The Contour of Sublimity in the Postmodern Age: The Exemplary Case of Jean-Francois Lyotard

Toward the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, sublimity was neglected and untended; the sublime was relegated to the margin of intellectual arena. It was until the middle of the twentieth century, the time of the rise and the development of postmodernism, the sublime rose to the surface of critical thought. In a series of writings, Jean-Francois Lyotard, along with Jameson, Nancy and other prominent postmodern thinkers, have emphasized the alienating, destructive aspects of the sublime, which relate to the “unpresentable.” The postmodern sublime, as (differend), is structured by the contradictions, aporias, hysteria, and schizophrenia; in fact, it bespeaks the postmodern global system characterized by fragmentation, particularly the dissociation of signs and their arbitrary referents. Postmodernism, therefore, evinces the decline of social agreement and the withering of the individual, and the postmodern age is apocalyptic fin-de-millennium. As a result, the postmodern experience is one in which the individual subject is fragmented, overpowered, or annihilated, as the social realm and any notion of the community suffers a similar erasure. So, as the dominant postmodern ontological frame of mind is “overwhelmed” by the aesthetic of the sublime, the aesthetic of the beautiful is subverted or relegated to the margin.