Introduction: “It's so beautiful …”

The beautiful has been “out of fashion” for quite some time. As Steven Shaviro observed (and this is still probably true more than two decades later since this was first written): “It has become quite fashionable to talk about the Sublime, as it is presented in Kant's Critique of Judgement, in relation to postmodernism. But it is rare to find anyone who similarly considers Kant's presentation of the Beautiful.” The sublime has the potential to appeal to our more “negative” inclinations—the overwhelming dread or awe popularized in dystopian (sci-fi) narratives (zombie narratives, apocalyptic narratives, cataclysmic [climate] narratives—perhaps even the Marvel universe?). “The Sublime seems more appropriate to contemporary taste,” Shaviro observes, “because it is an aesthetic of immensity, excess, and disproportion. Whereas the Beautiful is one of harmony and proportion. It is as if Beauty were somehow old-fashioned, whereas the Sublime is considered more radical.” But frankly—in the Trump era, coupled with a global pandemic (only previously envisioned by those very same sublime dystopian narratives mentioned above)—I have had enough. It is time that we reclaim the beautiful and other pleasurable affects.

Pleasurable affects are synonymous with the Kantian conception of the beautiful. Immanuel Kant argues that the beautiful is a subjective experience that is representative of the subject's feelings and reveals nothing innate about the referent which is characterized as “beautiful.” To say that the interstitial moments in Terrence Malick's 2011 film The Tree of Life are beautiful, actually says very little. The cosmos set to the soaring operatic score of Zbigniew Preisner's “Lacrimosa,” again, reveals very little about the audio-visual referent, instead it reveals something about the subject making the utterance—namely, these moments in The Tree of Life elicited from me intense pleasure (goosebumps). Expressing that something is “beautiful,” then, is little more than a veiled expression of pleasure, and reveals nothing about the innate characteristics of the cinematic material, or whatever the affecting referent might be. Lurking within Kant's Critique of Judgement, and specifically his “theory of the beautiful,” as Shaviro observes, “is really a theory of affect and of singularity; and it implies an entirely new form of judgment.” The aesthetic is a subjective position, it reveals more about the subject than it does about the nature of the referent that is recognized as pleasurable.