Sublime Point

A figure Merleau-Ponty borrows from Breton and deploys recurrently in *Adventures of the Dialectic* (1955) for the dreamed-of moment in which "matter and spirit would no longer be discernible as subject and object, individual and history, past and future, discipline and judgment" (AD 97). It is MP's diagnostic name for the Marxist utopia of reconciled opposites — the revolutionary moment's promise of overcoming all antinomies at once. MP's verdict: Lukács located the sublime point in the life of the Party; Trotsky drew his political perspectives from the "perfect moments" of October 1917; in both cases the sublime point becomes the dream that cannot survive its own institutionalization.

Key Points

  • Breton as source: Breton's L'Amour fou and Les Vases communicants develop "the sublime point" as the Surrealist figure of resolved contradictions (high/low, wake/dream, life/death). MP takes the figure and transposes it into the philosophy of history.
  • The Marxist utopia named: in the Preface, the revolution is "the sublime moment in which reality and values, subject and object, judgment and discipline, individual and totality, present and future, instead of colliding, would little by little enter into complicity" (AD 7).
  • Lukács's version: "Marxism could not resolve the problem that is presented and from which we started. It could not maintain itself at that sublime point which it hoped it could find in the life of the Party, that point where matter and spirit would no longer be discernible as subject and object, individual and history, past and future, discipline and judgment" (AD 97).
  • Trotsky's version: "One is then at that sublime point which we have mentioned several times. Trotsky always draws his perspectives from these perfect moments. He emphasizes the fact that constraint is then barely necessary, because the will to change the world finds confederates everywhere and because, from the fields to the factory, each local demand is found to concur in the general action" (AD 114).
  • A hub motif: the sublime point is one of the book's cross-chapter figures, appearing in the Preface (revolution as sublime moment), Ch 2 (Lukács's Party as sublime point), and Ch 4 (Trotsky's October insurrection as sublime moment). It consolidates MP's diagnosis that Marxism mistakes a momentary political phenomenon for a permanent structure.

Details

From Surrealism to Marxism

Breton's sublime point is a Surrealist figure for the resolution of contradictions — the imagined apex from which "life and death, the real and the imaginary, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low cease to be perceived contradictorily" (Second Manifesto of Surrealism, 1930; cf. L'Amour fou 1937). It is related to the alchemical lapis and to mystical theology: a point where opposites meet without synthesis.

MP detaches the figure from Surrealism and uses it to name a structural wish in the Marxist tradition. The Marxist sublime point is the imagined moment when the revolution's movement-phase would resolve all antinomies simultaneously: subject and object (in proletarian praxis), judgment and discipline (in the Party), individual and totality (in class consciousness), past and future (in the end of pre-history). Where Surrealism takes the point as accessible through dream, love, and automatic writing, Marxism takes it as accessible through political action and historical development.

Why the Sublime Point Fails

MP's critique runs at two levels:

  1. Phenomenological: the sublime point is only momentarily attestable; it cannot become a regime. When it becomes a regime it "no longer is what it was as movement" — see revolutions-true-as-movements-false-as-regimes. A sublime point that has become permanent is no longer sublime; it is an institution like any other, with its own inertia and its own opacity.
  2. Ontological: the opposites the sublime point promises to reconcile are not antinomies that can be synthesized; they are the co-constituting poles of a field whose structure is dialectical non-coincidence. Subject and object, individual and totality, are not lines that could meet at a point. They are "always imminent and never realized" — see chiasm, reversibility.

The first critique is political — it explains the historical failure of the revolutionary tradition. The second critique is ontological — it explains why the sublime point could not have succeeded even under better conditions.

Trotsky's Use

Ch 4 of Adventures of the Dialectic is the most sustained analysis of how the sublime point functions in a revolutionary mind. Trotsky "always draws his perspectives from these perfect moments" of October 1917. In those moments, the proletariat's will and the Party's direction coincided; "the will to change the world finds confederates everywhere"; "each local demand is found to concur in the general action"; "constraint is then barely necessary" (AD 114). These are the features of revolution-as-movement.

MP's diagnosis: "But can one conceive of a continued, of an established, flow, of a regime that would live at this level of tension, of a historical time which would be constantly agitated by this critical ferment, of a life without lasting attainments and without rest?" (AD 114). "Permanent revolution is this myth" — the fantasy that the sublime-point conditions can be institutionalized.

Trotsky could not imagine that the Party might betray the proletariat because his philosophy of history was built on the premise that the sublime point of October had already been achieved. The subsequent divergence of Party from proletariat he could not name as betrayal without admitting that the sublime point of October was local, temporary, and already lost. His inability to do so produced his practical paralysis between 1923 and 1927.

Lukács's Use

Ch 2's treatment of Lukács locates the sublime point at a subtler place: not in a moment of insurrection but in the life of the Party. Lukács's Party is the "mystery of reason" in which "concept becomes life" (AD 76), where speaker and audience applaud together the truth that appears between them (AD 76), where proletarian praxis finds its critical elaboration without being either the proletarians' opinion or the theoreticians' imposition. This is the sublime point at a structural level: the Party is the institution in which the subject/object, concept/existence, thought/action oppositions are resolved.

