The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy

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FEMINIST AESTHETICS AND THE CATEGORIES OF THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE SUBLIME

Christine Battersby

Introduction

Feminist explorations of the sublime and the beautiful have developed in markedly different directions. This is not surprising given the different histories of the two terms. Whereas the nature of the beautiful had been of key importance to Plato, Aristotle, and other ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, it was only during the Enlightenment period that a strong contrast was established between the beautiful and the sublime. But this was also the time when there was a decisive shift away from regarding the well-honed male body as best exemplifying the ideal of the beautiful, and beauty itself was domesticated and downgraded. As Mary Wollstonecraft registered in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Wollstonecraft 1996 [1792])—one of the earliest European feminist texts—to associate women with the duties of being beautiful in this newly demoted mode was, in effect, to give them the status of subordinate beings. Instead, Wollstonecraft aspired to the newly emergent category of the sublime, which was all too frequently being denied to ideally “feminine” women.

Beauty

In the case of beauty, philosophers generally maintained that what is involved is a response to an object or entity which is universal, disinterested, with all questions of desire, use-value, and personal taste set to one side. By contrast, in the case of the sublime, philosophers claimed that the pleasure in the sublime is not universal and also not simply formalist. Disinterestedness and embodiment were also given an entirely different role, in that physiological affect was registered as a significant element in the response to the sublime, even when the bodily response was also “transcended” or subsequently brought back under control. As a consequence, feminists have required different strategies when analyzing and countering two very different models of aesthetic judgement.

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Feminist philosophers who write about the beautiful have primarily concentrated on showing the inadequacy of claims that peoples across all cultures, periods of history, and ethnicities agree on the qualities, properties, or descriptors of beauty. This is evident in such significant anthologies as Peg Zeglin Brand’s Beauty Matters (Brand 2000) and her later collection, Beauty Unlimited (Brand 2013). These two books include essays on beauty in the early modern era, in contemporary non-Western cultures, and also distinct modes of beauty in particular genres of art, such as ballet, Bollywood cinema, and Balinese dance. Alongside these pieces, there are also articles on two related topics that frequently crop up in other major feminist texts on beauty and taste, for example, in Carolyn Korsmeyer’s Gender and Aesthetics (2004) and Savoring Disgust (2011). The first topic involves challenging the traditional linking of aesthetics, beauty, and disinterestedness. The second, related issue concerns the role of the body—and more specifically the female body—in the making of and appreciation of beautiful art. These emphases mean that relatively little attention has been paid to the beauty of natural landscape by those working in the field of feminist aesthetics, as Sheila Lintott (2010) somewhat despairingly observes.

Much of the most popular work by feminists on beauty has been by non-philosophers. A recent example is Natasha Walter’s Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism (2010), which focuses on the socialization of women, and the role that the ideal of beauty plays in our hypersexualized society. Walters can be read as updating the argument of Naomi Wolf in her bestselling book, The Beauty Myth (1990), who argued that contemporary women imbibe from patriarchal society an ideal of beauty that is as psychologically disabling as the medieval torture apparatus of the “iron maiden.” During the middle ages, Wolf claims, transgressive women were on occasions enclosed within “a body-shaped casket painted with the limbs and features of a lovely, smiling young woman” (1990: 493). Within these wooden caskets, women’s bodies were pierced by protruding iron spikes, or if these missed the mark, the women lost consciousness as they slowly suffocated and died. It turns out, however, that in repeating this story Wolf has herself been taken in by a different kind of male myth. The machinery of these “iron maidens” does not date back to the twelfth century, but was devised in the late eighteenth century at the earliest. Featuring in nineteenth-century “cabinets of curiosities” we find various authentic medieval artefacts, but displayed in a way that is entirely inauthentic, giving rise to the myth of the “iron maidens” which figure so often in later fictions and films, as well as in sensationalist museum displays. In this, males projected back onto the past their fears of female sexuality and of the newly emergent claims for female equality. Philosophically speaking, the male philosophers linked with this “invented history” also aimed to keep unruly matter within the constraints of form as they struggled to secure male dominance (Tanner 2006). Since beauty has been so frequently linked with the pleasures of “form,” and since women have been historically linked to a materiality that is uncontrollable, chaotic and hence also formless (Battersby 1989), these fantasy “iron maidens” are more philosophically interesting, and more closely linked to an ideal of beauty, than Wolf’s account initially suggests.

