The Ugly Sublime

Edouard Manet, "Lunch on the Grass" (1863)

Art, religion, and (philosophical) science are for Hegel the three progres­sive modes of the (self-)appearance of the Absolute, and the first problem here is that this progression does not quite work: The three terms are not at the same level. The pairing of art and thinking has a long tradition, reaching back to Heidegger’s Dichten und Denken, but why is religion added as a separate entity? Hegel himself often treats art and religion as aspects of the same self-deploying entity – for example, ancient Greek art is for him religion in the form of art, religion that finds its appropriate expression in art. Religion intervenes here as an uncanny intruder, a monstrosity of the supernatural in natural terms. Should the starting point not be religion rather than art? Was what we today consider art not historically first part of a religious or sacred experience? And is not the emergence of art in its independence, and not as part of the experience of the sacred – a process that reaches its peak only in modernity – strictly correlative to the rise of philosophy and (later) science as an autonomous mode of thinking no longer rooted in religion? Is, then, the pairing of Dichten und Denken itself the outcome of the withdrawal of religious experience?

The progress from art through religion to science moves in the direc­tion of Ver-Innerung, of recollection or internalization: It ends when the Spirit no longer needs the external medium of Vorstellung to express itself but deals with itself directly in the form of Spirit. This is why every preoccupation with deep mysteries, with unfathomable secrets to be disclosed to the initiated, and so forth is a sign that Spirit has not yet truly found itself: “The spirit only occupies itself with objects so long as there is something secret, not revealed, in them” (VPAII, 234/I, 604). This is why, from a Hegelian standpoint, one should reject absolutely the Schellingian and Heideggerian topic of an impenetrable, self-withdrawing Ground (Erde, Earth, in Heidegger). Both of them insist on the unsurpas­sable character of man’s finitude: Because of this finitude, we are forever caught in a struggle; we can never reach the Absolute at peace with itself (and this also holds for the Absolute itself, which is caught in this struggle). And, from the Hegelian standpoint, one should also reject Schiller’s and Schelling’s assertion of art as higher than philosophy as the only adequate rendering of the Absolute, of the harmonious identity of subject and object, ideal and real, freedom and necessity, reflection and spontaneity, activity and passivity (in contrast to philosophy or rational thinking, which privi­leges the subject and reflection).

According to Hegel’s (in)famous diagnosis, with the rise of moder­nity, “the form of art has ceased to be the supreme need of the spirit.” Even if excellent works are produced, “we bow the knee no longer” (VPA I, 142/I, 103). This thesis of Hegel’s acquired new content with the rise of what he could not forecast: the secular capitalist civilization that elevates scientific reason into the highest form of reason (not in the Hegelian sense of Wissenschaft, but in the Anglo-Saxon sense of positive science relying on experiments). Today, with the emergence of cogniti­vism and the brain sciences, the circle is somehow closed; the human mind itself has become an object of neurobiology; and although the representatives of the experimental sciences as a rule dismiss Hegel’s thought as the high point of speculative madness, as an artistic-obscurantist phenomenon that has nothing to do with science proper, Hegel’s thesis that art is no longer the supreme expression of spirit survives this scathing critique. Even cognitivists who admire art or frequently refer to it (Sacks, Damasio) do so in a benevolently condes­cending attitude – what matters is science, not art.

The Romantic reaction to modern scientific civilization invites us “to bend the knee anew” (as Pippin [2014a, p. 139] wrote apropos of Heidegger); in what is today often referred to as the “postsecular” spirit, it endeavors to reenchant reality, and to elevate art into (one of) the harbinger(s) of the ultimate truth about our lives inaccessible to science. (Another strategy is, of course, to search in the latest sciences themselves for the signs of their overcoming of the “mechanistic paradigm.”) One should be unambiguous here: Such reenchantments are a fake, a pleasing aesthetic game.

With Hegel against Hegel

So what are we to do? Robert Pippin’s goal in his After the Beautiful is “to see what Hegel missed, but see it in his terms” (Pippin 2014a, p. 61). The problem with this approach is, of course, how to avoid the naive and thoroughly pre-Hegelian distinction between an empirical, “historical Hegel” and the “true Hegel,” the Hegel true to his notion, or rather, at the level of his notion: Is not, for Hegel, the historical actualization of a notion its truth, the deployment of its actual potentials, so that his mode of thinking totally prohibits all reference to an ideal over against its historical realization? The fundamental limitation of the “historical Hegel,” the “blind spot in his treatment of modernity,” is formulated by Pippin in proto-Marxist terms: It is his “failure to anticipate the dissatis­factions that this ‘prosaic’ world … would generate, or his failure to appreciate that there might be a basic form of disunity or alienation that his project could not account for, for which there was no ‘sublation’ or overcoming yet on the horizon” (p. 46).

