ABSTRACT
How do art and science relate to sublimation? While they both engage in sublimation (i.e., they both generate a distance toward our immersion into the direct lived experience of reality), each of the two relies on a different mode of it. 1 Science accomplishes the process of sublimating abstraction. It totally evacuates the lived reality of the sexualized body, reducing reality to pure extension, to matter distributed in abstract space. For science, mathematizable abstraction is therefore the only contact with the Real. In it, reality and the Real are opposed as the concrete lived experience of bodies and abstract (ultimately senseless) numerical formulas. In contrast to it, art remains within lived reality. It cuts out from it a fragment, an object, elevating it to the “level of the Thing.” (Recall, as the zero-level of this procedure, Duchamp’s readymade art: by displaying a urinal as an object of art, it “transubstantiated” its materiality into the mode of appearance of the Thing.) 2 Science and art thus relate to the Thing in a totally different way: art directly evokes it (i.e., artistic beauty is the last veil that conceals/announces the dimension of the Thing), while,
What do all these examples enumerated by Leader have in common? They designate new “unnatural” (previously unknown) objects that emerged in our bodily reality as the result of scientifi c knowledge-they are, in a way, scientifi c knowledge materialized. As such, they undermine, violate even, our
most elementary “sense of reality”: what is so monstrous about the atomic bomb is not simply the amount of destruction but the more radical and unsettling fact that the very texture of our reality seems to disintegrate. Mutatis mutandis, the same goes for monsters that may emerge as the result of biogenetic engineering: in a sense, they are not a part of our “ordinary” reality.
