Enquiries on the Discourse of the Sublime – From Longinus to Žižek
By examining works or enquiries into the sublime in a philosophical or historical sense we can define it both in terms of its discourse and in its periodic movements. There is a tradition of these enquiries dating back to the first century with the Greek philosopher Longinus writing ‘Peri Hupsos’ or ‘On Sublimity.’ We see a renewal of interest in this treatise in the eighteenth century with writers such as Thomas Burnet, Joseph Addison and John Baillie each developing and proposing new theories. Of the period, Edmund Burke’s ‘A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful’ was the most passionate and fully realised. It was published anonymously in 1757 and attempted to address the new crises of sublime discourse. Shaw writes:
‘Having determined that the sublime is a function of the combinatory power of language, and not merely a quality inherent in certain words or objects, or for that matter in the divine, the stress begins to fall on ways of accounting for this phenomenon.[1]’
Having stood for the ‘effect of grandeur in speech and poetry’ in the Longinian tradition, it comes to stand for something at the heart of human nature. Burke’s enquiry links sublimity to terror as well as reverence and constructs a parameter by which to measure it in terms of cultural psyche. Critically, it places the sublime in the minds of men. It is as much a scientific investigation as a philosophical one, with Shaw explaining: ‘The argument of the treatise, in contrast to that of his predecessors, is thus entirely secular; God is no longer required to guarantee the authenticity of our experience.[2]’
In his ‘Critique of Judgment’ Immanuel Kant moves the sublime away from what Terry Eagleton calls the aestheticisation of the sublime. Defined as it has been in terms of morality and the sympathy of mankind, Kant argues for a sublime based in the totality of our reasoning and thoughts. Eagleton writes, that in Kantian sublime discourse:
‘We know that the sublime presentation is simply an echo of the sublimity of Reason within ourselves, and thus testimony to our absolute freedom. In this sense, the sublime is a kind of anti-aesthetic with presses the imagination to extreme crisis, to the point of failure and breakdown, in order that it may negatively figure forth the Reason that transcends it.[3]’
His analysis of the sublime undertakes theories of reason, boundlessness and transcendentalism and links them to notions of beauty and ethics. It moves the discourse forward in that it can now be discussed in a poststructuralist sense. It is, as Shaw reveals, a ‘structural necessity’ in sublime theory:
‘Sublimity for Kant is the feeling that arises whenever we as subjects, become aware of the transcendental dimensions of experience. The sublime occurs, that is, whenever ideas exceed the application of a concept; at such moments the mind comes alive to the existence of a faculty of reason transcending the limits of our sensual existence.[4]’
The examination of the sublime moves forward into the twentieth and twenty-first century with thinkers Jean-François Lyotard and Slavoj Žižek coming to represent contemporary theory. Postmodern engagement with the sublime takes Barnett Newman as its cultural predecessor with his seminal essay ‘The Sublime is Now’ reworking and developing American abstract thought for the modern era. Having investigated the sublime in purely aesthetical formal/spatial treatments, postmodern thought once more attempts to categorise it in terms of the supersensible self. Shaw writes ‘the difference between Romanticism, modernism, and postmodernism can therefore be measured in their contrasting attitudes to the unpresentable.[5]’ Lyotard’s ‘Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime’ and ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’ focus on the idea of presenting the unpresentable. He places sublimity in a political and consumer-driven society, redefining notions of realism, the modern and the postmodern. He proposes a theory of the ‘differend’ – analysing phrase and language in their inability to represent conflict and terror. The sublime becomes a demonstration of ‘lack’ with Shaw writing: ‘For Lyotard, the sublime is conceived as a disruptive event, forcing thought to a crisis...the resistance of the sublime is ultimately political.[6]’
Slavoj Žižek’s ‘The Sublime Object of Ideology’ looks to Jacques Lacan’s theory of the ‘Real’ and the ‘Symbolic’ to attempt to ‘account for the failure of language in its attempts at reference.[7]’ He constitutes contemporary sublimity by analysing and reworking preceding philosophical works – Hegelian and Lacanian thoughts are discussed in terms of advertising and cinema. He attempts to construct a new theory of the ‘other’ – comparable to Lyotard’s ‘unpresentable’ and the notion of the ‘Void’ – echoing Lyotard’s ideology of ‘lack.’ He discusses philosophy itself, re-categorising the sublime for contemporary visual culture. Speaking to us of things that are at once familiar and made strange, he proposes a ‘reification’ of the sublime for a bourgeoning mass-cultural postmodern and post-structural era.
‘On Sublimity’ or ‘Peri Hupsos’ by Longinus is a first century Greek treatise categorising and assimilating that which produces sublime feeling or thought. Its author is believed to be either the Augustan critic Dionysius of Halicarnassus or Cassius Longinus. He introduces sublimity as a type of eminence or excellence of discourse. It should be noted at the outset however that there is a distinction between grandeur and sublimity. Where grandeur produces amazement and wonder, the true sublime encompasses a combination of wonder and astonishment:
‘Sublimity, produced at the right moment, tears everything up like a whirlwind, and exhibits the orator’s whole power as a single blow.[8]’
The treatise puts forward various theories for sublimity – whilst it is something that should and does occur naturally/organically, as with all modes of experience there are various factors to take into consideration. There is the idea of interpellation – of using one’s own ideology to convince or sway opinion. The notion of ‘loftiness’ – an element of authority and of being ‘primed’ for sublimity is also apparent. He regards our engagement with the sublime as a type of power relationship and says that in order for this to take place we must embrace the sublime and ascribe a lofty purpose to the mind. He proposes that the sublime takes us on a kind of journey. There is a movement from one point to another with this journey involving subscription to an authority - crucial to the sublime experience. In doing so, one improves one’s character and becomes a better type of person. The idea of experience – of gaining knowledge in order to develop the self is a loaded concept for Longinus. Experience is necessary in order to engage with sublimity and is possessed by a certain type of individual – one that is receptive to noble emotions and authority. While this is generally only achievable through wealth and education it is his view that morality is a more important aspect of our character. Philip Shaw explains:
‘As the echo of a noble mind, the sublime elevates man above the tawdry concern with wealth and status...The parity between this notion of wealth and the nature of the sublime is, however, merely formal. For, unlike the sublime, grandeur of wealth is superficial and does not work to elevate the soul but rather to wither and ruin it. The implication of Longinus’ observation is, therefore, that the true sublime is on the side of morality.[9]’
He writes that although possession of great wealth and power may well be associated with magnificence; they are not prerequisites for encountering sublimity. He feels that a wise man is prudent in his disdain for these and should be admired. We should ascribe to achieve a genuine understanding of the sublime in order to appreciate it. This will come only with experience and we must always be suspicious of the ‘trappings’ of wealth, reputation and absolute power. He feels that wisdom rather than wealth is crucial to our development and it is here that we see the notion of being primed for sublimity. He says that we must ‘develop our minds in the direction of greatness and make them always pregnant with noble thoughts[10]’ and it is through our experiences that we will encounter the truly sublime. Longinus stresses the importance of repeated exposure to lofty thoughts and purposes saying:
‘Nature judged man to be no lowly or ignoble creature when she brought us into this life and into the whole universe as to a great celebration, to be spectators of her whole performance and most ambitious actors. She implanted at once into our souls an invincible love for all that is great and more divine than ourselves. That is why the universe gives insufficient scope to man’s power of contemplation and reflection, but his thoughts often pass beyond the boundaries of the surrounding world.[11]’
Longinus’ treatise defines the sublime as something that manifests certain characteristics and produces certain effects in the reader or listener[12]. These effects are achievable through the employment of certain devices and he lists these as the ‘five sources of sublimity[13]’ – great thoughts, strong emotions, use of figures (thought and speech), diction and elevated word arrangements. Of these, ‘great thoughts’ are the most important as sublime effect cannot occur if the orator has a trivial or servile mind. Strong emotions are key to producing sublime feeling as they inform the listener/reader as to the speaker’s passions: ‘There is nothing so productive of grandeur as noble emotion in the right place. It inspires and possesses our words with a kind of madness and divine spirit.[14]’ Longinus goes on to explain that figures are the ‘natural allies’ of sublimity – hyperbaton, polysyndenton and anaphora allow the writer to dismantle and refigure speech in such a way to inspire sublime thoughts. He often returns to the notion that we should consider the sublime in the creation of great thoughts and words and says that while this can involve a certain form of trickery the secret is not to reveal the nature of the trick: ‘’Art is perfect when it looks like nature, nature is felicitous when it embraces concealed art.[15]’ Defining the sublime as a rhetorical effect and categorising it in terms of language places it, as an experience, in the hands of the creator and the minds of the reader-listener. It is something that shows our ability to comprehend and rationalise in order to educate and elevate the mind. Interestingly, this is not always a comfortable experience with Shaw writing:
‘For Longinus, the discourse of the sublime, whether in political oratory or in epic verse, works to overcome the rational powers of its audience, persuading them to the efficacy of an idea by means of sheer rhetorical force. In Longinus’ view...listeners and readers are ravished or, more disturbingly, raped by the power of words.[16]’
He says of Longinus that his sublime is the ‘discourse of domination[17]’ and says that while it shows the sublime might originally have arisen in our contemplation of the natural world, art is required to give these feelings shape and coherence. It places the sublime in the context of our artistic development and cultural enquiries rather than the omnipotent majestic mountain-top or valley.
Terry Eagleton in his ‘Ideology of the Aesthetic’ says that within life, certain objects stand out in perfection. The ideality of these items informs the viewer of a 'sensuous experience[18]' from within. These objects are known to us as inherently beautiful and enforce a logic that is felt rather than understood: 'a rigorous logic is here revealed to us in matter itself, felt instantly on the pulses.[19]' While there are many definitions of the aesthetic and enquiries into matters of taste, observation and perception, the logic of the sublime is at heart a sensate experience. True sublimity in art links the viewer irrevocably with the work they encounter. The sublime speaks to us in terms of power, terror and awe. There are descriptions of it a 'simple, grand sensation[20]' contrasted with the Longinian notion of the viewer being struck with 'the boiling furnaces of Etna, pouring out whole rivers of liquid flame.[21]' Paul de Man has said that 'sublimity is a certain distinction and excellence in expression.[22]' A worthwhile creation should act upon the audience as a method of transport rather than a mere persuasion. According to Longinus this is because ‘persuasion is on the whole something we can control, whereas amazement and wonder exert invincible power and force and get the better of every hearer.[23]’ When learning about the art of creation, one must learn the correct tools and methodology of expression. It is through the repeated utilisation of these tools that a piece of art may become a breakthrough piece. A nonchalant mark on canvas may require many years of dedicated practice. These utilitarian marks and lines, when finally executed correctly, could be said to be our first encounter with sublimity. Whilst these are not the true sublime, they become a scaffold upon which it could hang. The point has also been made by William Duff that ‘the genius must himself be enraptured if the audience be similarly moved.[24]’ Gazing on authentic sublimity should therefore evoke a type of epiphany. There is a feeling of conquest and comprehension throughout and while this may seem an unusual notion to connect with the sublime it is as Longinus said: ‘the mind is elevated by it, and so sensibly affected as to swell in transport and inward pride, as if what is heard or read were its own invention.[25]’
Longinus’ ‘Peri Hupsos’ comes into popular culture once more in the eighteenth century where its appraisal influences countless works and treatises on the matter. Shaw writes that its influence is as far reaching and key to our understanding of the topic because for the first time in written history we have a tangible questioning and understanding of some aspects of the sublime experience. It stands for:
‘the effect of grandeur in speech and poetry; for a sense of the divine; for the contrast between the limitations of human perception and the over-whelming majesty of nature; as proof of the triumph of reason over nature and imagination; and, most recently, as a signifier for that which exceeds the grasp of reason.[26]’
We get the impression that Longinus is rather shyly trying to evoke the sublime in our reading of his text but it is as he says himself: ‘What can we say of all of this but that it really is “the dreaming of a Zeus”?[27]’
Edmund Burke’s ‘A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful’ was published in London in 1757. The first edition sees Burke propose what he calls a ‘theory of our passions.[28]’ He feels it is vital to investigate the topic as prior reasoning has been ‘extremely inaccurate and inconclusive.[29]’ It is the view of the author that the term ‘beauty’ has been subjected to much abuse and that the idea of the sublime is incorrectly used to explain all instances of passionate expression. Referring to the first major treatise on sublimity he says: ‘Even Longinus, in his incomparable discourse upon a part of this subject, has comprehended things extremely repugnant to each other, under the common name of the Sublime.[30]’ He feels that this type of consideration has led to a confusion of our ideas and attempts to rectify this under the various headings of terror, passion, pain and beauty. In the preface to the second edition, we see an expansion of the Enquiry and an added definition of ‘taste.’ He says that we must acknowledge that the sublime and the beautiful are very different things and any further contemplation or study should separate the two:
‘They are indeed ideas of a very different nature, one being founded on pain, the other on pleasure; and however they may vary afterwards from the direct nature of their causes, yet these causes keep up an eternal distinction never to be forgotten by any whose business it is to affect the passions.[31]’
Burke’s treatise comes at a point in history where the traditional Longinian proposals are being discussed and challenged. The topic has become popular once more with new theories attempting to expand on the importance of the sublime. It begins to move away from mountain-top appraisal and religious omnipotence and comes to reside in objects much closer to home. Shaw explains:
‘The association between the vast in nature and the vast in mind is itself therefore a product of a system of thought, linking such disparate authors as Burnet, Dennis, Addisson, and Shaftesbury ... systematicity itself may work blindly, without origin or tendency, and perhaps even without an author, for once animated by the combinatory or associative power of language, a power undetermined by God, mind, or nature, a mouse as much as a mountain may become a source of the sublime.[32]’
At this point in history the sublime becomes something that resides in the discourse by which it is discussed as well as in the physical object or the mind of the viewer.
