The Disaster of the Subject

Written for Vies d'artistes (Paris: La différence, 1990), an exhibition volume featuring works by Stanley Brouwn, On Kawara, Annette Messager, Zush [Alberto Porta y Muñoz], James Lee Byars, Hamish Fulton, Christian Boltanski, Ben [Vautier], Hanne Darboven, Roman Opałka, Arnulf Rainer, Ger van Elk, and Giuseppe Penone.

One photographs himself (as if he were) dead, grimacing in an atrocious manner, crucified, in agony, and–because that is somehow still not enough–smears the images with black paint. He speaks of 'sacrifice.'ⁱ Another, more or less disguised and made up like a rather sad acrobat, mimes in tiny sketches, always through photography, the story [l'histoire] of his family and his life, of his birth (and even of that before it) up until his communion (and beyond): as in a very poor traveling theater, he relies on few assistants and plays all the roles, the father and the mother, the grandfather, the priest, and himself as a child or adolescent.ⁱⁱ Yet another records, in a quasi-obsessional manner, the dates which punctuate his existence and his activity, or consigns with a sort of methodical rage the list of One Million Years Past or of One Million Years Future.ⁱⁱⁱ But he could just as well, as does another one, undertake to record–according to some meticulous protocol–the entire sequence of natural numbers from one to infinity.^iv And there is yet another who molds his own body parts, erecting an enigmatic statuary.^v Or another who collects–dolls, images, proverbs (fictitious or not)–all kinds of "clichés" which, drawn, photographed, redrawn, she assembles into series or into compositions, acting as votive displays, suggesting a secret ritual.^vi

I will end this recollection there: there are thirteen such cases presented here, under this generic title–in the form of an illustrious quotation–Vies d'artistes. And I ask myself the question that one cannot fail to ask oneself: what are they and the others doing there, exactly–these "artists"? How did they get there? What necessity did they obey? Why do they exhibit themselves in this way–or their roles, their objects, their fantasies and fetishes, their dates, their bodies, their "lives"–as if they were, themselves and by themselves, artworks? That is to say as "art," in its exhibitable capacity? And why, perceptible here to varying degrees, but perceptible all the same in Tours,^vii this quasi-religious obsession, this liturgical appearance of the presentation, these references, more or less precise, to cultic stereotypes?

The question is not: "what brings them all together here, today?" That would be to say: "what do they have in common, and what sort of configuration do they draw in the current landscape of what we still insist on calling 'art'?" Rather, the question is: "what question are they asking–'these artists'?" What do they testify to? And what do they give us to think? With respect to "art" [itself], precisely.

I will take the risk of condensing an answer into these two concise propositions [propositions lapidaires]: "something has happened [est arrivé] to art"; and if something has happened to art, it is, quite simply, that "art itself has happened."

The word art, in the general and unitary use that we make of it, has only been around for about two centuries (just like the word literature, moreover, with which it is strictly contemporary). And everyone knows that the onset [la survenue] of such terms, which is to say of such concepts, signified the appearance [l'apparition] of a new age, doubtless long rumored, but which only really came into being–under the name of "Romanticism"–at this precise moment, in this event which is, if you like, the advent of art. There, that which will end up being named the modern properly begins, even institutes itself.

We know this. Which is to say that the event, as such, is perfectly identified and located. What we know less of, on the other hand–what is less and less evident, judging by recent discussions of the postmodern–is the meaning that must be attributed to this event. Today, in fact, things are slipping away considerably [se dérobent passablement].

When Schelling published his Philosophy of Art in 1802 (and he clearly said "art," and not, for example, "the fine arts"–and thus included literature), he sanctioned, from the philosophical–that is, speculative–point of view, the hope of a nascent Romanticism, emancipated from religion (for such is in fact the first modern event: the collapse, if not of religion itself, at least of ecclesial authority): it seems to him that art is suddenly freed from all constraints, that it is accessing itself for the first time, and that nothing, from now on, will be able to undermine the fullness [la plénitude] of its essence. The arrival of art is the proclamation of its autonomy. And even if art is ordered to a superior destination, even to the very highest destination ([which would be] no less, say the first Romantics, than the founding of a "new" religion), this vocation does not mean any kind of subordination to any other end than itself. On the contrary, it is by working to achieve its own essence that art is at the same time the proclamation of its autotelia: art is, itself, its own end. This is why, henceforth, art is required to include its own critique of itself–to be, inseparably, both the work and the reflection on the work. Art unchained [L'affranchissement d'art] means, certainly, its entry into the very space of philosophy. But it is not that art is doomed, once again, to subordinate itself to it: Schelling and the Romantics knew too well the close historial complicity [l'étroite complicité, historiale] of religious subordination and philosophical subordination throughout the long deployment, since the Greeks, of what Heidegger will eventually call onto-theology. It is upon art, on the contrary, to "elevate" [relever] philosophy; and it is 'the work' which becomes the very place of the effectuation of truth. Here art alone is able to elaborate what philosophy–metaphysics, as one says since Kant–sought in vain to grasp, namely the Absolute. A practice henceforth sacralized, art itself is the presentation of the Absolute.

