The dialectics of decay: rereading the Kantian subject - interpretation of philosopher Immanuel Kant's essay 'Critique of Judgment'

67. In the essay "'Vision Itself Has Its History': 'Race,' Nation, and Renaissance Art History," (in Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America 1450-1650, ed. Claire Farago, New Haven, 1995, 67-88), Claire Farago offers an important discussion of Franz Kugler's Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte, first published in 1841-42, a very popular study by the most widely read art historian of the day. As Farago notes, George Kubler cites this study as the moment when anthropologists and art historians parted company. The footnote to Kant's third Critique offers up in bold relief the ideational substructure on which this division was conceived.

68. William Pietz, "Fetish," in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shift, Chicago, 1996, 197-98. See also the series of articles by William Pietz, "The Problem of the Fetish, I," Res, IX, Spring 1985, 5-17; "The Problem of the Fetish, II: The Origin of the Fetish," Res, XIII, Spring 1987, 23-45; "The Problem of the Fetish IIIa: Bosman's Guinea and the Enlightenment Theory of Fetishism," Res, XIV, Autumn 1988, 105-23. The Enlightenment construction of "primitive" art should be considered in this context as well, as it is in the study by Frances S. Connelly, The Sleep of Reason: Primitivism in Modern European Art and Aesthetics, 1725-1907, University Park, Pa., 1995.

69. Pietz, 1996 (as in n. 68), 199. Although Pietz discusses Kant's third Critique "as a solution to the problem of fetishism" for reasons other than those that I here highlight, my view concurs with his. Kant's particular use of the fetish in his Observations of 1764 demonstrates that from the outset detachment from the object was a defining feature of the sublime for him.

70. On the distinctions between mythical thought and scientific thought, see Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans. Ralph Manheim, New Haven, 1955 - 57. In The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, a multivolume work of the 1920s, Cassirer defines the trajectory from mythic to symbolic thought as, among other things, a successive movement away from the physical grasp on an object toward the mental grasp of an object. Mathematical thinking, a purely symbolic form of cognition, is considered the highest form of thought. Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is therefore a history of successive detachment from the world of objects, a trajectory viewed as a story of progress. Such an enlightened path from mythos to logos likewise undergirds the disciplinary matrix of the history of art.

71. Timothy J. Reiss, The Discourse of Modernism, Ithaca, N.Y., 1982, 39. In his analysis of the "analytico-referential" discourse of modernism, Reiss notes (39) the highly interesting relation between the phrase je ne sais quoi, the first substantive use of which occurs in 1628, and its consecration "in the second half of the century as the object of discussions on the sublime, which will become in turn the foundation of discussions on taste and of the new science of aesthetics in the eighteenth century." While Reiss does not mention Kant here, we may consider him in this context. The sublime certainly has its roots in the je ne sais quoi, in that which initially eludes ready definition. For Kant, however, the experience of the sublime turns more on a deja vu, as what the subject discovers is something unpleasantly familiar, namely the stubborn persistence of "a higher purposiveness" in his own faculty of mind.