Aesthetics in Deconstruction

AESTHETICS IN DECONSTRUCTION: DERRIDA’SRECEPTION OF KANT’S CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENTphil_428 327..344

JEFFREY S. LIBRETT

Take away from a painting all representation, all signification, any theme and any text-as-meaning,removing [. . .] also all the material (canvas, paint) [. . .] efface any design oriented by a determin-able end, subtract the wall-background, its social, historical, economic, political supports, etc., whatis left? The frame, the framing, plays of forms and lines which are structurally homogeneous withthe frame structure.1

[. . .] Kant [. . .] admits the lacks, the lacunary character [Mangelhaftigkeit] of his work. This is theword Hegel uses too [. . .] What if the lack formed the frame of the theory. [. . .] what if the lackwere not only the lack of a theory of the frame but the place of the lack in a theory of the frame (50,42–3).

What must be thought, then, is this inconceivable and unknowable thing, a freedom that would nolonger be the power of a subject, a freedom without autonomy, a heteronomy without servitude, inshort, something like a passive decision.2

Jacques Derrida discusses Kant at length in many texts across the entirety of hisprolific career, dealing with aesthetics, ethics, politics, anthropology, and so onwithin the context of multiauthor studies on a wide variety of themes. There canbe no question, therefore, of covering here Derrida’s contribution to the scholar-ship on, or philosophical use of, Kant in our times.3 I will focus on Derrida’s fairly

1 Jacques Derrida, “Parergon,” in La vérité en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978) 21–168, here 111;in English as “Parergon,” in Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicagoand London: U of Chicago P, 1987) 15–148, here 97–8. Pagination given hereafter parenthetically intext, first for French original, then for English translation.

2 Jacques Derrida, Voyous (Paris: Galilée, 2003); in English as Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans.Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005) 152.

3 For an introduction to Derrida’s reading of Kant’s aesthetics that focuses on the question of theexample, see Irene E. Harvey, “Derrida, Kant, and the Performance of Parergonality,” in Derrida andDeconstruction ed. Hugh J. Silverman (New York and London: Routledge, 1989) 59–76. See alsoPeter Milne, “Sans, and the Law of the Law: Following Derrida Following Kant,” Mosaic 40.2

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early writings (from the mid-1970s) concerning Kant’s faculty of reflexive judg-ment, as aesthetics and teleology, more specifically, “The Parergon” (from Truthin Painting) and “Economimesis,” two essays that deal largely with the Critiqueof Judgment.4 In doing so, however, I will try to disengage from these writingsnot just what Derrida has to say about the third Critique (or what he lets it saythrough him because he stresses the interpenetration of passivity and activity), butalso how what he says here coheres with his general approach to the problem ofreason. In this general approach, Derrida does not, I think, waver across his entirecareer, as he testifies and demonstrates, for example, in Rogues: Two Essays onReason (published roughly 30 years after the early essays on the third Critique, in2003).

Let me now, in two preliminary steps, first indicate how Derrida’s work on thethird Critique links up with his general approach to reason, and then summarizehis main position and arguments concerning the third Critique, before I show insome detail how these arguments function. In reading Kant’s third Critique, as wewill see, Derrida develops a theory of what he calls (among other things) the frameas always partial—as always partially lacking. Since every theory provides aframework (e.g., of interpretation, description, explanation, etc.), Derrida’s theoryof the frame is “self-consciously” a framing of the frame. It must, therefore, try toallow at every turn for its own lacking frame, its own frame as partially lacking.This accounts for its exacerbatedly self-fragmenting form, which I will necessar-ily diminish and reductively characterize here. Further, since in Derrida the framefunctions as a figure of the determining ground, and of the ground as reason(logos, ratio, Grund, Vernunft, raison, etc.), the theory Derrida is developing inand around “The Parergon” is a theory of the partial lack of reason in reason, and

(2007): 39–52, which connects the reading of the third Critique with questions of the juridical.For important recent readings of Derrida in relation to Kant, see Phil Rothfield, ed., Kant afterDerrida (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2002); Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence: PhilosophicalPerspectives from Kant to Derrida (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 2002), whichfocuses on university politics and religious politics; and Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism:Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008), which contests the post-secularistreading of Derrida undertaken by De Vries and others. For readings of Derrida on Kant thatfocus on the ethical and political dimension, see Marguerite La Caze. “At the Intersection:Kant, Derrida, and the Relation between Ethics and Politics,” Political Theory 35.6 (December2007): 781–805; Christian Lotz, “The Events of Morality and Forgiveness from Kant to Derrida,”Research in Phenomenology 36 (2006): 255–73; Jane Mummery, “Deconstructing the RationalRespondent: Derrida, Kant, and the Duty of Response,” Philosophy Today 50.5 (Winter 2006):450–62.

4 Immanuel Kant, “Kritik der Urteilskraft,” Werkausgabe X, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt amMain: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1979; in English Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, transl.Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), pages given parenthetically intext, first to German then to English edition.

