In the Critique of Judgment Kant argued that the mathematically sublime refers to the way that the mental faculties that present visual perceptions to the mind are inadequate to the concept corresponding to it; in other words, what we are able to make ourselves see cannot fully match up to what we know is there. We know it's a mountain but we cannot take the whole thing into our perception. Our sensibility is incapable of coping with such sights, but our reason can assert the finitude of the presentation.

With the dynamically sublime, our sense of physical danger should prompt an awareness that we are not just physical material beings, but moral and (in Kant's terms) noumenal beings as well. The body may be dwarfed by its power but our reason need not be. This explains, in both cases, why the sublime is an experience of pleasure as well as pain.

So we have an admission, from 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. he Lisbon earthquake of 1755 famously shook the metaphysical optimism of Europe's leading philosophers. Immanuel Kant would eventually manage its threat in "The Analytic of the Sublime" of his 1790 Critique of Judgment. In the twentieth century, human-inflicted catastrophes have supplanted the natural disaster as the source of sublime feeling. Auschwitz, however, is the name of an "event" that permits no compensatory retreat to an ostensible human dignity and is not recuperable within a transcendental tale of progress and greater good.

Kant's insight regarding the irreconcilability of imagination and reason is the stepping stone for Lyotard's forwarding of the sublime presence of an unconscious desire to postpone meaning and delay the process of signification. The differend mediating the link between representation and concept unfolds a sublime kind of heterogeneity which breaks down the harmonizing act of representation as conducive to transcendent meaning through language. The differend, to the extent that it creates "noise" and dissension in the communicative act, brings about a formless mass of statements and open-ended signifieds that cannot be unified by a common metalanguage.

Sublime feeling thus sensitizes us to an "outside and an inside" in thought, or to an "abyss" separating imagination and reason. Sublime feeling becomes, as a result, "the transport that leads all thought (critical thought included) to its limits." We have a pleasure-in-pain, a "recoil" of thought against its limitations.

Images produced mechanically, like photographs, achieve a degree of verisimilitude that outmatches practically anything hand-produced, and for this reason one might conclude that photographs reinforce a sense of stability or reality to cultural forms better than "realist" styles of painting since the quattrocento. Before mechanical reproduction, it could reasonably be claimed of a hand-produced painting like the Mona Lisa that it is absolutely unique and tied to a certain context of meaning, thus unambiguously authoritative. But after mechanical reproduction, leading to the Mona Lisa's appearance on billboards, magazine advertisements, and T-shirts, unity and stability of meaning are no longer possible. This is emblematic of what postmodern culture has both lost and found. It has lost its sense of presence or originating certainty, and it has gained infinity. Therein lies its sublimity.