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KANT, BENJAMIN, PENSKY AND THE

HISTORICAL SUBLIME phil_357 175..180

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 written paper, 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, including those 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, antirevolu-
tionary progressivism decried by Benjamin. By contrast, for Voltaire history was a
series of catastrophes, more devastating than sublime, and he tried to avoid the
blow-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 course of
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 in the
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 reso-
nates not only with Benjamin on the Trauerspiel but also with a dimension of Kant

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that remains underexplored in his excellent paper: the dimension 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 their ubiquity 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 conven-
tional shorthand. Anachronistic, for these are of course also seventeenth century Christian allego-
ries, stock images of the central European counter-reformation denoting human fallenness and its
attendant vanity.
Blood and 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 the counter-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. (10)

At the very least, one should pause over the questionably sacrificial alignment
Pensky evokes in this passage of fall and redemption, the effacement of the
distinction (more accurately the decisive binary opposition) between the human
and the animal, the apocalyptic tumbling of great cities, dying like dogs, awash in
blood, and the blood sacrifice that continues to nourish abstract thought. Here I
can only pause.
For Pensky, Kant may have retrospectively seen the French Revolution as in
some sense a sign of history, but the thrust of his philosophy of history was to
counter the historical sublime through a selective reading that reacted to the
“derangement of the affects” in what might perhaps be seen in terms of repression,
disavowal, or at least looking away from, if not working through, the bloodier
sides of the past and their depressing effects. As Pensky puts it:

Kant’s philosophical history thus requires a distinctive, even a peculiar relationship to the body of
empirical data comprising historical knowing. There is a distinctive form of cognitive hygiene
required if one is to adapt this historical knowledge into a philosophical history. That body of
knowledge both offers the material for a history of institutional progress, but also the opposite: the
collapse of historical narrative, the repetition of catastrophe. Kant is acutely aware of the toxic
potential of historical knowing to freeze into the image of the eternal repetition of violent failure.
A careful protocol is necessary to remain focused on the relevant institutional details of historical
knowing. One must learn to “fix one’s eyes” on a providential refraction of historical events; one
must train in the Odyssean skill of ignoring both the promise of material happiness and the reality
of material, historical suffering. (21)

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In a seemingly premature foreclosure of the problems of suffering, trauma, and

catastrophe, Kant took as his special target not so much terrorism as Abderism—
the view of history as “an infinitely repeatable cycle of progression and regres-
sion” (23), which Kant opposed because of its presumably “crippling
implications.” Here Pensky invokes Adorno’s dictum that “the unthinkability of
despair is the secret of Kant’s philosophy” (ibid). One might counterbalance this
with the view that the pressure if not the thinkability of despair was a reason why
Kant proposed something like a duty of optimism or of seeking the best in spite of
the worst in his apprehension of the course of history as it bore on the formation
of will and the possibility of action. Perhaps one might say that, for Pensky, Kant
rejected two of the three great options in the philosophy of history—history as
going down or as going up and down or around and around—in order to fashion
a variant of the third option: to wit, history seen as going upwards but in terms of
a performative, prophetic, regulative ideal.
The turn to Benjamin is also in certain respects a counter-Kantian turn to a
valorized, messianically inflected historical sublime, which as Pensky notes, it is
tempting but not altogether adequate to see as the manic complement to despair.
In any case, Benjamin for Pensky engages catastrophe and affirms the role of
affect in the linkage of historical knowledge and action. The affect is not empathy
as a component of understanding, since empathy in the restricted form Benjamin
encounters or construes it is a feeble modality of acceptance. Nor is it the type of
ecstatic “high” that is typically associated with das Erhabene, the kind of “high”
Jünger sought and prized in violent combat. Rather the affect in question is anger
or even rage that is politically motivating. Here messianism is not the endless
waiting for what is presumably to come. It is a form of interruption that stops the
course of desperate circumstances and their ideological construction as progres-
sive. In Pensky’s words, “a mode of the historical sublime—catastrophe—relates
cognition (of the minutia of historical memory) and rage (as a moral response to
the frustrated expectations of past generations) in a neat complementarity to
Kant’s own synthesis of the reflexive teleological judgment and the obstinate
contentment arising from the suppression of grief. And catastrophe—an idea
whose content Benjamin at one point defines simply as ‘to have missed the
opportunity’—is, as an Idea, provided an image-foundation where no discursive
analysis of the content is possible. That image is storm, or, if one likes, the sea of
blood, the ruined city” (30f.). Here, for Pensky, one has a participant’s response to
“that prophetic history that Kant had summoned from the observer perspective”
(34). In what seems to be a form of free indirect summary indicating his own
implication in what he attributes to Benjamin, Pensky concludes with these
forceful words: “[t]he proper normative and methodological orientation for the
historian from out of angry commitment to present politics is a tactical turn of the
back to that very present, on the historian’s own times, to gather affective strength

