...space, asking it might mean to "come after" Derrida, to "follow" him.

**********

Now that we are "after" Derrida, it is appropriate, even inevitable, that we "follow" him. And here, in the very first sentence of this essay, there already appear two words suspended, as Derrida himself might say, in the tenterhooks of quotations. What does it mean to "follow" Derrida? What would it mean for us to come "after" him? And if I were to indulge myself further in this Derridean vein, what might a discourse on his own "discourse on art"--again in quotations--accomplish for us, that we might begin to come to terms with what coming after Derrida, and following him, might mean?

To begin with, there is this term, "to follow." At the outset of the second section of the chapter in The Truth in Painting called "Parergon," Derrida says that he will follow the "enigma of pleasure" that puts the entirety of Kant's third Critique into movement (43). The possibility of pleasure, says Derrida, is the question, at least of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment. It is the question that precedes it, the question with which it opens and according to which it operates; we might tentatively say that it is one--although surely only one--of the questions that frames this Kantian discourse. A judgement of taste is aesthetic, says Kant in those opening passages of the third Critique, because in deciding whether something is beautiful or not we do not employ the understanding to refer the representation (Vorstellung) to the object so as to give rise to cognition, but rather use the imagination to refer it "to the subject and his feeling of pleasure or displeasure" (44/203). (1) From the very outset of the "Analytic of the Beautiful," it is clear that the judgement of taste does not give us any knowledge. Concepts play no part in aesthetic judgement. What we are interested in here is not the object but the relation of its representation "to the subject and to its affect (pleasure or displeasure)" (Derrida, Truth 44). The feelings of pleasure and displeasure designate nothing in the object, but allow the subject to feel him- or herself, to feel, as Kant puts it, how he or she "is affected by the representation" (44/204, trans. modified).

This is the very first section of the third Critique. In the second, Kant introduces another very well-known feature of his aesthetics: that the pleasure that is associated with aesthetic judging is disinterested. This is to say that it takes no interest in the object or its existence. The question, according to Kant, is only whether its representation "is accompanied by a liking," quite regardless of the object of the representation, or of one's normal orientation toward such things (for instance, a palace) (46/205). The feeling of pleasure that I feel when faced with something that I judge to be beautiful thus requires, in Derrida's words, "an absolute lack of interest for the existence of the thing." It removes itself from our interest in our judging it to be beautiful, or the pleasure itself is possible only through ignoring the object as object in favour of the affect, which leads Derrida very quickly to speak of "the enigma of the bereaved [endeuille] relation" to beauty and the "labour of mourning" that is thus "broached in advance" in this thinking on art and on the beautiful. From the outset, the beautiful "object" (and again we should use quotations, since this "object" is, in fact, no longer an object in the normal sense) is lost to us precisely in its being judged beautiful. It occasions the affect, but it is the affect that becomes the occasion. We are thus drawn "toward a nonexistence or at least toward a thing [...] the existence of which is indifferent to me," says Derrida. This leads him to compare this pure and disinterested pleasure with "a sort of transcendental reduction, the epoche of a thesis of existence the suspension of which liberates, in certain formal conditions, the pure feeling of pleasure" (Truth 44).

What is at stake in such an epoche? What is the significance of a reduction that suspends the existence of the beautiful "object"? When it is a question of the beautiful, says Derrida, following Kant, we must not become distracted by questions that miss the point. To judge Kant's famous example of a (potentially) beautiful object, a palace, in terms of my opinion that things of that sort are made merely to be gaped at, or in terms of Kant's now-mythic Iroquois sachem who had a preference, as Derrida puts it, for Paris's pubs [gargottes], or in terms of Rousseau's distaste for such ostentatious exhibitions of vanity--in all cases, this is to direct one's attention to the circumstantial features of the palace, its reasons for being, its shortcomings in comparison with the eating houses, the vanity of its owners (Kant [section]2: 45-46/204-205; Derrida, Truth 45). Such considerations are thus extrinsic to the judgement that this palace is beautiful (Truth 45). If beauty is to be judged in terms of the pleasure a representation produces in me, my concern is with what is intrinsic to the production of that pleasure, in the meaning that I give to that representation, and not with any factors that make me dependent on the real existence of the object in question (Kant 46/205).

What is at issue here, then, is knowing what we are talking about, being able to distinguish clearly between what is intrinsic to the attribution of the value beauty and what is and remains external to one's immanent sense of this value. This distinguishing between what is internal and proper to a thing and what is circumstantial with regard to it is a "permanent requirement" of philosophical procedure, according to Derrida, one that "organizes all philosophical discourses on art, the meaning of art and meaning as such, from Plato to Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger." Such a requirement demands a strict border to be drawn between the intrinsic and the extrinsic, between the proper and the circumstantial--a framing discourse is thus essential, "a discourse on the limit between the inside and outside of the art object" (Truth 45). Such a discourse is presupposed in all philosophical discourses on art (and, indeed, on meaning)--and yet it is one that is missing, or at least hard to place, in the Kantian text. What will establish and preserve this frame?

Such a question, we know, concerns the entirety of this discourse on Kant. Indeed, in Kant's case there appears to be more than one answer--the first Critique being one, a certain anthropological...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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