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in all of reason’s self-reflexions. Derrida both acknowledges—and analyzes—andattempts synoptically to look beyond the important differences between specificand partially nontranslatable, idiomatic formulations of reason across the trajec-tory of Western metaphysics. In questioning the limits of reason, he tries to gothrough and beyond the Heideggerian project, incorporating the insights of manyothers, notably including Freud (especially the Freud of Beyond the PleasurePrinciple).5

Derrida’s theory of the partial lack of reason is, further, inextricably bound upwith his theory of the “trace,” so a word on the latter is necessary before weproceed. As spirit or mind is almost universally taken in Western metaphysics toconstitute the reason, foundation, or origin of the body, or matter, which as thebody or matter of language appears as the “letter” or “trace,” Derrida appliedhimself early on to the repeated demonstration of the reversibility of the hierar-chical opposition between spirit and letter, as primary, literal foundation, and assecondary, derivative figure, respectively. Drawing on the structuralist notion thatmeaning inheres between binary poles and not within each pole or term, eachextreme rather constituting the other, he argued that the “trace” (thus displaced inits sense) can always be shown to constitute the mind-event of which it is (to be)the memorial inscription. In the frame theory Derrida develops in “Parergon,” theanalogy that forms the conceptual point of departure linking this work to Derrida’searlier work on the letter is this: The frame is to the picture as writing is to thevoice of spirit. What seems to supervene belatedly as an accessory to the funda-mental thing, to fix and delimit it from without, turns out to constitute that thing,repeating itself within the thing in advance. The frame functions like the letter, orthe “trace.” Because this is the case, and because in addition a frame always tracesa limit or line around what it frames, and because furthermore in French the namefor a brush-”stroke” is “trait,” etymologically synonymous with “trace” (so thatpainting itself becomes a matter of “traces”), Derrida can write with some justi-fication that his treatise on Truth in Painting (in which “Parergon” appears and thenotion of frame plays a prominant role throughout) concerns essentially “thetrace” or “trait.” In the Introduction to that book, he speaks of “the essentialparasitizing which opens every system to its outside and divides the unity of theline [trait] which purports to mark its edges. This partition of the edge is perhapswhat is inscribed and occurs everywhere [se passe partout] in this book”(11, 7).And he underlines the claim that the trait or trace is the main focus of the book byelaborating:

5 Alan Bass, Interpretation and Difference: The Strangeness of Care (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2006),quotes Derrida (albeit without giving the source) as calling his work “an inconceivable union ofHeidegger and Freud” (xiii).

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This connection/trait [trait] between the letter, discourse, painting is perhaps all that happens in TheTruth in Painting (13; 8). [. . .] The common feature [trait] of these four [essays that comprise TheTruth in Painting] is perhaps the trait. Insofar as it is never common, nor even one, with and withoutitself. Its divisibility founds text, traces, and remains [. . .]

[. . .] the question would no longer be ‘What is a trait?’ or ‘What does a trait become?’ [. . .] but“How does the trait treat itself? Does it contract in its retreat?” A trait never appears, never itself,because it marks the difference between the forms or the contents of the appearing [. . .] It beginsby retrac(t)ing [se retirer] (16, 11).

What, then, does Derrida do with the third Critique? The best way of broaching apreliminary summary is to start with the two most common and equally (im)plau-sible and current caricatures of the relationship between deconstruction and aes-thetics. Either one decides that deconstruction is simply an anti-aestheticaldiscourse, opposed to the integrity of aesthetic experience and of the aestheticwork, for it focuses negatively (especially in the case of Paul de Man) onthe “aesthetic ideology,” generates complex theoretical, philological, andphilosophico-historical texts that are incompatible with the nontheoretical life-closeness or organicism of the arts, etc.6 Such a view pigeonholes deconstructionas a rationalism, as theoreticist, analytic, and critical. Or else, one argues thatdeconstruction is an aestheticism, affirming free play in place of serious reason-ing, insisting on homonymic and other verbal associations rather than on rigorouslogical development, privileging metaphorical over literal language, distancingitself from politics and history, and so on. Such a view privileges the antiration-alism in deconstruction, reducing it to a blind, blinding, and self-blinding play ofimages. (The first dismissal tends to be that of chagrined literary scholars orartists; the second that of impatient philosophers, although of course it is not amatter exclusively of professional commitments or deformations here.) But themere simultaneous existence of both points of view prompts one to wonder ifperhaps both are questionable, and to wonder if perhaps their combination wouldtake us further. In contrast to both of these positions, I argue that “traces” of theaesthetic remain in a displaced way in Derrida. More specifically, I argue, withrespect to Kant’s reflexive judgment, that Derrida negates, and yet also affirms andeven universalizes in a displaced form the interplay between images (or signifiers)and concepts (or signifieds) that Kant conceptualizes under that heading. First,Derrida negates or contests the autonomy of reflexive judgment, specifically in theform of the autonomy of aesthetic judgment, and he also contests or negates itscapacity to serve as a totalizing facultative synthesis of consciousness (as passage

6 I will not enter into Paul de Man’s work on the “aesthetic ideology” here, except to recall both thatit is not without further ado identifiable with Derrida’s work, and that on the other hand, in de Manalso it is not a question of getting rid of any relationship with aesthetic traditions whatsoever. See hisAesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1996).

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between the understanding and reason). Since the capacity of judgment to absorbwithin itself and to synthesize the other two faculties is a condition for itsautonomy (because otherwise it remains determined by them from without), thesecond negation still concerns the autonomy of judgment. And yet, Derrida alsoaffirms the interplay between the sensuous and the supersensuous, and indeed asa ubiquitous occurrence, but no longer as one in which harmony can be stressedas opposed to dissonance, or mutual disruption, and no longer as one that guar-antees or even promises the autonomy of a consciousness as subject of represen-tations.7 Such a universalizing displacement of the aesthetic resembles in somerespects the attempt to break down the wall between life and art that was under-taken by the various historical avant-gardes, and it is no doubt influenced by theirwork, but it remains distinct from them in its circumspection with respect tometaphysical utopianism and in its continuing (if extremely ambivalent) adher-ence to a specifically “philosophical” discursive modality.8

TRACING THE LINES BETWEEN OPPOSED TERMS

The strategy guiding the specifics of Derrida’s approach to Kant’s aestheticscan be summarized most generally as the questioning of binary oppositionsfrom a standpoint that, however, shares with Kant’s sensibility a hostility toirrationalistic monism and a desire to maximize the subtlety of its discrimina-tions. Derrida examines a series of oppositions crucial to the Kantian architec-tonic. Derrida pursues the limits of Kantian formalism, but without referringto a substance or content that would be preferable to form, as his interest israther in the “trait,” which as we saw “marks the difference between the formsor the contents of the appearing” (16, 11). In the case of each opposition, then,he tries to show how the opposed terms are inscribed in one another such thateach disrupts the meaningful unity of the other, rather than either being separatefrom it or forming an unbroken whole with it. Detachment and attachment aremutually entangled. Derrida’s project is to trace from a place ambiguouslyinside and outside of Kant’s text the way in which that text, at once actively andpassively and in neither voice, lets itself be opened onto what it also wants toexclude.

As I indicated, the oppositions Derrida seeks to question fall under two head-ings. On the one hand, there are those that set up aesthetic judgment in its

7 Since Kant’s positioning of the reflexive judgment between reason and understanding does implythat it is balanced between spontaneity and passivity, an implication at odds with the supposedautonomy and disinterestedness of aesthetic judgment, it is as if Derrida were playing the formerimplication off against the latter.

8 Cf. Peter Bürger, Theorie der Avant-garde (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974).


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autonomy, and on the other hand those that organize the mediation betweenaesthetic judgment and the opposite form of reflexive judgment, the teleology, andbeyond this between subjectivity and objectivity, to provide the homogeneity ofreflexive judgment, the foundation of consciousness as theoretico-practical unity.For in the faculty of judgment it is a question of the “Mittelglied,” the “centralmember,” between practical reason and theoretical understanding, which is “aseparable part” insofar as it is “neither theoretical nor practical,” but is a “non-particular, nondetachable part, since it forms the articulation between two others,”insofar as it is “both theoretical and practical” (45, 38).

The oppositions that constitute the autonomy of aesthetic judgment include,above all, the distinction between pure and impure judgments (which turns aroundthe opposition between form and sensuous matter); and the distinction betweenfree and adherent beauty (which turns around the opposition between the absenceand presence of a concept of the object in the sense of its purpose, or what it issupposed to be, its perfection or Vollkommenheit).9

As for the second group, of the oppositions Derrida questions that concern thepassage between the beautiful work and (the teleology of) nature, as the subjectiveand objective forms of reflexive judgment, respectively, I will discuss those thatorganize Kant’s views on the metaphysics of genius.

Before sketching in greater detail how Derrida questions the main oppositionsat stake in these nodal points of Kant’s third Critique, it is necessary (in ordernot to efface entirely the polyvalence of Derrida’s discussion) to indicate brieflytwo other principal extra-aesthetic points of theoretical/textual reference that hebrings to bear on his reading of Kant, namely Freudian–Lacanian psychoana-lytic perspectives and the Heideggerian thought of Being. Concerning theformer, in a historicizing gesture, Derrida does not just question Kant’s formal-ist rationalism and logocentrism, but also underlines the phallocentrism andoral-aural fetishism of Kant’s theory of aesthetic experience. These observationssituate Kant in a history of gender ideology, and link such ideology with thehistory of metaphysics. But beyond this—on a level that is more “properly”philosophical—they indicate that Kant’s aspiring transcendental philosophy isempirically affected by a certain masculinist imaginary rooted in the body poli-tic(s) of its age. Yet Derrida is not just applying psychoanalysis here. Rather, inaccordance with a more extended deconstruction of the classical psychoanalyticopposition between perversion and neurosis that he carries out in Glas and

9 Within the chapter entitled “Le Parergon” in Truth in Painting, the subsections entitled “le parergon”and “le sans de la coupure pure” obscure perhaps the fact that they concern these, the two mainaspects of the aesthetic judgment, respectively. But Derrida’s emphasis on the centrality of marginalexamples and figural formulations should not induce us to overlook the aspect of systematicityorganizing his partially skeptical approach to Kant’s residual dogmatism.

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elsewhere, Derrida is arguing that, in this text, the “perverse” or fetishisticdenial of castration coincides with (and is unsettled by) its “neurotic” assump-tion, in that the establishment of the Mittelglied, whether as separate piece or assynthetic totalization, is always accompanied by its suspension, division, mul-tiplication, and so on.

Concerning Heideggerian ontology, and staying within the limits of the twoessays on Kant’s aesthetics, it is only necessary to point out here that the figure ofthe trait as framing delimitation comes to replace or supplement HeideggerianBeing, for example in the formulations, “there is frame, but the frame does notexist” (93, 81), and “there is some [cise, but] the cise of this broaching does notexist” (166, 145). If nothing exists without being enframed by a constitutivedetermination of its limits, then Being is nothing other than framing. Being istendentially reduced to, or at least supplemented by, writing, as the disseminationof the phallic logos. Derrida reads Heideggerian Being and Freudian castration/phallicization into or in the figures of framing and delimitation that he discoversin the Kantian text. How, then, does Derrida situate and/or discover (the trace of)this writing at the displaced center of the Kantian critique of aesthetic judgment?

BETWEEN THE WORK AND ITS CHARMS:THE PARERGON (OR “BY-WORK”)

Generally considered one of the first proponents of modern “autonomous” art,Kant places art’s autonomy above all in the experience of the beautiful as thedisinterested pleasure taken in a formal object that is half-perceived (or imagined)and half-understood (or conceptualized) as a purposiveness that is lacking in anyspecific purpose or end. Given that autonomy must always be achieved by someoperation of delimiting oneself against the outside, or the non-self, that takes theform of a marking or demarcation, it is clear that Derrida will look for the themeof the trait in Kant’s discussion of the limits of aesthetic autonomy. But aestheticautonomy requires detachment from both sensuous materiality and conceptualideality.