For Pippin, Hegel’s thought involves another limitation, which con­cerns the form of art itself; his conclusion – the end of art in its essential role – “is not motivated by anything essential in Hegel’s account and represents a misstep, not an inference consistent with Hegel’s overall project” (pp. 22-3). So when Hegel correctly claims that in our age, “art invites us to intellectual consideration” (VPA I, 26/I, 11), he under­mines the notion of art as intuitive and affecting, opening up the possibi­lity of a different kind of art, an art that is “explicitly self-reflexive and exploratory” (Pippin 2014a, p. 42), involving interpretive effort. (And, incidentally, the counterpart of this reflexivization ofart is that philosophy itself becomes “artistic.”) The bad luck with so-called conceptual art (which seems a perfect example of “art inviting us to intellectual con­sideration”) is that, as a rule, it works only as hapax: You do it once, you make your point, and it is over (there is only one pissoir for Duchamp, only one white square on black surface with Malevitch; we gain nothing by repeating the production of such objects). Hegel’s fateful limitation was thus that his notion of art remained within the confines of classical representative art. He was unable to consider the possibility of what we call abstract (nonfigurative) art (or atonal music, or literature that reflex­ively focuses on its own process of writing, etc.).

The truly interesting question here is in what way this limitation – remaining within the constraints of the classical notion of representative art – is linked to what Pippin views as Hegel’s other limitation, his inability to detect the alienation/antagonism that persists even in a modern rational society where individuals attain their formal freedom and mutual recog­nition. In what way – and why – can this persisting unfreedom/uneasiness/ dislocation in a modern free society only be properly articulated, brought to light, in an art that is no longer constrained to the representative model? Is it that the modern uneasiness, unfreedom in the very form of formal freedom, servitude in the very form of autonomy, and more fundamen­tally anxiety and perplexity caused by that very autonomy reach so deep into the very ontological foundations of our being that it can only be expressed in an art form that destabilizes and denaturalizes the most elementary coordinates of our sense of reality?

The very fact that art plays a key role within an epoch means that in this epoch Spirit is not reconciled with itself – this is why it still needs sensual embodiment (in a work of art). Consequently, Hegel prophesied the end of art because he failed to perceive radical antagonisms that persist in the apparently nonantagonistic self-reconciled bourgeois society where individuals are condemned to lead a prosaic everyday life. However, Pippin’s critique of the Hegelian reconciliation in a modern rational state is deeply ambiguous: Does the persistence of art mean that art – authentic and relevant art – is only possible in an unreconciled society, as it sounds when Pippin emphasizes that Hegel did not see the antagonism in modern society and links this failure to the persistence of art? (Recall the modernist dream of a reconciled society in which art disappears as a separate institution since it overlaps with real everyday life itself.) Or is it that art persists in its very concept even in a fully reconciled society? Or – a third option – is it that the persistence of art signals that reconciliation is not possible for a priori reasons?

What one should further bear in mind is that the Hegelian reconcilia­tion is ultimately the reconciliation with failure itself, not a peaceful state in which antagonisms are overcome. The illusion is not that of the enforced “false” reconciliation that ignores the persisting divisions; the true illusion resides in not seeing that, in what appears to us as the chaos of becoming, the infinite goal is already realized: “Within the finite, we cannot experience or see that the purpose is truly attained. To accomplish the infinite purpose is thus merely to sublate the illusion [or deception: Täuschung] that it is not yet accomplished” (EL §212 Z). In short, the ultimate deception is to fail to see that one already has what one is looking for – like Christ’s disciples who were awaiting his “real” reincarnation, blind to the fact that their collective already was the Holy Spirit, the return of the living Christ.

Returning to Pippin, the dissatisfaction in modern prosaic life is what modern art (in painting from Manet to Cézanne, Picasso, etc.) registers. So, again, Hegel’s “greatest failure” is that he

never seemed very concerned about [the] potential instability in the modern world, about citizens of the same ethical commonwealth potentially losing so much common ground and common confidence that a general irresolvability of any of these possible conflicts becomes ever more apparent, the kind of high challenge and low expectations we see in all those vacant looks … He does not worry much because of his general theory about the gradual actual historical achievement of some mutual recognitive status, a historical claim that has come to look like the least plausible aspect of Hegel’s account and that is connected with our resistance to his proclamations about art as a thing of the past. (Pippin 2014a, p. 60)

And Pippin himself designates as the core of this new dissatisfaction class division and struggle (here, of course, class is to be opposed to castes, estates, and other hierarchies). A fundamental ambiguity thus charac­terizes the disturbing and disorienting effect of Manet’s paintings: Yes, they indicate the “alienation” of modern individuals who lack a proper place within a society traversed by radical antagonisms, individuals deprived of the intersubjective space of collective mutual recognition and understanding; however, they simultaneously generate and reflect a liberating effect (individuals they depict appear as no longer bound to a specific place in the social hierarchy), as well as an immanently artistic progress in freedom as reflexive awareness of the activity one is involved in. In other words, the modern, prosaic world is the world of the rational state, freedom, and mutual recognition (even if this freedom is merely formal, masking deeper class antagonisms), while the premodern uni­verse is the world of hierarchic nonmutual order. Nicolas Bourriaud wrote in his introduction to Foucault’s booklet on Manet:

