ABSTRACT
This chapter develops a reading of the sublime in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, in order to show its impact on the Critique of Pure Reason. This reading follows Lyotard’s in many respects, but also diverges, and adopts the spirit, if not all of the substance, of Derrida’s essay “Parergon” from The Truth in Painting. The basic contention is that the sublime, understood as a problem concerning the negative imagination, represents the problem of the Schematism writ large. The reading of the sublime which I develop shatters externally, or from outside, the project of the First Critique, whereas the reading of the Schematism developed in the next chapter shatters the explicit project of the First Critique from the inside. The final chapter undertakes a theological evaluation of the status of the notion of the sublime which results in and from these shatterings.