The first place Derrida intervenes—where he discovers the infamous“parergon”—is in a passage where Kant is distinguishing between the formalqualities of the work and its sensuous materiality, that is, where he is defining thedividing line between aesthesis and the sensuous experience of the agreeable. Buthere, in the place of that dividing line, Derrida discovers an ambiguous somethingthat must situate itself inside the outside and outside the inside, which Kant callsthe “by-work” of ornamentation. At this juncture, Kant has excluded “charms”(Reiz) as related to feeling, and determined that the proper object (eigentlichenGegenstand) of the pure judgment of taste is constituted in the pictorial arts by thedrawing (Zeichnung), not the charms of color, and in the arts of play by the


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composition (Komposition), not the charms of sounds. He then qualifies thisexclusion, however, by allowing—already problematically—that such charms canplay an auxiliary role, highlighting these formal traits, as well as enlivening thepresentation and holding the perceiver’s attention (142, 110–11). And now exac-erbating this risk, he goes still further to consider “ornamentation:”

Even what one calls ornament (Zieraten) (parerga), that is that which does not belong inwardly asan element to the entire representation of the object, but only externally as an addition (Zutat) andaugments the pleasure of taste, does this however also only through its form: as in frames ofpaintings, or draperies on statues, or rows of columns around magnificent buildings (Prachtge-bäude). If the ornament does not consist itself in beautiful form, if it has been brought there, like thegolden frame, only in order to recommend the painting to agreement (Beifall) through its charm:then it is called decoration [or jewelry] (Schmuck) and interrupts authentic beauty (tut der echtenSchönheit abbruch) (142, 110–11).

For Kant, such parerga appear as an exceptional case, one that can be preventedfrom endangering the integrity of the work, if only they are excluded from theaesthetic representation unless they are themselves formally beautiful. But in along analysis, Derrida suggests that parerga are actually always involved asinvasive supplements of any work along one or another edge. He does so, in part,by questioning the validity and stability of Kant’s examples. To what extent isclothing—or some other decoration—separable from the body it covers andreveals? “We think we know what properly belongs or does not belong to thehuman body, what is detached or not detached from it—even though the parergonis precisely an ill-detachable detachment” (67, 59). As for columns around abuilding, why are they not integral parts of the building in its design? And on theother hand, if they are outside the building, then to what extent can one say thatthey still belong to it? Yet manifestly, it is impossible to determine whether theyare on the inside or the outside of the building. Concerning frames, are they notparadoxically at once in principle necessary to the integrity of the images theyenclose and in principle destructive of this integrity? Upon a little “reflection,” itseems that they induce an endless self-displacement of the edge, as soon as theyare constituted to establish that edge:

The parergon stands out [se détache] both from the ergon (the work) and from the milieu [. . .] Butit does not stand out in the same way as the work. [. . .] the parergonal frame stands out against twogrounds [fonds], but with respect to each of those two grounds, it merges [se fond] into the other.With respect to the work which can serve as a ground for it, it merges into the wall, and then,gradually, into the general text. With respect to the background which the general text is, it mergesinto the work which stands out against the general background. There is always a form on a ground,but the parergon is a form which has as its traditional determination not that it stands out but thatit disappears, buries itself, effaces itself, melts away at the moment it deploys its greatest energy(71, 61).

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In this way, Derrida argues for the necessity and infinite displaceability of framinglimits as parerga for all works, understanding “framing” in a sense that extendsfrom the most literal to the most figural or derivative, including the “framing” ofany interpretive or theoretical understanding. Further, Derrida emphasizes in hisanalysis here that the parergon always answers to an internal lack in the work, alack that it supplants, fills in, and repeats by displacement. The point is simple butimportant: The work always lacks internally its own external limit. The limitbelongs to it as what it always lacks. This means, on the one hand, that an“intrinsic” or “immanent” criticism or appreciation of works is not possible, buton the other hand, that the necessity of historicist or conceptual contextualism isendless, which relativizes any given contextualization. The context, as the fulfill-ment of the lack of the work, is always still lacking. As Kant was interested inevading or overcoming the impossible choice between rationalism and empiri-cism, so indeed is Derrida, as he repeatedly indicates, but what comes between thetwo in Derrida is not so much the structure of transcendental idealism (which onemight see as a fetishistic disavowal of the loss of the Ding an sich in the form ofits acknowledgment) but the trace, here in the formless form of the parergonalframe:10

the frame [. . .] is the decisive structure of what is at stake, at the invisible limit to (between) theinteriority of meaning (put under shelter by the whole hermeneuticist, semioticist, phenomenologi-calist, and formalist tradition) and (to) all the empiricisms of the extrinsic which, incapable of eitherseeing or reading, miss the question completely (71, 61).

Having established the conceptual figure of the parergon, both as it appears in thethird Critique and as it appears explicitly in Religion within the Limits of ReasonAlone, Derrida develops it further directly in ways too numerous for me to retracehere. Let me note in passing, however, that these include an important discussionof the very structure of the “analytic of the beautiful,” within which the passage onthe parergon appears (§14), as a parergon. While the structure of the “analytic ofthe beautiful” is based on the “analytic of concepts” from the first Critique, it ishere being applied to an aesthetic judgment that is not conceptual in character.11

Hence, it is an “inappropriate” imposition of a model taken from the outside ofthat object, namely aesthesis as nonconceptual, to constitute that object preciselyas nonconceptual.

10 Cf. Hägglund on the “quasi-transcendental” or “ultratranscendental” character of Derrida’s theoryof the “trace,” 19, 27ff, passim.

11 “the whole frame of the analytic of the beautiful functions, with respect to that the content orinternal structure of which is to be determined, like a parergon [. . .] neither simply internal norsimply external [. . .]” (83, 71).


