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In the Critique of practical reason, Kant develops the foundation of moral law in its objective and subjective aspects. After claiming that it is plausible to postulate the determination of will only through pure reason, it was necessary for the philosopher to demonstrate how it becomes conscious and acceptable to the moral agent. In this step, he examines the feeling of pleasure and displeasure, to which he associates, at first, the humiliation of the will given to the satisfaction of the senses, so that in the subject emerges a new quality of feeling, respect, also called moral sentiment. The same strategy is found in the third critique, where the constraint, this time, acts on the imagination, unable to encompass the sublime immensity with the help of understanding. The displeasure that comes from it leads to the recognition of reason as a higher faculty and, from it, to the pleasure that comes from the conscience of the moral law as a higher destination. To consider the way in which the subjective assimilates the moral law, here it is intended to think it under the hypothesis of being it, rather, through embarrassment and displeasure, not only founded on the freedom, but also on the humiliation of presumption. The argument follows Kant’s works on ethics, beginning with the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, then follows the path of the second to the third criticism. In this journey, we intend to examine the place that the feeling of pleasure occupies in the a priori foundation of the moral law, whether in the analytical of practical reason or in the analytical of the beautiful and the sublime.

Uwagi wstępne Proponowane ujęcie jest próbą zastosowania aparatu krytycznego zaczerpniętego z teorii tropów Paula de Mana do interpretacji współczesnej sztuki amerykańskiej. Omówione zostaną formy nostalgii za naturalną formą obecności przedmiotu w dziele w kontekście rozumienia sztuki jako kodu poddanego prawom retoryki. Przeciwstawię rolę przedmiotu w sztuce amerykańskiej Jaspera Johnsa i Roberta Rauschenberga koncepcji przedmiotu naturalnego sformułowanej w tekście de Mana zatytułowanym St...

Estetyka staje się więc paraestetyką, komentarz parologią, dzieło zaś – parapoetyką. J.-F. Lyotard, Filozofia i malarstwo w dobie eksperymentu Jacques Derrida, powołując się na badania Jonathana Cullera, wskazuje na pojawienie się w latach 70. w Stanach Zjednoczonych nowego i specyficznie amerykańskiego użycia terminu „teoria”. Celowo wyodrębniony znakiem cudzysłowu, tak rozumiany dyskurs teoretyczny jest – jak twierdzi filozof – „czysto północno-amerykańskim wynalazkiem, który należy odczyty...

Joseph Kosuth jako artysta i filozof Diagnozowana przez Jacques’a Derridę a mocno dziś podkreślana rola językowości znalazła swoje potwierdzenie także w sztukach wizualnych, w szczególny zaś sposób odcisnęła swoje piętno na dziełach Josepha Kosutha, artysty urodzonego w 1945 roku w Stanach Zjednoczonych (w Toledo, w stanie Ohio), a zatem piętnaście lat młodszego od Jacques’a Derridy. Sugerowane (a nie jawne) pokrewieństwo działań amerykańskiego artysty i francuskiego filozofa uczynię przedmio...

„Jestem za sztuką, która dojrzewa, sama o tym nie wiedząc, za sztuką, której dana była szansa startowania od zera” – twierdzi Claes Oldenburg w swoim manifeście komentującym projekt sklepu na 107 East 2nd Street w Nowym Jorku, który został wykonany, wraz ze sprzedawanymi tam towarami, z malowanego gipsu. W bardzo interesującym kontekście, jako przejaw neodadaistycznego i surrealistycznego z ducha powrotu do Kantowskiej idei „rzeczy samych w sobie”, interpretuje to przedsięwzięcie Jolanta Dąbk...

Wprowadzenie Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, w polskim wydaniu Postmodernizm, czyli logika kulturowa późnego kapitalizmu – obszerna, ponad czterystustronnicowa monografia, której poświęcony jest ten rozdział, została opublikowana w Stanach Zjednoczonych w roku 1991. Autor książki, Fredric Jameson, jest teoretykiem kultury związanym między innymi z ośrodkiem badawczym w Irvine –Critical Theory Institute, uc. W filozofii Jamesona można odnaleźć wiele założeń łączących ...

