Fritzman

Clio 23:2, Winter 1994, pages 167-189.

THE FUTURE OF NOSTALGIA AND

THE TIME OF THE SUBLIME
J. M. Fritzman

ABSTRACT: This article discusses the transversing of the nows of nostalgia and sublimity in light of Schrag’s
fitting response, Lacan’s symptom, Kant’s mathematical sublime, Freud’s “uncanny,” and Benjamin’s now-time.

Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but

their arrest as well.1

Having noted that the characterization of “Hegelianism as an event of thought arising

from the finite condition of the self-understanding of the historical consciousness does not

constitute an argument against Hegel,” but instead “simply testifies to the fact that we no longer

think in the same way Hegel did, but after Hegel,” Paul Ricoeur concludes with a question and a

wish: “For what readers of Hegel, once they have been seduced by the power of Hegel’s thought

as I have, do not feel the abandoning of this philosophy as a wound, a wound that, unlike those

that affect the absolute Spirit, will not be healed? For such readers, if they are not to give into

the weakness of nostalgia, we must wish the courage of the work of mourning.”2 In thus

opposing the work of mourning’s courage to nostalgia’s weakness, Ricoeur fails to recognize

that nostalgia possesses another, more radical and originary, sense. It is the weakness of

nostalgia that makes possible the courage of the work of mourning. The work of mourning

always is an exercise in nostalgia. There can be no question of arguing that nostalgia is weak

only in appearance, and actually is strong. Rather, nostalgia’s weakness is its strength.

1 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations: Essays and

Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), 264; hereafter
“Theses.”
2 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988), 3:206.

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Time is the longest distance between two places.3

Nostalgia comes from the Greeks. It marks their discovery, simultaneously their

invention, of a link between a desire to return home (nostos) and a sensation of pain (algia).

Home is not so much a place as a time. Pain has many modalities. So it should occasion no

surprise that the original sense of nostalgia later permutates, as dictionaries have it, to a “form of

melancholy caused by prolonged absence from one’s home or country,” or a “wistful or

excessive sentimental sometimes abnormal yearning for return to or of some past period or

irrecoverable condition.” Nevertheless, behind these notions there is another, forgotten idea.

Not only has this idea been forgotten, but the act of forgetting itself is remembered no longer.

Nor have these two forgettings happened by chance. As Friedrich Nietzsche reminds his readers,

“forgetting is no mere vis inertiae as the superficial imagine; it is rather an active and in the

strictest sense positive faculty of repression.”4 Simone Signoret’s witticism that “nostalgia isn’t

what it used to be” thus proves uncannily correct.5

What is required is an anamnestic procedure which will forcefully recall what has been

actively consigned to oblivion. Clearly, such a procedure must be specific to this almost

forgotten idea of nostalgia. “A good cook,” Ernst Bloch observes, “never makes a dish the same

way twice. The philosopher must proceed in the same way, with an eye constantly attentive to

the changing and wholly incomparable periphery of a thing, that is to say, with a procedure
suited to its object; nonetheless even then with a pluralism over which a distant, questionable,

ponderable star—indeed a star only worthy of questions—only then begins to form.”6 In the

case of nostalgia, paradoxically, what has been repressed is precisely what is required to discover

the originary idea of nostalgia. In order to recover that idea, then, it is necessary to become

3 Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie (New York: New Directions, 1970), 114.
4 Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans.
Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1968), 493.
5 Simone Signoret, La Nostalgie n’est plus ce qu’elle était (Paris: Editions du Seuil,
1976).
6 Ernst Bloch, “Recollections of Walter Benjamin,” trans. Michael W. Jennings, On
Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections, ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge: MIT P,
1988), 342-43.

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nostalgic about nostalgia. As will become apparent, such a procedure—one requiring what is

sought so as to discover what it has lost—is not irrational. It does involve, however, displacing

linear notions of time and causality. What is at stake here is best described in Slavoj Žižek’s

discussion of the symptom and repression in the writings of Jacques Lacan:

The Lacanian answer to the question: From where does the repressed return? is
therefore, paradoxically: From the future. Symptoms are meaningless traces,
their meaning is not discovered, excavated from the hidden depth of the past, but
constructed retroactively—the analysis produces the truth; that is, the signifying
frame which gives the symptoms their symbolic place and meaning. As soon as
we enter the symbolic order, the past is always present in the form of historical
tradition and the meaning of these traces is not given; it changes continually with
the transformations of the signifier’s network. Every historical rupture, every
advent of a new master-signifier, changes retroactively the meaning of all
tradition, restructures the narration of the past, makes it readable in another, new
way.7

The coupling of a pain with a desired homecoming is not accidental; the star of which

Bloch speaks “presupposes darkness” (343). Pain, as Nietzsche recognizes in his “Genealogy of

Morals,” is the precondition of memory (497). Nostalgia is a remembering that induces pain—

pain at the memory of a halcyon past. No doubt, this is a past that never existed, a past that

never was a present. The lost homeland only ever existed in a future, and nostalgia seeks to

remember what has yet to be imagined.

The recovery nostalgia seeks would be a messianic Now-Time (Jetztzeit), a utopian

moment when the past—which thereby becomes a future—is made present and fulfilled, a

mystical nunc stans. Now-Time would be a time filled by the presence of the now, a redeemed

time in which the future would retroactively constitute the past, and make meaningful the

present. In the words of Walter Benjamin’s fourteenth thesis on the philosophy of history:

History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time,
but time filled by the presence of the now [Jetztzeit]. Thus, to Robespierre ancient
Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the

7Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 55-56. Cf.
Michael Dummett, “Can an Effect Precede its Cause?” and “Bringing about the Past” in Truth
and Other Enigmas (Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1978), 319-50.