What vouches for Manet’s painting is the definite birth of an individual exiled from his certainties regarding his place in the world … The viewer is commanded to position himself as an autonomous subject, lacking the possible means to identify himself or to project himself into the artwork he confronts. (Bourriaud 2009, pp. 16-17)

For Pippin, the most direct sign of this disorientation is the perplexed gaze of the painted individual, an expression characterized as one of “looking without seeing.” The gaze is directed outside the frame, addres­sing us viewers, but we are treated “as if invisible or at the least irrelevant, occupying no important presence in the subject’s vacant or bemused look” (Pippin 2014a, p. 48). With this perplexed gaze, Manet is not just a precursor to impressionism; he effectively reaches beyond impression­ism and points toward modern art proper (expressionism and abstract painting). The perplexed gaze of the painted individual thus unsettles the viewer as well, making his/her gaze uncertain, simultaneously dislocated (moving, looking at the painting from more than one standpoint since what he sees is impossible to see from one standpoint) and fixed into the unpleasantly exposed position of a voyeur.

However, there is more lurking beneath the surface here. In The Luncheon on the Grass, Manet’s best-known painting, we see two couples, including two naked women, one in back, knee-deep in water, engaged in what appears a kind of postcoital cleansing (this association was often noted), and a nude in front just sitting on the grass with the expression of “looking but not seeing.” With whom did the one in back have sex, the silent man or the talking, gesticulating one? Visually, the nude in front and the silent man sitting behind her are a couple, so it must be that the talking man is the one who performed the act and is not flirting with the other woman – or is he covering up his failure to perform the act by his excessive activity? The situation remains ambiguous, but the perplexed, distracted gaze of the naked woman in front remains the gaze of a (sexually) nonsatisfied woman, so that the painting’s subtitle could well have been Iln’y a pas de rapport sexuel.

Far from being excessive, this reading is confirmed by the general feature of Manet’s nude paintings. They are clearly to be conceived as a repetition of classical desexualized nude paintings – a repetition with a twist, of course, that is, what matters is the difference with regard to the classical model. Manet’s nude Olympia (1863-1865) repeats Reclining Venus (Ingres, 1822), and what this repetition renders palpable is “the impossibility (under the emerging conditions of a capitalist society’s self­representation) of any continuation of the tradition of the nude in paint­ing, the impossibility, the immediate lack of credibility, of that abstraction from particularity, the desexualizing idealization and so relatively inno­cent address to the beholder” (Pippin 2014a, p. 77). In short, Manet’s Olympia “is not a nude; she is a naked individual” (ibid.). The same bodily position of the left hand (covering the vaginal area) in Ingres indicates tender shame, while in Manet it designates a prostitute’s repose and is as such vulgarly eroticized. All the obscenity of class, power, and sex brutally invade the space of the painting, and it is crucial to note that the effect of the repetition of Ingres in Manet is retroactive; it is not only that Ingres’s Venus is replaced by a prostitute, it is that Ingres’s Venus itself loses its innocence and becomes (visible as) a prostitute.

A further feature that manifests this irruption of obscenity in Olympia is the disturbing effect of its light. As Foucault pointed out, there is no discernible source of light within the space depicted by the painting, so that it is as if light emanates directly from us, the viewers. Our gaze at Olympia is the source of the extra-strong light, which means that our possessive erotic gaze makes her visible – in short, we are her customers, our looking at her is like the look of the tourists or potential customers at the prostitutes displayed in the windows in Amsterdam’s Red Light district. This brings us back to the topic of the gaze and its vicissitudes in painting. Hegel is fully aware of the disruptive power of the gaze, its exceptional status in the totality of a human body. For Hegel, the form of a human body is

a totality of organs into which the Concept is dispersed, and it manifests in each member only some particular activity and partial emotion. But if we ask in which particular organ the whole soul appears as soul, we will at once name the eye; for in the eye the soul is concentrated and the soul does not merely see through it but is also seen in it. Now as the pulsating heart shows itself all over the surface of the human, in contrast to the animal, body, so in the same sense it is to be asserted of art that it has to convert every shape in all points of its visible surface into an eye, which is the seat of the soul and brings the spirit into appearance. – Or, as Plato cries out to the star in his familiar distich: “When thou lookest on the stars, my star, oh! would I were the heavens and could see thee with a thousand eyes,” so, conversely, art makes every one of its productions into a thousand-eyed Argus, whereby the inner soul and spirit is seen at every point. And it is not only the bodily form, the look of the eyes, the countenance and posture, but also actions and events, speech and tones of voice, and the series of their course through all conditions of appearance that art has everywhere to make into an eye, in which the free soul is revealed in its inner infinity. (VPA I, 203-4/I, 153-4)

The weird thing is that the image of the thousand-eyed Argus “is not one of the beautiful but is rather monstrous, ugly even” (Pippin 2014a, p. 101); so how can such an outstandingly ugly image stand for the metaphor of how a beautiful work of art functions?1