Much more careful, and also more philosophically sophisticated, is Sandra Lee Bartky’s Femininity and Domination (1990). Although not primarily a series of essays on aesthetics, Bartky’s text explores what she terms “the fashion-beauty complex,” which “produces in woman an estrangement from her bodily being” through the projection of an image of her own body as somehow lacking, of being “what I am not” (1990: 40). Bartky situates herself in a phenomenological tradition, and is expanding on Simone de Beauvoir’s analysis of the condition of woman, as “made, not born,” in The Second Sex (Beauvoir 1952 [1949]). Beauvoir engaged extensively with the ways in which “beauty” and “woman” align to produce alienation between the lived body and the body as object of the gaze—not only of the other, but also the gaze of one’s own self, which internalizes the viewpoint of the other. Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight (2005 [1993]) is another important philosophical exploration of twentieth-century beauty ideals, especially that of the ideal of the well-honed, slim and athletic body. Bordo’s highly influential analysis of female beauty was groundbreaking in its use of feminist and empirical research, but nevertheless it fits awkwardly within the category of feminist aesthetics, especially since it challenges analyses that remain at the level of “the merely aesthetic” (2005 [1993]: 46).

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The Sublime: Early Developments

The fuzzy boundaries of the category of the “aesthetic” are particularly clear in the case of the sublime, as the history of the term makes clear. The craze for the sublime can be traced back to Nicolas Boileau’s 1674 translation of a fragmentary Greek text on rhetoric by Longinus, Peri Hypsous (On the Sublime) (2005 [c.100–c.200]), written sometime between the first and third centuries ce. The Greek author—whose true identity is not known—set out to analyze an apparently simple style of communication, which has such “irresistible power and mastery” that it produces “wonder” and transports the hearer (2005 [c.100–c.200]: 163). Longinus put down the effects to the “divine frenzy” of the speaker (2005 [c.100–c.200]: 258) and to a simple style that “casts a spell” on the audience (2005 [c.100–c.200]: 287). In Boileau’s version of the text, the power of the sublime is ascribed to an obscure quality, a “je-ne-sais-quoi” (“I-know-not-what”), leading others to focus on Longinus’ examples, including the love poetry of Sappho and also the account of creation in the Old Testament, as they attempted to understand the audience response.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, British writers on theatre, landscape, literature, and the visual arts could not get enough of the sublime; but now the focus had shifted to the nature of the sublime object, rather than questions of style. The sublime was said to involve an encounter with that which seems infinite, indefinitely large or microscopically small, uncanny, mysterious, obscure, dark, or sudden. What was essential was a feeling of terror, astonishment, or awe in the face of that which exceeds man’s cognitive, visual, auditory, or imaginative grasp, leading to a sense of the ineffable: something that language, music, or the visual arts can only point towards, and that remains suggestively half-hidden. Breaking with conscious control and individual personality or preferences, the pleasure-in-pain that was integral to the sublime seemed to take man temporarily beyond the human; but the pleasure was generated by the object—not by a god or by the divine—and opened up a kind of split within the subject before consciousness and reason re-established control.

When Wollstonecraft protests angrily about the way in which women are educated to render themselves beautiful and also shun the sublime, she was responding to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but also to Edmund Burke’s enormously influential A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1987 [1757/1759]). Wollstonecraft took on Burke’s ideal of the sublime, but argued that, in the case of women, “artificial notions of beauty and false descriptions of sensibility” distort the educational and moral development of girls, making “genteel” women “slaves to their bodies” so that they come to “glory in their subjection” (Wollstonecraft 1996 [1792]: 42–43). Wollstonecraft argues vehemently against those writers who try to make women “more pleasing” by giving “a sex to morals” (1996 [1792]: 35); and in so doing she also offers a critique of those who—like Burke—either implicitly or explicitly gender the categories of the beautiful and the sublime. Women, she maintains, should be allowed to “cultivate their minds,” including with “the salutary, sublime curb of principle” (1996 [1792]: 35), since it is only through cultivating a sense of moral duty and obligation that women can free themselves from their slave-like state. (On Wollstonecraft, see also Chapter 8 in this volume.)

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Burke had divided the passions into two broad types: those that are “social” and linked to sexual reproduction and care for others; and those which are linked with “self-preservation” and the protection of the individual’s body or mind (Burke 1987 [1757/1759]: 38–42). Burke saw beauty as bound up with the social passions; by contrast, the enjoyment in the sublime is generated when the ego operates in a defensive mode. In particular, Burke links the sublime to “astonishment,” “horror,” “fear,” and “terror,” but also to “delight”: a term that is given a narrow and technical definition involving the “removal of pain or danger” (1987 [1757/1759]: 57, 37). Burke’s examples of the sublime include terrifying kings and commanders; incomprehensible darkness and depths; looming towers and awe-inspiring mountains; and a range of other experiences that engender mental and also physiological (muscular and nervous) tension. Although the sublime is only implicitly linked to the male body (by means of Burke’s chosen examples), its polar opposite—beauty—is quite explicitly linked to the bodies of women which are described as (ideally) small, smooth, delicate and graceful, to match women’s “weak” temperament and social disposition (1987 [1757/1759]: 116, 117).

Burke describes beauty as being intimately bound up with the need to propagate the species:

The object, therefore, of this mixed passion which we call love is the beauty of the sex. Men are carried to the sex in general, as it is the sex, and by the common law of nature; but they are attached to particulars by personal beauty.

(1987 [1757/1759]: 42)

The “we” that Burke uses here is sexually specific, and “men” means “males.” According to Burke, it is the beautiful that operates on the (male) observer by a form of flattery, the sublime that threatens to overwhelm the ego through a form of mental rape that renders him (temporarily) passive:

There is a wide difference between admiration and love. The sublime, which is the cause of the former, always dwells on great objects, and terrible; the latter on small ones, and pleasing; we submit to what we admire, but we love what submits to us; in one case we are forced, in the other we are flattered into compliance.

(1987 [1757/1759]: 113)

Beauty, Burke claims, involves properties that “operate by nature,” and our responses are unaffected by “caprice” or by “a diversity of tastes” (1987 [1757/1759]: 117). But he never made the adjustments to his vocabulary that would have been necessary had he thought at all about the sexual, or aesthetic, pleasures of women. He also failed to consider the question of racial and cultural differences, insisting that “darkness and blackness” are always psychologically and physiologically “painful,” and hence excluded from the beautiful (1987 [1757/1759]: 144). As evidence, Burke cites the example of a (white) boy who was blind from birth who feels “great horror” when he first sees “a negro woman” after regaining his sight (1987 [1757/1759]: 144–145). In failing to explore how the world might seem to black or dark-skinned persons, Burke does, in effect, place non-white humanity outside the confines of those idealized human beings—not only male, but also belonging to the white and Northern races—whose responses serve as the aesthetic norm. In so doing, Burke prefigures a tendency in later literature and philosophy, which not only genders sublimity in complex fashions, but also links it to specific races and ethnicities (Battersby 2007).

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Thus, in the historical discourse of the sublime, the (male) subject who is celebrated as mastering terror is generally of European stock and white. The sublime became linked with the exploration of oceans, deserts and wildernesses, insofar as the potential extent or features of these territories remained excessive to the “human” (European/white) imagination. Certain indigenous peoples—most notably Arabs and North American Indians—who inhabited the wildernesses were allowed sublimity (Kant 2011 [1764]: 2/252–253; 58–59). However, once the landscape was tamed by the colonists, its perceived sublimity—and those of its inhabitants—tended to decline. Indeed, towards the end of the eighteenth century, we see the emergence of a third aesthetic category—the picturesque—which was treated as intermediate between the beautiful and the sublime, and that set out to frame, map, block, or otherwise contain the potential disturbance to the observer which was presented by the more raw experience of the sublime. We also find a fourth aesthetic category—the grotesque—increasingly deployed to separate European high arts, religions, and physiognomic features from those of Asia, Africa, and other so-called “primitive” cultures (Mitter 1992 [1977]; Cassuto 1996).

