In the early 1980s, the French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard mounted a persuasive argument the Sublime from mysticism and reconsecrating it for modernism. Irrespective of its erstwhile religious colouration, Lyotard argued that the Sublime summoned up the idea of a radical otherness, of an irreducible difference, of something unknowable, indeterminate, non-demonstrable and unrepresentable. He emphasized that Kant had characterized the Sublime in quite unmystical terms - as a "negative presentation" - and had equated it with "the abstract".

Lyotard suggested how the Romantic landscapists' commitment to the Sublime had placed art (maybe for the first time in history) in a critical, antagonistic relationship to the common suppositions of its patron class. It challenged scientific rationalism, technology and capitalism by refuting the assumption that one could "know all, be capable of all". In this respect, Romantic landscape painting was a forerunner and model of that "negative position.

In an earlier work (1984), "Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?," Lyotard views the sublime as legitimating the avant-garde as way of extending the critical enterprise to the arts. The method behind the madness of the avant-gardes, Lyotard contends, is incomprehensible unless one is already familiar with "the incommensurability of reality to concept which is implied in the Kantian philosophy of the sublime."