ABSTRACT
Despite modernity’s turn towards immanent values and immanent economies, giving rise to the politics of liberalism and the evolutionarism of Darwin, an appeal was made to that which transcended all immanence. It is the argument of this essay that modernity’s transcendence took two, symmetrical forms: absolute presence (announced in the aesthetics of the sublime) and profound absence (a meaninglessness aesthetically embodied in the kitsch). These two forms of transcendence were inseparable from modernity’s twofold construal of mimesis or representation in which, on the one hand, beyond or outside the sign lay direct and pure contact with the immediacy of the object being signified or, on the other, beyond and outside the sign lay direct and pure contact with the meaninglessness of the contingent flux.
