The Most Sublime of All Laws. The Strange Resurgence of a Kantian Motif in Contemporary Image Politics

The Most Sublime of All Laws: The Strange Resurgence of a Kantian Motif in ContemporaryImage PoliticsAuthor(s): Emmanuel AlloaSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 41, No. 2 (Winter 2015), pp. 367-389Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/679080 .

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The Most Sublime of All Laws: The StrangeResurgence of a Kantian Motif in ContemporaryImage Politics

Emmanuel Alloa

1. Forbidden Representation“Thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven image” (Exod. 20:4). The

second commandment from the Tables of Law, referred to in Exodus, isquoted prominently by Immanuel Kant, but not, as one might imagine, inhis Critique of Religion; the reference to the biblical commandment isfound in the Critique of the Power of Judgment.1 While in the Critique ofReligion Kant argues against any kind of commandment imposed by reli-gion or any other revealed faith,2 here, in the context of a discussion of theconcept of the sublime, he surprisingly quotes the second of the Mosaiccommandments, presenting it as the consummate exemplification of whatthe sublime purportedly is. Having concluded his analytics of the sublime,Kant adds a “General Remark” which reads as follows: “Perhaps there is nomore sublime passage in the Jewish Book of the Law than the command-

This text was first presented in the framework of the IKKM lectures at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar in November 2012.

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.1. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, in The Cambridge Edition of the

Works of Immanuel Kant, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, ed. Guyer (Cambridge, 2000),p. 156, hereafter abbreviated CPJ; see Kant, “Allgemeine Anmerkung zur Exposition derästhetischen reflektierenden Urteile,” Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790), Werke, ed. WilhelmWeischedel, 6 vols. (Wiesbaden, 1956–64), 5:274 (A 123, B 124).

2. See Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, trans. George di Giovanni, inReligion and Rational Theology, trans. and ed. Allen Wood and Di Giovanni (Cambridge, 1996),hereafter abbreviated R; see Kant, Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blo�en Vernunft(Königsberg, 1793).

Critical Inquiry 41 (Winter 2015)

© 2015 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/15/4102-0001$10.00. All rights reserved.

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ment ‘Thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven image’” (CPJ, p. 156).The trope of the unrepresentable—philosophically formulated in a contextwhere the aesthetical shifts towards the ethical— and its characteristicmoralization of the aesthetic experienced an unparalleled renaissancein the late twentieth century. In the wake of the experiences of massdestruction and particularly of genocidal extermination, the moral ar-gument concerning the prohibition of representation achieved a com-pletely new form of authority—secular but no less constraining.

Although other traumatic events of the twentieth century have alsogiven rise to certain rhetorics of unrepresentability, it is beyond doubt thatthe experience of the Holocaust established unrepresentability as an irre-vocable element of public discourse. While Pablo Picasso’s Guernica canstill be regarded as a forceful depiction of the tragic shelling of the Basquetown of Guernica by the German air force, one would be hard pressed tofind an artwork that is generally taken to represent the entirety of theShoah. While the Nazi perpetrators invoked a—needless to say, pro-foundly perverted—Kantian ethics to justify their deeds, and Adolf Eich-mann even gave a definition of the categorical imperative during his trial inJerusalem,3 Kant’s argument for the negative sublime and a secular versionof the unrepresentable was now called upon. At present, the tropes of the

3. This argument has been repeated often. See prominently Joshua Halberstam, “FromKant to Auschwitz,” Social Theory and Practice 14 (Spring 1988): 41–54. However, the oft-invoked Eichmann is not a good example of Nazi officials blindly claiming Kantianjustification. As Hannah Arendt relates in Eichmann in Jerusalem, at his trial in 1961, he indeedaffirmed that he had read Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and provided a fairly accuratedefinition of the categorical imperative in front of the judges. But Eichmann then proceeded

to explain that from the moment he was charged with carrying out the Final Solution hehad ceased to live according to Kantian principles, that he had known it, and that he hadconsoled himself with the thought that he no longer “was master of his own deeds,” that hewas unable “to change anything.” What he failed to point out in court was that . . . he hadnot simply dismissed the Kantian formula as no longer applicable, he had distorted it toread: Act as if the principle of your actions were the same as that of the legislator or of thelaw of the land—or, in Hans Frank’s formulation of the “categorical imperative in the ThirdReich,” which Eichmann might have known: “Act in such a way that the Fuhrer, if he knewyour action, would approve it.”

E M M A N U E L A L L O A is assistant professor in philosophy at the University of St.Gallen. He acts as senior research fellow at the National Center of Competencein Research (NCCR) Iconic Criticism in Basel and as codirector of the researchnetwork Dynamis of the Image at the College d’Etudes Mondiales, Paris. He isthe author of Das durchscheinende Bild: Konturen einer medialen Phänomenologie(2011) and The Resistance of the Sensible (forthcoming). He currently is workingon a book project, The Testimonial Image: The Belatedness of the Real.

368 Emmanuel Alloa / A Kantian Motif in Image Politics



unspeakable, of the unthinkable, and of the unimaginable are inseparable(to say the least) from official politics of memory and are central in therhetoric of influential books like Daniel Goldhagen’s Willing Executioners.Moreover, public debates such as that on the Memorial to the MurderedJews of Europe in Berlin testify that the argument pervades disputes aboutthe possibility of artistic responses to the Holocaust. If we are to followJacques Ranciere, the category of the unrepresentable constitutes “the cen-tral category of the ethical turn in aesthetic reflection.”4 As such, it is in-separable from a certain discourse of power, for—as W. J. T. Mitchell haspointed out—to declare that something is unrepresentable (God, theShoah, or any other possible event or thing) is at the same time to declareoneself the representative of it.5

Yet the emergence of this argument did not wait for a culture increas-ingly harried by the public institutionalization of memory and the liturgyof the unspeakable. From the onset, the gulf between the event and itspossible representation has been described by survivors struggling for ad-equate words. Robert Antelme writes in 1957 that during the first days afterreturning from Dachau, the survivors wanted nothing but to speak:

with us we brought back our memory of our experience, an experi-ence that was still very much alive, and we felt a frantic desire to de-scribe it such as it had been. As of those first days, however, we sawthat it was impossible to bridge the gap we discovered opening upbetween the words at our disposal and that experience which, in thecase of most of us, was still going forward within our bodies. Howwere we to resign ourselves to not trying to explain how we had got tothe state we were in? For we were yet in that state. And even so it wasimpossible. No sooner would we begin to tell our story than wewould be choking over it. And then, even to us, what we had to tellwould start to seem unimaginable.6

In the opening lines of the foreword to The Human Race, his autobio-graphical account of his experiences in the concentration camp, Antelme

(Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil [New York, 1965], p.136).

4. Jacques Ranciere, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge,2009), p. 123.

5. See W. J. T. Mitchell, “The Unspeakable and the Unimaginable,” Cloning Terror: TheWar of Images, 9/11 to the Present (Chicago, 2001), p. 63.