Kant’s Aesthetics

Strictly speaking, Burke and his contemporaries do not offer an aesthetics of the sublime and the beautiful, but what might instead be termed a philosophy of taste. Although some philosophers and historians trace the notion of aesthetics back to Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762), it is Immanuel Kant’s development of the concept of aesthetic judgment in his critical writings that is important in terms of the distinction between aesthetics and a philosophy of taste. Kant’s writings are generally divided into two distinct periods: the pre-critical writings (1746–1770) and the critical writings (1781–1804), and the distinctive emergence of the notion of aesthetic judgment did not occur until late in the critical period, with The Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), also sometimes referred as Kant’s Third Critique. (On Kant’s aesthetics, see also Chapters 37 and 38 in this volume.)

At the start of Kant’s critical project, he outlined two primary philosophical enquiries: into pure reason (concerning what we can know) and pure practical reason (concerning how we should act). The power of judgment that Kant explores in his Third Critique is hollowed out in the space between these two enterprises. Judgment is concerned with aesthetic experience—and the beautiful and the sublime in particular—but also with the way in which we treat nature as an ordered whole. It is the task of judgment to determine what everyone ought to judge on the basis of the data that is available to them. It is in this context that Kant develops the argument that aesthetic judgment is not just a response to external stimuli, but a response that is simultaneously immediate and also compelling. Pleasure (or displeasure) is an integral part of the experience, but the pleasure is such that we have to suppose that all human subjects would respond in exactly the same kind of way if they were in a similar position and faced with the same type of sensory input. In other words, Kant insists that in the case of a pure aesthetic judgment—and, for Kant, it is only judgments of beauty that count as pure—there is always a normative element.

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For Kant, the pleasure in beauty comes not from a particular sense or taste, but through the mode in which all the different faculties of the mind operate harmoniously. Beauty, he argues, is so pleasing to mankind that it seems as if the world had been created for man’s delight, and that means, he maintains, that we have to assume subjective universalizability. Aesthetics is more than simply a report on what the individual does or does not like. This is, however, where problems of sexual and racial difference intrude, and in very different ways insofar as the beautiful and the sublime are involved. In the case of beauty, the judgment that the “I” makes is so abstract that cultural differences are made to seem irrelevant; but Kant also fails to question his own (Northern European) standards of what is “harmonious” to the various faculties of the mind. By contrast, in the case of the sublime—which is not a pure aesthetic judgment, but a “mixed” judgment straddling the aesthetic and the moral—Kant differentiates between the two sexes and also between specific racial groupings. Women, “Orientals,” and Africans are debarred from the sublime, but males of Arab and North American Indian descent are credited with the noble character necessary for its enjoyment (Kant 2011 [1764]: 2/252–253, 58–59, and see Battersby 2007).

For Kant, the pleasures of the sublime are linked to mental turmoil. And this is because what is enjoyed in the first place is not, as with the beautiful, the sense of a perfect “fit” between the self and its surroundings. Instead, what is striking about the sublime is precisely the impression of something ineffable, indefinite, infinitely great (or small), and the incapacity of the mind to grasp what it is that is being observed or otherwise sensed or contemplated. Instead of the pleasure coming from the feeling that the world or the object had been created for my delight, the pleasure now comes from an initial sense of horror, terror, or astonishment, which is then overcome as the mind moves up a level—to that of the supersensible—and registers that at this level there is, after all, an order that was initially obscured. The sublime allows us a glimpse of something that we simply cannot know: a supersensible power (infinite nature or a God) in relation to which man can only feel humble and weak. In giving us some sense of what might lie beyond the knowable space–time world, the sublime is thus not a purely aesthetic pleasure, but one intermediate between the aesthetic and the moral. Crucially it involves an attitude of respect (Achtung) for that which could conceivably annihilate the “I” that Kant positions as being at the center of the knowable world.

For Kant, “true sublimity must be sought only in the mind of the one who judges, not in the object in nature, the judging of which occasions this disposition in it” (2000 [1790]: 5/256, 139). Thus, whereas for Burke, the enjoyment of the sublime was a matter of taste and of affect, for Kant what is involved is judgment: the mind responds to the data or “intuitions” that come in through the senses and, in so doing, the “I” discovers “a faculty of the mind that surpasses every measure of the senses” (2000 [1790]: 5/250, p. 134; bold in original). The enjoyment of the sublime is produced by the “I” as it responds to—and masters—the initial fear, disharmony, or discomfort that is produced as it encounters those vast, infinite, and indefinite entities that seem to threaten its very survival. Kant’s claim is that only those who have undergone an appropriate “moral” education and also have a suitable, non-timorous, and also non-sensuous character have the capacity to rise above the initial response of fear or bafflement, and to respond to the sublime with the appropriate feelings of enjoyment, respect, and “awe.”

