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community by confronting each individual with the prospect of his or her
imminent and solitary demise. In Lyotard’s words, with the sublime,
‘everyone is alone when it comes to judging’ (1986b:11).
The sublime functions in Lyotard’s work as a means of corroding the
two ‘materialist’ faiths (positivism and marxism) which characterize the
super-seded modern epoch. For example, responding recently to an attack
on postmodernism by the British marxist, Terry Eagleton (1985), Lyotard
(1986b) made the provocative (or facetious) claim that Marx ‘touches on
the issue of the sublime’ in the concept of the proletariat in that the
proletariat is, in Kantian terms, an Idea in Reason, an idea which must be
seen as such, not as an empirically verifiable existent (the working class).
The ‘proletariat’, in other words, according to Lyotard, cannot be
incarnated and specified as this or that group or class. It is not reducible to
‘experience’ (Lyotard declines of course to specify how—given this
distinction—marxism is to fulfil its claims to be a philosophy of praxis).
Using Adorno’s shorthand term to signal the litany of disasters which he
sees underwritng the modern period, Lyotard (1986a) asserts that
‘Auschwitz’ happened because people made precisely that category error
from the time of Robespierre’s Terror on, seeking to identify (more
commonly to identify themselves with) such Ideas in Reason. A succession
of revolutionary vanguards and tribunals have set themselves up as the
subjects and agents of historical destiny: ‘I am Justice, Truth, the
revolution…. We are the proletariat. We are the incarnation of free
humanity’ (Lyotard, 1986b: 11)—and have thereby sought to render
themselves unaccountable to the normative framework provided by the
web of ‘first order narratives’ in which popular thought, morality and
social life is properly grounded. Those moments when men and women
believed themselves to be Benjamin’s Angel of History who ‘would like to
stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed’
(Benjamin, 1968:257), moments of illusory Faustian omnipotence, and
certainty are the dangerous moments of supposedly full knowledge, when
people feel fully present to themselves and to their ‘destiny’ (the moment,
say, when the class in itself becomes a class for itself). For Lyotard they are
the moments of historical disaster: they inaugurate the time of
‘revolutions’, executions, concentration camps. In an ironic retention of
Kant’s separation of the spheres of morality, science and art (ironic in view
of Lyotard’s judgement of the Enlightenment legacy), he seeks to stake out
the sublime as the legitimate province of (post)modern art and aesthetics
whilst at the same time rigorously excluding as illegitimate and ‘paranoid’
any aspiration to ‘present the unpresentable’ through politics (that is, to
‘change the world’) or to constitute an ontology of the sublime (that is,
‘permanent revolution’, attempts to create a new moral or social order,
etc.). The sublime remains ‘das Unform’ (Lyotard, 1986b:11), that which is
without form hence that which is monstrous and unthinkable and rather