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continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome incarnate. It

evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past. Fashion has a
flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is a
tiger’s leap into the past. This jump, however, takes place in an arena where the
ruling class gives the commands. The same leap in the open air of history is the
dialectical one, which is how Marx understood the revolution. (“Theses” 263;
italics added)

Now-Time has nothing to do with the idea that history books are written by the winners. Not the

least of Benjamin’s merits is his discerning the necessary connection between progress and

dominance. What Now-Time redeems is the failures that are repressed and unmentioned in the

winners’ history. Now-Time is messianic, then, in a Jewish and not a Christian sense. It is not

the glorying in an already triumphant and conquering Christ, who now only awaits the

appropriate moment to return and establish an eternal dominion, but rather the understanding that

the Messiah only remains Messiah by not arriving. This is so because the Messiah is the

redeemer. The presence of the Messiah might establish the kingdom of God on earth, but since

the criteria of God are not human, that kingdom could be experienced only as oppressive. It is

for this reason, and also because the Messiah then would be in the embarrassing position of

redeeming from God, that the Messiah tarries.

If the winners’ homogeneous, empty time is progressive and evolutionary, Now-Time is

the static interruption of homogeneous time. If the time of the winners is deterministic and

additive, Now-Time is creationistic and outside the causal nexus. From the perspective of

homogeneous time, Now-Time events occur ex nihilo. “Now-Time signifies a time,” Bloch

explains, “when what is long past suddenly becomes a Now. Not, however, as a Romantic

reprise: the polis, say, in the French Revolution, was a Now. What is long past touches itself in

an odd, enveloping, circular motion, in which even the narrow and indifferent Now of 1925 or

1932 suddenly acquired correspondences or concordances that no longer remained in history. In

short: the continuum was exploded, so that the suddenly raw citation rises before our eyes”

(342). Naturally, nostalgia is not unaware of the double lack in what is sought—the absence of

both a longed for past, and a past that has yet to occur—and so there is a doubled pain.

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There also is, strangely, a pleasure associated with nostalgia, a delight in the recollections

that occasion anguish, and—Bloch adds—a “deep joyousness of the darkness that is closing in”

(343). This is a pleasure in thought’s ability to transcend facticity. Nostalgia is made possible

through the ability to imagine alternative possibilities, if not to the way things are now, then to

the way that they might have been, or could be. It may be that this inability to imagine

alternative presents is the source of still another pain, but this too is accompanied by a pleasure.

The pain of memory occasions pleasure precisely because the remembrance of things past is

painful. For this pain is itself a sign that the past may not be a destiny, that the present might be

contingent, and that perhaps the future need not be a nightmare. Even when this sign produces

only a hope without expectations—“it is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is

given to us”8—or no hope at all, it does engender delight at thought’s capacity to exceed both

any standard of sense and reality itself. In this entwining of pleasure and pain, nostalgia

transverses the sublime.

The Sublime is Now.9

As demonstrated by philological and historical studies, sublimity—like Aristotle’s

being—is said in many ways.10 “No article-length study,” Ronald W. Hepburn laments, “could

properly attempt to survey adequately, or to appraise, the immense diversity of theories of the

8 Walter Benjamin, “Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften,” Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1:1

(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), 201; cited in Martin Jay, The Dialectical
Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950
(Boston: Little & Brown, 1973), 105.
9 Barnett B. Newman, “The Sublime is Now,” The Tiger’s Eye 1:6, (1948): 51-53.
10 Cf. Jan Cohn and Thomas H. Miles, “The Sublime: In Alchemy, Aesthetics and
Psychoanalysis,” Modern Philology 74 (1977): 289-304; and Kari Elise Lokke, “The Role of
Sublimity in the Development of Modernist Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
40:4 (1982): 421-429.

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sublime.”11 Instead of attempting to trace the diversity and complexity of such theories, it is

Kant’s mathematical sublime that will be appealed to here.

In establishing a linkage between nostalgia and the Kantian sublime, there can be no

question of demonstrating either equivalence or correspondence. The relation between the

sublime and nostalgia is not one of identity. Rather, it would be a matter of elective affinities.

As was seen above, there occurs a certain transversing of nostalgia and the sublime. In other

words, and at the risk of inexactitude, there is an overlapping of the terrains of the two. This

overlapping should not be conceptualized as superimposition or palimpsest, although the notion

unfortunately suggests this. The transversal of Kant’s sublime and nostalgia instead would be a

matter of fusion. That is, there exists a line of intersection that shares characteristics of both.

This transversing allows the two concepts mutually to illuminate each other.

While allowing that in many respects Kant’s analysis represents an advance over that of

Edmund Burke, Jean-François Lyotard argues that there is a respect in which Burke’s treatment

is preferable. As Lyotard reads Burke, the principal cause of sublime experience is the (real or

imaginary) threat to self-preservation. Especially important is the apprehension that nothing

further will occur. “What is terrifying,” Lyotard urges, “is that the It happens that does not

happen, that it stops happening.” He further suggests that the role of time, and the fear of

temporal cessation, is obscured—if not lost—in Kant’s appropriation and transformation of the

Burkean sublime. This is what is at issue when Lyotard complains that Kant “strips Burke’s

aesthetic of what I consider to be its major stake—to show that the sublime is kindled by the

threat of nothing further happening.”12 In making this charge, Lyotard fails to recognize that in

Kant’s account of the mathematical sublime the It happens that does not happen. The It happens

11 Ronald W. Hepburn, “The Concept of the Sublime: Has It Any Relevance for
Philosophy Today?” Dialectics and Humanism 1-2 (1988): 137.
12 Jean-François Lyotard, “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,” trans. Lisa Liebmann,
Geoff Bennington, and Marian Hobson, The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1989), 204.

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that stops happening! Lyotard’s criticism does not do justice to the temporal regress in the

experience of the mathematical sublime.

