Under the gaze of Ulysses –

Species, words and other landscapes

a TRAVEL NOTEBOOK by Manuel Valente Alves

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Übermensch

“When Kant displaced the space of beauty from the empirical realm to the wholly subjective one, declaring taste a function of a judgment stripped of concepts, he nonetheless preserved the public dimension of this subjectivity by decreeing that such judgments are necessarily, categorically universal. Their very logic is that they are communicable, sharable, a function of whet culd only be called the 'universal voice.' Aesthetic experience's pleasure, diverted from the exercise of desire, is channeled precisely into a reflection on the possibility of universal communicability. It is only this, Kant says in the Second Moment of the Analytic of the Beautiful, 'that is to be acknowledged in the judgment of taste about the representation of the object,' Doubly paradoxical, then, such experiences of the beautiful are conceived as pleasure of disincarnated because without desire, and as pure individuality that can only act by assuming the assent of others.” –– Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (1993)

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