Sublime Failures

Book excerpt: In Sublime Failures, David Martyn argues that a return to Kant's latent "Sadianism" helps to confront the unresolved question of agency -- or how to formulate an ethic after the deconstruction of the subject -- in cultural studies theory. Acknowledging allegations of Kant's "empty formalism" and even of his proximity to a certain Sadianism, Martyn argues that Kant's ethics are valid not despite but because of their similarity to those of Sade. In close readings that address the historical and material conditions of the composition of their work, Martyn argues that the efforts of Kant and Sade to totalize systems -- of ethics, philosophy, pleasures, crimes -- must fail, but that the failure leads to important insights about ethics. The book offers philosophical and rhetorical analyses of the two authors' major works, and focuses on two related thematic fields: the economy of the gift and the materiality of writing. Stories of giving and thievery in Sade are read in tandem with Kant's elaborations about what is and is not "given" to us in the phenomenal world, and Kant's digressions on the challenges of writing a critique of pure reason are correlated with Sade's depictions of the crime of writing. A reinterpretation of the Kantian sublime then allows for an alignment of these two paradigms by showing how writing and the "gift" invalidate the teleological premises of traditional ethics. The book concludes with a critique of Lacan's essay, "Kant with Sade, " which provides an occasion to assess questions of gender, "race, " and cultural alterity.