The importance of the concept of a temporal regress is perceived by Rudolf A. Makkreel

when he writes:

In raising the possibility of an aesthetic mode of comprehension, Kant introduces

a feature of the imagination’s activity which contrasts with its previously assigned
functions. So far the imagination has been linked to the understanding, either to
help it synthesize the progressive sequence of representations in time or to help
specify its general concepts. In relation to the sublime, by contrast, the
imagination is claimed to institute a “regress” that annihilates the conditions of
time and is related not to concepts of the understanding, but to ideas of reason.
This imaginative regress is important for comprehending as a whole what is
normally apprehended as temporally discrete.13

According to Kant, this regress “cancels the condition of time in the imagination’s progression

and makes simultaneity intuitable.” Further, “since temporal succession is a condition of the

inner sense and of an intuition,” Kant reasons that the temporal regress must be “a subjective

movement of the imagination by which it does violence to the inner sense.”14 As will be seen,

the sublime now that is constituted by this temporal regress transverses the nostalgic now of

Jetztzeit. In order to understand these claims, it is first necessary to present schematically Kant’s

theory of the sublime.

Like judgments of the beautiful, judgments of the sublime result from a free play between

two faculties of the mind. In the case of judgments of the beautiful, this play is between the

imagination and the understanding. With judgments of sublimity, it is between the imagination

and reason. In contrast with the beautiful, whose distinguishing feature is restful contemplation,

the Kantian sublime is characterized by a feeling of “mental agitation connected with our

judging of the object” (101). The imagination refers the subjective purposiveness of this

13 Rudolf A. Makkreel, “The Regress of the Imagination: The Sublime and the Form of
the Subject,” Imagination and Interpretation in Kant: The Hermeneutical Import of the Critique
of Judgment (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990), 67-68.
14 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1987), 116.

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agitation either to the mind’s cognitive power or to its power of desire. As a result, the Kantian

sublime has two aspects. There is a mathematical and a dynamical sublime. The cognitive

power produces a mathematical attunement of the mind in terms of magnitude, and the power of

desire results in a dynamical attunement represented by dominance and might. Judgments of the

mathematically sublime are produced by the free play between the imagination and reason as a

faculty of cognition, and judgments of the dynamically sublime are occasioned by the free play

between the imagination and reason as a faculty of desire.15

Discussions of the Kantian sublime generally concentrate on its dynamical aspect, since it

is there that—as Makkreel writes—“the moral and religious themes most commonly associated

with the sublime are emphasized.” However, Makkreel also notes that “the less familiar account

of the mathematical sublime contains theoretical discussions of the general structure of our

consciousness of the sublime, and it is here that we see new points of departure for a theory of

the imagination. Although the imagination is usually conceived as a mode of sensuous

apprehension, it is now claimed to have also the power of aesthetic comprehension. Moreover,

the imagination is clearly revealed to be a function of judgment as well as a faculty of sense and

thus to be capable of establishing a measure for itself” (68). Accordingly, the focus here will be

on Kant’s discussion of the mathematical sublime.

An experience of the mathematically sublime is occasioned when the imagination

attempts—following the demands of reason as a faculty of cognition—to comprehend as a

totality a thing which is sufficiently large as to make impossible the comprehension of the thing

as whole. This effort, and subsequent failure, on the part of the imagination causes a sensation of

pain and frustration. This is not, however, the end of the matter. There also is felt a sense of

pleasure in reason’s demand to comprehend what is beyond the imagination’s ability to

schematize, that which is—as Paul Guyer writes—infinitely large, an “absolutely great whole”

(766). In turn, this demand of reason gives rise to the thought that the mind has a supersensible

15Cf. Paul Guyer, “Kant’s Distinction between the Beautiful and the Sublime,” Review
of Metaphysics 35 (1982): 765-66.

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faculty and that nature, considered as a supersensible substrate, is infinite. The experience of the

mathematically sublime gives rise to an idea of something which is absolutely large. In addition,

the mathematically sublime gives rise to the idea that the mind possesses a supersensible faculty,

and to the idea that nature—considered as a supersensible substrate—is infinite. These ideas are

never presented in sensible experience. Hence, it is not the thing occasioning the experience of

mathematically sublimity which is sublime, since the sensible thing is not itself infinitely large.

Rather, it is the faculty of the mind which attempts to comprehend an idea of something

infinitely large which is sublime.

According to Kant, besides the immediate prehension (fassen) of the magnitude of a basic

measure, there are two other activities which the imagination must perform. These are

comprehension and apprehension. Apprehension can progress to infinity, but comprehension

becomes increasingly difficult as apprehension progresses and it quickly reaches a limit. This

limit to the imagination’s comprehensive ability is “the aesthetically largest basic measure for an

estimation of magnitude.” The cause of this limitation is that “when apprehension has reached

the point where the partial presentations of sensible intuition that were first apprehended are

already beginning to be extinguished in the imagination, as it proceeds to apprehend further ones,

the imagination then loses as much on the one side as it gains on the other, and so there is a

maximum in comprehension that it cannot exceed” (108). It is at this point that the concept of a

temporal regress can be introduced. Kant writes:

Measuring (as [a way of] apprehending) a space is at the same time describing it,
and hence it is an objective movement in the imagination and a progression. On
the other hand, comprehending a multiplicity [Vielheit] in a unity (of intuition
rather than of thought), and hence comprehending in one instant [Augenblick]
what is apprehended successively, is a regression that in turn cancels [aufhebt] the
condition of time in the imagination’s progression and makes simultaneity
intuitable. Hence, (since temporal succession is a condition of the inner sense and
of an intuition) it is a subjective movement of the imagination by which it does
violence to the inner sense, and this violence must be the more significant the
larger the quantum is that the imagination comprehends in one intuition. (116)

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While the logically, or mathematically, determinative apprehension of a thing which

occupies space occurs during the progressive moments of linear time, and so takes time, aesthetic

comprehension requires a temporal regress which negates linear time. This negation of linear

time is what makes possible the non-successive comprehending of a thing as a unity. Kant

believes that time is continuous and not discrete. An instant, Augenblick, would represent an

ideal limit of the smallest possible duration of time in the same way that a point represents the

shortest possible length of a line. Logically determinative apprehension always requires the

succession of linear time. Unlike logically determinative apprehension that prehends things in

constituent parts, aesthetic comprehension attempts to take things in as organic wholes.