Let us proceed step by step. First, why many eyes? From the Freudian standpoint, only one answer is possible. In the same way that, according to Freud, the image of multiple penises in a dream signal castration (of the One), thousands of eyes cannot but signal the castration of the (one) Gaze. And the same goes for social life: The principal antagonism, when foreclosed or excluded, returns as a multiplicity. Does the same not hold for class antagonism, which, when occluded by the appearance of class balance (collaboration, mutual support, and complementarity – the cor­porate vision of society as a social body where every organ has its proper role to play), returns in the multiplicity of social separations and hierar­chies? (The same goes for the statues and paintings of Indian gods and goddesses with dozens of hands – what this signals is the lack of the one real Hand.) Bourgeois society generally obliterates castes and other hier­archies, equalizing all individuals as market-subjects divided only by class difference, but today’s late capitalism, with its “spontaneous” ideology, endeavors to obliterate the class division itself by proclaiming us all “self­entrepreneurs,” the differences among us being merely quantitative (a big capitalist borrows hundreds of millions for his investment, a poor worker borrows a couple of thousand for his supplementary education). The expected outcome is that other divisions and hierarchies emerge: experts and nonexperts; full citizens and the excluded; religious, sexual, and other minorities.Therein resides the lie of humanist universalism – or, as Carl Schmitt stated it brutally: “Whoever invokes ‘humanity’ wants to cheat” (Schmitt 1996 [1932], p. 54). Cheating here means simply obfuscating the antagonism in the very core of “humanity” (and thus covertly taking part by way of privileging one side in the antagonism).

The Ugly Gaze

So let us return to the (ugly) gaze that emanates from the painting, the way the painting we are looking at “returns the gaze.” Insofar as this gaze, the blind spot of the painting, is an ugly “phallic” protuberance, an excess that disturbs the painting’s harmony (as is the case with Holbein’s Ambassadors, where the blind spot is the ugly, prolonged anamorphic stain in the lower part of the painting), a work of art has to obfuscate this stain in its very heart if it is to become beautiful. This, for Lacan, is beauty – the domesticated ugliness of the gaze. The painter

gives something for the eye to feed on, but he invites the person to whom this picture is presented to lay down his gaze there as one lays down one’s weapons. This is the pacifying, Apollonian effect of painting. Something is given not so much to the gaze as to the eye, something that involves the abandonment, the laying down, of the gaze. (Lacan 1978, p. 101)

Gaze disturbing, ugly. “The problem is that a whole side of painting – expressionism – is separated from this field” (Lacan 1978, p. 101).

The image of thousand-eyed Argus is not the only case of ugliness in ancient Greece. There is (at least) also the (in)famous gigantic statue (the “colossus of Rhodes”) that stood above the entrance to the port; it was considered so disgusting with its large genitals and so on that it was taken as a divine punishment when a storm destroyed it. Where does this ugliness in ancient Greek art come from?

An answer is provided by Hegel, who does not conceive the ancient Greek miracle as emerging out of nowhere, but is fully aware of the violence of the break with preceding tradition that enabled it. The Greeks

certainly received the substantial beginnings of their religion, culture, their com­mon bonds of fellowship, more or less from Asia, Syria and Egypt; but they have so greatly obliterated [getilgt] the foreign nature of this origin, and it is so much changed, worked upon, turned round, and altogether made so different, that what they, as we, prize, know, and love in it, is essentially their own … The foreign origin they have so to speak thanklessly [undankbar] forgotten, putting it in the background – perhaps burying it in the darkness of the mysteries which they have kept secret [geheim] from themselves. They have not only done this, that is they have not only used and enjoyed all that they have brought forth and formed, but they have become aware of and thankfully [dankbar] and joyfully placed before themselves this at-homeness [Heimatlichkeit] in their whole existence, the ground and origin of themselves. (VGPI, 174/I, 150-1)

So there is nothing new for Hegel in the “Black Athena” thesis. As Rebecca Comay has noted, he even describes the way Greek art relates to its predecessors in terms of a “conquering” (siegen), “repression” (zuruckdrangen), “abolition” (fortfallen), “expunging” (tilgen), “annihila­tion” (vertilgen), “effacement” (Ausloschung), “erasure” (Verwischung), “stripping away” (Abstreifung), “excision” (abschneiden), “concealment” (verstricken) – of what? Of “the ‘Orient’ or its prehistoric avatar – animal, bodily, ugly, stupid” (Comay 2014, p. 126).

