The range of the aesthetic has expanded to cover not only a wider range of objects and situations of daily life but also to encompass the negative. This includes terrorism, whose aesthetic impact is central to its use as a political tactic. The complex of positive and negative aesthetic values in terrorism are explored, introducing the concept of the sublime as a negative category to illuminate the analysis and the distinctive aesthetic of terrorism.

Architecture defines and consumes people. It exposes them to a multitude of varieties of different aesthetic engagements. Architecture becomes a lived experience. However, this lived experience is always caught in the inner workings of the social and more specifically within cultural ideology. In modern capitalism, culture pervades every aspect of our lives. It shows its presence everywhere from our own homes to the public streets. Culture is everywhere, and architecture is a tool used for both the benefit and detriment of (...) the “culture industry”. Kant speaks of the sublime as a profound moment of reason realizing its ability to overcome its own limits. In this experience is it possible to be completely ravaged and descend into hades and melancholy? Is there a beauty in this descent? More specifically, can architecture become banal or pedestrian, uplifting or depressing? According to Theodor Adorno, our subjectivity is defined by the constant dialectical struggle between freedom and unfreedom (among other things). It is realizing our freedom in the face of our unfreedom that makes us truly able to attain some form of resistance. The sublime experience can be transformed into a spirit of revelation and beautifully allow us to in a way resist the one-dimensional tendencies of modern capitalism. Architecture, which is immersed in our societal being and contributes to many of our own subjective unfreedoms, comes to define our lives as inhabited space. When does architecture produce a sublime experience? Can architecture’s authentic “aura” stand out amongst the reproduced city and produce a sublime feeling that can be a form of resistance against the culture industry? Does Grand Central Terminal provide the key to an architecturally sublime experience? Using dialectical experience and examining the sublime feeling (in a critique of the Kantian sublime) as the key to breaking through the culture industry’s banal architectural hold on our subjectivity, this essay will examine the experience of the sublime as a key to unfolding resistance in the face of the banality of modern architecture in the city and opening our minds to the Great Refusal through the exploration of Grand Central Terminal. (shrink)

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)

This article examines Adorno’s re-conceptualisation of the traditional concept of the sublime, arguing that for Adorno the sublime aesthetic experience foregrounds an awareness of non-identity and the “priority of the object.” For Adorno, tears, shudders, and the emotions of shock and terror remain authentic responses to artworks because they remind the ego of its affinity with nature. Adorno’s treatment of the sublime in modern art and in relation to his theory of the dialectic of enlightenment invites a (...) radical critique of the claim of reason to autonomy and control. His notion of the sublime is illustrated by the performance work of Franko B as a contemporary example of the confrontation with the bodily sublime, which produces a “limit-experience,” a mode of subjective decentring as a result of our exposure to the impossible and the formless. While Adorno’s “negative” sublime is devoid of reconciliatory metaphysical meaning, it calls forth an altered subjectivity that opposes the wit... (shrink)

The notion of the sublime, used to describe a particular kind of overwhelming or exhilarating aesthetic experience, has garnered a great deal of attention by philosophers, critical theorists and literary scholars. In the midst of this growing body of literature, Professor Jane Forsey published an article asking whether an aesthetic theory of the sublime is even possible, and argued provocatively in the negative. Claiming that efforts to explain the sublime inevitably result in theories that are either (...) contradictory or incoherent, Forsey posed a challenge to anyone who takes the sublime seriously as an aesthetic category. This volume brings together an international slate of philosophers and scholars of the sublime, who have been invited to respond to, and critically engage with, Forseys article. Unlike other monographs and anthologies that deal broadly with the sublime in aesthetics, this collection examines specific conceptual problems with the very foundations of sublime theory in a manner that is tightly focused and rigorous. It represents a variety of approaches that defend the sublime, and concludes with an original response by Professor Forsey to her critics. (shrink)

The goal of this essay is thus to identify the species of music that is most justifiably denominated sublime and to characterize it as fully as possible, in part through a suggested taxonomy of the species, illustrated by a wide range of musical examples. After a general discussion of sublimity in its original sphere of application—the natural world—I go on to consider the nature of sublime musical experience. I propose that categorizing music as some species of sublime (...) is at base a matter of what it is most like or most resembles among natural phenomena. This results in a scheme which recognizes five distinguishable kinds of sublime music: negatively transcendent, positively transcendent, mixedly transcendent, energizing, and transcendent-energizing. I distinguish sublime music from other valuable music kinds and finish by pointing to some rewards that come with the experience of sublime music. (shrink)

The sublime (das Erhabene) in Kant is a feeling that elevates (erhebt)! the soul and results in an aesthetic judgment. While aesthetic judgments of beauty involve a feeling of pure pleasure (Lust), aesthetic judgments of the sublime rest on a feeling of pleasure and displeasure (Lust und Unlust) at the same moment. Kant describes the sublime at one point rather paradoxically as involving a" negative pleasure"(Critique 0/Judgment, Ak. V: 245). 2 The feeling of the sublime (...) is brought about by experiences where one has a sense of the infinity (Unendlichkeit) of nature. This sense of infinity can be brought about by the sheer size (Grofle) of an object. Kant would call this a feeling of the mathematically sublime. A mountain so large that one cannot take it in at a single glance causes a feeling of the mathematically sublime. One gets a different sense of the infinity of 'Kant's deliberate connection of the noun for the sublime. (shrink)

In this paper, the establishment of "modern" features, as subjectivity, representation and rational, and thus a concise statement of the post-modern critique of modernity, questioned and denied, in order to outline the negative characteristics of post-modern micro. However, more importantly, this will be more committed to master the modern mark out exactly what is very different from the new vision of modernity, made ​​any new way of life and ethical principles. This claim, post-modern addition to the challenge of modernity, (...) critical and negative, but also made ​​a positive value and vision. In other words, the "postmodern" will not just be a negative concept, puts a positive concept, can provide a positive value and ethical life. Which were open to him, to him who care for him who, for his generous and selfless person, and in which the pottery into the self, will be a future source of ethical principles and values ​​of life. Moreover, the rise of art from the post-modern sense of the sublime, it will be innovative and more importantly, aesthetic value, or is linked religious, ethical and artistic value of the key. Finally, out for the post-modern dualistic thinking, while offering more serious plight of relativism, we are trying to address the use of comparative philosophy, the problem of dualism, and advocated the micro-world and multi-cultural world, the ongoing language extrapolated to take and mutual learning, as a solution to relativism, to promote mutual understanding and a wealth of positive way. (shrink)

Interstices of the Sublime represents a powerful theological engagement with psychoanalytic theory in Freud, Lacan, Kristeva and Zi zek, as well as major expressions of contemporary Continental philosophy, including Deleuze, Derrida, Marion, and Badiou. Through creative and constructive psycho-theological readings of topics such as sublimation, schizophrenia, God, and creation ex nihilo, this book contributes to a new form of radical theological thinking that is deeply involved in the world. Here the idea of the Kantian sublime is read into (...) Freud and Lacan, and compared with sublimation. The sublime refers to a conflict of the Kantian faculties of reason and imagination, and involves the attempt to represent what is intrinsically unrepresentable. Sublimation, by contrast, involves the expression and partial satisfaction of primal desires in culturally acceptable terms. The sublime is negatively expressed in sublimation, because it is both the "source" of sublimation as well as that which resists being sublimated. That is, the Freudian sublime is related to the process of sublimation, but it also distorts or disrupts sublimation, and invokes what Lacan calls the Real. The effects of the sublime are not just psychoanalytic but, importantly, theological, because the sublime is the main form that "God" takes in the modern world. A radical postmodern theology attends to the workings of the sublime in our thinking and living, and provides resources to understand the complexity of reality. This book is one of the first sustained theological readings of Lacan in English. (shrink)

Aesthetics, both in its theoretical and empirical forms, has seen a renewed interest in the sublime, an aesthetic category dear to traditional philosophers, but quite neglected by contemporary philosophy. Our aim is to offer a novel perspective on the experience of the sublime. More precisely, our hypothesis is that the latter arises from ‘a radical limit-experience’, which is a metacognitve awareness of the limits of our cognitive capacities as we are confronted with something indefinitely greater or more powerful (...) than us. This hypothesis better explains the negative feelings involved in the experience of the sublime and accounts for its demarcation from other experiences (for example, terrible beauty). Experiences of the sublime have an overall positive valence, though. We will explore different ways in which a subject can try to overcome the negative evaluation involved in radical limit-experiences, and suggest that only one of them is appropriate to experiences of the sublime. (shrink)