6. Robert Antelme, The Human Race, trans. Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler (1957;Marlboro, Vt., 1992), p. 3.

Critical Inquiry / Winter 2015 369



already jumps forward in time and gestures toward the end of the narra-tive. What is yet to be told, the survivor quickly realizes, progressively takeson the character of the unimaginable. The word is italicized, as if to indi-cate that it does not belong to the narrator but is instead somehow takenover as a metaleptic quote.

Indeed, at the end of the narrative, the explanation for this wording isprovided: When the American soldiers who liberate the camp listen to thefirst accounts given by the detainees, their first reactions are “frightful” and“unimaginable.” But soon after, says Antelme, the soldiers grew tired oflistening to the innumerable accounts and simply repeat their judgment.“Frightful, yes frightful,” the detainees confirm, in the same tone of voice.Yet an unbridgeable gap has opened up between the survivors and theirliberators, “a gap,” as Sarah Kofman comments, “that the words ‘frightful’or ‘unimaginable’ uttered by the American could not bridge, since theireffect was to suggest to the detainee that he had been understood, that withjust a few words, the other had been able to ‘grasp’ everything and to form,about the unknowable and untransmissible, a definite and reassuring opin-ion.”7 The detainee has no choice but to submit to the apparent consensus, asAntelme concludes pithily: “unimaginable, it’s a word that doesn’t divide,doesn’t restrict. The most convenient word. When you walk around withthis word as your shield, this word for emptiness, your step becomes betterassured, more resolute, your conscience pulls itself together.”8 This pas-sage exemplifies as few others do how the notion of the unimaginablecould develop such a magnetic appeal that no one, not even the victims,could resist its pull. To pretend that it is imaginable, that it can be told,would be to relativize its devastating, overwhelming character and to be-tray the memory of those who have not survived. The survivor is caught ina double bind, which is one of the paradoxes of the witness: he has to speak,and to speak infinitely, and, at the same time, he cannot speak withoutbetrayal; the words are knotted, for there is no possible way that theywould be understood.9 Ultimately, he surrenders to the only possible so-lution: to endorse the imposed qualification, the discourse of the unimag-inable, an action that of course also puts an end to any discourse.

Despite these lucid remarks about its ambivalence, the category of theunrepresentable has become a key reference point of aesthetic debate, andquite often those very authors—such as Antelme, Primo Levi, Imre Ker-tesz, and Jorge Semprun—who have not surrendered to silence but have

7. Sarah Kofman, Smothered Words, trans. Madeleine Dobie (Evanston, Ill., 1998), pp. 37–38.8. Antelme, The Human Race, pp. 289–90.9. See Kofman, Smothered Words, p. 39.




written extensive accounts of their experiences are invoked to justify it. AsGeorges Perec notes in an early text on the effects of Antelme’s The HumanRace: “Everywhere, we are invited to feel the mystery, the unexplainable.The inexpressible is a value. The unsayable is a dogma.”10

Yet the clearest connection between the principle of the unimaginableand the biblical prohibition of representation has notoriously been putforward by the French filmmaker and author of arguably the most impor-tant film about the Holocaust (Shoah, 1986), Claude Lanzmann. Lan-zmann’s crusade against all attempts to visualize the Holocaust reached aclimax with Steven Spielberg’s 1994 narrative movie Schindler’s List, towhich Lanzmann responded with a hard-hitting article entitled “Holo-caust, the Impossible Representation”: “The Holocaust is first and fore-most unique in that it builds around itself, in a circle of flames, theboundary not to be crossed, because a certain absolute of horror cannot becommunicated: to pretend to cross it is to become guilty of the most seri-ous transgression. Fiction is a transgression, I feel deeply that there is aprohibition of representation.”11 Trying to represent the Holocaust is in-evitably bound to fail and also means to vulgarly give in to the “scopicdrive.”12 Lanzmann continues: “I truly thought, with humility and pride,that there was a before and an after Shoah, and that after Shoah a certainnumber of things could no longer be done. Now Spielberg has done them”(“H,” p. 400).

Lanzmann’s sentence is significant, for it deliberately plays on the syn-onymy between the event and the film about it, between the Shoah andLanzmann’s film of the same name. Nevertheless, not only does the film-maker claim moral authority over the possible ways of addressing the Ho-locaust, he also alleges the right to rule on any attempt of its relativizationthrough comparison. When Shoah was screened in Chinese in Nanjing in2004 and the audience related its topic to the experiences of the massacre ofNanjing committed during World War II, Lanzmann strictly forbade anysuch comparison and condemned the attempt of the Chinese translator tofind an adequate rendering of the word Shoah.13 He recalls how on anotheroccasion, when asked to explain the meaning of the word, he had said hedidn’t know what the word meant. “But we will have to translate it,” his

10. Georges Perec, “Robert Antelme ou la verite de la literature” (1963), in L.G.: UneAventure des annees soixante (Paris, 1992), p. 111.

11. Claude Lanzmann, “Holocauste, la representation impossible (sur La Liste deSchindler)” (1994), La Tombe du Divin Plongeur (Paris, 2012), p. 399 ; hereafter abbreviated “H.”

12. Lanzmann, “Le Monument contre l’archive?” interview by Daniel Bougnoux et al., LesCahiers de Mediologie 11 (2001): 278.

13. See Pierre Haski, “Nankin sous le choc de Shoah,” Liberation, 29 Sept. 2004, p. 7.




interlocutor replied, “no one will understand,”—“That’s precisely what Iwant, that nobody understands,” Lanzmann retorted.14 There is an “ob-scenity,” he adds, “of the very project of understanding.”15 Just as withKant’s sublime, what is at stake here infinitely exceeds the human capacityto grasp it. (If we could grasp the infinitely exceeding, it would of course nolonger be infinite, as Rene Descartes already underlined).16

Let us summarize. Lanzmann, who does not deny a certain mono-theistic genealogy and considers his iconoclasm justified by the JewishTalmud,17 advocates a triple prohibition: a prohibition of comparison, aprohibition of explanation, and a prohibition of representation. Like any law,Lanzmann’s laws are injunctions and cannot be justified further withoutrelativizing them. “Radicalism,” says Lanzmann, “cannot be divided. No‘why?’, but no answer either to the question about the refusal of the why,lest one reinscribes oneself into the mentioned obscenity.”18 Lanzmann’sargument is cunning, no doubt; from the onset, the question why? is de-clared to be obscene, and hence anyone asking why it is obscene is foundguilty of a double obscenity.