Poprzez inteligentny i błyskotliwy opis Szkoły z Irvine książka Ewy Bobrowskiej poszerza w sposób istotny wiedzę na temat poststrukturalistycznego myślenia krytycznego, władającego zachodnią humanistyką w ostatnim ćwierćwieczu. O ile dokonania Derridy, Lyotarda, Isera, a także Jamesona, Josepha Hillisa Millera, Greenblatta i Dominicka LaCapry są nieźle znane w polskim obszarze językowym, o tyle samo interdyscyplinarne przedsięwzięcie, zwane Szkoła z Irvine, nie doczekało się dotąd systematycznego i kompetentnego opisu. (...) Niezwykłe dyspozycje autorki, która jest anglistką, filozofem, historykiem sztuki i czynną artystką pozwalają udźwignąć wszystkie wymiary analizy, zawierającej elementy dyskursu krytycznego, rozprawy filozoficznej, intelektualnego odbioru dzieła sztuki. Książkę Ewy Bobrowskiej można czytać na kilka sposobów: jako wymagający współuczestniczenia przewodnik po współczesnej sztuce (głównie amerykańskiej), a także jako wizualizujący niektóre, nawet bardzo abstrakcyjne konstatacje - przewodnik po współczesnej filozofii (głównie postmodernistycznej). Spotykają się w tej pracy dwie hermetyczne i trudne dziedziny, spotykają się i wzajemnie oświetlają, dając czytelnikowi niezwykłą możliwość rozumienia współczesnego świata obrazów i idei. Szczególnie godna podkreślenia jest ta część pracy, która odwołuje się do wątków etycznych: pokazuje słabo rozpoznany element współczesnej filozofii a zarazem - nieprzeciętną wrażliwość autorki. (fragm. recenzji prof. Grażyny Borkowskiej) Through an intelligent and sharp description of the Irvine School of Critical Theory, Ewa Bobrowska’s book significantly expands the knowledge about post-structuralist critical thinking that has dominated the Western humanities in the last quarter of a century. While the achievements of Derrida, Lyotard, Iser, as well as Jameson, Joseph Hillis Miller, Greenblatt, and Dominick LaCapra are well known in Polish critical thought, the interdisciplinary project called the Irvine School has not yet been systematically and competently described. . . . The unusual dispositions of the author, who is an English philologist, philosopher, art historian, and an active artist, allow her to carry out all dimensions of the analysis, including critical discourse, philosophical reasoning, and an intellectual examination of a work of art. Ewa Bobrowska’s book can be read in several ways: as a guide to contemporary (mainly American) art that requires participation, and as a guide to contemporary (mainly postmodern) philosophy while visualising some, even very abstract, statements. These two diverse fields of contemporary art discourse and philosophy meet in this work and illuminate each other, giving the reader an extraordinary opportunity to understand the contemporary world of images and ideas. What is particularly worth emphasising is the part of the work that refers to ethical threads: it shows a little-known part of contemporary philosophy and, at the same time, the author’s extraordinary sensitivity. (excerpt from a review by Prof. Grażyna Borkowska)

A oto inny sposób myślenia o tym, co słuszne i niesłuszne: im dłużej żyją ludzie lub kultury, tym więcej, mając szczęście, mogą nabyć φρόνησις większej wrażliwości wobec innych, subtelniejszej typologii do opisu bliźnich i samych siebie. Pomagają kontakty z innymi, pomagają sokratejskie dyskusje; lecz od czasów romantyków najbardziej ze wszystkich pomagają nam poeci, pisarze i ideolodzy. Richard Rorty, Konsekwecje pragmatyzmu „Czy nie byłoby absurdem mówić o kalifornijskim krytycyzmie”, pyta ...

„W szczególności zaś uważam, że to właśnie w estetyce wzniosłości sztuka współczesna (łącznie z literaturą) odnajduje swój rozmach, zaś logika awangard – swoje aksjomaty. […] Pozostają one bowiem niewytłumaczalne bez odwołania do założonej w Kantowskiej filozofii wzniosłości niewspółmierności pomiędzy rzeczywistością i pojęciem” – twierdzi Jean-François Lyotard w swoim eseju Odpowiedź na pytanie: co to jest postmodernizm ? Postmodernizm bowiem, według Lyotarda, to epoka eksperymentu, oparta, ...