It is a reflection of this [Romantic] kind which will support, to varying degrees, the entire emancipatory effort of the modern, up to and including the avant-gardes. But what we must not forget is that barely a decade later, and under the same philosophical horizon, an identical observation (that the link between art and religion has been undone) leads to this [apparently contrary] verdict: art is a thing of the past. In The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), and then in the Lectures on Aesthetics twenty years later, Hegel posits that it is essential that art be the sensible presentation of "spiritual contents" and that, when it fails–by constraint or not–in this vocation, it ceases to respond to our "need for the absolute" supplanted by true religion ("the revealed religion," especially from the moment it is "internalized") and, better still, through philosophy itself, Absolute Knowledge. Which does not mean, as Heidegger comments in 1936, that "since the winter of 1828-1829 at the University of Berlin" we have not seen "many new works of art and artistic trends born"; but rather that the question remains "whether art is still, or whether it is no longer, an essential and necessary way by which the advent of truth [occurs]."^viii Formulated differently: from the moment when art ceases to be religion itself (which it was, for Hegel, among the Greeks), or ceases to be in the service of religion (as in the great Christian painting of the "Golden Middle Ages,"or even that of the Renaissance), it loses its vocation to the Absolute and likely loses itself, comes undone. It does not survive, in any way, its classical grandeur: it becomes inessential.

The same phenomenon–the disimbrication [désolidarisation] of art and religion–will therefore have signified, so to speak 'at the same time,' two radically contradictory assessments of the fortune [chance] of art. And both are significant for its future outcomes: the discourse of the "death of art" will have conditioned the advances of the modern (up to Duchamp, and beyond, as one of the representatives of this exhibition attests^ix) just as much as the discourse which relies on [art's] absolutization. Why is this? How, in the same historical and philosophical, but also artistic age–how, in the same epoch, did such a contradiction come to light? What happened when art itself, without religion, arrived?

Answer: something happened [est arrivé] to art. That is to say, something happened to what, precisely, we have been unifying under this term since this age or that era. Let's say: since 1800.

I propose to call what happened to art the disaster of the subject. And I will try to explain: all of the art of this time that is most obstinately 'itself' (these "vies d'artistes" are testimony to this) is caught up in this disaster. But a disaster–a change of stars [un changement d'astre], as Blanchot reminds us–is not necessarily a misfortune.^x

From the moment when art dissociates itself from religion–and this certainly does not happen all at once; it requires, from the Renaissance [onward], a long and slow process–, from the moment when, as a consequence, it frees itself from ecclesial authority and, at the same time, from philosophical authority (and philosophy–when it feels art escaping its jurisdiction, under the pretext of restoring its rights to sensibility or taste–hastens to found Aesthetics, whose first concern is to codify and hierarchize arts, genres and subjects), the question remains as to what the subject of art is: what to paint, for example, what to (re)present? It's all very well to remember that in Athens, "still lives" [natures mortes] (onions, in the canonical example) were purchased at a high price, but the fact remains: the 'great art,' in painting, presupposed elevated subjects: the gods or God himself, through the incarnation, and then, in descending order, the heroes and the saints, the greats of the world and their great deeds, the notables, in whatever capacity. Next came things of nature and objects, that is to say, from the landscape to the asparagus bouquet or the wine bottle, everything that gets brought up by the most servile and applied imitatio or, as one also said, by the ars (a bad translation of the techne of the Greeks) or by the hand (manus): a subaltern art, even when virtuoso, belonging to what Diderot still called the "le 'petit technique'."^xi

What to paint, then, when there is no longer a god left to (re)present–not even the Virgin, the latest of the deities of the Occident, whom Hegel thought had provided painting with its very subject, that is to say (maternal) love.^xii This is the disaster, this 'end of the subject.' And it is contemporary with the arrival of art.

