Intermezzo From the Beautiful to the Sublime
In: Inhuman EducationsSearch for other papers by Derek R. Ford in
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The intermezzo introduces an explicit consideration of aesthetics into the book, with a concentrated focus on Lyotard’s book on Kant’s third critique of judgment. Here, the distinction between the two forms of inhuman education turns on the difference between the aesthetic of the beautiful and the aesthetic of the sublime. After exploring Lyotard’s writing on Kant, I show how the inhuman education of the system, which is about innovation, is organized around the beautiful—with its demands for endless articulations and limitless dialogue—and how the inhuman education of infancy, which remains within initiation, finds resonance in the sublime—with its monstrous formlessness that blocks understanding, knowledge, and communication, disseizing the subject’s capacity of understanding. After articulating these differences and providing examples of each through Lyotard’s writings on art and artists, I return the idea of childish or idiotic writing—providing examples from Lyotard’s own writing—thereby demonstrating the ways in which they provide examples of writing under the (dis)order of the sublime.