Awe seems to be a complex emotion or emotional construct characterized by a mix of positive (contentment, happiness), and negative affective components (fear and a sense of being smaller, humbler or insignificant). It is striking that the elicitors of awe correspond closely to what philosophical aesthetics, and especially Burke and Kant, have called “the sublime.” As a matter of fact, awe is almost absent from the philosophical agenda, while there are very few studies on the experience of the (...) sublime as such in the psychological literature. The aim of this paper is to throw light on the complex relationship between awe (as understood by psychologists) and the experience of the sublime (as discussed by philosophers). We distinguish seven ways of conceiving this relationship and highlight those that seem more promising to us. Once we have a clearer picture of how awe and the experience of the sublime are related, we can use it to enhance collaboration between these domains. We would be able to use empirical results about awe in a philosophical analysis of the experience of the sublime, which in turn can help us to design novel experimental hypotheses about the contexts in which we experience awe. (shrink)

Resumen: El presente artículo constituye un aporte al conocimiento del arte en su vinculación con la filosofía y el psicoanálisis, en tanto aborda la tensión entre la representación y la construcción simbólica de la imagen artística en el contexto cultural/estético contemporáneo, mediante la relación entre lo Real lacaniano y la estática negativa de Adorno. Dicha relación encuentra su punto de articulación en el fenómeno estético de lo Bello, entendido como lo que encara al sujeto con el vacío de su deseo (...) radical, sin engañarlo y que permite integrar la negatividad propia de lo Real con los elementos formales que componen la obra artística, así como con los conceptos de radicalidad y autenticidad de la propuesta adorniana. La articulación entre la estética negativa de Adorno y el efecto estético de lo Bello de Lacan, se ejemplifica con una interpretación en clave psicoanalítica de la obra de la artista colombiana Doris Salcedo. Abstract: This article constitutes a contribution to the knowledge of art in its connection with philosophy and psychoanalysis, as it approaches to the tension between the representation and the symbolic construction of the artistic image in the contemporary cultural / aesthetic context, through the relationship between the Lacanian Real and Adorno's negative aesthetic. This relationship finds its articulation point in the aesthetic phenomenon of the Beautiful, understood as what confronts the subject with the emptiness of its radical desire, without deceiving it and that allows to integrate the Real´s negativity with the formal elements that make up the artistic work, as well as the Adornian proposal concepts of radicality and authenticity. At the end, a psychoanalytic interpretation of colombian artist Doris Salcedo’s work is made, in which the negative aesthetics and the aesthetic effect of the Beautiful are integrated. (shrink)

From the Copernican revolution of Immanuel Kant to the cognitive mapping of Fredric Jameson to the postcolonial politics of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, representation has been posed as both indispensable and impossible. In his pathbreaking work, _The Abyss of Representation_, George Hartley traces the development of this impossible necessity from its German Idealist roots through Marxist theories of postmodernism, arguing that in this period of skepticism and globalization we are still grappling with issues brought forth during the age of romanticism and (...) revolution. Hartley shows how the modern problem of representation—the inability of a figure to do justice to its object—still haunts today's postmodern philosophy and politics. He reveals the ways the sublime abyss that opened up in Idealist epistemology and aesthetics resurfaces in recent theories of ideology and subjectivity. Hartley describes how modern theory from Kant through Lacan attempts to come to terms with the sublime limits of representation and how ideas developed with the Marxist tradition—such as Marx’s theory of value, Althusser’s theory of structural causality, or Zizek’s theory of ideological enjoyment—can be seen as variants of the sublime object. Representation, he argues, is ultimately a political problem. Whether that problem be a Marxist representation of global capitalism, a deconstructive representation of subaltern women, or a Chicano self-representation opposing Anglo-American images of Mexican Americans, it is only through this grappling with the negative, Hartley explains, that a Marxist theory of postmodernism can begin to address the challenges of global capitalism and resurgent imperialism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.1 (2003) 231-240 [Access article in PDF] Rescuing the Rescuers in Philip Hallie's Ethical Sublime Patrick Henry "Only stories or visions of transcending personal isolation and indifference can move me... hope, joy lie only in the transcendence of self-absorption—in expansion." —Philip Hallie I THROUGHOUT HIS LIFE, Philip Hallie expressed strong distrust for abstract philosophy. He wanted his own philosophy constituted of flesh and blood, and (...) he believed in the centrality of narration in ethical writing. The personality of stories, the irrefutable nature of the individual's account had to form the essential basis in the teaching of ethics. It is no surprise, then, that in his posthumous Tales of Good and Evil, Help and Harm 1 Hallie leaves us with a series of powerful stories, biographical and autobiographical, as the final expression of his lifelong agonizing struggle to come to terms with his own ethical beliefs. There are no general proofs here. No abstract principles. No definitions of goodness and evil. Only stories that depict the being referred to by e. e. cummings as "manunkind" mysteriously achieving the "realizable ideal" of rescuer of strangers.Given Hallie's major work on the rescuers of Jews in the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed. The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There, 2 it seems appropriate that he begin this particular account of "tales of good and evil" in that same [End Page 231] village. Thus, the first biography he presents is that of Magda Trocmé, the wife of the pastor of the Protestant Church in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, André Trocmé, who, with his fellow pastor Edouard Theis, is said to have inspired the rescue mission in the village. Hallie underscores the communal nonviolent effort by clergy and villagers alike in this "city of refuge." While he admires both André and Magda as practitioners of the "great virtues," he more readily identifies with Magda's secularism than with her husband's piety. He celebrates her generosity, her refusal to turn anyone away from her door, her "quiet habit of efficacious compassion," and her terse explanation as to why the rescuers in the village did what they had done: "What do you mean? It had to be done, that's all."As much as Hallie related to Magda's secularism, he was unable to identify fully with her because he felt tainted by the killing he had done as an artillery man in the United States Army during World War II. "I was a helpful killer who violated the negative demand against killing ["Thou shalt not kill"] in order to obey the positive one to spread life. But Magda and her villagers! Their ethical purity was beyond me. They obeyed the negative demands of ethics by hating and hurting no one even while they obeyed the positive demands of ethics by saving [thousands of refugees]." Compared to Magda and the villagers, Hallie clearly saw himself as someone operating in the grey zone.With the introduction of Joshua James and the community of Hull, Massachusetts, we ascend from Hallie's personal quagmire of moral ambiguity to the realm of the "ethical sublime." Here the author relates the story of James, whose mother and sister died at sea in 1837 when he was 11 years old, and who would go on to a career of life-saving activity on the Massachusetts coast. James founded the Life-Saving Rescue Service, an organization that evolved into the Coast Guard (or more specifically The Search and Rescue Service of the Coast Guard). He spent his entire life in Hull (1826-1902) and over the course of nearly sixty years saved hundreds of sailor's lives and tens of thousands of dollars worth of property.Many coastal villages around the world, Hallie explains, profited greatly from shipwrecks. Their cargoes and the stuff the ships were made of were highly valuable to the generally poor people who inhabited such villages. Yet the village of Hull, the smallest village in the state, having roughly... (shrink)

