Life After Difference: The Positions of the Interpreter and the Positionings of the Interpreted

ing of person leaves no check on the temptation to universalize far beyond the specific practice. Suspending the personal becomes a ground for overriding it. The need to secure truths by achieving third-person agreements becomes the denial of all other features of personal life because they cannot be represented in a language of truths. Then there can be no resistance to method except from within: everything else proves merely per sonal interest or affective attitude. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.221 on Sun, 06 Nov 2016 05:49:08 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms LIFE AFTER DIFFERENCE 279 These problematic orientations seem so deeply embedded in our culture that it is difficult to imagine mere argument making much difference. We find ourselves in a situation where even opponents of this imperial reason like Lyotard end up mimicking its most radical atomistic features and bas ing their hopes for resistance on an analytic language purified of all discus sion of personal purpose and desire. Yet if we look more closely at the posi tions we occupy as interpreters in the arts I think we will see at least the outlines of a much richer version of third-person activity, a version capable of fleshing out what is involved in shifting from a pictorial to a pragmatic account of knowledge, and thus promising to maintain critical leverage on empiricist excesses without succumbing to the romantic expressivism now basic to that criticism. My guide here will be Kant. But I shall recast in con temporary terms what I take to be the core of his argument that the an tinomy of aesthetic judgment provides a symbol for the moral order.6 In so doing I hope to show how such correlating of first-person immediacy with third-person concerns for justification extends to the domains of ethics and politics, even if we abandon Kant's rationalism for the much more fluid dynamics of identification made possible by the aspectual view of subjective investments. The contemporary relevance of Kant's antinomy emerges clearly if we ask why one might care to invoke third-person terms at all in interpreting works of art. Why is it not sufficient to enjoy the work on one's own terms? The simplest answer is that then the work has no otherness, no difference deriving from the cultural position it occupies. The only way to attempt understanding differences (rather than simply acknowledging them) is to submit the self to some model of critical practice that requires casting one's own interests in impersonal or transpersonal terms. (Interests may align us to interpretive communities, but within them we must bracket autobiographical idiosyncracies.) However in asthetic experience we are usually not content with such knowledge unless we retain a sense of the distinctive personal investments giving life to what we come to understand. Rather than derive first-person states from the conditions of knowledge, we must see that agent as adapting to those states because of the modes of ex pression they make possible. This relation of the will to the desire for reasoned agreement explains why Kant sees aesthetic experience offering a symbol of the moral good because "it gives pleasure with a claim for the agreement of everyone else" (section 59, p. 199). Aesthetic experience provides the kind of reflexive space in which we can easily turn from the art object to the dispositions that pervade the subject's looking at the object. On the one hand we see clearly This content downloaded from 157.55.39.221 on Sun, 06 Nov 2016 05:49:08 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms