guerlac longinus and the subject of the sublime

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Longinus and the Subject of the SublimeAuthor(s): Suzanne GuerlacSource: New Literary History, Vol. 16, No. 2, The Sublime and the Beautiful:Reconsiderations, (Winter, 1985), pp. 275-289Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/468747Accessed: 10/04/2008 03:38

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Longinus and the Subject of the Sublime

Suzanne Guerlac

O N THE SUBLIME has traditionally been read as a manual of ele- vated style and relegated to the domain of the "merely" rhetorical. The rhetorical sublime has in turn been linked with

a notion of affective criticism1 in which analysis of style and expression centers upon questions of subjective feeling and emotive force. Paradoxically, it is this emphasis on force of feeling which obscures a more radical force at work in the Longinian sublime, one which threatens the very notion of the subjective, or the unified self-identity of the subject. If we read On the Sublime in terms of a "rhetoric" of enunciation, instead of expression, force is implicitly posed in relation to desire, and the subject of feeling, or the "aesthetic" subject, is disrupted, as well as the subject of certainty or the theoretical subject.

Longinus describes the operation of sublimity as a kind of im-

printing process which includes moments of expropriation and of identification. The sublime enunciation appears to be "wrung from the orator," to overwhelm the speaker or speak through him. Ho- mer's description of the War God in battle is cited by Longinus to

depict Homer himself, "swept away by the whirlwind" of the battle he describes-"'fringed are his lips with the foam-froth.' "2 The

speaker vanishes into his text. The listener, on the other hand, un-

dergoes a kind of traumatic inscription in receiving the "thunderbolt" and "lightning" of the sublime communication whose impact will "outlast the moment of utterance"-"the memory of it is ... indelible"

(p. 139). Demosthenes, we read, "with his violence, yes, and his speed, his force, his terrific power of rhetoric, burns, as it were, and scatters

everything before him" (p. 165). The effect of the sublime, Longinus says quite explicitly, is "not to persuade the audience but rather to

transport them out of themselves" (p. 125). But this "transport" occurs in two phases, first a sense of being "scattered," but then of being "uplifted with a sense of proud possession ... filled with joyful pride, as if we had ourselves produced the very thing we heard" (p. 139). The transport of the sublime, therefore, includes a slippage among the positions of enunciation, as the destinateur gets "transported" into the message and the destinataire achieves a fictive identification with the speaker.3 This is not so different from what could be said to take

place in the much milder, everyday occurrence of quoting. Indeed,

NEW LITERARY HISTORY

the structure of citation appears to be embedded in the very operation of sublimity, while the sublime itself might be characterized in terms of an inevitability of repetition or citation, a pre-eminent wor- thiness of being cited. To achieve sublimity, we read, is to be "clothed ... with immortal fame" (p. 125). One attains this "immortal" fame not just as author of an utterance or text, but as an ongoing force of enunciation maintained through the act of citation, which, as Antoine

Compagnon has suggested, repeats not simply the enonce but the act of enunciation itself.4 It is this force of enunciation, and not simply the message spoken, which is "indelibly" inscribed in the memory of the listener through the force of the sublime communication.

If hypsous is portrayed as an ecstatic moment, a transport which dislocates the subject, the text On the Sublime disrupts a number of fundamental category oppositions, such as form/content, true/false, and means/ends, which structure what Heidegger would call the "representational thinking" of the stable subject of knowledge. The Lon-

ginian thinking which presents the sublime as a kind of "fourth di- mension of meaning," to borrow Deleuze's phrase,5 occurs at a his- torical moment in which "logos" has not yet been stabilized as that

logic of the enonce upon which much of the subsequent development of philosophy as metaphysics depends.6 The thinking of Longinus is an eclectic philosophy of rhetoric understood as a "logic" of enunciation. Although we recognize a number of borrowings from Plato (especially from the Ion and the Phaedrus) and from Aristotle, elements retained from pre-Socratic thinking, such as Stoic concep- tions of nature and representation, as well as elements of Stoic logic, are more difficult to perceive.7 For modern readers, what is more, an explicit claim to systematic exposition tends to veil the philosophical eclecticism of the text. Longinus criticizes the work of a prede- cessor, Cecilius, for not having been systematic enough, clearly stating his own requirements for a systematic treatise. First, one must define one's subject, and second, one must show the readers "how and by what means ... we may reach the goal ourselves." It is at this point that Longinus slips in a preliminary question, namely, "whether there is an art of sublimity" at all? He continues: "For some think those are wholly at fault who try to bring such matters under systematic rules. Genius, it is said, is born and does not come of teaching, and the only art for producing it is nature" (p. 127). But he asks this question really only in passing, and, having defined sublimity as an "irresistible power of mastery" achieved through a "consummate excellence ... of language," Longinus goes on to propose "five genuine sources of the sublime" (p. 141). These, however, for the most part