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BETWEEN THE WORK AND ITS END: THE CUT AND ITS LACK

We have so far considered how Derrida questions the autonomy of the aestheticin relation to sensuous materiality. Let us now move on to the next Kantian binaryopposition that Derrida questions with a view to seeing what happens on themargin between the terms where they meet and diverge. It is now a matter of theother side of the aesthetic experience in Kant—the conceptual sphere encom-passed in ends, or purposes per se. For the beautiful is characterized, according tothe third moment or relation, as purposiveness without purpose. Derrida exploresthis determination under the heading of the “sans de la coupure pure,” literally butreductively translatable as the “without of the pure cut.” Let me unpack some ofthe associations implied by this section heading first, then outline Derrida’sexplicit argumentation on this point, granting that Derrida would not subscribe—and with strong justification—to the strict separability of these two levels, thelevels of rhetoric or literature and philosophy.

The main purposive ambiguity of “the without of the pure cut” is that it meansboth that the work is cut off from purposive conceptuality and that it is not (i.e.,that the cut does not take place). In addition, since “sans” is roughly homonymouswith “sens,” the implication is that the work is connected with the sensuous and/orthe supersensuous, whereas if there is no concept, the supersensuous should notplay a role here (except that in the interplay between imagination and understand-ing, it must). Further, since “sans” is homonymous also with “sang,” as the Englishtranslators Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod note (83, n21), Derrida is implyingthat aesthetic contemplation cannot be excluded from the violence of interested-ness as Kant would like. And finally, the image of a bloody cut—especially in lightof the quotation from Francis Ponge that Derrida places as epigram over thissection, which speaks of heads of pricks and retroversion of the uterus in connec-tion with fading tulips and the movement beyond formal beauty—is meant toconnect the aesthetic with the problematics of castration and dismemberment, andto evoke specifically the phallic connotations of reflexive judgment as the “middlemember” (Mittelglied) that fills the void between understanding and reason. Butenough on the section heading. What does Derrida argue?

The opposition Derrida is questioning here, as I have indicated, is that betweenwhat Kant here calls “free beauty,” as beauty properly so-called, which has norelation to a given purpose, and “adherent beauty,” which is not actually beauty atall, namely the linkage of beauty with a determinate purpose in the representationor object. The two main examples on which Derrida fastens in order to questionthe opposition are those of the tulip and an excavated tool that we do not findbeautiful. Acknowledging a potential counterargument, Kant grants someonemight argue that such a tool is indistinguishable from a beautiful tulip because thetool’s purpose is not immediately discernible on the basis of its form. This

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imaginary interlocutor then asks rhetorically if there is any difference betweenpurposiveness here and purposiveness in what we do find beautiful, since in bothcases the purpose itself is not explicitly presented. But Kant answers the objectionby insisting that we posit that the tool was designed with a purpose in mind,whereas in the case of the tulip, we experience its beauty purely subjectivelywithout any sense of a natural teleology underlying its production. Indeed, Kantgoes so far as to say here that anything we recognize as a Kunstwerk (155, 120),in the sense of a product of human intentionality, is an instance of adherentbeauty—that is, not really beauty at all. This argument makes particularly pressingthe construction of beautiful art (or fine art) as the art of genius, a naturalizationof beauty that Derrida will likewise problematize in more detail in “Economime-sis.” I come back to this in a moment.

So how does Derrida question the opposition between free and adherent beauty,or the border between art and the conceptually driven world of final causality, asthey are exempified by the living tulip and the dead, excavated tool, the border orframing trait between living nature inflected as feminine and the dead artificialityconnoted masculine? Derrida’s argument here is driven essentially by his sus-tained attention to the paradoxical notion of “purposiveness without purpose.”Since purposiveness implies the presence of purpose, however deferred or indi-rect, he suggests that one is evidently dealing in beauty with a simultaneouspresence and absence of the purpose. This is why Derrida insists on the paradoxi-cal “sans” as crucial to beauty. The trace of the absent end (purposiveness)includes it as absent presence in the work. Conversely, the presence of the end inadherent beauty is accompanied there by its absence, in that the end remainsseparable from, and in principle separate from—and as such lost to—the repre-sentation of the thing in the absence of its conceptual essence or defined perfec-tion. The connection that intervenes between the thing and its concept isparergonal.

The relation between free and adherent beauty, Derrida argues, is thus “chias-tic:” Free beauty is complete (lacking in nothing) because it is incomplete (lackingan end), while adherent beauty is incomplete (needing its end to be what it is, andinsufficient as beauty) because it is complete (still connected to its end). Free andadherent beauty verge upon and interfere with each other as complete and incom-plete because the disjunction between complete and incomplete is completelyincomplete (107, 94).

Finally, Derrida formulates this undecidability in terms of the undecidability ofa (non)phallic dynamic: To be castrated is not to be without relation to the phallicorder; and to assume phallic power neurotically is to be castrated, to identify witha fetish that denies castration. There is no place that is proper to the phallus: “Theseed wanders. What is beautiful is dissemination, the pure cut without negativity,a sans without negativity and without signification. [. . .] The negativity is


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significant. [. . .] It is a signifier. The without-goal, the without-why of the tulip isnot significant, is not a signifier, not even a signifier of lack. At least insofar as thetulip is beautiful, this tulip.” (108, 95) This disseminative wandering entails inDerrida’s reading that the Kantian aesthetic instance wanders beyond its ownlimits, spreads its contagious wandering throughout the sphere of the signifier orthe world of conceptual ends and sensuous images as their “sans”/“sens.” In otherwords, there is a radical purposelessness that inheres in all purposive communi-cation, while at the same time no communication is merely purposeless. Ground-lessness and grounding are inseparable.

