Page 109 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Glauber Rocha 99

whether a particular phenomenon is to be judged beautiful or ugly do
not haVe an impact on the universality with which aesthetic judgment
is invested. The disagreements are irresolvable because beauty cannot be
read off from the object as one of its properties, but that they arise at
all is because aesthetic judgment invokes a subjectively universal validity.
The beauty of the beautiful work of art is, following Kant s argument,
more akin to a promise of universal community than the emblem of its
realization. Beauty is the unredeemable bond that prevents community
from closing in on itself and rediscovering a more numerous egotism. In
Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event Lyotard writes: "The unanimity concern-
.
ing what is beautiful has no chance of being actualised. . . This kind of
consensus is definitely nothing but a cloud of community." 15 It is also the
solidarity without solidity by which Heidegger understands Being-with-
one-another and Arendt understands human plurality. As soon as it sees
itself solidifying, as reflected in a received opinion, this community breaks
up, some denouncing the received opinion as a cliché, others maintaining
its acuity and expressiveness. Only if there is the possibility of disagree-
ment does beauty maintain the tenuous manner of existence peculiar to
it, and only if there is the sociability of a universal feeling of participation
does humanity distinguish itself from what Kant assumes to be the invio-
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lable egotism of animals. Having retired the objective criteria of neoclas-
sical art manuals, Kant foreshadows a philosophical and political task for
the ambiguous transitions between the ugly, the beautiful, and the kitsch.
The uncertainty with which any given object is to be judged beautiful (or
ugly or kitsch) is the mirror proper to Kantian humanity, since in beauty s
resistance to reification community dispenses with empirical identity and
attains the higher universality that is otherwise reserved for the transcen-
dental. Bearing witness to the unpresentability of community, the aes-
thetic is the volatility of the here and now, as the site of indeterminacy, of
decision and political action. Whereas the disingenuous aestheticism of
bourgeois art worship betrays the unpresentability of Kant s community
through the very recognizability of the domain that it marks out for the
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autonomy (i.e., the existential neutrality and quarantine) of art, an artist
such as Rocha, who combats the mere aestheticization of art and, by exten-
sion, the confinement of aesthetic judgment, opens the work up to the
revolutionary promise of the beautiful.
When the beautiful no longer brushes up against the ugly, when it
no longer divides its audience, it ceases to be beautiful. If the undisputed