they check it against empirical evidence (which they do only very rarely), it is to add plausibility to their interpretation of the text, not to make a conclusive point about Kant’s theory itself. When on the other hand I claim that Kant “got it right,” I express my conviction that Kant’s account of aesthetic judgments coheres with our experience as aesthetic judges, and I treat Kant as if he were a scientist rather than a philosopher. But even in science, postulates are not verifiable (or falsifiable) hypotheses, and each one of the above “musts” is a postulate. My point is thus not to deny that these “musts” are theoretical necessities, or to affirm that they are instead moral obligations, or even to read them as an ambiguous mix of both. (I called them quasi-­moral

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injunctions for lack of a better term.) My point is that there are cases where the making of a theoretical postulate is itself a moral obligation. Let us consider the alternative laid down in the passage from section 22 that I quoted a minute ago, and let us for a brief moment treat postulates as if they were hypotheses: either humans are actually endowed with sensus communis or they are not. If it turns out that they are, then sensus communis is an empirical concept of the understanding; there is no sense anymore in calling it a postulate; the hypothesis is verified. If it turns out that humans are not so endowed, then sensus communis doesn’t exist; it is neither a postulate nor a concept of the understanding; it is a pseudoconcept, like the concepts of phlogiston before Lavoisier or ether before the Michelson-­Morley experiment. But Kant does not formulate the alternative from section 22 in a way that asks for the verification or falsification of a hypothesis. He writes that either “there is in fact such a common sense” (read sensus communis), or this common sense is “only the idea of one that is yet to be acquired.” In the first case the theoretical postulate has empirical reality, and it amounts to a verified hypothesis. The “must” in the above quotes has become rhetorical: their theoretical requirements having been met, must means is. In the second case the theoretical postulate has no such reality, and “a yet higher principle of reason only makes it into a regulative principle for us first to produce a common sense in ourselves for higher ends.” Because the theoretical requirements of the above quotes have not been met while not having been abandoned either (as is the case with the phlogiston or the ether), the meaning of that higher principle is clearly that must means ought to. If it were proved that we humans lack sensus communis, we would still face the moral obligation to produce it in ourselves—­for higher ends. And with that obligation comes the obligation to make the theoretical postulates that judgment precedes pleasure, that our mental state when we judge aesthetically is universally communicable, and so forth. A lot remains to be said about these “higher ends,” the most obvious being that their attainment is a historical task. But let us leave this as a trail to be followed on another occasion.47 For now, please allow me to underline the importance of the extraordinary passage from section 22 that I quoted. I find support for my reading of the entire third Critique—­and certainly of the passage in question—­in the fact that Kant indicates there with the word sollen that to opt for “the objective necessity of the confluence of the feeling of everyone with that of each” is an ethical ought, whereas the “objective necessity” we ought to opt for remains a theoretical must.48 To conclude, let us get back to the title of Marie-­Claire Ropars’s seminar, “Art without Subject?” (but with question mark). Let us finally address

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the question of the subject. I dodged it until now. I occasionally talked about the individual human being, whom common language makes us assimilate to the subject, but I succeeded in talking about the Kantian faculties and their free play without ever saying that they are the faculties of a subject nor whether they are the faculties of a subject.49 Is it possible to reread Kant without having recourse to the subject? Is it desirable? These are vexed questions, which my choice of the word hypokeimenon (substance) to say “subject,” and the substratum that word conjures up, inevitably raise. Here are three quotations, all three excerpted from section 57, where Kant gives the “Resolution of the Antinomy of Taste”: It is not a rule or precept but only that which is merely nature in the subject, i.e., the supersensible substratum of all our faculties . . . which is to serve as the subjective standard of that aesthetic but unconditioned purposiveness in beautiful art, which is supposed to make a rightful claim to please everyone.50 [The] determining ground [of the aesthetic judgment] may lie in the concept of that which can be regarded as the supersensible substratum of humanity.51 The rational concept of the supersensible substratum of all appearances in general . . . is already in terms of its species an indemonstrable concept and idea of reason.52

The word substratum evokes the image of an underlying ground, a carrying surface, a platform or plateau, in short, the solid and substantial image that the philosophical tradition associates with the notion of subject under its Greek name, hypokeimenon. But in Kant the substratum is said to be supersensible and the subject transcendental, which means that they are no more and no less than ideas of reason. God knows how much bad press the transcendental subject has received, and for how long, to the point where the philosophy of being appeared to more than one philosopher the best way to be done with the philosophy of the subject. I have no title to intervene in this vexed debate since I practice philosophical aesthetics not as a philosopher but mainly because I am in search of the best theory of art possible—­I mean, the one that explains the past of art best and mortgages the future of art the least. I turned to Kant because I think he had a better understanding of the nature and implications of aesthetic judgments than any philosopher I know before or after him and because I cannot conceive of a theory of art that finesses the aesthetic, that is, affective experience of works of art. (There are some, and they have noxious effects on the

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practice of art.) Since the idea of art without subject evokes for me the unpleasant idea of art without a responsible subject (witness the misinterpretations around Barthes’s Death of the Author), I am not ready to throw the subject to the dogs. Empirically, I shall not forsake the individual human being (whether artist or art lover) as concrete subject responsible for his or her aesthetic judgments. Kant gives us the means of thinking the subject of art as responsible vis-­à-­vis sensus communis, which is to say, vis-­à-­vis the idea of humanity as a community founded on the sharing of feelings. This responsibility is irresponsible before any other court than itself (Kant would have called it heautonomous), for nothing is falser and more dangerous than wanting to found the human community on the real, that is, political, sharing of feelings. Transcendentally, the aesthetic subject is the practical as well as theoretical idea of reason to which empirical subjects refer their state of mind—­their Gemütszustand—­when they judge that their personal feelings in front of beauty or art ought to be universally shared. Why not, then, endorse the subject as hypokeimenon but in the Kantian triple sense of supersensible substratum of all our faculties, supersensible substratum of humanity, and supersensible substratum of all appearances in general? What does Kant, always a good guide, suggest with these three qualifications of the word substratum? That the subject as supersensible substratum of all our faculties is, like Lautréamont’s dissection table allowing the surrealist encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine, the supposition we must make to conceive both the very real conflict of the faculties and the nevertheless necessary harmony of their free play. That the subject as supersensible substratum of humanity is the supposition we must make to think of sensus communis as the faculty of universal agreement without, for all that, entertaining any illusion regarding our real capacities to reach such agreement. And that the subject as supersensible substratum of all appearances is the supposition we must make to think of the subject as support of its relation to the object. It’s like that since Aristotle: to suppose—­to sup-­pose—­means to postulate a support—­in Greek, hypokeimenon. Kant teaches us something in addition to this, to wit, that the subject gets articulated according to three relations to the object that are irreducible to one another: according to the cognitive faculty, to the feeling of pleasure or pain, and to the faculty of desire.53 Aesthetic judgment performs their “synthesis.” This is why I’m convinced that there cannot be any art without subject. You might as well fantasize art without aesthetics—­an impossibility.

“Kant (d)’après Duchamp,” the middle chapter of Au nom de l’art (Paris: Minuit, 1989), contained a “cybernetic” reading of the reflective judgment that seemed so natural to me at the time that I did not bother to argue for it. I have undertaken to do this for the present book after realizing that such “anachronistic” reading had not been offered by anyone else. The part on Vaihinger’s Philosophy of the As If is excerpted from the original French chapter and has been translated by Jane Marie Todd.

11

Reflecting on Reflection

Reflection is an operation of the thinking mind that every human being with a functional brain performs a hundred times a day without even thinking about it. Notice the paradox: to reflect is to think without thinking—­at any rate, without thinking about the thinking process involved. Reflection operates without consciousness of itself; its reflexivity is of the same order of automatism as that of muscular reflex. Hence the difficulty of reflecting on reflection, a difficulty humorously illustrated by the story of the centipede that reflects on how it moves its legs and is immediately paralyzed. Starting with Descartes, philosophers have solved the difficulty by focusing not on reflection itself but on its result: cogito, ergo sum—­ the emphasis is on ergo. And reflexivity came to mean the contrary of subconscious automatism: it became the sign of a critical subject capable of seeing itself at work in the mirror of its own consciousness.1 Kant’s three Critiques rely on the precedent of Descartes’s cogito to the effect that they don’t problematize the act of reflection.2 Kant nowhere deems it necessary to formally and thematically reflect on reflection, even though he does it all the time automatically and quasi-­unconsciously, especially in the Critique of Judgment, where reflection is central. It is central, first, to the definition of taste, that is, the faculty of judging the beautiful. The beautiful, Kant states in section 39 of the Critique of Judgment, is the “pleasure of mere reflection.”3 In order to avoid the centipede’s ordeal and find ourselves paralyzed before we even begin to reflect on reflection, let’s assume that we know from experience what reflection is, and let’s ask, what is mere reflection? What does this emphasis on mere mean and entail? In the first, unpublished introduction, Kant defines two modi operandi of the power of judgment, one that he calls the determining or determinative judgment, and the other, precisely, the reflecting or reflective judgment:4 The power of judgment can be regarded either as a mere faculty for re-

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flecting on a given representation, in accordance with a certain principle, for the sake of a concept that is thereby made possible, or as a faculty for determining an underlying concept through a given empirical representation. In the first case it is the reflecting, in the second case the determining power of judgment.5

Although close to the distinction we intuitively make between reflection and the gathering of empirical knowledge under a concept, this definition remains vague. In the second, published introduction, Kant adds something more specific: The power of judgment in general is the faculty for thinking of the particular as contained under the universal. If the universal (the rule, the principle, the law) is given, then the power of judgment, which subsumes the particular under it [ . . . ], is determining. If, however, only the particular is given, for which the universal is to be found, then the power of judgment is merely reflecting.6

Now this definition makes the merely reflecting judgment appear like a variant of inductive reasoning, one that would be capable of inferring universal, not just general conclusions from individual premises. But this, of course, it cannot be: induction cannot possibly claim to rest on a priori grounds and remains conjectural and probabilistic (in Kant’s vocabulary, problematic). However strong induction’s tendency to maximize its findings, the universal is not within its reach because universality is not an empirical concept. With respect to maximization (a word that, as in the Analytic of the Sublime, entails that imagination, in its effort to comprehend an aesthetically defined maximum, glimpses an ethically defined maxim7), reflection is ambiguously heterogeneous. Whereas induction safely remains within the constraints of cognitive thinking, reflection may (or may not) transgress those constraints and land in the ethical domain. In light of the fact that reflecting on the beautiful as symbol of the morally good, as Kant does in section 59 of the third Critique, definitely lands us in the ethical domain, it is clear that the above definition of the merely reflecting power of judgment still needs to be clarified and fleshed out. Yet the body of the third Critique contains no further precisions on the reflecting judgment, which is mentioned much more often in the Critique of Teleological than in that of Aesthetic Judgment but nowhere receives a proper definition. An interpretation of the reflecting judgment alternative to induction offers itself in the modern concept of abduction first devised by Charles Sanders Peirce and applied to the realm of the aesthetic by the anthro-

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pologist Alfred Gell.8 Abductive reasoning infers the condition from the consequence, thereby inverting the logical sequencing of implication. Instead of a entails b, abduction reasons: since we have b, the explanation must be a. Although logically fallacious (there could be other explanations for b), abduction is in my view quite an adequate translation of Kant’s notion of the reflecting judgment inasmuch as it inverts the direction of logical inference. More about that inversion soon. The problem is that there is no direct support in Kant’s text, anywhere, for an interpretation of the reflecting judgment in terms of abduction. We are at a loss. Shall we obtain more help from Kant if we return to the first introduction? There, he had written To reflect (to consider), however, is to compare and to hold together given representations either with others or with one’s faculty of cognition, in relation to a concept thereby made possible. The reflecting power of judgment is that which is also called the faculty of judging (facultas diiudicandi).9

Although it is easy to understand that reflection—­which interestingly enough is now equated with the faculty of judging as such—­draws comparisons among representations, it is not easy to fathom how it compares a representation with the faculty of cognition. This seems to imply a jump to some metalevel, which Kant leaves unexplained, a jump of which the following passage from the second introduction bears witness.10 Speaking of the merely (again) subjective formal purposiveness of an object apprehended with pleasure, Kant writes, For that apprehension of forms in the imagination can never take place without the reflecting power of judgment, even if unintentionally, at least comparing them to its faculty for relating intuitions to concepts.11

That jump to a metalevel seems to require of me, as do indeed all passages in the third Critique where an appeal is made to the reflecting power of judgment, that I use my own such reflecting power in order to gain knowledge of the operation of reflective judgment itself. Both introductions make clear that the reflecting power of judgment creates, for its own usage, the concept of the purposiveness of nature, an objective purposiveness in the case of the teleological, a subjective purposiveness in the case of the aesthetic judgment, but in both cases one that belongs not to nature but to the reflecting power of judgment itself. The Third Moment of the Analytic of the Beautiful (sections 10–­17) establishes the connection of reflection with purposiveness. Although the word reflection appears only