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from the ‘peaks of earlier generations as they sink further and further into the
past.’ ‘A conception of history that has liberated itself from the schema of pro-
gression within an empty and homogeneous time,’ Benjamin concludes, ‘would
finally unleash the destructive energies of historical materialism that have been
held in check for so long’ ” (37).
In my own voice, I’ll conclude with a few questions, questions that bear on our
own use and abuse of past thinkers, notably Benjamin who has emerged as a
common, even a privileged, reference point in critical theory. What is the role of
immanent critique in a perspective that emphasizes affect, sublimity, destructive
energies, and decisive interruptions of revolutionary proportions? Is such a “mes-
sianic” perspective really available or desirable at all times on a collective and
historical in contrast to a personal level that I would be tempted to term late
romantic? How feasible is the appeal to what I think could be viewed as a blank
utopia or interruptive leap that not only resists blueprints of a future society but is
motivated by “an image-foundation where no discursive analysis of the content is
possible” (31)? This, I think, means a utopia or, if you prefer, a perspective by and
large devoid of any substantive notion of desirable change, especially with respect
to the problem of immanent critique of the economy and society. What is the
precise nature and role of violence in the affective rage that destroys what exists?
To what extent is violence construed in redemptive or divine terms (as seems to be
the case in Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence”) and not simply understood and
de-sublimated (or “de-sublimed”) as a tactic or strategy that may be more or less
effective, depending on circumstances? How does one reconcile the statement that
for Benjamin one must “focus the present as a moment of crisis [. . .] not at all in
messianic terms but in the perfectly profane and pragmatic terms of contemporary
political strategy and tactics” (31) with the later affirmations concerning the need
to “restore ‘a genuinely messianic face’ to the concept of the classless society” by
confronting the discourse of progress with “the image of the historical sublime”
(36)—a sublime involving the construction of “messianism as the arrest, rather
than the culmination of historical expectation” (ibid), whereby the classless
society is achieved not as a final goal but as an “interruption” (ibid)? What would
constitute a perfectly profane and pragmatic political strategy and tactics of the
historically sublime stoppage or interruption of historical expectation if not of
hitherto-known history? Are a banalizing, Sozialdemokratische Partei Deut-
schlands (SPD)-like, reformist discourse of progress and a messianic historical
sublime the only options or do they constitute a perhaps paralyzing impasse or
double bind? What are the different valences of the sublime in different “fields”
such as the political, the religious, and the aesthetic? Even if one cannot keep these
“fields” totally apart, are there dangers in the tendency to run them together, as
seems to be happening in recent invocations of the “postsecular” in which Ben-
jamin is himself a key reference point in figures such as Slavoj Zizek or Eric

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Santner? A final question here would be Benjamin’s understanding, insofar as one

can fathom it, of the creature, the human, and the other than human animal—and
whether Beatrice Hannsen’s “ethico-theological” notion of human openness to the
“infra-human” (in her Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals,
Human Beings, and Angels) and Eric Santner’s counter-view, in biopolitical and
psychotheological terms, of a distinctively, even uniquely human, “creaturely”
excess, what might perhaps be seen as an extreme form of the cringingly abject,
negative sublime, approximated only in animals deranged by humans, exhaust the
possibilities in reading Benjamin on the human/animal relation.

Cornell University

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