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LONGINUS AND THE SUBJECT OF THE SUBLIME

declare tautologically that sublimity comes from sublimity. First of all, each of the five sources is said to presuppose "a natural faculty of

expression." But this phrase corresponds with the definition of the sublime as an excellence of language and is elsewhere rendered

through the very term hypsous which designates the transport of the sublime. Longinus continues with two more sources which are im-

mediately acknowledged to derive from natural genius, to be "mostly congenital." The next two points, "proper construction of figures" and "nobility of phrase" (which includes unity of composition), are the only sources said to derive even "partly from art." As we shall see further on, however, a complicated reciprocity between means and ends undermines the systematic value of these points. Lastly, a source of sublimity said to "include all the others" again simply describes

sublimity itself or its effect, a "general effect of dignity or elevation." The means of achieving sublimity thus roughly correspond with the end, sublimity itself, which is only identifiable, or can only be deter- mined, through its effects. What we learn from the "five genuine sources" of the sublime is less "how to reach the goal ourselves" than that the Longinian sublime appears to be simultaneously end and means toward itself.

The tautological character of the development of these five points is consistent with the movement of hypsous itself, in which the trans-

port which marks sublimity as its identifying effect is also described as the moment of the "impregnation" of sublimity through precisely the impression the force of the sublime makes upon the destinataire, its inscription in his memory. In addition, however, as we shall see, the tautological "strategy" or movement of the text succeeds in sus-

pending the opposition between nature and art. This opposition, of course, had already been suspended rhetorically in the statement cited: "Genius, it is said, is born and does not come of teaching, and the only art for producing it is nature." Now Longinus does

pause over this complication, announcing that "it is not the way of Nature to work at random and wholly without system" (p. 127). Na- ture, therefore, includes a certain "art." Indeed, this conception of nature appears to be derived from a notion of genius which empha- sizes art as much as nature. Genius, we are told, "needs the curb"- that is, method or art-"as often as the spur"-which is to say, the free gift of nature. Thus, if earlier an art of the sublime was put into

question through the notion of genius, here genius functions as a term which can signify nature or art. Indeed, it implies precisely a mixture of the two, as the following passage suggests: "Demosthenes declares that the greatest of all blessings is good fortune, and that

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next comes good judgement.... We may apply this to literature and say that Nature fills the place of good fortune, Art that of good judgement" (p. 127). Genius now parallels nature, understood as in- clusive of art. The opposition between those two terms has been dis- mantled, yielding a dual origin of the sublime which now performs precisely a mediating function between the terms of the initial opposition. Opposition becomes reciprocity, and it is indeed the reci-

procity between nature and art which structures the "systematic" enumeration of the five sources of the sublime because, as we shall see further on, the notion of system implied here is itself a function of this reciprocity. We begin to see how ironic it is that the Longinian sublime has been trivialized with reference to a distinction between a "natural sublime" and a "rhetorical sublime" when one of the most crucial features of the Longinian sublime (and of this text) is the neutralization of the opposition between nature and art and the en- actment (or elaboration) of their reciprocity. This reciprocity is ela- borated through the very logic of the text of Longinus (which cor-

responds with the logic of the event of sublimity)-namely, that principle of Stoic logic which concerns the reversal of means and ends.

Nowhere is the movement of reciprocity between means and ends more explicitly at work than in the discussion of the use of figures and of nobility of phrase, the two sources of the sublime conceded earlier to derive "partly from art." "Metaphors make for sublimity," we are told (p. 215). On the other hand, "A figure is always most effective when it conceals the very fact of its being a figure" (p. 185). And how is this fact concealed? Precisely through the effect of sub-

limity itself, which provides "a wonderfully helpful antidote against the suspicion that accompanies the use of figures" (p. 185). Thus the mechanism of the means toward the achievement of the end is en- abled through the end itself. Art achieves its force through a dissimulation of its artifice, that is to say, by appearing as nature: "For art is ony perfect when it looks like nature" (p. 193).