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twice in the Third Moment, it is there that the reflecting judgment gets theorized if it gets theorized anywhere at all. Compare this excerpt from section 11—­“Thus nothing other than the mere form of purposiveness [die bloße Form der Zweckmäßigkeit] in the representation can constitute the determining ground of the judgment of taste”—­with this one from section 13—­“A judgment of taste which thus has for its determining ground merely the purposiveness of the form [bloß die Zweckmäßigkeit der Form] is a pure judgment of taste.”12 A thinker as precise as Kant does not invert the order of a genitive by mistake. We must therefore assume, even though he does not explain himself, that the equivalence between “merely the purposiveness of the form” and “the mere form of purposiveness” is a springboard for our reflection, as it probably was for his. Both are said to be the determining ground of the judgment of taste. But that determining ground is in fact only an “as if ground,” presupposed and yielded by the judgment of taste itself, which is merely reflecting. How to interpret this “as if ” and this “merely”? Surely they are connected. A famous interpretation is the one Hans Vaihinger developed in his 1911 book The Philosophy of the As If, according to which Kant’s “as if ” is a reservation that makes the reflecting judgment a hypothetical determining judgment.13 It is already difficult to accept this interpretation with respect to the theoretical usage of reason, where, according to Vaihinger, the “as if ” becomes a “heuristic fiction”: ever a convinced Newtonian, Kant knew not to feign hypotheses.14 With respect to the practical usage of reason, Vaihinger’s reading is inadmissible, since the words fiction and heuristic are meaningless outside the cognitive domain. On the point of the “as if ” and the “merely” as well as on several other points, I side up against Vaihinger with Henry Allison, who insists in his reading of the third Critique that all judgments, including the determinative ones, are reflective but that the aesthetic and the teleological judgments are nondeterminative and therefore only or merely reflective.15 A merely reflective judgment is a judgment that knows the “as if ” to be its only rule, and therefore cannot be reflected upon, except through a merely reflective judgment that knows the “as if ” to be its only rule. How reflection on reflection escapes infinite regress or vicious circularity is by jumping to an apparent metalevel of reflection, the level Kant seemed to imply when he wrote of comparing a representation with one’s faculty of cognition. Some works of art demand such apparent metareflection: to experience them aesthetically is to have one’s mind move teleologically along a “strange loop,” the topology of which the ever-­ascending staircases in the Escher print reproduced here exemplify.16 I borrow the notion of strange loop from Douglas Hofstadter’s great book, Gödel, Escher, Bach.17 Escher prints are nice illustrations of what Hofstadter calls paradoxical level-­crossing feedback loops, but as works of

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16. M. C. Escher, Relativity, lithograph, 1953. 11.7″ × 11.3″ / 29.7 × 28.8 cm. © 2017 The M.C. Escher Company, The Netherlands. All rights reserved.

art of modest ambition,18 they don’t stand up to Hofstadter’s other example of such loops, the endlessly rising six-­voice ricercar from J. S. Bach’s Musical Offering. The aesthetic experience of it triggers a reflecting process that extracts from “merely the purposiveness of the form” “the mere form of purposiveness” and accesses the ambiguously heterogeneous intellectual level Kant calls the supersensible, where the maximization of a presentation subreptitiously lands us in the ethical domain.19 The modulation of Bach’s endlessly rising canon is such that each of its cycles finishes in a key one tone higher than the one it started in, only to land in the initial C minor at the end. That canon is much more than an illustration, it is an extraordinary incarnation of an aesthetic phenomenon that

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transgresses the constraints of cognitive thought and opens the door to an experience that, depending on your disposition, you may or may not want to call mystical but that, in any case, incrementally elevates your mind and then suddenly brings you back to the sensuous pleasure the music yields, only to trigger the same cycle again and again. The mind is pulled up from the phenomenal to the supersensible level, the better to be led back to the phenomenal in order to reflect on its own ascension, analogized by the endlessly rising canon. Bach’s ricercar is perhaps unique in that it elicits an aesthetic experience raised to the status of reflective model for all aesthetic experience; needless to say, not all strange loops reach that level of artistic achievement. It remains that the notion of strange loop is really useful, theoretically, in order to apprehend the reflective judgment without being caught in the conundrums of reflection when it reflects on itself. Here is how Hofstadter defines strange loops: What I mean by “strange loop” is—­here goes a first stab, anyway—­not a physical circuit but an abstract loop in which, in the series of stages that constitute the cycling-­around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive “upward” shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle. That is, despite one’s sense of departing ever further from one’s origin, one winds up, to one’s shock, exactly where one had started out. In short, a strange loop is a paradoxical level-­ crossing feedback loop.20

Kant could not have known of feedback loops, strange or not. Not before the 1920s was the word “feedback” in common use, and then only among engineers. Not before Norbert Wiener theorized feedbacks in his 1948 book Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine was the fact adequately conceptualized that causal chains and flows of information sometimes bend to fold back onto and feed back into themselves.21 Not before the advent of cybernetics were philosophers fully equipped to demystify Aristotle’s causa finalis and to bring the “ghost in the machine” down from the Olympus of magic and theology to the prosaic ground level of scientific knowledge.22 Kant could obviously not have read Wiener. Neither must we, in fact: as everyone knows today, feedback loops are ubiquitous in nature and technology alike. Even the latter, technological kind was already available to observation in Kant’s time, although its theory remained in limbo for the next century and a half. Watt’s centrifugal governor was patented in 1788 while Kant was writing the third Critique, but it was not before Maxwell’s 1868 article, “On Governors,” that their working was theorized mathematically, and

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then still not in terms of regulatory feedback.23 (Incidentally, kubernétès is the Greek word for governor or ship helmsman.) Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie already described a self-­regulated system, called in French baille-­blé, that adjusted the supply of grain to the stones of a windmill proportionally to the force of the wind. And the water clocks of antiquity had built-­in feedback loops akin to the one that is activated by the floater of our modern toilet flushes! All these devices imply an engineer’s practical understanding of how regulative feedbacks work, but they don’t suppose the concept of feedback in the mind of their constructors. Proof that one doesn’t need a concept of reflection in order to reflect. It is more complicated when it is the concept of reflection that one reflects on, something Kant, like Descartes, was not in a position to do self-­consciously because feedback—­which was in a way the true unacknowledged object of the Critique of Teleological Judgment—­was also the method—­or rather, the manner—­of the third Critique.24 There is a lot of irony in this. Kant was no doubt a master at reflection, but even a mind like his could not, in its own time and—­I surmise—­because of its own reflective activity, grasp the significance that the circular looping of causal chains had for the understanding of apparently teleologically oriented systems. The closest he came to that understanding was his concept of “reciprocal action” from the first Critique,25 and, in the third, the extension of that concept to “natural ends” as being “reciprocally the cause and effect of their form.”26 But “reciprocal action” is a static concept informed by Newton’s third law and required by the experience of simultaneity; it involves no circular looping. And by Kant’s own admission, to say, “a natural end must be related to itself reciprocally as both cause and effect” is “a somewhat improper and indeterminate expression.”27 It certainly doesn’t apply to the heautonomous operation of reflection itself. The word heautonomy occurs only once in the Critique of Judgment, in the second introduction. It characterizes the reflective judgment in its apprehension of a natural law, which the judgment, being merely reflective and not determinative, can hold valid for itself only.28 The irony of Kant’s ordeal transpires in that hapax legomenon. Nothing is more ironic indeed than the difficulties inherent in the heautonomous operations of reflexivity, the height of irony being attained when reflection tries to reflect on itself. May I come to Kant’s rescue by proposing an anachronistic definition of his notion of a reflective judgment? It is a feedback loop of the mind. Kant knew how to reflect and how to incite his readers to reflect but, lacking the concept of the feedback, he found himself unable to theorize the reflecting judgment—­that is, unable to determine what a reflecting judgment is by way of a determining judgment. In that sense, the Critique of Judgment, precisely because it is a critique and not a theory, tries to ignore but in

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the end does not escape the centipede’s problem. The fact that with the concept of the feedback we possess the determining description of reflexivity that Kant couldn’t have possessed settles the issue of whether he succeeded in finding the a priori ground for reflective judgments that the third Critique sought to establish. In my view, he didn’t: the deduction of the judgment of taste is not a true deduction, it is the heautonomous result of reflection. But from our vantage point—­the vantage point of a culture that no longer attaches much value to all-­encompassing philosophical systems and has made unprecedented room for indeterminacy in art and science alike—­Kant’s failure is his success. The fact that the judgment of taste is “deduced” from its own exercise—­merely reflectively deduced, I should add—­entails a lesson all the more precious that it gives weight and autonomy to the realm of the aesthetic far beyond what Kant had fathomed. I’d say, bluntly, that the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment survives the demise of the Critique of Teleological Judgment. Let’s not forget that understanding the aesthetic judgment was not Kant’s main goal with the third Critique; he treated aesthetics as a case study from which he extracted a model of judgment—­the reflective judgment—­that enabled him to solve the antinomy of the teleological judgment, which was his main focus of interest. Here is how he phrased that antinomy: Thesis. All production of material things is possible in terms of merely mechanical laws. Antithesis. Some production of material things is not possible in terms of merely mechanical laws.29 When Kant speaks of “some production of material things,” he has in mind organized, that is, living beings, their sustenance, their reproduction, and their spontaneous repair. The issue that preoccupied—­I should say obsessed—­him in the third Critique was how to reconcile the blatantly teleological adaptation of living beings—­is a bird’s wing not designed for flight?—­with the strictly causal explanation that Cartesian and Newtonian mechanicism imposed as the only scientifically valid one. His solution to the antinomy lies in the “as if ” of reflective judgment. The maxim active in the thesis is that I must reflect on all fruits of nature as if they were explicable by recourse to mechanical laws only, without for all that maintaining that such is the case. The maxim active in the antithesis is that I must reflect on the organized fruits of nature as if their explanation required recourse to final causes, without maintaining that such is the case either. Inasmuch as neither maxim implies a dogmatic thesis as to the reality of natural laws but merely guides my reflection, both are compatible with one another, and the antinomy is solved.30

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The Critique of Teleological Judgment is obsolete. If Kant had been able to read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), and if he had been abreast of the cybernetic explanation of natural selection offered by neo-­ Darwinism, he would probably not have written the third Critique. The concept of the feedback solves the antinomy of the teleological judgment by simply suppressing the antithesis: today we know that life was not only “possible in terms of merely mechanical laws” but actually emerged from inorganic chemical compounds in strict accordance with mechanical laws. In scientific matters we have no use, except rhetorical, for Kant’s “as if.” We know indeed that natural forces are causal and not final or purposive, and we also know, while Kant didn’t, that when those forces are harnessed to systems comprising feedback loops, they behave as if they knew where they are going and why. Every feedback loop, strange or not, has its own built-­in as if–­teleology. This applies eminently to Darwinian evolution. When biologists casually speak of natural selection choosing this or that solution to a problem couched in teleological terms, they use a rhetoric where the “as if ” is implied and implicit. Living nature can indeed be described, in full awareness of this rhetoric, as if it organized itself according to a plan. Unlike Kant, we are no longer under any epistemological obligation to think of living nature in this way in order to make sense of our place in the natural world. Regarding teleology, Kant placed the “as if ” in the human mind and made it the engine of the reflective judgment because he could not conceive of an “as if ” immanent to the natural and technical processes involving feedback loops the way cybernetics and modern science routinely do. From the moment the purposiveness of apparently teleological systems was demystified, the Critique of Teleological Judgment became a museum piece in the history of philosophy (and certainly of science). Not so the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, however. Even if we were to theorize ourselves as cybernetic machines, as biology and the behavioral sciences do, the “engine” of our aesthetic judgment would still place the “as if ” in the human mind—­the ethical as well as the cognitive mind. In aesthetic matters there is no cognitive gain that is not the outcome of exercised mere reflective judgment—­that is, a judgment that knows the “as if ” to be its only rule. And there is no pure aesthetic judgment, especially if it pertains to a masterpiece such as Bach’s ricercar from the Musical Offering, that doesn’t open onto the supersensible, theoretically and ethically. This has not changed since Kant’s time. Possessing the metaconcept capable of theorizing the reflexivity of our aesthetic judgments does not dispense us from judging reflectively and without concept. What has radically changed since Kant’s time is the extraordinary investiture the realm of the aesthetic has received since the Critique of Teleological Judgment

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proved its uselessness: it became the task of the aesthetic judgment alone to bridge the gap between science and ethics and to answer Kant’s third fundamental question, “What am I allowed to hope?” (The first two, posed in the first and the second Critiques, were “What can I know?” and “What must I do?”) This task—­I repeat: to answer the existential question of humanity’s hope and not to establish the epistemological aprioricity of aesthetic and teleological judgments, as the standard reading of the third Critique has it—­had been the reason why Kant wrote the Critique of Judgment in the first place, or, at least, the reason why we, today, should be interested in it. And it is no longer beautiful nature but rather art—­ art as such—­that has been invested with this task. The second volume of Aesthetics at Large, tentatively subtitled Art, Politics, Nature, will set out to investigate this task’s implications. To conclude the present volume, I would like to return once again to the passage from section 22 pertaining to sensus communis, which I realize in retrospect was a mantra that inspired my reading of the Critique of Judgment throughout. This indeterminate norm of a common sense is actually presupposed by us, as is shown by our claim to lay down judgements of taste. Whether there is in fact such a common sense, as a constitutive principle of the possibility of experience, or whether a higher principle of reason makes it only into a regulative principle for producing in us a common sense for higher purposes; whether, therefore, taste is an original and natural faculty or only the idea of an artificial one yet to be acquired, so that a judgement of taste with its assumption of a universal assent in fact is only a requirement of reason for producing such harmony of sentiment; whether the ought, i.e. the objective necessity of the confluence of the feeling of any one man with that of every other, only signifies the possibility of arriving at this accord, and the judgement of taste only affords an example of the application of this principle—­these questions we have neither the wish nor the power to investigate as yet.31