Il s’agit de revenir maintenant sur la portée historico-politique de l’Analytique du sentiment esthétique sublime. L’enjeu n’est pas exclusivement exégétique, mais vise notamment à évaluer ce qu’il en est du « progrès vers le mieux » dans le temps présent. L’essence de l’affect esthétique sublime réside dans un retournement : la défaillance des formes sensibles de présentation, par leur défaut même, présente, négativement, une Idée de la raison (l’infini, la liberté), dont le sentiment est universellement partageable en principe. (...) S’y révèle ainsi « notre destination supra-sensible » : témoigner de l’inconditionné, cultiver la « susceptibilité » aux Idées. Et cela à l’occasion des séquences historico-politiques tout aussi bien, y compris les conjonctures les plus « désolantes ». La désolation elle-même, si elle relève de cette esthétique de la présentation négative de l’Idée, peut faire « signe d’histoire », c’est-à-dire : être un indice probant que les humains dans leur histoire progressent dans la capacité au mieux. Tel fut le cas de l’affect d’ enthousiasme qui gagna les peuples européens lors de la Révolution en 1789. Mais il peut en aller de même pour le chagrin, voire pour le désespoir (en tout cas le « désespoir révolté », die entrüstete Verzweiflung ). 2. Il reste que le retournement de la défaillance des formes en sentiment sublime ne va pas sans quelques difficultés intrinsèques, liées à sa différence d’avec le beau : cette défaillance annonce un certain retrait de l’Idée de sens communis (gage, pourtant, de l’universalité sans concept à laquelle prétend le sentiment esthétique) ; et sa conversion en affection sublime exige la médiation d’une culture rendant les esprits plus sensibles aux Idées. Ne faut-il pas en conclure que, avec ce retrait du sens communautaire et le déclin de la culture (à l’ère de l’industrie culturelle multi-médiatique), il ne peut pas y avoir d’affection sublime, partageable publiquement et faisant « signe d’histoire », attestant qu’il y a progrès? 3. Ce manque de signe esthétique, affectif, éclairerait comment une crise de l’histoire et du politique est-elle possible. Cette crise, n’est-elle pas ce qui s’installe désormais comme le trait constitutif fondamental de notre sort à présent? En proie aux menaces de catastrophe globale qui pèsent aujourd’hui sur la planète et sur l’humanité, ce qui nous reste encore de « résistance » n’est-il pas dû davantage à l’angoisse de la survie, plutôt que tiré par le sens d’une Idée incommensurable qui, témoignant de notre destination supra-sensible, attesterait toujours que nous sommes en progrès vers le mieux? (shrink)

This paper offers a critique of what it terms the ‘Heideggerian-deconstructive’ reading of Kant’s “Analytic of the Sublime” and develops an alternative ‘genealogical’ interpretation of it. It is argued that the ‘Heideggerian-deconstructive’ reading of Kant’s text emphasises the ‘question of presentation’. By contrast, the concerns of the ‘genealogical’ interpretation of Kant’s sublime are affective and ‘libidinal’ in character. The underlying issue concerns the prioritisation of the orders of presentation and affectivity respectively and the balance between them in Kant’s (...) text. The paper begins with an appreciative overview of the ‘Heideggerian-deconstructive’ reading of Kant’s sublime as found in texts by Derrida, Escoubas, Lacoue-Labarthe, Lyotard, Nancy and Sallis. In the ensuing sections the ‘genealogical’ alternative is developed. It is suggested that such a ‘Nietzschean’ reading has two phases, oppositional and immanent respectively. The first phase exposes the evaluative economy of Kant’s text and identifies themes within it which endorse the constitutive values of the ‘Platonic-Christian’ tradition. Kant’s sublime appears to be a ‘moral’ response to the a-symmetry between ‘raw nature’ and the transcendent aspirations of rational-moral humanity. However, due to its oppositional character, this form of ‘genealogical’ critique does not execute a sufficiently radical critique of Kant’s text. A second, immanent form, of ‘genealogical’ reading is required. This focuses on the theme of ‘negative pleasure’ in Kant’s text and argues that it has priority over that of ‘negative presentation’. Kant’s sublime no longer appears to be ‘moral’ in orientation but advocates passionately the pleasures of a specific, non-universalisable, ‘affective-libidinal’ economy. The task arising concerns the evaluative comparison of different aesthetic sensibilities, the ‘negative pleasure’ of Kant’s sublime and the Nietzschean alternative of a ‘tragic joy’ that affirms precisely the ‘contrapurposiveness’ of ‘raw nature’ from which Kant turns away. This is a contrast between a teleological and dysteleological sublime, ‘human’ and ‘post-human’ aesthetic sensibilities. (shrink)

Within the first book of Manilius’ _Astronomica_ the exposition of doctrines concerning the Milky Way plays a central role. The poet presents the galaxy as such an eye-catching, luminous object that cannot fail to arouse the viewer’s emotions. Finally, wonder at the sublime spectacle of the galaxy is for Manilius the stimulus that prompts men to inquire about the causes of that celestial phenomenon. This article aims to analyze the relationship between emotion, sublime, and knowledge in the context (...) of Roman culture in the early imperial age. Manilius’ passage is then compared with Chapter 35 of Ps-Longinus’ _Treatise on the Sublime_, in which the theme of wonder at the grandeur of nature is central. Finally, as a demonstration of the vitality of the link between emotion and knowledge, a comparison is offered between Manilius and Chapter 5 of Seneca’s _De otio_. (shrink)

In this work, I explored the complex relationship between psychological awe and the philosophical concept of the sublime. While psychology has often considered awe as a positive emotion distinct from the negative variant of the sublime, philosophical discourse has suggested an inherent historical and aesthetic connection between the two phenomena. I aimed to provide a preliminary contribution towards solving this puzzle, by relying on empirical findings from psychology and drawing from philosophical theories of Longinus, Kant, Schopenhauer and (...) Hegel. I suggested a conceptualization of awe as a potential cultural evolution of the sublime, thus highlighting an overlap of key dimensions, such as vastness, self-transcendence, and alteration of sense of time. Moreover, I outlined practical insights and guidelines for eliciting awe in everyday life. Finally, the transformative nature of awe was explored by integrating psychological and philosophical perspectives, thus enabling a broader understanding of complex emotions and how they can influence human experience and wellbeing. (shrink)

The paper explores Burke’s twofold solution to the paradox of negative emotions. His Philosophical Enquiry (1757/59) employs two models that stand on different anthropological principles: the Exercise Argument borrowed from authors like the Abbé Du Bos, guided by the principle of self-preservation, and the Sympathy Argument, propageted by notable men of lettres such as Lord Kames, ruled by the principle of sociability. Burke interlocks these two arguments through a teleologically-ordered physiology, in which the natural laws of the human body (...) and mind, secretly working in the depth of the nerve fibres, ensure both self-preservation and sociability. Utilizing both efficient and final causes throughout his Enquiry, Burke argues that the experiences of pain and terror – under certain conditions – are made agreeable (delight) by providence,so that the physiological mechanisms underlying these experiences could ensure the health and strenuousness of the nerve fibres amidst the corrupting pleasures of commercial society (Exercise Argument). Furthermore, due to the ambiguous character of this delight annexed to such experiences, they also function as exercises for our social passions (Sympathy Argument). Te 'egoistic' anthropological drive to remove the visceral uneasiness that dominates these experiences facilitates moral action when it is needed the most: when others in pain need our help. In accordance with the anthropocentric providentialism of the moderate Enlightenment, it is the design of the human frame that ensures the activities essential to our health (self-preservation) and moral conduct (sociability), a design that not only guarantees that pleasure, if exclusive and excessive, is 'inconvenient', and pain, if mitigated and harmless, is aesthetically agreeable, but also that our 'egoistic' drive to self-preservation ultimately improves sociability. (shrink)

This interview with the philosopher Bernard Stiegler was conducted in Paris on 28 January 2015, and first appeared in Dutch translation in the journal De uil van Minerva. The conversation begins by discussing the fundamental place occupied by the concept of ‘technics’ in Stiegler’s work, and how the ‘constitutivity’ of technics does and does not relate to Kant and Husserl. Stiegler is then asked about his relationship with Deleuze, and he responds by focusing on the concept of quasi-causality, but also (...) by arguing that there is a certain trajectory in Deleuze’s thought, situating his own philosophy in relation to its various moments. Stiegler is then asked to respond to the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks carried out three weeks prior to the interview. After making a couple of precautionary remarks, Stiegler relates such occurrences to the problem of what he calls ‘spiritual poverty’, to the intensification of ‘negative sublimation’ that can occur when there is a disconnection between the generations, and more generally to the growth of nihilism. All of these phenomena relate to the exploitation of technology by a virulent capitalism that irrationally believes that only the market is rational. After consideration of the complex historical relationship between Islam and modernization, and of both of these to Nietzsche’s ‘death of God’, and after recalling the destructive role played by the West in the rise of fundamentalism and jihadism, Stiegler concludes by reflecting on the fact that, ultimately, ‘intellectuals’ have failed to use technologies in ways that produce alternatives to consumerism. (shrink)

The present article aims to inquire the negativity implied in the relation between man and nature in Kant’s early philosophy. This negativity will be treated from the realm of the theodicy as the dimension from where human fate can be posed. The characterization of this fate will be possible via ethical and aesthetic dimensions set out by Kant in his works dedicated to the subject of theodicy and philosophy of nature; i.e. Über Optimismus, which dates back to the 1750´s. Followingly, (...) we will discuss certain aspects of the author´s Universal History of Nature and Theory of Heaven, and thereafter we will refer ourselves to three minor works concerning earthquakes. In the last chapter we will point out how the comprehension of the aforementioned works are essential in order to define the sentiment of the sublime. In conclusion we will define the sublime as incompatible with optimism. (shrink)

_Dialectic_ is now widely regarded as a classic of contemporary philosophy. This book, first published in 1993, sets itself three main aims: the development of a general theory of dialectic, of which Hegelian dialectic can be seen to be a special case; the dialectical enrichment and deepening of critical realism, viz. into the system of dialectical critical realism; and the outline of the elements of a totalizing critique of Western philosophy. The first chapter clarifies the rational core of Hegelian dialectic. (...) Chapter two then proceeds to develop a general theory of dialectic. Isolating the fallacy of 'ontological monovalence', Roy Bhaskar then shows how absence and other negating concepts such as contradiction have a legitimate and necessary ontological employment. He then goes on to give a synoptic account of key dialectical concepts such as the concrete universal; to sketch the further dialectical development of critical naturalism through an account of what he calls four-planar social being; and following consideration of the dialectical critique of analytical reason, he moves on to the real definition of dialectic as absenting absence and in the human sphere, the axiology of freedom. Chapter three extends and deepens critical realism’s characteristic concerns with ontology, science, social science and emancipation not only into the realms of negativity and totality, but also into the fields of reference and truth, spatio-temporality, tense and process, the logic of dialectical universalizability and on to the plane of ethics, where it articulates a combination of moral realism and ethical naturalism, whereby consideration of elemental desire involves commitment to the eudaimonistic society. This is then followed by a sublime discussion of key moments in the trajectory of Western philosophy, the tradition of which can now be seen to be based on what the author calls the unholy trinity of the epistemic fallacy or the reduction of being to knowledge, primal squeeze or the collapse of structure and alethic truth, and ontological monovalence. (shrink)

The extended dual-aspect monism framework of consciousness, based on neuroscience, consists of five components: (1) dual-aspect primal entities; (2) neural-Darwinism: co-evolution and co-development of subjective experiences (SEs) and associated neural-nets from the mental aspect (that carries the SEs/proto-experiences (PEs) in superposed and unexpressed form) and the material aspect (mass, charge, spin and space-time) of fundamental entities (elementary particles), respectively and co-tuning via sensorimotor interaction; (3) matching and selection processes: interaction of two modes, namely, (a) the non-tilde mode that is the (...) material and mental aspect of cognition (memory and attention) related feedback signals in a neural-network, which is the cognitive nearest past approaching towards present; and (b) the tilde mode that is the material and mental aspect of the feed forward signals due to external environmental input and internal endogenous input, which is the nearest future approaching towards present and is a entropy-reversed representation of non-tilde mode; (4) the segregation and integration of information, and (5) the necessary ingredients of SEs (such as wakefulness, attention, re-entry, working memory, stimulus at or above threshold level, and neural-net PEs). This framework leads to structural and functional coherence between the mind and the brain, bridges the explanatory gap (the gap between SEs and their neural-correlates), and leads to our mundane subjective experiences. This extended dual-aspect monism (eDAM) framework (Vimal, 2008, 2010, 2013, 2015a, 2015b) could be the fundamental basis of various religions and philosophies. This is a Western perspective. On the other hand, Eastern perspectives emphasize the practical methods for achieving altered experience at samadhi state. An important corollary of these methods (such as yogic method) is the sublimation of negative aspects of seven groups of self-protective energy system (desire, anger, ego, greed, attachment, jealousy, and selfish-love) into their positive aspects. Their negative aspects create war and suffering, whereas their positive aspects advance science and technology, family values, peace, and happiness. Here, the Western perspective framework is extended to include the concepts of the sublimation process to encompass Eastern perspectives. The four elements (war, suffering, peace, and happiness) are ubiquitous in both space and time because they are essential contributors to the variations for natural selection in our evolutionary system. The sublimation process optimizes the system: minimizes war and suffering, maximizes peace and happiness, and enhances family values and individual progress. This is consistent with both Eastern and Western perspectives. (shrink)

Henri Bergson's work is often presented as an optimistic philosophy. This essay presents a counter-narrative to that reading by looking to the place of the problem of evil within his integral metaphysics. For, if Bergson’s philosophy is simply optimistic, or simply derives meaning from the wholeness of experience, then it risks a theodical structure which undercuts its ability to speak to contemporary social and political problems of suffering. A theodical structure is one that, at bottom, justifies the experience of suffering (...) by way of a concept of the whole or some concept that functions to subsume everything within it. Suffering is subsumed and given meaning by placing it within a relation, often with a telos that redeems or sublimates the experience of suffering. This takes such a singular experience such as suffering and renders it merely relative to the part it plays within the system of everything. On my reading, Bergson’s philosophy contains a supplement of what we might call pessimism or negativity inherent in his metaphysics as integral experience. This supplement undermines the theodical structure that may be assumed to undercut Bergson’s philosophy when confronted with evil or suffering and is seen most clearly in his critique of the notion of “everything.”. (shrink)

Ever since Freud introduced the idea of the death drive as a means of explaining the apparently inborn inclination towards aggression, psychoanalysis has been riven by the question of negativity. For social theorists who lean upon psychoanalysis, the question is even more acute: how should these theories interpret the persistence of misrecognition and violence within contemporary societies? Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition represents the most compelling attempt to address these questions within the so-called ‘third generation’ of critical theory, yet Honneth (...) sidesteps or sublimates the most troubling aspects of the psychoanalytic legacy, displaying a quasi-Hegelian ‘cunning of recognition’ that sees human destructiveness as a purposive, experimental force within the psyche and the social. By rooting his theory in the work of D.W. Winnicott, Honneth avoids the ambivalent account of psychic and social life offered by object relations theorists such as Melanie Klein and Wilfrid Bion. However, I argue that Klein’s concept of ‘integration’ offers a more compelling orientation for social theory, insofar as it countenances the fragility of recognition alongside a desire for misrecognition. The turn to Klein and those directly influenced by her, such as Bion and Hanna Segal, has both theoretical and practical implications for contemporary critical theory. Theoretically it makes the case for reconnecting mainline critical theory – with its overtures to liberalism and deliberative democracy – with agonistic approaches to social life. Practically speaking it directs attention to the social and political spaces by which destructive impulses can be effectively articulated, held, and to some extent worked through. In particular, it offers a psychological and political defense of recent experiments in local, grassroots-organized truth and reconciliation processes. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 26, Issue 1, pp 118 - 147 This paper challenges the widespread emphasis on the absence of God in post- Holocaust historiography, theology, and art by suggesting that Barnett Newman’s _Stations of the Cross_ may have been conceived under the theological category of the apophatic rather than the aesthetic category of the sublime. This paper focuses on the “anti-realist” position of Newman and other artists for whom the Holocaust necessitated a renewed aniconic tendency in Jewish aesthetics. (...) His work, I suggest, holds out a tension between absolute absence and redemptive presence that at once resists and affirms a negative aesthetic of God’s solidarity with suffering. (shrink)

ABSTRACT George Berkeley is usually not discussed in the canonical histories of modern aesthetics. Similarly, Berkeley scholars do not seem to have paid attention to his possible contribution to modern aesthetics. Berkeley exploited certain theoretical potentials of the emerging aesthetic experience that was invented and formulated especially by his contemporaries like Joseph Addison, Richard Steele and Lord Shaftesbury. He applied these elements in shaping a theologico-aesthetic language in the very same period when Francis Hutcheson and Alexander Baumgarten wrote their widely (...) acclaimed first aesthetic theories in Europe. At the same time, Berkeley advances the linguistic and religious aspects of the modern aesthetic experience not in his theoretical, but in his pragmatical and popularizing writings. Instead of relying on a purely rational theology or a negative theology, he offers an ‘aesthetic’ one based on the model of the beautiful and the sublime. Aesthetically, this meant a re-interpretation and re-configuration of the duality of the beautiful and the sublime – decades before Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry. (shrink)