Burke’s treatise is made up of five sections and an introduction on the idea of taste. Like Longinus he makes a link between experience and knowledge. He informs us that although he may continually educate himself, a novice’s ‘knowledge is improved, his Taste is not altered.[33]’ Mankind should instead consider that ‘taste does not depend upon a superior principle in men, but on superior knowledge.[34]’ What we consider to be good taste is in fact ‘in reality is no more than a refined judgment.[35]’ These judgments are improved by attention and reasoning rather than social position:
‘A rectitude of judgment in the arts which may be called a good Taste, does in a great measure depend upon sensibility; because if the mind has no bent to the pleasures of the imagination, it will never apply itself sufficiently to the works of that species to acquire competent knowledge of them.[36]’
Burke says that taste therefore is not a separate faculty of the mind. We are each in receipt of the ability to judge and to imagine. He proposes a theory of a cultivation of knowledge to inform that taste in order to make the correct judgement: ‘It is known that the Taste (whatever it is) is improved exactly as we improve our judgment, by extending our knowledge, by a steady attention to our object, and by a frequent exercise.[37]’
Burke now attempts to develop a set of criteria by which we can formulate our comprehension of sublimity. He is concerned ‘with the task of providing a new way of understanding the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, one grounded in a sensationist account of the human mind.[38]’ He formulates his theory of terror and the sublime stating:
‘No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. For fear being an apprehension of pain and death, if operates in a manner that resembles actual pain. Whatever therefore is terrible, with regards to sight, is sublime too.[39]’
The notion of threat and its capacity to influence the mind is examined in order to propose an ‘alternative vision for social change.[40]’ Luke Gibbons writes that the linking of terror and sublimity in Burke’s treatise allows for a shift in our cultural sensibilities – where the sublime in the Longinian tradition discusses a type of mental movement – a journeying that subscribes to a higher authority in order to elevate and develop the mind, in the Burkean tradition, this movement is expanded upon. It becomes a cultural rather than personal shift and leads to what he calls a ‘restorative process.[41]’ Gibbons explains:
‘For the Enlightenment, the injured body was incapable of looking beyond itself, and hence attaining the universal or cosmopolitan stance required to operate in the civic sphere. By contrast, Burke’s aesthetics outline an alternative, radical form of sensibility – the “sympathetic sublime’ – in which the acknowledgment of oppression need not lead to self-absorption, but may actually enhance the capacity to identify with the plight of others.[42]’
It is through our capacity to empathise with our fellow man that we are capable of producing sublime feeling. Kant writes that:
‘Beauty is not a concept of an object, and a judgment of taste is not a cognitive judgment. All it assumes is that we are justified in presupposing universally in all people the same subjective conditions of the power of judgment that we find in ourselves.[43]’
The same can be said of Burke’s supposition – sublimity lies in our ability to presuppose and to judge sympathetically; our natural affinities and recognition. He writes:
‘as our creator has designed us, we should be united by the bond of sympathy, he has strengthened that bond by a proportional delight; and there most, where our sympathy is most wanted, in the distresses of others.[44]’
Burke’s Enquiry also discusses the idea of beauty. This has been described as the ‘engenderment’ of the sublime and we see for the first time the concept of ‘feminine beauty’ versus the ‘masculine sublime.’ The sensation or effect of beauty is described at length throughout Burke’s text and he avers that it is most commonly seen that beauty ‘is experienced most fully in men’s sexual perception of women.[45]’ Beauty lies in the feminine realm of seduction and is associated with love and desire. It is through admiring and being enchanted by beauty that men’s base feelings of lust turn to love. We are raised therefore to a higher level of consciousness and ‘above the level of brutes.[46]’ We see that the application of beauty and its feminine ‘deceit’ raises a dilemma for Burke. His Enquiry suggests that the dominant masculine is ‘engaged in a perpetual war with female lassitude.[47]’ The previous anointment of the sublime as the ultimate force and power in our consciousness is now undermined by the subtlety of the beautiful. Shaw points out:
‘Where the sublime “dwells on large objects, and terrible,” and is linked to the intense sensations of terror, pain, and awe, the focus of the beautiful, by contrast, is on “small ones, and pleasing” and appeals mainly to the domestic affections, to love, tenderness and pity[48].’
This leads to a conflict for Burkean scholars. If it is that the truly sublime is all-encompassing and terrible – something to be fearful of, how is it that female lassitude can have such a destabilizing effect without harbouring some magnificent power of its own. If it connotes small, domestic pleasures how can this be enough to influence the brutality of the sublime in its masculine potency and domination? This is a shaky foundation upon which to build sublime theory with Shaw explaining: ‘it seems therefore that Burke’s privileging of the sublime is prompted by a number of fears: the lapse of the extraordinary into custom; the collapse of masculinity in the face of female languor.[49]’
Burke’s Enquiry closes with an investigation into the effect of words on our passions. He begins:
‘They seem to me to affect us in a manner very different from that in which we are affected by natural objects, or by painting or architecture: yet words have as considerable a share in exciting ideas of beauty and of the sublime as any of those, and sometimes a much greater than any of them.[50]’
Like Longinus, Burke makes a connection between words and the aesthetic of the sublime. The origins of these feelings lie in our contemplation of the spoken word with Shaw concluding that
‘the Burkean sublime, with its emphasis on the psychological effects of terror, proved decisive in shifting the discourse of the sublime away from the study of natural objects and towards the mind of the spectator.[51]’
The Enquiry proposes that, while ultimately the sublime is something that happens within us, it is a relationship into which we enter. We understand that a genuine feeling of the sublime should be all-encompassing but know that this sensation works on a number of different levels, with the viewer or hearer’s stance being taken into account. We enter into a relationship with sublimity and, while external objects affect our internal output, the sublime is not something that simply happens to us. Shaw surmises ‘The argument of the Treatise...is thus almost entirely secular; God is no longer required to guarantee the authenticity of our experience.[52]’ Rather it lies in our capacity to engage with the sublime on a cognitive and considered level. In his Enquiry he has proposed a ‘theory of our passions[53]’ and the ‘common nature[54]’ of man means we use three standard tools of evaluation: the Senses; the Imagination; and the Judgment. This has lead to an ‘agreement of mankind[55]’ regarding notions of taste and a sublime that evokes the ‘triumph of real sympathy.[56]’ He has written a theory of a cultivation of knowledge and we see that mankind can now consider that ‘taste does not depend upon a superior principle in men, but on superior knowledge.[57]’ Finally, as Crowther writes:
‘by showing that the sublime is intrinsically connected with them, (Self Preservation/ Morality) Burke is able to invest the sublime passion with an intensity and, as it were, existential magnitude that more than compensates for its lack of positivity.[58]’
The ‘Analytic of the Sublime’ by Immanuel Kant was first published in 1790 and is the conclusion to his ‘Critique of Judgment.’ This Critique is part of the Kantian trilogy with the rest compiled from his ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ and ‘Critique of Practical Reason.’ The analysis emphasises our ability to comprehend the unimaginable and the ‘shift from spectacle to spectator.[59]’ He wrote admiringly:
‘The fundamental laws of the motions of the heavenly bodies ... would have remained for ever undiscovered if Copernicus had not dared, in a manner contradictory to the senses, but yet true, to seek the observed movements, not in the heavenly bodies, but in the spectator.[60]’
If we are to consider the notion of the ‘Kantian Sublime’ we must first examine, as Edmund Burke has done at the outset of his Enquiry, the notion of ‘taste.’ Immanuel Kant’s theory says that:
‘(for) beauty is not a concept of an object, and a judgement of taste is not a cognitive judgement. All it assumes is that we are justified in presupposing universally in all people the same subjective conditions of the power of judgement that we find in ourselves.[61]’
Kant gives as his definition of the sublime ‘the name given to what is absolutely great.[62]’ He makes an important distinction between sublimity and magnitude at this junction. Paul Crowther explains that because magnitude depends on relativity, and because there will always be an object in the world that is ‘greater’ than its predecessor, in order to find the ‘absolutely great’ (sublime) ‘we must look beyond the phenomenal world to that which sustains it, namely the noumenal or supersensible realm.[63]’ We are told that while our concept of the sublime lies beyond the perception of our senses, it does ultimately stem from within the self, as is the case with our judgements of taste and beauty. Crowther writes: ‘It is the seat of that which is most fundamental to human beings, namely that aspect of the self which is free, and able to act on rational principles. This supersensible self is what is ultimately sublime.[64]’
As with any encounter of the sublime previously investigated (Longinus, Burke), Kant speaks of a kind of cerebral dialogue taking place – what he calls a ‘mental movement.[65]’ The shifting of thought beyond the mind’s dependence on the physical senses, leads to a ‘double mode’ of the representation of an object. The first of these can be described as the mathematical sublime with the second defined as the dynamical sublime. In terms of the mathematical sublime we experience what Crowther calls ‘an experiential ideal of reason.[66]’ He writes that:
‘Vast natural objects defeat our powers of perceptual and imaginative comprehension, thus occasioning a feeling of pain. Since however, this striving for comprehension is instigated by the rational self, the failure of our cognitive faculties at the sensible level serves to present or exemplify the superiority of our supersensible being. Hence, our feeling of pain gives way to one of pleasure. In the experience of the mathematical sublime...the limits imposed on sensibility reinforce our awareness of what is ultimate and infinite in humans.[67]’
In our quest to comprehend the incomprehensible, the imagination rushes in to fill the void left by our sensory handicap when examining ‘spatial or temporal magnitude.[68]’ The parallel nature of our comprehension and its subsequent failure, where a perceived object cannot be ‘grasped in sensible intuition,[69]’ shows that we can facilitate ‘ideas of reason’ in the face of the infinite. We can therefore, apply the idea of ‘totality’ to boundlessness, with this action also forming the basis of the dynamical sublime. Shaw illustrates this saying:
‘Through the encounter with the vast in nature the mind discovers within itself a faculty that transcends the realm of sensible intuition...what is uncovered is the rational a priori ground of cognition, a pure “idea” of totality or freedom, which is not subject to the empirical, contingent conditions of nature.[70]’
To explain his theory of the dynamical sublime, Kant introduces the notion of the vast natural world. He concisely says ‘nature, considered in an aesthetic judgment as might that has no dominion over us, is dynamically sublime.[71]’ Again, we see that a sense of helplessness is intrinsic in all of our sublime encounters. We are aware of our weakness in the face of natural phenomena and are reminded of Burke espousing the pleasure found in fear when contemplating the ‘terrible.’ Like Burke, Kant says that when we remove ourselves from the physical source of ‘mighty nature,’ we can contemplate our situation, not in terms of our corporeal weakness, but in terms of our mental strength. To explain Kant’s theory, Crowther quotes from Blaise Pascal’s Pensées who says:
‘Man is only a reed, the weakest thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed … if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than his destroyer, because he knows that he dies, and also the advantage that the universe has over him; but the universe knows nothing of this.[72]’
Kant finishes by saying ‘sublimity, therefore, does not reside in any of the things of nature, but only in our own mind, in so far as we may become conscious of our superiority over nature within, and thus also over nature without us.[73]’
Further concepts of the Kantian sublime are those of reason and morality. Where magnitude is relative to its surroundings and the senses are applied at an individual’s will and in the face of certain events, Kant says that reason is ‘a principle that remains true in all circumstances, irrespective of sensible interests.[74]’ In the second half of his ‘Critique of Practical Reason,’ he analyses this faculty saying that it allows our thought to ‘transcend the natural realm.[75]’ Man’s desire to be ethically moral dictates that, unlike the sublime which works by demonstrating the failure of our sensible intuition, ‘it must be guided by a principle that has nothing to do with basic human wants and desires.[76]’ It is, as Shaw writes, the ‘obligation to think beyond the given.[77]’ However, it is like the sublime in that reason ‘exposes the limits of understanding[78]’ and in doing so, writes a frame-work for morality, ethics and goodness. It could be said that our capacity to endure or engage with sublime thoughts and feelings also allows us the capacity to judge the substance of our experience. Like Burke who craved a sublimity of ‘fellow-feeling,’ Kant wishes for a ‘philosophy of the Good.[79]’
Reason lies at the heart of Kant’s sublime. It gives us the facility to not only comprehend vast objects in their totality but also demonstrates man’s ability of judgement. It is something that lies in our own capabilities with Shaw saying:
‘Sublimity for Kant is the feeling that arises whenever we, as subjects, become aware of the transcendental dimensions of experience. The sublime occurs, that is, whenever ideas exceed the application of a concept; at such moments the mind comes alive to the existence of a faculty of reason transcending the limits of our sensual existence.[80]’
Kant’s theories of transcendence and synthesis allows for a mind that functions to engage with the world around it. Again, we see that the sublime is not just something that happens to us. The mirroring of the sublime object with the transcendence of thought tells us that the sublime also lies within. It is as much in our own capacity to view, to process and to understand, as it is in the objects we invest with sublimity. It becomes the basis of our moral compass and, by understanding what is absolutely ‘great’ we come to an understanding of what it is to be human.