I shall not venture further into the discussion of Lanzmann’s position atthis point, nor will I list any further examples of the many voices invokingthe trope of unrepresentability. My issue is rather to consider the perti-nence of Jacques Ranciere’s claim that the category of the unrepresentableis at the core of the so-called ethical turn, to examine its different modes ofrhetorical instantiation, and to see if those arguments are useful enough toanalyze them critically, in both the works of Ranciere and those of Jean-Luc Nancy and Georges Didi-Huberman. The last part of the essay will askwhether the reference to Kant is justified and whether the claim of theunrepresentability of certain events made in the name of a certaininterpretation of Kant is not in fact a Kant heavily influenced by a later,namely Hegelian, reading. As I will try to show, it is G. W. F. Hegel’sdefinition of the sublime as a “substantial unity” that fatally foreshad-ows the contemporary understanding of unrepresentability as the qual-ity of a specific object.19

14. Lanzmann, “Ce mot de ‘Shoah’” (2005), La Tombe du Divin Plongeur, p. 364.15. Lanzmann, “The Obscenity of Understanding: An Evening with Claude Lanzmann,” in

Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore, 1995), p. 205.16. See Rene Descartes, letter to Mersenne, 15 Apr. 1630, Correspondence, trans. John

Cottingham et al., vol. 3 of The Philosophical Writings of Rene Descartes (Cambridge, 1991), p. 23.17. Lanzmann, “Shoah est une oeuvre talmudique: Le Talmud interdit la representation,”

interview with a journalist of the newspaper Liberation, 29 June 1987, p. 17.18. Lanzmann, “Hier ist kein Warum” (1988), in Bernard Cuau et al., Au sujet de “Shoah”:

Le Film de Claude Lanzmann (Paris, 1990), p. 279.19. This phrase from Hegel’s Aesthetics will be discussed at a later point in the essay.




2. The Unrepresentable: Between Normative Prescription andLogical Impossibility (Nancy)Let us begin with the claim that unrepresentability is related to a mor-

alizing stance. First of all, it has to be said that the trope of unrepresent-ability is certainly much older than any possible ethical turn. Or, to stick toRanciere’s terminology: It seems as if unrepresentability has been an evenmore prominent issue within the representational regime than within anethical regime. As a matter of fact, the epistemological implications of theconcept of representation have been dependent on the notion of the un-representable, and it can even be asserted that to a certain extent the re-definition of the notion of representation is a direct result of aconfrontation with the issue of unrepresentability.

In his Sixth Meditation, Descartes writes that there are objects our imag-ination cannot represent adequately, such as a chiliagon, a polygon withone thousand sides.20 Is a chiliagon therefore unrepresentable? Only ifrepresentation amounts solely to imaginative intuition. On the otherhand, we can quite easily conceive of a polygon with a thousand sidesconceptually, even without intuitive content. As a result, the notion ofrepresentation has to be extended to encompass intellective representationalso; the chiliagon is thus not unrepresentable, it is only unrepresentableintuitively. But here again, the question arises: is it true that we cannotimagine a thousand-sided object? And is this due to our limited imagina-tion, while an algorithm could instantly produce a technical drawing of athousand-sided object? To what extent is it really accurate to say that therecan be no image of a chiliagon? As one could argue along with RoderickChisholm, a picture of a speckled hen may contain thousands of specklesmy eye could never count, and yet I see a speckled hen.21 In brief: Within anepistemological framework, the issue of unrepresentability concerns logi-cal possibilities or impossibilities.

How does an epistemological category become an ethical one? InKantian terminology, this happens when we move from Nichtsein toNichtsollen – in English: from what cannot be to what ought not to be.Any kind of ethics, it goes without saying, only makes sense where agiven situation might also be different. However catastrophic both Hiro-shima and Fukushima may be—as Nancy argues in his book L’Equivalence des

20. See Descartes, “Meditation Six: Concerning the Existence of Material Things, and theReal Distinction between Mind and Body,” Meditations, Objections, and Replies, trans. and ed.Roger Ariew and Donald Cress (Indianapolis, 2006), p. 40.

21. See Roderick Chisholm, “The Problem of the Speckled Hen,” Mind 51 (Oct. 1942):368–73.




catastrophes22—no ethical claim can be addressed to a tsunami, any morethan to the earthquake of Lisbon of 1755 that so utterly unsettled Kant.What does it entail, therefore, to claim that Auschwitz cannot be repre-sented? In “Forbidden Representation,” Nancy ponders the implicationsof the dictum of the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz and, beyondthat, about the possibility of representation of and after Auschwitz.23 Ispoetry after Auschwitz impossible because poetry has lost its legitimacy asa literary genre and is being replaced by testimony, the only new literarygenre, as Elie Wiesel once affirmed, invented by our age?24 Is poetry afterAuschwitz impossible because there can be no poetry about Auschwitz?The dictum seems to hesitate between fact and claim, between observationand plea.

It is incontrovertible that there has been poetry after Auschwitz and evenpoetry about Auschwitz. The shift of trope from the assertion of a definiteimpossibility (poetry as poetry can no longer be written) to a normativeclaim (poetry about Auschwitz should not be written as it would be bar-baric) and to its later reversal (poetry after Auschwitz is admissible andeven necessary, as Theodor Adorno seems to imply in 1966, when he con-cedes that his earlier affirmation might have been wrong: “perennial suf-fering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream”)25

shows—to say the least—how ambivalent the question is.It may well be that, to a large extent, the ubiquitous presence of the

trope of unrepresentability in today’s moral debates is owed to the system-atic blurring of logical limits and normative demands. The Lanzmann caseis emblematic of this blurring. He even goes as far as to say that the imagesof corpses seen in Alain Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard are not images of theextermination, for they are simply “victims of typhus in a concentrationcamp,” which would allow for the conclusion: “Of the exterminationcamps, there is no image.”26 When the example of the motion picture filmshot by a German officer in Latvia in 1941 showing Einsatzgruppen masskillings is brought up, he adds, “it is nothing.”27 And what about the wis-

22. See Jean-Luc Nancy, L’Equivalence des catastrophes (apres Fukushima) (Paris, 2012).23. See Nancy, “Forbidden Representation,” trans. Sarah Clift, The Ground of the Image,

trans. Jeff Ford and Clift (New York, 2005), pp. 27–50; hereafter abbreviated “FR.”24. “If the Greeks invented tragedy, the Romans the epistle, and the Renaissance the

sonnet, our generation invented a new literature, that of testimony” (Elie Wiesel, “TheHolocaust as Literary Inspiration,” in Wiesel et al., Dimensions of the Holocaust [Evanston, Ill.,1977], p. 9).

25. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York, 1973), p. 362.26. Haski, “Nankin sous le choc de Shoah,” p. 7.27. Lanzmann, “Le Lieu et la parole,” interview by Marc Chevrie and Herve Le Roux, Au

sujet de Shoah, p. 297.




senschaftliche Dokumentarfilm G.K. from 1941–42, which, according to thescript, was to show a gassing procedure in detail?28 Lanzmann’s answer canbe anticipated:

Had I found an existing film—a secret film, since it was strictly for-bidden—filmed by a member of the SS and showing how 3000 Jews,men, women, children die together, asphyxiated in a gas chamber ofthe Krematorium II of Auschwitz, had I found such a thing, then notonly would I not have shown it, I would have destroyed it. I cannotsay why. It goes without saying [ca va de soi]. [“H,” p. 399]

There can be no image of extermination—the statement seems to imply—but even if there were one, there should not be any. The prohibition ofrepresentation will be enforced through iconoclastic violence, if necessary,as if to reinforce the prescription’s incontestable nature. What ought not tobe cannot be. “Ca va de soi.” It goes without saying. The claim of unrepre-sentability itself needs no justification; it is itself unsayable, which—tospeak with Giorgio Agamben—is equivalent to the silent adoration of thearcanum put forward by the theology of glorification: “euphemein, to ador-ing in silence, as one does with a god.”29

3. The Unrepresentable as Property of the Object (Ranciere)Nancy’s observation that the discourse of the unrepresentable rests on a

deliberate confusion of fact and value, of description and prescription, istaken up by Ranciere and radicalized even further. In “Are Some ThingsUnrepresentable?” Ranciere asks what it would mean to say that there arethings or events that are constitutively unrepresentable.30 To declare thatany given object is unrepresentable by artistic means, says Ranciere, maymean sensibly different things. Indeed, the claim of the unrepresentabilityof the Holocaust differs from Edmund Burke asserting that John Milton’sdescription of Lucifer in Paradise Lost is unrepresentable in painting or

28. The film, which was never completed but for which Hermann Schweninger said he hadtaken pictures from the outside window of the gas chamber of the Euthanasie-AnstaltSonnenstein near Dresden, was meant to be shown to medical personnel in the context of theeuthanasia project T4 directed at mentally ill patients (a direct connection to the Final Solutioncould not be established). See Karl-Heinz Roth, “Filmpropaganda fur die Vernichtung derGeisteskranken im Dritten Reich,” in Reform und Gewissen: Euthanasie im Dienste desFortschritts, ed. Götz Aly et al., 2 vols. (Berlin, 1985), 2:183. See also Michel Burleigh, Death andDeliverance: Euthanasia in Germany 1900 –1945 (Cambridge, 1994), p. 202.

29. Giorgio Agamben, The Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans.Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York, 1999), pp. 32–33.

30. See Ranciere, “S’il y a de l’irrepresentable?” Genre Humain 36 (2001): 81–102; trans.Gregory Elliott under the title “Are Some Things Unrepresentable?” The Future of the Image(London, 2007), pp. 109–38; hereafter abbreviated “A.”




that Virgil’s Laocoon from the Aeneid is unrepresentable in sculpture.31

Beyond the ancient argument that poetry is superior to the visual artsbecause it can confine itself to invoking where visual arts have to show, whatis at stake in the case of the representation of genocidal events is a certainextraordinary status of the event itself. Unlike the argument of media spec-ificity and their respective limits in representation, which entails that thereare better or worse, more adequate or less appropriate ways of showingsomething, unrepresentability is now turned into a characteristic qualify-ing an object or an event as such.

The proof that unrepresentability has to be considered an intrinsicquality can be measured by those artistic attempts that do not acknowledgeit: “whoever wants to make images of the unrepresentable horror,” Ran-ciere paraphrases the argument, “will be punished for it by the aestheticmediocrity of the product.”32 But the argument is flawed. This aestheticmediocrity does not prove that the event is unrepresentable as such; itmerely shows the inadequacy of the representation. While unrepresent-ability can be held to be a categorical quality, inadequacy is clearly a relativeone. If a representation is inadequate, it raises the question of whetherthere can be better ones. This is why Ranciere goes on arguing that theassertion of unrepresentability is not so much a total iconoclasm as a claimthat what is to be represented should be represented in a certain form, witha certain language appropriate to its exceptionality. This, in turn, onlyexpresses a paradoxical nostalgia for a regime in which objects can have acorresponding particular form in which they are expressed; this desirehowever rests on the problematic equation of antirepresentative art andthe art of the unrepresentable, which “places a whole regime of art underthe sign of holy terror” (“A,” p. 137).

Even the allegation that the Holocaust has brought about a new—negative—aesthetics is questioned by Ranciere. While the paratactic writ-ing of Levi or Antelme, made up of a concatenation of splintered fragmentsof perception, was taken as the only possible mode of testimony befittingthe experience of dehumanization, this style of linking small observa-tions and sensations was arguably already one of the major features ofthe nineteenth-century literary revolution. “The short notations at thebeginning of Antelme’s book L’Espece humaine, describing the latrines andsetting the scene of the camp at Buchenwald, answer to the same pattern asthe description of Emma Bovary’s farmyard.”33 It is precisely the attempt to

31. See Ranciere, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, p. 123.32. Ranciere, Chronicles of Consensual Times, trans. Corcoran (London, 2010), p. 41.33. Ranciere, “The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes,” New Left Review 14 (Mar.–Apr.

2002): 150.




correlate a certain moral claim about history to a specific aesthetic gene-alogy of antirepresentationalism, such as that which Gerard Wajcmanundertakes in L’Objet du siecle,34 that exemplifies all the internal contra-dictions of the trope of unrepresentability, hence “anti-representativeart is constitutively an art without unrepresentable things.” “In and ofitself the event neither prescribes nor proscribes any specific artisticmeans”; it is only an issue of “relative” or “comparative unrepresentabil-ity,” of “adaptation of the means and ends of representation.” Against allkinds of speculative hyperbole, Ranciere advocates aesthetic sobriety.“Nothing is unrepresentable as a property of the event. There are simplychoices” (“A,” pp. 137, 130, 129).

Lanzmann’s film Shoah is a good example of the fact that no artworkcan avoid a certain process of selection of what will and what will not beshown. Although Lanzmann’s film certainly avoids fictional reconstruc-tion, it cannot avoid construction. Historians have shown that the emptyclearing of Chelmno on which Simon Srebnik stands and speaks was not aswide as it appears in the film. The director thus used a wide-angle lens tounderscore the discrepancy between the scenes described in Srebnik’s tes-timony and the peaceful appearance of the site today. Like every film-maker, Lanzmann makes images; like every artist he makes choices; it isthese that will be judged. “If one knows what one wants to represent—i.e.,in the case of Claude Lanzmann, the reality of the incredible, the equiva-lence of the real and the incredible—there is no property of the event thatproscribes representation” (“A,” p. 129).