The effectiveness of the sublime thus depends upon an appearance of art without art, or upon a reciprocity between art and nature. In this discussion of figurative language, however, art no longer means what it did in the opening pages of the treatise, where it stood for system or method, represented by the curb as opposed to the spur. Now it signifies the production, by rhetorical means, of "that seductive effect upon the audience" which "all orators and historians make their supreme object." Whereas earlier in the text sincerity was associated with genius as natural gift and sublimity was defined in terms of a force of conviction, here sincerity is posed as a contrived effect. Art as seduction now implies the successful production of an impres-

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sion or effect of sincerity through a strategic concealment of figures as devices of rhetorical manipulation. Thus, considered as a function of nature, the sublime implies nobility and sincerity. Considered as a function of art, it implies the reverse. Since the sublime is a function of both nature and art, it carries a force of sincerity and of duplicity, of truth and of falsity, or implies a mode of force which undermines these very oppositions. As Derrida has remarked in another context, "La force ne se pense pas a partir des couples d'opposition."8

It is precisely as event of force that sublimity can only be presented by means of citation. Not an essence which could be defined or analyzed, identifiable only through its effects, sublimity can only be

presented in action, through and as an act of enunciation. Hence the citations which cut through the text of Longinus. But as we now

surely recognize, to illustrate sublimity is not a simple task. For if the sublime is only successful (or "felicitous") when it dissimulates its own mechanisms, then the citations which are meant to exemplify sublimity are being asked to present to the reader that which the reader is not meant to see. Indeed, as Longinus writes of the "sublime in-

tensity" of Demosthenes: "You could sooner open your eyes to the descent of a thunderbolt than face unwinking his repeated outbursts of emotion" (p. 225). Instead of illuminating us concerning the nature of the sublime and "how to achieve the effects ourselves," examples of sublimity risk pointing to the source of illumination itself, a

blinding gesture. Now if we cannot "face" the sublime, the implication is that we

might better approach it obliquely, in profile as it were. And it is just at the limits of citation, both in the movement from one citation to another (as Neil Hertz was the first to point out)9 and at the limits of citation and commentary, that we must direct our attention. But this introduces another question, that of the figurativity of Longinus's own language and its dissimulation. Here another reciprocity con- fronts us. For if the limits between citation and commentary might be said to "present" the sublime in this text, this very limit is blurred by the possibility that the citations themselves might function figu- ratively, and hence in a dissimulated fashion, within the commentary of Longinus. It is not just Boileau's declaration that Longinus himself was sublime that alerts us to the possibility of dissimulation on the part of the author of On the Sublime, but also the occasion of the

writing of the text. For if Longinus dramatizes the need for dissimulation of figurativity through a scenario of speech "addressed to a judge ... or a ruler in high place," On the Sublime itself addresses a certain Terentius, who, if we are to believe the text, "required" Lon-

ginus "to prepare some notes on the sublime." Addressing Terentius

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directly, Longinus writes: "You yourself... will, I am sure, do what

duty and your heart alike dictate and give me the benefit of your unbiased judgement. For he spoke well who, in answer to the question 'What have we in common with the gods?' said 'Kindness and Truth'"

(p. 125). Without knowing more about the relationship between the one who calls himself "Longinus" and Terentius, we can see that the interlocutor who has required the writing of this text is in the position of judge and is being compared to the gods.