The notion of the Greek miracle as the outcome of organic sponta­neous self-generation is thus an illusion grounded on brutal repression – and, as always with Hegel, these repressed origins return in the fatal flaw of classic Greek art that is the obverse of its very achievement. And we should not be surprised to learn that this repression takes the form of the exclusion of the gaze. A Greek statue is the perfect human form, the balance of body and spirit – however, as such, it has to be without gaze: Their eyes are flat, pure surfaces, not the punctual window into the depth of the soul, since such a crack in the bodily surface would disturb its unity, its harmonious beauty. This is why Greek statues do not yet display subjectivity proper:

If we compare this vocation of romantic art with the task of classical art, fulfilled in the most adequate way by Greek sculpture, the plastic shape of the gods does not express the movement and activity of the spirit which has retired into itself out of its corporeal reality and made its way to inner self­awareness … What [these sculptures] lack is the actuality of self-aware sub­jectivity in the knowing and willing of itself. This defect is shown externally in the fact that the expression of the soul in its simplicity, namely the light of the eye, is absent from the sculptures. The supreme works of beautiful sculpture are sightless, and their inner being does not look out of them as self-knowing inwardness in this spiritual concentration which the eye discloses. This light of the soul falls outside them and belongs to the spectator alone; when he looks at these shapes, soul cannot meet soul nor eye eye. (VPA II, 131-2/I, 520-1)

However, as we have just seen, within Greek art itself, this excluded (foreclosed even) excess of gaze returns as a disturbing multitude: The whole body of a Greek statue becomes a surface with hundreds of eyes. But it is only in later Romantic art that this excess returns. Modern subjectivity is the return of the monstrous dimension excluded from the ancient Greek harmonious art. This is why the category of beauty is no longer central for modern art: In it, we pass from the Beautiful to (differ­ent modalities of) the Sublime.

The passage from Greek beauty to the Christian sublime and then to the outright explosion of the Ugly as an aesthetic category was first system­atically deployed by Karl Rosenkranz, editor and scholar of Hegel, author of his first “official” biography, although himself a reluctant Hegelian, in his Ästhetik des Häßlichen (Aesthetics of the ugly2). Rosenkranz’s start­ing point is the historical process of the gradual abandonment of the unity of True, Good, and Beautiful: Not only can something ugly be true and good, but ugliness can be an immanent aesthetic notion, that is, an object can be ugly and an aesthetic object, an object of art. Rosenkranz remains within the long tradition from Homer onward that associates physical ugliness with moral monstrosity; for him, the ugly is das Negativschöne (the negatively beautiful): “The pure image of the Beautiful arises, shining all the more against the dark background/foil of the Ugly” (Rosenkranz 1853, p. 36). Rosenkranz here distinguishes between a “healthy” and a “pathological” mode of enjoying the Ugly in a work of art: To be aesthetically enjoyable and, as such, edifying and permissible, ugliness has to remain as a foil of the beautiful – ugliness for the sake of itself is a pathological enjoyment of art.

Ugliness is as such immanent to Beauty, a moment of the latter’s self­ development. Like every concept, Beauty contains its opposite within itself, and Rosenkranz provides a systematic Hegelian deployment of all the modalities of the Ugly, from the formless chaos to the perverted distortions of the Beautiful. The basic matrix of his conceptualization of the Ugly is the triad of the Beautiful, the Ugly, and the Comical, where the Ugly serves as the middle, the intermediate moment, between the Beautiful and the Comical: “A caricature pushes something particular over its proper measure and creates thereby a disproportion which, inso­far as it recalls its ideal counterpart, becomes comical” (Rosenkranz 1853, p. 145).3

A whole series of issues arises here. First, can this third term not also be conceived as the Sublime, insofar as the ugly in its chaotic and over­whelming monstrosity that threatens to destroy the subject recalls its opposite, the indestructible fact of Reason and of the moral law? The Sublime can appear (turn into) ridiculous, and the ridiculous can appear (turn into) sublime, as we learned from Chaplin’s late films.

Second, the notion of the Ugly as the foil for the appearance of the Beautiful is profoundly ambiguous. It can be read (as it is by Rosenkranz) in the traditional Hegelian way: The Ugly is the subordinated moment in the game the Beautiful is playing with itself, its immanent self-negation which lays the (back)ground for its full appearance. Or it can be read in a much stronger, literal sense, as the very (back)ground of the Beautiful, which precedes the Beautiful and out of which the Beautiful arises. This is the reading proposed by Adorno in his Aesthetic Theory: “If there is any causal connection at all between the beautiful and the ugly, it is from the ugly as cause to the beautiful as effect, and not the other way around. If one originated in the other, it is beauty that originated in the ugly and not the reverse” (Adorno 1984a, p. 75). Adorno’s point here is twofold. First, concerning the notion of art, the Ugly is the “archaic” or “primi­tive” chaotic (Dionysian) life substance that a work of art “gentrifies,” elevates into the aesthetic form, but the price for this is the mortification of the life substance. The Ugly is the force of life against the death imposed by the aesthetic form. Second, with reference specifically to the modern era in which the Ugly became an aesthetic category, Adorno claims that art has to deal with the Ugly “in order to denounce, in the Ugly, the world which created it and reproduces it in its image” (Adorno 1984a, p. 72). The underlying premise here is that art is a medium of truth, not just an escapist play of beautiful appearances. In a historical situation in which the Beautiful is irreparably discredited as kitsch, it is only by presenting the Ugly in its ugliness that art can keep open the utopian horizon of Beauty.

A third point that arises is, what if the reversal of the Ugly into the Comical (or the Sublime) does not occur? Herman Parret describes such an option with regard to the Kantian Sublime: If the overwhelming pressure of the Ugly gets too strong, it becomes monstrous and can no longer be sublated/negated into the Sublime.