‘Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime’ was originally published as a ‘collection of lessons[81]’ rather than a book in its own right. It is a compilation of thoughts written as preparation for an oral lecture on Immanuel Kant’s ‘Critique of Judgement.’ Its author, Jean-François Lyotard, explains that it has not been written as merely instruction or accompaniment to Kant’s philosophy but rather requires that one reads his Critique in order to understand the text. He acknowledges that it has been written as a series of lecture notes and surmises that:
‘One could say that these lessons try to isolate the analysis of a differend of feeling in Kant’s text, which is also the analysis of a feeling of differend, and to connect this feeling with the transport that leads all thought (critical thought included) to its limits.[82]’
First published in 1991, the book is made up of a series of chapters analysing and discussing Kantian sublime philosophy – from aesthetic reflection and subjectivity to comparisons between the sublime and notions of taste. It considers the idea of aesthetic and ethics in the realm of sublimity and concludes that the communication of sublime feeling lies with violent interactions between the idea of the absolute and the differend. By ‘differend’ he means ‘a difference which exists in a blatant manner but which is structured such that the victim cannot find a means by which to address it.[83]’ Rather than existing in a litigious sense, he categorises it under the terms of language -
‘A phrase that comes along is put into play within a conflict between genres of discourse. This conflict is a differend, since the success (or validation) proper to one genre is not the one proper to others.[84]’
Once more we see a sublime mired in conflict and violent thoughts. He concludes his Lessons with the theory that:
‘The Idea of the finality without concept of a form of pure pleasure cannot be suggested by the violent contra-finality of the object. The sublime feeling in neither moral universality nor aesthetic universalization, but is, rather, the destruction of one by the other in the violence of the differend. This differend cannot demand, even subjectively, to be communicated by all thought.[85]’
Lyotard offers an alternative discourse on the sublime. He wishes us to consider a ‘parology’ or ‘false reasoning’ with regards to works of art. He feels that by creating the unrecognisable or ‘presenting the unpresentable’ we can destabilise the rules governing the materialistic and thence culturally vapid society in which we live. Where Kant strives for a comprehension of totality, Lyotard says that the postmodern should instead ‘wage a war against it.[86]’ Shaw writes: ‘(Lyotard) regards the artistic avant-garde as a vital tool in exposing the logic of late capitalism ... driven by a desire to disrupt the means by which capitalist economies determine realism.[87]’ The idea of the aesthetic therefore becomes a loaded political concept – beauty is the method by which a materialistic society is enslaved and controlled. Lyotard sees the sublime as an experience of ‘the happening’ and ‘the not happening.’ The paradoxical nature of eventhood means that the experience testifies only to the event itself and therefore cannot be appropriated by an aesthetical political regime. In terms of art, a ‘beautiful’ painting is something that can be ‘grasped by sensibility[88]’ and is ‘intelligible to understanding.[89]’ The sublime must take on a different role with Lyotard writing in his essay ‘The Sublime and the Avant-garde:’
‘The inexpressible does not reside in an over there, in another words, or another time, but in this: in that (something) happens. In the determination of pictorial art, the indeterminate, the ‘it happens’ is the paint, the picture. The paint, the picture as occurrence or event, is not expressible, and it is this that it has to witness... Here and now there is this painting, rather than nothing, and that’s what is sublime... It’s still the sublime in the sense that Burke and Kant described and yet it isn’t their sublime any more.[90]’
In terms of artistic practice therefore, we see that Lyotard’s theory is best applied to Modernist works which are formless/abstract. These works appear in a Postmodern state which is defined as an era/movement that is constant and flowing rather than definable by its demise or the demise of a predecessor. Rather than signifying the end of the modern, it should instead signify a type of symbiotic discourse. He writes ‘Postmodernism is not modernism at its end, but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.[91]’ We are reminded of Jean-Luc Nancy who wrote: ‘The sublime is not so much what we’re going back to as where we’re coming from.[92]’
It is through his definition of realism in these postmodern terms that Lyotard makes his most defining claims on the sublime, particularly in relation to Kant and the avant-garde. Since photography now exists to document and categorise imagery we move away from a dependence on paint or the artist to accurately render a scene in order to make it recognisable or familiar to us. Instead, what he calls the ‘ready-made techno sciences[93]’ undertake the role of documenter of our age and the capacity for ‘infinite production’ allows for a new set of rules governing aesthetics and culture. Crowther writes:
‘It is with the impact of photography and techno scientific culture, then, that we find the historical beginnings of a postmodern sensibility – wherein our conceptions of art and the aesthetic are transformed.[94]’
He can now define art in two separate and distinct categories – that of fine art and mechanical art which, due to the nature of its production lies outside the traditional parameters of ‘taste’ and aesthetic appreciation. The application of forms and imagery in painting likewise adopt a new role. ‘Realism’ becomes something that is instantly understandable and recognisable. Photography lies within this category, representing as it does the infinite production of a communication based media and culture. Painting in the Postmodern era defined by Lyotard must therefore undertake a new function. Crowther explains: ‘Lyotard’s reasoning here is based on the fact that because Modernist works can be “formless” or “abstract” (in comparison with conventional representation), this enables them to allude to the “unpresentable” or “invisible.”[95]’ On the notion of photography Lyotard writes:
‘It allows the unpresentable to be put forward only as the missing contents; but the form, because of its recognisable consistency, continues to offer to the reader or viewer matter for solace and pleasure. Yet these sentiments do not constitute the real sublime sentiment which is an intrinsic combination of pleasure and pain.[96]’
With regards to painting therefore, the sublime must reside in what he calls the ‘melancholic’ or ‘novatio’ – a nostalgia for presence which lies somewhere, undefined, between the ‘happening’ and the ‘not happening’ and in the painted forms themselves. He says that ultimately:
‘The sublime feeling is an emotion, a violent emotion, close to unreason, which forces thought to the extremes of pleasure and displeasure, from joyous exaltation to terror; the sublime feeling is as tightly strung between ultra-violet and infrared as respect is white.[97]’
Slavoj Žižek’s ‘The Sublime Object of Ideology’ is one of four investigations into themes varying from Hegelian philosophy and Marxism to Christian theology. The focus of ‘The Sublime Object’ is his reading of Lacanian psychoanalysis where, as Shaw explains: ‘the sublime is identified, via Hegel, as the “reified” effect of the inconsistency of the symbolic order.[98]’ Again, we see a sublime theory based in conflict and disorder. Having read Hegel, who quests for a totality of thought and the absolute in contradicting parenthesis, and Lacan’s notion of the ‘void at the heart of symbolisation,[99]’- that is to say - a theory of lacking, Žižek proposes that dialectical thought will not produce synthesized viewpoints. Rather, he acknowledges that ‘contradiction (is) an internal condition of every identity.[100]’ He feels that the truth of our existence and identities is found in contradiction and it is this ‘oxymoronic style[101]’ of thought that forms the basis of his sublime discourse. Tony Myers writes:
‘One of Žižek’s main contributions to critical theory is his detailed elaboration of the subject ... If you take away all your distinctive characteristics, all your particular needs, interests, beliefs, what you are left with is a subject. The subject is the form of your consciousness, as opposed to the contents of that form which are individual and specific to you.[102]’
Žižek writes that the aim of his ‘Sublime Object’ is therefore, to introduce the key concepts of Lacan in terms of what he calls ‘post-structuralism,[103]’ to encourage a ‘return to Hegel[104]’ – a new reading of Hegelian thought post-Lacan and to attempt to contribute to the discourse of the sublime via new readings of ‘well-known classical motifs,[105]’ – amongst them, commodity and fetishism.
Jacques Lacan contributes to the discourse of the sublime through what Shaw calls a ‘materialistic tradition.[106]’ He feels that nonsensical things such as religion are explainable in terms of the sublime and through the process of what Freud called ‘sublimation.’ Shaw writes: ‘As advanced by Freud, sublimation refers to the process by which the libido is transferred from a material object towards an object that has no obvious connection with this need.[107]’ Lacan reworks this theory, reversing the process so that we see the libido shifting instead to a Thing or object, away from the ‘void of the unserviceable[108]’ to something tangible or concrete. Žižek states that this object now ‘assumes a sublime quality the moment it occupies the place of the Thing.[109]’ This transfer comes to identify the ‘void’ in our symbolization of the object – what Lacan calls ‘the-beyond of the signified.[110]’ Shaw writes that ‘the Thing for Lacan is a kind of non-thing; we become aware of it as a kind of void or absence residing at the heart of signification.[111]’ We see a theory of lacking – the emptiness of the unthinkable becomes sublime to allow us to categorise the non-thing. Žižek writes:
‘Now we can understand why the signifier as such has the status of the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz[112] in Lacan. It is no longer the simple Saussurean material representative of the signified, of the mental representation-idea, but the substitute filling out the void of some originally missing representation: it does not bring to mind any representation, it represents its lack.[113]’
Through defining an object with a title and supplying it with representation in the form of language, however, the signifier of the missing representation now serves to function as what he calls a ‘metalanguage designation.[114]’ This effect of titling limits/totalizes the object in terms of its sublimation and we have a philosophical impossibility or a ‘theory of lack’ to now consider. Shaw explains:
‘The sublime, therefore, as presented by Žižek, ought not to be conceived as a transcendent “Thing-in-itself” beyond the field of representation, but rather as an indicator of the traumatic emptiness, the primordial lack, residing at the heart of all forms of symbolization.[115]’
Žižek asks to consider instead the notion of a sensus communis – whereby the coherence of reality depends on our engagement with a sublime Idea that can never fully occur in that reality. He says:
‘The Thing-in-itself is found in its truth through the loss of its immediacy. In other words, what appears, to “external reflection”, as an Impediment is in fact a positive condition of our access to the Truth: the Truth of a thing emerges because the thing is not accessible to us in its immediate self-identity.[116]’
It is, as Anthony Elliot writes: ‘the subject of lack exists prior to any mode of subjectivization. It is the “empty place” of individuality[117]’ and it is within this space that the Zizeakean sublime exists.