But let us return to Longinus's discussion of the dissimulation of

figurative language. Figures are the "natural allies" of the sublime, we read, and "draw ... marvellous reinforcement from the alliance"

(p. 185). Longinus borrows these military metaphors for the dissimulation of figurative language from a citation from Demosthenes which is presented as an example of a "proper" use of figures, which is to say, a hidden one. The quote is from a speech delivered in defense of a policy which has resulted in overwhelming military defeat. Here is the analysis Longinus gives of the use of the figure of

adjuration by Demosthenes:

When in a sudden moment of inspiration, as if possessed by the divine af- flatus, he utters his great oath about the champions of Greece, "It cannot be that you were wrong; no, by those who bore the brunt at Marathon," then you feel that by employing the single figure of adjuration-which I here call apostrophe-he has deified his ancestors by suggesting that one should swear by men who met such a death, as if they were gods: he has filled his judges with the spirit of those who bore the brunt there: he has transformed his argument into a passage of transcendent sublimity and emotion, giving it the power of conviction which lies in so ... startling an oath: and at the same time his words have administered ... an antidote, with the result that, re- lieved by his eulogy, they come to feel as proud of the war with Philip as of their victories at Marathon and Salamis. (P. 181)

Now according to Longinus, the dissimulation of figurativity is achieved through sublimity itself, "antidote" to the use of figures. Here, however, the figure itself serves as antidote and could hardly be said to be concealed. But here the figure itself produces, directly or explicitly, the seductive effect upon the listener-namely, the effect of making losers feel like winners. What is more, if it is said to be sublimity itself which best conceals figurativity, here the figure itself accomplishes something like the transport of the sublime. The figure works so successfully, Longinus explains, because it fills the audience with the spirit of victorious heroes and makes them "come to feel as proud of the war with Philip as of their victories at Marathon and Salamis." This description parallels the earlier account of the

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transport of the sublime, during which the listener is "uplifted with a sense of proud possession" and comes to feel as if he had uttered the words himself. If discourse is an agon, identification with the speaker is also identification with the victor.

The citation which exemplifies a "proper" use of figures thematizes in a literal and quite urgent mode the Longinian figure for seduction through discourse: military defeat. In Demosthenes' speech, the effect of the figure of adjuration coincides with the mechanism of dissimulation (or its effect), namely, the gesture of making losers feel like winners. If the proper use of figures-their dissimulation-is presented as being a means of defeating a listener judge, the example of Demosthenes' speech both thematizes defeat on the level of the enonce and enacts it on the level of enunciation. The defeat on the level of enunciation is achieved through the figure of adjuration which, in the enonce, is antidote to, or veils, a feeling of defeat. In other words, it is as antidote to a feeling of defeat that the figure veils itself as instrument of defeat. The citation exemplifies a proper use of figures, one in which sublimity serves as antidote to a use of figures which is itself a means of attaining the sublime. Or rather, it figures a proper use of figures, since the figure of adjuration is not what is dissimulated here, but rather the way in which it figures the opera- tions of sublimity itself within the text of Longinus-that which serves as antidote to figurativity, means of dissimulation. What is concealed is not the figure but its figurativity, that is to say, the way in which it figures the self-concealing of figurativity. Within the citation the figure of adjuration which acts as antidote to defeat by inviting an identification with victory repeats the structure of hypsous itself as end or effect. Thus the relationship between figural language and the sublime as a reciprocity of means and ends overlaps with a reciprocity of means and ends which operates through the sublime itself and which was responsible for the tautological aspect of Lon- ginus's "systematic" analysis of the "five genuine sources" of sublimity or of "how to achieve the effect ourselves."

Now if this circularity of means and ends involved in the use of figures is a function of the necessity for producing an impression of art without art-"art is only perfect when it looks like nature"-the reciprocity between art and nature includes a further complication, namely, that "nature succeeds only by concealing art about her person." Here art signifies once again system or method, as it did earlier, and it is precisely nature "in person," the human body, which figures art in this sense: "Nothing is of greater service in giving grandeur to such passages," Longinus comments of some examples of

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sublimity, "than the composition of the various members." And he continues: "It is the same with the human body. None of its members has any value apart from the others, yet one with another they all constitute a perfect organism. Similarly if these effects of grandeur are separated, the sublimity is scattered with them to the winds: but if they are united into a single system ... they gain a living voice"

(pp. 237-39). "Nobility of thought," which concerns the question of

unity, was, along with the proper use of figures, one of the five "genuine" sources of sublimity said to derive "partly from art"-which is to say, from that system or method which is also found within nature. To present or figure the unity of composition necessary to attain the "unified effect" of sublimity, Longinus cites the following poem of

Sappho:

I think him God's peer that sits near thee face to face, and listens to thy sweet speech and lovely laughter.

