The approach of the unpresentable: Postmodernity, the sublime and the language of the lyric

The Postmodern, in its sublime dimension, has become the central theme of a discussion concerning the essence of art. This discussion does not seek to determine what art is, but whether it remains possible in an era of aesthetic and technoscientific reason. My dissertation presents the thesis that the sublime interrupts the artistry of form, particularly in lyric poetry, and offers art to the impossible and undecidable space of a rebirth.Chapter One investigates the concept of the Postmodern in the work of Jean Lyotard. Through a reading of his major work, The Differend, I argue that the temporal character of the "Postmodern" can only be grasped through the notion of the event, which involves a complex conjuncture between Levinas' instant and Heidegger's Ereignis. Postmodernity refers not to an historical epoch, but to an essential temporality of the future anterior as a recurrent, singular beginning.Chapter Two argues that the Postmodern has become above all a question of the density of art, which according to both Lyotard and Jean Luc Nancy must be a sublime destiny. Through an interpretation of the three major reflections on art carried out by Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, I attempt to show how art reaches its end and yet persists in the form of fictioning essence of technoscience. The sublime, they argue, places art into question within itself, while it transports art towards something other: the unpresentable.Chapter Three initiates a reading of Kant's aesthetic philosophy which attempts to explore the basis for and the problems pertaining to the "sublime destine" of art.Chapter Four addresses the work of three poets--Wallace Stevens, Gottfried Benn, and Cesar Vallejo--in order to interrogate the writing of unpresentability. Furthermore, I explore the idea that the lyric offers the greatest resistance to the idea of a sublime destiny. These subjects are pursued through three related problems: (1) Stevens' notion of the "Supreme Fiction," and the death of God, (2) the disappearance of myth in Benn's Statische Gedichte, and (3) the de-idealization of language in Vallejo's Trilce. These problems concern the basic question of the nature of sublime transcendence in poetry.