Žižek’s account of the sublime is also based on his reading of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel who advocated the use of dialectical thinking in order to understand the world around us. He felt that by combining individual thoughts we could form an ‘Absolute Idea’ and said that it was only through using this dialectical device that we could form an idea of totality. Shaw writes:
‘In Hegelian dialectics, thought begins with a thesis, or idea, which is countered by an antithesis, an opposing idea. The conflict is resolved by combining thesis and antithesis in a synthesis, which compromises a greater, more encompassing idea.[118]’
Žižek explains Hegel’s theory as, once more a testimony to the notion of lacking. If this type of dialectical thought is applied, for example, to the notion of the object or Kant’s ‘thing-in-itself,’ in Hegelian terms the sublime is an object ‘whose positive body is just an embodiment of Nothing.[119]’ Where Kant’s contemplation of the infinite signifies man’s ability to comprehend totality or boundlessness, in Hegel our comprehension instead emphasises the inadequacy of our vision/contemplation. Shaw explains:
‘(It) does not point to the existence of a supersensible realm, beyond appearance, but rather to the inadequacy of appearance to itself, to the sense in which appearance, or phenomena, is oriented around a determinate lack. Again, Žižek stresses, with a glance to Lacan, that the sublime object is merely the embodiment of this lack.[120]’
However, Žižek notes that despite his opposing view of Kant’s sublime, Hegel does not stand in opposition to Kant and that we as reader should be aware of this fact. He feels, rather, that his notion of the sublime takes itself even more literally than Kant’s writing:
‘Hegel’s position is, in contrast, that there is nothing beyond the phenomenality, beyond the field of representation...The experience of the Sublime thus remains the same: all we have to do is to subtract its transcendent presupposition – the presupposition that this experience indicates, in a negative way, some transcendent Thing-in-itself persisting in its positivity beyond it...We must limit ourselves to what is strictly immanent to this experience, to pure negativity, to the negative self-relationship of the representation.[121]’
Žižek’s ‘Sublime Object’ serves to further discourse on the sublime for the twenty-first century. His theory expands on Lacan’s notion of transcendence and sublimation which, it could be said, was never fully realised in terms of the sublime. He also proposes a theory for Hegel which differs from previous reasoning that he stands in opposition to Immanuel Kant, regarding it instead as standing as well as it. Crucially the appeal of Žižek is his contemplation of philosophy in easily recognisable and familiar articles. In ‘The Sublime Object’ alone he discusses fourteen different Hitchcock films as well as popular sci-fi cinematic culture – ‘The Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ and ‘Alien.’ In this regard he is similar to Longinus who used Homer’s Odyssey to expand upon his theory of the sublime, or indeed Edmund Burke who discussed Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ at length in his Enquiry. Žižek puts the sublime in the age of Lyotard’s ‘techno-sciences’ as well as regarding it in terms of social structures and human agency. He has become known as a ‘philosopher of the real,[122]’ where, in terms of discussion he can explain his thoughts using ‘real objects – e.g. European toilet design rather than abstract ideas with no immediate reference to us.[123]’ His position on the sublime, when centred on his reading of prior philosophy, encourages a reconstruction of thought, rather than a tearing apart of ideas to create new theories. Elliot writes that where he is:
‘critical of philosophical traditions that see social and political identities as deriving from objective interests, needs or desires ... (he) locates the emergence of identity as a contingent process of linguistic articulation. A discursive process of political hegemony at once creates social and cultural identities and, in so doing, covers over that insufficiency which is understood to lie at the heart of subjectivity.[124]’
He writes in his preface to ‘The Sublime Object’ that what critics of Hegel’s voracity need is ‘a dose of an effective laxative[125]’ and it is with a voracity of his own that he attempts to rectify our notions on the reification of language, of the idealisation of a society which cannot exist and a proposition that the subversion of this ‘social fantasy’ should be the ultimate task of any critique of ideology.[126]
The examination and dissection of these texts show a type of evolution of thought regarding the sublime. It is treated as a philosophical subject but also, as a condition of the mind and self. They represent the concerns of mankind at each point in their history and show an ever-increasing appetite to understand what it is to feel and be human. We differentiate ourselves through our engagement with the sublime, not only through our ability to contemplate grandeur and wonder but in the contemplation of infinity itself. Rather grandly, the enquiries show a movement away from the regard of the natural world toward an appraisal of the self and our capacity for definition and thought. The sublime can be found in all things it would seem – vast landscapes, oratorical devices, infinity and the notion of the ‘other’ – the nothingness of the unpresentable, the apparent ‘void’ at the heart of contemplation. Regardless of the role of the sublime, what each review testifies to most is the subject of our engagement. They represent our ability to contemplate, raising the self above the ‘level of brutes.[127]’ The power of language and the reification of thought to synthesise new thoughts have become as important as the boundless landscapes we inhabit. Just as we think we have ‘figured out’ the sublime, a new appraisal or consideration arrives to represent the thoughts of that age. There is no sublime object without our engagement with that object. Our application to the subject of the sublime, as represented by Longinus and his peers, is sublimity itself and it is found within these enquiries.
[1] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, Routledge, 2006, p.48
[2] Ibid. p.49
[3] Eagleton, Terry, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Blackwell Publishers, 1990, p.91
[4] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.88-89
[5] Ibid. p.115-116
[6] Ibid. p.129-130
[7] Wright, Edmund, Wright, Elizabeth, ‘Introduction,’ The Žižek Reader, Ed. Wright, Edmund, Wright, Elizabeth, Blackwell Publishing, 1999, p.7
[8] Longinus, Dionysius, On Sublimity, Translated by Russell, D.A., Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1965 p.2
[9] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.18
[10] Longinus, Dionysius, On Sublimity, p.7
[11] Sircello, Guy, ‘How is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?’ The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, p.541-50, Fall, 1993
[12] Op.Cit
[13] Longinus, Dionysius, On Sublimity, p.8
[14] Longinus, ‘On Sublimity,’ Greek and Roman Aesthetics, Ed. Bychkov,V. Oleg, Sheppard, Ann, Cambridge University Press, 2010, p.151
[15] Longinus, ‘On Sublimity,’ Classical Literary Criticism, Ed. Russell, D.A., Oxford University Press, 1972, p.167
[16] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.4
[17] Ibid. p.14
[18] Eagleton, Terry, Ideology of the Aesthetic, Blackwell Publishers, 1990, p.15
[19] Eagleton, Terry, Ideology of the Aesthetic, p.17
[20] Baillie, John, ‘An Essay on the Sublime,’ The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, Ed. Ashfield, Andrew, de Bolla, Peter, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p.97
[21] Longinus, On the Sublime
[22] DeBolla, Peter, The Discourse of the Sublime, Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject, John Wiley and Sons, 1989
[23] Longinus, ‘On Sublimity,’ Classical Literary Criticism, p.143
[24] Duff, William, An Essay on Original Genius; And its Various Modes of Exertion in Philosophy and the Fine Arts, Particularly in Poetry, BiblioLife, 2010
[25] Henry Home, Lord Kames, from Elements of Criticism, Routledge, 1993
[26] Shaw, On the Sublime, p.4
[27] Longinus, Dionysius, On Sublimity, p.14
[28] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Oxford University Press, 1998, p.1
[29] Op.Cit
[30] Op.Cit
[31] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry, p.113
[32] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.45
[33] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry, p.19
[34] Op.Cit
[35] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry, p.22
[36] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry, p.23-24
[37] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry, p.25
[38] White, Stephen K., Edmund Burke: Modernity, Politics and Aesthetics, Sage Publications, 1994, p.25
[39] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry, p.53
[40] Gibbons, Luke, Edmund Burke and Ireland, Cambridge, 2003, p.xii
[41] Ibid. p.29
[42] Ibid. p.xii
[43] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.77
[44] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry, p.42
[45] Furniss, Tom, Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender, and Political Economy in Revolution Cambridge University Press, 2003, p.35
[46] Ibid. p.36
[47] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.62
[48] Ibid. p.57
[49] Ibid. p.63
[50] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry, p.149
[51] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.71
[52] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.49
[53] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry, p.1
[54] Ibid. p.1
[55] Ibid. p.15
[56] Ibid. p.43
[57] Ibid. p.19
[58] Crowther, Paul, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism, p.117
[59] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p. 73
[60] Op.Cit
[61]Kant, Immanuel, ‘Critique of Judgment,’ http://philosophy.eserver.org/kant/critique-of-judgment.txt., 20th November, 2010
[62]Op.Cit
[63] Crowther, Paul, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993, p.77
[64] Ibid. p.135
[65] Kant, Immanuel, ‘Critique of Judgment,’ http://philosophy.eserver.org/kant/critique-of-judgment.txt., 20th November, 2010
[66] Crowther, Paul, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism, p.136
[67] Ibid. p.137
[68] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.80
[69] Ibid. p.81
[70] Ibid. p.82
[71] Kant, Immanuel, ‘Critique of Judgment,’ http://philosophy.eserver.org/kant/critique-of-judgment.txt., 20th November, 2010
[72] Pascal, Blaise, Pensées, trans. J. Warrington (Dent, London, 1973) p.110
[73] http://philosophy.eserver.org/kant/critique-of-judgment.txt 20th November, 2010
[74] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.84
[75] Ibid.p.75
[76] Op.Cit
[77] Op.Cit
[78] Kant, Immanuel, ‘Critique of Judgment,’ http://philosophy.eserver.org/kant/critique-of-judgment.txt., 20th November, 2010
[79] Op.Cit
[80] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.88
[81] Lyotard, Jean-François, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, Stanford University Press, 1994, p.ix
[82] Ibid. p.x
[83] Rapaport Herman, ‘Lyotard, Jean-François: Le Différend,’ SubStance 15, no.1, 1986, p.82-86
[84] Bobo, D., Michael, ‘Missional Implications of The Differend by J.F. Lyotard,’ www.patheos.com, October 11th 2012
[85] Lyotard, Jean-François, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, p.239
[86] Malpas, Simon, Jean-François Lyotard, Routledge, 2003,p.49
[87] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.125
[88] Ibid. p.124
[89] Op.Cit
[90] Lyotard, Jean-François, ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,’ The Continental Aesthetics Reader, Ed. Cazeux, Clive, Routledge, 2000, p.455
[91] Lyotard, Jean-François, The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, University of Minnesota, 1984, p.79
[92] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.1
[93] Crowther, Paul, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993, p.154
[94] Ibid. p.155
[95] Ibid. p.156
[96] Lyotard, Jean-François, The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, p.79
[97] Lyotard, Jean-François, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, p.228
[98] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.147
[99] Ibid. p.135
[100] Myers, Tony, Slavoj Žižek: Routledge Critical Thinkers, Routledge, 2003, p.16
[101] Ibid. p.17
[102] Ibid. p.11
[103] Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology, Verso, 1989, p.xxx
[104] Op.Cit
[105] Op.Cit
[106] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.132
[107] Ibid. p.135
[108] Žižek, Slavoj, ‘Courtly Love, or Woman as Thing,’ The Žižek Reader, Ed. Wright, Edmund, Wright, Elizabeth, Blackwell Publishing, 1999, p.157
[109] Op.Cit
[110] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.135
[111] Op.Cit
[112] By ‘Vorstellungsrepräsentanz’ Žižek is referring to the idea of the ‘representative’ or the substitute of representation as proposed by Freud. It is the ‘signifying element filling out the vacant place of the missing representation.’