THE DIVINE MOUTH OF HUMAN GENIUS, OR THE MITTELGLIED ASTOTALITY OF ART AND NATURE

Having questioned the stability of the distinction between free and adherentbeauty, as a distinction between the presence and absence of concepts of purposesin the aesthetic object/experience, Derrida remains confronted—although henever quite puts it this way—with an important tension in Kant. The tension is thatbetween the claim that the “artwork,” because it contains purposes, is necessarilythe product of human purposive intentionality, and as such incompatible withbeauty, and the claim that the “artwork,” as a work of “fine” or “beautiful” art, canindeed become an occasion for aesthetic reflexion, that is beauty. In order toresolve this tension, Kant mobilizes the Genie-ästhetik commonly embraced in hisperiod.12 According to Kant’s formulation, the genius creates without knowingwhat he is doing, and nature “gives the rule to art” in that the artist, imitatingnatura naturans, becomes the conduit for nature’s own purposiveness. In turn, inthe “Critique of teleological judgement,” nature’s purposiveness is reduced to theregulative principle that allows us analogically to project human intentionality intonature for the sake of understanding the organic as a phenomenon in which partsand whole serve as means for each other qua ends. Despite this turn, in the“Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,” or rather because of it, the purposiveness in thework of art can be shorn of its human purposes, to be replaced only (subsequently)by the ultimate purpose of creation: the realization of the human as a realm ofends. The naturalization of the artistic work, then, a dimension that still power-fully links Kant to European irrationalism and romanticism, enables him to saveart, for the sake of aesthesis, from its inscription in means-ends instrumentalrationality. The “autonomy of art”—or aesthetic art—is established or reestab-lished here, paradoxically, through the naturalization of art, its reduction to whatis outside of itself, but in turn, nature will be reinscribed into art through regulative

12 Although he also responds critically to the irrationalist version of the Genius-cult by restricting theclaims of genius to specifically aesthetic productivity.

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teleology. From this perspective, the autonomous function of aesthesis, or theMittelglied of reflexive judgment, is no longer a detached piece mediating some-where between the understanding and reason, but the essential fusion of these twofaculties, of nature as the totality of the sensuous object, and reason as thesupersensuous mind of man. The two extremes of the system are enclosed togetherin this specular interplay of man and nature in the mirror of genius. What doesDerrida have to say about these structures within the third Critique?

It is in the essay entitled “Economimesis,” an offshoot of the “Parergon”reading, that Derrida develops an extended discussion of this aspect of Kant’sthought about the aesthetic. The principal opposition concerned is that betweenfree, or liberal art, and the crafts (Handwerk), which Kant characterizes as “mer-cenary,” “salarial,” or “remunerated” arts—Lohnkunst. The former are free, thelatter compelled; the former are offered without ulterior purpose, the latter arepresented in exchange for some benefit (i.e., their production serves an end).Rather than being pure gift, they enter into an economy of exchange.13 Analo-gously, beautiful art has to be art of genius because if not, its freedom is bound byrules, and its production is driven by the purpose of concretely realizing suchrules.

In response to this opposition between free and mercenary art, and the meta-physics of genius it supports, Derrida’s emphasis is twofold. First, he stresses thatthrough the aesthetics of genius, Kant shores up the problematic Aristoteliantradition of the humanity of the human as a mimetic being raised above the levelof animality.14 Second, he suggests that this separation can be shown to fail in twodifferent ways. First, the opposition between free and unfree that organizes thehuman privilege over material nature is destabilized by the position of mimesis onboth sides of the inequality. And second, the oral sphere of spiritual and tastefulgenius will be undermined in its purity, invaded by the disgusting. I will take eachof these points in turn.

Concerning the opposition between free and mercenary arts, Derrida arguesthat when the free arts are associated with the genius as what avoids exchange,including the exchange of mimetic representation, the entire dimension ofunfreedom enters surreptitiously on a different, if “higher” level. If free art is freebecause it distances itself from mimesis (as the slavish exchange of a representa-tion for a determinate presence), its genial imitation of the productivity of nature

13 On the nonharmonious interpenetration of gift and exchange, see Jacques Derrida, Donner le temps.I. La fausee monnaie (Paris: Galilée, 1991), in English as Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, transl.Peggy Kamuf (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1992). See the excellent commentary inHägglund, 36–9.

14 For Derrida’s later pursuit of this question, see L’animal que donc je suis (Paris: Galilée, 2006), inEnglish as The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (NewYork:Fordham UP, 2008).


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reintroduces enslavement to mimesis (and to mimetic exchange) at the verymoment when the dictation of nature is supposed to assure the genius of itsfreedom (62, 67 ff; 6, 9 ff).15

Concerning the second point, the metaphors of orality, genius as supplementedby taste is condensed in the bodily figure of the mouth (and the implied ear), in thespeaking-to-oneself-and-listening-to-oneself-speaking that Derrida reads in thesubordination of the aesthetic to discursive metaphors. This “exemplorality” (73,13) of the Kantian aesthetic—as evidenced, for example in the ultimate privilegeKant grants poetry over all the other arts—represents for Derrida an empiricallimit—one of two bodily figures—of the Kantian critique of taste. Together withthe phallic imagery of castration and erection, the Kantian discourse privilegesimagery of the mouth (as associated with the ear and hearing). This discourse is,thus, overdetermined by phallogocentrism. The phallogocentric privilege is sup-posed to ensure that the genial imitation of nature’s productivity remains “pure”of ulterior motives. But by pressing this strangely familiar combination of oral andphallic empirical-imaginary values into the service of the organization of a tran-scendental philosophical discourse, Kant compromises precisely the “purity” ofthat discourse.

