The Gothic Sublime

Theory of the Gothic Sublime argues that the sublime figures without transcendence: Confronted with the “colossal,” the “absolutely great,” the mind turned inward into its own unconscious, regressed into its own labyrinth, to discover, in the tangled labyrinth of its dreams, a depth from which it could no longer soar into the grand design of the Kantian/Romantic sublime. In the process (of writing out this confrontation) a marked schizophrenic intensity emerges, both at the level of the subject (forever on the verge of madness) and at the level of the signifying chain (there is a distinct radicalization of the relationship between the signifier and the signified, the word and its referent).
Ultimately, however, we are confronted with a kind of black hole theory of the sublime. The black hole, which surfaces in Piranesi’s paintings, “Interiors measurelessly strange, / Where the distrustful thought may range,” or in Mary Shelley’s feverish handwriting, takes us back to the essential problematic of the Gothic and the Postmodern. The problematic takes two forms. The first, articulated so well by Kant, is the issue of the presentation of the unpresentable. Kant, of course, had seen that the representation of the “colossal,” the absolutely great, can occur only at that moment when reason gives way to imagination for a fleeting moment before it regains its power. What happened during this gap, this lapse, this concession or giving way, is the coming into being of the moment of the sublime. The second, articulated by Schopenhauer and Freud, is the “oceanic sublime,” the sublime as the dissolution of self in death. It is the latter, the compulsion toward our own ends (in death), that explains the inherently apocalyptic tendencies in the Gothic as the subject ingratiatingly gets absorbed into the sublime object.

http://graduate.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/zach.sublime2.html

Objects of the Feeling of the Kantian Sublime

The sublime is in turn of different kinds. Its feeling is sometimes accompanied with a certain dread, or melancholy, in some cases with quiet wonder and in still others with a beauty completely pervading a sublime plan. The first I shall call the terrifying sublime, the second the noble, and the third the splendid. Deep loneliness is sublime, but in a way that stirs terror. Hence, great far-reaching solitudes…have always given us occasion for peopling them with fearsome spirits, goblins, and ghouls. – Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, 47-8.

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. – Einstein

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. – E.L. Doctorow

Unconscious Contents

“In unconscious life negation must be regarded as a productive force rather than a limitation, or privation, of objects there might be for experience. Freud insists that the unconscious does not understand negation in its conventional sense, any more than it understands the conventional categories of space, time and causality. The unconscious is not governed by those transcendental categories by which philosophers have sought to police the operations of what used to be called the ‘mind’. It is possessed by an unstoppable positivity. The unconscious experience of a ‘negative object’ is positive, real and direct.”- Mark Cousins

Redefining Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia should not be seen as a disorder of human nature but, rather, as a configuration of human conditions.

The lucid courage for essential anxiety assures us the enigmatic possibility of experiencing Being. For close by essential anxiety as horror of the abyss dwells awe. – Heidegger, 1998/1943: 234

Sublime Terror

“The shudder released by the work of art, the experience of the modernist sublime, is the memory of the experience of terror and strangeness in the face of threatening nature. Shudder is the memorial experience of nature’s transcendence, its non-identity and sublimity, at one remove. Shudder is a memory, an afterimage, ‘of what is to be preserved’… Shudder is the address of the other; it corresponds to what Gadamer would identify as strangeness in the object of understanding, and what Heidegger thinks of in terms of the claim of being. Above all, shudder is the terror of the sublime in Kant, a terror made safe by the retraction of the object at its source.”
– J.M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art

“So far we have seen that the shudder is not just a mimetic reaction to primary, undifferentiated otherness. It is also, and more importantly for our purposes, a spontaneous and somatic response of revulsion at pure identity. But even in this extended sense the shudder is not merely a negative response. The shudder fulfils a positive epistemic function. It is the gateway to the path of truth. It allows what is to disclose itself as radically evil. As such, the shudder is the form which metaphysical experience assumes under social conditions of total identity… In Aesthetic Theory Adorno claims that works of modernist art can, in virtue of their characteristic autonomy, successfully capture and impart the shudder…The shudder is a reaction to the cryptically shut, which is a function of that element of indeterminacy.”
– James Finlayson, Metaphysical Experience

In The Sublime Object of Psychiatry:  Clinical and Cultural Approaches to Schizophrenia (Oxford UP: 2011), Angela Woods argues that schizophrenia is invoked as psychiatry’s disciplinary limit point and, as such, becomes psychiatry’s ‘sublime object’:  “Through its ongoing construction in psychiatric writing as opaque, bizarre, and resistant to analysis, schizophrenia at once attracts and frustrates ever more sophisticated forms of scientific inquiry, exceeding and thus marking the limits of any given interpretive model” (16-17).

Ethics and Schizophrenia

Michael Stocker’s “The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories” is a popular paper in ethics on the ways in which modern ethical theories fail to account for motive, producing a sort of schizophrenia because the agent is unable to use his reasons or motives as a basis for his actions.  Duty, rightness and obligation conflict with motives associated with love and friendship.

Click to access stocker.pdf