It may appear that aesthetic comprehension also could only occur discretely. That is, it

would seem that first one part of the thing would be apprehended, and then the next, until all of

the constituents of the thing had been apprehended. At that point, the subject would comprehend

the thing as a unity through recollection. The subject would remember the discrete parts. By

rapidly considering first one and then another, it would successively hold them in memory, and

so come to think the thing as a whole. This process would take time, and so the simultaneous

recollection of all the parts could not happen. Put otherwise, this entire process could not occur

in an instant.

Kant maintains, however, that it does occur in an instant. This instant is not an instant of

linear time, but rather an instant that folds, or warps, linear time. This folding of linear time does

not disturb the objective order of time, but it interrupts the subjective time order, and so violates

inner sense. This violence brings linear time, as it is subjectively experienced, to a halt; it stops

the progressive succession of linear time. From the perspective of the objective time order, on

the one hand, the subject continues to exist in time and any mental activity takes time. From the

standpoint of the subjective time order, on the other hand, the subject dwells in an atemporal

now, and thought no longer takes time. The instant of aesthetic comprehension would represent

an expanded instant of logically determinative apprehension, such that the two instants would no

longer be equal, nor would they admit of a common measure. In the instant of the objective time

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order, nothing happens; but anything can happen in the instant of the subjective time order. This

makes possible a simultaneous aesthetic comprehension which would otherwise have been

impossible.

The sublime transverses nostalgia in that, for both, there is “an intrinsic combination of

pleasure and pain: the pleasure that reason should exceed all presentation, the pain that

imagination or sensibility should not be equal to the concept.”16 Based on the above discussion,

it also can be seen that the aesthetic comprehensive now of Kant’s mathematical sublime

transverses the now of nostalgia. Both involve the interrupting of time. The time disrupted is, in

both cases, the same homogeneous, empty, and linear time. Further, both nows are oriented

toward the future. As has been seen, the Kantian mathematical sublime involves a temporal

regress which, although not affecting the progressive movement of linear time in the objective

time order, brings that movement to a stop for the subjective time order. While Kant is silent on

this point, it is clear that this regress is only meaningful on condition that it is temporary. If it

were permanent, or eternal, the subject would be in a Parmenidean time in which there was only

the eternal instantaneous equivalence of thought and being. The subject must return to the

objective linear time in order for there to be aesthetic comprehension. So the meaning of the

temporal regress depends on its ending, which is to say that the meaning depends on there being

a future. It is not impossible that the possibility of there not being a future is itself a source of an

experience of the sublime. Despite his preference for Burke’s sublime, Lyotard makes this clear:

The possibility of nothing happening is often associated with a feeling of anxiety,

a term with strong connotations in modern philosophies of existence and of the
unconscious. It gives to waiting, if we really mean waiting, a predominantly
negative value. But suspense can also be accompanied by pleasure, for instance
pleasure in welcoming the unknown, and even by joy, to speak like Baruch
Spinoza, the joy obtained by the intensification of being that the event brings with
it. This is probably a contradictory feeling. It is at the very least a sign, the

16 Jean-François Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?” trans.

Régis Durand, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington
and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984), 81; references to this work
hereafter given by page numbers in text, unless otherwise noted.

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question mark itself, the way in which it happens is withheld and announced: Is it
happening? The question can be modulated in any tone. But the mark of the
question is “now,” now like the feeling that nothing might happen: the
nothingness now. (198)

In addition, insofar as the imagination attempts to comprehend aesthetically something

which is absolutely large, more precisely, something large enough to frustrate the imagination’s

attempt to comprehend it as a totality, the thing which occasions an experience of the

mathematical sublime does not present in sensible experience an instance of absolute largeness,

but only alludes to that idea. The sublime is a matter of the sensible presentation of a thing

which points beyond itself, signifying that there is something else which necessarily remains

unpresentable.17 Because it is unpresentable in experience, that something else never can be

more than a negative idea. Here again the sublime transverses nostalgia. For the lost homeland

of nostalgia likewise remains unpresentable in experience. It is for this reason that, while the

experiences of the sublime and nostalgia may give rise to enthusiasm, they have nothing to do—

in Kant’s words—with “fanaticism, which is the delusion [Wahn] of wanting to SEE something

beyond all bounds of sensibility, i.e., of dreaming according to principles (raving with reason)”

(135). The presentations of nostalgia and the sublime avoid fanaticism precisely because they

merely are negative. It remains to be suggested that the unpresentable thing of the sublime may

be the unpresentable homeland of nostalgia.

Lyotard distinguishes a postmodern sublime from modern aesthetics. The latter also is
“an aesthetics of the sublime, though a nostalgic one. It allows the unrepresentable to be put

forward only as the missing contents; but the form, because of its recognizable consistency,

continues to offer to the reader or viewer matter for solace and pleasure.” In contrast, the

postmodern sublime involves “an intrinsic combination of pleasure and pain.” “The

postmodern,” he writes, “would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in

presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste

17Cf. Jean-François Lyotard, “Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime,” trans. Lisa
Liebmann, Artforum 20:8 (1982): 64-69.

