The Sublime Unknown

Simon Morley
Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact or reason. John Keats, Letter of 21 December,1817 With the advent of the aesthetics of the sublime the stake of art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was to be the witness to the fact that there is indeterminacy. Jean-Franois Lyotard Return to nature. That is to say, re-examine the source. Nature is the realm of infinity where one can continuously bring ones self back to nothingness. One can limit or define ones self in the midst of this realm of the undefined or infinite. Staring at the depths of self negation is the true recognition of history; this is the starting point where one can be transformed. Lee Ufan.

There is a work of the negative in the image, writes Georges Didi-Huberman,

dark efficacy that, so to speak eats away at the visible (the order of represented appearances) and murders the legible (the order of signifying configurations). He continues: From a certain point of view, moreover, this work of constraint can be envisaged as a regression, since it brings us, with ever-startling force, toward a this-side-of, toward something that the symbolic elaboration of artworks has covered over or remodeled. There is here a kind of anadyomene movement, a movement whereby something that has plunged into the water momentarily reemerges, is born before quickly plunging in again: it is the materia informis when it shows through form, it is the presentation when it shows through representation, it is opacity when it shows through transparency, it is the visual when it shows through the visible. i The concept of the sublime is closely bound-up with this anadyomene movement. For it addresses an ontological undecidability that effects and also infects what is seen, felt, and thought, forcing us to recognize the limits of our knowledge and to explore what we dont know, and perhaps what we fear. In what follows I will first discuss the origins and deployment of the concept in Western art. Then I will ask what might be the best way to talk about the meaning of the sublime experience and its relationship to the unknown .

Next, I introduce a supplementary reading of East Asian philosophy, and end my discussion by referring to the art and writings of the contemporary Korean artist Lee Ufan. In making this journey, I am not interested in reversing privileged cultural distinctions so that East Asian culture becomes, for example, the source of all goodness and the West of decadence. Rather, my purpose is to resist the binary of East-West by problematizing it. I am interested in bringing into contact two recursive cultural orientations, and will be using East Asian art and ideas as an elsewhere, as Franois Jullien says of his own groundbreaking work on China, deploying my discussion as a roundabout way of disinterring buried possibilities, of reopening understanding from within my own Western culture.ii

1. Etymologically, the word sublime comes from the Latin sublimis (elevated, lofty), which is derived from the preposition sub, meaning up to and limen (the threshold, surround or lintel of a doorway) but also from limes - a boundary or limit. As Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe puts it, the sublime posits the incommensurability of the sensible with the metaphysical (the Idea, God)iii. It is the feeling we have when we stand on the unstable and shifting threshold where we stare into the abyss, before the unseen and unseeable, the unknown and unknowable. The concept emerged in the eighteenth century in order to challenge outdated views of human consciousness and to find new interpretative tools for the understanding of experiences that seemed increasingly important. But it has its deeper origins in Western traditions that consider the sacred intrinsically problematic for representation. In the monotheistic religions the divine is considered inherently transcendent and unrepresentable - the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah denounced idols as mere blocks of wood and stone, and this prohibition developed into a thorough-going suspicion of images as potentially idolatrous. But in practice, images proliferated within Christianity: for the Western Church they were understood to be useful ways to communicate the religious message for the illiterate, while in the Eastern, the concept of the icon meant pictures were vessels for substantiating the real image of the divine. In Judaism and Islam, however, a deeper iconophobia prevailed, one that fed into Cabbala, Neoplatonist, Gnostic and alchemical traditions, and Christian and Islamic mysticism,

