Sublime Sufferings

The violence of reading, as Robert Musil conceives of it in his debut novel, is not reducible to the violence of a given represented content. The scene of reading mediates between language and phenomenon, between intradiegetic circumstance and the external world, between the unrepresentable and the depicted. It necessarily points to the moment in the text where the project of representation becomes questionable—in Musil’s case, it is the moment when the violent institutional formation of young pupils is shown to owe its force to an abstract and primordial violence as the form-giving dynamic behind all formation that, in turn, cannot take on a recognizable form of its own. In Kant’s vocabulary, such violence may be called transcendental: it radically exceeds the capacity of representation and thus causes a kind of pain that is no longer recorded in any sensory register but emerges precisely when this register breaks down due to an unaccommodable suprasensory surcharge. The failure of representation, in other words, elicits a pain that exceeds the parameters of what is perceivable. By another name, Kant knew this failure as the “sublime.” The following chapter dedicates itself to the sublime pain that pangs at the heart of the problem of representation itself.