Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1998. Vol. 2. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)

Book reviews - Tibor Tóth: Patricia Waugh: Practising Postmodernism Reading Modernism

imperialistic violence and Postmodernism, in spite of the obvious political and aesthetic dangers posed by both interpretations. In the section entitled 'The Poetics of the Sublime, Presenting the Unpresentable,' Waugh concentrates on Lyotard's essay 'Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?' and Lyotard's interpretation of Kant's concept of the representational act of imagination. Her suggestion is that Lyotard turns the premises of Kant's concept of the sublime against itself to argue for a postmodern version which recognizes that the sublime is the unrepresentable in presentation itself. The interpretation that the outside space identified by Lyotard has to remain sublime, serves as a starting point for Waugh's parallel analysis of Kant and Lyotard. In the section entitled 'Enlightenment, Exhausted or Incomplete?' Waugh discusses Habermans's project to reinvent reason in order to complete the 'unfinished' Enlightenment. She argues that though Habermans is anxious to refute postmodern aestheticism, his critique of the dominance of narrow expertise and the fragmentation of human powers, actually borrows from the Romantic critique of industrialisation developed from the writing of Rousseau and Schiller. Waugh concludes the section by discussing Haberman's 1980 talk demanding that the aesthetic should be freed from the grip of the institutionalised, professional critics, and goes on by discussing the art of the unrepresentable in the section entitled 'Terror and Sublime.' Introducing Lyotard's reaction to Habermans's particular call for an integration of the aesthetic into the 'lifeworld', Waugh invokes Kant 's concept of the beautiful. She quotes Kant's view on the beautiful as pleasure formulating our common response of the shared basis of human understanding and the existence of harmonious, intersubjective experiences of value, and the sublime as the experience leading to recognition of the inadequacy of the values produced by the conceptual thought. Waugh concludes that Lyotard sees in the postmodern as in the Romantic, the expression of sublime, a form of resistance to the banal and automating effects of modern life, and the sublime remains a never to be realised beyond. Waugh refuses to accept the idea that Postmodernism has exhausted its usefulness. In the section 'The Concept Versus the Luminous Detail, Against Totality' she states that Lyotard intends the elaboration of a philosophical position which implicitly refuses available paradigms within the tradition of analytical philosophy and this position is easy to turn back on itself. She argues that the postmodern condition envisaged by Lyotard, Rotry, Foucault, Deluze and Fish is itself simply a totalisation, an invention of theory as it denies the possibility of theory in a contemporary version of the ancient Liar Paradox. When postmodernism tries to formulate a critique of Enlightenment, she argues, it can't step out of the thing it examines and 191