and, later, Protestantism. Here, the godhead was deemed intrinsically unrepresentable, unknowable and ineffable. But in Western mystical traditions it was also argued that this transcendent Ground of Being could nevertheless be approached negatively through aphairesis: the subtraction, abstraction and purgation of signs in order to make room for the absentcum-presence of the divine. In the Renaissance and Baroque this understanding of negation as a mystical value fed into the more general re-alignment of the arts towards the expression of the obscure and suggestive. The desire to reach deep into the unknown to touch the Idea, the Essence, the Universal, the Divine obliged artists to shed the world of appearances, and thereby to repudiate the conception of art as imitation of the visible world. Later, although the Enlightenment heralded a new-found confidence in reason and in the ability to master reality, it also brought to the surface the contrary awareness of the profoundly limited nature of the self. This led thinkers and artists to explore ways of opening up consciousness to the ungraspable and ineffable, and to draw greater attention to intense experiences lying beyond conscious control, experiences that were threatening to self-mastery. Artists expressed the chimerical, stochastic and fundamentally metamorphic realm of the imaginative, of the felt, the suggestive, the potential, the ambiguous. For example, painters, through diminishing the amount of visual data available to the eyes, explored the affective and spiritual potency generated by the absence of a clearly articulated depths of field, and by the subsequent loss of clearly bounded forms. Under the sway of the sublime experience, artists felt compelled to bring forth visual analogies for a reality conceived as lying beyond the material realm, one fundamentally without shape or form. In the process they forged a new visual language based on negations, abbreviations, concealments, erasures, blanks and absences. Caspar David Friedrich, for example, under the influence of negative theology and informed by pietistic Protestantisms teachings, conceived of his empty canvas as invoking a void that harbored the infinite and unrepresentable God; the vacant vistas he conjured were intended to convey the closeness and inevitability of death and the redemptive power of the divine. Friedrich believed he was making room for a more elevated vision, and through the indirection implied by such levels of pictorial blankness and refusal to depict anything clearly, thought he was blinding the physical eye and opening a spiritual organ that could then see God.

But the meaning of the ineffable experience with which the sublime brings the self into contact was by its very nature undefinable. What is ultimately at stake in thinking about the sublime, as such theories suggest, is the fragile unity of the self when poised on the threshold between being and nothingness. In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) Edmund Burke addressed the emotions of the self when confronted by what seems threatening, and the thrill engendered by the shock and fear this situation could provoke. In relation to the arts, Burke employed the term sublime to distinguish a category of experiences antithetical to those evoked by the beautiful, and that was embodied by representations of such awesome natural phenomena as stormy seas, rugged mountains, and the deepest night. He saw something ennobling in the moment of confrontation with the overwhelming and frightening, as if the challenge it posed ultimately served to strengthen the self.
iv

In

Critique of Judgment (1790) Immanuel Kant also focused on the limits of reason, but shifted attention away from the external sources of the sublime experience in order to address the consequences and its origins within the human mind. For Kant, the sublime was a way of talking about what happens when the subject is faced with something it doesnt have the capacity to understand or control. It may be terrifying, or it may just be so complex that an inability to form a clear conception of it in the mind leads to a profound sense of the difference between the experience and the thought. As a result, Kant argued, the self is made aware of indeterminacy, ambiguity, and the limits of reason, thereby coming to understand more clearly the true nature and limited extent of its powers.
v

For Kant the unknown, or noumenon, was in principle inaccessible to

experience, and therefore must be considered a limiting concept beyond which one cannot, or should not travel. vi

Other nineteenth century thinkers, however, had more positive visions of the realm into which the sublime propelled consciousness. Friedrich Schiller explored the emancipating effects of being brought to the threshold where reason falters, and in On the Sublime (1801) claimed that while the beautiful is valuable only with reference to the human being, the sublime, on the other hand, is the way the ecstatic daemon within man reveals itself.vii Friedrich Hegel, in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1827), also contested Kants essentially negative interpretation , declaring that sublimity was how the divine manifested itself in the natural world. It involved not so much a voiding of the

power of reason but a moment of fusion with the Absolute wherein the beautiful was fulfilled.viii Arthur Schopenhauer, in The World as Will and Representation (1819), explored the fearfully abysmal fissure lying at the heart of being, but envisaged a consciousness capable in certain situations of observing itself in the very act of confronting the inner abyss and so attaining a dark grandeur.ix In Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-1885) Friedrich Nietzsche mocked the solemnity of the socalled sublime one, who like Friedrich, perhaps, he believed brooded too long in the shade. As he wrote in The Gay Science (1882/1887), it was necessary to leave the safety of dry land, and heading out into the unknown ocean, experience the horizon of the infinite.x Nietzsche recognized that, as Jill Marsden put s it, [s]ince that which eludes the form of being cannot be known, that is, it cannot be re-cognized as the same, philosophical consciousness can at best speculate about the unknown form the perspective of terra firma, commuting it to the status of an unknown object and thus maintaining the familiar relation to a subjective representation to what is objectively represented as if the mirror were eternally reflecting the shore. xi Nietzsche celebrated those willing to embrace the flux and indeterminacy brought about by the loss of the traditional and secure sense of selfhood.
xii