4. Challenging Representation (Nancy, Didi-Huberman)Although convergent on many points, the approaches of Nancy and

Didi-Huberman diverge slightly from Ranciere’s. While they agree onthe critique of unrepresentability as the property of an event and crit-icize the normative conclusions drawn from it, they tend to grant thetrope of unrepresentability a certain heuristic importance in the at-tempt to understand what representation is. For any iconoclastic dis-missal of representation cannot but highlight that which it tries to negate;no one has attracted as much attention to the issue of the power of imagesas the Byzantine iconoclasts.35 To what extent does any new reiteration ofthe prohibition of images—in its characteristic ambiguity between consta-tive and normative—confirm, not the end of representation by any means,

34. See Gerard Wajcman, L’Objet du siecle (Lagrasse, 1998).35. I’ve developed this argument more in detail in Alloa, “Visual Studies in Byzantium: A

Pictorial Turn Avant la Letter,” Journal of Visual Culture 12 (Apr. 2013): 3–29.




but rather that its question remains wide open? In his essay “La Represen-tation interdite,” translated as “Forbidden Representation,” Nancy sug-gests that the prohibition (l’interdit) has in fact to be understood as the“challenged” or “questioned” representation (la representation interdite),for in French, the expression etre interdit also means to be “dumb-founded,” “disconcerted,” or “taken aback” (which in turn alludes back tothe interdictum of Roman law, which survives in modern judicial systemsas interlocutory injunction: the arbiter going between two conflicting par-ties and pronouncing an arrest, a suspension of opposing claims until thetrial can be set. The interdictio would thus stand, in Nancy’s eyes, for thatwhich intervenes in the discourse and brings it to a halt, leaving it bereft ofits certainties) (see “FR,” p. 38).

The question for Nancy is thus: “What became of representation itself atAuschwitz?” (“FR,” p. 34). If the argument that there cannot be any rep-resentation amounts to saying that there can be no adequate representa-tion, what does that say about the concept of representation? At this point,Nancy suggests an interesting aspect: the re- of representation should notbe understood as repetitive but rather as intensive (or, to be more precise,in the manner the initially iterative value of the prefix re- was progressivelytransformed into an intensive or, as it is called in linguistics, frequentativevalue). Representation is more than a subordinate, vicarious presentation;it is—thus Nancy—the reinstantiation of presence for a certain gaze, adirected presentation of presence, supplemented with a specific interpre-tation of what is to be seen. Consequently, representation “does not pres-ent something without exposing its value or sense” (“FR,” p. 36). Tosummarize: Representation is presentation plus signification of what it pres-ents. For Nancy, it is this indissociable linking of representation to signifi-cation—representation as the added value of presence—that explains thatthe so-called crisis of representation is, first of all, a crisis of meaning.

The notion of signification implied in the order of representation is anotion of complete signification without any lack. According to Nancy,repraesentatio would be the Latin equivalent of the Greek hypokeimenon,the ability to subsume something signified—fully and thoroughly—underthe order of conceptuality. However, the assumption of the completenessor saturation of the signified rests on an initial dichotomy. Unlike therepresenting entity, the represented thing is full and determined, but at theprice of being absent, invisible, and intellectual.

Two scenarios open up: either to completely cut off this realm andprohibit any attempt to bring it into presence through representation (thiswould correspond to the iconoclast option) or to deny the dichotomy andtry to completely transfer the full and saturated signification into presence




(this would correspond to totalitarian ideology). This second alternative isbest illustrated, says Nancy, by what he eventually called, along with Phi-lippe Lacoue-Labarthe, the ideology of national-aestheticism,36 that is, thecomplete transferral of signification into ostentative real presence and theannihilation of anything that could ruin the saturation of this presence:“The Aryan body is an idea identical to a presence, or it is the presence ofan idea without remainder” (“FR,” p. 39).37 The ideology of the Volkskör-per, according to Nancy, is the instantiation of a purely present ideathrough the annihilation of that which supposedly impedes its full realiza-tion. The exhaustive bringing-into-presence of the idea is correlated to anexhaustion of everything that supposedly threatens its completion. Thisalso entails, however, that, not only must this “remainder” be annihilated,but also the remains of this annihilation itself, which would otherwise actas a reminder that the annihilation was not complete.

This is the point where Didi-Huberman’s argument in Images in Spite ofAll comes in. The prohibition of representation is not only a possible eth-ical stance in response to the Holocaust; it was one of the operative prin-ciples of it. In The Drowned and the Saved, Levi recalls the cynical wordswith which the detainees were welcomed upon their arrival at Auschwitz:“‘none of you will be left to bear witness, but even if someone were tosurvive, the world will not believe him. . . . Even if some proof shouldremain and some of you survive, people will say that the events you de-scribe are too monstrous to be believed.’”38

No traces were meant to be left, and the signs at the entrances of certaincamps reading Fotografieren verboten! confirm the strict ban laid on anyphotographic documentation within the camp and of the process of exter-mination39 (incidentally, a ban that was by no means specific to the exter-mination of the European Jews but was operative in the Armeniangenocide, the genocidal project of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, andothers). The totalitarian dimension of genocide hence seems to imply adouble extermination. As Didi-Huberman puts it, the Endlösung involvesan annihilation enacted twice: the total destruction of the Jews and thedestruction of all traces of this destruction (see I, p. 21).

36. See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political,trans. Chris Turner (Oxford, 1990), chap. 7 as well as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, “The NaziMyth,” trans. Brian Holmes, Critical Inquiry 16 (Winter 1990): 291–312.

37. See also Nancy, “Un Souffle,” Rue Descartes 15 (1997): 14.38. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York, 1989),

pp. 11–12.39. See Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, trans.

Shane B. Lillis (Chicago, 2008), p. 23; hereafter abbreviated I.




In the controversy that followed the exhibition “Photographies descamps de concentration et d’extermination Nazi” organized by ClementCheroux,40 Gerard Wajcman in a way reiterated Lanzmann’s argument ofunrepresentability as a property of the event when he said that it was byvirtue of this double extermination that it has to be acknowledged that“there are no images of the Holocaust.” As Wajcman puts it, “the irrepre-sentable exists.”41 Once again, the interdiction of representation—the factthat there ought to be no images of it—did not mean that there never wereany images. The four photographs secretly taken by the members of theAuschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando in August 1944, which constitutethe core of Didi-Huberman’s Images in Spite of All, testify of the sometimesdesperate attempts to represent in spite of all, in spite of the totalizingambition of the prohibition of representation operational within the con-centrationary system: “The four photographs snatched from Auschwitz bymembers of the Sonderkommando were also, therefore, four refutationssnatched from a world that the Nazis wanted to obfuscate, to leave word-less and imageless” (I, p. 20). By contrast, one can only say that theseimages are nothing (“ca n’est rien”) if one embraces a totalizing concept ofimages.

Didi-Huberman’s meticulous and scrupulous lesson on the represen-tation or nonrepresentation of the Shoah hence opens out into a moregeneral reflection on what representation is. The trope of unrepresentabil-ity prohibits any reflection on representation and on its inherent limits,for it either postulates the image as something total (and thus unattain-able) or as nothing (and thus dismissible). However—and the photos ofthe Sonderkommando exemplify this aspect—it is in the very inade-quacy of representation, when the experience is made up of a rift betweenwhat shows and what is shown, that it becomes clear: The image is “neitherall (as Wajcman secretly fears) nor nothing (as he assumes peremptorily)”(I, p. 65); it neither reveals everything nor simply veils what really is andhence amounts to nothing. Very often, says Didi-Huberman, either toomuch or too little is expected of images, either because they are treated asmere evidence among millions of further documents, and thus the specif-ically visual evidence (in the sense of evidentia) is dismissed, or because toomuch is asked of them, that is to act as proofs, to say it all. As a matter offact, however, “the image is neither nothing, nor one, nor all” (I, p. 121). Byboth drawing on and transforming Jacques Lacan’s notion of the “not-all”

40. See the catalogue that includes Didi-Huberman’s essay ““Images malgre tout,” Memoiredes camps: Photographies des camps de concentration et d’extermination nazis (1933–1999), ed.Clement Cheroux (exhibition catalogue, Hotel de Sully, Paris, 2001), pp. 219–41.