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which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which

searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense

of the unpresentable” (81). It is clear that the nostalgia for the unattainable of which Lyotard

speaks, one whose recognizable form provides solace and pleasure, also is opposed by the

originary concept of nostalgia that is at issue in this article. If the modern notion of nostalgia

merely is a matter of missing contents, nostalgia in its originary sense would be missing both

form and content. Originary nostalgia seeks to recover its lost homeland through continual

inventions which, like Kant’s sublime, are never adequate to their concept. It is this which

makes it essentially experimental, and so postmodern in Lyotard’s sense.

It might be objected that the two nows ultimately are incompatible. It seems that, while

the nostalgic now works to fan the flames of discontent, the sublime now is essentially

conservative. Perhaps it cannot be denied that Kant is no revolutionary. Nevertheless, he

recognizes that the sublime is something that rulers have cause to fear. For he believes that the

feeling of the sublime is intensified by being “wholly negative as regards the sensible,” so much

so that it may border on enthusiasm. Kant writes:

Once the senses no longer see anything before them, while yet the unmistakable
and indelible idea of morality remains, one would sooner need to keep it from
rising to the level of enthusiasm, than to seek to support these ideas with images
and childish devices for fear that they would otherwise be powerless. That is also
why governments have gladly permitted religion to be amply furnished with such
accessories: they were trying to relieve every subject of the trouble, yet also of
the ability, to expand his soul’s forces beyond the barriers that one can choose to
set for him so as to reduce him to mere passivity and so make him more pliable.
(135)

Such a passage may not be revolutionary in intent, but it also cannot be regarded as an

endorsement of the status quo. For contained within it is the suggestion that the subject should

expand the forces of the soul beyond the barriers which the government establishes. Further, it

may be that the government itself presents an unpresentable Kantian idea. That is, it is possible

that the state is a thing sufficiently large or mighty that it cannot be comprehended aesthetically

as a totality. This would mean that the government could become an occasion for an experience

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of the sublime. In that case, paradoxically, governments would have cause to fear themselves as

potentially subversive. No doubt, this is why governments amply have furnished themselves

with such patriotic accouterments—Kant’s “images and childish devices”—as pledges, parades,

and flags. Whatever else it may be, then, Kant’s position cannot properly be described as

conservative, and it is possible that it will be revolutionary in effect. Here too the sublime

proves to be oriented toward the future.

Wiener posits two beings each of whose temporal

dimensions moves in the opposite direction from
the other. To be sure, that means nothing, and that
is how things which mean nothing all of a sudden
signify something, but in a quite different domain.
If one of them sends a message to the other, for
example a square, the being going in the opposite
direction will first of all see the square vanishing,
before seeing the square. That is what we see as
well. The symptom initially appears to us as a
trace, which will only ever be a trace, one which
will continue not to be understood until the analysis
has got quite a long way, and until we have realized
its meaning.18

In saying that the nows of nostalgia and of the sublime are oriented toward the future, the

position advocated here must be distinguished from another notion to which—though similar in

formulation—it is opposed diametrically. The future is neither the legitimation nor the

justification for present positions and actions, although the criteria for judging them come from

the future. Already it can be seen that this entails the rejection of that line of argument—found,

for example, in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Humanism and Terror—whereby present

(revolutionary) struggle is justified by its eventual success.19 The position advanced here

represents a repudiation of the triumphalism of progressive evolutionism. In other words,

18 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953-
1954, trans. John Forrester and Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1988), 159.
19 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist
Problem, trans. John O’Neill (Boston: Beacon P, 1969).

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interventions that fail still may be justified. There is no necessity that things eventually will get

better or that justice ultimately will prevail. The strictest of taboos must be placed on the future

insofar as it would pretend to serve as a court of appeal. Similarly, it often is claimed that the

tribunal of history will demonstrate such and such. In opposition to that perspective, the position

defended here recognizes that history demonstrates nothing.

This can be comprehended by a brief discussion of the “unheimlich,” the Freudian

sublime—The “Uncanny.” The uncanny is “undoubtedly related,” Freud thinks “to what is

frightening—to what arouses dread and horror,” and since the word is not always defined clearly,

“it tends to coincide with what excites fear in general.” Rather than being frightening because it

represents something new and strange, “the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads

back to what is known of old and long familiar.” Based on a study of the variant meanings of

unheimlich and heimlich, Freud writes that “heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in

the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich

is in some way or other a sub-species of heimlich.”20 To understand this ambivalence, he

examines the effect produced by the doubling of situations and characters in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s

“The Sand-Man.”21 Freud concludes that “when all is said and done, the quality of uncanniness

can only come from the fact of the ‘double’ being a creation dating back to a very early mental

stage—a stage, incidentally, at which it wore a more friendly aspect. The ‘double’ has become a

thing of terror, just as, after the collapse of their religion, the gods turned into demons. The other

forms of ego-disturbance exploited by Hoffmann can easily be estimated along the same lines as

the theme of the ‘double.’ They are a harking back to particular phases in the evolution of the

self-regarding feeling, a regression to a time when the ego had not yet marked itself off sharply

20 Sigmund Freud, The “Uncanny” in The Standard Edition of the Complete

Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, trans. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix
Strachey, and Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth P, 1962), 219, 220, 226.
21 Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, “The Sand-Man,” Eight Tales of Hoffmann, trans.
J. M. Cohen (London: Pan Books, 1952).

