III—

Kant loves Isis for her unavail ability. She is the totality of all that was, is, and will be: no one can lift her veil and that is what makes her sublime. Isis appears (veiled) a second time in Kant's writing. In "On a Newly

Emerged Noble Tone in Philosophy" (1796), a polemic against romantic philosophers of feeling, he describes the veiled goddess as "the inner moral law in its inviolable majesty," and while Kant says that both he and the romantics (or "mystagogues") must "bend our knees" before her, he is suspicious of their claims to immediacy and of the danger that representation in images will displace philosophical principles.^[21] It might appear that these two manifestations of Isis present her under very different aspects, or with more than one veil. In the note to the Critique she becomes "Mother Nature" and stands for the ultimate truth of things, while in the later essay she personifies the moral law. If Kant were an ultimately dualistic philosopher we might wonder how she could play both roles. Yet as the Critique of Judgment makes clear, he wants to bridge the apparent gap between cognitive and moral domains. Isis can figure as an aesthetic idea for the truth of nature, for the moral law, or finally, for the very tentative connection between them that Kant wants to effect.

Derrida's parodic response to Kant's essay "Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy" (1983) shows in part how Isis functions there. For although in The Truth in Painting Derrida never comments upon Isis' appearance in the third Critique —an extremely interesting omission given her parergonal position within the text and the centrality of this concept to Derrida's reading of it—in "An Apocalyptic Tone" he remarks in some detail upon "the intrigue of a certain veil of Isis."^[22] Derrida understands Isis exclusively as a "matter of the veil and of castration" (15) and even appears to link murder, castration, and femininity: he calls Isis "the universal principle of femininity and murderess of Osiris" (19). "Faced with Isis," he says, "I am going to expose myself to taking (and tying) up again with the threads of this intrigue and with the treatment of castration" (15).^[23] Faced with Isis, Derrida looks the other way.

In Kant's "On a Newly Emerged Tone," as in Derrida's "Apocalyptic Tone," Isis has neither existence nor interest apart from her veil. This veil plays a surprisingly large role in Kant's flirtation with Isis, given that he explicitly includes "drapery on statues" under the category of parerga (72, §14). In the case of Isis Kant would seem to insist, contrary to his more explicit aesthetics, that the parergon or frame cannot be eliminated from the figure or work. Indeed, Kant's criticism of the romantic philosopher of his day, whom he calls the "philosopher of intuition" (284) or "philosopher of vision" (285), is elaborated in terms of the latter's rapport with the veiled goddess. "The term 'Philosophy,'" Kant tells us, has "lost its

first meaning as a 'Scientific Wisdom of Life'" and "now implies the revelation of a mystery" (283). The "Philosopher by Inspiration" (283) refuses mediation and seeks direct contact with what the true philosophers—"those 'schoolmen' who proceed slowly and cautiously through criticism to knowledge" (284)—know to avoid. Believing himself in immediate and intuitive relation with the mystery, the romanticist tries to attain an intimate rapport with the goddess without the aid of conscientious, diligent labor. In the futile attempt to see directly into the unseeable, he hopes "to come so near to the goddess Wisdom that [he] can hear the rustling [Rauschen ] of her garment" (285). For although "the Platonic sentimentalist . . . 'cannot remove the veil of Isis, [he tries] to make it so thin [so dunne ] that one can divine the goddess beneath it' [unter ihm ]. How thin? Presumably still dense enough to make of that phantom [Gespenst ] whatever one likes" (285; emphasis mine).

The true philosopher, however, should place the law above and beyond personification, even that represented by the veiled goddess; recognize the difference between the moral law and the mystery of vision and contact; and realize that, as Derrida says, "the moral law never gives itself to be seen or touched" (13). Kant concludes: "the veiled goddess before whom both of us bend our knees is the inner moral law in its inviolable majesty. What we ought to do remains the same. Only: to reduce the moral law to logical conceptions is the philosophical procedure, to personify it in a veiled Isis is an aesthetic representation" (285). But Kant himself comes close to deviating from properly "philosophical procedure" through recourse to what he says distinguishes the "philosopher of intuition" from the "schoolmen": he personifies the sublime moral law (which may itself be the veiled truth of nature) as a veiled goddess.

Isis and her inscription are sublime because they manifest a certain reserve and distance: because she is past, present, and future, no one can lift her veil, that is, directly apprehend the totality she represents. Kant's Isis is impenetrable, and therein lies her power. She is herself the enigma she exhibits and she ensures the place of the unknowable by placing a frame around it, thereby giving its supposed inaccessibility limit and definition. But, as we have seen, Isis' veil raises the same questions that haunt the parergon and the sublime: is there a "real" ghost behind the veil or sheet that adorns it? Is the ghost identical with the veil that seems to conceal it; does anything lie beneath the veil? And what if Isis, exemplar

of the sublime, were indeed a ghost? Would the anonymous spectator really be able "to make of that phantom whatever one likes?" Kant and Derrida both assure us that it is dangerous, if not in fact a serious error, to get near enough to find out, that we should keep a proper distance and leave the veil intact.

Like Kant's notion of Isis, ghosts are (as Marjorie Garber reminds us) "often veiled, sheeted, and shadowy in form . . . a cultural marker of absence, a reminder of loss," and they appear in the place where they have not been acknowledged or admitted. Ghosts "always come back, but they are always already belated when they come—it is only when they return, re-venant , that they are ghosts, and carry the authority of their own belatedness."^[24] For example, in the numbers of a certain address: 124 Bluestone Road, the house in which Beloved takes place and for which, as for the third Critique , we sense a third term it cannot possess.^[25] For the number three simultaneously names what the house on Bluestone Road does not contain and signifies the return of that which renders detachment impossible. It also announces that, since there are definitely a lot more than two of us now, the ghost story can begin. Again.