Exactly at the site of this culminating, privileged spiritual metaphor of themouth, the materiality of the body enters Kant’s discourse. After entering thisdiscourse by the mouth, so to speak, it then reemerges from Kant’s mouth as thename for what the aesthetic discourse cannot swallow: Ekel. And as I will show,the reference is ultimately to nothing less extensive than sensuous experience ingeneral. But we must begin with the disgusting as disruptive of all aestheticpleasure in art: “Only one kind of ugliness cannot be represented in a wayadequate to nature without destroying all aesthetic satisfaction, hence beauty inart, namely, that which arouses Ekel (disgust, nausea),” (§48, On the Relation ofGenius to Taste, 247, 190).16 The nauseating, which cannot be represented in anaesthetic manner, is the literally and figurally distasteful, as Derrida puts it “the(internal and external) border which traces its limit and the frame of its parergon[. . .] what [. . .] does not allow itself to be transformed into oral auto-affection”(87, 21). The disgusting is what exceeds the system of autonomy and theautonomy of the system to the degree that, as Kant puts it, “in this strange

15 See the elaboration in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, L’imitation des modernes (Paris: Galilée, 1986),which pursues some of the aporias that arose when modernity, and especially German culturalmodernity, articulated itself around the double bind of an imitation of a non-imitative naturalorigin.

16 As if to confirm the term’s importance, by the way, the recent translation of the third Critique byPaul Guyer and Eric Matthews effaces its most obvious meaning by translating it systematically as“loathing.”

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sensation [of nausea] resting on sheer imagination, the object is represented asif it were imposing the enjoyment which we are nevertheless forcibly resisting”such that “the artistic representation of the object is no longer distinguished inour sensation itself from the nature of the object itself” (248, 190). The nau-seating object is the nonrepresentable because its representation is immediatelya presence, as a forcing to enjoy, which is to say a forcing onto the level ofexcessive presence—jouissance or Genuß—beyond and despite representation.For this is what it means to force enjoyment: The thing destroys its ownrepresentation.17

But the disgusting is not merely the figure for a particular phenomenon thatwould remain on the outside of taste such as vomit, or the culminating scene ofPink Flamingos. Rather, it inheres in taste as the smell on which taste depends. AsDerrida puts it: “The chemistry of smell exceeds the tautology of taste/disgust”(92, 25).18 First, smell is the supplement of taste: “He who is deficient in the senseof smell is likewise weak in taste” (quoted from the Anthropology in “Economi-mesis,” 91, 23). The latter sense is necessary to the former. And while both tasteand smell are “more subjective than objective,” and tend to overwhelm the subject,“smell is, so to speak, taste at a distance, and other people are forced to share inthe enjoyment whether they want to or not. Hence, by interfering with individualfreedom, smell is less sociable than taste” (92, 25).19 Smell, then, forces one toenjoy—Kant defines Genuß as innigste Einnehmung or “the most intimate takinginto ourselves” (Anthropology, 451, 269)—an indeterminable (unrepresentable)object that has already entered one’s body from an alien beyond, exactly as does

17 The representation of the nauseating is nauseating, and it overwhelms representation as does thenauseating itself, forcing us to “enjoy,” which in this case means at the limit “to vomit”—to rejectenjoyment on the level of enjoyment itself, to enjoy (in) the rejection of enjoyment, against ourwill not to enjoy its rejection by replacing its forcing of rejection with representation. But in whatsense is the nauseating, or vomit, as the concept of the “telos” or perfection of the nauseating, asDerrida maintains, “a parergon of the third Critique considered as a general synthesis of tran-scendental idealism” (88, 21)? As what forces enjoyment, “vomit” is a name for what preventsthe suspension of enjoyment that is necessary to disinterested pleasure. Vomit is a name forexcessive enjoyment, enjoyment as excess and emptying. Derrida goes on to say that “the literallydisgusting is maintained, as security, in place of the worse [. . .] in place of the replacement thathas no proper place, no proper trajectory, no circular and economical return. In place of pros-thesis” (91, 23). The disgusting is a name for irrecoverable and unmournable loss, which is whyit appears as a loss of control over enjoyment in Kant’s discourse of taste as the foundation ofsubjective autonomy.

18 While Derrida does not actually clarify as well as he might the complete textual basis for this claimtoward the very end of “Economimesis,” the answer is in the sections from the Anthropologyconcerning the five senses that Derrida is discussing.

19 Because it is taste at a distance, smell actually comes closer to us than taste, into the lungs, even ifit is farther from the (now indeterminate) object-source.


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the nauseating.20 Smell proliferates and forces an enjoyment that is not pleasure.As Kant complains, smell is “the most ungrateful and also seems to be the mostdispensable” (Anthropology, 453, 270) organ sense, one that there’s no point incultivating because “there are more nauseating objects than pleasant ones [mehrGegenstände des Ekels als der Annehmlichkeit] [. . .] and the enjoyment comingfrom the sense of smell can also only always be fleeting and transient if it shouldgive pleasure (vergnügen)” (453, 270). Since smell is inseparable from taste, andsmell tends toward nauseation, the nauseating too is inseparable from taste, as itsinternal outer limit. But since taste, at least in its inner unity with its objectivemirror image teleology (or as genius), is the foundation of the unity and the unityof the foundation of consciousness, the invasion of the autonomy of taste by theheteronomy of scent qua disgusting undermines the autonomy (or self-affection)and self-sameness of the subject tout court.

Still further, disgust goes beyond smell to affect or predicate itself of all matterof sensation as such, thereby endangering the arts with the artificiality of materi-ality. This extension of nausea occurs when the motif of disgust reappears, strik-ingly, in the section of the Critique of Judgment on the combination of the arts(§52). Here, Kant speaks of “sensation,” in general, as leading to disgust. Spe-cifically, he says this in the context of repeating that the “essential” thing in“beautiful art” is form, which disposes the spirit to ideas, not

the matter of sensation (the charm or the emotion), where it is aimed merely at enjoyment, whichleaves behind it nothing in the idea, and makes the spirit dull, the object by and by loathsome [hereagain the translators avoid ‘disgust’ and transform it simply into ‘loathing’], and the mind, becauseit is aware that its disposition is contrapurposive in the judgement of reason, dissatisfied with itselfand moody [nicht in der Materie der Empfindug (dem Reize oder der Rührung), wo es bloß aufGenuß angelegt ist, welcher nichts in der Idee zurückläßt, den Geist stumpf, den Gegenstand nachund nach anekelnd, und das Gemüt, durch das Bewußtsein seiner im Urteile der Vernunft zweck-widrigen Stimmung, mit sich selbst unzufrieden und launisch macht] (264–5, 203).