[113] Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p.179
[114] Ibid. p.158
[115] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.138
[116] Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p.243
[117] Elliot, Anthony, ‘Žižek, Slavoj,’ Key Contemporary Social Theorists, Ed. Elliot, Anthony, Ray, Larry, Blackwell Publishing, 2003, p.275
[118] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.153
[119] Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p.206
[120] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.139
[121] Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p.233
[122] Myers, Tony, Slavoj Žižek: Routledge Critical Thinkers, p.29
[123] Op.Cit
[124] Elliot, Anthony, ‘Žižek, Slavoj,’ Key Contemporary Social Theorists, p.274
[125] Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p.xxii
[126] Elliot, Anthony, ‘Slavoj Žižek,’ Key Contemporary Social Theorists, p.274
[127] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry, p.148
‘Having determined that the sublime is a function of the combinatory power of language, and not merely a quality inherent in certain words or objects, or for that matter in the divine, the stress begins to fall on ways of accounting for this phenomenon.[1]’
Having stood for the ‘effect of grandeur in speech and poetry’ in the Longinian tradition, it comes to stand for something at the heart of human nature. Burke’s enquiry links sublimity to terror as well as reverence and constructs a parameter by which to measure it in terms of cultural psyche. Critically, it places the sublime in the minds of men. It is as much a scientific investigation as a philosophical one, with Shaw explaining: ‘The argument of the treatise, in contrast to that of his predecessors, is thus entirely secular; God is no longer required to guarantee the authenticity of our experience.[2]’
In his ‘Critique of Judgment’ Immanuel Kant moves the sublime away from what Terry Eagleton calls the aestheticisation of the sublime. Defined as it has been in terms of morality and the sympathy of mankind, Kant argues for a sublime based in the totality of our reasoning and thoughts. Eagleton writes, that in Kantian sublime discourse:
‘We know that the sublime presentation is simply an echo of the sublimity of Reason within ourselves, and thus testimony to our absolute freedom. In this sense, the sublime is a kind of anti-aesthetic with presses the imagination to extreme crisis, to the point of failure and breakdown, in order that it may negatively figure forth the Reason that transcends it.[3]’
His analysis of the sublime undertakes theories of reason, boundlessness and transcendentalism and links them to notions of beauty and ethics. It moves the discourse forward in that it can now be discussed in a poststructuralist sense. It is, as Shaw reveals, a ‘structural necessity’ in sublime theory:
‘Sublimity for Kant is the feeling that arises whenever we as subjects, become aware of the transcendental dimensions of experience. The sublime occurs, that is, whenever ideas exceed the application of a concept; at such moments the mind comes alive to the existence of a faculty of reason transcending the limits of our sensual existence.[4]’
The examination of the sublime moves forward into the twentieth and twenty-first century with thinkers Jean-François Lyotard and Slavoj Žižek coming to represent contemporary theory. Postmodern engagement with the sublime takes Barnett Newman as its cultural predecessor with his seminal essay ‘The Sublime is Now’ reworking and developing American abstract thought for the modern era. Having investigated the sublime in purely aesthetical formal/spatial treatments, postmodern thought once more attempts to categorise it in terms of the supersensible self. Shaw writes ‘the difference between Romanticism, modernism, and postmodernism can therefore be measured in their contrasting attitudes to the unpresentable.[5]’ Lyotard’s ‘Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime’ and ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’ focus on the idea of presenting the unpresentable. He places sublimity in a political and consumer-driven society, redefining notions of realism, the modern and the postmodern. He proposes a theory of the ‘differend’ – analysing phrase and language in their inability to represent conflict and terror. The sublime becomes a demonstration of ‘lack’ with Shaw writing: ‘For Lyotard, the sublime is conceived as a disruptive event, forcing thought to a crisis...the resistance of the sublime is ultimately political.[6]’
Slavoj Žižek’s ‘The Sublime Object of Ideology’ looks to Jacques Lacan’s theory of the ‘Real’ and the ‘Symbolic’ to attempt to ‘account for the failure of language in its attempts at reference.[7]’ He constitutes contemporary sublimity by analysing and reworking preceding philosophical works – Hegelian and Lacanian thoughts are discussed in terms of advertising and cinema. He attempts to construct a new theory of the ‘other’ – comparable to Lyotard’s ‘unpresentable’ and the notion of the ‘Void’ – echoing Lyotard’s ideology of ‘lack.’ He discusses philosophy itself, re-categorising the sublime for contemporary visual culture. Speaking to us of things that are at once familiar and made strange, he proposes a ‘reification’ of the sublime for a bourgeoning mass-cultural postmodern and post-structural era.
‘On Sublimity’ or ‘Peri Hupsos’ by Longinus is a first century Greek treatise categorising and assimilating that which produces sublime feeling or thought. Its author is believed to be either the Augustan critic Dionysius of Halicarnassus or Cassius Longinus. He introduces sublimity as a type of eminence or excellence of discourse. It should be noted at the outset however that there is a distinction between grandeur and sublimity. Where grandeur produces amazement and wonder, the true sublime encompasses a combination of wonder and astonishment:
‘Sublimity, produced at the right moment, tears everything up like a whirlwind, and exhibits the orator’s whole power as a single blow.[8]’
The treatise puts forward various theories for sublimity – whilst it is something that should and does occur naturally/organically, as with all modes of experience there are various factors to take into consideration. There is the idea of interpellation – of using one’s own ideology to convince or sway opinion. The notion of ‘loftiness’ – an element of authority and of being ‘primed’ for sublimity is also apparent. He regards our engagement with the sublime as a type of power relationship and says that in order for this to take place we must embrace the sublime and ascribe a lofty purpose to the mind. He proposes that the sublime takes us on a kind of journey. There is a movement from one point to another with this journey involving subscription to an authority - crucial to the sublime experience. In doing so, one improves one’s character and becomes a better type of person. The idea of experience – of gaining knowledge in order to develop the self is a loaded concept for Longinus. Experience is necessary in order to engage with sublimity and is possessed by a certain type of individual – one that is receptive to noble emotions and authority. While this is generally only achievable through wealth and education it is his view that morality is a more important aspect of our character. Philip Shaw explains:
‘As the echo of a noble mind, the sublime elevates man above the tawdry concern with wealth and status...The parity between this notion of wealth and the nature of the sublime is, however, merely formal. For, unlike the sublime, grandeur of wealth is superficial and does not work to elevate the soul but rather to wither and ruin it. The implication of Longinus’ observation is, therefore, that the true sublime is on the side of morality.[9]’
He writes that although possession of great wealth and power may well be associated with magnificence; they are not prerequisites for encountering sublimity. He feels that a wise man is prudent in his disdain for these and should be admired. We should ascribe to achieve a genuine understanding of the sublime in order to appreciate it. This will come only with experience and we must always be suspicious of the ‘trappings’ of wealth, reputation and absolute power. He feels that wisdom rather than wealth is crucial to our development and it is here that we see the notion of being primed for sublimity. He says that we must ‘develop our minds in the direction of greatness and make them always pregnant with noble thoughts[10]’ and it is through our experiences that we will encounter the truly sublime. Longinus stresses the importance of repeated exposure to lofty thoughts and purposes saying:
‘Nature judged man to be no lowly or ignoble creature when she brought us into this life and into the whole universe as to a great celebration, to be spectators of her whole performance and most ambitious actors. She implanted at once into our souls an invincible love for all that is great and more divine than ourselves. That is why the universe gives insufficient scope to man’s power of contemplation and reflection, but his thoughts often pass beyond the boundaries of the surrounding world.[11]’
Longinus’ treatise defines the sublime as something that manifests certain characteristics and produces certain effects in the reader or listener[12]. These effects are achievable through the employment of certain devices and he lists these as the ‘five sources of sublimity[13]’ – great thoughts, strong emotions, use of figures (thought and speech), diction and elevated word arrangements. Of these, ‘great thoughts’ are the most important as sublime effect cannot occur if the orator has a trivial or servile mind. Strong emotions are key to producing sublime feeling as they inform the listener/reader as to the speaker’s passions: ‘There is nothing so productive of grandeur as noble emotion in the right place. It inspires and possesses our words with a kind of madness and divine spirit.[14]’ Longinus goes on to explain that figures are the ‘natural allies’ of sublimity – hyperbaton, polysyndenton and anaphora allow the writer to dismantle and refigure speech in such a way to inspire sublime thoughts. He often returns to the notion that we should consider the sublime in the creation of great thoughts and words and says that while this can involve a certain form of trickery the secret is not to reveal the nature of the trick: ‘’Art is perfect when it looks like nature, nature is felicitous when it embraces concealed art.[15]’ Defining the sublime as a rhetorical effect and categorising it in terms of language places it, as an experience, in the hands of the creator and the minds of the reader-listener. It is something that shows our ability to comprehend and rationalise in order to educate and elevate the mind. Interestingly, this is not always a comfortable experience with Shaw writing:
‘For Longinus, the discourse of the sublime, whether in political oratory or in epic verse, works to overcome the rational powers of its audience, persuading them to the efficacy of an idea by means of sheer rhetorical force. In Longinus’ view...listeners and readers are ravished or, more disturbingly, raped by the power of words.[16]’
He says of Longinus that his sublime is the ‘discourse of domination[17]’ and says that while it shows the sublime might originally have arisen in our contemplation of the natural world, art is required to give these feelings shape and coherence. It places the sublime in the context of our artistic development and cultural enquiries rather than the omnipotent majestic mountain-top or valley.
Terry Eagleton in his ‘Ideology of the Aesthetic’ says that within life, certain objects stand out in perfection. The ideality of these items informs the viewer of a 'sensuous experience[18]' from within. These objects are known to us as inherently beautiful and enforce a logic that is felt rather than understood: 'a rigorous logic is here revealed to us in matter itself, felt instantly on the pulses.[19]' While there are many definitions of the aesthetic and enquiries into matters of taste, observation and perception, the logic of the sublime is at heart a sensate experience. True sublimity in art links the viewer irrevocably with the work they encounter. The sublime speaks to us in terms of power, terror and awe. There are descriptions of it a 'simple, grand sensation[20]' contrasted with the Longinian notion of the viewer being struck with 'the boiling furnaces of Etna, pouring out whole rivers of liquid flame.[21]' Paul de Man has said that 'sublimity is a certain distinction and excellence in expression.[22]' A worthwhile creation should act upon the audience as a method of transport rather than a mere persuasion. According to Longinus this is because ‘persuasion is on the whole something we can control, whereas amazement and wonder exert invincible power and force and get the better of every hearer.[23]’ When learning about the art of creation, one must learn the correct tools and methodology of expression. It is through the repeated utilisation of these tools that a piece of art may become a breakthrough piece. A nonchalant mark on canvas may require many years of dedicated practice. These utilitarian marks and lines, when finally executed correctly, could be said to be our first encounter with sublimity. Whilst these are not the true sublime, they become a scaffold upon which it could hang. The point has also been made by William Duff that ‘the genius must himself be enraptured if the audience be similarly moved.[24]’ Gazing on authentic sublimity should therefore evoke a type of epiphany. There is a feeling of conquest and comprehension throughout and while this may seem an unusual notion to connect with the sublime it is as Longinus said: ‘the mind is elevated by it, and so sensibly affected as to swell in transport and inward pride, as if what is heard or read were its own invention.[25]’
Longinus’ ‘Peri Hupsos’ comes into popular culture once more in the eighteenth century where its appraisal influences countless works and treatises on the matter. Shaw writes that its influence is as far reaching and key to our understanding of the topic because for the first time in written history we have a tangible questioning and understanding of some aspects of the sublime experience. It stands for:
‘the effect of grandeur in speech and poetry; for a sense of the divine; for the contrast between the limitations of human perception and the over-whelming majesty of nature; as proof of the triumph of reason over nature and imagination; and, most recently, as a signifier for that which exceeds the grasp of reason.[26]’
We get the impression that Longinus is rather shyly trying to evoke the sublime in our reading of his text but it is as he says himself: ‘What can we say of all of this but that it really is “the dreaming of a Zeus”?[27]’
Edmund Burke’s ‘A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful’ was published in London in 1757. The first edition sees Burke propose what he calls a ‘theory of our passions.[28]’ He feels it is vital to investigate the topic as prior reasoning has been ‘extremely inaccurate and inconclusive.[29]’ It is the view of the author that the term ‘beauty’ has been subjected to much abuse and that the idea of the sublime is incorrectly used to explain all instances of passionate expression. Referring to the first major treatise on sublimity he says: ‘Even Longinus, in his incomparable discourse upon a part of this subject, has comprehended things extremely repugnant to each other, under the common name of the Sublime.[30]’ He feels that this type of consideration has led to a confusion of our ideas and attempts to rectify this under the various headings of terror, passion, pain and beauty. In the preface to the second edition, we see an expansion of the Enquiry and an added definition of ‘taste.’ He says that we must acknowledge that the sublime and the beautiful are very different things and any further contemplation or study should separate the two:
‘They are indeed ideas of a very different nature, one being founded on pain, the other on pleasure; and however they may vary afterwards from the direct nature of their causes, yet these causes keep up an eternal distinction never to be forgotten by any whose business it is to affect the passions.[31]’
Burke’s treatise comes at a point in history where the traditional Longinian proposals are being discussed and challenged. The topic has become popular once more with new theories attempting to expand on the importance of the sublime. It begins to move away from mountain-top appraisal and religious omnipotence and comes to reside in objects much closer to home. Shaw explains:
‘The association between the vast in nature and the vast in mind is itself therefore a product of a system of thought, linking such disparate authors as Burnet, Dennis, Addisson, and Shaftesbury ... systematicity itself may work blindly, without origin or tendency, and perhaps even without an author, for once animated by the combinatory or associative power of language, a power undetermined by God, mind, or nature, a mouse as much as a mountain may become a source of the sublime.[32]’
At this point in history the sublime becomes something that resides in the discourse by which it is discussed as well as in the physical object or the mind of the viewer.
