Page 108 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

98 James Phillips

universal voice does not of itself demonstrate the empirical existence of a
universal community). Similarly, the beauty discovered in an image is not
straightforwardly its point of weakness with respect to reactionary poli-
tics, as though what should expose the intolerability of a minority s situa-
tion here and now occasions instead a flight from the here and now to the
pleasure of participation in the universal community of taste. What has
been held against aestheticism from the nineteenth century on is that the
engagement with the here and now that is coextensive with the work of arts
sensuous immediacy is vitiated in the existential neutrality of the universal-
izing judgment "This is (merely) beautiful." The sensuous immediacy of the
work of art, once it is no longer allowed to communicate with the sensuous
immediacy of political action, is reinvented as the beautiful complement of
the bourgeoisies disingenuous resignation of political action to the univer-
sal laws of history and economics.
If in the history of art since the Enlightenment, in nineteenth-century
French poetry as much as in Brazilian underground cinema, the ugly is
embraced, this is not because the release of the work of art from its state of
suspended animation—in the abstract white space of the museum, in the
abstract dark space of the cinema—can be brought about through recourse
to the ugly. In the judgment "This is ugly" the same claim to be speaking
in a universal voice is put forward that differentiates "This is beautiful"
from "This is agreeable to me!' The incorporation of the ugly signals not so
much a break with Enlightenment aesthetics as with the templates of the
beautiful with which in the eighteenth century Kant, following Johann
Georg Hamann and followed by the romantics, already broke.
The battle against the recognizability of the beautiful by objec-
tive criteria is a battle for the political essence of the beautiful. This is
what makes the Critique of the Power of Judgment a preeminently political
work. 13 Kant suggests that the community announcing itself in the judg-
ment "This is beautiful" is unable to close ranks: it occupies the space of
14
plurality by which Arendt understands the political. The beautiful is the
problem rather than the proof of universal community: in aesthetic judg-
ment there is a claim to universal validity rather than universal validity
as such. It is only when the beautiful takes on the stability of a fact that
antiart appears the opposite of art. In the Critique of the Power of Judgment
the Enlightenment philosophy of art declares itself in advance impervious
to the shocks resulting from the later general substitutions of the pleas-
ing and the unpleasing. For Kant, disagreements between individuals over