There is for Kant a progression from the colossal to the monstrous, i.e. towards the total annihilation of our faculty of presentation. If the colossal can already be considered a sublime correlate, then it remains certainly inside an acceptable limit; with the monstrous, on the other hand, one has passed beyond the acceptable limit, in full terror and total unpleasure. With the monstrous we are in the margin of the acceptable where the imagination is fully blocked to function. It looks as if the monstrous is the Thing, inexpressible and abyssal. The monstrous does violence to subjectivity without submitting it to any legality. (Parret 2009, p. 4)

The Sublime pleasure is a pleasure in unpleasure, while the Monstrous generates only unpleasure – but, as such, it provides enjoyment (Genuss, jouissance). Therein resides the link between enjoyment and disgust:

The “disgust for the object” arises from a certain “enjoyment” [Genuss] in the “matter of sensation” which distances the subject from its purposiveness. Pleasure [Lust] is opposed to “enjoyment” insofar as “pleasure is culture” [wo die Lust zugleich Kultur ist] … “Enjoyment” in matter, in contrast, pro­vokes disgust. In addition, this enjoyment of losing oneself in the matter of “charms and emotions” has a direct impact on the health of our body: it generates disgust which manifests itself in corporeal reactions like nausea, vomiting and convulsions. Pleasure-unpleasure [Lust/Unlust] in the feeling of the sublime has nothing to do with that “enjoyment” [Genuss] destructive of culture and generative of disgust. (Parret 2009, p. 7)

Do we not get here even an echo of what Kristeva calls “abject” (Kristeva 1982)? The object of enjoyment is by definition disgusting, and what makes it disgusting is a weird superego injunction that appears to emanate from it, a call to enjoy it even if (and precisely because) we find it ugly and desperately try to resist being dragged into it:

Kant insists on the non-representability of ugliness in art: “ [in] disgust … that strange sensation, which rests on nothing but imagination, the object is presented as if it insisted, as it were, on our enjoying it even though that is just what we are forcefully resisting.” This is a typically Kantian approach: in a single phrase, there is a gleichsam (as it were) and an als ob (as if). The ugly object has no reasonable effect on the Gemüth. Instead, an excited and dangerously disconcerted imagina­tion petrifies the subject in its corporeity. This is the very essence of disgusting ugliness: it threatens the stability of our corporeity, our body “forcefully resists” the incitement to enjoy that ugliness deceitfully imposes on us. (Parret 2009, pp. 6-7)

This, finally, brings us to the heart of disgust: The object of disgust “threatens the stability of our corporeity”; it destabilizes the line that separates the inside of our body from its outside. Disgust arises when the border that separates the inside of our body from its outside is violated, when the inside penetrates out, as in the case of blood or excre­ment. It is similar with saliva: As we all know, although we can without problem swallow our own saliva, we find it repulsive to swallow again saliva that was spit into a glass out of our body – again a case of violating the Inside/Outside frontier. What distinguishes man from animals is that, with humans, the disposal of excrement becomes a problem – not because it has a bad smell, but because it came out from our innermost. We are ashamed of excrement because, in it, we expose/externalize our innermost intimacy. Animals do not have a problem with it because they do not have an “interior” as do humans. One should refer here to Otto Weininger, who designated volcanic lava as “the shit of the earth” (Die Lava ist der Dreck der Erde). It comes from inside the body, and this inside is evil, criminal: “The Inner of the body is very criminal” (Das Innere des Körpers ist sehr verbrecherisch) (Weininger 1997, pp. 187, 188).

There Are Comedies and Comedies

How, then, can we think with Hegel against Hegel apropos of art after Beauty? Pippin is right to point out that in his proclamation of the end of art (as the highest expression of the absolute), Hegel is paradoxically not idealist enough. What Hegel fails to see is not simply some post-Hegelian dimension totally outside his grasp, but precisely the “Hegelian” dimen­sion of the analyzed phenomenon. The same goes for economy: What Marx demonstrated in his Capital is how the self-reproduction of the capital obeys the logic of the Hegelian dialectical process of a substance-subject that retroactively posits its own presuppositions. However, Hegel himself missed this dimension – his notion of industrial revolution was the Adam Smith-type manufacture where the work process is still that of combined individuals using tools, not yet the factory in which the machin­ery sets the rhythm and individual workers are de facto reduced to organs serving the machinery to its appendices. This is why Hegel could not yet imagine the way abstraction rules in developed capitalism. This abstrac­tion is not only in our (financial speculator’s) misperception of social reality; it is “real” in the precise sense of determining the structure of the material social processes themselves. The fate of whole strata of a population, and sometimes that of whole countries, can be decided by the “solipsistic” speculative dance of capital, which pursues its goal of profitability in blessed indifference to how its movement will affect social reality. Therein resides the fundamental systemic violence of capitalism, much more uncanny than the direct precapitalist socio­ideological violence. This violence is no longer attributable to concrete individuals and their “evil” intentions, but purely “objective,” systemic, anonymous.