'Tis this that makes my heart flutter in my breast. If I see thee but for a little, my voice comes no more and my tongue is broken.

At once a delicate flame runs through my limbs; my eyes are blinded and my ears thunder.

Sweat pours down: shivers hunt me all over. I am grown paler than grass, and very near to death I feel.

"Is it not wonderful," Longinus comments, "how she summons at the same time, soul, body, hearing, tongue, sight, colour, all as though they had wandered off apart from herself? She feels contradictory sensations ... for one at the point of death is clearly beside herself.... Lovers all show such symptoms as these, but what gives the

supreme merit to her art is, as I said, the skill with which she chooses the most striking and combines them into a single whole" (p. 157). What Longinus appreciates in the poem of Sappho is clearly not a

representation of unity, or of a unified body. The body is portrayed as broken, fragmented. It is through this fragmentation, however, that the articulations of the body, and hence the "systematic" character of its composite nature, are thrown into relief. And it is the force of enunciation which unifies these fragments, "combin[ing] them into a single whole," embodying the text and the body-which now serves as a figure for the unity of composition of the text.

The poem of Sappho serves as a figure within the text of Longinus, however, on two levels. Figure for unity of composition (through the metaphorical identification of text and body) on the level of enunciation, on the level of the enonce it figures the destinataire of the sublime enunciation. If the "effect of genius" or sublimity is to "trans-

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port the audience outside themselves," this transport is figured by Sappho, "clearly beside herself with love."

The citation which immediately follows Sappho's poem figures the act of sublime enunciation itself. It is taken from Homer and describes a storm threatening the lives of sailors at sea. But the images of the storm's "jaws of destruction," its "breath," and its "shroud of foam" all recall earlier descriptions of the sublime in action. We remember Homer portrayed by Longinus in terms of Homer's own

description of the War God who "stormily raves ... / Fringed are his

lips with the foam-froth." The storm extends the metaphors invoked to describe the "sublime intensity" of Demosthenes, whose genius was said to strike "like thunder and lightning," to blind and to dumbfound. The body represented in Sappho's poem figures the

object or recipient of this force: "My voice comes no more and my tongue is broken." The broken body receives the thunder and lightning of the storm: "Flame runs through my limbs, my eyes are blinded and my ears thunder." And once again what is being figured is also literally mentioned within the text, for it is "listening to sweet

speech," among other things, which drives the narrator of the poem "clearly beside herself."

The figure of the destinataire is not the one explicitly acknowledged by Longinus. Indeed, the figure which operates on the level of the enonce is dissimulated. It is hidden by means of just the kind of operation we analyzed in connection with the Demosthenes example. Longinus had used an explicit figure of unity as "antidote" to fragmentation. He has made losing, or being mastered, look like winning, like the unified and masterful force of the destinateur figured at the level of enunciation. The two converge in the "body" of the poem, just as in the transport of the sublime there is an ec-stasis and an identification across the positions of enunciation.

We remember that unity and figurativity were the two "genuine" sources of sublimity said to derive "partly from art," and that both are crucial for the sublime to operate a reciprocity between art and nature. A relationship between these two sources is articulated

through a citation from Plato which receives a lengthy commentary from Longinus: Plato's description of the human body. If the body is posed as figure of unity and negated in its unity in the poem by Sappho, the unity of the body is restored or reconstituted textually in the Plato example. What is more, the unity of the body, which was earlier offered as a metaphor for textual unity, is here reconstituted in its very systematicity textually, through a systematic use of meta-

phor: "The head he calls the citadel of the body, the neck is an isthmus built between the head and the chest, and the vertebrae, he

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says, are planted beneath like hinges.... The seat of the desires he compares to the women's apartments and the seat of anger to the men's. The spleen again is the napkin of the entrails. ... 'After this,' he goes on 'they shrouded the whole in a covering of flesh, like a felt mat, to shield it from the outer world'" (pp. 213-15).