Burke’s treatise is made up of five sections and an introduction on the idea of taste. Like Longinus he makes a link between experience and knowledge. He informs us that although he may continually educate himself, a novice’s ‘knowledge is improved, his Taste is not altered.[33]’ Mankind should instead consider that ‘taste does not depend upon a superior principle in men, but on superior knowledge.[34]’ What we consider to be good taste is in fact ‘in reality is no more than a refined judgment.[35]’ These judgments are improved by attention and reasoning rather than social position:
‘A rectitude of judgment in the arts which may be called a good Taste, does in a great measure depend upon sensibility; because if the mind has no bent to the pleasures of the imagination, it will never apply itself sufficiently to the works of that species to acquire competent knowledge of them.[36]’
Burke says that taste therefore is not a separate faculty of the mind. We are each in receipt of the ability to judge and to imagine. He proposes a theory of a cultivation of knowledge to inform that taste in order to make the correct judgement: ‘It is known that the Taste (whatever it is) is improved exactly as we improve our judgment, by extending our knowledge, by a steady attention to our object, and by a frequent exercise.[37]’
Burke now attempts to develop a set of criteria by which we can formulate our comprehension of sublimity. He is concerned ‘with the task of providing a new way of understanding the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, one grounded in a sensationist account of the human mind.[38]’ He formulates his theory of terror and the sublime stating:
‘No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. For fear being an apprehension of pain and death, if operates in a manner that resembles actual pain. Whatever therefore is terrible, with regards to sight, is sublime too.[39]’
The notion of threat and its capacity to influence the mind is examined in order to propose an ‘alternative vision for social change.[40]’ Luke Gibbons writes that the linking of terror and sublimity in Burke’s treatise allows for a shift in our cultural sensibilities – where the sublime in the Longinian tradition discusses a type of mental movement – a journeying that subscribes to a higher authority in order to elevate and develop the mind, in the Burkean tradition, this movement is expanded upon. It becomes a cultural rather than personal shift and leads to what he calls a ‘restorative process.[41]’ Gibbons explains:
‘For the Enlightenment, the injured body was incapable of looking beyond itself, and hence attaining the universal or cosmopolitan stance required to operate in the civic sphere. By contrast, Burke’s aesthetics outline an alternative, radical form of sensibility – the “sympathetic sublime’ – in which the acknowledgment of oppression need not lead to self-absorption, but may actually enhance the capacity to identify with the plight of others.[42]’
It is through our capacity to empathise with our fellow man that we are capable of producing sublime feeling. Kant writes that:
‘Beauty is not a concept of an object, and a judgment of taste is not a cognitive judgment. All it assumes is that we are justified in presupposing universally in all people the same subjective conditions of the power of judgment that we find in ourselves.[43]’
The same can be said of Burke’s supposition – sublimity lies in our ability to presuppose and to judge sympathetically; our natural affinities and recognition. He writes:
‘as our creator has designed us, we should be united by the bond of sympathy, he has strengthened that bond by a proportional delight; and there most, where our sympathy is most wanted, in the distresses of others.[44]’
Burke’s Enquiry also discusses the idea of beauty. This has been described as the ‘engenderment’ of the sublime and we see for the first time the concept of ‘feminine beauty’ versus the ‘masculine sublime.’ The sensation or effect of beauty is described at length throughout Burke’s text and he avers that it is most commonly seen that beauty ‘is experienced most fully in men’s sexual perception of women.[45]’ Beauty lies in the feminine realm of seduction and is associated with love and desire. It is through admiring and being enchanted by beauty that men’s base feelings of lust turn to love. We are raised therefore to a higher level of consciousness and ‘above the level of brutes.[46]’ We see that the application of beauty and its feminine ‘deceit’ raises a dilemma for Burke. His Enquiry suggests that the dominant masculine is ‘engaged in a perpetual war with female lassitude.[47]’ The previous anointment of the sublime as the ultimate force and power in our consciousness is now undermined by the subtlety of the beautiful. Shaw points out:
‘Where the sublime “dwells on large objects, and terrible,” and is linked to the intense sensations of terror, pain, and awe, the focus of the beautiful, by contrast, is on “small ones, and pleasing” and appeals mainly to the domestic affections, to love, tenderness and pity[48].’
This leads to a conflict for Burkean scholars. If it is that the truly sublime is all-encompassing and terrible – something to be fearful of, how is it that female lassitude can have such a destabilizing effect without harbouring some magnificent power of its own. If it connotes small, domestic pleasures how can this be enough to influence the brutality of the sublime in its masculine potency and domination? This is a shaky foundation upon which to build sublime theory with Shaw explaining: ‘it seems therefore that Burke’s privileging of the sublime is prompted by a number of fears: the lapse of the extraordinary into custom; the collapse of masculinity in the face of female languor.[49]’
Burke’s Enquiry closes with an investigation into the effect of words on our passions. He begins:
‘They seem to me to affect us in a manner very different from that in which we are affected by natural objects, or by painting or architecture: yet words have as considerable a share in exciting ideas of beauty and of the sublime as any of those, and sometimes a much greater than any of them.[50]’
Like Longinus, Burke makes a connection between words and the aesthetic of the sublime. The origins of these feelings lie in our contemplation of the spoken word with Shaw concluding that
‘the Burkean sublime, with its emphasis on the psychological effects of terror, proved decisive in shifting the discourse of the sublime away from the study of natural objects and towards the mind of the spectator.[51]’
The Enquiry proposes that, while ultimately the sublime is something that happens within us, it is a relationship into which we enter. We understand that a genuine feeling of the sublime should be all-encompassing but know that this sensation works on a number of different levels, with the viewer or hearer’s stance being taken into account. We enter into a relationship with sublimity and, while external objects affect our internal output, the sublime is not something that simply happens to us. Shaw surmises ‘The argument of the Treatise...is thus almost entirely secular; God is no longer required to guarantee the authenticity of our experience.[52]’ Rather it lies in our capacity to engage with the sublime on a cognitive and considered level. In his Enquiry he has proposed a ‘theory of our passions[53]’ and the ‘common nature[54]’ of man means we use three standard tools of evaluation: the Senses; the Imagination; and the Judgment. This has lead to an ‘agreement of mankind[55]’ regarding notions of taste and a sublime that evokes the ‘triumph of real sympathy.[56]’ He has written a theory of a cultivation of knowledge and we see that mankind can now consider that ‘taste does not depend upon a superior principle in men, but on superior knowledge.[57]’ Finally, as Crowther writes:
‘by showing that the sublime is intrinsically connected with them, (Self Preservation/ Morality) Burke is able to invest the sublime passion with an intensity and, as it were, existential magnitude that more than compensates for its lack of positivity.[58]’
The ‘Analytic of the Sublime’ by Immanuel Kant was first published in 1790 and is the conclusion to his ‘Critique of Judgment.’ This Critique is part of the Kantian trilogy with the rest compiled from his ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ and ‘Critique of Practical Reason.’ The analysis emphasises our ability to comprehend the unimaginable and the ‘shift from spectacle to spectator.[59]’ He wrote admiringly:
‘The fundamental laws of the motions of the heavenly bodies ... would have remained for ever undiscovered if Copernicus had not dared, in a manner contradictory to the senses, but yet true, to seek the observed movements, not in the heavenly bodies, but in the spectator.[60]’
If we are to consider the notion of the ‘Kantian Sublime’ we must first examine, as Edmund Burke has done at the outset of his Enquiry, the notion of ‘taste.’ Immanuel Kant’s theory says that:
‘(for) beauty is not a concept of an object, and a judgement of taste is not a cognitive judgement. All it assumes is that we are justified in presupposing universally in all people the same subjective conditions of the power of judgement that we find in ourselves.[61]’
Kant gives as his definition of the sublime ‘the name given to what is absolutely great.[62]’ He makes an important distinction between sublimity and magnitude at this junction. Paul Crowther explains that because magnitude depends on relativity, and because there will always be an object in the world that is ‘greater’ than its predecessor, in order to find the ‘absolutely great’ (sublime) ‘we must look beyond the phenomenal world to that which sustains it, namely the noumenal or supersensible realm.[63]’ We are told that while our concept of the sublime lies beyond the perception of our senses, it does ultimately stem from within the self, as is the case with our judgements of taste and beauty. Crowther writes: ‘It is the seat of that which is most fundamental to human beings, namely that aspect of the self which is free, and able to act on rational principles. This supersensible self is what is ultimately sublime.[64]’
As with any encounter of the sublime previously investigated (Longinus, Burke), Kant speaks of a kind of cerebral dialogue taking place – what he calls a ‘mental movement.[65]’ The shifting of thought beyond the mind’s dependence on the physical senses, leads to a ‘double mode’ of the representation of an object. The first of these can be described as the mathematical sublime with the second defined as the dynamical sublime. In terms of the mathematical sublime we experience what Crowther calls ‘an experiential ideal of reason.[66]’ He writes that:
‘Vast natural objects defeat our powers of perceptual and imaginative comprehension, thus occasioning a feeling of pain. Since however, this striving for comprehension is instigated by the rational self, the failure of our cognitive faculties at the sensible level serves to present or exemplify the superiority of our supersensible being. Hence, our feeling of pain gives way to one of pleasure. In the experience of the mathematical sublime...the limits imposed on sensibility reinforce our awareness of what is ultimate and infinite in humans.[67]’
In our quest to comprehend the incomprehensible, the imagination rushes in to fill the void left by our sensory handicap when examining ‘spatial or temporal magnitude.[68]’ The parallel nature of our comprehension and its subsequent failure, where a perceived object cannot be ‘grasped in sensible intuition,[69]’ shows that we can facilitate ‘ideas of reason’ in the face of the infinite. We can therefore, apply the idea of ‘totality’ to boundlessness, with this action also forming the basis of the dynamical sublime. Shaw illustrates this saying:
‘Through the encounter with the vast in nature the mind discovers within itself a faculty that transcends the realm of sensible intuition...what is uncovered is the rational a priori ground of cognition, a pure “idea” of totality or freedom, which is not subject to the empirical, contingent conditions of nature.[70]’
To explain his theory of the dynamical sublime, Kant introduces the notion of the vast natural world. He concisely says ‘nature, considered in an aesthetic judgment as might that has no dominion over us, is dynamically sublime.[71]’ Again, we see that a sense of helplessness is intrinsic in all of our sublime encounters. We are aware of our weakness in the face of natural phenomena and are reminded of Burke espousing the pleasure found in fear when contemplating the ‘terrible.’ Like Burke, Kant says that when we remove ourselves from the physical source of ‘mighty nature,’ we can contemplate our situation, not in terms of our corporeal weakness, but in terms of our mental strength. To explain Kant’s theory, Crowther quotes from Blaise Pascal’s Pensées who says:
‘Man is only a reed, the weakest thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed … if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than his destroyer, because he knows that he dies, and also the advantage that the universe has over him; but the universe knows nothing of this.[72]’
Kant finishes by saying ‘sublimity, therefore, does not reside in any of the things of nature, but only in our own mind, in so far as we may become conscious of our superiority over nature within, and thus also over nature without us.[73]’
Further concepts of the Kantian sublime are those of reason and morality. Where magnitude is relative to its surroundings and the senses are applied at an individual’s will and in the face of certain events, Kant says that reason is ‘a principle that remains true in all circumstances, irrespective of sensible interests.[74]’ In the second half of his ‘Critique of Practical Reason,’ he analyses this faculty saying that it allows our thought to ‘transcend the natural realm.[75]’ Man’s desire to be ethically moral dictates that, unlike the sublime which works by demonstrating the failure of our sensible intuition, ‘it must be guided by a principle that has nothing to do with basic human wants and desires.[76]’ It is, as Shaw writes, the ‘obligation to think beyond the given.[77]’ However, it is like the sublime in that reason ‘exposes the limits of understanding[78]’ and in doing so, writes a frame-work for morality, ethics and goodness. It could be said that our capacity to endure or engage with sublime thoughts and feelings also allows us the capacity to judge the substance of our experience. Like Burke who craved a sublimity of ‘fellow-feeling,’ Kant wishes for a ‘philosophy of the Good.[79]’
Reason lies at the heart of Kant’s sublime. It gives us the facility to not only comprehend vast objects in their totality but also demonstrates man’s ability of judgement. It is something that lies in our own capabilities with Shaw saying:
‘Sublimity for Kant is the feeling that arises whenever we, as subjects, become aware of the transcendental dimensions of experience. The sublime occurs, that is, whenever ideas exceed the application of a concept; at such moments the mind comes alive to the existence of a faculty of reason transcending the limits of our sensual existence.[80]’
Kant’s theories of transcendence and synthesis allows for a mind that functions to engage with the world around it. Again, we see that the sublime is not just something that happens to us. The mirroring of the sublime object with the transcendence of thought tells us that the sublime also lies within. It is as much in our own capacity to view, to process and to understand, as it is in the objects we invest with sublimity. It becomes the basis of our moral compass and, by understanding what is absolutely ‘great’ we come to an understanding of what it is to be human.
