The Postmodern Sublime

In the last three decades of the twentieth century, the philosophical concept of the sublime underwent a renaissance among a number of “continental” philosophers, after having fallen largely out of favor around the end of the preceding century. Many thinkers who turned to the concept of the sublime at this time were associated in one way or another with the then-nascent and fiercely debated categories of “postmodern theory” and “postmodernism” in general; accordingly, this trend in continental thought quickly became identified by the name “postmodern sublime.” In this chapter, we examine the work of four influential thinkers of this postmodern incarnation of the sublime: Jean-François Lyotard, Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze, and Fredric Jameson. Other writers also contributed to this discourse, but the work of these four encapsulates effectively its central themes and issues, while at the same time illustrating the wide range of its elaboration and use. Common to these thinkers’ work is a more or less explicit but fundamental engagement with Kant’s “Analytic of the Sublime”. For each of them, the contemporary importance of the experience of sublimity, as well as the central problematic of its concept, concerns the issue of what Kant in the Critique of the Power of Judgment calls Darstellung : the process through which the imagination presents sensible intuition to rational thought. In the aesthetic experience of the sublime, on their interpretation, the imagination tries to present an intuition of some object that is strictly and intrinsically unpresentable, thereby running up against its own limit. This means, in these thinkers’ view, that the experience of the sublime involves a crisis for the faculty of presentation in the form of an irresolvable conflict between it and a set of objects that remain fundamentally inaccessible to it, but that it strives to present nonetheless. This issue of irresolvability, which is central to the way these thinkers conceptualize the sublime, was first and most rigorously analyzed by Kant in the third Critique . For this reason, the thinkers of the postmodern sublime focus almost exclusively on Kant’s interpretation and reject both pre-Kantian and German Idealist and Romantic discourses of the sublime; the latter tend to resolve the conflict between presentation and what cannot be presented, whereas the former ignore the issue altogether.