In the first chapter, “Why Kant Got It Right,” I maintained somewhat abruptly that “Kant’s reflection throughout the [Critique of Judgment] is a long and elaborate intellectual translation of what every single aesthetic judgment actually does.” And I added that this was why “the Critique of Judgment is a critique and not a theory: it is in exercising your reflective judgment that you understand what a reflective judgment is.”32 Nothing exemplifies this better than the passage above. I tend to read it, intellectually, the way I hear, aesthetically, the endlessly rising canon in the

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ricercar from Bach’s Musical Offering. Our aesthetic experience, always concrete and singular, is the C minor in which the canon starts: we do “lay down judgments of taste,” and we claim to do so. We cannot help liking or disliking what we perceive, and in pure judgments of taste we claim universal assent for our likes and dislikes; in experiencing things aesthetically, we presuppose the presence of sensus communis in everyone. With this presupposition the canon has risen to the next key, and the next reflective feedback loop sets in: the question of “whether there is in fact such a common sense, [ . . . ], or whether—­the canon rises to the next keynote—­a higher principle of reason makes it only into a regulative principle for producing in us a common sense for higher purposes”—­the canon rises again—­is a question that cannot fail to elevate our mind and bring it to the threshold of the supersensible: no aesthetic experience worthy of the name exhausts itself in sensual pleasure, even if it is presupposed to be universally shareable. The canon is now in its highest key. Yet our mind’s access to the supersensible is immanent to our aesthetic pleasure, and we experience Hofstadter’s strange loop: “one winds up, to one’s shock, exactly where one had started out.” The canon finds itself in the initial C minor again only to begin a new cycle with the addition of another voice—­a universal voice, eine allgemeine Stimme. Kant’s philosophical ricercar now assumes the postulation of sensus communis by the faculty of taste to the effect that taste and sensus communis are now one and the same: “whether, therefore, taste [read sensus communis] is an original and natural faculty or—­the canon rises—­only the idea of an artificial one yet to be acquired . . .” The word idea pulls the mind up and brings it to the consideration that should sensus communis not exist in fact, a higher principle of reason—­the fugue rises once again to its highest key tone—­would impose us to acquire it, artificially, through culture and education. And with this imposition, we have definitely landed in the ethical if not in the political domain. Schiller, no doubt, heard Kant’s ricercar in this way when he wrote his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man.33 With the ethical voice now added to the fugue, let us read on: “so that a judgement of taste with its assumption of a universal assent—­second strange loop: we’re back in the initial C minor—­in fact is only a requirement of reason—­we’re up one key—­for producing such harmony of sentiment—­ and up one more; whether the ought—­the ethical voice sings louder—­i.e. the objective necessity of the confluence of the feeling of any one man with that of every other—­we’ve reached the highest keynote again—­only signifies the possibility of arriving at this accord . . .” And here we experience a third strange loop: “and the judgement of taste only affords an

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example of the application of this principle—­we’re once again keyed to the initial C minor—­these questions we have neither the wish nor the power to investigate as yet.” Just when we feel elated by the ascending movement of Kant’s ricercar, we are denied its immediate resolution. As mentioned earlier, section 22 ends in disappointment, deflation, and indefinite postponement of the question.34 That’s where I believe Kant is truly our contemporary: our non-­utopian, even anti-­utopian, unremittingly critical, disenchanted, yet future-­looking contemporary. It is in abandoning myself to the frustration of Kant’s incapacity to answer the ultimate question, “What am I allowed to hope?” that I strengthen my conviction that Kant’s possible failure—­on his own terms—­is his success for us. Adorno had more than a glimpse of this. Not by chance did I devote the pivot chapter of this book to his desperate endeavor to rescue Kant from himself.35 Not by chance either did I hint at Adorno’s mistake in enlisting Hegel to that task. A deeply felt philosophical frustration with Kant is the prerequisite for a fruitful rereading of his achievement. Starting with Schiller, the romantics experienced this frustration, and they could not, they would not accept it. It is highly ironic that we, today, should consult and perhaps revel in that same frustration in order to salvage Kant from the romantics, from their fanatically idealistic heir, Hegel, and from the latter’s disastrous legacy.

Notes

De a r R e a de r 1. Immanuel Kant, “The Contest of Faculties,” in Kant, Political Writings, ed. H. S. Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 183. 2. Barnett Newman, “Response to Clement Greenberg” (1947), in Selected Writings and Interviews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 164. 3. The historical and art-­historical pieces of the puzzle will be the object of another three books, to be published under the generic title Modernism Revisited. The first volume, titled Duchamp’s Telegram, is forthcoming. 4. I was William C. Seitz Senior Fellow at CASVA in 2012–­2013; I received a three-­month research grant at the Clark Art Institute in 2009; and I was scholar-­in-­ residence at the Getty Research Institute in 2008–­2009.

On e 1. Jean-­François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 32. 2. To be fair, some Kant scholars do not silence that fact at all; they dispute it. See chapter 7, “Resisting Adorno, Revamping Kant,” note 32. May I beg my readers to suspend their objections until the contours of a more or less coherent reading of Kant emerge? Meanwhile, impatient readers might want to know that on this as well as on several other issues (but not all), I tend to side with Henry E. Allison’s reading of the Critique of Judgment; see his Kant’s Theory of Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 3. More about that in chapter 11, “Reflecting on Reflection.” 4. Those arguments are the ones developed by Kant in the four “moments” of the Analytic of the Beautiful. 5. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 176. Guyer’s translation is the most recent and, aiming at interpretive neutrality, technically the closest to the German text. I shall use it whenever I can throughout this book, but since the book is not an

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exegesis of the third Critique, I shall on occasion allow myself to use freer or more literary translations that express my reading of the text better than Guyer’s. I consulted three translations besides Guyer’s: Critique of Judgement, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett 1987); Critique of Judgment, trans. J. C. Meredith (1911; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952); Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard (1892; New York: Hafner 1951). Hereafter I shall refer to the various editions simply by CJ followed by the name of the translator in parentheses. 6. CJ (Bernard), 77. 7. CJ (Guyer), 170–­71. 8. This is a point where I diverge from Allison’s reading and, like Guyer, would give priority to the second “moment” of the Analytic of the Beautiful over the first. Though I agree with Allison that Kant intended the four “moments” of the Analytic as a progressively built-­up argument, for reasons that will slowly appear, I do not read them in this way. See Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, 78ff.; Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 131–­32. 9. Some of these reasons will be investigated in Aesthetics at Large, vol. 2, notably in “Art as Symbol of the Politically Good,” and “Does the World Need Artists?”

T wo 1. Jasper Johns, “Marcel Duchamp (1887–­1968), An Appreciation,” Artforum (November 1968). 2. Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 1–­2. 3. Thierry de Duve, Nominalisme pictural: Marcel Duchamp, la peinture et la modernité (Paris: Minuit, 1984); Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); Au nom de l’art: Pour une archéologie de la modernité (Paris: Minuit, 1989); Résonances du readymade (Nîmes: Jacqueline Chambon, 1989). The translation of the latter two books (plus one other essay) make up Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 4. “On ne devrait jamais cesser de s’émerveiller, ou de s’inquiéter, de ce que notre époque trouve parfaitement légitime que quelqu’un soit artiste sans être peintre, ou écrivain, ou musicien, ou sculpteur, ou cinéaste. . . . La modernité aurait-­elle inventé l’art en général?” de Duve, Au nom de l’art, back cover. 5. I’m alluding to Times Square, a permanent sound installation by Max Neuhaus located under the metal grille that covers the subway ventilation system at the north end of the pedestrian island on Broadway between Forty-­fifth and Forty-­sixth Streets. Created in 1977, the installation ran almost uninterrupted until 1992 and became permanent in 2002 with the support of the Dia Art Foundation. 6. This needs to be nuanced, of course. Carl Andre and Richard Serra are sculptors, period (which is why I don’t see them as bona fide minimalists). On the other hand, even though Robert Morris wrote important “Notes on Sculpture,” his work is more indebted to painting, Jasper Johns’s in particular, than it is to sculpture.

Notes to Pages 30–42

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7. In “The Readymade and the Tube of Paint” and “The Monochrome and the Blank Canvas,” the two chapters of Kant after Duchamp making up the section “The Specific and the Generic,” I argued that Duchamp’s passage from cubist painting to readymades signaled a transition that concerned all visual artists, while the tube of paint and the blank canvas—­two readymades that belong a priori to the conventions of painting and that Duchamp, of course, never actualized but to which he alluded in many ways—­provided the missing links in the transition between painting (the specific) and art (the generic). 8. The score of 4′33″ was recently acquired by MoMA and beautifully contextualized in There Will Never Be Silence: Scoring John Cage’s 4′33″, a show held at MoMA October 12, 2013 through June 22, 2014. 9. James Pritchett (The Music of John Cage [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], 59–­60) has traced the origin of 4′33″ (1952) to an unrealized project from 1948, Silent Prayer, a piece of uninterrupted silence Cage intended to sell to Muzak Co. Cage himself, however, has always acknowledged Rauschenberg’s White Paintings of 1951 as the relevant precedent for 4′33″. As he wrote in an article on Rauschenberg, “To Whom It May Concern: The white paintings came first, my silent piece came later.” John Cage, “On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work,” in Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 98. See Brandon Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-­Avant-­Garde (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 42–­46, and 300n33. 10. What follows is an extremely condensed summary of that transition. For the full account, see the series of six articles I published in Artforum between October 2013 and April 2014: “Pardon my French” (October 2013); “Don’t Shoot the Messenger” (November 2013); “Why was Modernism Born in France?” ( January 2014); “The Invention of Non-­Art: A History” (February 2014); “The Invention of Non-­ Art: A Theory” (March 2014); and “‘This is Art’: Anatomy of a Sentence” (April 2014). The following chapter is a different phrasing of the theoretical argument of the last of those articles. A revised and expanded version of the series will be part of Duchamp’s Telegram. 11. Anonymous, Fluxus Broadside Manifesto, 1965, in Fluxus Codex, ed. Jon Hendricks (New York: Abrams, 1988), 26. The same sentence is excerpted from “Something about Fluxus” and attributed to George Brecht, May 1964, in Happening and Fluxus (Cologne: Kölnischer Kunstverein, 1970). 12. I shall nevertheless touch on the issue of the postmodern in Aesthetics at Large, vol. 2, “On Time.” 13. See Alain Badiou, Being and Event (New York: Continuum, 2007).

T hr e e 1. For a detailed account of the invention of non-­art, see my articles “The Invention of Non-­Art: A History,” and “The Invention of Non-­Art: A Theory,” Artforum (February and March 2014), expanded and included in my forthcoming book Duchamp’s Telegram. 2. For a “post-­Duchamp” theory of art that rests on this distinction, see George

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n o t e s t o pag e s 4 3 – 5 7

Dickie, Art and the Esthetic: An Institutional Analysis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 1974. 3. Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). 4. See my essay “Comparer les incomparables; ou, Comment collectionne-­ t-­on?,” in La place du goût dans la production philosophique des concepts et leur destin critique (Rennes: Archives de la Critique d’art, 1992). 5. “The Museum without Walls” is the translation of André Malraux’s “Le musée imaginaire,” the first part of his book Les voix du silence (Paris: Gallimard, 1951). 6. More about that in the next chapter, “The Idea of Art and the Ethics of the Museum: A Candid Theory.” 7. Malraux, Les voix du silence, 529ff. 8. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968). On Malraux and the readymade, see my essay “Le temps du readymade” in Marcel Duchamp, vol. 3, Abécédaire: approches critiques, ed. Jean Clair (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1977); reprinted in Thierry de Duve, Essais datés 1976–­2010, vol. 1, Duchampiana (Genève-­Paris: Mamco-­Presses du réel, 2014). 9. See the previous chapter, “From Beaux-­Arts to Art-­in-­General: A Bit of History.” 10. The issue of representativity will be taken up again in chapter 5, “Do Artists Speak on behalf of All of Us?,” as well as in chapter 6, “Le sens de la famille: Aesthetics as the Transcendental Ground of Democracy.” 11. It is actually the beautiful that gets so defined: “Das Schöne bestimmt sich dadurch als das sinnliche Scheinen der Idee.” G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik, 1.1.3, “Die Idee des Schönen.” But in Hegel the artistically beautiful is superior to the naturally beautiful, so we may consider that the definition applies to art even better than to beauty in nature. 12. See Arthur Danto, After the End of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Hans Belting, Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte: Eine Revision nach zehn Jahren (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1995).

Four 1. Thomas McEvilley, “Art in the Dark,” Artforum (Summer 1983): 62. 2. Ibid., 63. 3. Ibid. 4. See my essays, “Figure Zero,” in Marcel Broodthaers, exhibition catalog (New York: MoMA, 2016), 30–­39 and “This Wouldn’t Be a Pipe: Magritte and Marcel Broodthaers,” in Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images, exhibition catalog (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2006), 95–­107. 5. François Récanati’s book La transparence et l’énonciation (Paris: Le Seuil, 1979) provides us with an understanding of how quotation marks make the quoted phrase autonymous: “The only objects that we must represent if we want to talk

Notes to Pages 60–75

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about them, are the ones that we cannot introduce into the discourse in the flesh; for all others, it is possible in principle to present them, to produce them, instead of representing them. For example, says Carnap, we can adopt the rule according to which, instead of the word match, we will always place a match on the paper. But, more often than extralinguistic objects, it is linguistic expressions that we use as their own designation. An expression used in such a way is said to be autonymous” (70, my translation). It is interesting that Récanati, following Searle against Russell, upholds an antirepresentational theory of language that authorizes self-­reference and thus autonymy. For Russell, the quotation marks around “Socrates” are mandatory for the sentence “Socrates has eight letters” to make sense. For Searle and Récanati, they can be virtual. 6. See sections 10 to 13 of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. See also chapter 11 here, “Reflecting on Reflection.” 7. I wrote this with the model of European public museums in mind. Whether American private museums conform to this model depends on how the board of trustees conceives the museum’s public and educational mission. 8. Other criteria of course intervene, not least among them the price of the work and the museum’s acquisition policy with regard to areas of specialization, “holes” in the collection, national or regional imperatives, and so on. But when all is said and done, the final decision is aesthetic. Having sat for three years on the acquisition committee of the Musée national d’art moderne at the Pompidou Center, I have verified this many times. 9. Poor Norman Rockwell, as Greenberg used to say—­he who has lambasted Rockwell as the epitome of kitsch more than any other critic ever. This essay was written long before MoMA gave Björk a retrospective. 10. I write people with a small p, to distinguish it from the political idea of the People, with a capital P. To ignore that distinction is the mark of populism and almost always denotes a reactionary stance.