Plato's account of the human anatomy presents concretely, and one could almost say literalizes, Longinus's statement that "nature conceals art about her person." The metaphor of the felt mat even figures (within the discourse of Longinus) the dissimulation of figurative language which operates the other principle associated with the reciprocity of art and nature-namely, that "for art to be successful it must appear as nature." Here, however, the art or system within nature exemplified by the human body is presented to us (and, by implication, can only be presented to us) by means of an unconceal- ment of the figurativity of figurative language. The blatant and sus- tained use of metaphor by the philosopher, however, restores coher- ence to the concealed figurative significations at play within the text of Longinus. It articulates the presence of art or system within nature, restoring the unity of the body which appeared fragmented in the Sappho poem, and thereby grounds the play of the body as figure within the text of Longinus, where it operates as a kind of figurative hinge which permits the theoretical swing between art and nature. It is on this basis that the body can serve as metaphor for the sublime text. As Longinus proceeds to tell us, however, it was precisely for "improper" use of figures that Plato himself is said to have been "torn apart" by his detractors. Longinus concedes that the passage in question is full of mistakes, but goes so far as to suggest that it is all the grander because of them.

Critical disagreement concerning the sublimity of the Plato text launches a discussion of the relationship between the sublime and imperfections or faults which ultimately puts into question the possibility of distinguishing a true from a false sublime. On the Sublime opens with criticism of a number of passages marred by faults such as "bombast," "tumidity," and so forth. What Longinus chiefly objects to in these passages of false sublime is "theatrical attraction" or the "display of unseemly triviality," which violates the principle of art without art. But if, to be perfect, art must "appear like nature," nature itself, in the context of the subsequent discussion, is associated not with perfection at all, but with imperfection. Perfection in this context shifts to the side of art and connotes mere artfulness or technical mastery. "Which is better in poetry and prose," we are asked, "grandeur with a few flaws or correct composition of mediocre quality, yet entirely sound and impeccable?" The answer is not long in coming:

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"Perfect precision runs the risk of triviality, whereas in great writing ... there needs be something overlooked" (my italics). Now if Lon-

ginus had earlier remarked that "faults go very closely" with the sublime, here faults are invoked as marks of a "heedlessness" of genius, signs of "true sublimity": "Faults make an ineradicable impression," Longinus argues, "but beauties soon slip from our memory" (p. 219). We remember, however, that earlier memory was given as the most reliable criterion for judging true sublimity: "A passage cannot really be a true sublime if its effect does not outlive its utterance. For what is truly sublime gives abundant food for thought.... The memory of it is stubborn and indelible." The status of the passages criticized by Longinus for their faults at the beginning of the essay begins to

appear problematic. That the movement of this text implicitly undoes the possibility of

a firm distinction between a true and a false sublime is, however, entirely consistent with the play of truth and falsity within the event of the sublime as force of enunciation. If the false sublime is accused, as we have seen, of being "void of sincerity," sincerity in this context is less a question of intention and expression than of an effect produced through a dissimulation of figurative language. The sincerity- effect of the sublime accomplishes, as we have seen, the duplicitous posing of losers as winners as a form of seduction. Sincerity implies a truth value, or at least an intended one. It operates at the level of the enonce. The sincerity-effect of the sublime, which operates at the level of the enunciation, carries instead a "force value"-an apparent force of conviction which coincides with a force of seduction. In the

Longinian sublime, sincerity and duplicity produce the same effect:

transport, ec-stasis. The orator loses himself in his message, his words

appear to be "wrung from him." The audience is transported "out of themselves." There is no stable ground for truth or sincerity in the event of sublimity, which, through a force of enunciation, disrupts the stable identity of the subject.

In "The Origin of the Work of Art" Heidegger appeals to this kind of transport or ec-stasis to subvert a conventional conception of ar- tistic creation as subjective expression, and, more broadly, a conventional idea of the subject.10 The "creation" of the work of art (where, of course, a certain accent must be placed on the word of) includes a moment of "co-creating" or "preserving." This occurs through an ec- stasis of the destinataire, a displacement (a "verriickung" and an "ein- riickung") of the beholder "out of the realm of the ordinary," which is to say of the "ontic." This is what Heidegger calls the "solitariness" of the work of art, glossed by Blanchot as "la solitude qui n'exprime que le mot 'etre.' "'1 It is "solitariness" in this sense which operates

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the "genitive of the difference" in both the title and the movement of Heidegger's text-the reciprocity of the origin of the work of art and of the work of art as origin. In Heidegger's essay the language of strife or polemos, the ec-stasis of solitariness, the "co-creating" of

creating and preserving, the extravagant play of reciprocity in the

language and the movement of the text, all repeat key features of On the Sublime in a philosophical register which explicitly challenges the status of the subject of representational thinking as well as the status of the artist as "expressive" or "emotive" subject.