« Mont Blanc », poème écrit par Percy Shelley, publié en 1817 dans un récit de voyage intitulé Histoire d’un voyage de six semaines (écrit avec Mary Shelley) suscite le débat. En effet, certains critiques considèrent, dans une perspective téléologique, que la partie prosaïque du récit a été revue pour préparer le lecteur au sublime du poème tandis que, pour d’autres, le poème n’est qu’un simple appendice à une œuvre composite. Plusieurs arguments peuvent appuyer chacune des deux thèses, mais, quoi qu’il en soit, il semblerait bien que le récit de voyage soit davantage fictionnel que référentiel. "Mont Blanc", a poem written by Percy Shelley, published in 1817 in a travel account entitled History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (written with Mary Shelley) has sparked debate. Indeed, some critics consider, from a teleological perspective, that the prosaic part of the story was revised to prepare the reader for the sublime of the poem; while for others, the poem is merely an appendix to a composite work. Several arguments may support each of the two hypotheses; yet, in any case, it would seem that the travel narrative is more fictional than referential.

Il est courant d’opposer, à propos des images en art, une herméneutique symbolique et une phénoménologie du sensible (ou une esthétique du sublime), une logique de la signification et une logique de la sensation. L’ambition de cet article est double. Il consiste, d’une part, à justifier la pertinence d’une herméneutique de l’image, dans une parenté avec le courant iconologique, en montrant qu’interpréter plus permet de ressentir davantage. Il consiste d’autre part à montrer les limites d’une herméneutique de l’image lorsqu’elle se réduit à la recherche d’un sens caché et prétend toujours transformer le sensible en intelligible. It is common to oppose, with regard to images in art, a symbolic hermeneutics and a phenomenology of the sensible (or an aesthetics of the sublime), a logic of meaning and a logic of sensation. The ambition of this article is twofold. It consists, on the one hand, in justifying the relevance of a hermeneutics of the image, in a relationship with the iconological current, by showing that interpreting more makes it possible to feel more. On the other hand, it consists in showing the limits of a hermeneutics of the image when it is reduced to the search for a hidden meaning and always claims to transform the sensible into the intelligible.

Can we measure the experiences of physical and VR art installations? How could that be done? The present research attempts to answer these questions through the use of a multimethod approach to assess every dimension of the experience of art. Wristband and questionnaires have been used as research tools to understand how the experience of art installations in the museum takes place and to study it, through and across two different installations. To examine art experiences in an ecologically valid setting, a pop-up lab was used at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, creating an opportunity to reach the «golden path» for empirical investigation of art experiences and, in the present instance, specific experience of art installations. Two installations have been selected from the exhibition «The Intelligence of Plants» (16.10.2021 – 20.02.2022) as single-cases to explore a suitable methodology for the experience of art installations. Both installations were chosen by the curator Franziska Nori for their shared goal of connecting the observers’ bodies with the ones of the giant trees featured in both installations, in order to look for commonalities with other non-human fellow beings. Additionally, both these installations aim at evoking experiences of the sublime in the audience. Sensations, emotions, and thoughts, as well as physiological reactions and movements, partake in these experiences. Data collected with the presented methodology is potentially very rich thanks to the presence of original art installations (rather than their reproductions) over the space and time they are meant to be visited. Data from the questionnaires can be considered ecologically valid, as consisting of accurate subjective reportages of the visitors while actually experiencing the installations in situ. The proper measurement of physical and behavioral patterns is however harder to achieve as it relies on biometrics in a real-world setting. To overcome this issue and have more control over the multiple variables that can affect the measurements, a collaboration among disciplines and professionals from the art sector is at the heart of the matter.

Cet essai étudie les avantages et les limites du sublime lorsqu’il est utilisé comme une stratégie rhétorique et narratologique pour représenter et décrire les animaux non-humains, et plus précisément dans les mémoires, un genre littéraire qui demeure sous-étudié mais pourtant riche et prometteur pour envisager les liens entretenus entre humains et non-humains. Au vu de l’absence d’une révision conclusive des théories fondatrices du sublime (e.g., Burke et Kant) qui rendent compte d’une esthétique clivante entre animaux « beaux » et « sublimes » et/ou entre humains et animaux, le présent article analyse deux cas (American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon [2008] et Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter [2012] de Steven Rinella) qui déploient le sublime dans des descriptions d’animaux vivants ou morts. Les animaux morts représentés par Rinella deviennent des natures mortes (ou mourantes) qui suscitent des réflexions, à la fois chez l’auteur et chez le lecteur ou la lectrice, sur l’éthique de la chasse et du bien-être animal ainsi que sur les tensions qui persistent dans les relations entretenues entre animaux humains et non-humains. This essay explores the avenues opened and limits set by the sublime when used a rhetorical and narratological strategy for figuring and describing non-human animals in the memoir, an understudied but promising genre for examining human/nonhuman relationships. Since few (if any) recent theories of the sublime provide a viable revision of the fraught aesthetic distinction between sublime and beautiful animals and/or between humans and animals outlined in foundational works on the sublime (e.g., Burke’s and Kant’s texts), this article analyzes two case studies (Steven Rinella’s American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon [2008] and Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter [2012]) that imaginatively deploy the rhetoric of the sublime in descriptions of living animals and dead animals. In Rinella’s memoirs, the described dead animals become still lifes which produce reflections on the ethics of hunting, on animal welfare, and on the tensions existing in the relationship between human and non-human animals.