For him, the truly sublime experience meant

abandoning the securities offered by orthodox codes and creeds, and in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) cast the truly sublime individual as the one who can reject the safe dream of Apollonian rationality, where all is light and sanity, in order to dive into the limitless ocean and embrace Dionysian intoxication the frenzy of the God of wine and madness.xiii. This, as the dissident surrealist Georges Bataille would later declare, was a vision of the self forced to remain in intolerable nonknowledge, which has no other way out than ecstasy.xiv

2. In fact, as Jacques Rancire has argued, modern culture as a whole can be seen as marked by a fatal bifurcation into Nietzsches two rival plots of consciousness: the Apollonian, which weaves its way through its own opacity and the resistance of the materials, in order to become the smile of the statue or the light of the canvas, and the Dionysian, which is hatched by the unconscious and unleashes a pathos that disrupts the forms of doxa, and makes art the inscription of a power that is chaos, radical alterity..the unthinkable in thought.xv These contrasting impulses drive the modern

selfs relationship to the world: one aims to consolidate the self, or what Freud would call the Ego, and thus to reinforce the various kinds of boundaries that separate self from world, while the other, traversed, so Freud would argue, by the pulse of unconscious desires, works to dismantle the Ego and to erase boundaries. The sublime experience therefore depends on positing an idea of the self that is involved in dynamic transformations - a self that is fundamentally mutable, a subject-in-process or on-trial, as Julia Kristeva terms itxvi. The sublime defines the moment when thought comes to an end and we encounter the other. On this liminal border-line we experience the limits of what can be cognized, and at the same time we make contact with another kind of seeing, another kind of knowing, another kind of feeling. As a consequence, discourses on the sublime must pose more questions in relation to the unknown and ineffable than they answer. What, for example, is happening psychologically within the force-field of the sublime experience when formal and objectively ordered social time is destabilized by some unstructured, informal and subjective moment of heightened vision during which the self is radically altered by something that presses on it from beyond normative reality, challenging the assumptions upon which such a reality is based? And what might the social and political consequences of this experience be? If it this moment is enacted within the dialectics set up between nature on the one side and culture on the other, with the sublime signifying the unconstrained and unconditional power of nature within the unknown (desire, void, loss of self), then to what extent is succumbing to its allure also a way of accepting domination by, and subjection to, nature? Or, putting it another way, to what extent is the sublime ultimately tied to the death drive? These questions are especially pressing because in a very real sense modernity is continuously and disturbingly sublime, causing what Walter Benjamin, writing in the 1930s, termed a disorienting psychic condition of traumatic shock, which leads to hugely destabilizing consequences, not only for the individual but also for society.xvii Since Benjamins time, the spatio-temporal compressions and distortions produced by globalized communication technologies have thrown the postmodern subject yet more deeply into a sublime abyss. As Paul Virilio argues, for example, the effect of the acceleration in speed that is central to modern experience means we live today within a vertiginously confusing dromoscope where inanimate objects appear as if they were animated by a violent movement. xviii In this situation, the self, so Sherry Turkle

