The Linguistic Condition : Kant's Critique of Judgment and the Poetics of Action

I would like to express my gratitude to the Morris Louis Estate for having granted me permission on an exceptional basis to feature Louis ' "Beta Lambda" (1961) on the cover of this work. From my first conception of this project and all across the years of its development, as my understanding of its thesis of a "free" "linguistic condition" of judgment grew, Louis' unparalleled "Unfurled" series, of which "Beta Lambda" is a touchstone I have had the fortune to view my life long, appeared directly before my mind's eye. More than any other individual work I know, it concretely represents the centrality of the act of judgment to Kant's tripartite Critique, i.e., the absolute necessity of judgment, precisely because lacking "any proper realm of its own, " to the opposing realms of knowledge and moral action so forcefully delineated in the First and Second Critiques. "Beta Lambda" enacts the very condition, of an unprescripted realm of perception actively enabling opposing forces to hold together, at whose description this book aims. My thanks to the Morris Louis Estate for enabling me to bring it before the reader's eye as well. Preface: xiv others. Myths of mimetically dissembling statues and automata fashioned by Daedalus and Hephaestus, mortal and god alike, and the endless echoes of Ovid's Narcissus and Echo, and Pygmalion and Galatée, in fictional and theoretical accounts of desire stuck mistaking self for other, find their inverted confirmation in explicitly "alien" models of the subject in which reflexive self-projection is instead short-circuited: La Méttrie's simulacrum of man, or homme-machine, incapable not only of desire but of the "imagination" desire requires; Diderot's homme horloge, homme automate, and wished-for "decomposition of a man, " theoretically imagined, like Condillac's statue, as artificial aids in isolating present and absent sensations from our nonsensory ability to represent them. The dummy of Hoffman's Sandman whose fatal allure "lives" on in Offenbach's gorgeously scored Olympia and Delibes' Coppélia, along with the many mail-order mannequins figuratively and literally embraced in current cinematic iterations of the medieval romance genre; the singing sea creatures silenced by the same magic spells that grant them limbs, and the myriad denizens of erotic, mytho-fantastic and science-fiction scenarios descended from them -in short, all the beautiful "body doubles" that "people" nightmare narratives of life limited to "going through the motions, " semblances of subjects doomed to remain -as Dvorák's Rusulka perfectly, paradoxically, describes -"a silent echo of the elements, " themselves all stand for an uncanny absence of "standing, " the invisible yet acknowledged "condition" that, independent of the merely phenomenal materiality and false effigies of aesthesis, alone constitutes the capacities for experience and action that produce a subject as such. Rendered incapable of self-articulation in exchange for coveted human corporal form alone, Dvorák's mythic Rusulka, returned to her watery element, elects to regain both eros and voice at the cost of the life of the human subject with whom she most desired to communicate. The sense of horror with which she recognizes the state of living death to which her future existence is thus consigned, is not shared, ironically enough, by the voluble spokesmen for just such inert animism that have propelled the tide of bizarrely spiritualist -"post-philosophical" and "post-Marxist" -"materialisms, " which, echoing neo-Cartesian echoes of neo-Platonic mysticisms, have increasingly submerged all articulated "grounds" for "standing" -for the very possibility of possible action -over recent years. Overlapping conflations of the empirical with the ontological, ontology with a sensation-based aestheticism, aesthesis as such with the political, and the political, thus, ultimately, with the nonpolitical, "divine" or "sacred, " all describe, in one figurative vocabulary or another, an autotelic status quo rendering any notion of action, rather than predetermined reaction, per force, "immaterial. " i Once objects of understanding themselves, critical theories of i. Among the most widespread of such -now commonplace -figurations of "life" mysteriously liberated from articulation, historicity, disparity, relationality and discursive mediation of any kind are Deleuze's traceless "nomadic" motions in space and predetermined monadic entelechies; Rancière's "politics" of evanescent aesthetic sensations and equations of deprivation and whose product is a representation may provide us with our own grounds for reflection, for arriving at an understanding of the acquisition of knowledge itself. For what we do when we do without knowing produces knowledge that, rather than directly reflecting a foregone conclusion, comes about unforeseeably, without causal or conventional determination, and with the presence of something that effectively negates the negation or absence of something, a representation. Thus, "doing without knowing" may mean living ignorance, pure and simple, an ongoing practice of accidental hit or miss, or it may mean, in a purposeful, constructive sense, acting so as to achieve an aim or bring something about despite the absence of the direct knowledge, means, or data that would facilitate, if not predetermine action in the first place. "Doing without knowing" may be as commonplace as ignoring what one does -as most of us, unconsciously or consciously, gracefully or catastrophically, do most of the time -but it may also be doing something different from the norm, something that, in its precise contours, cannot have been done before in that it requires, among other things, the real absence of positive information, whether apprehended by the senses in the present or passed along by an already mediated tradition (or "prejudice"), an absence that alone enables the real presence of ignorance, as well as its positively negative effects. Uncertain not only as to what he or she knows, but as to