F i ve 1. See Irving Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (New York: Harper and Row, 1976). 2. See Martin Warnke, The Court Artist: On the Ancestry of the Modern Artist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 3. T. J. Clark, “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art,” Critical Inquiry 9 (September 1982): 139–­56; reprinted in Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, ed. Francis Frascina (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 59. 4. Glenn Ligon, “Black Light,” Artforum (September 2004): 245. 5. Ibid. 6. See chapter 1, “Overture: Why Kant Got It Right.” 7. I must add a proviso that is valid for both branches of the alternative: neither establishes a ground in the sense of “if A, then B.” The grounding happens retroactively in accordance with Kant’s conception of a reflecting judgment. See chapter 11, “Reflecting on Reflection.”

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8. See the passage from section 22 of Kant’s Critique of Judgment quoted in chapter 1. 9. See Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-­Aesthetic (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), and Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 10. Clement Greenberg, “Seminar II,” Art International 18, no. 6 (Summer 1974): 73; reprinted in Clement Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 17. 11. Clement Greenberg, “Can Taste Be Objective?” Artnews, February 1973, 92; reprinted in Homemade Esthetics, 29. 12. Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics, 23. 13. On the antinomy of taste, see chapter 8, “Conceptual Art in Light of Kant’s Antinomy of Taste.” 14. CJ (Guyer), 175. 15. Ibid., 124. 16. CJ (Pluhar), 160 (translation modified). 17. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 271–­77. 18. Émile Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 1:235, 236. 19. See section 8 of the Critique of Judgment, where Kant plays on the words allgemeine Stimme (universal voice) and Einstimmung (agreement)—­literally, one voice (or “voicing”). 20. The positing of a deity to whom humans address their prayers on behalf of a community composed of a ‘they and I’ defines the representative power of priesthood. In Catholicism, where the community is conceived as universal and where the deity is monotheistic, the pope is ultimately the only legitimate spokesman of the Church, in a-­one-­to-­one relationship with God. 21. Thierry de Duve, Voici: 100 ans d’art contemporain. 2nd ed. (Ghent: Ludion, 2001), 251; English translation as Look–­100 Years of Contemporary Art, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (Ghent: Ludion, 2001), 251. 22. See chapter 10, “A Transcendental Chicken-­and-­Egg Dilemma,” for an alternative to the standard reading of the difficulties brought up by that borrowing. 23. See “Art Was a Proper Name,” chapter 1 of Kant after Duchamp, 3–­86. 24. This “illimitation” of the “you” is what I believe is achieved by Roni Horn’s extraordinary series of 100 photographs of Isabelle Huppert “impersonating” roles she has played in movies over the course of her career. The work is titled Portrait of an Image (with Isabelle Huppert), 2005. See my essay, “Portrait of the Artist as Anybody,” in Roni Horn, exhibition catalog, Collection Lambert en Avignon (Paris: Editions Phébus, 2009), 195–­99.

Six 1. United Nations General Assembly, “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” December 10, 1948 (http://www.un.org/en/universal-­declaration-­human-­rights/ index.html).

Notes to Pages 92–100

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2. Franca Sciuto, “Préface,” Déclaration universelle des droits de l’homme (Paris: Folio-­Gallimard, 1988), 12. 3. Quoted in Pascal Bruckner, “Happiness,” in The Columbia History of Twentieth-­ Century French Thought, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Columbia University Press 2006), 244. 4. Sigmund Freud, Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex, in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. A. A. Brill (New York: Modern Library, 1995), 585n1. 5. CJ (Guyer), 123, 173–­76. On taste as sensus communis aestheticus and common sense as sensus communis logicus, see 175n*. 6. Although sensus communis is said to be a Gemeinsinn, the shareability it supposes is allgemein and takes the names of allgemeine Stimmung and allgemeine Beistimmung in sections 21–­22. In section 8, even before sensus communis proper is introduced, its idea is announced as allgemeine Stimme. 7. CJ (Bernard), 77. 8. Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, ed. Jose Harris (1887; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 9. More about the beautiful as the symbol of the morally good in Aesthetics at Large, vol. 2, “Art as Symbol of the Politically Good.” 10. Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Verso, 2014), 41. 11. Plato, Laws, 3.690c. 12. Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, 43. 13. The passage (Laws, 700a–­701b) is worth citing in full: “Athenian: Under the ancient laws, my friends, the people was not as now the master, but rather the willing servant of the laws.—­Megillus: What laws do you mean?—­Athenian: In the first place, let us speak of the laws about music—­that is to say, such music as then existed—­in order that we may trace the growth of the excess of freedom from the beginning. Now music was early divided among us into certain kinds and manners. One sort consisted of prayers to the Gods, which were called hymns; and there was another and opposite sort called lamentations, and another termed paeans, and another, celebrating the birth of Dionysus, called, I believe, ‘dithyrambs.’ And they used the actual word ‘laws,’ or nomoi, for another kind of song; and to this they added the term ‘citharoedic.’ All these and others were duly distinguished, nor were the performers allowed to confuse one style of music with another. And the authority which determined and gave judgment, and punished the disobedient, was not expressed in a hiss, nor in the most unmusical shouts of the multitude, as in our days, nor in applause and clapping of hands. But the directors of public instruction insisted that the spectators should listen in silence to the end; and boys and their tutors, and the multitude in general, were kept quiet by a hint from a stick. Such was the good order which the multitude were willing to observe; they would never have dared to give judgment by noisy cries. And then, as time went on, the poets themselves introduced the reign of vulgar and lawless innovation. They were men of genius, but they had no perception of what is just and lawful in music; raging like Bacchanals and possessed with inordinate delights, mingling lamentations with

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hymns and paeans with dithyrambs; imitating the sounds of the flute on the lyre, and making one general confusion; ignorantly affirming that music has no truth, and, whether good or bad, can only be judged of rightly by the pleasure of the hearer. And by composing such licentious works, and adding to them words as licentious, they have inspired the multitude with lawlessness and boldness, and made them fancy that they can judge for themselves about melody and song. And in this way the theaters from being mute have become vocal, as though they had understanding of good and bad in music and poetry; and instead of an aristocracy, an evil sort of theatrocracy has grown up. For if the democracy which judged had only consisted of educated persons, no fatal harm would have been done; but in music there first arose the universal conceit of omniscience and general lawlessness; freedom came following afterwards, and men, fancying that they knew what they did not know, had no longer any fear, and the absence of fear begets shamelessness. For what is this shamelessness, which is so evil a thing, but the insolent refusal to regard the opinion of the better by reason of an over-­daring sort of liberty?” 14. Every Athenian citizen but not yet every human being, of course. The exclusion of women, slaves, and metics from public affairs makes Athens a nonuniversalizable democracy. 15. Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, 38. 16. See Michel Foucault, “Man and His Doubles,” in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 303–­43. 17. I offer this translation of le partage du sensible—­most often rendered as “the distribution,” sometimes as “the partition of the sensible”—­because both translations miss the primary meaning of partage, which is “sharing,” although they adequately capture the emphasis Rancière puts on the secondary meaning of partage as départage: the separation of the parts among those who partake in the sharing. The German word mitteilen, used by Kant to refer to the communication of feelings in the sensus communis, is in my view the closest to Rancière’s usage of partage. See Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum International, 2004). 18. Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 69, 42. 19. Ibid., 139. 20. A brilliant proponent of that opinion is Joseph Margolis. See his book, On Aesthetics: An Unforgiving Introduction (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2009), esp. 22–­ 23. 21. On the reflective judgment as a feedback of the mind, see chapter 11, “Reflecting on Reflection.” 22. Although I find Rancière’s recourse to the random choice of the Athenian ruler naively idealistic, I think I understand why he went that route. His main point being that democracy is paradoxically founded on its absence of foundation, he wanted to avoid Claude Lefort’s classic explanation of that paradox, which had democracy being organized around the “empty place” left by the regicide. See Rancière, Dissensus, 34.) It is because I share Rancière’s reticence to see the political ultimately founded on a murder that I think filiation, more precisely, paternity,

Notes to Pages 103–12

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needs to be thought anew, starting with a reinterpretation of Freud’s Totem and Taboo. I shall deal with the concept of fatherhood, its critique, and its controversial importance for artistic authorship in a forthcoming book. 23. See chapter 3, “The Post-­Duchamp Condition: Remarks on Four Usages of the Word Art. 24. See Eric Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004).

S e ve n 1. Theodor W. Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1991), 83. 2. Ibid., 82, 83. 3. Ibid. 4. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-­Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 1. 5. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1997), 17–­18. 6. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), 110. 7. Here is the German original: “Die Kunstwerke verdanken ihr Dasein der gesellschaftlichen Arbeitsteilung, der Trennung geistiger und körperlicher Arbeit. Dabei jedoch treten sie selbst als Dasein auf; ihr Medium ist nicht der reine, für sich seiende Geist, sondern der, welcher in die Existenz sich zurückbegibt und kraft solcher Bewegung das Getrennte als vereint behauptet. Dieser Widerspruch zwingt die Kunstwerke dazu, vergessen zu lassen, daß sie gemacht sind: der Anspruch ihres Dasein, und damit der von Dasein selber als eines Sinnvollen, gerät um so überzeugender, je weniger mehr in ihnen daran mahnt, daß sie hervorgebracht wurden, daß sie dem Geist als einem ihnen selber Äußerlichen sich verdanken. Kunst, welche nicht mehr das gute Gewissen hat zu solchem Trug, ihrem eigenen Prinzip, hat bereits das Element aufgelöst, in dem einzig sie sich realisieren kann.” Theodor W. Adorno, Versuch über Wagner (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1952), 104. I am grateful to Christian Katti for his help with the translation of this and other quotations as well as for his precious advice with regard to Adorno and the Adorno literature. Whether or not to leave the word Dasein untranslated was a question, because it is unclear from the context whether Adorno borrowed it from Heidegger or from Hegel. Versuch über Wagner precedes Jargon der Eigentlichkeit by twelve years, so we cannot expect Adorno to have yet articulated the virulent critique of Heidegger the later book contains. Precisely for this reason, I preferred to forge the not quite Heideggerian expression “existence-­in-­the-­world” to translate Dasein in this paragraph because I think that is literally what Adorno meant. 8. CJ (Pluhar), 174 (translation slightly modified). 9. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 6 (translation modified). 10. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 135 (translation modified). 11. Commenting on Adorno’s “models” in the last part of Negative Dialectics,

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Jean-­François Lyotard writes, “The idea of the model corresponds to this reversal in the destiny of dialectics: the model is the name for a kind of para-­experience, where dialectics would encounter a non-­negatable negative, and would abide in the impossibility of redoubling that negative into a ‘result.’” Lyotard, The Differend, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 88. 12. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 32. 13. Ibid., 190 (translation modified). 14. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 261–­65. 15. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 98. Kant’s description of schematism is to be found in the Critique of Pure Reason, 273. 16. “Natural beauty” replaces “art” in Kant’s case, but Adorno most often ignores the substitution, one sign among many that he has a Hegelian reading of Kant. 17. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 135–­36, 233, 210. 18. Ibid., 72. 19. Ibid., 260 (translation modified). 20. See Theodor W. Adorno, “Ist die Kunst heiter?” in Versuch das “Endspiel” zu verstehen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, 1972), 14. 21. I borrow the expression “damaged life” (beschädigtes Leben) from the subtitle of Minima moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. 22. Within the Frankfurt School, the German word Affirmation, rarer than the customary Bejahung, is shared mostly by Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. The latter has added psychosexual connotations (false happiness through “repressive desublimation”) to the mainly political ones the word conveyed for Adorno. 23. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 406. 24. Ibid., 407. 25. The pathos is especially palpable in Homo Academicus (Paris: Minuit, 1984), where Pierre Bourdieu closely observed the social group in which he intimately took part and went so far as to assume—­not without pain or courage—­the personal consequences of the demystification of the consensus apparently projected by academics as a class. 26. Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973). 27. Quoted without reference by Trent Schroyer in his foreword to The Jargon of Authenticity, vii. 28. See, among other texts, Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime. 29. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 196–­99. 30. Philippe Lacoue-­Labarthe, Musica ficta (Figures de Wagner) (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1991), 238–­42. 31. See chapter 1, “Overture: Why Kant Got It Right.” 32. See, for example, Paul Guyer, “Kant on the Purity of the Ugly,” in Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 141–­62; Reinhard Brandt, “Zur Logik des ästhetischen Urteils,” in Kants Ästhetik/Kant’s Aesthetics/L’esthétique de Kant, ed. Herman Parret (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1998), 229–­45; Daniel Dumouchel, “La laideur introuvable: Les multiples