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from the external world and from other people” (236). Toward the end of The “Uncanny,”

Freud provides its “gist” in two considerations:

In the first place, if psycho-analytic theory is correct in maintaining that every

affect belonging to an emotional impulse, whatever its kind, is transformed, if it is
repressed, into anxiety, then among instances of frightening things there must be
one class in which the frightening element can be shown to be something
repressed which recurs. This class of frightening things would then constitute the
uncanny; and it must be a matter of indifference whether what is uncanny was
itself originally frightening or whether it carried some other affect. In the second
place, if this is indeed the secret nature of the uncanny, we can understand why
linguistic usage has extended das Heimliche into its opposite, das Unheimliche….
For this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is
familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it
only through the process of repression. This reference to the factor of repression
enables us, furthermore, to understand Schelling’s definition … of the uncanny as
something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light. (241)

For Freud, then, the uncanny represents the reoccurrence of a repressed emotional impulse.

However, if this is so—it well may be asked—does not the now take on an essentially

historical orientation? Must the earlier claim that the nows of nostalgia and of the sublime are

directed toward the future be retracted? The answer must be in the negative. This is so because

what was formerly repressed returns from the future! How is this to be understood? The great

merit of Lacan is his recognition that—as seen above—the meaning of repression, and of its

symptoms, comes from the future. Prior to the patient’s psychoanalysis, what will be diagnosed

later as the symptoms of repression are not yet symptoms. Rather, they are meaningless traces

which await their psychoanalytic interpretation. In their Hegemony and Socialist Strategy,

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe introduce several distinctions which are helpful here as well:

“We will call articulation any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their

identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice. The structured totality resulting from

the articulatory practice, we will call discourse. The differential positions, insofar as they appear

articulated within a discourse, we will call moments. By contrast, we will call element any

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difference that is not discursively articulated.”22 To employ their terminology, these

meaningless traces are elements that must be inserted into a symbolic order in which they then

will be articulated as moments. The traces only become symptoms as a result of the

psychoanalysis. Only at the conclusion do they retroactively become what they always were

already. To pun on the title of a movie, what is imperative is the return back to the future.

Further, as demonstrated by Freud’s writings—and by the subsequent appearance of two

sequels—this return does not occur only once. Instead, the return to the future continually

reoccurs. It is in this sense that Friedrich Nietzsche’s celebrated doctrine of eternal reoccurrence

should be understood.23 What eternally returns is not the sameness of the past, but rather the

difference of a future which brings its past with it.

What is at stake in the Lacanian return to the future becomes clear in Calvin O. Schrag’s

concept of the fitting response. “The ethical question is no longer,” Schrag writes, “an inquiry

guided by theories of the moral subject and an inventory of the peculiar properties that constitute

moral character, but rather becomes a question of the fitting response of the decentered subject in

its encounter with the discursive and social practices of the other against the backdrop of the

delivered tradition.” He sees that “value theory is transvalued and the ethical question is

repostured” at the point where rhetoric and ethos intersect, so that “the ethical requirement

within the space of ethos is that of the fitting response.” Later, Schrag invokes the notion of

temporality to describe further the work of the fitting response:

The fitting response preserves the ethos and the polis. It is situated within them
and always proceeds from them. The response is a response to the attitudes,
behavior patterns, meaning-formations, and moral assessments that define the
space shared by the rhetor and the interlocutor, the self and the other. In the
language of Gadamer, the response always takes place within the context of the
tradition, with its delivered prejudgements and assessments. It is a fitting
response because it serves and preserves the tradition (as the conjunction of ethos

22 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a
Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985), 105.
23 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage,
1974), 273-274, sec. 341.

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and polis). It appropriates the tradition, even if only in a negative way. So there
is the moment of appropriation which fosters preservation, keeping the tradition
intact and serving its end. This we might call the hermeneutics of participation, a
participation which conserves that which has been transmitted through the
tradition. But there is another moment in the fitting response—the moment that
occasions invention, novelty, the emergence of the not yet said and the not yet
accomplished. This defines the fitting response as a critical response, through
which the prejudgments of the tradition are amended, reassessed, or indeed
displaced. This we would call the hermeneutics of distanciation and critique.24

Rejecting appeals to universal or pre-existing criteria, Schrag convincingly argues that political

and moral interventions receive their justification from their fittingness.

Precision and care are called for if the radicalness of the insight contained here is to be

understood correctly. In a review of Schrag’s Communicative Praxis and the Space of

Subjectivity, Michael J. Hyde chides him for failing to provide an explanation of the criteria for

judging the fit of the fitting response. “Schrag tells his reader what a fitting response ought to

do,” Hyde writes, “but nowhere does he detail how this response should take shape. What

criteria should structure and guide rhetoric in its fitting response?”25 There are four possible

answers to Hyde’s question. A discussion of the incorrect first three will show their limitations

and will make clear what is preserved from them in the correct fourth answer.

It seems obvious from Schrag’s discussion that the question—from where do the criteria

for the fitting response emerge?—cannot be answered by claiming that the criteria are universal.

Such an answer would involve an act of abstraction whereby the situation loses all specificity.

That is, an appeal to universals surreptitiously demands that the actual situation be ignored, and

an imaginary one substituted for it. A second answer that must be sublated is the assertion that

the question of criteria is misguided. If there were no criteria operative at any point, there would

be no way to differentiate a fitting response from its opposite. The third answer would urge that

24 Calvin O. Schrag, Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity (Bloomington:

Indiana U P, 1986), 202, 207.
25 Michael J. Hyde, “Review of Calvin O. Schrag’s Communicative Praxis and the
Space of Subjectivity,” Phenomenological Inquiry 10 (1986): 158.

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the criteria already are present somehow in the situation itself. This notion of immanent criteria

is the least misleading answer, but it too must be subjected to critique.

What the above three suggestions—universal criteria, no criteria, immanent criteria—

have in common is their presupposing as intelligible a notion of objective criteria which ignores

the role of the intervening, decentered subject. This last sentence is not true, it might be replied,

because each of the three answers allows that the subject is one constituent of the specific

situation. However, to conceptualize the intervening subject as only one part of the situation, as

the reply does, is simply to repeat the mistake. The failure of all three answers is that they do not

realize that the intervening subject constitutes—or better, articulates—the situation in its

specificity. Recognizing the articulatory activity of the intervening subject permits an answer to

Hyde’s worry. The criteria which structure and guide rhetoric in its fitting intervention come

from the future. To see this, consider the three rejected answers.