One will note that the event owes nothing to the supposed progression of technology. Between 1802 and 1805, there was no question of photography yet (photography would only become a problem towards the end of the 1820s, when Hegel died, and when the Romantics of the second generation–Carus, Friedrich–seized upon the discovery of Niépce and Daguerre in light of which Ingres would decree the end of painting). This means that the misfortune that befalls art, this misfortune of the crisis of the subject, is not related in any manner to the perennial problem of imitation. (On the contrary: if the photograph appears, it is because the subject of painting is affected [touché].) The question: "What to paint?" does not amount to the question: "should we imitate?" The proof is that we will not soon cease imitating. But suddenly, with the help of photography, these two questions merge, which traces out a completely different path to the future of modern art, of "emancipated" art: it imagines that the liberation from figurative constraints (of the mimetic code) is the liberation of [art's] own essence. [Art thus] cultivates sketching and pure form, or painting for painting's sake (color, pigmentation), the refusal of figuration (like, in literature, the pure work on language [sur la langue]) or figuration without support (apples, without gold or the choice of Paris; a carafe of wine and bread, without the Last Supper). But this is misleading. It is not art that must be liberated from the subject; it is now the subject that art itself must mourn. Whether [art] imitates or not does not change anything. Art is now subjectless, except through the effect of citations internal to its own history. Which almost means that it is now without object [sans objet], as we say of a vain or erroneous request.

This is what Baudelaire glimpses when he speaks to Manet about the "decrepitude" of his art.^xiii But not when he fulminates against photography and believes he has touched the truth of art by opposing imagination to imitation.^xiv Although, in spite of himself (and because of a very old tradition: it dates back to the treatise On the Sublime attributed to Longinus), there passes, in a certain way, a truth.

Shortly before the concept of art was invented, still in the 18th century, people were discussing whether the fine arts, as they said then, were a matter of ars or ingenium, of technical skill or given by nature (the "mechanical part" of art was opposed to "invention"). The question–present in d'Alembert, in Diderot–was: what is the element of genius [génie] in painting when, in [rhetorical] eloquence or poetry (as taught by Longinus), it is so much more obvious? And hence one began to say, as Baudelaire would affirm without hesitation, that [genius] was not only preponderant but that it alone genuinely explained the existence of art. A great painting was first of all a great painter, something we have known obscurely since Vasari. From there, there was only one step toward confusing the work with the artist himself–which Baudelaire, decidedly very symptomatically, took without the slightest difficulty by elaborating the theory of dandyism.^xv The real work of art, one began to suspect, was the artist himself.

In this sense, (modern) art–the disaster of the subject–is the absolute triumph of the subject: of the artist. This shows that disaster is in effect not just misfortune. It is the artist, henceforth, who decides what art is or, more precisely, whether there is art or not. What previous ages had severely codified as an homage to genius–the sovereignty of the artist–here is now the rule, and there is no work that has any chance of imposing itself without first of all its author imposing himself, which is to say that he manifests–if I may dare say: even to himself–that he is indeed an artist. And that doing this is enough, or must be enough, for there to be art.

However, the rule is without rule. The triumph of the subject is in turn a disaster (the changement d'astre is too momentous, it causes a precipitation in the course of events, the epoch which thus opens is prey to [further] disaster [l'affolement]^xvi). It is not that the social or institutional authorities of recognition are lacking, even if their weakened legitimacy (the bourgeois of Baudelaire, the "philistines", the State of today), compared to that self-bestowed by more hierarchical societies [celle s'octroyaient les sociétés hiérarchisées], partially ruins their powers of legitimation. It is because it is difficult, and almost impossible, given the loss or disdain of the ars, to proclaim oneself a genius. The disaster of the subject is the disaster of authority. Who authorizes whom?

(Consider the immense effort that modern artists have had to make, not only to constitute themselves as artists, but to construct upon themselves a legendary personage: the martyr of art, the supernatural creator, the provocative and destructive apostate. Or consider also the effort that was required of poets and writers, even thinkers, préfaciers to catalogs of all kinds, to legitimize the resulting works.)