Notes to Pages 119–21

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visages du déplaisir,” in L’année 1790—­Kant—­Critique de la faculté de juger—­Beauté, vie, liberté, ed. Christophe Bouton, Fabienne Brugère, and Claudie Lavaud (Paris: Vrin, 2008), 13–­27; Herman Parret, “The Ugly as the Beyond of the Sublime,” in Histories of the Sublime, ed. Christian Madelein, Jan Pieters, and Bart Vandenabeele (Brussels: Académie Royale de Belgique pour les Sciences et les Arts, 2005). For an interesting defense of the possibility of an aesthetics of ugliness in Kant, see Christian Strub, “Das Häßliche und die ‘Kritik der Ästhetischen Urteilskraft’: Überlegungen zu einer systematischen Lücke,” Kantstudien 80 (1989): 416–­46. 33. Karl Rosenkranz, Aesthetik des Häßlichen (1853), ed. Walther Gose and Walter Sachs (Stuttgart-­Bad Cannstatt: F. Frommann, 1968.) As a Hegelian, however, Rosenkranz is utterly unconvincing. His book is not much more than a typology of the different sorts of ugliness. 34. “Only one kind of ugliness cannot be represented in a way adequate to nature without destroying all aesthetic satisfaction, hence beauty in art, namely, that which arouses loathing” (CJ [Guyer], 190). Let it be said in passing that the “Kant after Duchamp” approach amends Kant so as to admit loathing or disgust into the list of legitimate aesthetic feelings. Nothing essential in Kant’s contribution to aesthetics is thereby put into question even though disinterestedness gets problematized and receives a new reading. 35. Hegel showed his followers the way by assimilating actual opposition (e.g., light vs. darkness) to reflective determination (light containing its negation as part of its truth). See the three “Remarks on Contradiction” in G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1969), 435–­43. 36. Immanuel Kant, “Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy,” in Theoretical philosophy, 1755–­1770, trans. David Walford in collaboration with Ralph Meerbote (1763; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 205–­41, esp. 219. 37. Ibid., 221. 38. The pun is not irrelevant. Of course, when Kant wrote The Conflict of the Faculties (Der Streit der Fakultäten, 1798), the conflict in question involved the faculties in the sense of the schools of the Prussian University, not in the sense of the faculties of the mind (Vermögen). Yet the idea that the conflict among the former might be the institutional transposition of a conflict among the latter (both are facultates in Latin) certainly occurred to Kant and must have amused him. 39. CJ (Guyer), 102. 40. Ibid., 103. 41. For an attempt in this direction, see chapter 10, “A Transcendental Chicken-­ and-­Egg Dilemma.” 42. Imagination, in Kant’s sense, has both the productive function our present-­ day usage of the word carries and the receptive function we would assign to perception. Sensibility takes care of what we would call sensations, that is, raw sense data not yet organized into percepts. 43. Of course, the rose is not objectively beautiful the way it is objectively red. The question of the “objectivity” of aesthetic judgment is too complex to be dealt with here. Let me simply state that on this point, I almost completely adhere to what

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Adorno has to say: “The strongest buttress of subjective aesthetics, the concept of aesthetic feeling, derives from objectivity, not the reverse. Aesthetic feeling says that something is thus; Kant would have attributed such aesthetic feeling, as ‘taste,’ exclusively to one who was capable of discriminating in the object.” Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 164 (translation slightly modified). I disagree only with the last sentence: to discriminate among discriminating and nondiscriminating people in matters of taste was not Kant’s business as a philosopher. Whether he thought he could do this “in real life” depends on how much confidence he had in his own taste. Needless to say, the matter is speculative. 44. Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties (1798), trans. Mary J. Gregor and Robert Anchor in Religion and Rational Theology, ed. Allen W. Wood and George Di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 301–­3. See Jean-­François Lyotard, “Le Différend et le signe de l’histoire,” Change International 1 (Fall 1983): 114–­19. 45. Kant, Conflict of the Faculties, 302. 46. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 101. 47. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 17. 48. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 110. Note Adorno’s strange turn of words in the already quoted sentence: “It would be preferable that in some better times art vanish altogether than that it forget the suffering that is its expression and in which form finds its substance” (260, translation modified). He does not speak of suffering as a content that art expresses but rather of the suffering that is art’s expression; neither does he speak of suffering finding its form in works of art but of form finding its substance in the suffering. In the next sentence he adds, “This suffering is the humane content [der humane Gehalt, not Inhalt] that unfreedom counterfeits as positivity” (ibid.) 49. Of course, the rose is no more objectively ugly than it is objectively beautiful. See note 43. 50. CJ (Guyer), 103, modified (see chap. 10, “A Transcendental Chicken-­and-­ Egg Dilemma”). 51. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 234. 52. CJ (Guyer), 217. 53. A similar, less anthropomorphic and perhaps less naive description—­one that imparts a linguistic turn to Kant’s notoriously language-­blind philosophy—­ can be found in Lyotard’s notion of the “archipelago of phrase regimens.” See The Differend, passim. 54. See the last chapter of de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (“Archaeology of Practical Modernism”). 55. CJ (Guyer), 124. 56. Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (London: Neville Spearman, 1967), 34. I modified the translation on some crucial points where Adorno’s Hegelian turn of mind was lost. Compare with the German: “Je totaler die Gesellschaft, um so verdinglichter auch der Geist und um so paradoxer sein Beginnen, der Verdinglichung aus eigenem sich zu entwinden. Noch das aüßerste Bewußtsein vom Verhängnis droht zum Geschwätz

Notes to Pages 129–32

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zu entarten. Kulturkritik findet sich der letzten Stufe der Dialektik von Kultur und Barbarei gegenüber: nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch, und das frißt auch die Erkenntnis an, die ausspricht, warum es unmöglich ward, heute Gedichte zu schreiben. Der absoluten Verdinglichung, die den Fortschritt des Geistes als eines ihrer Elemente voraussetzte und die ihn heute gänzlich aufzusaugen sich anschickt, ist der kritische Geist nicht gewachsen, so lange er bei sich bleibt in selbstgenügsamer Kontemplation.” Theodor W. Adorno, “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft,’ in Prismen, vol. 10.1 of Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), 30. 57. Literally, “To absolute reification, critical spirit has not risen.” The translators of Prisms, Sam and Shierry Weber, have had recourse to the same expedient as I: they slipped in the word challenge. In addition, they split Adorno’s long sentence in two: “Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-­satisfied contemplation.” Adorno, Prisms, 34. 58. Jean-­François Lyotard, “Discussions; ou, Phraser ‘après Auschwitz,’” in Les fins de l’homme: À partir du travail de Jacques Derrida, ed. Philippe Lacoue-­Labarthe and Jean-­Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilée, 1981), 289, 290 (my translation). 59. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 381. 60. Lyotard, “Discussions,” 291 (my translation). 61. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 362. 62. Ibid., 366, 367. 63. Auschwitz is not the only name of the unnamable: Treblinka or Sobibor stand for the same fact. 64. The just-­quoted “All post-­Auschwitz culture, including its urgent critique, is garbage” is dialectically echoed in the following, from Adorno’s essay on Endgame: “Beckett’s garbage cans are emblems of the culture that was reconstructed after Auschwitz.” Theodore W. Adorno, Versuch das Endspiel zu verstehen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), 201 (my translation). 65. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, in Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary J. Gregor and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 173–­77. The Cambridge edition does not underline the Latin subtext in Faktum, which it translates as “fact,” but J. Gibelin’s French translation does. On its first occurrence, in the first sentence of the “Deduction of the Principles of Pure Practical Reason,” the translator uses the French, fait, followed by the Latin, factum, in parentheses. Immanuel Kant, Critique de la raison pratique (Paris: Vrin, 1974), 55. 66. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 215. 67. CJ (Guyer), 124. I allowed myself to compress the sentence somewhat because it is clear that here, as elsewhere (but not everywhere), Kant considers taste and sensus communis as one and the same faculty. Kant’s German for “in fact” is in der Tat (no trace of Faktum, here). 68. The authors see Sade the way they see Nietzsche (in On the Genealogy of Morals), as having uttered the most intransigent critique of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, as having unearthed the natural principle (self-­conservation) behind

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Kant’s lofty moralism, and as having revealed the true nature of the bourgeois subject emancipated by the Enlightenment. I shall seek another pairing of Kant with Sade a little further down, one that I think is much more to the point. 69. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 74. The authors paraphrase here the often-­cited first line of Kant’s conclusion of the Critique of Practical Reason (269): “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence [ . . . ]: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” Kant speaks of the moral law as “a fact of pure reason,” page 177 of the Critique of Practical Reason. 70. Maurice Blanchot wrote virtually the same thing: “Losing the ideal generality that Kant gave it, the categorical imperative has become the one Adorno formulated more or less in the following terms: Think and act in such a way that Auschwitz never gets repeated; which implies that Auschwitz must not become a concept and that an absolute was reached there in reference to which all other rights and all other duties are being judged.” Maurice Blanchot, Les intellectuels en question (Paris: Fourbis, 1996), 55–­56 (my translation). 71. If the moral law were so deducible, its relation to natural laws would be schematic—­precisely what Kant, in the second Critique, took such great care to refute, to the point of even coining a new word to mediate that relation: moral law, he said, finds its type (not its scheme) in natural law, which means that what both have in common is no more than the form of universal legislation. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 194–­98. 72. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 196 (translation slightly modified). The first formulation of the categorical imperative was the following: “Act in such a way that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle in a universal legislation” (ibid., 164; translation slightly modified). 73. Proofreading the manuscript in July 2018, I realize the frightening extent to which the above passage points to Donald Trump as a Sadean—and sadistic—hero whose philosophical goal (granted that he is capable of having one) is to demonstrate politically that humanity should jettison the idea of sensus communis. 74. Adorno (quoting himself in a letter to Karl Thieme), letter to Horkheimer, June 2, 1949, cited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, “Editor’s Afterword,” in Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 220. 75. Ibid., 224. 76. Horkheimer and Adorno, “Rettung der Aufklärung: Diskussion über eine geplante Schrift zur Dialektik” (October 14, 1946), in Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1985), 12:602 (my translation). 77. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 67. Later in the chapter, and not surprisingly, Horkheimer congratulates Nietzsche for having unveiled the same “truth” in On the Genealogy of Morals—always a matter of reducing the moral law to the laws of nature. 78. Jacques Lacan, “Kant with Sade,” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2005), 646. 79. “‘I have the right to enjoy your body,’ anyone can say to me, ‘and I will exercise this right without any limit to the capriciousness of the exactions I may wish

Notes to Pages 135–45

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to satiate with your body.’” Marquis de Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom, quoted by Lacan, “Kant with Sade,” 648. Compare with Kant’s third formula for the categorical imperative: “So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.” Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy, 80. 80. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–­60 (New York: Norton, 1997), 79. 81. Adorno, Versuch über Wagner, 104 (my translation; see note 7). 82. See my essay “Some Philosophical Implications of Eric Cameron’s ‘Routine Extremism,’” in Cover and Uncover: Eric Cameron, ed. Ann Davis (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2011), reprinted in Aesthetics at Large, vol. 2, as “On Genius and Eric Cameron’s ‘Routine Extremism.’” 83. See my essay, “When Is Art Political? Suzanne McClelland’s Call with Information,” in Suzanne McClelland, 36 × 24 × 36 (New York: Team Gallery, 2016). 84. Witness again the famous first line of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: “It is self-­ evident that nothing concerning art is self-­evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist” (1). 85. CJ (Guyer), 185 (translation slightly modified). 86. Thierry de Duve, “Do Artists Speak on Behalf of All of Us?,” in The Life and Death of Images: Ethics and Aesthetics, ed. Diarmuid Costello and Dominic Willsdon (London: Tate, 2008), 154. I omitted this passage from the excerpts from that text that constitute chapters 1 and 5.

E ig h t 1. Joseph Kosuth, “Art after Philosophy I and II,” Studio International (October/ November 1969), reprinted in Kosuth, Art after Philosophy and After: Collected Writings, 1966–­1990 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 18. 2. Clement Greenberg, “Seminar Six,” Arts Magazine 50 ( June 1976): 93, reprinted in Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics, 57. 3. CJ (Guyer), 215. 4. Ibid., 216. 5. Ibid. 6. On that “subjective ground,” see chapter 10, “A Transcendental Chicken-­and-­ Egg Dilemma.” 7. CJ (Guyer), 217. Guyer translates Enträtselung as “demystifying,” which to a modern reader carries connotations the original German doesn’t have. I replaced it with “solving the riddle.” 8. Ibid., 186. 9. CJ (Pluhar), 179. 10. On authorship according to Duchamp, see my essay “Authorship Stripped Bare, Even,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 19/20 (1990–­1991): 234–­41. 11. Marcel Duchamp, “Apropos of Readymades,” in Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 141.