‘Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime’ was originally published as a ‘collection of lessons[81]’ rather than a book in its own right. It is a compilation of thoughts written as preparation for an oral lecture on Immanuel Kant’s ‘Critique of Judgement.’ Its author, Jean-François Lyotard, explains that it has not been written as merely instruction or accompaniment to Kant’s philosophy but rather requires that one reads his Critique in order to understand the text. He acknowledges that it has been written as a series of lecture notes and surmises that:
‘One could say that these lessons try to isolate the analysis of a differend of feeling in Kant’s text, which is also the analysis of a feeling of differend, and to connect this feeling with the transport that leads all thought (critical thought included) to its limits.[82]’
First published in 1991, the book is made up of a series of chapters analysing and discussing Kantian sublime philosophy – from aesthetic reflection and subjectivity to comparisons between the sublime and notions of taste. It considers the idea of aesthetic and ethics in the realm of sublimity and concludes that the communication of sublime feeling lies with violent interactions between the idea of the absolute and the differend. By ‘differend’ he means ‘a difference which exists in a blatant manner but which is structured such that the victim cannot find a means by which to address it.[83]’ Rather than existing in a litigious sense, he categorises it under the terms of language -
‘A phrase that comes along is put into play within a conflict between genres of discourse. This conflict is a differend, since the success (or validation) proper to one genre is not the one proper to others.[84]’
Once more we see a sublime mired in conflict and violent thoughts. He concludes his Lessons with the theory that:
‘The Idea of the finality without concept of a form of pure pleasure cannot be suggested by the violent contra-finality of the object. The sublime feeling in neither moral universality nor aesthetic universalization, but is, rather, the destruction of one by the other in the violence of the differend. This differend cannot demand, even subjectively, to be communicated by all thought.[85]’
Lyotard offers an alternative discourse on the sublime. He wishes us to consider a ‘parology’ or ‘false reasoning’ with regards to works of art. He feels that by creating the unrecognisable or ‘presenting the unpresentable’ we can destabilise the rules governing the materialistic and thence culturally vapid society in which we live. Where Kant strives for a comprehension of totality, Lyotard says that the postmodern should instead ‘wage a war against it.[86]’ Shaw writes: ‘(Lyotard) regards the artistic avant-garde as a vital tool in exposing the logic of late capitalism ... driven by a desire to disrupt the means by which capitalist economies determine realism.[87]’ The idea of the aesthetic therefore becomes a loaded political concept – beauty is the method by which a materialistic society is enslaved and controlled. Lyotard sees the sublime as an experience of ‘the happening’ and ‘the not happening.’ The paradoxical nature of eventhood means that the experience testifies only to the event itself and therefore cannot be appropriated by an aesthetical political regime. In terms of art, a ‘beautiful’ painting is something that can be ‘grasped by sensibility[88]’ and is ‘intelligible to understanding.[89]’ The sublime must take on a different role with Lyotard writing in his essay ‘The Sublime and the Avant-garde:’
‘The inexpressible does not reside in an over there, in another words, or another time, but in this: in that (something) happens. In the determination of pictorial art, the indeterminate, the ‘it happens’ is the paint, the picture. The paint, the picture as occurrence or event, is not expressible, and it is this that it has to witness... Here and now there is this painting, rather than nothing, and that’s what is sublime... It’s still the sublime in the sense that Burke and Kant described and yet it isn’t their sublime any more.[90]’
In terms of artistic practice therefore, we see that Lyotard’s theory is best applied to Modernist works which are formless/abstract. These works appear in a Postmodern state which is defined as an era/movement that is constant and flowing rather than definable by its demise or the demise of a predecessor. Rather than signifying the end of the modern, it should instead signify a type of symbiotic discourse. He writes ‘Postmodernism is not modernism at its end, but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.[91]’ We are reminded of Jean-Luc Nancy who wrote: ‘The sublime is not so much what we’re going back to as where we’re coming from.[92]’
It is through his definition of realism in these postmodern terms that Lyotard makes his most defining claims on the sublime, particularly in relation to Kant and the avant-garde. Since photography now exists to document and categorise imagery we move away from a dependence on paint or the artist to accurately render a scene in order to make it recognisable or familiar to us. Instead, what he calls the ‘ready-made techno sciences[93]’ undertake the role of documenter of our age and the capacity for ‘infinite production’ allows for a new set of rules governing aesthetics and culture. Crowther writes:
‘It is with the impact of photography and techno scientific culture, then, that we find the historical beginnings of a postmodern sensibility – wherein our conceptions of art and the aesthetic are transformed.[94]’
He can now define art in two separate and distinct categories – that of fine art and mechanical art which, due to the nature of its production lies outside the traditional parameters of ‘taste’ and aesthetic appreciation. The application of forms and imagery in painting likewise adopt a new role. ‘Realism’ becomes something that is instantly understandable and recognisable. Photography lies within this category, representing as it does the infinite production of a communication based media and culture. Painting in the Postmodern era defined by Lyotard must therefore undertake a new function. Crowther explains: ‘Lyotard’s reasoning here is based on the fact that because Modernist works can be “formless” or “abstract” (in comparison with conventional representation), this enables them to allude to the “unpresentable” or “invisible.”[95]’ On the notion of photography Lyotard writes:
‘It allows the unpresentable to be put forward only as the missing contents; but the form, because of its recognisable consistency, continues to offer to the reader or viewer matter for solace and pleasure. Yet these sentiments do not constitute the real sublime sentiment which is an intrinsic combination of pleasure and pain.[96]’
With regards to painting therefore, the sublime must reside in what he calls the ‘melancholic’ or ‘novatio’ – a nostalgia for presence which lies somewhere, undefined, between the ‘happening’ and the ‘not happening’ and in the painted forms themselves. He says that ultimately:
‘The sublime feeling is an emotion, a violent emotion, close to unreason, which forces thought to the extremes of pleasure and displeasure, from joyous exaltation to terror; the sublime feeling is as tightly strung between ultra-violet and infrared as respect is white.[97]’
Slavoj Žižek’s ‘The Sublime Object of Ideology’ is one of four investigations into themes varying from Hegelian philosophy and Marxism to Christian theology. The focus of ‘The Sublime Object’ is his reading of Lacanian psychoanalysis where, as Shaw explains: ‘the sublime is identified, via Hegel, as the “reified” effect of the inconsistency of the symbolic order.[98]’ Again, we see a sublime theory based in conflict and disorder. Having read Hegel, who quests for a totality of thought and the absolute in contradicting parenthesis, and Lacan’s notion of the ‘void at the heart of symbolisation,[99]’- that is to say - a theory of lacking, Žižek proposes that dialectical thought will not produce synthesized viewpoints. Rather, he acknowledges that ‘contradiction (is) an internal condition of every identity.[100]’ He feels that the truth of our existence and identities is found in contradiction and it is this ‘oxymoronic style[101]’ of thought that forms the basis of his sublime discourse. Tony Myers writes:
‘One of Žižek’s main contributions to critical theory is his detailed elaboration of the subject ... If you take away all your distinctive characteristics, all your particular needs, interests, beliefs, what you are left with is a subject. The subject is the form of your consciousness, as opposed to the contents of that form which are individual and specific to you.[102]’
Žižek writes that the aim of his ‘Sublime Object’ is therefore, to introduce the key concepts of Lacan in terms of what he calls ‘post-structuralism,[103]’ to encourage a ‘return to Hegel[104]’ – a new reading of Hegelian thought post-Lacan and to attempt to contribute to the discourse of the sublime via new readings of ‘well-known classical motifs,[105]’ – amongst them, commodity and fetishism.
Jacques Lacan contributes to the discourse of the sublime through what Shaw calls a ‘materialistic tradition.[106]’ He feels that nonsensical things such as religion are explainable in terms of the sublime and through the process of what Freud called ‘sublimation.’ Shaw writes: ‘As advanced by Freud, sublimation refers to the process by which the libido is transferred from a material object towards an object that has no obvious connection with this need.[107]’ Lacan reworks this theory, reversing the process so that we see the libido shifting instead to a Thing or object, away from the ‘void of the unserviceable[108]’ to something tangible or concrete. Žižek states that this object now ‘assumes a sublime quality the moment it occupies the place of the Thing.[109]’ This transfer comes to identify the ‘void’ in our symbolization of the object – what Lacan calls ‘the-beyond of the signified.[110]’ Shaw writes that ‘the Thing for Lacan is a kind of non-thing; we become aware of it as a kind of void or absence residing at the heart of signification.[111]’ We see a theory of lacking – the emptiness of the unthinkable becomes sublime to allow us to categorise the non-thing. Žižek writes:
‘Now we can understand why the signifier as such has the status of the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz[112] in Lacan. It is no longer the simple Saussurean material representative of the signified, of the mental representation-idea, but the substitute filling out the void of some originally missing representation: it does not bring to mind any representation, it represents its lack.[113]’
Through defining an object with a title and supplying it with representation in the form of language, however, the signifier of the missing representation now serves to function as what he calls a ‘metalanguage designation.[114]’ This effect of titling limits/totalizes the object in terms of its sublimation and we have a philosophical impossibility or a ‘theory of lack’ to now consider. Shaw explains:
‘The sublime, therefore, as presented by Žižek, ought not to be conceived as a transcendent “Thing-in-itself” beyond the field of representation, but rather as an indicator of the traumatic emptiness, the primordial lack, residing at the heart of all forms of symbolization.[115]’
Žižek asks to consider instead the notion of a sensus communis – whereby the coherence of reality depends on our engagement with a sublime Idea that can never fully occur in that reality. He says:
‘The Thing-in-itself is found in its truth through the loss of its immediacy. In other words, what appears, to “external reflection”, as an Impediment is in fact a positive condition of our access to the Truth: the Truth of a thing emerges because the thing is not accessible to us in its immediate self-identity.[116]’
It is, as Anthony Elliot writes: ‘the subject of lack exists prior to any mode of subjectivization. It is the “empty place” of individuality[117]’ and it is within this space that the Zizeakean sublime exists.
