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Now, the Begebenheit, or sign of history, continues Lyotard, can be understandably found on the side of audiences watching great historical upheavals: first, revolutions themselves are like spectacles of nature, they are formless and thus account for an experience of the sublime; second, the spectators, as opposed to direct participants, are not empirically implicated and therefore, so to say, corrupt. However, being in the «theater hall» is an unprecedented privilege. For the feeling of the sublime experienced by the spectators spreads out toward «all the national stages», in other words, is potentially universal. This universality, as Lyotard goes on to show, is of a very special nature, for, quite unlike cognitive phrases, the feeling of the sublime «judges without a rule» (italics added). Its a priori is not a rule universally recognized, but one that awaits its own universality. Universality in abeyance, in suspense (universalité en souffrance), a promise of universality, which necessarily brings us to sensus communis. Characteristic of the aesthetic judgment, this common or communal sense is an «indeterminate norm» in that it does not guarantee that «everyone will agree to my judgment…». But, as a faculty of judgment, it does take account of the «mode of representation of all other men». To finish the argument, enthusiasm as a probative Begebenheit (and also a pure aesthetic feeling) calls upon a consensus which ends up being nothing other than «a sentimental anticipation of the republic» (in the form of a de jure undetermined sensus).

Here I will stop. I will only point to the one important consequence that follows. The universality invoked by the sublime (as well as by the beautiful), concludes Lyotard, is merely an Idea of community, for which no proof, that is, no direct presentation, exists or will ever be found. What there does exist, however, is a bond, a bond of «communicability» between two parties to a conflicting phrase, and this bond retains «the status of a feeling». Communicability, one might say, is a way of «logging onto» the phrase of taste and thus of informing it with varying degrees of heterogeneity. For Lyotard sensus communis (in aesthetics) signifies an «appeal to community» (italics added) which is carried out a priori and judged without any rule of direct presentation. What is a priori shared is «a feeling».

Of course, it is no discovery that Kant opens up a space for a thinking of community. But thinking Kant according to this exigency is quite another matter. I would claim that this very «retrospection» is a sign of change — if not a Begebenheit in the proper sense, then at least something that emerges from within contemporaneity and that tends to be associated with the present-day «condition». There is much to discuss inside as well as beyond the Kantian framework. Let us simply bear in mind the following. Community is never there, that is, it is not objectifiable. Not only does it remain unpresentable, but it cannot be, properly speaking, achieved — even the French Revolution is meaningful to the extent to which it is anticipatory of the republic. (Community, let me note in passing, is on the side of that eventuality which is dispersed in time: Kant’s Begebenheit is what he explicitly calls «signum rememorativum, demonstrativum, prognosticon», a sign recalling, showing, and anticipating all at once.) Yet, there must be something that allows for a discourse of the community, even though community itself cannot but fail. (And, one must add, it is always failed — always on the edge of language, always indicating an «other» space, always, in a word, anonymous.) We must be able to deliver its message and its promise. For Kant, as Lyotard convincingly shows, the problem is resolved by the affective paradox of the sublime. A feeling is shared about a formless something that alludes to the beyond of experience, yet the feeling itself constitutes an «as-if presentation» (be it of the Idea of civil society or that of morality), and it emerges right there where the Idea cannot be presented, i.e., in experience. (Of course, Kant’s understanding of experience is significantly different from what was said about it earlier above. Rather, the Begebenheit itself would be synonymous to that experience.)