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12. Denis de Rougemont, “Marcel Duchamp, mine de rien,” Preuves 204 (February 1968): 45. 13. CJ (Guyer), 219. 14. CJ (Pluhar), 214–­15. 15. Ibid., 215. Here and in the next two citations, I have modified Pluhar’s translation of Vernunftidee, opting for “idea of reason” rather than “rational idea.” 16. CJ (Pluhar), 215. 17. For my definition of art itself, see chapter 3, “The Post-­Duchamp Condition: Remarks on Four Usages of the Word Art.” 18. CJ (Pluhar), 85 (translation slightly modified). 19. Ibid., 183. 20. Needless to say, there are as many sorts of conceptual art as there are artists who call themselves—­or whom others call—­conceptual artists. But the three things all sorts seem to have in common are antiexpressionism, antisentimentalism, and reliance on language. All first-­generation conceptual artists felt compelled to distance themselves from “formalist,” Greenbergian aesthetics, perceived as exceedingly subjective and arbitrary. Some thought they had found more objective bases for their art in structuralism, logical positivism, or post-­Wittgensteinian philosophy. Others did not feel the need for objective bases and simply embraced the radical openness of art in the wake of Duchamp’s readymades and John Cage’s chance compositions in music. Who coined the appellation conceptual art is unclear. Henry Flynt coined the term concept art in 1961 in response to what he perceived as the debacle of mathematics in “serious” avant-­garde music. His article “Concept Art” was published in An Anthology of Chance Operations, edited by La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low in 1963. Idea Art is the title of Gregory Battcock’s anthology of texts on conceptual art (New York: Dutton, 1973), which, among other texts by artists, reissued Joseph Kosuth’s “Art after Philosophy I and II.” Even though Kosuth coined the expression “Art as Idea as Idea” to refer to a series of works he began in 1966, he doesn’t make any semantic difference between concept and idea. 21. Although Sol LeWitt is not seen today as a conceptual artist, his “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” published in Artforum in June 1967, and his “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” first published in 0–­9 (a magazine edited in New York by Vito Acconci, 1969) and co-­opted in the same first number of Art-­Language (London, May 1969) where Weiner’s “Statements” and Dan Graham’s “Poem-­Schema” were published, are viewed by many as early manifestos for what was then still an inchoate art movement. 22. LeWitt, “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 106. 23. Ibid. 24. Lawrence Weiner, “Benjamin H. D. Buchloh in Conversation with Lawrence Weiner,” in Alexander Alberro, Alice Zimmerman, Benjamin Buchloh, and David Batchelor, Lawrence Weiner (London: Phaidon, 1998), 28. 25. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Aspen Magazine 5/6 (1966). 26. Let’s recall Lawrence Weiner’s “Declaration of Intent,” as it accompanies

Notes to Pages 148–55

[ 2 27 ]

every one of his conceptual pieces since his 1968 “Statements”: “1. The artist may construct the piece. 2. The piece may be fabricated. 3. The piece need not be built. Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership.” 27. Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” a lecture given at the meetings of the American Federation of the Arts in Houston, April 1957, in Duchamp, Salt Seller, 138. 28. LeWitt, “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” in Conceptual Art: a Critical Anthology, 107. 29. Duchamp, unpublished interview with Harriet and Sidney Janis, 1953. 30. I insist—­but I cannot develop this here—­that you access the critical model needed to sustain the “Kant after Duchamp” approach to aesthetics and art theory only after having judged that the sentence “This is art”—­applied not to any of Duchamp’s readymades but only to Fountain—­is an aesthetic judgment in the strictest Kantian sense. I offered a tentative (still unsatisfactory) explanation of this in my article, “‘This Is Art’: Anatomy of a Sentence,” Artforum (April 2014). Volume 2 of Aesthetics at Large will present a more satisfactory explanation. 31. Harold Rosenberg, The Anxious Object (New York: Collier, 1973), 18. 32. The formula I used in Au nom de l’art (p. 86) and Kant after Duchamp (p. 321) was slightly different: “Thesis. The sentence “This is art” is not based on the concept of art; it is based on the aesthetic/artistic feeling. Antithesis. The sentence “This is art” assumes the concept of art; it assumes the aesthetic/artistic idea.” 33. Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). 34. Barry Schwabsky, “Delays in Words,” On Paper I, 6 ( July-­August 1997), reprinted in B. Schwabsky, Words for Art (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013), 162–­173. 35. Kant after Duchamp, 59. 36. Ibid., 321. 37. Ibid., 64. 38. Ibid., 65 and 69. 39. C. Greenberg, “Seminar Five,” Studio International 189/190 (May–­June 1975): 191; reprinted in Homemade Esthetics, 41. 40. For a sense of these paradoxes, see “Kant (d)’après Duchamp,” the second chapter of Au nom de l’art, and Aesthetics at Large, vol. 2, “On Time.” 41. Marcel Duchamp, Entretiens inédits avec Georges Charbonnier, RTF, 1961 (my translation). 42. “It’s the onlookers who make the paintings.” Duchamp to Jean Schuster, “Marcel Duchamp, vite,” Le Surréalisme même 2 (Spring 1957), reprinted in Duchamp du Signe, ed. M. Sanouillet and E. Peterson (Paris: Flammarion, 1975), 247. 43. They are easily available at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=vBhMQz7-­X34. 44. M. Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” in Duchamp, Salt Seller, 138. 45. Clement Greenberg, “After Abstract Expressionism,” Art International 25 (October 1962), 30, reprinted in Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, Modernism with a Vengeance, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 131–­32.

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46. See chapters 3 and 4, “The Readymade and the Tube of Paint” and “The Monochrome and the Blank Canvas,” in de Duve, Kant after Duchamp. 47. See Rosalind Krauss, “‘. . . And Then Turn Away?’ An Essay on James Coleman,” October 81 (Summer 1997): 3–­33; “Reinventing the Medium,” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 2 (Winter 1999): 289–­305; “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-­Medium Condition (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999); Under Blue Cup (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). 48. Art & Language was founded in 1968 in Coventry, England, and initially included Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge, Michael Baldwin, and Harold Hurrell. The group published a magazine, Art-­Language, of which the first number, issued in May 1969, was subtitled “The Journal of Conceptual Art.” Joseph Kosuth joined as its United States editor in 1970, and Charles Harrison became general editor in 1971. From the early seventies on, Ian Burn, Mel Ramsden, Roger Cutforth, Terry Smith, Michael Corris, and others were involved, either occasionally or for variable durations. The history of the group is complicated and fraught with dissentions, excommunications, and secessions. Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden are the two members of the original group who remain active today under the banner of Art & Language. 49. “I don’t understand the term ‘conceptual art.’ . . . I make art. . . . It’s very realist art, since it deals with real materials and real relationships of human beings to those materials.” “Lawrence Weiner: Interview by Lynn Gumpert,” in Lynda Benglis, Joan Brown, Luis Jimenez, Gary Stephan, Lawrence Weiner: Early Work, exhibition catalog (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1982), 53, quoted by Birgit Pelzer, “Dissociated Objects: The Statements/Sculptures of Lawrence Weiner,” October 90 (Autumn 1999): 79. 50. Although Sol LeWitt held that not all aesthetic ideas an artist has need to be materialized, he never committed the mistake of believing that one could present art as idea of reason directly: “Ideas can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.” LeWitt, Sentence 10, “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” in Conceptual Art: a Critical Anthology, 107. 51. See Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” Art International 12 (February 1968): 31–­36; Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (New York: Praeger, 1973). 52. Seth Siegelaub, 1969, quoted in Alexander Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 55. 53. Ibid. 54. Jean-­François Lyotard, “Representation, Presentation, Unpresentable,” in Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 119–­28. 55. Robert Barry, Inert Gas Series/Helium, Neon, Argon, Krypton, Xenon/From a Measured Volume to Indefinite Expansion, 1969. The work was the release, by the artist, of five measured volumes of rare gases into the atmosphere in various locations surrounding Los Angeles. Although photographs were taken of the action of the releases, the only tangible evidence of the work is a poster bearing the above

Notes to Pages 160–71

[ 2 29 ]

title (letterpress on paper, 35 3/16″ × 23 1/8″, 1969), published by Seth Siegelaub. 56. Kosuth’s “Art after Philosophy” is rightly considered as the most important manifesto for conceptual art. I admire the artist for having penned this text at the age of twenty-­three, but that doesn’t make the theory it defends correct. I have given it some critical attention in the fourth and fifth chapters of Kant after Duchamp. I don’t feel the need to repeat my critique here. 57. See the epigraph to this chapter.

Nin e 1. CJ (Pluhar), 61. 2. Ibid., 62. 3. I will, however, in the next chapter. 4. CJ (Pluhar), 103. 5. Ibid., 63. 6. Ibid. 7. Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook 8 (1965), reprinted in D. Judd, Complete Writings 1959–­1975 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1975), 184. 8. Clement Greenberg, “Seminar One,” Arts Magazine 48 (November 1973), reprinted in Homemade Esthetics, 8. 9. CJ (Pluhar), 63. 10. Wassily Kandinsky, “Reminiscences,” in Complete Writings on Art, vol. 1, ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), 369. 11. Admittedly, my account of Kant’s free play is too simple. It is close to what Paul Guyer called the “precognitive” interpretation of the harmony of the faculties; but it will suffice here. I shall complicate that account in the next chapter. See “The Harmony of the Faculties Revisited,” in Guyer, Values of Beauty, 77–­109. 12. See Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 1,” in Continuous Projects Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 7. 13. See my essay “Performance Here and Now: Minimal Art, a Plea for a New Genre of Theatre,” in “Essays on Performance and Cultural Politicization,” special issue, Open Letter 5/6 (Summer-­Fall 1983): 234–­60. 14. Rosalind Krauss, “Death of a Hermeneutic Phantom: Materialization of the Sign in the Work of Peter Eisenman,” a + u ( January 1980): 189–­219. Reprinted with a few changes in Peter Eisenman, House of Cards (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 166–­88. 15. Rosalind Krauss, Passages on Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), 266–­67. 16. Marcia Tucker, Robert Morris (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1970), 25. 17. Krauss, “Death of a Hermeneutic Phantom,” in Eisenman, House of Cards, 176 18. Ibid., 179 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid.

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21. CJ (Pluhar), 59. 22. In Passages on Modern Sculpture (17–­20), Rosalind Krauss discusses Rodin’s Three Shades but doesn’t make the comparison with Morris’s Three L-­Beams. 23. I am alluding to the last sentence of Michael Fried’s famous and much criticized essay “Art and Objecthood,” where he opposes the mere presence of minimal art to the presentness of truly modernist art: “Presentness is grace.” Artforum ( June 1967), reprinted in Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 168.

Ten 1. Or, to be precise, in the “Kant after Duchamp” sense, that is, applying to art what Kant had to say about beauty. 2. CJ (Pluhar), 61, 63. 3. Ibid., 61. Both Pluhar and Guyer (CJ, 102) speak of “Judging” rather than “Judgment.” The German word is indeed Beurteilung, not Urteil. For a discussion of that word’s translation, see the “Editor’s Introduction,” in CJ (Guyer), xlvii–­xlviii. 4. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 224. 5. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 231. 6. What Kant means by the universality of aesthetic judgments is their universal validity; logically, aesthetic judgments are singular. They apply to individual objects, one by one. See Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, 105–­106. 7. CJ (Pluhar), 61. 8. CJ (Guyer), 103. 9. Ibid. (translation slightly modified). 10. Ibid., 102 (translation slightly modified). 11. CJ (Pluhar), 61. Allison helpfully glosses “self-­contradictory” as meaning “self-­defeating” (Kant’s Theory of Taste, 111). 12. One has to wait for the Anthropology (1798) to see the nuances articulating Gemüt, Seele, and Geist somewhat disentangled. Ambiguities will always remain, however, because Kant often ascribes the same word slightly different meanings according to context. Immanuel Kant, “Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View,” in Anthropology, History and Education, ed. Günter Zöller and Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 13. CJ (Guyer), 102. 14. Ibid., 103. 15. In the second, published introduction, Kant implicitly admits that tautological character when he writes that the pleasure in a judgment of taste “can express nothing but its suitability to the cognitive faculties that are in play in the reflecting power of judgment, insofar as they are in play” (CJ [Guyer], 76). Allison, for his part, writes that “it is essential to distinguish between this harmony of the faculties and their free play,” but he does so in order to make room for negative judgments of taste, where “the outcome of the free play is a state of disharmony.” Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, 116, 117. There is no contradiction with what I am claiming here: I am dealing only with positive judgments since I put the emphasis on the condition

Notes to Pages 183–91

[ 2 31 ]

of agreement of the faculties. For my take on the free play in both positive and negative judgments, see chapter 7, “Resisting Adorno, Revamping Kant.” 16. CJ (Pluhar), 61, 62 (emphasis mine). 17. CJ (Guyer), 102, 103. 18. Tautegorical is a term Lyotard introduces in his comments on aesthetic reflection in Kant’s third Critique: “a term by which I designate the remarkable fact that pleasure and displeasure are at once both a ‘state’ of the soul and the ‘information’ collected by the soul relative to its state.” Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, 4. 19. Invoking the immediate reflexivity of aesthetic feeling (as Lyotard does) explains the tautegorical character of the Gemütszustand but, as I shall note further down, in section 9 Kant has not yet introduced reflection. 20. CJ (Pluhar), 61 (translation slightly modified). 21. I tend to see feelings and affects as signals, in accordance with the way Freud saw the affect of anxiety in Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, vol. 20 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-­Analysis, 1959), 77–­172. 22. CJ (Pluhar), 62. 23. I used both CJ (Pluhar), 88, and CJ (Guyer), 122–­23, and collaged the two translations. 24. CJ (Pluhar), 62. 25. CJ (Guyer), 167–­68. 26. Paul Guyer, “The Harmony of the Faculties Revisited,” in Guyer, Values of Beauty, 80. 27. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 273. 28. Ibid., 295–­321. 29. “First Introduction to the Critique of the Power of Judgment,” CJ (Guyer), 17. 30. Although the third Moment contains no mention of the reflecting judgment per se, the following sentence from section 10 all but explicitly introduces it: “Hence we can at least observe a purposiveness as to form, and take note of it in objects—­ even if only by reflection.” CJ (Pluhar), 65 (emphasis mine). 31. CJ (Guyer), 103. 32. CJ (Pluhar), 63. 33. CJ (Guyer), 104. 34. Ibid. 35. CJ (Pluhar), 156. 36. CJ (Pluhar), 158. 37. Critique of Pure Reason, bk. 1, “Analytic of Concepts, Chapter 1, On the Clue to the Discovery of all Pure Concepts of the Understanding,” 204–­218. The translators, Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, translated Leitfaden as “clue.” 38. CJ (Guyer), 108, 106. 39. More about the reflective judgment in the next chapter, “Reflecting on Reflection.” 40. CJ (Guyer), 123 (with the word attunement borrowed from Pluhar, 88, replacing disposition). The German word is Stimmung and refers back to the Gemütszu-

