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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

return of the sublime « Previous | |Next »
July 14, 2008

After Kant, who reserved the concept of the sublime for nature ---and understood it in terms of the as a presentation of unpresentability--- the sublime becomes a historical constituent of art. This category is rarely mentioned in artistic discourse in Australia, even though it can be seen in various visual works. The sublime is that which, in its infinity, appears as shocking and overpowering; from within the opacity of the art work the sublime means the negation of the idealist conception of a harmonious aesthetic synthesis between sensuous appearance and spiritual content (the beautiful);

In The Touch of Art: Adorno and the Sublime Espen Hammer comments on the return of the sublime in late modernity:

hardly any aesthetic category has attracted more attention than the notion of the sublime. From Barnett Newman’s invocation of America as the post- or non-historical space of the sublime event and Derrida’s reading of the sublime in Kant’s Third Critique as a non-representable disruption of a metaphysics of presence to Lyotard’s conception of a presentation of the unpresentability of ideas of totality and, most recently, Rosalind Krauss’ anti-Greenbergian rehabilitation of Bataille’s notion of l’informe, the fracturing and destabilizing operations of the sublime has often come to be seen as the defining characteristic of modern art überhaupt.

The return of the sublime is not limited to aesthetics as there are wide-ranging ethical, political and epistemological implications. Consequently, the sublime has also figured prominently as a focal point for conceptualizing the nature of modernity itself. Hammer comments:
In this respect, the most influential contribution has no doubt been Lyotard’s discourse, which, by aiming to offer an account of modernity purged of all illicit reference to finality and closure, links the artistic sublime to the nihilistic affirmation of an unrestricted hyper-reflexivity, perspectivism and experimentalism: for Lyotard, the arché of the modern is the anarché of the postmodern. The consummate exhaustion of the “presentable” world of cosmos and mundus is thereby affirmed as fate.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:22 PM |