Žižek’s account of the sublime is also based on his reading of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel who advocated the use of dialectical thinking in order to understand the world around us. He felt that by combining individual thoughts we could form an ‘Absolute Idea’ and said that it was only through using this dialectical device that we could form an idea of totality. Shaw writes:
‘In Hegelian dialectics, thought begins with a thesis, or idea, which is countered by an antithesis, an opposing idea. The conflict is resolved by combining thesis and antithesis in a synthesis, which compromises a greater, more encompassing idea.[118]’
Žižek explains Hegel’s theory as, once more a testimony to the notion of lacking. If this type of dialectical thought is applied, for example, to the notion of the object or Kant’s ‘thing-in-itself,’ in Hegelian terms the sublime is an object ‘whose positive body is just an embodiment of Nothing.[119]’ Where Kant’s contemplation of the infinite signifies man’s ability to comprehend totality or boundlessness, in Hegel our comprehension instead emphasises the inadequacy of our vision/contemplation. Shaw explains:
‘(It) does not point to the existence of a supersensible realm, beyond appearance, but rather to the inadequacy of appearance to itself, to the sense in which appearance, or phenomena, is oriented around a determinate lack. Again, Žižek stresses, with a glance to Lacan, that the sublime object is merely the embodiment of this lack.[120]’
However, Žižek notes that despite his opposing view of Kant’s sublime, Hegel does not stand in opposition to Kant and that we as reader should be aware of this fact. He feels, rather, that his notion of the sublime takes itself even more literally than Kant’s writing:
‘Hegel’s position is, in contrast, that there is nothing beyond the phenomenality, beyond the field of representation...The experience of the Sublime thus remains the same: all we have to do is to subtract its transcendent presupposition – the presupposition that this experience indicates, in a negative way, some transcendent Thing-in-itself persisting in its positivity beyond it...We must limit ourselves to what is strictly immanent to this experience, to pure negativity, to the negative self-relationship of the representation.[121]’
Žižek’s ‘Sublime Object’ serves to further discourse on the sublime for the twenty-first century. His theory expands on Lacan’s notion of transcendence and sublimation which, it could be said, was never fully realised in terms of the sublime. He also proposes a theory for Hegel which differs from previous reasoning that he stands in opposition to Immanuel Kant, regarding it instead as standing as well as it. Crucially the appeal of Žižek is his contemplation of philosophy in easily recognisable and familiar articles. In ‘The Sublime Object’ alone he discusses fourteen different Hitchcock films as well as popular sci-fi cinematic culture – ‘The Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ and ‘Alien.’ In this regard he is similar to Longinus who used Homer’s Odyssey to expand upon his theory of the sublime, or indeed Edmund Burke who discussed Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ at length in his Enquiry. Žižek puts the sublime in the age of Lyotard’s ‘techno-sciences’ as well as regarding it in terms of social structures and human agency. He has become known as a ‘philosopher of the real,[122]’ where, in terms of discussion he can explain his thoughts using ‘real objects – e.g. European toilet design rather than abstract ideas with no immediate reference to us.[123]’ His position on the sublime, when centred on his reading of prior philosophy, encourages a reconstruction of thought, rather than a tearing apart of ideas to create new theories. Elliot writes that where he is:
‘critical of philosophical traditions that see social and political identities as deriving from objective interests, needs or desires ... (he) locates the emergence of identity as a contingent process of linguistic articulation. A discursive process of political hegemony at once creates social and cultural identities and, in so doing, covers over that insufficiency which is understood to lie at the heart of subjectivity.[124]’
He writes in his preface to ‘The Sublime Object’ that what critics of Hegel’s voracity need is ‘a dose of an effective laxative[125]’ and it is with a voracity of his own that he attempts to rectify our notions on the reification of language, of the idealisation of a society which cannot exist and a proposition that the subversion of this ‘social fantasy’ should be the ultimate task of any critique of ideology.[126]
The examination and dissection of these texts show a type of evolution of thought regarding the sublime. It is treated as a philosophical subject but also, as a condition of the mind and self. They represent the concerns of mankind at each point in their history and show an ever-increasing appetite to understand what it is to feel and be human. We differentiate ourselves through our engagement with the sublime, not only through our ability to contemplate grandeur and wonder but in the contemplation of infinity itself. Rather grandly, the enquiries show a movement away from the regard of the natural world toward an appraisal of the self and our capacity for definition and thought. The sublime can be found in all things it would seem – vast landscapes, oratorical devices, infinity and the notion of the ‘other’ – the nothingness of the unpresentable, the apparent ‘void’ at the heart of contemplation. Regardless of the role of the sublime, what each review testifies to most is the subject of our engagement. They represent our ability to contemplate, raising the self above the ‘level of brutes.[127]’ The power of language and the reification of thought to synthesise new thoughts have become as important as the boundless landscapes we inhabit. Just as we think we have ‘figured out’ the sublime, a new appraisal or consideration arrives to represent the thoughts of that age. There is no sublime object without our engagement with that object. Our application to the subject of the sublime, as represented by Longinus and his peers, is sublimity itself and it is found within these enquiries.
[1] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, Routledge, 2006, p.48
[2] Ibid. p.49
[3] Eagleton, Terry, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Blackwell Publishers, 1990, p.91
[4] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.88-89
[5] Ibid. p.115-116
[6] Ibid. p.129-130
[7] Wright, Edmund, Wright, Elizabeth, ‘Introduction,’ The Žižek Reader, Ed. Wright, Edmund, Wright, Elizabeth, Blackwell Publishing, 1999, p.7
[8] Longinus, Dionysius, On Sublimity, Translated by Russell, D.A., Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1965 p.2
[9] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.18
[10] Longinus, Dionysius, On Sublimity, p.7
[11] Sircello, Guy, ‘How is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?’ The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, p.541-50, Fall, 1993
[12] Op.Cit
[13] Longinus, Dionysius, On Sublimity, p.8
[14] Longinus, ‘On Sublimity,’ Greek and Roman Aesthetics, Ed. Bychkov,V. Oleg, Sheppard, Ann, Cambridge University Press, 2010, p.151
[15] Longinus, ‘On Sublimity,’ Classical Literary Criticism, Ed. Russell, D.A., Oxford University Press, 1972, p.167
[16] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.4
[17] Ibid. p.14
[18] Eagleton, Terry, Ideology of the Aesthetic, Blackwell Publishers, 1990, p.15
[19] Eagleton, Terry, Ideology of the Aesthetic, p.17
[20] Baillie, John, ‘An Essay on the Sublime,’ The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, Ed. Ashfield, Andrew, de Bolla, Peter, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p.97
[21] Longinus, On the Sublime
[22] DeBolla, Peter, The Discourse of the Sublime, Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject, John Wiley and Sons, 1989
[23] Longinus, ‘On Sublimity,’ Classical Literary Criticism, p.143
[24] Duff, William, An Essay on Original Genius; And its Various Modes of Exertion in Philosophy and the Fine Arts, Particularly in Poetry, BiblioLife, 2010
[25] Henry Home, Lord Kames, from Elements of Criticism, Routledge, 1993
[26] Shaw, On the Sublime, p.4
[27] Longinus, Dionysius, On Sublimity, p.14
[28] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Oxford University Press, 1998, p.1
[29] Op.Cit
[30] Op.Cit
[31] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry, p.113
[32] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.45
[33] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry, p.19
[34] Op.Cit
[35] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry, p.22
[36] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry, p.23-24
[37] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry, p.25
[38] White, Stephen K., Edmund Burke: Modernity, Politics and Aesthetics, Sage Publications, 1994, p.25
[39] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry, p.53
[40] Gibbons, Luke, Edmund Burke and Ireland, Cambridge, 2003, p.xii
[41] Ibid. p.29
[42] Ibid. p.xii
[43] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.77
[44] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry, p.42
[45] Furniss, Tom, Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender, and Political Economy in Revolution Cambridge University Press, 2003, p.35
[46] Ibid. p.36
[47] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.62
[48] Ibid. p.57
[49] Ibid. p.63
[50] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry, p.149
[51] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.71
[52] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.49
[53] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry, p.1
[54] Ibid. p.1
[55] Ibid. p.15
[56] Ibid. p.43
[57] Ibid. p.19
[58] Crowther, Paul, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism, p.117
[59] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p. 73
[60] Op.Cit
[61]Kant, Immanuel, ‘Critique of Judgment,’ http://philosophy.eserver.org/kant/critique-of-judgment.txt., 20th November, 2010
[62]Op.Cit
[63] Crowther, Paul, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993, p.77
[64] Ibid. p.135
[65] Kant, Immanuel, ‘Critique of Judgment,’ http://philosophy.eserver.org/kant/critique-of-judgment.txt., 20th November, 2010
[66] Crowther, Paul, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism, p.136
[67] Ibid. p.137
[68] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.80
[69] Ibid. p.81
[70] Ibid. p.82
[71] Kant, Immanuel, ‘Critique of Judgment,’ http://philosophy.eserver.org/kant/critique-of-judgment.txt., 20th November, 2010
[72] Pascal, Blaise, Pensées, trans. J. Warrington (Dent, London, 1973) p.110
[73] http://philosophy.eserver.org/kant/critique-of-judgment.txt 20th November, 2010
[74] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.84
[75] Ibid.p.75
[76] Op.Cit
[77] Op.Cit
[78] Kant, Immanuel, ‘Critique of Judgment,’ http://philosophy.eserver.org/kant/critique-of-judgment.txt., 20th November, 2010
[79] Op.Cit
[80] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.88
[81] Lyotard, Jean-François, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, Stanford University Press, 1994, p.ix
[82] Ibid. p.x
[83] Rapaport Herman, ‘Lyotard, Jean-François: Le Différend,’ SubStance 15, no.1, 1986, p.82-86
[84] Bobo, D., Michael, ‘Missional Implications of The Differend by J.F. Lyotard,’ www.patheos.com, October 11th 2012
[85] Lyotard, Jean-François, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, p.239
[86] Malpas, Simon, Jean-François Lyotard, Routledge, 2003,p.49
[87] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.125
[88] Ibid. p.124
[89] Op.Cit
[90] Lyotard, Jean-François, ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,’ The Continental Aesthetics Reader, Ed. Cazeux, Clive, Routledge, 2000, p.455
[91] Lyotard, Jean-François, The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, University of Minnesota, 1984, p.79
[92] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.1
[93] Crowther, Paul, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993, p.154
[94] Ibid. p.155
[95] Ibid. p.156
[96] Lyotard, Jean-François, The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, p.79
[97] Lyotard, Jean-François, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, p.228
[98] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.147
[99] Ibid. p.135
[100] Myers, Tony, Slavoj Žižek: Routledge Critical Thinkers, Routledge, 2003, p.16
[101] Ibid. p.17
[102] Ibid. p.11
[103] Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology, Verso, 1989, p.xxx
[104] Op.Cit
[105] Op.Cit
[106] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.132
[107] Ibid. p.135
[108] Žižek, Slavoj, ‘Courtly Love, or Woman as Thing,’ The Žižek Reader, Ed. Wright, Edmund, Wright, Elizabeth, Blackwell Publishing, 1999, p.157
[109] Op.Cit
[110] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.135
[111] Op.Cit
[112] By ‘Vorstellungsrepräsentanz’ Žižek is referring to the idea of the ‘representative’ or the substitute of representation as proposed by Freud. It is the ‘signifying element filling out the vacant place of the missing representation.’
[113] Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p.179
[114] Ibid. p.158
[115] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.138
[116] Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p.243
[117] Elliot, Anthony, ‘Žižek, Slavoj,’ Key Contemporary Social Theorists, Ed. Elliot, Anthony, Ray, Larry, Blackwell Publishing, 2003, p.275
[118] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.153
[119] Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p.206
[120] Shaw, Philip, The Sublime, p.139
[121] Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p.233
[122] Myers, Tony, Slavoj Žižek: Routledge Critical Thinkers, p.29
[123] Op.Cit
[124] Elliot, Anthony, ‘Žižek, Slavoj,’ Key Contemporary Social Theorists, p.274
[125] Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p.xxii
[126] Elliot, Anthony, ‘Slavoj Žižek,’ Key Contemporary Social Theorists, p.274
[127] Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry, p.148