And in exact homology to this reign of abstraction in capitalism, Hegel was paradoxically not idealist enough to imagine the reign of abstraction in art. That is to say, in the same way that in the domain of economy he was unable to discern the self-mediating Notion that structures the eco­nomic reality of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption, Hegel was unable to discern the Notional content of a painting that mediates and regulates its form (shapes, colors) at a level that is more basic than the content represented (pictured) by a painting – “abstract painting” mediates/reflects sensuality at a nonrepresentative level:

seeing abstraction as self-conscious, conceptual, not, as with Greenberg, reduc­tionist and materialist. Pollocks and Rothkos are not presentations of paint drips and color fields and flat canvas. They conceptualize components of sensible meaning that we traditionally would not see and understand as such, would treat as given, and this can make sense because the result character of even sensible apprehension, a generalized idealism evident even in the likes of Nietzsche and Proust, has come to be part of the intellectual habits of mind of modern self­understanding, even if unattended to as such. Such is for Hegel the new way nonrepresentational art might matter. (Pippin 2002b, p. 23)

Exemplary here is Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, which explores how colors, forms, points, lines, and their interplay directly evoke spiritual inner life (pure emotions), bypassing representative con­tent. One should bear in mind here the gap that separates authentic art from mere decorative art. Nonfigurative decorative art also displays the interplay of forms and colors, but this interplay is not a purveyor of a deeper historical Truth. While Kandinsky’s text is full of naive theosophical theses, two of his points nonetheless hit the mark, bearing witness to the fact that what he calls “Spiritual” is also Spirit in the Hegelian sense. First, the progress of art stands for the progress in freedom: “The greatest freedom of all, the freedom of an unfettered art, can never be absolute. Every age achieves a certain measure of this freedom, but beyond the boundaries of its freedom the mightiest genius can never go. But the measure of freedom of each age must be constantly enlarged” (Kandinsky 1977, p. 17). And second, it is rooted in its historical moment: “Every artist, as child of his age, is impelled to express the spirit of his age (this is the element of style) – dictated by the period and particular country to which the artist belongs (it is doubtful how long the latter distinction will continue to exist)” (p. 33).

Hegel, of course, does not go in this direction; for him, art after the end of art, art in a reconciled world, has to be comical. What if, however, comedy and radical nonreconciliation do not exclude each other (the reason the best films about the Holocaust are comedies)? Recall how Primo Levi, in If This Is a Man, describes the dreadful selekcja, the survival examination in the camp:

The Blockältester [the elder of the hut] has closed the connecting-door and has opened the other two which lead from the dormitory and the Tagesraum [daily room] outside. Here, in front of the two doors, stands the arbiter of our fate, an SS subaltern. On his right is the Blockältester, on his left, the quartermaster of the hut. Each one of us, as he comes naked out of the Tagesraum into the cold October air, has to run the few steps between the two doors, give the card to the SS man and enter the dormitory door. The SS man, in the fraction of a second between two successive crossings, with a glance at one’s back and front, judges everyone’s fate, and in turn gives the card to the man on his right or his left, and this is the life or death of each of us. In three or four minutes a hut of two hundred men is “done,” as is the whole camp of twelve thousand men in the course of the afternoon. (Levi 1987, pp. 133-4)

Right means survival; left means gas chamber. Is there not something properly comic in this, the ridiculous spectacle of appearing strong and healthy, of attracting for a brief moment the indifferent gaze of the Nazi administrator who presides over life and death? Here, comedy and horror coincide: Imagine the prisoners practicing their appearance, trying to hold head high and chest forward, walking with a brisk step, pinching their lips to appear less pale, exchanging advice on how to impress the SS man; imagine how a simple momentary confusion of cards or a lack of attention of the SS man can decide my fate.

This “comical” aspect, of course, causes no laughter – it rather stands for a position beyond comedy and tragedy. On one hand, the Muslim4 is so destitute that his stance can no longer be considered “tragic”: There is no dignity in him that is crucial for the tragic position; that is, he no longer retains the minimum of dignity against the background of which his miserable actual position would have appeared as tragic. He is simply reduced to the shell of a person, emptied of the spark of spirit. If we try to present him as tragic, the effect will be precisely comic, as when one tries to read tragic dignity into meaningless, idiotic persistence. On the other hand, although the Muslim is in a way comic, although he acts in the way that is usually the stuff of comedy and laughter (his automatic, mindless, repetitive gestures, his impassive pursuit of food), the utter misery of his condition thwarts any attempt to present and/or perceive him as a comic character. If we try to present him as comic, the effect will be precisely tragic, as when the sad sight of someone cruelly mocking a helpless victim (say, putting obstacles in the way of a blind person to see if he will stumble), instead of producing laughter in us, generates sympathy for the victim’s tragic predicament. Did not something along these lines happen with the rituals of humiliation in the camps, from the inscription Arbeit machtfrei above the entrance to the gate at Auschwitz to the music band that accompanied prisoners to work or to the gas chambers? The paradox is that it is only through such cruel humor that the tragic sentiment can be generated. The Muslim is thus the zero-point at which the very opposition between tragedy and comedy, between sublime and ridiculous, between dignity and derision is suspended, the point at which one pole directly passes into its opposite. If we try to present the Muslim’s predicament as tragic, the result is comic, a mocking parody of tragic dignity, and if we treat him as a comic character, tragedy emerges.