Paradoxically, perhaps, it is as treatise on rhetoric-understood now as a "logic" of enunciation-that On the Sublime invites a further elaboration of the dislocation of the subject by the working of the work of art. For hypsous presents what Heidegger calls the "solitariness" of the work of art as force of enunciation. "La definition du

sujet de l'enonciation," Vincent Descombes writes (distinguishing the

"sujet de l'enonciation" as "sujet de l'inconscient" from the "sujet de l'enonce" as "sujet de volonte"), "est ... le lieu de la production des enonces." And he continues: "Le sujet est la ou il parle, son Sein est son Dasein."12 The force of hypsous in this context could be said to

pose the Other ("celui a quije parle" ["the person to whom I speak"]) as subject of enunciation when, in the moment of transport, the hearer feels as if he had uttered the words himself. In so doing it dramatizes a division within the subject, exhibiting the gap between the subject of enunciation and the subject of the enonce when the Other "says" the subject of the enonce. As we have seen in the privi- leged examples of both the proper use of figures and unity of com-

position (the two sources of the sublime which we can presumably learn ourselves), the figurativity of the text On the Sublime itself operates through precisely this division between the levels of the statement and the enunciation. The sublimity which cannot be faced

emerges in profile at the limit of text and citation, which marks the limit between subject of enunciation and subject of the enoncd.

But just as the Sappho poem figured both unity (on the level of

enunciation) and division or fragmentation (on the level of the

enonce), hypsous, which might be said to reinforce the "refente du sujet," can also be viewed as a strategy (of seduction perhaps) to undo the effects of castration, or, in other words, as a kind of "antidote" to division and defeat. For at the moment of hypsous the interlocutor, or Other, slips back, through the fictive identification with the subject of enunciation, to the level of semblable or other. He or she could be said to return to the order of the imaginary.

The Longinian sublime implies a dynamic overlapping, or reci-

procity, between the orders of the symbolic and the imaginary. And it does so not only with respect to the effect (or end) of hypsous, but

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with respect to the origins or means of achieving it as well. For besides the five "genuine" sources of the sublime already noted, there is, as

Longinus puts it, "another road ... which leads to sublimity.... Zealous imitation of the great historians of the past." And he continues: "For many are carried away by the inspiration of another, just as the story runs that the Pythian priestess . . . becomes ... impreg- nated with the divine power [of the tripod] and is at once inspired to utter oracles; so too, from the natural genius of those old writers there flows into the hearts of their admirers as it were an emanation from the mouth of holiness." Plato, for example, who "has irrigated his style with ten thousand runnels from the great Homeric spring ... would never have reared so many ... flowers to bloom among his philosophical tenets ... had he not striven, yea with heart and soul, to contest the prize with Homer.... As Hesiod says: 'Good is this strife for mankind.'" Here, of course, is the moment of aggres- sion associated with the order of the imaginary. But the "impregnation" of sublimity does not occur in this order alone. Mere imitation of the other does not suffice to achieve the "immortal fame" of sub-

limity. If, as we suggested, the structure of hypsous implies that some-

thing like citation is embedded in its very operation, if the sublime

implies a movement from citation to citation, a certain gap is neces-

sary in the move from citation to citable speech. The gap is a dialogic one. The "zealous imitation" Longinus recommends includes the gesture of posing the "old writer" one would imitate as interlocutor, or, to sustain a certain rhetoric of psychoanalysis, to pose the other as Other. Still more will our thoughts be led to the ideal standard of

perfection, we read, "if we give our minds the further hint, 'How would Homer or Demosthenes, had either of them been present, have listened to this passage of mine? How would it have affected them?' Great indeed is the ordeal, if we propose such a jury and audience as this to listen to our own utterances and make believe that we are submitting our work to the scrutiny of such superhuman wit- nesses and judges. Even still more stimulating would it be to add, 'If I write this, how would all posterity receive it?'" (pp. 169-71). Here the means of achieving the sublime is to run the desired end, the

transport of hypsous, in reverse. We retain the combination of ima-

ginary identification and interlocution, this time posing the other, the one we would aspire to imitate, as Other, an alterity hyperbolized here as "all posterity."