The answer that there are universal criteria is not completely wrong. Such criteria do

exist, but in the future, and not in a cloud-cuckoo-land where they usually are located. If the

subject’s intervention is judged fitting, it also will be judged universally binding upon all

similarly situated persons. Further, the intervention’s fittingness will be judged to be a result of

its being an application of pre-existing criteria. What must not be lost from view, however, is

that the situation only becomes articulated as the result of the subject’s action. Put otherwise, the

situation becomes itself as the result of the intervention. Nor is the answer that there are no

criteria operative wholly misguided. There are no criteria prior to the intervention. The attempt

to argue that there are such previously existing criteria necessarily involves the imaginary

construction of a situation in which the intervention is depicted furtively as already having taken

place. Finally, the answer that criteria already are contained—in some sense—in the situation,

and that what is required is their discernment is acceptable as a first approximation.

What remains to be added is that it is the subject’s intervention which articulates the

criteria-laden situation. This idea is explicated by Žižek’s analysis of Hegel’s diagnosis of the

beautiful soul:

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The falsity of the “beautiful soul” lies not in its inactivity, in the fact that it only
complains of a depravity without doing something to remedy it; it consists, on the
contrary, in the very mode of activity implied by this position of inactivity—in the
way the “beautiful soul” structures the “objective” social world in advance so that
it is able to assume, to play in it the role of the fragile, innocent and passive
victim. This, then, is Hegel’s fundamental lesson: when we are active, when we
intervene in the world through a particular act, the real act is not this particular,
empirical, factual intervention (or non-intervention); the real act is of a strictly
symbolic nature, it consists in the very mode in which we structure the world, our
perception of it, in advance, in order to make our intervention possible, in order to
open in it the space for our activity (or inactivity). The real act thus precedes the
(particular-factual) activity; it consists in the previous restructuring of our
symbolic universe into which our (factual, particular) act will be inscribed. (215-
216)26

For purposes of analysis, then, the fitting response can be conceptualized as having two aspects.

The first involves the establishment of the situation in its specificity. The second is the subject’s

action in this context. Intervention does not merely occur at the point where rhetoric and ethos

intersect, but it also articulates that point. Put otherwise, intervention is both the intersection of

rhetoric and ethos, and that which makes their intersection possible. Further, since rhetoric and

ethos can be said meaningfully to exist only at the point of their intersection, intervention is what

articulates each in its specificity. Hence, once judgment is conceptualized as itself an

intervention, it is clear that, as Lyotard says, “we judge without criteria. We are in the position

of Aristotle’s prudent individual, who makes judgments about the just and the unjust without the

least criteria.”27 Although judgment later may appeal to criteria, it occurs without them. The

criteria do not precede judgment, rather it is the judgment that constitutes them.

Herein lies the true radicalness of Schrag’s concept of the fitting response, marking its

decisive break with previous interpretations of phronesis. According to those understandings,

practical wisdom is a matter of discerning and applying the criteria which already are immanent

26 Leon J. Goldstein also recognizes that Hegel’s dialectic is a retrospectively-applied

technique: “Dialectic and Necessity in Hegel’s Philosophy of History” in Substance and Form
in History: A Collection of Essays in Philosophy of History, ed. Leon Pompa and William H.
Dray (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P, 1981), 42-57; and “Force and the Inverted World in
Dialectical Retrospection,” International Studies in Philosophy 20: 3 (1988): 13-28.
27 Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich
(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1979), 14.

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constituents of the delivered tradition. At their most daring—for example, in Hans-Georg

Gadamer’s work on phronesis—such interpretations at best allow that the delivered tradition also

immanently contains the resources for discerning aspects of the criteria which always were

present, but not detected hitherto. On Schrag’s account, however, it is the intervention itself that

retroactively constitutes the delivered traditions which will provide the backdrops to the

intervention! It is the subject’s encounters with the other which establish the contexts of those

encounters. It is for this reason that the judgment regarding the fittingness of an intervention

always is a matter of hindsight. This judgment always occurs in the intervention’s future, and is

itself another intervention.28 It should be obvious that the fitting response is an active—and not

a reactive—force. The notion of response, which admittedly may suggest mere reaction, arises

by concentrating attention on what has been identified as the second aspect of the subject’s

intervention. Attending equally to both aspects permits the realization that the so-called response

is just as much an interrogation or, more precisely, a catechization.

The meaning of a situation is located in the future. Naturally, this entails the rejection of

any naive hermeneutics which would seek to discover the meaning of a text or an event simply

by situating it within its historical context. Like the three incorrect answers to Hyde’s question,

such a position is not entirely wrong. It correctly perceives that meaning is a matter of context;

that is, elements only become moments when articulated within some discourse. What it fails to

recognize is that an intervention simultaneously establishes the context to which it is a response.

Put otherwise, an intervention is an element which articulates the discourse of which it is a

moment. It could be said, then, that a theory of interpretative practical wisdom such as

28 Cf. David James Miller, “Immodest Interventions: A Response to Michael J. Hyde

Concerning Calvin O. Schrag’s Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity,”
Phenomenological Inquiry 11 (1987): 113: “The claims, demands, and possibilities which
construct the ‘standpoint’ and its specificity themselves provide the ‘means’ for answering the
question: ‘What is required of me?’ And the answer to this question has always already shaped,
structured, and guided response. Yet while these immanent criteria are operative in response,
they can be specified only post festum, in further response, and are forced into transcendence
only through violence to their particularity.”

