One Step Closer to the Real: Lyotard and Speculative Realist Aesthetics

This essay critically examines the relationship between the aesthetics of Jean-François Lyotard and that of speculative realism, with a focus on Steven Shaviro’s version, comparing Shaviro and Lyotard through their respective readings of Kant. Unlike most speculative realists, who typically position Kant as a prime adversary, Shaviro finds a way out of the correlationist epistemology and metaphysics established in the Critique of Pure Reason by examining Kant’s analysis of aesthetic experience in the Critique of Judgement. He emphasises how, for Kant, aesthetic experience escapes the determinate imposition of conceptual categories and involves a freer relation to sensible forms. Many of Shaviro’s points are anticipated by Lyotard’s reading of Kant. However, Lyotard also recognises a kind of ‘preconceptual’ correlation at the level of sensibility, where forms prepare it for matching with concepts. The sublime escapes this preconceptual correlation because it is a ‘formless’ aesthetic. Lyotard may thus be understood to take ‘one step closer to the real’ in moving from the aesthetic of the beautiful to that of the sublime.