If consideration of the Longinian sublime as "merely" rhetorical has for a long time trivialized it and masked its force, it is also rhetoric, as it is understood now (within a certain "rhetoric" of psychoanalysis) as theory of enunciation, which suggests a path toward further elaboration of that force. In this context the question of truth

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of enunciation implies the problem of the unconscious as function of discourse or enunciation. Psychoanalysis poses the subject of enunciation as subject of desire. It is through this rhetoric that we can begin to approach the sublime not only in terms of the law or subli- mation (through Kant), but in terms of desire as well.

"For purposes of nutriment," Plato wrote, "they irrigated the body, cutting channels into it as one does in a garden." Longinus borrows Plato's metaphor for the circulatory system and applies it to the "body" of Plato's texts, "irrigated ... from the great Homeric spring." It is tempting to continue the circulation of the metaphor and to compare the body of the Longinian text, "irrigated" with citations, to the desiring body and its "dispersion infinie de failles," with each citation "ne faisant que donner encore plus de champs a la suivante, la chargeant de toutes les divisions qu'elle porte en elle-meme."13 The subject of the sublime would be that ecstatic one who writes, through the greffier Lacan: "Je suis a la place d'oui se vocifere que 'l'univers est un defaut dans la purete du non-etre.' "14

YALE UNIVERSITY

NOTES

1 See, among others, Elizabeth Nitchie, "Longinus and Later Literary Criticism," Classical Weekly, 27 (1933-34), 121-26, 129-35. 2 "Longinus," On the Sublime, tr. W. Hamilton Fyfe, in Vol. XXIII of Aristotle, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), p. 151. All subsequent references will be given within the text and will refer to this edition. Although the identity of "Longinus" is disputed, we use this name to designate the author since it has historically done so. 3 Destinateur and destinataire refer to the speaker and his interlocutor (or the person addressed) respectively. The terms are derived from Roman Jakobson's "Linguistique et Poetique," in Essais de Linguistique Generale (Paris, 1963). 4 Enonce refers to a statement uttered, as distinguished from enonciation, which refers to the act of uttering speech. Emile Benveniste elaborates this distinction in "La Nature des Pronoms," in Problemes de Linguistique Generale, I (Paris, 1966). The distinction is taken up by Lacan in, for example, "La Subversion du Sujet," Ecrits II (Paris, 1971). See Antoine Campagnon, La seconde main (Paris, 1979). 5 Gilles Deleuze, Logique du sens (Paris, 1969), p. 18. 6 Vincent Descombes, L'inconscient malgre lui (Paris, 1977), p. 79. 7 Charles Segal discusses the influences on On the Sublime and its philosophical eclecticism in "YPOS and the Problem of Cultural Decline in De Sublimitate," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 64 (1959), 121-46. 8 "Force cannot be thought through binary oppositions." Jacques Derrida, "Force et signification," in L'Ecriture et la difference (Paris, 1967), p. 46, 9 The method of reading employed here was inspired by Neil Hertz's "Lecture de Longin," Poetique, 15 (1973), 292-306.

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LONGINUS AND THE SUBJECT OF THE SUBLIME 289

10 Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," in Poetry, Language, Thought, tr. Albert Hofstadter (New York, 1975), pp. 17-87. 11 "... the solitary which expresses only the word 'to be.' " Maurice Blanchot, L'espace litteraire (Paris, 1955), p. 79. 12 "The definition of the subject of enunciation" (distinguishing the "subject of enunciation" as "subject of the unconscious" from the "subject of the statement" as "willing subject"), "is the site of the production of statements. The subject is there where he speaks, his Sein is his Dasein." Descombes, p. 80. 13 ". .. infinite dispersion of faults" ... "only giving more range to the next, charging it with all the divisions it carries in itself." "L'infini et la castration (Elements)," Scilicit, 4 (1973), 100. 14 "I am there where it is spoken that 'the universe is a defect in the purity of non-

being.' " Jacques Lacan, "La subversion du sujet et la dialectique du desir," in Ecrits II (Paris, 1971), p. 182.

guerlac longinus and the subject of the sublime

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