Psychoanalytical theory's main axiom tells that drive does not function in a 'natural', but in a distorted and 'perverted' way. Drive's most basic purpose is not the organism's self-preservation, but its 'pleasure' . That is why life, being natural and biological, is not lived naturally and biologically: the organism takes a'polymorph perverse' distance towards its natural, biological functioning and, in that very distance, 'enjoins' it. On the most fundamental level, it lives from that very 'pleasure'. Lacan's theory of desire is (...) an elaboration of that Freudian thesis on the polymorph perverse pleasure principle. The Lacanian 'ethics of desire', elaborated in his sixth and seventh seminar, is built upon that thesis as well. That is why, at the very end of his sixth seminar , he defines sublimation as 'perverse' and therefore of ethical value: in a non-repressing way, sublimation opens up desire to its polymorph perverse ground. However, in the next seminar , Lacan changes his theory on both sublimation and perversion. Now, sublimation is defined as the cultural gesture by which we put a desired object on the level of 'das Ding' . Here, perversion gets an ethically negative meaning: for, so Lacan argues, when we put ourselves as subject at the position of that Thing, we act like a pervert, and abuse the ethical rule for immoral purposes. The article follows in detail thisshift in Lacan's theory and discusses its important impact on his thesis on ethics. (shrink)

The relationship between aesthetics and science has begun to generate substantial interest. However, for the most part, the focus has been on the beauty of theories, and other aspects of scientific practice have been neglected. This book offers a novel perspective on aesthetics in experimentation via ten original essays from an interdisciplinary group comprised of philosophers, historians of science and art, and artists. -/- The collection provides an analysis of the concept of beauty in the evaluation of experiments. What properties (...) do practising experimenters value? How have the aesthetic properties of scientific experiments changed over the years? Secondly, the volume looks at the role that aesthetic factors, including negative values such as ugliness, as well as experiences of the sublime and the profound, play in the construction of an experiment and its reception. Thirdly, the chapters provide in-depth historical case studies from the Royal Society, which also allows for a study of the depiction of scientific experiment in artworks, as well as contemporary examples from the Large Hadron Collider and cases of experiments designed by artificial intelligence. Finally, it offers an exploration of the commonalities between how we learn from experiments on the one hand and the cognitive value of artworks on the other. -/- The Aesthetics of Scientific Experiments will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in philosophy and history of science, philosophy and history of art, as well as practising scientists and science communicators. (shrink)

The paper will examine the critical psychoanalytical model of emancipation proposed by Herbert Marcuse. I will show that Marcuse’s critical model has two moments; one that I call negative, formulated around the idea of repressive sublimation—as developed by Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man—and another one that I call normative, which finds its roots in a very peculiar reading of Freudian narcissism and leads to the idea of nonrepressive sublimation. By this reading of Marcuse, I hope to circumscribe the role of (...) psychoanalysis in the redefinition of the actual tasks of Critical Theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:134 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it —­Genesis 3:6 Abstract Aesthetics has emerged as an important battleground in the moral quest for a lower carbon society. Especially in the case of proposed wind farms (an environmentally benign technology in terms of low carbon emissions), (...) opponents frequently refer to the unsightly machines creating negative landscape impacts and ruining the view. This essay seeks to reflect on the particular ways in which visual aesthetics are framed and mobilized in this moral debate. Exploring the dividing lines between pictoral and more-­ than-­ representational approaches I ask if the moral dilemmas in our landscape decisions (e.g. individual rights to beauty or collective duties toward future generations) are obscured by physical or visual realms. The largely invisible nature of wind, electricity and climate change, set within the physical and tangible nature of landscapes and turbines, challenges us to experience the aesthetics of landscapes-­ with-­ machines through more creative and engaging means that are not limited to visibility, nor deaf to morality. SIN, DUTY, AND THE AESTHETICS OF NATURE As the first act of sin in the bible, Eve’s consumption of a visually aesthetic fruit led to humans being banned from the Garden of Eden. Looking at the above sentence more closely, we could even argue that “good for food” is not a positive condition (e.g. tasty, nourishing), but Justice in the Eye of the Beholder? ‘Looking’ Beyond the Visual Aesthetics of Wind Machines in a Post-­Productivist Landscape DAN VAN DER HORST Dan van der Horst / Justice in the Eye of the Beholder? 135 rather the absence of a negative (e.g. inedible), whilst “also desirable” may sound like the hunger for wisdom was only a secondary, additional attraction. The sentence thus draws attention to the key role of aesthetics in the making of a moral decision; would Eve have eaten the forbidden fruit if it was not “pleasing for the eye”? Aesthetic judgments may be informed by a range of factors, but as this bible quote illustrates, morality is key among them. Associations between right and wrong on the one side and beauty or ugliness on the other, are not exactly rare in written history, be they religious, literary or scholastic works. As a marked contribution to the latter, Immanuel Kant has paid particularly close attention to the links between aesthetics and morality, arguing amongst others that any universal agreement in judgments of the sublime must rest on an appeal to moral feelings.1 But universality is not the only logical link between aesthetic judgementandmorality.Peoplecanfeelasenseof‘duty’tofindcertainthings beautiful e.g. because that is the aesthetic judgment of the group they aspire to belong to.2 Whilst this sense of duty can refer to social conditioning and group belonging, it also has resonance for landscape aesthetics at a time of anthropogenic climate change (a universal threat) when we must “learn to love the low carbon landscape.”3 This presents a point of departure from the debate on the moral obligation of preserving aesthetically pleasing landscapes (as we tend to do through legal designations, e.g. national parks), an ethical logic which leads, to use the words of Holmes Rolston, “from beauty to duty.”4 Moreover a posi­ tive aesthetical appreciation of a landscape because it accommodates low carbon technologies, would potentially require an inverse ethical logic, i.e. from duty to beauty.5 Notwithstanding the clear conceptual links between moral and aesthetic judgment, in everyday life it may be far less clear what kind of moral issues may underpin particular expressions of aesthetic sensibility. This can be particularly problematic for the deployment of environmental technologies (i.e. technologies pursued to reduce pollution ) that have significant landscape footprints. That is where we can find universal moral claims demanding environmental action for the common good rubbing up against aesthetic landscape judgments in places where such developments are proposed. This produces an unsatisfactory situation in which the deployment of clean technologies ENVIRONMENT, SPACE, PLACE / VOLUME 10 / ISSUE 1 / 2018 136 is delayed, tensions within local communities may increase... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kant’s Worldview: How Judgment Shapes Human Comprehension by Rudolf A. MakkreelRiccardo PozzoRudolf A. Makkreel. Kant’s Worldview: How Judgment Shapes Human Comprehension. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2021. Pp. 284. Hardback, $99.95. Paperback, $34.95.This is the last book Rudolf Makkreel published before passing away in October 2021. No wonder, then, that it makes some strong points, one of which is truly fundamental: the time has come to recognize the (...) expediency of reading Kant along with Dilthey for a better understanding of the workings of human comprehension. Makkreel maintains that Kant endorsed “a more inclusive idea of philosophizing according to a world-concept (Weltbegriff ),” for Kant had realized that, because reason cannot simply extrapolate from the ways in which the understanding proceeds to a determinate lawful order, it is necessary to tame the speculative projections of reason by our own powers of orientation and judgment. Hence, Makreel concludes that “the overall worldview we can actually arrive at will need [End Page 511] to include supplementary modes of organizational order that are not determinant but reflective” (3).Throughout the book, Makkreel is pleading for Kant scholars to acknowledge the heuristic value of a set of concepts whose philosophical effectiveness has been to date underestimated. Readers will find many convincing analyses of the lexical cloud around judgment: determining judgment (bestimmende Urteilskraft) against reflecting judgment (reflektierende Urteilskraft) in its connection with the Weberian distinction between explaining (Erklären), understanding (Verstehen), and comprehending (Begreifen). What is at stake in contrasting the last two, understanding and comprehension, insists Makkreel, is the scope of what humans can claim to know, for while it is important to base knowledge claims on the empirical understanding, we must remain open to what could lie beyond the horizon of sense. Hence, critical philosophy is there to supplement “the limits of actual geographical” surveys of the earth with the “boundaries of all possible descriptions of the earth” (KrV A 759/B 787), whereby limits (Schranken) are negative empirical markers that do not take into account what could be beyond them, while boundaries (Grenzen) are positive markers that “presuppose a space existing outside a certain definite space and enclosing it” (Prolegomena, AA 4:352). Makkreel suggests we can infer that whereas earthly limits are imposed from without, worldly boundaries are in some sense self-imposed. Earthly limits would act as external negative restraints on the understanding, while worldly bounds work as internal positive constraints on reason as it attempts to comprehend both what we can and cannot know. Comprehension, argues Makkreel, can be “shown to be a mode of reason whose bounds must be judgmentally self-binding” (14).Let me take a step back. Makkreel intends to show that the task of understanding in its relation with comprehension is what we need to provide an overall characterization of Kant’s philosophical project. This is a bold stance, given Kant’s argument that the faculty of understanding (Verstand) proceeds discursively, namely one step at a time, which makes the project of a more holistic comprehension (Begreifen) highly problematic. However, Makkreel notes that if it is true that “concepts of reason serve for comprehension” (KrV A 311/B 367), it is also true they are purely inferential and at times sophistical (13). To help define what Kant ends up meaning by ‘comprehension,’ Makkreel provides exhaustive references to important discussions about this notion in Kant’s Lectures on Logic and the Critique of Judgment (40–46).Here comes to the foreground the notion of worldview (Weltanschauung) that stands alone in the title of his book. It is in the context of his discussion of the mathematical sublime that Kant broached the idea of an overall “worldview [Weltanschauung]” (KU AA 5:255), which nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophers (e.g. Hegel, Dilthey, and Jaspers) took to denote a common or generic outlook on life. For Makkreel, though, ‘worldview’ designates a comprehensive way of characterizing Kant’s distinctive philosophical project (13).As I said above, this is a bold stance. While the first part of the book focuses on philosophizing according to a world-concept, the second part turns to our practical concerns as we act in the world. In... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 30.3 (2000) 3-11 [Access article in PDF] Preface The State of Death Jonathan Strauss In reality, there is perhaps a greater distance between old age and youth than there is between decrepitude and death, for here one must not consider death to be something absolute.... Death is not armed with a blade, nothing violent accompanies it, life ends by imperceptible nuances.... (D. J.)We dare... to assert, on the (...) basis of a knowledge of the structure and properties of the human body and a large number of observations, that death can be cured. (m.) —Diderot and d'Alembert, Encyclopédie1But if Man is Action, and if Action is Negativity "appearing" as Death, Man, in his human or speaking existence, is only a more or less deferred death, and one that is conscious of itself.Therefore: to recognize Discourse philosophically, or to recognize Man as one who speaks, is to accept unambiguously the fact of death and to describe... its significance and reach. Now, this is precisely what philosophers before Hegel omitted to do. —Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de HegelDeath changed in the nineteenth century. The shift probably began during the Enlightenment, when, as Philippe Ariès has argued, people learned for the first time to fear their mortality—not just the terrors and uncertainties of their demise or the anguish over an eventual punishment for their sins, but extinction itself [1: 112-14, 125]. Within the space of a few decades, death became a sheer and unredeemable absence, an unconsolable loss, and a confrontation with pure negativity. During those years, death was transformed from a nuance between different states to an absolute. It became, in itself, infinite and sublime, a nothingness whose discovery, like that of the zero, unleashed unknown and limitless powers. These now had to be grappled with, to be grasped theoretically as well as practically, in both the intimacy of private fears and the communality of public legislation. And once death was recognized as an absolute it could be put to use as one, for both the individual and the social collective.Hegel, as Kojève taught, was the first to harness the new forces of mortality within an intellectual mechanism worthy of their scope. "Death," he wrote in the preface to the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, "... is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength" [19]. This power to grasp one's demise, to confront it and "tarry" with it, was what he called the Subject—at once the isolated unit of humanity confronted by the limits of its mortality and the key to the social orders that [End Page 3] depend on it, in a pragmatic sense. As justice and enfranchisement increasingly rely on the responsibility of single subjects, so does death rise in importance as the final determiner of socially answerable individuality. In this setting, where mortality is the limit of the subject, society becomes a state of death, a collective grounded in the transcendental absolute of a nothingness that intervenes regularly and practically within the events of life.In such a state, executions are not merely exercises of authority or purgings of unassimilable elements from the social body; they are also, and most significantly, spectacles of the transcendental grounds of the social itself. Here, death is democratic not merely because it is the universal leveler, not simply because it imposes a one hundred percent experience tax on all brackets of the population, but because it produces the uniform units of untransferable humanity, individuals, who at once suffer the obligation to conform to the state and enjoy the, at least theoretical, enfranchisement to transform it. Throughout our days, in the most insignificant details, we feel this mortal isolation organizing our legal relation to our social context, and in each case my death to come draws a line around me, saying: this is you. My metro pass and airline tickets will be valid, my response to the jury duty summons required, and my vote counted, unless I die. It does not matter that I have changed lovers, or... (shrink)