41. Gerard Wajcman, “De la croyance photographique,” Les Temps Modernes 613 (2001): 47.




(le pas-tout), Didi-Huberman coins the concept of the “in spite of all.”What has to be understood, he concludes, is that images will always beinadequate to any possible use made of them. The categorical confusionconsists in taking what is merely a “use value” for an “ontological status”(I, p. 69); the inadequacy is that of a process, not a quality of an object. Thisin turn brings Didi-Huberman’s argument very close to that of Kant in thethird Critique and its notion of inadequacy (Unangemessenheit) in experi-encing the sublime.

5. Probing the Limits of Representation with KantThe “General Remark” that follows the analytic of the sublime in the

Critique of the Power of Judgment contains the aforementioned, surprisingreference to the second commandment of the Tables of Law: “Perhapsthere is no more sublime passage in the Jewish Book of the Law than thecommandment ‘Thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven image.’”How are we to understand this sentence from a Kantian perspective? Atfirst it must indeed disconcert, when one thinks of Kant’s remarks aboutbooks of law. In the treatise on the Conflict of Faculties, the higher faculties(theology, jurisprudence, and medicine) are opposed to the inferior fac-ulty (philosophy). All higher faculties, Kant affirms, are based upon writ-ings containing statutes that stem from “the whimsical decree of a higherauthority.”42 The authority of such laws or statutes thus does not derivefrom the authority of reason but from an external power: “the biblicaltheologian (as a member of a higher faculty) draws his teachings not fromreason but from the Bible; the professor of law gets his, not from naturallaw, but from the law of the land; and the professor of medicine does notdraw his method of therapy as practiced on the public from the physiology ofthe human body but from medical regulations” (CF, p. 35). As is wellknown, Kant’s critical endeavor consists of disassembling any heterono-mous claims and having a philosophy that “mercilessly strips” from theforeign government “all the shiny plumes.” As the inferior faculty, philos-ophy must reject any statutes enforced by foreign powers, as it deals withteachings “which are not adopted as directives by order of a superior[welche nicht auf den Befehl eines Obern zur Richtschnur genommen war-den]” (CF, p. 43; trans. mod.).

It would be erroneous, however, to understand Kant’s critique of reli-gion as an overall rejection of it, just as it would be improper to supposeKant questions authority as such; Kant does not reject all authority, only

42. Kant, The Conflict of Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor (New York, 1979), p. 33; trans.mod.; hereafter abbreviated CF. See Kant, Der Streit der Fakultäten (1798), vol. 6 of Werke.




foreign authority. In the wake of heteronomous foreign authorities, Kant’sethics aims at singling out the only valid one: the authority of reason. Thereasonable will is autonomous by means of its capacity for giving itself itsown law, which is defined exclusively by its form—neither by its applica-tion nor by its content—as a moral law.

Nevertheless—and this is the whole point of Kant’s treatise on Religionwithin the Boundaries of Mere Reason —it may happen that certain histor-ically instituted laws (which are rooted in religious revelation and have ahistorical tradition) and moral laws (which are rooted in reasoning) coincide.As a result, the difference between autonomy and heteronomy, which onemight have thought to define the opposition of philosophy and theology,shifts to an internal difference within religion (to be more accurate, to a dif-ference between what Kant calls a “religion of faith” and a “religion ofreason”).

It is not that the religion of faith is being subordinated to reason as such,as the title Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blo�en Vernunft mighterroneously suggest, but rather that the revealed religion is described as awider circle containing another circle with a smaller radius, the principlesof which are compatible with reason. This metaphor of the two concentriccircles, which Kant himself draws on (see R, p. 40), gives rise to a newdistinction that is crucial for understanding the prohibition of images: thedifference between statutary law and moral law. While the law of puremorality requires no application of foreign force in order to be observed,since its observation derives from the noncoercive coercion of under-standing, the statutary law is doubly dependent on an external power. Itdepends on the constituting power of an arbitrary legislator, whose rea-sons are impenetrable, and it hinges on the applying power that guaranteesthe application and the observation of the statutes.

In this context, Kant’s ambivalent interpretation of the Jewish Deca-logue is telling. On the one hand, he sees in the blind following of those tenlaws he calls “coercive laws” (Zwangsgesetze) the highest form of arbitrary,statutary religiosity, the justification of which lies in a historically singularrevelation and which is reliant on a state-religious constitution for its im-plementation (see R, p. 163n). On the other hand, the Decalogue containsthe core of the moral understanding of the law, according to Kant, just asrevealed religions already concentrically contain rational religion. Conse-quently, the second commandment should not be understood as a Kanon,but as an Organon, not as a revealed content of the law, but as a vehicle ora medium of what the law is.43

43. On the distinction between Kanon and Organon, see CF, pp. 61–63. See also in Religion




What is significant for our purpose here is that according to Kant some-thing invisible exists that does not necessarily have to have the character ofa sacred mystery. Kant criticizes the religions based on faith for presup-posing something like an arcanum that every believer knows but cannottell of beyond him- or herself. Kant objects that while the form according towhich any principle has to be shaped—such as the principle of humanfreedom—must be universally intuitive and shared, its reason is impene-trable for the individual (Kant speaks of the “inscrutability of the idea offreedom” [CPJ, p. 156]). A comment on Religion within the Boundaries ofMere Reason contains the following instructive sentence: “But as regardswhat transcends the senses . . . we see nothing of it . . . apart from its law(though this is enough by itself)” (R, p. 190n; trans. mod.).

Kant’s interpretation of the Old Testament prohibition of images thusamounts to saying that beneath the statutary, normative proscription lies alogical, categorical impossibility. It is not that representing suprasensoryprinciples through images is prohibited; rather, it is fundamentally impos-sible to find any positive representation.

I am stressing positive here, as Kant nevertheless thinks that another(precarious because negative) form of presentation of this invisible is pos-sible. Of this suprasensorial we see “nothing,” writes Kant, “apart from itslaw,” adding “though this is enough by itself.” What cannot be fathomed isnot merely invisible; it reveals itself negatively, as the pure law of its ownunrepresentability, as a purely formal how with no intuitive what. The lawsgoverning what lies beyond sensorial intuition are the laws of experience.They strictly amount to the terms in which that which cannot appear assensory content presents itself to experience. The principles of unrep-resentability thus do not lie in some ineffable absolute realm; theycoincide with the principles of experience as such and its limits. Noth-ing is unrepresentable—one could summarize—because unrepresent-ability is no thing; it is not a quality of an object but a determination ofexperience defined through its constitutive limits.

