In The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature, Emily Brady takes a fresh look at the sublime and shows why it endures as a meaningful concept in contemporary philosophy. In a reassessment of historical approaches, the first part of the book identifies the scope and value of the sublime in eighteenth-century philosophy, nineteenth-century philosophy and Romanticism, and early wilderness aesthetics. The second part examines the sublime's contemporary significance through its relationship to the arts; its (...) position with respect to other aesthetic categories involving mixed or negative emotions, such as tragedy; and its place in environmental aesthetics and ethics. Far from being an outmoded concept, Brady argues that the sublime is a distinctive aesthetic category which reveals an important, if sometimes challenging, aesthetic-moral relationship with the natural world. (shrink)

Current understandings of the sublime are focused by a single word and by a single author. The sublime is not a word: it is a concept and an experience, or rather a whole range of ideas, meanings and experiences that are embedded in conceptual and experiential patterns. Once we train our sights on these patterns a radically different prospect on the sublime in antiquity comes to light, one that touches everything from its range of expressions to its (...) dates of emergence, evolution, role in the cultures of antiquity as a whole, and later reception. This book is the first to outline an alternative account of the sublime in Greek and Roman poetry, philosophy, and the sciences, in addition to rhetoric and literary criticism. It offers new readings of Longinus without privileging him, but instead situates him within a much larger context of reflection on the sublime in antiquity. (shrink)

The Sublime in Schopenhauer's Philosophy transforms our understanding of Schopenhauer's aesthetics and anthropology. Bart Vandenabeele breaks new ground by providing what is probably the first monograph to be devoted exclusively to Schopenhauer's theory of the sublime. The book focuses on Schopenhauer's conception of the sublime and how it relates to the individual and its attitude towards life. The author explores in unusual depth Schopenhauer's relation to Kant, whose follower and critic he was, and shows how Schopenhauer's aesthetic (...) theory moves beyond Kant's in numerous meaningful ways. Drawing on recent insights in psychology and the philosophy of mind, Vandenabeele seeks ultimately to rework Schopenhauer's theory into a viable form so as to establish the sublime as a distinctive aesthetic category with a broader existential and metaphysical significance. (shrink)

Why are we interested in history at all? Why do we feel the need to distinguish between past and present? In this book, the author argues that the past originates from an experience of rupture separating past and present. Think of the radical rupture with Europe's past that was effected by the French and the Industrial Revolutions. Sublime Historical Experience investigates how the notion of sublime historical experience complicates and challenges existing conceptions of language, truth, and knowledge. These (...) experiences of rupture are paradoxical since they involve both the separation of past and present and, at the same time, the effort to overcome this separation in terms of historical knowledge. The experience unites feelings of loss/pain with those of love/satisfaction, and thus is in agreement with how sublime experience is ordinarily defined. The experience is also precognitive since it precedes historical knowledge. As such it is a challenge to traditional conceptions of the relationship between experience and truth or language. It compels us to disconnect the notions of experience and truth. (shrink)

The question of the sublime remains considerable in Schopenhauer’s thought, insofar as it gives the essential clue to his ethical intentions. Schopenhauer’s emphasis on corporeality and the questioning of representation at the limits of his metaphysics of the Will, as well as his discourse on freedom without any reference to a moral law, mark a distance from the Kantian perspective. In this article, our aim is to examine Schopenhauer’s thought of the sublime while taking into account Kant’s analyses (...) on the subject. (shrink)