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stand. 41. CJ (Guyer), 122. 42. Ibid., 124. 43. Ibid., 176. 44. Ibid., 102 (translation slightly modified, emphasis mine). 45. CJ (Pluhar), 62 (emphasis mine). 46. I used both CJ (Pluhar), 88, and CJ (Guyer), 122–­23, and collaged the two translations (emphasis mine). 47. See de Duve, Aesthetics at Large, vol. 2. 48. The German phrase is “das Sollen, d.i. die objektive Notwendigkeit des Zusammenfließens des Gefühls von jedermann mit jenes seinem besondern.” I find it interesting that Guyer translates Sollen as “should,” whereas Pluhar, Meredith, and Bernard opt for “ought.” (I used Bernard’s translation in chap. 1 and shall again in the next chapter.) 49. Addressing this question, Lyotard beautifully wrote that taste results from the “fiançailles” of the two faculties and announces not a subject conceived as the accomplished unity of the faculties but rather “the hoped-­for birth of a united couple. There is not one subjectivity (the couple) that experiences pure feeling; rather, it is the pure feeling that promises a subject. In the aesthetic of the beautiful the subject is in a state of infancy.” Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, 20. 50. CJ (Guyer), 219 (emphasis mine). 51. Ibid., 216 (emphasis mine). 52. Ibid., 218–­219 (emphasis mine). 53. May I, without going any further, draw attention to an analogy? Jacques Lacan also speaks of three relations to the object irreducible to one another: according to the symbolic, the real, and the imaginary. Whether they can be mapped (in this order) onto Kant’s three relations to the object remains to be seen.

E le ve n 1. I stick here to the conventional view of the Cartesian cogito. In Ego Sum (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), Jean-­Luc Nancy has complicated this view, insisting on the cogito’s emptiness of content and thus of result. 2. Although none of Kant’s Critiques problematizes the act of reflection, the first Critique problematizes the misuse of the concepts of reflection (identity and difference, agreement and opposition, inner and outer, matter and form). See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, “Of the Equivocal Nature or Amphiboly of the Conceptions of Reflection from the Confusion of the Transcendental with the Empirical use of the Understanding.” 3. CJ (Pluhar), 158. 4. Regarding the translation of bestimmend and reflectierend, I approve of Guyer’s coherent rendering of them as “determining” and “reflecting” (see his “Editor’s Introduction” in CJ [Guyer], xlvii), but I allow myself more freedom. I often use “determinative” and “reflective,” and even sometimes “reflexive.” 5. CJ (Guyer), 15 (emphasis mine).

Notes to Pages 200–204

[ 2 33 ]

6. CJ (Guyer), 66–­67. 7. See the Analytic of the Sublime, section 26. A similar effort at maximization is required of the imagination confronted with the presentation of aesthetic ideas, where imagination “quickens” understanding to go beyond its own limits and venture into the domain of reason, but only of theoretical reason. No ethical maxim is glimpsed thereby. See section 49, “On the Powers of the Mind Which Constitute Genius.” 8. Charles Sanders Peirce, “Deduction, Induction, and Hypothesis,” Popular Science Monthly 13 (1878): 470–­82; Collected Papers, vol. 2, Elements of Logic (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1965), 619–­44; Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998). 9. CJ (Guyer), 15. 10. We encountered a similar jump with the subsumption of the faculty of imagination under the faculty of understanding in section 35. See chapter 10, “A Transcendental Chicken-­and-­Egg Dilemma.” 11. CJ (Guyer), 76. 12. CJ (Guyer), 106, 108 (emphasis changed and some elisions made). 13. Hans Vaihinger, Die Philosophie des Als Ob (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1911). 14. Hypotheses non fingo (I do not feign—­or contrive—­hypotheses). Isaac Newton, General Scholium appended to the second (1713) edition of the Principia. 15. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste, 15–­16, 44–­45. 16. Although reflective judgments come in two kinds, the aesthetic and the teleological, logically implying four kinds of metareflections (two that reflect teleologically and two that reflect aesthetically either on the aesthetic or on the teleological judgment), second-­degree aesthetic judgments are not possible. See Clement Greenberg’s comment on this issue, quoted in chapter 8, “Conceptual Art in Light of Kant’s Antinomy of Taste.” The reflective metajudgment Escher’s print demands is therefore a teleological judgment reflecting on the aesthetic experience of the print. 17. Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach (New York: Vintage, 1980). 18. Maurits Escher’s reputation has somewhat eclipsed that of his inspirer, Oscar Reuterswärd, who created the first impossible tribar in 1934. See Bruno Ernst, The Eye Beguiled: Optical Illusions (Cologne: Taschen, 1992), 69. And of course, one should not forget the less systematic but wittier and more artistically convincing precedent of William Hogarth’s copper engraving, False Perspective, designed as a frontispiece to John Joshua Kirby’s book, Dr. Brook Taylor’s Method of Perspective Made Easy (London, 1754). 19. Kant defines subreption as “substitution of a respect for the object instead of for the idea of humanity in our subject.” CJ (Guyer), 141. 20. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, 101–­102. 21. See Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge: Technology Press, 1948); The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950). 22. The expression “ghost in the machine” was proposed by the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle (The Concept of Mind, 1949) in order to ironically describe Cartesian dualism.

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23. I lifted the following from the Wikipedia site on “Centrifugal governor”: “The centrifugal governor is often used in the cognitive sciences as an example of a dynamic system, in which the representation of information cannot be clearly separated from the operations being applied to the representation” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifugal_governor). This sounds like an apposite description of Kant’s difficulties with the “strange loops” of reflective judgments. 24. “There are in general, to be sure, two ways (modus) of putting thoughts together in a presentation, one of which is called a manner (modus aestheticus) and the other of which is called a method (modus logicus), which differ from each other in that the former has no other standard than the feeling of unity in the presentation, while the latter follows determinate principles in this.” CJ (Guyer), 196. 25. See the third Analogy of Experience, which posits the principle of reciprocal action (Wechselwirkung), translated as “interaction” in the Cambridge edition (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 316–­21). 26. CJ (Guyer), 245. 27. CJ (Guyer), 244. 28. “The power of judgment thus also has in itself an a priori principle for the possibility of nature, though only in a subjective respect, by means of which it prescribes a law, not to nature (as autonomy), but to itself (as heautonomy) for reflection on nature.” CJ (Guyer), 72. Heautonomy also appears in the first, unpublished introduction. Speaking of the autonomy demonstrated by the power of judgment, “which is thus legislative with regard to the conditions of reflection a priori,” Kant adds, “this autonomy is not, however (like that of the understanding, with regard to the theoretical laws of nature, or of reason, in the practical laws of freedom), valid objectively, i.e., through concepts of things or possible actions, but is merely subjectively valid, for the judgment from feeling, which, if it can make a claim to universal validity, demonstrates its origin grounded in a priori principles. Strictly speaking, one must call this legislation heautonomy, since the power of judgment does not give the law to nature nor to freedom, but solely to itself, and it is not a faculty for producing concepts of objects, but only for comparing present cases to others that have been given to it and thereby indicating the subjective conditions of the possibility of this combination a priori.” CJ (Guyer), 28. 29. CJ (Guyer), 267. 30. See CJ (Guyer), 266–­270. 31. CJ (Bernard), 77. 32. See chapter 1, “Overture: Why Kant Got It Right.” 33. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, trans. Reginald Snell (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1954). 34. See chapter 10, “A Transcendental Chicken-­and-­Egg Dilemma.” 35. See chapter 7, “Resisting Adorno, Revamping Kant.”

Index of Proper Names

Abélard, Pierre, 150 Adorno, Gretel, 134 Adorno, Theodor W., iv, 4–­5, 10, 106–­38 passim, 210, 219n7, 219n11, 220nn15–­16, 220nn20–­22, 220n25, 220n32, 222n48, 222n56, 223n57, 223n64, 223n68, 224n69, 224n77 Allison, Henry, 194, 202, 211n2 (chap. 1), 212n8, 230n6, 230n11, 230n15 Andre, Carl, 22–­24, 22, 155, 212n6 (chap. 2) Aristotle, 112, 197, 204 Art & Language, 157, 160, 228n48 Arts and Crafts, 98 Atreus, 93 Auschwitz, 125, 127–­30, 132–­34, 136–­37, 222n56, 223nn63–­64, 224n70 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 202–­4, 207, 209 Badiou, Alain, 37 Bannon, Stephen, 4 Barry, Robert, 158, 159, 228n55 Barthes, Roland, 68, 148, 179, 197 Bauhaus, 98 Baumgarten, Alexander, 27, 192 Beckett, Samuel, 114, 129, 130, 136 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 122–­23 Belting, Hans, 50 Benjamin, Walter, 47, 117, 137 Benveniste, Émile, 82

Beuys, Joseph, 153 Blind Man, The, 34, 34 Brancusi, Constantin, 23 Braque, Georges, 159 Brecht, Bertolt, 3 Brecht, George, 35, 213n11 Broodthaers, Marcel, 52, 56–­57, 56, 62, 157 Cage, John, 31–­32, 157, 213n8 Caro, Anthony, 30 Carroll, Lewis, 52 Caygill, Howard, 10, 66, 85 Cézanne, Paul, 35, 67, 155 Churchill, Winston, 103 Clark, Timothy J., 69 Cleisthenes, 99–­100 Clinton, Hillary, 3, 5 Cohen, Lynne, 55, 64 Courbet, Gustave, 24, 69 Crimp, Douglas, 68 Damisch, Hubert, 68 Danto, Arthur, 10, 28, 50 Darwin, Charles, 16, 102, 207 Dean, Max, 54 Degas, Edgar, 30 Delaunay, Robert, 35 Deleuze, Gilles, 93, 118 Descartes, René, 185, 199, 205 Dickie, George, 42

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Duchamp, Marcel, 6–­9, 13, 15–­16, 21–­ 24, 26–­48 passim, 52–­57, 62, 66, 69, 86, 103, 118, 132, 138, 140–­42, 145–­57, 159–­60, 198, 213n7, 213n10, 214n8, 225n10, 227n42 Einstein, Albert, 16 Eisenman, Peter, 170 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 7–­8 Escher, Maurits, 202, 203, 233n18 Fluxus, 28, 35, 157 Foucault, Michel, 100, 118 Frege, Gottlob, 150 Freud, Sigmund, 93, 219n22, 231n21 Fried, Michael, 168, 170, 173–­74, 230n23 Gautier, Théophile, 126 Gell, Alfred, 201 Gide, André, 93, 105 Goodman, Nelson, 150 Graham, Dan, 157 Greenberg, Clement, 70, 78–­80, 82, 85, 142, 152, 156, 164–­65, 167–­68, 170, 173, 175, 233n16 Grünewald, Matthias, 114 Guattari, Félix, 93 Guyer, Paul, 186, 189, 212n8, 220n32, 229n11, 230n3, 232n48 Habermas, Jürgen, 134 Hammons, David, 72, 73 Hartung, Hans, 35 Haydn, Joseph, 107, 109 Heartfield, John, 75 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 9, 27, 49–­50, 109–­14, 116–­18, 123, 126, 136–­ 37, 210, 214n11, 219n7, 221n35 Heidegger, Martin, 117, 219n7 Hobbes, Thomas, 96 Hofstadter, Douglas, 202–­4, 209 Horkheimer, Max, 113, 132–­36, 224n69, 224n77 Horn, Roni, 87, 216n24

i n de x of proper na m es

Indépendants, Société des artistes, 33–­35 Independents, Society of—­Artists, 34, 46 Johns, Jasper, 27, 32, 212n6 Jorn, Asger, 35 Judd, Donald, 164, 173 Kandinsky, Wassily, 70, 77, 165–­68, 173 Kant, Immanuel, 1, 3–­10, 15–­22, 24–­25, 27, 28, 37, 39, 49–­50, 66, 70, 75–­ 82, 84–­86, 88, 91, 93, 94–­98, 101–­5, 107, 111–­38 passim, 140, 142–­49, 153, 155–­56, 159, 162–­65, 167–­68, 171–­73, 179–­210, 211n2 (chap. 1), 211n4 (chap. 1), 212n8, 216n19, 218n17, 220n16, 220n32, 221n34, 221n38, 221nn42–­43, 223n65, 223n67, 224nn71–­72, 224n79, 229n11, 230n3, 230n6, 230n12, 230n15, 231n19, 231n30, 232n48, 232n2, 233n19, 234nn24–­25, 234n28 Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgment (Critique of the Power of Judgment, or third Critique), 6–­8, 15–­16, 19–­20, 24, 27, 39, 56, 70, 78, 80, 82, 91, 94–­ 95, 97, 101–­2, 104, 113, 117, 120, 122, 124, 126–­27, 131, 133, 135, 137–­38, 142, 146, 163, 180–­81, 185, 187, 190–­93, 195, 199–­202, 204–­5, 207–­8, 211n5, 215n6 (chap. 4), 216n19, 220n32, 230n3, 230n6, 230n15, 231n30, 232n48, 233n19, 234n24, 234n28 Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Practical Reason (or second Critique), 6, 91, 95, 113, 131, 135, 137, 143, 180, 208, 223n65, 224nn71–­72 Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason (or first Critique), 6, 8, 50, 80, 91, 95, 137, 143, 172, 180, 187, 190, 205, 232n2, 234n25 Kant after Duchamp, 6–­9, 15, 30, 42, 86, 140, 150–­52, 212n3, 213n7, 216n23, 222n54, 227n32, 227n46, 229n57