Compte rendu de l’exposition « Füssli, entre rêve et fantastique » au musée Jacquemart-André, Paris, 16 septembre 2022-23 janvier 2023. Art exhibition review of Füssli, entre rêve et fantastique, at the Jacquemart-André Museum, 16th September 2022-23th January 2023.

Found art is an artistic movement that appropriates non-art items to challenge traditional art and stimulate public discourse. While this concept has been applied to aesthetics and socio-political movements, we argue that Donald Trump’s rally performances throughout his 2015–2016 U.S. presidential campaign employed similar strategies, transferring affect and eliciting audience participation. Using elements drawn from literature examining found art and the Happenings during the 20th century, we conduct an aesthetic criticism of various spectacles during Trump’s presidential run to understand how his campaign communicated with audiences, despite its appeal to the negative sublime.

In this paper I consider the four images from Auschwitz analyzed by Didi- Huberman in Images in Spite of All -the so-called Sonderkommando photographs- through the lens of the “historical sublime” as proposed by historian Eelco Runia. These photographs are taken as an example of a possible reconciled aesthetic experience with an “unimaginable” past that horrifies us. Moreover, I argue that aesthetic depictions are able to champion a model of historical commemoration which makes these events imaginable again. In order to show this, I will first employ the concept of the “sublime historical event” which Runia proposes to interpret the Holocaust’s historical catastrophe. Runia’s “historical sublime” provides a framework to understand the process of becoming what “we are no longer” through the invention of new identities that defy our former ones and explain historical discontinuities. Secondly, I will examine the Sonderkommando photographs by applying Runia’s notion of commemoration to the viewer’s aesthetic experience of these images. I will finally suggest the possibility of a reconciliation with our former identities, those who committed sublime historical acts with which we no longer identify, thanks to this aestheticized experience of commemoration. Resumen En este artículo considero las cuatro imágenes de Auschwitz analizadas por Didi-Huberman en Imágenes pese a todo -las llamadas fotografías del Sonderkommando- a través del concepto de lo “histórico sublime” propuesto por el historiador Eelco Runia. Es más, sugiero que dichas fotografías son un ejemplo para una experiencia estética de reconciliación con un pasado “inimaginable” que nos horroriza. Para ello, primero utilizo el concepto de “evento histórico sublime”, tal y como Runia lo expone, para interpretar la catástrofe histórica del Holocausto bajo estos términos. Lo “histórico sublime” nos provee de un marco teórico suficiente en este caso para comprender el proceso de devenir en algo que “no somos ya” a través de la invención de nuevas identidades que desafían aquellas que una vez fuimos y que explica el avance discontinuo de la historia. En segundo lugar, examino las fotos Sonderkommando aplicando la noción de conmemoración de Runia a la experiencia estética de estas imágenes. Por último, planteo la posibilidad de reconciliarnos con nuestras identidades pasadas, aquellas que cometieron actos históricos sublimes con los cuales ya no nos identificamos, gracias a esta experiencia estética de conmemoración.