The topic of the sublime is making a return to contemporary discourse on aesthetics and cognition. In Sublime Understanding, Kirk Pillow makes sublimity the center of an alternative conception of aesthetic response and interpretation. He draws an aesthetics of sublimity from Kant's Critique of Judgment, bolsters it with help from Hegel, and establishes its place in a broadened conception of human understanding. He argues that sublime reflection provides a model for an interpretive response to the uncanny Other (...) outside our conceptual grasp; it advances our sense-making pursuits but eschews unified, conceptual determination. Thus "sublime understanding" is the always partial, indeterminate grasping of contextual wholes through which we make sense of the uncanny particular in both art and the lived world. The book is divided into three parts. In the first two parts, Pillow presents insightful reinterpretations of Kant's and Hegel's aesthetics. In the third part he develops his own model of an aestheticized understanding, which illuminates contemporary discussions of metaphor and interpretation, while bridging Anglo-American and continental treatments of these issues. The presentation is a model of clear and well-crafted exposition, exemplifying the practice of aesthetically reflective sublime understanding that it articulates. (shrink)

A monograph devoted exclusively to Kant's theory of the sublime a subject currently witnessing a revival amongst European philosophers in relation to debates about the nature of postmodernism.

Often labelled as "indescribable," the sublime is a term that has been debated for centuries amongst writers, artists, philosophers and theorists. Usually related to ideas of the great, the awe-inspiring and the overpowering, the sublime has become a complex yet crucial concept in many disciplines. Offering historical overviews and explanations, Philip Shaw looks at: · The legacy of the earliest, classical theories of the sublime through the romantic to the post-modern and avant-garde sublimity · The major theorists (...) of the sublime such as Kant, Burke, Lyotard, Derrida, Lacan and Zizek, offering critical introductions to each · The significance of the concept through a range of literary readings including the Old and New testaments, Homer, Milton and writing from the romantic era · How the concept of the sublime has affected other art forms such as painting and film, from abstract expressionism to David Lynch's neo-noir This remarkably clear study of what is, in essence, a term which evades definition, is essential reading for students of literature, critical and cultural theory. (shrink)

This collection of texts on the Sublime provides the historical context for the foundation and discussion of one of the most important aesthetic debates of the Enlightenment. The significance of the Sublime in the eighteenth century ranged across a number of fields - literary criticism, empirical psychology, political economy, connoisseurship, landscape design and aesthetics, painting and the fine arts, and moral philosophy - and has continued to animate aesthetic and theoretical debates to this day. However, the unavailability of (...) many of the crucial texts of the founding tradition has resulted in a conception of the Sublime often limited to the definitions of its most famous theorist Edmund Burke. Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla's anthology, which includes an introduction and notes to each entry, offers students and scholars ready access to a much deeper and more complex tradition of writings on the Sublime, many of them never before printed in modern editions. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between ignorance, authority and nationalism in neoliberal thought and practice to argue that, far from signalling its end, the recent global rise of the right-wing demagogue is firmly rooted in neoliberalism. Part one mobilises the aesthetic concept of the sublime to explore the central place of, and relationship between, ignorance and authority. Part two argues that neoliberalism has its own form of nationalism which is underpinned by a social Darwinist logic. It is here that (...) we find the basis for the intersection between neoliberalism and the forms of vitriolic and xenophobic nationalism which have helped propel the global ascendency of the neoliberal demagogue. The concluding section argues that, in the context of growing inequality and insecurity, the demagogue mystifies social relations, projecting blame for the failings of the system on those constructed as "enemies of the people" in the interests of maintaining the status quo. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The demand for sublimation of one's primitive and “evil” instincts plays a crucial role in Nietzsche's ethics. But prominent misreadings of Nietzsche's concept of sublimation have led to errors in interpreting his view of the highest type of man. I argue that Nietzsche's view of sublimation is that it is the elevation of the objects of a drive through reinterpretation or reimagining them in such a way that the attainment of these new objects achieves a greater potency of expression (...) for the drive while retaining its intrinsic aims. I also clarify the function of sublimation in his ethics. (shrink)

Christine Battersby is a leading thinker in the field of philosophy, gender studies and visual and literary aesthetics. In this important new work, she undertakes an exploration of the nature of the sublime, one of the most important topics in contemporary debates about modernity, politics and art. Through a compelling examination of terror, transcendence and the ‘other’ in key European philosophers and writers, Battersby articulates a radical ‘female sublime’. A central feature of The Sublime, Terror and Human (...) Difference is its engagement with recent debates around ‘9/11’, race and Islam. Battersby shows how, since the eighteenth century, the pleasures of the sublime have been described in terms of the transcendence of terror. Linked to the ‘feminine’, the sublime was closed off to flesh-and-blood women, to ‘Orientals’ and to other supposedly ‘inferior’ human types. Engaging with Kant, Burke, the German Romantics, Nietzsche, Derrida, Lyotard, Irigaray and Arendt, as well as with women writers and artists, Battersby traces the history of these exclusions, while finding resources within the history of western culture for thinking human differences afresh The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference is essential reading for students of continental philosophy, gender studies, aesthetics, literary theory, visual culture, and race and social theory. (shrink)

The aesthetic tradition has identified as paradigmatically sublime such objects as imposing mountains and intense storms, as well as monumental art. But the tradition also acknowledges less paradigmatic cases, including sometimes mathematical structures or abstract concepts. In this paper, we argue that there is also a case for considering phenomenal consciousness – the experiential quality of subjective awareness – as a sublime phenomenon. One appreciates this, we argue, when one is struck by (fitting) awe upon contemplating (a) the (...) perplexing existence of something like phenomenal consciousness in an otherwise completely material universe and (b) the role of consciousness in injecting meaning and value in an otherwise brutally factual reality. (shrink)

In this provocative and original work, Slavoj Zizek takes a look at the question of human agency in a postmodern world. From the sinking of the Titanic to Hitchcock's Rear Window, from the operas of Wagner to science fiction, from Alien to the Jewish Joke, the author's acute analyses explore the ideological fantasies of wholeness and exclusion which make up human society. Linking key psychoanalytical and philosophical concepts to social phenomena such as totalitarianism and racism, the book explores the political (...) significance of these fantasies of control. In so doing, The Sublime Object of Ideology represents a powerful contribution to a psychoanalytical theory of ideology, as well as offering persuasive interpretations of a number of contemporary cultural formations. -- Back cover. (shrink)

Based on their critical analysis of Kant's "Critique of Judgment", the authors of this book show from different perspectives in what way the Kantian concept of the sublime is still a main stream of inspiration for contemporary thinking.

Tracks the sublime art movement from Kant to the 21st century and onwards to a new future Stephen Zepke tracks the sublime art movement from its beginnings in Kant to its flowering in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He shows that the idea of sublime art waxes and wanes in the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Ranciere and the recent Speculative Realism movement. With it, a visionary politics of (...) art seeks to give it the most creative power possible: the power to overcome our conditions and embrace the unknown. (shrink)

This volume offers readers a unique and comprehensive overview of theoretical perspectives on "the sublime," the singular aesthetic response elicited by phenomena that move viewers by transcending and overwhelming them. The book consists of an editor's introduction and fifteen chapters written from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Part One examines philosophical approaches advanced historically to account for the phenomenon, beginning with Longinus, moving through eighteenth and nineteenth century writers in Britain, France, and Germany, and concluding with developments in contemporary (...) continental philosophy. Part Two explores the sublime with respect to particular disciplines and areas of study, including Dutch literature, early modern America, the environment, religion, British Romanticism, the fine arts, and architecture. Each chapter is both accessible for nonspecialists and offers an original contribution to its respective field of inquiry. (shrink)

This book explores the impulses behind the fascination for that experience.

This edited collection had its origins in a two-day conference held at the Tate Britain, organised collaboratively by research staff and students at Middlesex University and the London Consortium in order to celebrate the 250th Anniversary of the publication of Edmund Burke's famous book on the sublime. The conference was funded by Middlesex University, the London Consortium and the Tate Britain's AHRC-funded "Sublime Object: Nature, Art and Language" research project. The conference set out to critically examine the legacy (...) of the sublime in contemporary art, culture and society and to assess the value and the dangers of this concept as it is articulated in current thought and practice. The book selected from and expanded on the papers delivered at the conference in order to pursue this goal further. It was broken into themed sections (each of which had an introduction), each exploring an different issue around contemporary uses of the sublime. The sections were: 1. Nature, Ecology and the Sublime; 2. The Sublime After Kant; 3. Capitalism, Terror, Art and the Sublime; 4. Baroque and Beyond: Art, Sex and the Sublime; 5. The Cinematic Sublime. The volume reflects the interdisiplinarity of the concept of the sublime today, and includes essays whose appraoches come from aesthetics and ethics, ecological and political thought, psychoanalysis, feminism, film studies, literary studies, art history and popular culture. It includes papers by internationally renowned authors from the UK, America and Europe alongside the new voices of younger academics. The contributors were: Jane Bennett (Johns Hopkins University), Mark Bould (University of the West of England), Eu Jin Chua (London Consortium), Gudrun Filipska (Middlesex University), Cornelia Klinger (Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna / University of Tübingen, Germany), Esther Leslie (Birkbeck), William McDonald (Middlesex Univeristy), Laura Mulvey (Birkbeck), Claire Pajaczkowska (Royal College of Art), Griselda Pollock (University of Leeds), Gene Ray (Geneva University of Art and Design), Bettina Reiber (Central St. Martins), Jan Rosiek (University of Copenhagen), Sherryl Vint (Brock University, Canada), and Luke White (Middlesex University). (shrink)

Based on an account of the Brighton Photo-Biennial Memory of Fire: The War of Images and Images of War, curated by Julian Stallabrass in late 2008, this essay considers the photographic coverage of the recent imperialist interventions in the Middle East. Taking its cue from Stallabrass's event, it reflects on the decline of documentary and photojournalism since the Vietnam War and the current attenuated politics of the media. It argues that the problem of the sublime extends beyond the current (...) genre of 'aftermath'-photography and asks what might constitute a more cognitively adequate politics of the image. (shrink)

An important work offering a viable theory for the concept of "Sublime" in philosophy.

Christine Battersby is a leading thinker in the field of philosophy, gender studies and visual and literary aesthetics. In this important new work, she undertakes an exploration of the nature of the sublime, one of the most important topics in contemporary debates about modernity, politics and art. Through a compelling examination of terror, transcendence and the ‘other’ in key European philosophers and writers, Battersby articulates a radical ‘female sublime’. A central feature of _The Sublime, Terror and Human (...) Difference_ is its engagement with recent debates around ‘9/11’, race and Islam. Battersby shows how, since the eighteenth century, the pleasures of the sublime have been described in terms of the transcendence of terror. Linked to the ‘feminine’, the sublime was closed off to flesh-and-blood women, to ‘Orientals’ and to other supposedly ‘inferior’ human types. Engaging with Kant, Burke, the German Romantics, Nietzsche, Derrida, Lyotard, Irigaray and Arendt, as well as with women writers and artists, Battersby traces the history of these exclusions, while finding resources within the history of western culture for thinking human differences afresh _The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference_ is essential reading for students of continental philosophy, gender studies, aesthetics, literary theory, visual culture, and race and social theory. (shrink)

The Sublime Today considers contemporary applications of aesthetic philosophy and earlier theories of the sublime from Longinus, Boileau, Burke, Kant, and Hegel to current literary and cultural contexts. Today, aesthetic experience itself seems to be changing, given the rise of new media and new conditions for the viewing and the reception of works of art. How might the rhetoric of the sublime be used to both describe our current situation and help formulate constructive responses to it? The (...) Sublime Today collects the work of scholars in literature, film, art, and media studies and provides a forum for investigating the contemporary relevance of the sublime, both as it has been understood historically and as it has been formulated by more recent theorists such as Jameson, Lyotard, Kristeva, and others. The volume includes essays on literary readings of the sublime in Coetze, Eggers, Lahiri, and Auster; essays on film and the visual arts in the work of François Ozon and in recent participatory art; and essays on how new technologies and media, as in media representations of 9/11, re-frame our relationship to the aesthetics of the sublime, especially as they intersect with questions of gender, the postcolonial, and the uneasy politics of terror. (shrink)

To what extent does the construction of any curriculum framework have to contain axiological assumptions? Educators have been made aware of tacit epistemological assumptions underlying existing curricular frameworks by the continual demands for their revision. Eisner suggested that curriculum policy should be centred around imagination; economic rationalists have suggested that it be made more functional and accountable than traditional university disciplines allow for. Is it possible, as Efland suggests, to combine competing traditional ideologies of education in a complex postmodern pastiche (...) which can nonetheless provide standards of assessment and evaluation without presuming a grand narrative? Brown suggests not. This paper examines the challenge of maintaining principled standards and recognising postmodern relativities, making particular reference to the notion of the sublime and the arts curriculum. (shrink)

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828) manifeste dans les 82 gravures de la série Les désastres de la guerre, réalisées entre 1810 et 1815, un cri de protestation contre la violence du soulèvement du Dos de Mayo suite à l’invasion des troupes napoléoniennes, la guerre d'indépendance espagnole (1808–1814) et la Restauration bourbonienne qui s'ensuivit en 1814. Mais au lieu de développer une vision héroïque de la guerre Goya y représente la force des oppositions en prise avec la bestialité et brosse (...) un paysage humain qui mêle le sublime et l’horreur mais aussi des harmonies funèbres qui jouent avec les hommes emportés par l’Histoire. (shrink)

This chapter argues that Kant’s aesthetic theory of the sublime has particular relevance for his ethics of virtue. Kant contends that our readiness to revel in natural sublimity depends upon a background commitment to moral ends. Further lessons about the emotional register of the sublime allow us to understand how Kant can plausibly contend that the temperament of virtue is both sublime and joyous at the same time.

Machine generated contents note: -- Clinical Theory -- 1. Psychiatry on schizophrenia: clinical pictures of a sublime object -- 2. Schizophrenia: the sublime text of psychoanalysis -- Cultural Theory -- 3. Antipsychiatry: schizophrenic experience and the sublime -- 4. Anti-Oedipus and the politics of the schizophrenic sublime -- 5. Schizophrenia, modernity, postmodernity -- 6. Postmodern schizophrenia -- 7. Glamorama, postmodernity and the schizophrenic sublime -- Conclusion.

The sublime in classical aesthetics arrived at a famous formulation with Kant as a subjective quality more elevated than beauty, linked to commotion and respect followed by reaffirmation. However, a new interpretation of the Schopenhauerian sublime is necessary in its transforming appreciation of the importance of this feeling as a psychological state, which is not yet metaphysical as usually understood, when dealing with struggling situations without resolution. Here the focus will be on a variety of the sonorous (...) class='Hi'>sublime in contemporary music, which finds resonances with Schopenhauer’s sublime: Witold Lutoslawski’s Three Poems of Henri Michaux for mixed chorus and orchestra focuses on unpredictability and form-contrariness, “picturing” surrealist texts of uncertainty in Pensées, violence in Le Grand Combat, and resignation in Repos dans Malheur. (shrink)

Amidst a worsening climate crisis, there is growing public discourse theorising the possible colonisation of outer space to secure a sustainable future for humanity. In the face of these escapist fantasies, political discussion on humanity's relation to the universe is notably limited and primarily frames space exploration as a dangerous Promethean endeavour. While I do not contest this claim, I argue that humanity's technological capabilities and acquired knowledge of the universe can alternatively facilitate an Earth-centred engagement with the Cosmos as (...) a sublime aesthetic experience. I frame the sublime Cosmos and its infinite expanse of dynamic material forces, as a site of resistance against Promethean visions of human mastery and colonisation. I then theorise how the sublime Cosmos can be productively engaged as a source of political imagination and spiritual elevation. Recovering a spiritual attachment to Earth is necessary, for we are irrevocably tied to this rapidly destabilising planet. (shrink)

Sublimity addresses the nature of the sublime experience itself, and the function that experience has played, and continues to play, within aesthetic discourse. The book both updates and revises existing treatments of the sublime in the eighteenth century, examines its neglected role in the nineteenth century aesthetics, and analyzes the significance of the modifications the concept has undergone in order to serve the interests of contemporary aesthetics. The book thus offers the most comprehensive coverage of the history of (...) the sublime available. (shrink)

This research paper comparatively assesses Deleuze’s and Lyotard’s post-Kantian thought on the sublime. Initially, I argue that their unfaithful treatment of Kant bears consonance in dramatizing the heterogeneity of the transcendental faculties, relegating determinate thought to a subsidiary consideration, and conceiving of aesthetics as an excessive mode of production rather than a reflective form of judgement. However, they diverge in the details regarding aesthetic production in their writings on modernist painting. In conclusion, I maintain that these accounts require a (...) paradigmatic shift in thought away from determinate judgement toward a fidelity to events. The significance of drawing these two thinkers together in this regard is in the recognition and elucidation of an event-oriented ontology, whereby the subject is actively transformed through creative responses to singular events in a process of rupture and regeneration. This rests upon the postulate that reality is not exhausted by experience, and carries with it an ethical imperative to resist limiting the future to the present conditions of experience. (shrink)

This article demonstrates a novel conceptualization of sublimity: the sublime in the pedestrian. This pedestrian mode of sublimity is exemplified by the Biblical Abraham, the central figure of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous Fear and Trembling. It is rooted in the analysis of one of the foundational stories of the three monotheistic religions: Abraham’s averted sacrifice of his son Isaac. The defining feature of this new, pedestrian mode of sublimity is that is remains hidden behind what I call a total incognito. It (...) is similar to the classical ‘elevated mode of sublimity’ as developed by Burke, Kant, and Schiller insofar as it denotes two contrasting feelings at once: repulsion and attraction. It is different insofar as Kierkegaard’s pedestrian mode of sublimity remains hidden from view and can only be shown indirectly. This article expounds the new, pedestrian mode of sublimity by investigating the relation between the incognito and the sublime in Fear and Trembling. It achieves that goal by engaging three perspectives: (1) the sublime failure that comes to the fore in the incognitos of an imaginary Abraham; (2) the ‘fear without being afraid’ that is invoked by God’s incognitos; (3) the total incognito of the pedestrian which conceals Abraham’s sublimity. (shrink)

This Element considers Kant's account of the sublime in the context of his predecessors both in the Anglophone and German rationalist traditions. Since Kant says with evident endorsement that 'we call sublime that which is absolutely great' and nothing in nature can in fact be absolutely great, Kant concludes that strictly speaking what is sublime can only be the human calling to perfect our rational capacity according to the standard of virtue that is thought through the moral (...) law. The Element takes account of the difference between respect and admiration as the two main varieties of sublime feeling, and concludes by considering the role of Stoicism in Kant's account of the sublime, particularly through the channel of Seneca. (shrink)

L'histoire du sublime, presque aussi ancienne que la philosophie, concerne, de nos jours, la plupart des disciplines qui la constituent esthétique, politique, éthique, anthropologie. Les philosophes ont d'abord pensé le sublime dans la sphère du discours. Ils ont étendu ensuite son domaine aux différents arts et aux grands phénomènes de la nature,- pour étudier, enfin, son apparition dans diverses formes d'activité humaine, comme les sciences et les techniques. Le sublime confronte la philosophie aux limites de son pouvoir, (...) en vue de la mettre en échec ou de lui permettre d'aller plus loin. Il opère à la fois comme principe de connaissance et comme principe de métamorphose. D'une part, il subvertit les valeurs du beau, du vrai et du bon, d'autre part, il me transcende ou me sublime, au sens très général où la sublimation est dépassement de soi. Le présent livre vise à redonner au sublime la place qu'il mérite dans notre système éducatif et dans nos vies : celle d'une épreuve initiatrice, susceptible d'insuffler la vie à des connaissances qui resteraient sinon formelles et tronquées. Il cherche également à nous orienter vers une science possible du sujet qui prenne en compte la vocation de l'homme à se transcender lui-même. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant’s work on the sublimity of aesthetic experience lends itself to puzzlement, if not misclassification. Complicating matters, Kant distinguishes between two kinds of sublimity: respectively, the “mathematical” and “dynamical” sublime. More mystifying is that the sublime is ineffable, beyond the ken of human comprehension. These perplexities notwithstanding, Kant argues that sublime sentiment produces a feeling of supersensible comfort. Commentators identify this comfort emanating most strongly from the dynamical sublime. However, in this paper I draw from (...) the unity of reason thesis to offer a plausible account of how the mathematical sublime is equally capable of providing the same feeling of supersensible comfort. (shrink)

While sublimation is not the first word in psychoanalysis, it nevertheless constitutes the final aim of psychoanalytic thought in both its clinical and theoretical orientations. Indeed, if psychoanalysis is primarily a practice whose aim is to alleviate a patient’s sufferings, and if these sufferings are largely the result of a conflict between the exigencies of an individual’s drives and the necessities of a civilized social life, then effective therapeutic action presupposes some knowledge of the way in which such a conflict (...) might be resolved.Yet the concept of sublimation not only exhibits the ultimate horizon, the aim or even the ethical norm of therapeutic action, it also provides a striking outline of the conception which psychoanalytic theory has of the human being. Sublimation cannot be understood without a previous understanding of such key psychoanalytic concepts as the unconscious, drive and desire, sexuality and pleasure, dream and reality. Tying together the ultimate ends of psychoanalytic therapy with the first principles of ‘Freudian metapsychology’, a study of the notion of sublimation invites us not only to take an overall view of psychoanalytic theory, but also to test its coherence.It would not, then, be an exaggeration to say that the value of psychoanalysis as theory and as practice depends essentially on its ability to think sublimation and, more specifically, to think the relation between the economy of a singular libidinal body and the demands of a cultural life accomplished within a symbolic field transcending the individual. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Nietzsche sometimes offers the elusive suggestion that his psychology is not just original, but inaugural: a “first” in the field of philosophy. This article argues that a clue to his inaugural ambitions is discovered in his novel use of sublimation as a concept that engages in both a genealogical critique and a therapeutic reassessment of the basic prejudices of value dualism that he claims constitute the evaluative core of the Western tradition. Genealogically, sublimation provides Nietzsche with a new structure (...) of naturalistic narrative that explains how traditionally opposed values actually share a common natural origin. Therapeutically, Nietzsche's various sublimation narratives serve to qualify the effects of his own naturalistic critique by revealing how and why our animal bodies and drives can now be practically affirmed as a new source of human dignity. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, to explain the distinction between Kant’s notions of the sublime and ugliness, and to answer an important question that has been left unnoticed in contemporary studies, namely why it is the case that even though both sublime and ugliness are contrapurposive for the power of judgment, occasioning the feeling of displeasure, yet that after all we should feel pleasure in the former, while not in the latter. Second, to apply my (...) interpretation of the sublime and ugliness to contemporary art, and to resolve certain issues that have been raised in accounting for the possibility of artistic sublimity. I argue that an experience of a genuine artistic sublimity is an uncommon occurrence. I propose that the value of contemporary art can be best explained by referring to Kant’s notion of ugliness and his theory of aesthetic ideas. (shrink)

