Abstract

The dissertation seeks to gain a sound understanding of the thought of Jean-Francois Lyotard through a reexamination of Immanuel Kant's critical undertaking, particularly its aesthetic elements, and that a new and enlightened insight into Kant can be attained by examining the study of Kant that Lyotard has mounted. ;Reflective judgment in the Critique of Judgment has an architectonic role in Kant's thought, namely, to unify and integrate the human faculties. Judgments of the sublime are of particular interest because they are a mixture of pleasure and displeasure owing to an irreconcilable conflict between imagination and reason. Reason calls for an image of the absolutely great in a single moment. Lyotard calls this aesthetic temporality. ;Lyotard links the conflict of the sublime to his notion of the differend. The differend and reflective judgment both involve making judgments without preestablished rules and both are characterized by an aesthetic feeling. In conjunction with the differend, Lyotard's concept of the phrase entails issues of orientation, jurisdiction and legitimation much as reflective judgment does. The differend points to the incommensurablilties of thinking, especially the conflict between reason and aesthetics. The differend is a critical structure, and in this sense can be viewed as Kantian in its inspiration, because it speaks to the limits of thinking itself. ;A sublime subjectivity follows from the recasting of time from that of ordinary experience into that of aesthetic temporality. Because reflective judgments are disinterested, they must also be public and communicable to others. They also require the maturity of the subject. While Kant proposes an enlightened, mature and social subject, Lyotard speaks of a subject in infancy. The childhood of the subject reflects its unpreparedness for the sublime. In the aesthetic moment, the mind is in its childhood: without language or reason, its mental powers are checked. ;Lyotard's notion of the immaterial ties together Kant's position that the sublime can be only represented negatively with the task of presenting that there is an unpresentable, which Lyotard assigns to postmodernity. The immaterial is not the data of cognitive intuition but rather the timbre and nuance that strike the subject before the mind sets to work cognizing. The immaterial is the kind of originary "presentation" or donation that Lyotard had argued Kant could not recognize and that understanding eclipses. The immaterial announces that an event happens, an event that can never, strictly speaking, be appropriated by any subject, in any time