The Ancients knew very well that a genius–a "great nature," as Longinus said–was a man inhabited by a god, or gods. They spoke of mania (madness or inspiration) and enthusiasm; and there was evidence there, just as it was clear that their heroes, in their very destiny, responded to the injunction of the divine, of a daimon. Sovereignty, whatever its order, was "daemonic". Someone other than man, in this case, made man; or man constantly "overcame" man [l'homme "passait" constamment l'homme].^xvii And when this was particularly manifest–illustrious, striking–it was valid as an example: from then on we modeled ourselves [on se réglait] on these heroes as they modeled themselves on the gods. We imitated the other in ourselves because it was the only way to be ourselves and to respond to our nature (which was nothing other than nature itself). To belong to oneself was to obey: to be oneself outside of oneself.

One such imitation–which has nothing in common, of course, with "the imitation of nature," but in which Kant, who did not really know how to name it, secretly detected the transmission of genius–was authority. Transposed into Christianity, such a law thus carried on (the saint, according to the Imitation of Christ,^xviii is never more than a hero, supposing the order of revelation). Now, in the epoch when man–genius included–defines himself as a subject and internalizes, relates to himself, the outside of himself which constituted the self, it is precisely this sort of sanction which suddenly fails and collapses. When Vasari wrote his Lives, he still had Plutarch in mind, and he was not without edifying ulterior motives. But when Diderot constructs the modern theory of genius, which he nevertheless still attempts to relate to nature, he translates into the dialogue his immense dismay with its counterexample–this derisory mimicry–who is [embodied by] Rameau's nephew: the very type, almost convincing, of the false genius, that is to say, of the false artist. An exemplarity that only upholds itself: such is what maddens [affole], literally, the modern artist. And it is not for an instant an effect of chance if madness [la folie], in the age of the subject–as much the ruin of the subject as of the work itself–is the ultimate exemplarity; that is to say, practically the only sanction.

Practically, because during this time art survives. It survived its arrival, which was almost its death. In the absence of all rule and all sanction. It survives in its own haste [précipitation] and desire to annihilate itself (to finally die) or likewise to annihilate that within it which subjects it to older constraints. It therefore survives in the very liberation which ruins it. And this is very precisely what defines its task–the work it must accomplish: to be art itself, to achieve its own end, which can only be understood if one is willing to understand the double resonance of the word.

This is why it is absolutely necessary for art itself to take itself as its subject. Today, in its survival, art is no longer–and can no longer be–more than the question of its own possibility. Which means, first of all, the question of the possibility of its subject–or, if one prefers, of its author.

An affair, once again, of survival, but this time in the sense of a higher life [d'une vie supérieure]. If nothing and no one authorizes the artist, if no sanction other than deterioration can any longer verify the work (not even, as we know, the ransacking or cancellation of the work), then a heroic choice must be made: one must become an artist, decide as an artist, obstinately and rigorously. And begin all again, anew, with heroism or holiness–with exemplarity: inventing the rules and conduct, practicing methodical exercises, constructing a ritual, exposing oneself–without reserve or fear–, arranging life like the work, to exhibit–in its purest state–the ingenium. To speak of an autobiographical destiny of art would be too weak: no "life" exists before this occurrence of existence (of the work); no subject, hardly an agent, allows himself to be located before the act of his exhibition [exposition]. The artistic gesture is purely poetic. And if one wants to speak about experimentation, then we should know that experience itself (from the Latin ex-periri, or 'the traversal of a danger') defines this "extremism" which Adorno deemed "the only legitimization in art."^xix