The Gospel of John is a sublime theological work describing an exalted vision of the cosmic harmony between God and humankind as mediated by the Divine Word. At the same time, the gospel also vilifies nonbelievers and identifies them with a historical group, “the Jews,” in a manner that contributed significantly to Christian anti-Semitism for many centuries. This essay describes both the positive and negative elements of John's portrayal of Jews and Judaism, and suggests some ways that twenty-first (...) century readers might come to terms with this problematic issue. (shrink)

In Alice Walker’s vignette “The Flowers,” a young black girl’s walk in the woods is interrupted when she treads “smack” into the skull of a lynched man. As her name predicates, Myop’s age and innocence obstruct her from seeing deeply into the full implications of the scene, while the more worldly reader is jarred and confronted with a whole history of racial violence and slavery. The skeleton, its teeth cracked and broken, is a temporal irruption, a Gothic “smack” that shatters (...) the transience of the pastoral scene with the intrusion of a deeper past from which dead matter/material de-composes the story’s present with the violent matter/issue of racism. Walker’s story is representative of an important trope in fiction, where the pastoral dead speak through the details of their remains, and the temporal fabric of text is disrupted by the very substance of death. Against the backdrops of Terry Gifford’s post-pastoral and Fred Botting’s Gothic understanding of the literary corpse as “negative[ly] sublime,” this essay explores the fictional dead as matter unfettered by genre, consistently signifying beyond their own inanimate silences, revealing suppressed and unpalatable themes of racial and sexual violence, child abuse and cannibalistic consumerism. Along with Walker’s story, this study considers these ideas through new readings of Stephen King’s novella The Body, Raymond Carver’s story “So Much Water So Close to Home,” and The Road by Cormac McCarthy. While these writers may form an unlikely grouping in terms of style, each uses pastoral remains as significant material, deploying the dead as Gothic entities that force the reader to confront America’s darkest social and historical matters. (shrink)

This discourse aims to consider the relationship between culture and emotion in light of cultural philosophy by analyzing the sublime emotion,which is an emotional expression of human beings. Firstly,consideration will be given to the necessity of analyzing the sublime emotion in terms of the cultural,social and political aspects of present-day Japan. Secondly, the double-barreled characteristics of the sublime emotion, which have been lost amidst the globalizing trends of the day, will be clarified. In this regard, in particular, (...) I would like to shed light on the relationship between the sublime emotion and the critique of postcolonial reason. Thirdly, through these considerations, the fact that the sublime emotion has diverse functions in its historical and social contexts will be elucidated. I will first examine the negative meaning of the sublime emotion throught a critique of emotional reason, and then focus my attention to the positive meaning of the sublime emotion with the aim of considering the relationships between conditions of sublime potential and others. Fourthly, efforts will be made to pursure the method of reconciliation between the universalisitic, essentialist statements and the relativistic, constructivist statements, using the critique of emotional reason. In conclusion, I will elaborate on the sublime and critical functions based on emotional reason from a pluralistic standpoint. (shrink)