Accordingly, when the third Critique speaks of negativity, this negativ-ity does not concern something beyond presentation; it is rather the pre-sentation itself that becomes negative. Kant characterizes this presentationas “abstract,” but in its most basic etymological sense. This “abstract pre-sentation [abgezogene Darstellungsart], . . . becomes entirely negative inregard to the sensible” (CPJ, p. 156). Therefore, presentation does not give

within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, where the statutary law is described as that of a religionwhich “can contain only the means to its promotion and propagation” (R, p. 138).




in to unrepresentability. As Jean-Francois Lyotard stressed in his Lessonson the Analytic of the Sublime,44 even the “nonpresentation” remains apresentation, albeit—in Kant’s terms—a “merely negative presentation”(CPJ, p. 156). Within presentation, there is a withdrawal. Yet, what is sub-tracted or abstracted here is not absolute in the sense that it is isolated (asHegel later has it); what defies our full grasp is that which withstandsrepresentation within representation.

A tension persists between the imagination striving to provide the con-cept with its corresponding image45 and the experience of an intrinsic limitwithin presentation that prevents full adequation. It may be worth remem-bering that the experience of Entgrenzung, that is, the undoing of limita-tions which happens in the face of the sublime, is at once an experience ofstern limitation and of resistance (sublimity hence being defined as that“which pleases immediately through its resistance [Widerstand] to the in-terest of the senses” [CPJ, p. 150]). The experience of resistance is vital toKant’s system of thought, as it is only through this experience that theinadequacy of all presentation may be intuited.

Kant further avails himself of the concept of resistance to keep otherattitudes toward images at a distance. One is the unconditional truth inthe transcending power of images—the fancy he calls the “visionaryrapture” of imagination, which believes itself able to see somethingbeyond all bounds of sensibility; in the Religions-Schrift, this is termed“religious delusion” (see R, pp. 190–94). But the alternative attitude iscriticized even more severely: the belief that images are fully adequateand can themselves substitute for the critical use of the intellect. Quiteoften, governments feed the subject with “images and childish devices”since by being “merely passive, he can more easily be dealt with” (CPJ,p. 156). This passage should not be read as yet another oppositionbetween autonomy and heteronomy; what is at stake here is rather howthe experience of limits “that are arbitrarily set for him” impedes thesubject in experiencing his own constitutive limits (CPJ, p. 156). Bycontrast, the sublime, rather than being that which connects withsomething supposedly lying beyond, stands for an experience sub li-mine, beneath the threshold or of the threshold.

Beyond the opposition between the “visionary rapture” that attempts tovisualize the unrepresentable on the one hand (CPJ, p. 156), and the het-eronomy of an imposed “fetish-faith,” which enforces a mechanical repe-

44. See Jean-Francois Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. ElizabethRottenberg (Stanford, Calif., 1994), pp. 147–58.

45. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781), Werke, 2:18 (A140/B); Critique of Pure Reason,trans. Paul Guyer and Allen A. Wood (Cambridge, 1998), p. 273.




tition of arbitrary forms in the name of “one principle” on the other (R, p.198), beyond the opposition of a transcendent thing-as-such and a purelyimmanent presence, Kant gestures at a concept of presentation (exhibitio)in which the rules of presentation themselves come to the fore. Such aconcept of presentation implies a Copernican turn. Attention has shiftedfrom the content or the what of representation to the form or the how ofrepresentation (corroborated by the fact that judgments of the sublime arenot determinative but reflective). To rephrase this: When Kant invokes thebiblical commandment of nonrepresentation, this says far more about presen-tation than about anything allegedly unrepresentable per se. Beyond Kant,one could probably argue that the inadequacy invoked here for the expe-rience of the sublime is hardly restricted to the sublime but that it concernsany given sensible presentation—that which Edmund Husserl will latercall the “inadequacy”46 or the “radical incompleteness” of any perceptiveexperience.47

6. From Abstraction to Absolution: Specters of HegelOur return to Kant in the previous section was not intended as a mere

hermeneutic exercise, which would be quite dispensable as such, especiallyin the wake of the many comprehensive interpretations that have beengiven of the Kantian analytics of the sublime. Rather, we returned to itbecause it was on the grounds of Kantian analytics that one of the mostsignificant debates on the trope of unrepresentability arose, whichforms the topic of this last section. We started by recalling Ranciere’sclaim that the ethical turn in aesthetics and politics hinges centrally onthe category of the unrepresentable. Not content with stating that claim,Ranciere also links it closely with the idea of the postmodern and Lyotard’sreappraisal of the sublime. Beyond the public discourses of the unimagi-nable, it is Lyotard’s postmodern thinking that is primarily responsible—according to Ranciere—for philosophically legitimizing the trope ofunrepresentability, ubiquitous today, and bringing about the blurring offact and norm characteristic of terror.

In order to bolster this strong claim, Ranciere moves on to the groundson which Lyotard himself developed his idea of the unpresentable: Kant’sanalytic of the sublime. Ranciere tries to demonstrate from this that Lyo-tard is not actually moving away from a logic of totalization, as he claims,but towards it, insofar as his reading of Kant is in fact overshadowed by a

46. Edmund Husserl, Erste Philosophie, ed. Rudolf Boehm, vol. 8 of Husserliana (TheHague, 1950), p. 44.

47. Husserl, Ding und Raum, vol. 16 of Husserliana, p. 51.




Hegelian specter. In what follows, Ranciere’s grievances will be examinedsuccessively, and it will be shown that while he most definitely makes animportant point about the Hegelian shift Lyotard undertakes when aes-theticizing the sublime, he proves to subscribe even more strongly to thetradition of Hegelian dialectics himself, hastily identifying the unrepre-sentable with the unthinkable and thus missing the incommensurabilitybetween the intuitive and the conceptual that was indeed the crucial pointin Lyotard’s own Kant reading.

But let’s proceed step by step. In an essay that he considers a “counter-reading of Kant,” Ranciere first of all reminds us how, in order to outlinehis ethics of the differend, Lyotard introduces the issue of art into thesublime where Kant had deliberately kept it out. How to allude to the factthat there is something that cannot be accounted for, to bear witness to thefact that there is something that does not fit into the picture? For Lyotard,this awareness of the untotalizable remainder explains why in the twenti-eth century, “the arts have not had the beautiful as their main concern, butsomething which has to do with the sublime.”48 According to Lyotard,Kant himself had led the way when he “cites the commandment, ‘Thoushalt not make graven images’ (Exodus), as the most sublime passage in theBible, in that it forbids all presentation of the Absolute. Little needs to beadded to those observations to outline an aesthetic of sublime paintings.”49

In fact, however—as Ranciere rightly emphasizes—much still needs to beadded, as from a Kantian viewpoint, “the very idea of an art of the sublimewould seem contradictory.”50 Indeed, if the feeling of the sublime ariseswhile standing in front of St. Peter’s in Rome or in front of the pyramids ofGiza, the feeling does not point either to Michelangelo’s art or to that of anEgyptian architect, as it is not the property of any determined object: “thesublime must not be shown in products of art (e.g., buildings, columns,etc.), where a human end determines the form as well as the magnitude,nor in natural things whose concept already brings with it a determinate end(e.g., animals of a known natural determination)” (CPJ, p. 136).

