| Abstract | Moreover, accounting for kitsch in terms of an aesthetics of the sublime relates the issue of kitsch to the most insistent problem in German aesthetics from Kant to Heidegger: how can beauty appear out of the sublime? Coming to an understanding of this supposedly aesthetic issue means for the philosophers involved, primarily [Friedrich Nietzsche] and Heidegger, the annulment of aesthetics as a separate domain and the realization that art is a place where truth happens and community is formed. Moreover, by starting from the problems of relating the two categories of the beautiful and the sublime to each other and considering kitsch as a problematic outcome of this attempted merging, we can understand the attraction that such kitsch presents even to the most sophisticated minds. Kitsch will thus be identified not with a debilitating and debased culture for the masses, but rather with a phenomenon in which the most advanced thinking can lose itself. Heidegger's involvement with National Socialism is one such example. This essay will deal briefly with another such case, that of Nietzsche's professed recovery from that kind of fascination with [Richard Wagner].(6)
At the end of the main part of his essay, Nietzsche expresses three hopes concerning the future of art, of which the first is that "the theater should not lord it over the arts." I understand here that the theatrical is intimately related to kitsch, but in a broader sense than in, say, the Greenbergian view of kitsch. Let us consider an obvious connection: theatricality is first and foremost "acting for someone."(18) It is related to the central term of criticism in Nietzsche's philosophy, that of the reactive psychology. Theatricality is thus related to the function of kitsch identified by [Clement Greenberg], that of being specifically made for an audience so that its production is governed by the thought of its effects. The theatrical is tantamount to the creation of effect, effects of truth: "Wagner never calculates as a musician, from some sort of musician's conscience: what he wants is effect, nothing but effect. And he knows those on whom he wants to achieve his effects."(19)
In Wagner, there is a complete renunciation of the conditions of the musical medium (what Nietzsche calls "style"), but this is not done for the sake of communication, subject matter or easy emotional impact. The medium is obliterated so as to create the effect of the formless: "Why, then, have beauty? Why not rather that which is great, sublime, gigantic -- that which moves masses? Once more it is easier to be gigantic than to be beautiful; we know that."(23) In conclusion, I should like to return to the issue raised by [Saul Friedl]änder concerning the relation between National Socialism and present discourse about it, in the light of the aesthetics of the sublime. Consider the problem of memory that such an aesthetics presents. It is possible to describe the experience of the sublime, as [Immanuel Kant] does, as being a form of consciousness that does violence to our sense of time. We experience a breakdown of the conditions of time in which relations to ourselves and to others take place and, as it were, experience the seriousness demanded by considering existence as a whole. This has important implications for the relation between the sublime and memory. There is no active memory of the sublime experience that can in any way recover its power. Such memory is always a mediation and cannot recover the sense of shock of the experience itself. The experience of the sublime not only defeats our sense of time but is also resistant to memory. To remember it would be to repeat it.
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