The article explores the closeness of the theme of the monstrous to the concept of the sublime, first of all linking them as moments that challenge our cognitive possibilities, starting from these two aspects: the feeling of fear and the rupture of the ordinary representative scheme of the subject. Among the many revivals and interpretations of the Third Critique and of Kant's sublime, two authors of the French twentieth century – Gilles Deleuze and Jean-François Lyotard – bring together (...) the sublime and the monstrous, radicalizing their epistemological scope, making them not only a cognitive possibility, but a necessary condition for the emergence of thought. (shrink)

Burke's theory of the sublime helps us understand how we use aesthetic values to deal with our political regimes. Insofar as political regimes use power, they can be experienced as sublime. The sublime experience is a power exchange, from object to subject. But it might also be a power drain, which would leave us helpless toward our regimes. Includes analyses of the uses of beauty and sado-masochism.

O trabalho visa uma leitura da teoria da sublimidade na Crítica da razão prática, a partir da análise das passagens nas quais, em particular na conclusão da obra e no terceiro capítulo da Analítica da razão prática pura, Kant oferece respaldo textual para destacarmos certa distância teórica com relação à concepção estética do sublime sucessivamente apresentada na Crítica da faculdade do juízo, notadamente na formulação geral do §23. Para isso, e tendo como plano de fundo uma perspectiva contrastiva de (...) interpretações que aproximam segunda e terceira Críticas quanto ao sublime, sugerimos que, nessas duas obras, há variações referentes tanto à dinâmica envolvida pelo sublime quanto ao seu objeto de referência, assim como no que tange à caracterização dos sentimentos de admiração e respeito mediante os quais, segundo Kant, o sublime se expressa. Palavras-chave: Kant; sublime; respeito; admiração. (shrink)

The first English-language anthology to provide a compendium of primary source material on the sublime. The book takes a chronological approach, covering the earliest ancient traditions up through the early and late modern periods and into contemporary theory. It takes an inclusive, interdisciplinary approach to this key concept in aesthetics and criticism, representing voices and traditions that have often been overlooked. As such, it will be of use and interest across the humanities and allied disciplines.

In this paper, I argue that one of the most intense ways women are encouraged to enjoy sublime experiences is via attempts to control their bodies through excessive dieting. If this is so, then the societal-cultural contributions to the problem of eating disorders exceed the perpetuation of a certain beauty ideal to include the almost universal encouragement women receive to diet, coupled with the relative shortage of opportunities women are afforded to experience the sublime.

In recent years, the claim of the unrepresentability of the Shoah has stirred vivid debates, especially following the strong positions taken by the French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann and author of Shoah (1986). This claim of unrepresentability, it can be shown, draws part of its attraction from the fact that it oscillates undecidedly between a claim of logical impossibility (“the Shoah can’t be represented”) and a normative demand (“the Shoah shouldn’t be represented”). This essay analyzes the argumentative structure of the advocates (...) of the unrepresentability and shows why the often made connection to Kant is flawed. Although his Critique of the Power of Judgment affirms indeed that the prohibition of representation is the “perhaps most sublime passage in the Jewish Law”, turning the prohibition of representation into a supposedly Kantian claim does not hold grounds. The essay reconstructs the political framework of the debate, situates the Kantian passage in its precise philosophical context and then successively assesses the main arguments put forward by Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière and Georges Didi-Huberman in their critique of Lanzmann’s categorical imperative. While showing why the rhetoric of the “unrepresentable” bear troubling structural analogies to what they want to fight (i.e. the politics of erasure, which always also include the erasure of the traces of erasure), a certain notion of the “unrepresentable” is rescued nevertheless at the end of the essay. Representation, so it is argued by returning to a Kantian distinction, is not a matter of Kanon, but a matter of Organon, which then puts the debate about the Sublime (which took place between Lyotard and Rancière in the 90’s) into a new perspective. (shrink)