declares, is perhaps better understood not as so much as an I but as a we: Living with flux may no longer be temporary, she notes, because technology is bringing postmodernism down to earth itself; the story of technology refuses modernist resolutions and requires an openness to multiple viewpoints. xix It is not surprising, then, that in contemporary art and theory the sublime has become a major preoccupation. But while it has returned as a concept with contemporary significance it is now usually shorn of most of its heady metaphysical connotations and presented instead as a way of theorizing the deconstruction of the intelligibile, of the knowledge and meanings that once lay safely at the heart of the discursive fields of epistemology, ontology and semantics. The exploration of the non-masterable rather than the masterable now preoccupies us, meaning that we must accommodate discreteness, spacings, the blank and the interval, liminality, non-knowledge and nonknowing - everything that borders or interrupts intelligibility and sense. The sublime is a feeling, and yet, more than a feeling in the banal sense, it is the emotion of the subject at the limit, writes Jean-Luc Nancy: The subject of the sublime, if there is one, is a subject who is moved. In the thought of the sublime, it is a question of the emotion of the subject, of that emotion which neither the philosophy of subjectivity and beauty nor the aesthetics of fiction and desire is capable of thinking through, for they think necessarily and solely within the horizon of the enjoyment of the subject (and of the subject if enjoyment). xx For Jean-Franois Lyotard, meanwhile, drawing on psychoanalysis and phenomenology, the sublime addresses the fundamental facts of unknowability and ineffability xxi. Indeterminacy, which lies inscribed at the centre of the discourse of the sublime, thus also sites it at the very heart of modernity and postmodernity. The unpresentable is the ultimate problem confronting art, and formlessness or the absence of form is, writes Lyotard, a possible index to the unpresentable.xxii The territory of the sublime experience is one traversed by the unruly currents of unconscious desires and the lure of half-buried memories. As Sigmund Freud had argued, in order to find psychic stability the normal Ego necessarily bases itself on the suppression of undesirable urges and traumatic memories which are transformed into purer and more morally and socially acceptable forms. But this Ego continuously encounters destabilizing and only partially repressed psychological forces. Lyotard describes what he calls the figural, which i n the discursive realm of the sign erupts from the unconscious and generates feelings of the

uncanny, characterized by Freud as an unsettling ambivalence or fear originating in what is known of old and long familiar things but which cannot be fully brought to consciousness.xxiii The energy that pulses in subterranean ways through representationsis fundamentally at odds with the clear and comprehensible realm of signs. Invisible, to different degrees, the different levels or types of figure (figure-image, figure-forme, figurematrice) constitute a kind of haunting, writes Geoffrey Bennington of Lyotards concept, a figuring that is even a dis-figuring.xxiv The most powerfully uncanny pulse to be carried from deep within the unconscious brings with it what Freud called the oceanic feeling or a desire for the intimate union of the Ego and the surrounding world, experienced as an absolute certitude of satisfaction and security, but also as loss of self in favour of that which surrounds and contains us, as Kristeva puts it.xxv For Freud this feeling had played a negative role - he took the term oceanic feeling from Romain Rolland, who used it in an affirmative way to evoke a sense of limitlessness, boundary-free being - but for Freud as a manifestation of infantile narcissism the oceanic feeling, or what Freud came to call the Nirvana principle or complexxxvi, was inherently regressive and tied to the death drive, which has undergone a modification in living organisms through which it has become the pleasure principle.xxvii For as the goal of the Ego was to bring about a stable and coherent sense of selfhood by successfully sublimating the death instinct into the life instinct, any drives threatening this autonomy were deemed by Freud to be pathological. But in post-Freudian theory informed by feminism in particular, however, the primordial experience of the oceanic, has more recently undergone reassessment. For Kristeva, for example, it implies an expanded sense of self, one that is open to the sensation of connectedness between ourselves and other beings. The oceanic feeling is interpreted as a distant memory of the newborn who has not yet established boundaries between his Ego and the mothers body. Like the sublime experience, it gives access to an experience of the jubilant osmosis of the subject in the communal flesh of a not-yet self engulfed in a not-yet world, and so serves as the basis for the powerful affects at the heart of the religious experience.xxviii From a very different perspective, Carl Jung had also approached the connection between the sublime experience and the de-centering of the self that is implied by the

oceanic feeling. Via his study of mystical and alchemical texts, Jung explored the connotations of sublimity in its earlier senses as something inextricably bound up with metaphysics and mysticism. For Jung, the self has access to transpersonal and collective levels of consciousness to an objective psyche or an Anima Mundi a world soul suffused with subjectivity, and from the procedures described in proto-scientific works he found analogies to how modern psychology was coming to understand the progress of the psyche towards greater self-awareness, or as Jung termed it, individuation. xxix To some extent, recent findings in cognitive neuroscience and neurobiology have corroborated Jungs intuitions rather than Freuds concerning the meaning of the sublime experience, in so far as they suggest that for the brain a sense of limitlessness is an intrinsic, distinct and constant aspect of consciousness that can be located The left hemisphere is phsyilogically in regions of the right brain hemisphere.