When Lyotard now considers that the unpresentable has the nature of athing, that it is even “The Thing,” to adopt Lacanian terminology, and thatthere could be something like an art specific to it, he is already followingHegel’s aestheticization and reification of the sublime, as Ranciere appro-

48. Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and RachelBowlby (Stanford, Calif., 1991), p. 135.

49. Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?” The PostmodernCondition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1984),p. 78.

50. Ranciere, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, p. 89.




priately points out. As a matter of fact, in his Aesthetics, Hegel substantiallytransforms the “abstract” character of (or within) experience into theproperty of an object considered as “absolute” and connects it with an artthat bridges incommensurability by means of symbolization. Rather thanconceiving the sublime as that which no longer coincides with its represen-tation, Hegel situates the sublime at a very low level, before beauty, as astage of art where content and form do not coincide yet. As a consequence,the sublime is summarized as the “attempt to express the infinite, withoutfinding in the sphere of phenomena an object which proves adequate forthis representation.” Such an infinite is something superior to any “expres-sion of the sensible” and stands “in contrast to the totality of appearance”in the mode of a “substantial unity.”51

For this reason, Hegel concludes, “we need not place [sublimity] in thepure subjectivity of the mind and its Ideas of Reason; on the contrary, wemust grasp it as grounded in the one absolute substance [der einen abso-luten Substanz] qua the content which is to be represented” (A, 1:363). Thenature of this absolute substance, characterized as the “thinking, absolute,non-sensuous One [denkende, absolute, sinnlichkeitslose Eine]” (A, 1:429),52

is—thus Hegel—that which is best exemplified by “Hebrew poetry” (A,1:364). It “cancels the positive immanence of the Absolute in its createdphenomena and puts the one substance explicitly apart” (A, 1:364).

While Lyotard had famously claimed that it was dialectical reason thatforeshadowed twentieth-century extermination, insofar as exterminationis only the endpoint of the process of dialectics concerned with cancellingany alterity from its core,53 Ranciere now convicts him of still being un-willingly Hegelian when identifying the sublime with the Thing and de-ducing claims about the art it would supposedly require. Or, if Lyotard isnot a dialectician right away, he is at least a negative dialectician, in thefashion of Adorno (with whom Lyotard always refused to be associated).54

But while trying to demonstrate that Lyotard’s Kant is biased by Hege-

51. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford,1975), 1:363; trans. mod.; hereafter abbreviated A. See Hegel, Vorlesungen uber die Ästhetik I, vol.13 of Werke (Frankfurt am Main, 1986), p. 467.

52. See Hegel, Vorlesungen uber die Ästhetik II, vol. 14 of Werke, p. 15.53. See Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van den Abbeele

(Minneapolis, 1988), pp. 90–97.54. In fact, Adorno also made reference to the Judaic prohibition of images when trying to

explain what negative dialectics are. While classical dialectics express the nonidentical by meansof identification, a negative dialectics, which tries to resist the reifying tendencing of positivedialectics, has no other solution than to observe “extreme loyalty to the prohibition of images[äu�erste Treue zum Bilderverbot], far beyond what this once originally meant” (Adorno,“Reason and Revelation,” Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. W. HenryPickford [New York, 2005], p. 142).




lian dialectics, Ranciere surreptitiously assumes a dialectician’s standpointwithout even noticing it, thereby missing one of the perhaps most radicalaspects of Lyotard’s reading of the Kantian sublime. Why so? Let us goback to Ranciere’s criticism that Lyotard posits a correlation between thefact that something nonpresentable comes to the fore in the feeling of thesublime and the necessity of a sublime art. This criticism is certainly jus-tified from a Kantian perspective, but from the onset Ranciere’s argumentnever was about a right or a misguided interpretation of Kant. From thiscorrelation however, so he seems to imply, all other conclusions automat-ically derive:

The unpresentable paradoxically becomes the ultimate form in whichthree speculative postulates are preserved: the idea of a correspon-dence between the form and the content of art; the idea of a total in-telligibility of the forms of human experience, including the mostextreme; and, finally, the idea of a correspondence between the ex-planatory reason of events and the formative reason of art. [“A,” p.136]

But only a true dialectician can believe that one automatically arrives at theultimate Aufhebung in the intelligible concept by initially stating thatthere is sublime art in the historical. Ranciere affirms that by positingan “unthinkable,” Lyotard has himself yielded to the “principle of acomplete rationalization” (“A,” p. 134). This would probably hold true,and Ranciere would have a good point in affirming that the “discourseof the unthinkable-unrepresentable” annuls itself (“A,” p. 135), exceptfor one fact: Lyotard never used the word unthinkable. Not only is healways very cautious in keeping the two apart (what is unpresentable isby no means unthinkable; on the contrary, it is quite thinkable, from themathematical sublime to the rational planning of the extermination of theEuropean Jews); from Lyotard’s (Kantian) perspective, equating the un-thinkable and the unrepresentable very much appears to be the ultimateHegelian operation.

As a matter of fact, when casting another glance at Hegel’s Lectures onAesthetics, one cannot but notice the strange parallel between the lowestand the highest stage, between the symbolic and the conceptual. As men-tioned above, Hegel attributes to the sublime a very specific locationwithin the architecture of his aesthetics. It corresponds to the early, “sym-bolic form of art.” The idea of divinity inspiring Egyptian art cannot hitupon any adequate image and thus renounces its presentation, substitut-ing a symbol for its image. Thanks to its conceptual nature, the symbolbridges the gulf that would otherwise be insuperable. In a way, this chapter




anticipates the ultimate stage of the dialectical odyssey through art. Thesymbolic intervenes not only where the idea does not have a sensible ap-pearance yet but also at the end of the dialectical process, where the exter-nal appearance is no longer needed, as its content has been fully interiorizedin the form of the concept. What seemed to be bad infinity is now turnedinto good infinity; the unthinkable has received its highest form of deter-mination. Ranciere is absolutely right when showing that the discourse ofthe unthinkable and that of the fully thinkable are symmetrical—and inthe wake of the contemporary, quasi-theological discourse of unrepresent-ability a reminder of its authoritarian (if not terrorist) structure is, alas,necessary. But this concerns—to use Kant’s terminology—only the Kanon. Toreflect on unpresentability in terms of an Organon is to highlight that withinthe event of sensible presentation is something that cannot be reduced to theorder of the concept. In this sense, it would certainly be a bit too rash (andrationally self-confident) to affirm that representation is merely a question ofchoice.




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The Most Sublime of All Laws. The Strange Resurgence of a Kantian Motif in Contemporary Image Politics