This contradictory feeling––pleasure and pain, joy and anxiety, exaltation and depression––was baptized or rechristened between the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe by the name of the “sublime.” It is over this word that the destiny of classical poetics was wagered and lost; it is in this name that esthetics made its critical prerogatives matter to art, and that romanticism––in other words modernity––triumphed. It remains for the art historian to explain how the word sublime reappeared in the language of Barnett Newman, a Jewish painter from New York, during the ‘40s. The word sublime is common currency today in colloquial French to suggest surprise and admiration, somewhat like America’s “great,” but the idea that it denotes belongs to the most rigorous kind of reflecting on art for at least the past two centuries. Newman did not ignore the esthetic and philosophical stakes involved with the word. He read Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, (1757), and criticized Burke’s overly “surrealistic” description of the sublime oeuvre. Conversely, Newman judges Surrealism to be overly reliant on a preromantic or romantic way of dealing with the indeterminate. Thus, when he sought sublimity in the “here and now” he broke with the eloquence of romantic art but not with its fundamental task of bearing pictorial or otherwise expressive witness to the inexpressible. The inexpressible does not reside in an “over there,” in another world or another time, but in this: that “it happens.” In the determination of pictorial art the indeterminate, the “it’s happening,” is color––the painting. The color––the painting––as occurrence or event is not expressible, and it is to this that it must bear witness.

Perhaps the locus of the whole difference between romanticism and the “modern” avant-garde is to translate “The Sublime is Now” as “Now the Sublime is This”––not elsewhere, not up there or over there, not earlier or later, not once upon a time, but here, now, “it happens”––and it’s this painting. Now, and here, there is this painting where there might have been nothing at all, and that’s what is sublime. Letting go and disarming all grasping intelligence, recognizing that this occurrence of painting was not necessary and is barely visible, an openness to the Is it happening? , the protection of the occurrence “before” defending it, by illustration or commentary, the guarding “before” putting up one’s guard, and looking––looking under the aegis of now––these are the rigors of the avant-garde. In literary art this plea on behalf of the Is it happening? found one of its most rigorous realizations in Gertrude Stein’s How to Write (1931). It’s still the sublime in the sense of Burke and Kant, and (yet) isn’t their sublime any more.

The sublime may well be the single artistic sensibility to characterize the Modern. Paradoxically, it was introduced to literary discussion and vigorously defended by the French writer Nicolas Boileau-Despéaux, classified in literary history as one of the most dogged advocates of ancient classicism. In 1674 Boileau published his L’Art poétique, but he also published Du sublime, his translation or transcription from the Peri hupsous (On the sublime). This is a treatise, or rather an essay, attributed to a certain Longinus about whose identity there has long been confusion, and whose life we now estimate as having begun toward the end of the first century of our era. The author was a rhetorician. Basically, he taught those oratorical devices with which a speaker, of whatever style, can persuade or move an audience. The didactics of rhetoric were then still linked to the tradition of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian. They were, in other words, linked to a republican institution wherein one had to know how to speak before assemblies and tribunals. One might expect that Longinus’ text would invoke the maxims and encomiums transmitted by this tradition. But this compact text is permeated by unsureness, as though its subject––the sublime, indeterminacy––sabotaged didactic strategies. I cannot analyze this hovering any further here. Boileau himself and numerous other commentators were aware of it, and concluded that the sublime could only be attained through a sublime style. Longinus certainly tried to define sublimity through discourse, writing that it was unforgettable, irresistible, and, most importantly, thought-provoking. He even tried to locate sources for this sublime in the ethos of the orator, in his pathos, and in the various procedures of discourse: figures of speech, choice of words, enunciation, composition. However, when it comes to the sublime, major obstacles get in the way of rhetorical and poetic regulations. There is, for example, wrote Longinus, a sublimity of thought sometimes recognizable in speech by its extreme simplicity of shape, at the precise point where the high character of the speaker creates an aura of solemnity. It sometimes takes the form of outright silence. While I would welcome and accept that silence for a beat or two, the reader will agree that it constitutes the greatest indeterminacy of all. What can remain of rhetoric (or of poetics) when the rhetorician in Boileau’s translation announces that to attain the sublime effect “there is no better figure of speech than the altogether hidden, that which we do not even recognize as a figure of speech”? How does one conceal speech; are there self-erasing figures of speech? How do we distinguish between hidden idioms and nonidioms? And what is a nonidiom? And what about this, very likely the final blow to didactics: the fact that such a sublime discourse accommodates any number of stylistic defects and formal imperfections? Plato’s style, for example, is full of bombast and strained comparisons and excess. Plato, in short, is a mannerist or a baroque compared to a Lysias, and so is Sophocles compared to an Ion, or Pindar compared to a Bacchylides. Only the former names in these pairings are sublime, whereas the latter one are merely perfect. Shortcomings in this métier are apparently therefore trifling matters, if they are the price to be paid for “true grandeur.” Grandeur in speech is true when it bears witness to the discrepancy between thought and the real world. Is it Boileau’s translation that brings us to this analogy, or is it the influence of early Christianity on Longinus?