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Kant makes it clear in a series of minor texts that bridge the critical and pre-critical periods that he does not think that women should be educated to transcend fear. In his Lectures on Anthropology (2012 [1782–1789]), for example, he claims that “preservation of the species” is an “aim” of nature, “which is entrusted to the woman’s womb,” limiting women’s education to care for “three items, kitchen, children, and sick room.” It is the “tenderness” of nature that makes women more “fearful” than men, and this is a “universal” quality of women—even those who are “savages” (2012 [1782–1789]: 25/706–707, 236–238). Woman’s timidity is a social and biological necessity, since “nature has entrusted to woman her dearest pledge, the child.” “Feminine qualities,” such as fearfulness, which are regarded as weaknesses in males, are thus entirely appropriate for women since, in them, “masculine qualities are always unseemly” (2012 [1782–1789]: 25/1189, 322, emphasis in original).

In his Lectures on Anthropology, Kant maintains that women should never transcend fear and take delight in the sublime. However, in his early essay, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (2011 [1764])—which is clearly influenced by both Burke and by Rousseau—Kant makes the more empirical claim that women are incapable of acting on the basis of true moral “principle” and enjoying the sublime:

The virtue of the woman is a beautiful virtue. The virtue of the male ought to be a noble virtue. Women will avoid evil not because it is unjust, but because it is ugly, and for them virtuous actions mean those that are ethically beautiful. Nothing of ought, nothing of must, nothing of obligation. . . . It is difficult for me to believe that the fair sex is capable of principles, and I hope not to give offense by this, for these are also extremely rare amongst the male sex.

(2011 [1764]: 2/231–232, 39; bold in original)

In other words, Kant adopts in this early work exactly the type of view to which Wollstonecraft objected so vehemently in 1792: he sexes morality and reserves for males “the salutary, sublime curb of principle” (Wollstonecraft 1996 [1792]: 35).

The “Feminine” Sublime

There is by now a large body of feminist literature analysing the significance of sexual difference in Kant’s aesthetics––including texts by Cornelia Klinger (1997 [1995]), Timothy Gould (1995), Battersby (1995; 2007)––or charting female writers’ responses to Kant (Jones 2000). However, it’s only very recently that a reliable English translation has been offered of Kant’s Lectures on Anthropology (2012 [1782–1789]) and his misogynistic marginal “Remarks” (1764–1765) to the Observations (2011 [1764]), meaning that more work remains to be done. As well as these feminist approaches, a number of extremely influential theorists of the “feminine” have also drawn on Kant’s writings—and often in rather surprising ways.

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For Kant, as well as for many of the post-Kantian philosophers, the sublime is barred to women, but is associated with a feminine object, and with a (terrifying and awe-inspiring) female figure, who is concealed behind a veil. The key passage in Kant is to be found in the Third Critique (2000 [1790]):

Perhaps nothing more sublime has ever been said, or any thought more sublimely expressed, than in the inscription over the Temple of Isis (Mother Nature): “I am all that is, that was, and that will be, and my veil no mortal has removed.”

(2000 [1790]: 5/316 n., 194 n., bold in original)

For many post-Kantian writers—including the influential philosopher, poet and dramatist Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805), and the widely-read German novelist, poet, and philosopher Novalis (1772–1801)—the sublime became associated with an “unveiling” of this infinite “other,” but, as I have argued in detail elsewhere (Battersby 2007), it remains a male agent who encounters the “feminine” other and, as such, the sexual biases of the sublime are not deeply disturbed.

