'Susceptibility.' Radical Philosophy 162 (2010): 57-59.

Review of Jean-François Lyotard, Enthusiasm: The Kantian Critique of History, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2009.


In this slim volume, published in English translation more than a decade after his death, Lyotard reissues Kant’s call, in his preface to the first Critique, for a ‘critical tribunal’, and denounces ‘perpetual peace ... by the death of the capacity to judge’: critique, Lyotard argues, sets a limit to the pretensions of political, no less than metaphysical illusion.

The Kant-interpretation Lyotard sketches here, relative throughout to the question of ‘the political’ and to the name ‘Wittgenstein’, proceeds along several converging lines of enquiry: how it is that the critical is ‘analogous to the political’ (chapter 1); how it is that judgement, in Kant, is less a ‘faculty’ than a constitutively inconclusive ‘power of [finding] “passages” between the faculties’ (chapter 2); how it is that judgement retrieves a sign of ‘the Idea of freedom’ from the affect of ‘historico-political enthusiasm’ (chapter 3); and how it is that this judgement, as a critical sensitivity to what is ‘delivered up by our time’, serves to ‘sanction the coexistence of what is heteronomous’ (chapter 5). The ‘heteronomous’ is basically coterminous with Lyotard’s ideal of ‘ethical culture’ in this work, but that the word here has only a lexical relation to heteronomy in the second Critique is indicative of a radical shift in problematic. Lyotard seeks the ‘trace of freedom within reality’ in the wake of a ‘sublime feeling’, and not in practical reason as such. It is out of the formlessness of insurgency and the suspense of historico-political purposiveness, rather than respect for a pure ‘form of lawfulness’, that judgement comes to concern itself with the possibility of emancipation. A critical ‘discourse of emancipation’ — whose precondition, here citing Kant, is an ‘Empfänglichkeit to Ideas’: and thus, ethical culture — takes a surge of purposive lawlessness as its inaugural sign.

The translator orients us in his preface to the occasion for this study, a version of which Lyotard presented in 1981 to a recently convened ‘Centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique’ in Paris, on the invitation of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy.

Lyotard opens the volume with an ‘Argument’ that names Wittgenstein, and the name resurfaces at decisive points in his text. It is Wittgenstein who inspires Lyotard’s substitution of ‘phrases’ and ‘phrase families’ for the Kantian terminology of ‘presentations’ and ‘faculties’ (which never entirely disappears). A paragraph from his 1983 essay ‘Wittgenstein “After”’ illuminates this linkage — this decision — which remains quite obscure in Enthusiasm:

"… this Viennese from the beginning of the century continues to sense the malaise of his time. Nietzsche had thought that it was a sickness of the will. But Wittgenstein is a republican, like Kant. Like Kant, he thinks that the time is diseased by language. Kant did not know capitalism, however, while Wittgenstein had been immersed in it. The examination of language games, just like the critique of the faculties, identifies and reinforces the separation of language from itself. There is no unity to language; there are islands of language, each of them ruled by a different regime, untranslatable into the others. This dispersion is good in itself, and ought to be respected. It is deadly when one phrase regime prevails over the others."

However impossible — or in the vulgar sense, uncritical — this series of ‘passages’ may seem, it beautifully anticipates the structure, basic concern and leitmotifs of Enthusiasm.

As a single instance of this: Lyotard’s reference to ‘islands of language’ here recalls ‘the archipelago’, a figure to which he devotes the second chapter of Enthusiasm. But it is in the 1983 Wittgenstein essay, and not in Enthusiasm, that Lyotard intimates how the very form of Wittgenstein’s investigations may have provided him with this figure of the archipelago, according to which he reconceives Kant’s faculties and the factions of the various antinomies. And, clearly, Lyotard does reconceive Kant. The valorisation of ‘Kantian critique’ in this volume is a renovation, a recalibration: despite the volume’s subtitle, Lyotard produces an unapologetically post-Kantian ‘critique of history’. What intrigues is the way in which it appears to be post-Kantian in the strictest sense: displaying a less marked affinity to Marx and Wittgenstein, perhaps, than to certain preoccupations in German philosophy in the last decade or so of the eighteenth century.