Index of Proper Names

Kelly, Ellsworth, 35 Klein, Yves, 36–­37 Kosuth, Joseph, 141, 160, 226n20, 228n56 Krauss, Rosalind, 68, 170–­76 Kripke, Saul, 43, 150–­51 Krugman, Paul, 3 Kupka, František, 35 Labarrière, Pierre-­Jean, 118 Lacan, Jacques, 135 Lacoue-­Labarthe, Philippe, 118 Le Pen, Marine, 4 Levine, Sherrie, 152 LeWitt, Sol, 147–­48, 157, 226n21, 228n50 Ligon, Glenn, 72, 74 Lipps, Theodor, 123 Lissitsky, El, 69 Loach, Ken, 93 Lukács, György, 125 Lumière, Auguste and Louis, 67 Lyotard, Jean-­François, 9, 15, 112, 118, 129–­30, 150, 158, 219n11, 222n53, 231n18, 232n49 Magritte, René, 57–­58 Malevich, Kasimir, 6, 35, 77 Malraux, André, 44, 47, 214n5 Manet, Édouard, 24, 69, 126 Manzoni, Piero, 36–­37 Marcuse, Herbert, 98, 220n22 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 63 Martin, Ron, 54 Marx, Karl, 9, 109, 112, 115, 117, 125–­26 Matisse, Henri, 30, 35, 155 McEvilley, Thomas, 52, 54, 59, 62 Medea, 94 Mondrian, Piet, 35, 77 Monet, Claude, 67 Morris, Robert, 166–­76, 166, 212n6 Mutt, Richard, 34–­35, 46 Nancy, Jean-­Luc, 10, 232n1 Nauman, Bruce, 63, 175, 175

[ 2 37 ]

Nazi (Nazism), 104, 128, 132 Neuhaus, Max, 212n5 Newman, Barnett, 7, 35, 158 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 9, 111, 135, 137, 223n68 Obama, Barack, 2, 138 Ockham, William of, 150 Orbán, Viktor, 4 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 136 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 200 Picasso, Pablo, 35, 114, 157, 159 Plato, 99–­100, 217n13 Plekhanov, Georgi, 98 Pollock, Jackson, 35, 155 Rancière, Jacques, 99–­103, 218n17, 218n22 Rauschenberg, Robert, 32, 36–­37 Reinhardt, Ad, 35 Rembrandt van Rijn, 54, 59 Revolution: American, 3; French, 3, 5, 96, 104, 122, 125 Rockwell, Norman, 63, 64, 215n9 Rodin, Auguste, 30, 155, 173, 174, 229n22 Ropars, Marie-­Claire, 10, 178–­80, 195 Rosenberg, Harold, 149 Rosenkranz, Karl, 119, 221n33 Rothko, Mark, 35 Rougemont, Denis de, 145 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 96 Russell, Bertrand, 150, 214n5 Russolo, Luigi, 31 Sade, Marquis de (Donatien Alphonse François), 132, 134–­36, 223n68, 224n79 Saint-­Simon, Henri de, 98 Sanders, Bernie, 2, 3 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 111, 137 Schiller, Friedrich, 98, 122, 209–­10 Schlegel, Friedrich and August, 116

[ 2 38 ]

Schoenberg, Arnold, 118 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 111 Schwabsky, Barry, 150–­51 Sciuto, Franca, 92 Seurat, Georges, 35, 67 Shakespeare, William, 114 Simpson, Lorna, 72 Smith, Brydon, 54 Smith, David, 30 Socrates, 57–­58 Stalin, Joseph, 125 Steichen, Edward, 92, 92 Stieglitz, Alfred, 34 Still, Clyfford, 35 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 8

i n de x of proper na m es

Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), 91–­94, 96, 98, 102–­3, 105 Vaihinger, Hans, 198, 202 Wagner, Richard, 107 Warhol, Andy, 67 Weiner, Lawrence, 148, 157, 226n26, 228n49 Weston, Edward, 152 Wiener, Norbert, 204 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 103–­4 Wols, 35 Worringer, Wilhelm, 123 Xenakis, Iannis, 31

Tiedemann, Rolf, 134 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 97 Trump, Donald, 1–­5, 224n73 Tucker, Marcia, 170–­71

Index of Concepts

address (addressee), 18–­19, 58, 60, 66, 69–­70, 75–­78, 82–­86, 88, 216n20. See also mandate anti-­aesthetic, 77–­78, 85, 157, 164 antinomy: of art, 146–­47, 149–­52; fourth, 137; of practical reason, 180; of taste, 79, 126, 140–­44, 159, 187, 196; of teleological judgment, 206, 207 art altogether, 22, 43–­50 passim, 60–­61 art as such, 7, 41–­51 passim, 103, 142, 208 Art-­in-­General, 16, 27, 31–­43 passim, 46–­47, 49, 51, 103, 142, 156; art-­in-­ general, 36, 39–­41; art in general, 6, 28–­29, 31–­32, 36, 40, 145 art itself, 45–­50 passim, 58, 60–­61, 146–­49, 156–­57, 226n17 autonomy (autonomous), 6, 27, 39, 54–­ 58, 62–­63, 72, 104, 108, 113, 125–­26, 138, 159, 168, 206, 234n28. See also heautonomy (heautonomous) autonymy (autonymous), 55, 57–­58, 62–­63, 214n5 avant-­garde, 24, 69–­70, 226n20 cognition (knowledge, concept): determinate, 60, 143–­44, 147, 184–­86, 194, 234n24; indeterminate, 20, 60, 143, 189, 193, 205, 208 conceptual art (artist, conceptual-

ism), 28, 30–­31, 44, 67, 141–­42, 147–­ 48, 156–­60, 164, 167, 226nn20–­21, 226n26, 228nn48–­50, 228n57 creativity, 153 deictic, 57–­58, 80–­81, 83 dialectic (dialectics, dialectical, dialectically), 9, 50, 110–­20, 123–­38 passim, 142, 187, 190, 220n11, 223n64 disinterestedness, 19, 21, 79, 85–­86, 99, 125, 165, 221n34 enthusiasm, 2–­5, 21, 94, 122 feeling, 17–­25 passim, 41–­50 passim, 59, 76, 84, 86, 88, 93–­97, 99, 103, 105, 119–­25, 127–­28, 131, 133–­34, 136, 149, 151, 158–­59, 163–­73 passim, 176, 180, 183–­88, 191–­95, 197, 208–­ 9, 218n17, 221n34, 221n43, 227n32, 231n19, 231n21, 232n49, 234n24, 234n28 formalism, 70, 77–­78, 80–­81, 126, 170 free play (of the faculties, of imagination and understanding), 19, 21, 119–­ 20, 122, 124, 134, 144, 162–­65, 167–­ 68, 172–­73, 179–­83, 185–­90 passim, 194, 196–­97, 229n11, 230n15. See also harmony (accord, agreement, attunement, interplay) of the faculties

[ 2 40 ]

genius, 6, 75, 100, 103, 137, 144–­45, 148–­49, 153, 155–­56, 217n13 harmony (accord, agreement, attunement, interplay) of the faculties, 120–­22, 125–­27, 146, 163–­64, 168, 170, 172, 175, 181, 183–­86, 188, 197, 229n11, 230n15. See also free play (of the faculties, of imagination and understanding) heautonomy (heautonomous), 197, 205, 206, 234n28 humanism, 46–­47, 61, 63–­64, 70–­71, 75–­76, 80–­81, 84, 93 idea: aesthetic, 145–­46, 148, 156–­58, 228n50, 232n7; of reason, 98, 146–­ 52 passim, 156–­59 passim, 196–­97, 226n15, 228n50; regulative, 49–­50, 98, 126–­27, 152, 190; transcendental, 79, 97, 101, 191–­92 identity politics, 68, 70–­72, 77–­78. See also multiculturalism (multiculturalist) imagination, 19, 81, 120–­22, 124–­25, 144, 146–­49, 159, 163–­69, 172, 179, 181, 183–­86, 188, 194, 200–­201, 221n42, 232n7, 233n10. See also free play (of the faculties, of imagination and understanding) judgment: aesthetic, 11, 15–­21, 24, 27–­ 28, 42–­44, 46–­47, 50–­51, 60, 70, 72, 75–­77, 82, 103, 118–­19, 126, 138, 142, 144–­45, 149–­52, 154, 164, 168–­ 69, 172–­73, 176, 181, 183–­87, 193–­94, 196–­97, 201, 206–­8, 221n43, 227n30, 230n6, 233n16; determining (determinative), 19, 187–­88, 196, 199–­206 passim, 232n4, 234n24; reflecting (reflective), 8, 19–­20, 50, 60, 79–­80, 84–­85, 91, 95, 113, 144–­45, 149, 187, 189, 190–­93, 198–­209, 215n7 (chap. 5), 218n21, 230n15, 231nn18–­19,

i n de x of proper na m es

231n30, 232n2, 232n4, 233n16, 233n23 (see also reflection [reflect, reflecting, reflective, reflectively, reflexivity]); of taste, 18–­21, 27, 84, 95, 105, 120, 124, 131, 142–­43, 163–­64, 172, 180–­83, 187–­90, 193–­94, 202, 206, 230n15; teleological, 8, 91, 93, 95, 102, 105, 111, 127, 131, 200–­202, 205–­ 8, 233n16 “Kant after Duchamp” approach (or hypothesis), 7, 8, 13, 21, 24, 26–­28, 36, 39, 69, 103, 118, 132, 138, 140–­42, 152, 159–­60, 221n34, 227n30, 230n1 mandate, 58, 60–­61, 69–­70, 75–­78, 82, 85, 121. See also address (addressee) minimal art (artist, minimalism, minimalist), 28, 30, 157, 162–­64, 166–­67, 170, 173–­76, 212n6, 224n13, 230n23 modernism (modernist), 24, 35–­37, 68–­71, 75, 137, 152–­53, 155, 164–­ 74 passim, 211n3, 213n10, 222n54, 230n23 modernity, 22, 29, 36–­37, 39, 80, 100, 104, 137, 149–­50 multiculturalism (multiculturalist), 68, 70–­71, 76–­78. See also identity politics negativity, 114, 118–­19, 123, 125, 127, 132 noumenal, 146 postmodernism (postmodernist), 68, 70–­71, 77, 141, 164, 166, 169–­71, 173, 175–­76 purposiveness, 19, 21, 88, 91, 95, 191, 196, 201–­3, 207, 231n30; without purpose, 19, 21, 165 reason (practical), 6, 98–­99, 102, 117, 127, 132, 137, 146–­48, 156–­58, 168, 180, 194, 202, 223n65 reflection (reflect, reflecting, reflec-

Index of Proper Names

tive, reflectively, reflexivity), 8, 17, 19, 25–­26, 47, 50, 79–­80, 84–­85, 99, 101–­2, 113, 122, 143–­45, 149, 152, 156, 159, 164, 168–­69, 187, 190–­93, 199–­ 209, 215n7 (chap. 5), 231nn18–­19, 232n2, 233n23, 234n28. See also judgment: reflecting (reflective) representativity (representative), 48, 68–­72, 75–­76, 78, 80–­82, 85, 97, 214n10, 216n20 revolution (revolutionary), 2–­5, 94, 97–­98, 104, 125 romantic, 2, 110–­11, 116, 122, 137, 210 schematism, 80, 113, 121, 186–­88, 190, 220n15 sensibility, 121, 124, 168, 221n42 sensus communis, 7–­8, 19–­21, 23–­24, 50, 76, 78–­80, 82, 84, 86, 95–­102, 104, 122–­23, 127–­28, 130–­36, 142, 191–­93, 195, 197, 208–­9, 217nn5–­6, 223n67; consensus communis, 101; dissensus communis, 101 subsumption (subsume), 121, 147, 151, 165, 167, 185–­87, 189, 192, 200, 233n10 supersensible, 8, 126, 131, 143, 146, 196–­ 97, 203–­4, 207, 209

[ 2 41 ]

transcendental, 6–­8, 19, 49, 76, 79, 81–­82, 86, 95, 97–­104, 113, 116, 120, 126–­27, 137, 163–­64, 167–­68, 171–­72, 179–­81, 183, 185, 188, 190–­92, 196–­ 97, 232n2 transcendental deduction, 20–­21, 28, 180, 185, 187, 189, 191, 206, 223n65 transcendentalism, 8, 79–­80, 102, 116–­ 17; transcendentalist, 7, 8, 130, 138 understanding, 19, 97, 102, 117, 120–­ 22, 124–­25, 131, 144, 146, 149, 156, 163–­69, 172, 179, 181, 183–­86, 188, 191, 194–­96, 232n7, 233n10, 233n28. See also free play (of the faculties, of imagination and understanding) universal assent (approval), 17–­20, 75–­ 76, 78, 85, 95, 99, 143, 149, 192–­93, 208–­9 universalism, 70–­71, 78, 80 universality, 19, 21, 70–­71, 76–­77, 81, 84, 102, 181–­83, 188, 192, 200, 230n6; claim to, 19, 21, 70, 76–­77, 102, 182, 188 utopia (utopian, utopianism, utopianist), 4–­5, 8, 97–­99, 104, 111–­12, 114, 125, 153, 210