Kant, Benjamin, Pensky And The Historical Sublime

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KANT, BENJAMIN, PENSKY AND THE HISTORICAL SUBLIME
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DOMINICK LACAPRA

I shall have to oversimplify Max Pensky’s intricate argument and focus on one crucial element in it: the role of the historical sublime bound up with catastrophe and violence, often seen as epitomized in revolution. I’ll note that Pensky, in his powerfully writtenpaper, prefaces his discussion of Kant and Benjamin with an incisive review of Enlightenment approaches to history, notably in Condorcet and Voltaire. Both shared with others a conception of empirical history as inducing melancholy in its endless chronicle of debilitating facts and in its limitation of thought to recording and somehow organizing these facts. Flying in the face of facts, includingthose of his own life as he finally took poison when in hiding during the Revolution, Condorcet affirmed the role of progress that in his thought might be seen as having a sublime aura in contrast to the kind of normalizing, antirevolutionary progressivism decried by Benjamin. By contrast, for Voltaire history was a series of catastrophes, more devastating than sublime, and he tried to avoid theblow-back experienced by Benjamin’s Angel of History by opposing to those facts a humanistic spirit of obduracy. Supplementing Pensky’s account here, I would add to his observation that Rousseau went even further afield by valorizing prehistory, where humans were unabashedly closer to animals. Conjoining a view of history as catastrophe with contestatory models that might impede the destructive courseof civilization and return humans to a more empathic relation to all others, Rousseau even intimated that humans like other animals are not fallen or marked by original sin. And the sublime in Rousseau, if there is one, would be more related to evanescent moments in which we make contact with the golden age within us through reverie and certain relations with others (including nature) as well as inthe communal feast having at best a problematic connection with catastrophic events in history, however putatively revolutionary, redemptive, or messianic. I would pick out a seemingly marginal comment in Pensky’s paper that resonates not only with Benjamin on the Trauerspiel but also with a dimension of Kant 175

DOMINICK LACAPRA

that remains underexplored in his excellent paper: thedimension whereby Kant like so many others seeks a definitive criterion radically separating humans from other animals because of the presumably sublime status of “man” as moral being:
The sea of blood; the ruined city: in mid-century, Voltaire adopted the two tropes that recur so frequently in the Enlightenment project of philosophical history that they’re worth pointing out, not just because of theirubiquity but also because of their productively anachronistic character for the jargon of Enlightenment, and their evocation of the historically sublime itself as a sort of conventional shorthand. Anachronistic, for these are of course also seventeenth century Christian allegories, stock images of the central European counter-reformation denoting human fallenness and its attendant vanity. Bloodand ruin convey the creaturely aspect of natural history and the specter of the withdrawal of God’s saving gift of significance to the span of a human life or many lives, without which the distinction between the human and the animal is effaced, our great cities tumble and vanish, and we die, like dogs, awash in blood. In hindsight, it was probably a fairly short step from the lakes of blood of thecounter-reformation authors of the seventeenth century to the great re-signification of the image of democratic soil soaked in the blood of both revolutionaries and tyrants in the European and American Enlightenment: the sacrificial aspect of republican governance, the fructifying function of tyrant’s blood for the tree of liberty and the blood sacrifice that continues to nourish abstract right....