characterised by an ability to deliver a sense of structure and cohesion. As the neurologist Iain McGilchrist points out, it seeks certainty, which is also related to narrowness, as though the more certain we become of something the less we see. xxx The right-hemisphere, on the other hand, makes it possible to hold several ambiguous possibilities in suspension together without prem ature closure on one outcome. McGilchrist further notes that [o]ne of the most consistent early finds in hemisphere specialisation was that whenever an image is either only fleetingly presented, or presented in a degraded form, so that only partial information is available, a righthemisphere superiority emerges. xxxi The left brain hemisphere has an affinity for what it itself has madewell-worn familiarity, certainty and finitude, while the right hemisphere has an affinity for all that is other, new, unknown, uncertain and unbounded.xxxii

3. It is no coincidence that the concept of the sublime, and the willingness of Western thinkers and artists to explore what lies on the other side of the borderline dividing reflective consciousness from ecstatic experience, coincided with the period during which Eastern ideas began to become better known in the West.xxxiii Indeed, neurological research has also made important discoveries that suggest the Oriental worldview is more inightful than Occidental concepts into how the brain actually

organizes consciousness. As McGilchrist observes: the evidence suggests.that the East Asian cultures use strategies of both [brain] hemispheres more evenly, while Western strategies are steeply skewed towards the left hemisphere. xxxiv For in Oriental thought there developed early on the idea that consciousness is something that cannot be caught within the net of any sign-system or language deployed by human minds. Instead, we are urged to open ourselves to a sense of absolute contingency, unpredictability, impermanence, emptiness and otherness. Indeed, Oriental thinking has steadfastly focused awareness on ontological lack or deficiency on how we inevitably fail to comprehend reality through thinking. Only silence can be an adequate response to ultimate reality. Thus Zen, for example, teaches that understanding is wordless and can be transmitted only from mind to mind, that truth is not a matter of empirical observation and so we must abandon faith in languages ability to reveal anything that can adequately be called the real. As the thirteenth century Japanese Zen Buddhist monk Dogen put it: To study the Way is to study oneself. To study oneself is to forget oneself. To forget oneself is to be awakened by all things. To be awakened by all things is to let body and mind of self and others fall away. Even the traces of awakening come to an end, and this traceless awakening is continued endlessly. xxxv

The fundamental insight of Oriental thought is that the human subject the I - is neither limited nor distinguished by an inviolable and bounded individuality. A sense of this impermanence especially impinges on the self through awareness of void, emptiness or blankness. Indeed, through a process of interiorisation and transformation, emptiness is understood to be inextricably connected with and also prior to fullness. Void participates in both the noumenal and the phenomenal worlds: in the noumenal dimension, Oriental accounts of the origins of the universe traditionally describe it as arising out of nothing: No-existence I call the beginning of Haven and Earth, writes Lao Tzu.xxxvi This evokes the origin of all things in the state of nonbeing. Meanwhile, at the level of the phenomenal world, everything concrete and empty is understood to be the prior condition for full. I n nature, analogues to this condition are such

phenomena as water, clouds, mists and smoke, which to a high degree manifest traits of impermanence. Thus the metaphysical dimension referring to essence and origin is linked to the physical one of phenomena. Emptiness proceeds by hollowing out fullness, just as fullness, in turn, is opened wide by the void, writes Franois Jullien. The material