^{i. This is a reference to Arnulf Rainer's multimedia self-portraits featured in the Vies d'artistes collection. The emphasis on sacrifice may refer to Georges Bataille's conception of "sacrifice" as the representation of death by necessary proxy of a certain "subterfuge," which is appraised at length elsewhere in Lacoue-Labarthe's work. In "The Caesura of the Speculative" [1978], for example, he writes (per Christopher Fynsk's rendering) that "[following Bataille] the theory of death presupposes [...] a theater: a structure of representation and a mimesis, a space which is enclosed, distant, and preserved [...] where death in general, decline and disappearance, is able to contemplate 'itself,' reflect 'itself,' interiorize 'itself'" (208). Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography [1989]. Christopher Fynsk, trans. (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998). (All footnotes by D. T.)↩}
^{ii This is likely a reference to James Lee Byars' work in the collection.↩}
^{iii Printed in English in the original, these phrases are references to On Kawara's multimedia installation/performance One Million Years (Past and Future).↩}
^{iv This refers to the paintings of Roman Opałka.↩}
^{v This likely refers to the sculptures of Giuseppe Penone.↩}
^{vi This refers to Annette Messager's work.↩}
^{vii This is likely a reference to Tours' status as a center of medieval Christian art.↩}
^{viii Lacoue-Labarthe is citing Martin Heidegger's "Origin of the Work of Art" [Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes] essay, first drafted from 1935-7 and published 1950. My translation.↩}
^{ix This is a reference to the Fluxus-associated artist Ben.↩}
^{x Lacoue-Labarthe is citing Maurice Blanchot's "Le communisme sans héritage" [1968]: "Le hiatus théorique est absolu; la coupure, de fait, décisive. Entre le monde libéral-capitaliste, notre monde, et le présent de l'exigence
communiste (présent sans présence), il n'y a que le trait d'union d'un désastre, d'un changement d'astre" (italics mine). See Blanchot, Écrits politiques, 1953-1993, Éric Hoppenot (ed.) (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), p. 161.↩}
^{xi In an essay with thematic similarities to the one here, Jean-François Lyotard glosses Diderot's judgment of "mere trivial technique" as subordinate to essentially external, transcendent inspiration. See his "The Sublime and the Avant-Garde," Paragraph, Vol. 6 (October 1985), p. 7.↩}
^{xii See Pt. III of the first volume T.M. Knox's translation of Hegel's (Heinrich Gustav Hotho-transcribed) Lectures on Aesthetics: "But in this sphere the most accessible topic for art is Mary's love, maternal love, the most successful object of the religious imagination of romantic art. For the most part real and human, it is yet entirely spiritual, without the interest and exigency of desire, not sensuous and yet present: absolutely satisfied and blissful spiritual depth. It is a love without craving, but it is not friendship; for be friendship never so rich in emotion, it yet demands a content, something essential, as a mutual end and aim. Whereas, without any reciprocity of aim and interests, maternal love has an immediate support in the natural bond of connection. But in this instance the mother's love is not at all restricted to the natural side. In the child which she conceived and then bore in travail, Mary has the complete knowledge and feeling of herself; and the same child, blood of her blood, stands all the same high above her, and nevertheless this higher being belongs to her and is the object in which she forgets and maintains herself. The natural depth of feeling in the mother's love is altogether spiritualized; it has the Divine as its proper content, but this spirituality remains lowly and unaware, marvellously penetrated by natural oneness and human feeling. It is the blissful maternal love, the love of the one mother alone who was the first recipient of this joy. Of course this love too is not without grief, but the grief is only the sorrow of loss, lamentation for her suffering, dying, and dead son, and does not, as we shall see at a later stage,' result from injustice and torment from without, or from the infinite battle against sins, or from the agony and pain brought about by the self. Such deep feelings here, spiritual beauty, the Ideal, human identification of man with God, with the spirit and with truth: a pure forgetfulness and complete self-surrender which still in this forgetfulness is from the beginning one with that into which it is merged and now with blissful satisfaction has a sense of this oneness" (541-42). G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel's Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. 1., trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). A free transcript of this translation is available in full at marxists.org.↩}
^{xiii Baudelaire famously penned an enigmatic note to his friend Manet after an 1865 opening: "vous n'êtes que le premier dans la décrépitude de votre art" ["You are the first in the decrepitude of your art."].↩}
^{xiv See, for example, Baudelaire's eviscerations of photography in the wake of the Salon of 1859: "une folie, un fanatisme extraordinaire s'empara de tous ces nouveaux adorateurs du soleil!" ["A madness, an extraordinary fanaticism took possession of all these new sun-worshippers!"].↩}
^{xv The metaphysical, historical, and poetical significance of dandyism was considered throughout much of Baudelaire's oeuvre, including the eponymous essay, "Le Dandy" [1863].↩}
^{xvi Note: the French "l'affolement" carries simultaneous connotations of insanity, terror/panic, and disorder that are impossible to render in one English term. I render it "disaster" here, following Sean Tatol's recommendation, in part to emphasize a certain recursivity in the formulation. Lacoue-Labarthe later uses its verb form affoler, which I (no less approximately) render to madden for that context; but the 'disastrous' connotation should be heard in both cases.
↩}
^{xvii This is difficult to render in English. Lacoue-Labarthe is referring to the persistence of some transcendental sovereignty or imperative in reference to which man 'regulated' himself, "constantly" (ultimately, perhaps, what is elsewhere figured as 'the Law').↩}
^{xviii Lacoue-Labarthe is referring to Thomas à Kempis's 15th century religious text.↩}
^{xix Several comparable formulations can be found throughout Aesthetic Theory [1970].↩}
^{xx Note the ourobouric structure of this essay.↩}