Enthusiasm is a ‘metacritique’ or perhaps a ‘Romantic critique’ of the historico-political in Kant — to echo a polemical title of J.G. Hamann’s and the aspirations of the early German Romantics (while avoiding, as Lyotard does, the moribund term ‘postmodern’). And these allusions are not a distraction. On the contrary: having recourse to Hamann and the Frühromantik, respectively, could perhaps have clarified for Lyotard — and can clarify in retrospect — the provenance of this work. Hamann’s Metacritique of the Purism of Reason was written in response to the typesetter’s proofs of Kant’s first Critique (it is unclear how they came into Hamann’s possession). Its sole relevancy here is this: Hamann accuses Kant of glossing over, perhaps of repressing, critique’s material and its crux — namely, language. Where Lyotard has Kant recognise that his ‘time is diseased by language’, Hamann has Kant suffer from the disease of idealistic philosophy in their time: a disdain for language. Thus, in his very concern to revisit critique as a ‘philosophy of phrases’, Lyotard — however disparately and indirectly — is perhaps not executing Kant’s ‘unannounced program’, but what Hamann desired in the Metacritique.

It is, incidentally, Hamann who also fore-echoes Lyotard’s figure of the archipelago (while Kant envisions a perilously solitary island in the first Critique). In Socratic Memorabilia — a work he dedicates to Kant, among others — Hamann writes:

"On this occasion Socrates spoke of readers who could swim. A confluence of ideas and feelings … made his [Heraclitus’] statements into an archipelago, perhaps, for whose communication bridges and ferries of method were lacking."

Hamann very consciously employs this figure against the architectonic impulse that Kant would profess in the first Critique and pursue thereafter. Lyotard decides — less convincingly, and less instinctively — to interpret Kant’s architectonic as archipelago.

One laudable result of this decision, however, is Lyotard’s attention to Kant’s minor works, and the most impressive instance of this is his reflection on the ‘Conjectural Beginning of Human History’ in chapter 4. This 1786 essay has been wrongly neglected, and here Lyotard’s instinct — which is that the ‘strange “manner” in which [it] is written’ has not been exhausted, or even seriously investigated — is sure. And yet: Lyotard imposes a ‘novelistic phrase’ on Kant’s speculative reconstitution of the myth of the Fall, when Kant here — an admirer of Rousseau’s novels, at very least — has no more concern with the Roman as a genre than with holy writ as revelation. By way of contrast, Hölderlin and Novalis, in the years immediately following the publication of the third Critique, set their hands to novels and novellas; and Hyperion would more likely answer to Lyotard’s desire that the novelistic phrase be seen as ‘a legitimate fashion’ in which to ‘phrase the historico-political’.

The questions could thus become: Why does Lyotard valorise Kant when the Enlightenment ‘has become obsolete’, rather than Counter-Enlightenment figures such as Hamann? Why does he conjure an archipelagic, linguistic Kant rather than revisit the Metacritique and the early German Romantics? And why plead that Kant drafted some species of novella in 1786, rather than appeal to Novalis’ and Hölderlin’s genuine efforts a decade later?

And there are less extrinsic questions that could follow, such as: In what phrase-regime could an injunction ‘to judge justly, without criteria’ serve as an injunction? What could ‘justly’ here enjoin that is not said in ‘judge’? Perhaps only this: that the word ‘judge’ must conserve within itself an Idea of justice; and as Lyotard cites Kant, ‘all that our Ideas make known to us really is that we know nothing’.

In the end, it is against the oscillations of sensitivity and insouciance in this work, elegantly translated throughout, that such questions are raised. It retains its beauty and its capacity to keep us alert in the Kantian corpus, and in history, to a ‘vigorous emotion’ which is, so Lyotard suggests, the only moral passion.


David van Dusen