dimension of objects and the immaterial one of ideas, are united through participating in nonbeing, void or emptiness: Far from forming two opposing and separate qualities or states, emptiness and fullness are structurally correlated; each exists only by virtue of the other.xxxvii As a result emptiness is quite the contrary of a no mans land, blank spot, or negative space, as it is in western thinking. Ra ther, void is the nodal point where potentiality and becoming interweave, in which deficiency and plenitude, self-sameness and otherness, meet, as Cheng writes.xxxviii This implies a system of thought that fundamentally challenges the implicit bias of Western dualistic thinking. This traditional worldview can be characterized by a recursive orientation that believes in a radically transcendent personal deity who creates and controls the natural world and human beings. The Eastern worldview, in contrast, is dominated by belief in an immanent and impersonal principle of which the natural world and human beings are understood to be intimate aspects. The sociologist Colin Campbell characterizes these two types as materialistic dualism (West) and metaphysical monism (East).xxxix As Thomas P. Kasulis puts it, these are two recursive orientations that, in relation to identity, prioritize intimacy (East) and integrity (West)xl, or, as the psychologist Richard E. Nisbett terms it, in addressing the context of social cognition, a tendency to think in terms of holism (East) and analysis (West)xli. It should be stressed that these orientations are not intended to suggest rigid bifurcation, or the existence of essences, but rather the presence of different cultural patterns that play more or less dominant roles within cultures. Thus materialistic dualism in the West leads to a bias that means the experience of a suddenly de-centered self and the loss of agency that is addressed by the concept of sublime is seen as a quasi-terroristic rupture with the structured coordinates of selfhood that is simultaneously both emancipating and threatening to a sense of autonomy. In contrast, in the Oriental paradigm of metaphysical monism, this same de-centering experience signifies both the loss of agency but also the completion of the self within the hear and now a self now established within an expanded field, activated and engendered in the very space where the impossibility of language and representation is signaled, and where selfmastery and access to a coherent sense of reality collapses. To be empty of a fixed identity allows one to enter fully into the shifting, poignant, beautiful and tragic contingencies of the world, writes the former Tibetan Buddhist monk, Stephen Batchelor. It makes possible an acute awareness of life as a crea tive process, in which each

person is inextricably involved. Yet despite the subjective intensity of such a vision, when attention is turned onto the subject itself, no isolated observer is to be found. xlii Not surprisingly, the concept of radical impermanence and void that lies at the heart of metaphysical monism has considerable importance within the language of East Asian art. As the Korean art historian and curator Lee Joon writes concerning void: From the perspective of Western art, which explicates everything based on forms, the void of Asian painting may appear, to certain extents, to suggest a lack of forms or a space of incompletion. As a matter of fact, it is difficult to find a term corresponding to the concept in the Western artistic lexicon. Empty space, a negative element, implies absence of physical representation or is synonymous with blank space. In the theory of East Asian painting, however, void exists as a complete, legitimate part of a work, and, in a more active sense, is an unpainted painting. In that sense, void does not mean the renunciation of the use of space but rather the encouragement of space and is absence-cum-presence. xliii Void, in fact, constitutes a central aspect of an expanded system of representation, one in which emptiness is considered to be a privileged sign. Indeed, as Cheng emphasises, it is precisely through void that the other units within the system of painting are defined as signs. Thus, as Jullien puts it, the emptiness of clouds and mists is not only t he indistinct beyond into which forms vanish at the horizon as it would be within the conventions of Western landscape painting. On the contrary, in East Asian art it also permeates the interiority of forms, opens then, aerates them, liberates them, and makes them evasive.xliv Traditionally, the phenomenal aspects of the world depicted in East Asian art and poetry were simply derived from the Chinese characters for mountains-waters (shan-shui), which is usually translated into English as landscape In fact, shan-shui implies a wholly different purpose for the depiction of trees, mountains, rivers, clouds, and so on. As Jullien writes: In European semantics, landscape is a term of unity and deploys the world in relation to a perceiving function that projects its perspective outward. Mountains -waters does not merely express the relationship in full but also dissolves any point of view directed at that relationship. It is no longer the initiative of a subject that promoted the landscape, carving up a horizon from its own position; any consciousness finds that it is implicated from the start in the great play of opposition-complementarity that encompasses it. Rather than a landscape constituted as an object of perception, the term mountains waters expresses immersion established from the start in what constitutes the interactive animation of the components of the world. xlv