It is often asserted that Nietzsche's proposal that "there is no truth" is indebted to his views on aesthetics. That is, it is argued both that Nietzsche perceived art as exclusive of truth, and that he viewed the whole of existence as artistic in this sense. In this paper I attempt to supplement this argument by excavating the sense of truth that is available in Nietzsche's thought concerning art. "Dionysian truth" is not a property of objects which represent the world. (...) Rather, it arises in acts of artistic creation. I hope, here, to present a view of truth which is compatible with Nietzsche's attempt to understand the world as a process of conflicting forces rather than a collection of subjects and objects. ;The first chapter is concerned with Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, in which music is offered as an example of Dionysian truth. Music, in this work, enables us to overcome our sense of ourselves as isolated self-consciousnesses, an experience which engenders artistic creativity. The notion of Dionysian truth, however, is not fully disassociated, in The Birth of Tragedy, from the view that music pictures or represents the "world will." ;In the second chapter I argue that Nietzsche's commitment to the Dionysian is apparent in his unique understanding of physiology. The authority of the ego is undermined by exhibiting it as an epiphenomenon of the more fundamental physiological drives. I argue that such an understanding subverts the claim that Nietzsche values art as a means of sublimating the passions, as well as the claim that Nietzsche ultimately identifies truth with that which serves our own self-preservation. ;The third chapter demonstrates how a specific artistic practice,Expressionist Painting, understands itself in Dionysian terms, and suggests reasons why a Dionysian view of art may not offer itself as a means for the evaluation of artworks. Finally, I attempt to show how the understanding of power which is structured by a Dionysian perspective may help us to overcome some of Nietzsche's negative and reactionary suggestions that the powerful are, or should be, cruel and manipulative towards others. (shrink)

The mainstream interpretation of Schopenhauer's philosophy is dialectical and stresses the continuity between aesthetics and ethics. This interpretation has its own plausibility but is overly confident in the letter. Restricting the value of Schopenhauer's aesthetic theory to a mere propaedeutic of an ethics, wherein the ascetic ideal of the denial of willing is central, might seem fully justified at first sight, but clearly overlooks a number of crucial complexities and ambivalences. First of all, it obliterates the specificity and complexity of (...) Schopenhauer's theoryof (aesthetic) pleasure. In the first section, aesthetic pleasure is shown to be closely linked with a peculiar form of non-conceptual insight, which is at the core of Schopenhauer's philosophy. In the second section, it is argued that aesthetic pleasure cannotbe reduced to the so-called negative pleasure that accompanies the liberation from individual willing. The dialectical reading of Schopenhauer's philosophy invariably stresses the negativity of aesthetic pleasure to argue for the 'bridge' between the aesthetic disinterestedness and the ethical denial of willing. Schopenhauer's aesthetics, however, acknowledges a kind of intrinsic and positive pleasure, which is bound up with the perception of the (Platonic) Idea in and through the concrete object and with the non-ordinary use of the cognitive faculties. The aesthetic contemplation is a peculiar kind of(non-conceptual) self-consciousness, which is itself a source of pleasure and is to some degree independent of the pleasure of relief from the demands of desire. Moreover, this dialectical interpretation avoids a detailed and radical scrutiny of Schopenhauer's theory of the sublime feeling. In the second section, the sublime feeling is contrasted with the beautiful and is shown to be a pure feeling that meets the specific conditions of an aesthetic appreciation. An attentive reading of Schopenhauer's fascinating theory of the sublime intimates a new interpretation of his philosophy, in which the fissures between aesthetics and ethics appear. The aesthetic feeling of the sublime hampers a smooth crossing from the aesthetic realm to the ethical denial of willing in asceticism, since it is not at all an harmonious feeling which accompanies the liberation from the will and does not promise an everlasting freedom from willing. The sublime feeling is an ambivalent mixture of pleasure and pain, of joy and sorrow and reveals a deep and unbridgeable gap in the heart of subjectivity itself. It is clearly distinct from and even contradictory to the ascetic's ideal of restraint and denial of the will. (shrink)

This essay deals critically with Nietzsche’s anthropological typology of the “free spirit par excellence”, “we spirits”, persons endowed with positive as against negative power patterns, and the ideal of the Übermensch. The conclusions are twofold. The first is that actually it was not Nietzsche’s ideal of the Overman that was the pinnacle of his anthropological philosophy, but the even more ideal type of the “free spirit par excellence”. The second conclusion is that it is impossible to envisage a society (...) consisting of such “free spirits”. This thesis is highlighted by contrasting the society of Übermenchen, who, according to Nietzsche, might live in society and even need it as a sine qua non for their cultivation, with free spirits par excellence, who are by definition free from any social ethos, and hence impossible within its framework. However, I argue that, on Nietzsche’s terms, the ideal of the Übermench is also not viable in society. Hence this essay points to an inherent flaw ofNietzsche’s existential philosophy -- thenon-viability of its most sublime ideals. (shrink)

A philosophical elaboration of Theodor Adorno's conception of aesthetic form. Adorno's aesthetic theory is presented through a reconstruction of the major concepts in his Aesthetic Theory and via the projects of Dialectic of Enlightenment and Negative Dialectics. The dissertation argues that the nature of social and political institutions and ideologies is best revealed through an analysis of the critical social function embodied in aesthetic form. Artworks occupy such a ripe critical position--both in society and in aesthetic theory that confronts (...) what is specifically social in form--because of the way in which artworks simultaneously instantiate and deny socially constructed reality. Modernist art represents a key moment in the history of aesthetic form because it presents the seeming impossibility of artworks asserting any meaning. ;A central task of the dissertation is to show how aesthetic form might resolve the problem of enlightenment, that is, whether and precisely how artworks might overcome the dilemma of reason being always complicit in power and domination. The concept of aesthetic appearance is examined in light of what Adorno terms the crisis of semblance in order to reveal how aesthetic form is the potential transcendence of instrumental rationality. ;The dissertation is situated within the German tradition of Kant and Hegel's aesthetic theories, in which notions of beauty and the sublime have an emphatic relationship to the constitution and form of subjectivity. The concept of the ugly is examined as a specifically modernist phenomenon that represents the aesthetic return of repressed nature. The primary concepts through which Adorno's aesthetic theory is presented include mimesis, exchange, sacrifice and identity. ;The final third of the dissertation consists of arguments against the contemporary philosophical theorists of postmodernism: Jurgen Habermas, Frederic Jameson, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Peter Burger and Albrecht Wellmer. It is argued that each of these writers fails to confront, or misreads, the core arguments and insights of Adorno's aesthetic theory. (shrink)

While philosophy and psychoanalysis privilege language and conceptual distinctions and mistrust the image, the philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva recognizes the power of art and the imagination to unblock important sources of meaning. She also appreciates the process through which creative acts counteract and transform feelings of violence and depression. Reviewing Kristeva's corpus, Elaine P. Miller considers the intellectual's "aesthetic idea" and "thought specular" in their capacity to reshape depressive thought on both the individual and cultural level. She revisits Kristeva's (...) reading of Walter Benjamin with reference to melancholic art and the imagination's allegorical structure; her analysis of Byzantine iconoclasm in relation to Freud's psychoanalytic theory of negation and Hegel's dialectical negativity; her understanding of Proust as an exemplary practitioner of sublimation; her rereading of Kant and Arendt in terms of art as an intentional lingering with foreignness; and her argument that forgiveness is both a philosophical and psychoanalytic method of transcending a "stuck" existence. Focusing on specific artworks that illustrate Kristeva's ideas, from ancient Greek tragedy to early photography, contemporary installation art, and film, Miller positions creative acts as a form of "spiritual inoculation" against the violence of our society and its discouragement of thought and reflection. (shrink)

