Page 110 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

100 James Phillips

masterpiece nonetheless does not cease to be beautiful, it is because its
institutionalization brings it to teeter on the edge of kitsch, thereby re-
storing it to the disputability of the beautiful. The "aura" of the work
of art, which Walter Benjamin denounces as a vestige of the cultic, can
be explained also in terms of the shimmer of objective uncertainty with
which aesthetic judgment recognizes a specific work of art as beautiful.
The beautiful cannot be pinned down as an objective trait. In its nomadic
itinerary, abandoning what was considered beautiful for something new, it
resembles a swarm of locusts in search of fresh sustenance. In its appetite
for the new, beauty is comparable to imperialism; nevertheless, where im-
perialism aspires to a universal of control, beauty appeals to a universal of
dissent. It calls forth to community by means of its invocation of universal
validity, yet it disavows the community able to read off its unity from the
unequivocality of an object. The subjectively universal validity of aesthetic
judgments is strictly unpresentable, since the appeal is being made not to a
property of the object whose stability is the condition of universally bind-
ing judgments with respect to it but to the universality that inhabits the
judging subject in its irreducibility to its empirically conditioned desires,
The universalism of aesthetic judgment is its possibility rather than
its actuality. The community of aesthetic judgment can never realize itself
as the truth and decidability of what is—in short, it can never mistake
itself for the majority—because it is in possibility, in thought's over-
reaching of the actual, that Kantian humanity comes into the insubstan-
tial community proper to it as a community of thinking beings. Thought
is not an activity of an actual subject but rather the possibilities within
which the actual is a point of realization. That which unites humanity
is the possibility of a contestation of what is. This contestation results
from the existence of thought rather than from the existential neutrality
of the general concept. Actuality is even the moment in which existence
comes closest to the existential neutrality of the concept, insofar as what
is offers the decidability of its actuality to the concept as a point of entry:
actuality is existence's hour of metaphysical temptation.
If we think at all, it is community that thinks in us, breaching the
hermetism of the particular. Kant, who is often passed off as the philoso-
pher of liberal democracies, elaborates a conception of sociability that has
nothing to do with the extrinsic harmony of selfish interests. Should it be
objected that the transcendental dignity of a sociability of thought is like-
wise far removed from the humiliations of the daily political struggles of