Norman Bryson, in an essay that links Western scopic regimes to East Asian ideas grounded in radical impermanence, brings the theorizing of Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Lacan - chosen as representative of modern western ideas on how the self is constituted through vision - into confrontation with those of the Japanese philosopher Keiji Nishitani, who saw Western phenomenology through the lens of Buddhism and so could suggest an entirely different interpretation of what is at stake. Bryson writes: Nishitani engages with Sartre as precursor, and both regard the centering of the universe around the sovereign subject as illusion. In the field of sunyata [void or blankness] the centralised subject falls apart; its boundary dissolves, together with the consoling boundary of the object. Nihility and blankness undo the subjects centering of the world upon itself; and, radically decentered, the subject comes to know itself in noncentred terms, as inhabiting and inhabited by a constructive emptiness. Such decentering is a central theme in Lacan and in Nishtitani; and yet their approaches are quite different. xlvi Bryson makes an enlightening comparison between Chinese flung ink painting, read from within its own conceptual framework, and Hans Holbeins The Ambassadors (1533), with its celebrated anamorphic representation of a skull, as it was seen from a Lacanian perspective. In Lacan, the skull appears in and as the protest of the Imaginary against its own decentering, as the menace of death, writes Bryson. The flung ink figures, on the other hand, represent instead the subjects acceptance of decentering. As a result, Bryson concludes, while the skull represents the subjects fear of dissolution, the flung ink embodies instead the subjects renunciation of a central subject position, on a field of radical emptiness where the last remains of the cogito are rendered null and void, literally cast out on empty air.xlvii By seeking to identify with a sense of emptiness East Asian thought intends to put the self in harmony with the world so it can become the worlds mirror. The void roots an individual life in the phenomenal world of time and space while linking it to origins in the numinous - the unknown, the eternal, nature and the infinite. This movement is envisaged as fundamentally non-transgressive, as it does not aim to transcend, negate, overturn or repudiate forms, structures and difference, but rather to integrate the self into harmony with the unbounded and impermanent, and with the sameness of nonbeing. In this sense, East Asian concepts signify the condition of dynamic suspension between opposites. In contrast to a binary mode of thinking that proceeds in terms of discrimination between opposites, East Asian thought suggest a kind of middle way based on integration.

4. A de-centered view of the self and its impact on the making of art is especially important to the Korean artist Lee Ufan: Rather than my work defining me or the other way round, something different grows in the mutual interaction and response and suddenly comes into existence. This is the context of my work and my position within it. When Lee encounters a canvas with brushes and painting, a work of art comes into existence. Therefore, strictly speaking, it is wrong to say that Lee has painted a canvas with paint and brushes. This would be a Western-European mistranslation xlviii By so doing, Lee believes he can deploy his art as a situation within which it is possible to experience what he calls a return to nature.xlix But as Jullien cautions, we should be wary of attributing to it the kinds of association familiar in the West. Indeed, the divergence in meaning serves to highlight the fundamental contrast between materialistic dualism and metaphysical monisms responses to otherness and the unknown. Jullien writes: the Chinese did not conceive of nature as a distinct notion , one that confers an objective status on any occurrence lying outside our will, but which.is not random.l Instead, nature was considered to signify many things that on a noumenal plain refer to processes of regulation within the cosmos. Thus, when Lee talks of his desire to be reunited with nature he is not referring to some monolithic entity that stands outside him, but rather to the movement closer into intimate harmony with breath-resonance and with the contingent processes of becoming. But, however, as as Jullien points out, a consequence of the Western perspective a recursive pattern of thought occurred towards the problem of the unknown: Europeans were able to conceive of nature as a single term because they contrasted it to technology.while at the same time conceiving it, since Aristotle, on the model of technology.In thus setting nature homologically in opposition to a perceiving -effective subjects initiative, Europeans made it the object of both expertise and mastery. They drew a benefit from that convenient (perhaps too convenient division): nature is in principle knowable, hence can be dominated, whereas everything unfathomable was condensed and blocked economically in the figure of God. li I like artworks that drift on feelings of infinity, Lee declares.lii But by this he does not mean to imply some transcendent experience. Rather, he is referring to the extent to which an artwork can convey a sense of immersion in nature through being a channel for breath-resonance the chi - that pulses through everything, and which void serves

to channel. For this reason Lee developed what he calls an aesthetics of encounter: Works that have been formed by their interactions with the surrounding world allow me to feel the inexhaustible breath of infinity, Lee writes.
liii

Infinity is what materializes

when I depart from the self and interact with that which is other than myself. .I want to perceive the world from a space created by that relationship.liv

NOTES

Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, trans. John Goodman, (University Park: Penn State Press, 2005), p.142-143 ii Francois Jullien, The Great Image has no Form, or, On the nonobject through Painting (Chicago : University of
i

