Traditionally the "sublime" as a term in aesthetics refers to the experience of pleasurable anxiety that we experience when confronting wild and threatening sights like, for example, a massive craggy mountain, black against the sky, looming terrifyingly in our vision.That's Kant's understanding in the Critique of Judgement.

The category of the sublime has been revived under postmodernism after a century or more of neglect. What does it mean in postmodernity? I reckon one way to understand it is the admission, fromKant, as one of the philosophical architects of the Enlightenment, that the mind cannot always organise the world rationally. Some objects are simply incapable of being brought neatly under concepts.That is the starting point.

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