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Gadamer’s does not recognize the products of its own creativity. “Such awe seizes man,” Lacan

writes, “when he unveils the lineaments of his power that he turns away from it in the very action

employed to lay its features bare.”29 So it has been with hermeneutics. Seeking to appropriate

and thereby to preserve the tradition—and Gadamer consistently assumes that a single tradition

is at issue—it fails to comprehend that those traditions are its own inventions.

This understanding of the Schragian fitting response permits a return to the claim made

above that the nows of nostalgia and of the sublime are oriented toward the future. This is a

future which reactivates the past, and so may provide a site of resistance in the present.

Benjamin writes of the importance of the working class not forgetting “its hatred and its spirit of

sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated

grandchildren.” Although a certain skepticism may be expressed regarding Benjamin’s

identification of the working class as the agent of revolutionary change, his essential insight is

correct. The fight against oppression is not only a struggle on behalf of present and future

generations. It also is a fight on behalf of previous generations, the dead. Naturally, it is too late

to liberate them from the oppression they experienced. It is the oppression that they now are

subjected to that is at issue. Now they exist as mere specters on the margins of the winner’s

history. Their struggles and narratives are repressed from that history. These are the repressed

which return in revolutionary struggle, and the struggle against injustice always is revolutionary

in that it contains the potential for the return of the repressed. If this struggle fails, the dead may

be said to die a second death. For not only do they die a physical death, but they also die a

symbolic death. Their names are repressed or—and perhaps this is even worse, constituting a

form of living death—made to support the oppression they opposed when they lived. It should

not be forgotten that Benjamin also writes that “only that historian will have the gift of fanning

the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the

enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious” (262, 257).

29 Jacques Lacan, Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, trans. Anthony Wilden

(Baltimore: John Hopkins U P, 1984), 3.

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As seen above, the meaning of an intervention is given in the future. It must be added, if

this is to be understood in its truly radical sense, that this future never arrives, and never becomes

a present. To see why this must be so, it is only necessary to recall two things. First, the

judgment of an intervention is itself another intervention, and so the meaning of that judgment

itself still remains in the future, waiting still another judgment. Second, as Schrag emphasizes,

the fitting response essentially is incomplete if only the moment of the subject’s activity is

considered. Rather the fitting response demands the response of the other, and this latter

response too elicits a further response. It is obvious that the final meaning of the response will

be deferred forever.

Far from being a cause for pessimism, this conclusion is optimistic. The future is

radically open, and so nothing ever is settled finally or finished. Liberatory struggles, then, are

politics of resistance without guarantees. As Benjamin observes:

The soothsayers who found out from time what it had in store certainly did not
experience time as either homogeneous or empty. Anyone who keeps this in
mind will perhaps get an idea of how past times were experienced in
remembrance—namely, in just the same way. We know that the Jews were
prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them
in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all
those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not
imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty
time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah
might enter. (266)

It is this originary nostalgia that allows the continuation of struggle when—from the perspective

of homogeneous, empty time—there is no hope of success, and permits an escape from the
seducements of performativity.

The position advocated here is not an idealism where that is understood as the view that

the material world is illusory. Neither is the position a materialism where subjects are part of a

deterministic natural order. It rather would be a Benjaminian historical materialism whose

method is one of “suspended dialectics.” While the subject may constitute a situation by an

intervention, the subject in turn is the product of a series of heterogeneous networks. Further,

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there are always limits to the extent of a context’s malleability, of the subject’s ability to define

the situation. However, and this is the decisive consideration, those limitations never are given

in advance. Rather, they are discovered in the future, where they also may be overcome.

If there is a resignation, it is a paradox of the

enthusiastic resignation: we are using here the term
“enthusiasm” in its strict Kantian meaning, as
indicating an experience of the object through the
very failure of its adequate representation.
Enthusiasm and resignation are not then two
opposed moments: it is the “resignation” itself, i.e.
the experience of a certain impossibility, which
incites enthusiasm.30

Ricoeur opposes nostalgia’s weakness to the work of mourning’s courage. Trauerarbeit

is what Freud calls the work of mourning. Freud’s Trauerarbeit is “an intrapsychic process,”

according to Laplanche and Pontalis, “occurring after the loss of a loved object, whereby the

subject gradually manages to detach himself from this object.” They note that Freud says, in

“Mourning and Melancholia,” that in order for the ego to detach itself from the lost object, “each

single one of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object is brought

up and hypercathected, and detachment of the libido is accomplished in respect of it.”31 It may

be hypothesized that this process of hypercathection could continue indefinitely. Its ultimate

limit might seem to be the total forgetting of the lost object. There is, though, a further step

possible. This would be the additional forgetting of the hypercathection process itself.
There is no reason to wonder if this second step can be actualized, for what else has

happened to the originary sense of nostalgia? However, it is that originary sense of nostalgia that

makes possible the work of mourning. This occurs because the thing that the work of mourning

forgets is located in the lost homeland—or, more exactly, it is this lost homeland—of nostalgia.

30 Slavoj Žižek, “Beyond Discourse-Analysis” in Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the

Revolution of Our Time (London: Verso, 1990), 259-60.
31 J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald
Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1973), 485, 486.

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What nostalgia seeks to recall are fully hypercathected memories and expectations. It is

precisely in its weakness that nostalgia makes possible the courage of the work of mourning.

Kant claims that “every affect of the VIGOROUS KIND (i.e., which makes us conscious that we

have forces to overcome any resistance, i.e., makes us conscious of our animus strenuus) is

aesthetically sublime.” Hence, the courage of the work of mourning is sublime because “even

grief (but not a dejected kind of sadness) may be included among the vigorous affects, if it has its

basis in moral ideas” (133, 137). It may be that the hypercathected memories and expectations

are irretrievable, but the attempt to recover them bears witness to a power surpassing any

sensible standard.

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