This description needs to be read in relation to the already cited passage detailing the
consequences of dining in House VI. There is, however, an additional important element
that is introduced here and while it cannot be pursued it must, at least, be noted. It
concerns the relationship between the visible and the invisible. The question that must be
asked is what type of totality is the ‘context’ invoked by Eisenman. (A way towards
understanding the complexity of this question may be provided by Burke’s description of
succession as conveying the artificial sublime.) The problem of the precise nature of the
totality is also linked to the openness marking the overcoming of prediction.
The centrality of experience within Eisenman’s writings does not mean that
experience needs to be taken at face value. There are no experiences as such. Experience,
as will be suggested, involves a complex doubling. The question within which a start can
be made, is why it is that, when in Burke’s terms, ‘danger and pain press too nearly, they
are incapable of giving any delight, and are more simply terrible’. The experience of
‘danger and pain’ is such that they are not within the actuality of their presence also
objects of experience. There is therefore no sense in which there is a split such that it
would then be possible to posit the reality of a recognition of experience that is
coterminous with the experience itself. The body, fear and terror are present as one. The
possibility of delight and hence of the sublime occurs only after ‘a certain distance’ and
with ‘certain modifications’. The terms ‘distance’ and ‘modification’ refer to a complex
state of affairs.
The first element that must be noted is the causal relationship between the source of
terror and the state of terror. Neither, however, can be said to exist as an object of
experience in which there is any sense of reflexivity. The unity of body, fear and terror
predominates. The instant, as a consequence, must be understood as excluding
objectivity. Now the distance that emerges is the breakdown of this unity in which the
causal relation itself becomes an object of experience. Its becoming an object is founded
on the emergence within it of alterity.
The same movement also occurs in the passage quoted (in fact misquoted) from Pope
earlier in the Enquiry. The passage as cited by Burke reads:
As when a wretch, who conscious of his crime
Pursued for murder from his native clime,
Just gains sure frontier, breathless pale amaz’d
All gaze, all wonder.19After which Burke adds:
when we have suffered from some violent emotion, the mind naturally
continues in something like the same conditions after the cause which first
produced it ceases to function.^20While the argument Burke advances concerns the relationship between pleasure and pain
in terms of which it will be possible to distinguish between delight and pleasure, it is the
internal operation of these passages that is important here. They rehearse the movement
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