The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies the solace of good forms . . . that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them, but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable.142
This sense of the “unseen” is central to Bill Viola’s work. Its appeal is, I want to call it, a poetics of hope in the as-yet-unsatisfied desire for union and fellowship with the (divine) other, such that the divine—God—is present in being hidden. We might also call it “desire,” desire for that which is beyond experience, for the transcendent reality—the pleasurable excess—that can never be attained but only morally intuited—a desire for the Other. It is a God whose presence is felt—revealed—indirectly; and its givenness or grace rests upon our disinterestedness (in the Kantian sense of disinterest). It involves a phenomenology of hope, such that we remain receptively open to the overwhelming promise of the “appearance,” or in the Christian understanding, “reappearance” of God.
95. For a good, succinct historical overview of the concept of the Sublime, see Shaw, Sublime.
96. Žižek, Sublime Object, 229.
97. Crowther, Kantian Sublime, 171.
98. Kant, Critique of Judgement, in Davies and Turner, Silence and the Word, 106.
99. Lyotard, “Presenting the Unpresentable,” 65.
100. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, in Costelloe, The Sublime, 48.
101. Kavanaugh and Rodrigues, Complete Works, 246–47.
102. Turner, Darkness of God, 264–65.
103. Addison, Collected Works, III, 397–98.
104. Burke, Philosophical Inquiry, 33.
105. Kavanaugh and Rodrigues, Complete Works, 206.
106. Burke, Philosophical Inquiry, 57.
107. In this context see also Ian Greig’s essay “Quantum Romanticism” in Hoffman and Whyte, Beyond the Finite, 106–127.
108. Quoted in Ward, Theology and Contemporary Critical Theory, 126.
109. Otto, Idea of the Holy, 1–3.
110. Burke, Philosophical Inquiry, 59.
111. Kavanaugh and Rodrigues, Complete Works, 126.
112. Ibid., 158.
113. Costelloe, Sublime, 115.
114. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, in Costelloe, Sublime, 117.
115. Kant, Critique of Judgement, §27.
116. Crowther, Kantian Sublime, 17.
117. Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics, 214.
118. Interview, August 19, 2013.
119. Guerlac, Thinking in Time, 28.
120. Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics, 9–10.
121. Ibid., 38.
122. Viola, Reasons for Knocking, 278.
123. See Paul Douglass, “Deleuze’s Bergson,” in Burwick and Douglass, Crisis in Modernism, 368–88.
124. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 1–2, my emphasis.
125. Deleuze, Bergsonism, 51.
126. Ibid., 59
127. Ibid., 65, my emphasis.
128. Bergson, Essai, 132.
129. Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics, 65, my emphasis.
130. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language.
131. Kristeva, Kristeva Reader, 97–132.
132. Walsh, Bill Viola, 212.
133. Viola in Townsend, Art of Bill Viola, 75.
134. Guerlac, Thinking in Time, 2.
135. Lyotard, “Presenting the Unpresentable,” 64–69.
136. Ibid., 68.
137. Johnson, “The Postmodern Sublime,” in Costelloe, The Sublime, 118–131, 120.
138. Ibid.
139. Ibid., 122.
140. Franke, On What Cannot Be Said, 9.
141. Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained, 9–10.
142. Quoted in Ward, Theology and Contemporary Critical Theory, 137–38.
4 The Unseen Passions and the Ethics of Sublimity
The responsibility for the other can not have begun in my commitment, in my decision . . . The responsibility for the other is the locus in which is situated the null-site of subjectivity . . . All my inwardness is invested in the form of a despite-me, for-another. Despite-me, for-another is signification par excellence.
—Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence
Within the theoretical framework of apophatic theology and the philosophical sublime, I want now to return in a more concrete way to Bill Viola’s art and specifically to a much more recent series of installations collectively titled The Passions, a project organized and first exhibited at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, which the artist began in 2000 as a participating scholar in a year-long study sponsored by the Getty Research Institute. The Getty’s focus topic that year was how to represent, in word and image, the power and complexity of human emotion. Viola’s project takes the form of more than twenty video pieces variously connected by the theme of extreme emotion, aimed at conveying fundamental but inarticulate human states of being: love, hope, sorrow, joy, desire. Here we do well to recall Henri Bergson on the “terrorism” of the “brutal word”—language “which stores up what is stable, common, and therefore impersonal in human impressions.” What suffers most at the hands of “the brutal word” are emotions, passions. Bergson in the passage quoted below is speaking of the fires of love, a vivid analogy very much at the core of St. John’s poetry (and Viola’s iconography) in which the 16th-century mystic referred to the real “heating and enkindling” force of “fire” that “transforms the wood into itself and makes it as beautiful as it is itself;” this, the saint goes on, is like the “divine, loving fire of contemplation. Before transforming the soul, it purges it of all contrary qualities . . . For love is like a fire that always rises upward as though longing to be engulfed in its center.”143 Here, now, is Bergson:
A violent love, a deep melancholy invades our soul, provoking a thousand diverse elements that melt together, interpenetrate, without definite contours, without the least tendency to separate themselves one from another. Their originality is at this cost. A moment ago each one of them borrowed an indefinable coloration from the milieu where it was placed. Now it is bleached out and ready to receive a name . . . Feeling is a living being, which develops, and is therefore always changing . . . when we separate these moments out, unfurling time into space, the feeling loses its animation and its color. Then we are left with only the shadow of ourselves.144