1982 年 1982 巻 6 号 p. 65-83
The supposed radicalism of Burke's treatise The Sublime and the Beautiful, toppling as it apparently does the orderly canons of Augustan decorum, has long been something of an embarrassment to critics sympathetic to the reactionary thrust of his Reflections on the Revolution in France. I have attempted to demonstrate that Burke's aesthetics are in fact structured by a psychoanalytical narrative that unites, rather than contrasts, them with his explicit politics. Psychoanalysis cannot, however, merely map its categories on to its object texts, for to do so is to abolish their specific materiality in a fit of theoretical idealism. I have therefore sought those moments of textual 'parapraxis'. those slippages of argument, points of selfcontradiction, elisions of key terms, or unresolved indeterminacies. at which a Freudian hermeneutic may be unreductively applied. Governed by an Oedipal structure that twists into incoherence the surface of its text, Burke's aesthetic of the Sublime turns out not to be a dallying with madness, but rather the very moment of its expulsion in the name of a cultural and political order he would defend more stridently in the Reflections.