So maybe Hegel, in his tragic vision, was not able to consider the possibility of a horror worse than tragedy, one that, precisely for this reason, may give rise to comedy, a laughter that is not done from the position of reconciliation, laughing at the vanity of the conflicts that persist, but a laughter through which the subject’s total capitulation and disorientation transpire. In other words, Hegel knew that comedy follows tragedy; what he was not able to imagine is a comedy more horrible than tragedy. So it is not that Hegel jumped too quickly to comedy, to comic reconciliation, and that he should see that the tragedy of alienation and antagonism goes on in the modern world. In the modern world, tragedy passed over to comedy, there is no return to tragic experience, and we should learn to see the horror in terms of comedy, in comedy itself. For Hegel, however, the comedy that fits the modern era concerns what he calls Humanus, art without historical Truth, just depicting ordinary life with its irrelevant conflicts and in this way signaling that the Absolute is reconciled with itself. Modern art transcends itself, but

in this self-transcendence art is nevertheless a withdrawal of man into himself, a descent into his own breast, whereby art strips away from itself all fixed restric­tion to a specific range of content and treatment, and makes Humanus its new holy of holies: i.e. the depths and heights of the human heart as such, mankind in its joys and sorrows, its strivings, deeds, and fates. Herewith the artist acquires his subject-matter in himself and is the human spirit actually self-determining and considering, meditating, and expressing the infinity of its feelings and situations: nothing that can be living in the human breast is alien to that spirit any more. This is a subject-matter which does not remain determined artistically in itself and on its own account; on the contrary, the specific character of the topic and its outward formation is left to capricious invention, yet no interest is excluded – for art does not need any longer to represent only what is absolutely at home at one of its specific stages, but everything in which man as such is capable of being at home. (VPA II, 237-8/I, 607)

In this universe where there are no privileged “great topics” and “any­thing goes,” all conflict has to remain in the domain of comedy:

Absolute subjective personality moves free in itself and in the spiritual world. Satisfied in itself, it no longer unites itself with anything objective and particular­ized and it brings the negative side of this dissolution into consciousness in the humor of comedy. Yet on this peak comedy leads at the same time to the dissolution of art altogether. All art aims at the identity, produced by the spirit, in which eternal things, God, and absolute truth are revealed in real appearance and shape to our contemplation, to our hearts and minds. But if comedy presents this unity only as its self-destruction because the Absolute, which wants to realize itself, sees its self-actualization destroyed by interests that have now become explicitly free in the real world and are directed only on what is accidental and subjective, then the presence and agency of the Absolute no longer appears positively unified. (VPA III, 572-3/II, 1236)

It is interesting to note that the expression l’art pour l’art, which regis­ters art’s full autonomy as an end in itself, not serving any broader social purpose, was coined by Hegel’s French pupil Victor Cousin and is the strict obverse of Hegel’s thesis on the end of art. It is as if art loses its privileged status of the expression of Absolute at the very moment when it asserts its full autonomy. When it finally arrives at what it was striving for – the full emancipation from the sacred, from social utility, and so on – the prize becomes worthless; the emancipation of art turns into the emancipation from art. This is one of the ways to understand why Hegel himself characterized art after the end of art as its self-destruction – and is this not what modern art effectively is, caught as it is in a permanent process of self-questioning that goes up to self-annihilation? But we can also understand it in a different way, as the regression of art into super­ficial comedy. That is to say, does Hegel’s description not fit perfectly the universe of today’s sitcoms, from Seinfeld to Mexican telenovelas? The (social) world is basically reconciled; there are no antagonisms cutting across it, just ordinary people with their everyday, mostly ridi­culous complications. The very form of sitcoms seems to evoke the Hegelian “spurious infinity”: There are no big issues, just melodramatic complications that pop up and disappear. So it seems as if Hegel was here ahead of his time; it is only today that reality has generated a product that fits his description.

[1] One can thus conceive cubism as a kind of inverted Argus: In it, the painting presents an object (say, a human body) as if it is simultaneously viewed from multiple standpoints. In this sense, in cubism the viewer/beholder himself becomes a multi-eyed Argus.

[2] Hässlich: ugly and, literally, worthy of hatred, that which provokes hatred, “hateable.”

[3] Rosenkranz strangely ignores Hegel in his book on the Ugly, although Hegel points the way toward the Ästhetik des Häßlichen when he conceives Romantic art as the art that liberates subjectivity in its contingency (ugliness) and culminates in humor as a way to assume the ugly.

[4] [As recorded by Levi, Muselmänner was inmates’ term for those in the camps who had given themselves over to despair, the “living dead” who were considered prime candidates for the selection described here.—Ed.]

Slavoj Žižek, "Comedy between the Ugly and the Sublime"