that has already been noted. In the lines from Pope the sublime effect emerges only when
the terror no longer dominates and is itself therefore taken as an object. The amazement
marks the emergence of the object and therefore of the causal relation also as an object.
In both passages distance creates the conditions in which objectivity becomes
possible. This distance, however, is not simple distance. It involves doubling. With terror,
within the all-encompassing power of a ‘violent emotion’, there is no split between cause
and effect such that the cause and the effect are themselves possible objects of experience
This possibility becomes real with—and within—the split itself. The split creates the
distance within which the object becomes reworked and repeated such that it presents
itself—qua object of experience—for the first time. For Burke, therefore, the sublime
experience involves objects that are both the same and different. Amazement is the re-
recognition that is original. Distance involves a repetition in which the object is
reworked; hence the use of the term ‘modification’. The distance is not one of simple
chronology in that the object is not re-presented; it is never just given again within an
atemporal sequence governed by similitude.^21 Hence the analogy with the Freudian
conception of Nachträglichkeit.^22 The action engendering the sublime is deferred.
The doubling of the object within repetition in which it is presented again for the first
time is not sublime. It is rather that the Burkean conception of the sublime allows for
such a conception of the object to be understood. The use of Burke is not intended to
establish an analogy between avant-garde experience and the sublime, but rather to
provide the temporality proper to this particular form of experience. The analogy, if there
is one, is between the experience of an object that resists understanding and explanation
in the terms provided by tradition (understood as the determination in advance), and
‘terror’ or ‘violent emotion’. It is only with distance in which the experience itself
becomes an object of experience that it is possible to break through shock and overcome
silence. (The work of art remains a step ahead.)
The way therefore that tradition comes to be known emerges out of the work—both
the work as object and the work as the process of objectification within interpretation.
The truth of the object of avant-garde experience will be to mark the distance it
constructs between sensibility and understanding. The understanding here is not the one
equipped with regulative ideas. Understanding is the process that emerges out of
sensibility. It is the understanding that is involved in the recognition of ‘terror’ and
‘violent emotions’ as objects of experience. Understanding will contain sensibility since
it occasions delight. The postulated existence of regulative ideas is, when removed from
the realm of the cognitive, the analogue of tradition. It is the resistance to them,
transgression, felt within avant-garde experience, that comes to be grasped by the
understanding, in its having found objectivity. The grasp is never complete.
It is within the domain of the avant-garde that the heterological will be affirmative.
The re-reading of the tradition in which anoriginal heterogeneity is rediscovered for the
first time will involve a particular conception of philosophical activity; the task of
affirmation. It is clear that such a conception of interpretation bears the same relation to
tradition as Eisenman’s ‘buildings’ do to the tradition of architecture.
WORKS WITH OPEN DOORS
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