MP's diagnosis is that this cannot hold. The Party must make decisions; decisions cannot be continuous self-criticisms; the representatives of negativity become positive powers "ever more strongly in the name of positivity" (AD 114); the sublime point of the "applauding audience" becomes the spectacle of "unanimous" decisions. Lukács's philosophical sublime point is as fragile as Trotsky's political one.

The 1955 and 1961 Sublime Points

The wiki's Breton page already notes that MP appropriates the sublime point for his late ontology (1959–61). That appropriation is the later, ontological use of the figure — the sublime point as a figure for the structure of the flesh, for the productive non-coincidence of sensing and sensed. The 1955 use is the political-historical use, diagnostic of the Marxist utopia of reconciled opposites.

These two uses are not contradictory. In fact they are the same figure used to identify an illusion and to point toward its ontological truth. The Marxist sublime point is an illusion because it treats as a permanent synthesis what is in fact a momentary convergence; the ontological sublime point is a true figure for the structure of the flesh precisely because it recognizes that "always imminent and never realized" is the essence of the point. A sublime point that is instituted-as-regime is a betrayal; a sublime point understood as the dialectical non-coincidence at the heart of experience is MP's late ontology.

Positions

  • Breton: the Surrealist figure — high/low, life/death, real/imaginary reconciled in a single point. MP takes over the figure.
  • Lukács: the philosophical sublime point — the Party as the place where matter and spirit, concept and life, are no longer discernible. MP uses him to diagnose the figure.
  • Trotsky: the political sublime point — October 1917 as the perfect moment from which all subsequent politics takes its perspective. MP's Ch 4 diagnoses this use.
  • Later MP (1959–61): the ontological sublime point — the figure for the flesh's constitutive non-coincidence. Affirmatively deployed.

Connections

  • is MP's name for the Marxist utopia of reconciled opposites
  • recurs in the Preface, Ch 2 (Lukács), and Ch 4 (Trotsky) of Adventures of the Dialectic
  • is transposed from Breton's Surrealism to the philosophy of history
  • is the dialectical opposite of movement vs. regime — the sublime point is the dream that the movement-phase could be made permanent
  • is refused by the new-liberalism — the new liberalism accepts that no political institution occupies the sublime point
  • exposes the structure of ultrabolshevism — ultrabolshevism is what happens when one tries to reach the sublime point by pure action without dialectic
  • is later reworked ontologically as a figure for chiasm and reversibility — "always imminent and never realized" is the post-Marxist sublime point
  • reveals the illusion behind permanent revolution — permanent revolution is the claim that the sublime point can be institutionalized
  • has a late ontological development (see andre-breton entity page) — MP uses the figure affirmatively in 1959–61 for the structure of the flesh
  • is developed as a structural figure by Johnson and Carbone (johnson-carbone-saintaubert-2020-poetic-of-the-world ch. 2) who read it as "permanent revolution" in the ontological register — the bridge term between the 1955 political critique and the late ontology

Open Questions

  • Does MP's later affirmative use of the sublime point (in the 1959–61 ontology) contradict his critical use in 1955, or are they two sides of the same figure (illusion vs. truth of the structure)? The wiki's present reading is continuity through translation.
  • Is the diagnosis of Trotsky historically fair? Trotsky after his expulsion sometimes explicitly analyzed the "disappearance" of the October sublime point; MP reads him as unable to name this, but it could be argued Trotsky did name it, though too late.
  • What is the relation between the Marxist sublime point and the Hegelian absolute knowledge? Both claim a point where all oppositions are reconciled; MP treats the first as a politicization of the second, but the structural relation deserves further articulation.
  • Is the sublime point's ontological use a metaphor or a continuation? That is, does MP use "sublime point" in 1959–61 because the figure happens to apply, or because the same figure names the same structure in different domains? The latter would imply that MP thinks of the Marxist illusion as a misrecognition of a real structural feature.

Sources

  • merleau-ponty-1955-adventures-of-the-dialectic — the primary source for the political use. Preface at p. 7 (revolution as "sublime moment"); Ch 2 at p. 97 (Lukács's Party as sublime point); Ch 4 at p. 114 (Trotsky's perfect moments). The figure is marked in the text as recurring: "one is then at that sublime point which we have mentioned several times."
  • andre-breton — the Surrealist source of the figure.
  • merleau-ponty-1968-visible-and-invisible — the later ontological deployment (see andre-breton).
  • johnson-carbone-saintaubert-2020-poetic-of-the-world — Ch 2 (Johnson/Carbone) develops the sublime point as structural figure for the coincidence of antinomies in the late ontology: "Not a preestablished harmony, but a permanent revolution." The political register of 1955 and the ontological register of 1960–61 are explicitly connected in this secondary source — "permanent revolution" is the bridge term.
  • alloa-chouraqui-kaushik-2019-contemporary-philosophy — ch. 11 (Johnson) extends the sublime-point engagement through Breton's Mad Love and Manifesto of Surrealism.