Kant himself (2002 [1796]) was deeply scornful of those philosophers who thought that they could lift the veil of Isis, and access the sublime “truth” concealed beneath it. More recently, Jacques Derrida (1993 [1981]) has responded to Kant’s ban on access to Isis, emphasizing that Kant requires this unknowable and feminine “other” to secure the boundaries of what can be known and what can be expressed. In the wake of Derrida, a school of literary and cultural criticism has developed which looks to deconstruction to develop a positive account of a “feminine” sublime. Some of these critics engage productively with women writers, and also with questions of race (Freeman 1995). However, the link between “the feminine” and women is not straightforward. As Joanna Zylinska explains,

The feminine sublime . . . is born from the excess that the earlier theorists of the sublime attempted to tame or annul. I am not interested . . . in determining whether or not there is a sublime which is specific to women. Instead, I use this term to explore instances in which absolute and incalculable alterity can no longer be housed by the discursive restraints of traditional aesthetics, leading, as a consequence, to the eruption of affect and the weakening of the idea of the universal subject.

(2001: 8, emphasis in original)

Zylinska then goes on to equate “death” with “the ultimate source of fear in the experience of the sublime,” and to interpret “the feminine sublime” as a “recognition” of “mortality and finitude to which the self is exposed in its encounter with absolute difference” (2001: 8). We thus find a curious contrast between two strands of gendered critique. Whereas most feminist theorists of the beautiful have been concerned to argue that aesthetic qualities cannot be universalized, in critical theory a distinctive mode of analysis has emerged that emphasizes the feminine whilst, at the same time, downplaying sexual, racial, and ethnic differences in face of the universal experience and fear of death.

Arguably there are analogous difficulties with Jean-François Lyotard’s extensive engagement with the Kantian sublime, which has also been extremely important for some feminist critics (Klinger 1997 [1995]; Zylinska 2007). In Peregrinations (1988) Lyotard argues that Kant’s account of the sublime dissolves the subject into a “stream of sensitive clouds,” through which “no ‘I’ swims or sails; only mere affections float. Feelings felt by no one, attached to no identity, but making one cloud ‘affected’ by another” (1988: 34). Lyotard himself floats happily along with this notion of the dissolution of the subject; but for women who have historically been denied full personhood, and whose subject position has yet to be adequately theorized from a philosophical point of view, this embrace of disembodied affect is premature. By treating difference in an extremely abstract way, Lyotard makes specific bodily, cultural, and historical differences disappear. By contrast, Lyotard’s emphasis on the role of dissensus and inaudibility in the Kantian account of the sublime is politically useful for feminists (Ziarek 2001; Grebowicz 2007).

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Thus in his Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (1994 [1991]), Lyotard argues that what is distinctive about the Kantian sublime is that it involves a “differend,” which entails “neither moral universality nor aesthetic universalization, but is, rather, the destruction of the one by the other” (1994 [1991]: 239). This differend involves irresolvable tension and “cannot demand, even subjectively, to be communicated to all thought” (1994 [1991]: 239). In political terms, the differend involves a conflict or dispute that is irresolvable because it brings into play at least two language games that would describe what is at stake in incommensurable terms. Any resort to “solving” the dispute by appeal to one of the language games simply covers up the difference and rests on something that is, from the perspective of the language game adopted, “unpresentable.” I find Lyotard’s emphasis on differences concealed within languages, and also within history, enabling. What is also important is the way in which he puts gender issues at the center of philosophical debate. However, gender for Lyotard does not mean sexual difference, but rather the feminine/masculine distinction. And since the sublime is so often linked to a “feminine” object or a passive—“feminine”— spectator who is nevertheless allocated the body of a male, Lyotard’s position is promising but also ultimately disappointing for those who are concerned to develop an aesthetics that is feminist, and who are not simply concerned with a concealed Otherness which is coded as “feminine.”

Also important to these developments has been the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan who draws on Hegel—as well as Kant—as he positions “woman” as a kind of unrepresentable “Other” that cannot be spoken or, indeed, represented, but that also forever haunts the boundaries of language and also of vision. In his 1959–1960 Seminar Lacan turns to Kant’s account of the beautiful and the sublime in the Critique of the Power of Judgment as a means of understanding the character of Sophocles’ Antigone who, for Hegel, represented “woman” in her purest form (Hegel 1977 [1807]: §456–475, 273–289; Battersby 1998: 109–116). Lacan’s Antigone/woman is constructed as beautiful (as the object of desire), in order to cover over that which threatens the ego (death and the sublime). Antigone “pushes to the limit the realization of something that might be called the pure and simple desire of death as such. She incarnates that desire” (Lacan 1992 [1959–1960]: 282).