Chicago Press, 2009) xvi iii Philip Lacoue-Labarthe, Sublime Truth (Part 1), Cultural Critique (Spring 1991) 26; reprinted in Jean-Franois Courtine, ed., Of the Sublime: Presence in Question (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993). iv Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) Part II, Sections III; ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) 534. v Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790); trans. J.J. Meredith (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1973) 106. vi Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781 and 1787), translated by Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1933), 255/311 vii Friedrich Schiller, On the Sublime (1801); trans. Julius Elias (New York: Ungar, 1966) viii G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (c. 181826; transcripts by one of his students, Heinrich Gustav Hotho, published posthumously in 1835 and 1842); trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975) ix Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (1819) vol. III; trans. Jill Berman (London: Everyman, 1995). x Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882/1887), trans. Walter Kauffman (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), Aphorism 124 xi Jill Marsden, After Nietzsche: Notes Towards a Philosophy of Ecstasy (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 2-3 viii Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Spake Zarathustra (1882-1885), trans. Thomas Common, (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1997),Part II, 35, p.114-16. xiii Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872); trans. Shaun Whiteside (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994) xiv Georges Bataille, Inner Experience (1954); trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 12 xv Jacques Rancire, The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes, in Heart of Darkness, ex. cat. (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2007), 43 xvi Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans, Alice Jardine, (Columbia University Press, 1984) Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936); in Illuminations , ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 21751 xviii Paul Virilio, , Negative Horizon, trans. Michael Degener (London and New York: Continuum,2005), p.105 xix Sherry Turkle, Who am We? in Reading Digital Culture, David Trend, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2001), 245 and 249 xx Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sublime Offering, in Jean-Francois Courtine, ed, Of the Sublime Presence in Question, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett, (Albany: Statue University of New York Press, 1993), 44 xxi Jean-Franois Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, trans. by Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon, Introduction by John Mowitt, (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime, trans. Lisa Liebmann, Artforum, April 1982, pp 64-9; The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991) xxii Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge , trans. by Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984),78 xxiii Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (1930); trans David McLintock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002) Chapter 4. xxiv Geoffrey Bennington, Go Figure, Parrhesia, No. 12, 2011, 37
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Julia Kristeva, A Freudian Approach: The Pre-Religious Need to Believe, 2010, http://www.kristeva.fr/believe.html. xxvi Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), in The Standard Edition, Vol. XXI, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press. 1961), 65 xxvii Sigmund Freud, The Economic Problem of Masochism (1924), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. XIX (1923 25), trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press,1961), p160 xxviii Kristeva, A Freudian Approach: The Pre-Religious Need to Believe, 3 xxix See for example: Carl Jung, Jung on Alchemy, ed. Nathan Schwartz-Salant (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). xxx Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the making of the Western World, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 83 xxx ibid., 82 xxxi ibiid.,82
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For example, Arthur Schopenhauers thought was deeply influenced by Buddhism, which he viewed however as a pessimistic religion. See J.J.Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment: the Encounter between Asian and Western Thought (London: Routledge, 1997)
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McGilchrist, op.cit., 458 Quoted by Stephen Batchelor, Verses from the Center: A Buddhist Vision of the Sublime, (New York: River Head Books, 2000),30 xxxvi Franois Cheng, Empty and Full: the Language of Chinese Painting, trans Michael H. Kohn, (Boston and London; Shambala, 1994) xxxvii Jullien, op. cit., 84 xxxviii Cheng, op.cit. 13 . xxxix Colin Campbell, The Easternization of the West: A Thematic Account of Cultural Change in the Modern Era , (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2008) xl Thomas P. Kasulis Intimacy or Integrity: Philosophy and Cultural Difference(Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 2002) xli Richard E. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners think differentlyand why (New York: Free Press, 2003) xlii Batchelor, op. cit. p44-45 xliii Lee Joon, Void: Mapping the Invisible in Korean Art ,Void in Korean Art , ex. cat. (Seoul: Leeum Samsung Museum, 2008), unpaginated. xliv Jullien, op.cit. 78 xlv ibid. 122 xlvi Norman Bryson, The Gaze in the Expanded Field in Hal Foster, (ed.), Vision and Visuality, (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), 106. See also: Bryson, Gaze and Glance, Chapter 5 of Vision and Painting (1983) xlvii Lee Ufan, Selected Writings by Lee Ufan, 1970-96, edited by Jean Fisher, (London: Lisson Gallery, 1996), 106 xlviii ibid. 120 xlix ibid. 23 l Jullien, op. cit., 129 li ibid. lii, Lee Ufan, op.cit., 103 liii ibid. liv ibid. 104
xxxiv xxxv