what one can know, and in possession of no "fall-back" position or perceptible path forward, the subject contrives another way of proceeding by putting another sensible form or object in position: the subject, any subject, in other words, represents. Such uncertainty should be sharply distinguished from the all-too-handy refrain of self-exculpation, "Had I known then what I know now. " This disclaimer of disastrous, typically vainglorious action implies that empirical ignorance, rather than personal interest and duplicity, at once causes our acts and exonerates us from all future responsibility for their consequences. Yet knowing this -that one can always plead former ignorance at a later date -is not to know nothing but, indeed, to know something, something of not only personal and calculable but historical and incalculable consequences, and to proceed or to continue to act, on the basis of it, is to shadow, if not eclipse the content of such an alibi with the conscious foreknowledge of its future rhetorical, exculpatory effect. Acting on the knowledge that one can always claim one acted out of ignorance is to clothe one's acts in the costume of a Bildungsroman, a ready-to-wear trope of self-serving deindemnification passing itself off as innocence after the fact. Oriented instead, in their distinctive approaches to knowledge, toward our response to and responsibility for what we do with experience, as partial or limited as that experience may be, Kant and Diderot -distinct theorists of doing without knowing in their own right -refuse equally to confuse ignorance with innocence and the pursuit of selfinterest with uncertainty, to tailor morality to the limits of cognition. Before Kant theorized judgment as a specifically noncognitive activity directly dependent (as described in Part One of this study) upon our ability to communicate and be understood by others, and thus to speak, in effect, not merely for oneself but for "any" and "everyone" ("jedermann"), both Kant and Diderot related cognitive Preface. Acting upon Condition -- Chapter One. Introduction: Before -- Judgment: Doing without Knowing in Kant and Diderot -- Part I. Linguistic Conditions -- Chap. Two. "The Condition of -- Judgment:" Kant's "Common Sense," or the Origin of Language in the Third -- Critique -- 1. -- "Common Sense" and Signification, or What is Not Tautology -- 2. "Technique" -- 3. "Free" -- 4. "Feeling" -- 5. Speech Act and "Communicability" -- 6. Rousseau's Nouns -- 7. Diderot's Adjectives -- 8. Kant's Predicates: ?Synthetic -- Judgments a Priori? and "A General Voice" -- 9. "The Schema," or Language Inside -- 10. What is Articulation? -- 11. World Without Words: Wordsworth -- Part II. Missing Senses and Poetics -- Chap. Three. "Judgment" and the -- Genesis of What We Lack: "Poetry," "Schema," and the "Monogram of Imagination" in Kant -- 1. -- "Judgment" in the "Age of Critique" -- 2. -- Judgment and "Indifference:" The "Common Sense? of Imagination in -- Arendt -- and Kant -- 3. -- The Schema and the Language of Poetry -- 4. -- Poetry and the Judgment of Critique -- Chap. Four. Kleist's Mere Formalities -- 1. Kant and Kleist: -- Representation and Irony -- 2. What happened: Missed Representation -- and Misrepresentation in "Die Marquise von O?" -- 3. Contesting "Judgment" in "The -- Duel" -- Bibliography -- Primary Bibliography -- Secondary Bibliography Cover Halftitle Series Title Copyright Dedication Epigraph CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS PREFACE: ACTING UPON CONDITION Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION: BEFORE JUDGMENT: DOING WITHOUT KNOWINGIN KANT AND DIDEROT Part I LINGUISTIC CONDITIONS Chapter 2 THE “CONDITION” OF JUDGMENT: “COMMON SENSE,” OR THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE IN KANT’S THIRD CRITIQUE 1. “Common Sense” and Signification, or What is Not Tautology 2. “Technique” 3. “Free” 4. “Feeling” 5. Speech Act and “Communicability” 6. Rousseau’s Nouns 7. Diderot’s Adjectives 8. Kant’s Predicates: “Synthetic Judgments A Priori” and “A General Voice” 9. “The Schema,” or Language Inside 10. What is Articulation? 11. World Without Words: Wordsworth Part II MISSING SENSES AND POETICS Chapter 3 “JUDGMENT” AND THE GENESIS OF WHAT WE LACK: “POETRY,” “SCHEMA,” AND THE “MONOGRAM OF IMAGINATION ” IN KANT 1. “Judgment” in the “Age of Critique” 2. Judgment and “Indifference:” the “Common Sense” of Imagination in Arendt and Kant 3. The Schema and the Language of Poetry 4. Poetry and the Judgment of Critique Chapter 4 KLEIST’S MERE FORMALITIES 1. Kant and Kleist: Representation and Irony 2. What happened: Misrepresentation and Missed Representation in “Die Marquise von O . . .” 3. Contesting “Judgment” in “The Duel” BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Bibliography Secondary Bibliography INDEX "Providing a unique interpretation of Kant's theory of judgement as integral to his overall project, Claudia Brodsky explores his continued relevance to contemporary theoretical concerns. The Linguistic Condition traces how Kant combined sensus communis, or common sense with the communicative nature of judgement to reveal that, for him, acts of judgement are dependent on their linguistic articulation, so that in Kantian philosophy language and judgement are inextricably linked. In this first in-depth analysis of language in the Critique of Judgement, Brodsky forms creative connections between literature and philosophy"-- Provided by publisher "Providing a unique interpretation of Kant's theory of judgement as integral to his overall project, Claudia Brodsky explores his continued relevance to contemporary theoretical concerns. The Linguistic Condition traces how Kant combined sensus communis, or common sense with the communicative nature of judgement to reveal that, for him, acts of judgement are dependent on their linguistic articulation, so that in Kantian philosophy language and judgement are inextricably linked. In this first in-depth analysis of language in the Critique of Judgement, Brodsky forms creative connections between literature and philosophy"-- Résumé de l'éditeur