Temporality and the Lyotardian Sublime: Kant between Husserl and Freud. Issue 51 (2nd July 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Milne, Peter W.
• Is Part Of: Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology. Issue 51:Number 3(2020)
• Page Start: 201
• Page End: 214
• Publication Date: 2020-07-02
• Subjects: Jean-François Lyotard -- Immanuel Kant -- Edmund Husserl -- Sigmund Freud -- temporal synthesis -- sublime affect; Phenomenology -- Periodicals; Fenomenologie; Filosofie; Phénoménologie -- Périodiques; Phenomenology; Periodicals; 142.7
• DOI: 10.1080/00071773.2019.1652978
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0007-1773

Abstract

ABSTRACT: While Lyotard's first book was an introduction to phenomenology, most of the work that follows can be said to openly challenge the limits of phenomenological analysis. This is particularly evident in the well-known writings on the Kantian sublime, which Lyotard reads as a "temporal crisis" that undoes the conscious knowing subject and escapes "experience" in the phenomenological sense. Nonetheless, if this allows him to relate the sublime to Freud's "unconscious affect, " this "crisis" only becomes visible in contrast to a figure of subjective temporalization the model of which, I argue, is broadly Husserlian. Approaching the sublime as a temporal crisis thus allows not only for a clearer view of the import of Lyotard's late work on the affect with regard to subjectivity, knowledge, and experience; it also reveals what that work continues to owe to a certain phenomenological analysis.