Inspired by research on the Rwanda genocide and the decapitation, in July 2008, of a passenger on a Canadian Greyhound bus, this occasional paper explores the shared agitation with which we may respond to two seemingly disparate instances of evil such as these. Arguing against discontinuous claims that distinguish between pre- and post-metaphysical conceptions of evil pivoting around the figure of Kant, the article identifies three logics suggestive of continuity in Western thought on evil: negativity, functionalism and the messianic. Focusing (...) on the theme of negativity, the article argues that the essentially apophatic doctrine of the privation of evil is reconstituted in postmodern thinking as the liminal nature of evil. While acts of evil relate to what is both/either mathematically or qualitatively sublime (Kant), and while this experience may account for our agitation, we nonetheless employ figures like ‘hubris’, the ‘uncanny’ (Freud) and the ‘state of exception’ (Agamben) to traverse the liminal in order to interpret instances of human praxis which, given their liminal nature, will always remain brute fact. The article argues that these figures, in particular the temporal structure implicit in Freud’s account of the uncanny, can usefully be explored to account for the agitation with which we respond to instances of evil as diverse as the two that inspired this article. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Capitalism in “Wealthy Hellas”? PETER W. ROSE Josiah ober has taken on the very ambitious task of analyzing a vast swath of ancient Greek history— precisely the periods—as his opening quotation from Byron (1) implies—most admired by those who have devoted any time to the study of Greek antiquity: Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth! Immortal, though no more! Though fallen, great!1 At the same time, again as (...) suggested by the repetition of Byron’s lines (206, also mentioned on 293), Ober’s book falls within the large category of celebratory works about ancient Greece—like Werner Jaeger’s once popular three volumes of Paideia or, at the outset of the twentieth century, Alfred Zimmern ’s The Greek Commonwealth.2 It does not, on the other hand, fit in with a plethora of relatively recent, relatively short (as opposed to George Grote’s twelve volumes) histories of Greece aimed at the potentially lucrative textbook market for general more comprehensive overviews of Greek civilization.3 As such, the basis on which Ober celebrates ancient Greece merits close scrutiny. history and the overriding thesis ober’s conception of “history” here is heavily weighted towards the theoretical elaboration and justification of an Josiah Ober, The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (Princeton University Press 2015), hardback, 415 pages. A truncated, arbitrarily reorganized version of this review appeared in New Left Review 103 (2017) 139–49. Thanks to Daniel Tompkins for full comments on an earlier version, and to Peter Green and Stephen Hodkinson for clarifications on specific points. arion 26.3 winter 2019 overriding thesis. Five initial chapters of a total of eleven are devoted to that task before five chronologically focused chapters, which offer a cursory romp through Greek history from ca. 1000 BCE to 334 BCE and some brief suggestions about the period down to the decisive takeover of Greece by Rome, usually dated to 31 BCE. The volume is capped by a final summary and overview chapter. Ober is admirably forthright about his agenda. Immediately in his preface he declares, “in states where citizens keep rulers in check, public authority protects individual rights and the rule of law pertains most of the time. These political conditions promote economic growth. The conjunction of democratic politics and a strong economy is, in practice, available only to affluent citizens of highly developed countries.... Democracy and growth define the normal, although not yet the usual, conditions of modernity” (xiii, my emphasis).4 This somewhat utopian conception of the present-day interface of democratic institutions and economic growth—posited as an unquestioned desideratum in sublime disregard of “ecology” in the literal sense5—underlies Ober’s whole project. While acknowledging the obvious negatives of ancient slavery,6 “denial of rights to women, and glorified war,” he argues “if we are interested in the conjunction of political and economic exceptionalism, we must start somewhere, and classical Greece was the society in which the wealth-and-democracy package first emerged in a form that can be studied in depth” (xv). Athenian democracy has been at the center of Ober’s impressive scholarly career at least since the publication of his study of fourth-century BCE Athenian rhetoric, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (Princeton 1989). “Athens” or “democracy” have featured in the titles of all his subsequent book publications7—not to mention the extraordinary output of more specialized essays in multiple venues. One overriding question about his latest book is whether the unique phenomenon of Athenian democracy is being unduly generalized to “Classical Greece.” 142 capitalism in “wealthy hellas”? The special focus of his interest here in ancient Greece, the “conjunction of political and economic exceptionalism,” is further clarified in his opening chapter which begins with the quotation from Byron cited above: “Byron’s vision of greatness was inspired by ancient Greek cultural and intellectual achievement: art and architecture, literature, visual and performance art, scientific and moral thought.... Hellas was great because of a cultural accomplishment that was supported by sustained economic growth. That growth was made possible by a distinctive approach to politics” (1–2). Greek cultural achievements, however, are bracketed (and in practical terms dismissed)8 in favor of the “wealth-anddemocracy... (shrink)

In this paper I explore Žižek’s stance on ideology. I begin with an overview, move to his understanding of the ‘act’ and then move into the second part of the paper which is a discussion of the first part in relation to his encounter with Deleuze in Organs Without Body. I claim that this was a missed encounter, or rather it will always remain an impossible encounter given that Lacan, Badiou and Žižek’s philosophical embrace of negativity bumps up squarely against (...) Deleuze and Guattari’s affirmative stance. This deadlock does not offer a ‘solution’ as much as the political consequences that emerge from the two paths taken. It is further claimed that these crossroads are separated by two very different understandings of infinity as they are developed in the Kantian antinomy of the mathematical and dynamic sublime. (shrink)

D'Amico's review of Castoriadis' Crossroads in the Labyrinth (Telos, 60) can be taken as a negative example of one of the book's central theses: namely, that there exists an intimate connection between sublimation and truth. In D'Amico's case, there is little of either. One is struck by the vehemence of the attack and wonders about the source of its unmediated anger. I am usually reluctant to make psychologizing arguments in public controversies. However, in this case, I feel justified in (...) asserting that only extra-theoretical factors can account for the tone and character of the review. Whatever these factors may have been, they apparently prevented the reviewer from taking up the work in a serious fashion, as reflected not only in the failure to grapple with central theoretical issues. (shrink)

ABSTRACTI defend a non-reductionist view of music, according to which music should be understood in terms of musical beauty. I suggest that general theories of music are legitimate, and I discuss sublimity and argue that it is a species of beauty. Musical experience is the experience of aesthetic properties of that are realized in sounds. Sometimes, when we are fortunate, this experience generates pleasure in musical beauty. As Hanslick rightly insisted, there is no way to begin to understand what music (...) is, or to understand its value and why we value it, without putting musical beauty in the foreground and celebrating our experience of it. This positive position has negative consequences. Musical appreciation does not require pathologies of emotion, spurious political narratives, intimations of religious profundity and so on. The value is in the sounds. It is an immanent value, not a transcendent one. It is a this-worldly value, not an other-worldly delusion, or something self-indulgently in us. Musical beauty is there in the sounds, in “tones and their artistic combination,” as Hanslick maintained. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 26, Issue 1, pp 118 - 147 This paper challenges the widespread emphasis on the absence of God in post- Holocaust historiography, theology, and art by suggesting that Barnett Newman’s _Stations of the Cross_ may have been conceived under the theological category of the apophatic rather than the aesthetic category of the sublime. This paper focuses on the “anti-realist” position of Newman and other artists for whom the Holocaust necessitated a renewed aniconic tendency in Jewish aesthetics. (...) His work, I suggest, holds out a tension between absolute absence and redemptive presence that at once resists and affirms a negative aesthetic of God’s solidarity with suffering. (shrink)

Until recently, theorists of creativity have consistently maintained that two necessary conditions must be satisfied in order for us to legitimately ascribe creativity to a given phenomenon: a) that it exhibit novelty, and b) that it possess value. However, researchers investigating malevolent forms of creativity have claimed that the value condition is problematic insofar as we often ascribe creativity to products that are of entirely negative value for us. This has given rise to a number of modified conceptions of (...) the value condition, all of which I argue are inadequate (Sections 1 and 2). To address this issue, I advance a novel conception of creative value (Section 3). My contention is that even though malevolent creative products may be of net-negative value, they are nonetheless endowed with a degree of positive value for the predicating individual – that is, insofar as the salient originality of such products elicits an intrinsically-valuable affect of surprise. In Section 4 I then examine the way in which this affect promotes cultural flourishing and to that extent may be considered instrumentally valuable. The principal conclusion of these observations is that the existence of malevolent creativity does not genuinely controvert the standard view that creative products must possess positive value for the predicating individual. (shrink)

Preface: The dog's bollocks-- at the media dinner party -- Introduction: "The Marx brothers", "The Elvis of cultural theory", and other media clichés -- The mediated imp of the perverse -- Žižek's tickling shtick -- Big (Br)other : psychoanalysing the media -- Understanding the media : the sublime objectification of ideology -- The media's violence -- The joker's little shop of ideological horrors -- Conclusion: Don't just do it : negative dialectics in the age of Nike.

The aim of this paper is to present the idea of violence in Nietzsche’s work, seen as a basic principle that organizes and unites different elements of his philosophy. Violence is one of its crucial categories, which he exploits in his descriptions and analyses of metaphysical, historical and social-cultural reality. In what follows, I shall examine different meanings and renditions of violence in Nietzsche, both in their negative as well as positive aspects. I shall start from an attempt to (...) locate Nietzsche’s understanding of violence within the Western philosophical tradition. Then, I will discuss it in the light of the evolution of Nietzsche’s work. By analyzing the positive and constructive meaning of violence, I shall be able to conclude the essay by emphasizing that in Nietzsche’s political project violence acquires a spiritual and sublime nature. (shrink)