And this, in turn, always occurs when the fine arts are not brought “nah oder fern”into relation with “moral ideas, which alone are attended by an independentpleasure” [ein selbständiges Wohlgefallen] (265, 203). Without this connectionwith moral ideas, the fine arts serve “distraction” (Zerstreuung), which is addic-tive, because one needs more and more of it the more one feels bad aboutindulging in it. Natural beauties are connected more readily with moral ideas, inturn, the implication being that arts tend toward distraction and sensation, false

20 Immanuel Kant, “Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht,” in Werkausgabe XII, ed. WilhelmWeischedel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979) 395–690. In English as Anthropology from aPragmatic Point of View, trans. Robert B. Louden, in Immanuel Kant, Anthropology, History, andEducation, ed. Günter Zöller and Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007) 227–429.

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needs, artificiality, etc. In short, not only is smell, as the basis of taste, in generaldisgusting, but so is all matter of sensation, all “charm or emotion” which puts theimagination, an intuitive faculty at the core of genius qua art production, in dangerof ruining beauty by leading to disgust and to distraction, thereby turning thenatural source of genius to its ruin in an art of artificiality, an artificial art. Thebeautiful becomes disgustingly artificial to the degree that it remains in contactwith the sensuous.

But even beyond sense as the foretaste of the disgusting, Derrida argues, whatis “foreclosed” is not so much what makes one want to vomit—because such afigure still clings to the privilege of orality—but the possible

vicariousness of vomit [. . .] its replacement by anything else—by some other unrepresentable,unnameable, unintelligible, insensible, unassimilable, obscene other which forces enjoyment andwhose irrepressible violence would undo the hierarchizing authority of logocentric analogy—itspower of identification (92, 25).

In other words, what the Kantian critical system includes by exclusion is thepossibility that this being-forced-to-enjoy, for which nausea disgust is a synecdo-che, is not reducible to the sphere of one chemical sense, but affects all the senses,including the inner sense, and even thought itself, as the essence of Kantianspontaneity, to the point of threatening the very Vitalempfindung (Anthropology,446, 265).

Indeed, Kant names one determinate analogous replacement of the literallydisgusting, the one that concerns precisely the “spiritual enjoyment” (Geistes-genuß) of “communication of thought.” When it is “forced upon us,” as in “theconstant repetition of supposedly amusing or witty quips” (die Wiederholungimmer einerlei witzig oder lustig sein sollender Einfälle), we find it “widerlich,”and this we also call “nausea.” (Anthropology, 451, 269). But such nauseatingEinfälle—which we could here translate as “gags,” and through the propagation ofwhich Derrida himself consciously and constantly provoked his readership (e.g.,in the phrase “le sans de la coupure pure”)—these gags are only one determinateand still orally linguistically focused version of the disruption of autonomy towhich Derrida is alluding under the heading of “vomit.” The limit of taste withwhich Derrida is concerned is the necessary and continuous nonsovereignty of thesubject, its immanent and constitutive exposure to a world of excess and lackbeyond its control, its interruption by and dispersion across illimitable (un)limi-tation, signaled here in Kant by the reemergence of inimical materiality in oppo-sition to the spiritual fusion of genial aesthesis.21

21 Cf. Hägglund on “infinite finitude” in Derrida, 46 passim.


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CONCLUSION

Derrida negates the detached autonomy of the aesthetic sphere by placing indoubt the dividing lines between aesthetic experience and both sensuous materi-ality and conceptual purposes (or purposive concepts). He also negates the smoothsynthesis in the aesthetic (as genius) of the human and natural realms, subject andobject, by arguing that what Kant alternately calls the natural other and theartificial other, materiality, invades and disrupts spiritual humanity from within, inthe figure of the nauseating, which forces enjoyment and disrupts representation.He argues, therefore, that the Mittelglied of reflexive judgment exists neitherseparately nor fused with (and as the fusion of) the positing of practical reason andspeculative objective knowledge.

At the same time but on two different conceptual registers, Derrida links theKantian problematic with the Freudian and Heideggerian ones. Questioning theFreudian–Lacanian opposition between neurotic repression and perverse dis-avowal, this negative demonstration extends his polemical argument that theassumption of the phallus and of castration, here as the existence of the separatefiller of the abyss, is not incompatible with its disavowal, the disappearance of theabyss itself, and that neither position is sustainable because each is undone by itsopposite. In relation to Heidegger’s thinking of Being, here replaced by theframing trait, Derrida suggests in these texts that something like Being reappearsin Kant’s third Critique as parergonality.

What traces of the aesthetic remain, then, or what is positively retained ofKantian aesthetic reflexion? As I have tried to indicate, there remains, for Derrida,of Kant’s “harmonious agreement of imagination and understanding,” the unde-cidable, self-disruptive, and partially dissonant interplay between form andcontent, sensuality (or referentiality), and meaning (signification), as constantlyopened by the “trait”—the (non)Being of inscription—which is always dividing(itself) into strewn distribution or dissemination. But this undecidable interplay isnot limited to a specific sphere of autonomous existence that could be isolatedfrom discourses of knowledge or ethical obligation. Unlimited aesthesis, or exthe-sis as one might say, in bad taste and as a gag, is not merely disinterested. It alwaysremains bound up with materiality and spiritual meaning, even if the two cannotbe decisively distinguished in a given instance of inscription. The exthetic as theauto-heteronomy of dissemination is the play of the trait, of which Derrida writesthat there is some, although it does not exist as such.

University of Oregon

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Aesthetics in Deconstruction