Lacan’s Antigone/woman represents the threat of the dissolution of the self into the Otherness that bounds it; but, for Lacan, “woman” and “women” are two quite different things. He argues that women only attain identity by separating from the Other/the Mother, and taking on a masculine subject-position. Women can speak; but they can’t speak as “woman”: that inexpressible and unrepresentable Otherness, which constitutes a feminine—not female—sublime. Given this framework, it is not surprising that several of the most important French theorists of the féminin, including Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Catherine Clément, and Luce Irigaray, engage with the question of the sublime as they explore how the féminin functions in language in ways that give it more power than Lacan allowed. In none of their writings, however, can the féminin be equated with the female. It is Irigaray who comes closest to promoting a female sublime, especially in Speculum of the Other Woman (1985 [1972]); but her approach to the sublime is always mediated by Lacan and her wish to “jam” the machinery of psychoanalysis and philosophy (Irigaray 1985 [1977]: 78).

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Reimagining the Sublime

Bonnie Mann’s Women’s Liberation and the Sublime (2006) engages with both Irigaray and Lyotard. And whereas I have argued that Lyotard pays insufficient attention to bodily differences, Mann shows how Lyotard gets “entangled” in the complex temporalities of the sublime while neglecting spatiality and locatedness (2006: 69). She “talks back” to theorists of the postmodern sublime, and argues that “certain kinds of sublime experience are both rooted in and disclosive of our relations of dependency on other persons and on places, of our vulnerability and injurability” (2006: 145). Drawing on the “fickle feeling” (2006: 131) of the sublime and also feminist theory and practice, she develops a powerful argument for the need to develop an ethics and aesthetics of place and of environmentalism (2006: 159ff).

Less influential than Irigaray in terms of English-language feminism, but more consistently engaged with the question of the sublime, was Sarah Kofman (1934–1994). Opposed to the stylistic obfuscation of both Lacanianism and l’écriture féminine, she was nevertheless always interested in showing how philosophy has been driven not solely by reason and rationality, but also by male libido and sexual desire. Thus, for example, she reads the Kantian sublime through Freudian psychoanalysis, linking respect for women to a horror of their bodies (Kofman 2007 [1982]). Writing as a Jew whose rabbi father had been deported from Paris and killed in Auschwitz, she is also painfully aware of the links between “the sublime,” the “smothered words,” and the “infinite, untransmissible knowledge” of the detainees in the Camps (Kofman 1998 [1987]: 40–41, 37) As well as engaging extensively with Freud, she was also a close reader of Nietzsche, who was profoundly influenced by—and ultimately an opponent of—Arthur Schopenhauer and his aesthetics of the sublime. Like Nietzsche, Kofman developed an ideal of counter-sublime “laughter,” in the face of the profound despair at living which Schopenhauer linked to the sublime in The World as Will and Representation of 1818–1859. Haunted, however, by “the inexpressible affliction” of Auschwitz, and the demand to express “that which cannot be said and yet must be said” (Kofman 1998 [1987]: 31), Kofman’s life ended not in laughter, but in suicide—on Nietzsche’s birthday, in an apparently symbolic act.

The sublime is an elusive category, and one that stretches the boundaries of aesthetics. Responses to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the genocide at Auschwitz, the ground zeroes of Hiroshima and 9/11, the Middle Passage endured by those transported on the slave ships, and the tortured bodies of slaves, have all been linked to the thematics of the sublime (Gilroy 1993: 187–223; Fulford 2005; Ray 2005; Battersby 2007). Elsewhere I have argued that what is needed is an aesthetics that pays attention to embodiment. I have also emphasized (Battersby 1998; 2007) the need to treat pregnancy as normal to the human subject position: the sublime is transformed if we stop treating the “I”/“other” boundary in a way that normalizes the body of males. From such a female perspective, the sublime object is not simply an excess, pushed beyond the limits of language, but is instead more like an “other within,” concealed within diverse histories and cultures—or rather one of a number of “smothered others” whom we need to learn to hear and also to see.

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