Purpose: The core of this research is the multi-layered and diverse presence of the Sublime in art today, as analysed through the oeuvre of Peter Doig, the contemporary British painter who belongs to the stream of the Young British Artists, which was developed in Great Britain in the 1990s. Topic: The present research begins with the definition of the idea of the Sublime and continues with a historical review of its manifestations in British art. Peter Doig is chosen because it is a suitable field of research into the current image of the Sublime. Methodology: Peter Doig’s work will be thoroughly examined so that the above view can be demonstrated, through a critical analysis of his paintings, and the similarities and differences with the powerful landscape painting of the 19th-century Romanticism that filled the viewer with awe and fear. Doig translates this artistic knowledge into a peculiar, internally experienced image-making that acrobats on the fringes of the established structures of artistic composition, attempting to portray the unpresentable, the timeless, the transcendent, the ambiguous, the illusory, the after-human elements that construct the landscape of Today. The selected works’ analysis is based on the immediacy of representation as an independent carrier of energy of human experience, which leads the artist to re-use the medium of painting. The research continues by examining, through its painting techniques but also via his use of photography and ready-made postcards, the ways in which the artist uses the materiality of the medium to test how the seemingly closed boundaries of representation expand into many fields of feeling, reading and understanding a timeless Now. Result: The research concludes with critical predictions about the directions and the position that the notion of the Sublime may take, starting from the creative codes in the work of Peter Doig. The paper does not seek to build a position based on unshakable, definitive and non-negotiable conclusions, but to constitute an original and thorough academic springboard, with poetic coordinates of aesthetic consideration, in the research on the applications of the painterly Sublime today.

Frederic Church, l’un des plus célèbres peintres paysagistes américains du XIXe siècle, effectua, au cours des années 1850, deux séjours en Amérique du Sud, qui se révélèrent décisifs dans l’évolution de son art. Admirateur du naturaliste allemand Alexander von Humboldt, il cherchait à traduire le sentiment d’une nature ordonnée, ainsi que l’idée du sublime. Les paysages grandioses de la cordillère des Andes se prêtaient idéalement à ses intentions et, dans ses toiles, Church donna aussi libre cours à sa propre vision de la nature. Dans cet article, l’accent sera mis sur le rôle capital de ces voyages dans l’œuvre du peintre, dont la profonde originalité des paysages représentés lui confère une place particulière dans la peinture américaine du XIXe siècle. Frederic Church, one of the most famous 19th-century American landscape painters, made two trips in South America during the 1850s, which turned out to be decisive in the evolution of his art. A great admirer of German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, he strove to convey the sentiment of a well-ordered nature, together with the idea of the sublime. The majestic landscapes of the Andes proved to be an ideal ground to express such intentions and Church, in his canvasses, also gave free course to his own vision of nature. In this article, the emphasis will be laid on the role of those trips in the works of the painter, whose original landscapes earnt him a particular importance in 19th-century American painting.

L’artiste et poète romantique William Blake (1757-1827) produisit, entre la fin du 18e siècle et le début du 19e siècle, plusieurs livres illustrés unissant texte, images, et décorations marginales. Ce mémoire se penche sur ces illustrations afin d’en analyser les motifs selon l’orientation théorique de l’ « altérité », un concept composite unifiant trois sens : l’infinitude, soit la dimension insaisissable de l’autre ; la distinction, soit l’altérité en tant que différence ; et la déclinaison, soit un mouvement hors du soi. Les chapitres abordent cette « altérité » à travers plusieurs thématiques : la dynamique de la forme visuelle, le lien du sublime et de l’émerveillement à la vision, la représentation du corps et du genre, et le rapport avec la nature. Chaque chapitre exemplifie une manière dont l’« altérité » se lie à des enjeux conceptuels issus de perspectives romantiques et contemporaines. L’analyse considère l’iconographie en tant que reflet et expression de l’imagination blakéenne, guidant la lecture vers une vision et une subjectivité accrues. Le « marginalium », l’élément décoratif marginal du livre illustré, parvient à symboliser cette vision de manière ponctuelle. La « figure flottante », une version humanisée et singularisée de ce marginalium, sous-tend les divers motifs, évoquant l’infinitude du potentiel humain., Between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, William Blake (1757-1827), a romantic artist and poet, produced various illuminated works which unite text, images, and decorations set in the margins of the page. This thesis considers the iconography of these works, attempting to understand their visual motifs through the theoretical standpoint of “alterity”, a composite notion uniting three meanings: infinitude, or a quality of limitlessness; distinction, or the difference of what is “other”; and extension, suggesting a motion outside the self. The different chapters exemplify how this notion of “alterity” relates to contemporary and romantic theoretical constructs. Among the subjects considered are: “alterity” in itself, the significance of Blakean visual form, the sublime and the experience of awe, the representation of the body and of gender, and the relationship to the natural world. The thesis considers the Blakean iconography as a reflection of the imagination, guiding the reader towards a heightened capacity for vision and subjectivity. The “marginalium”, the decorative marginal element of the illustrated books, symbolizes such vision by a punctual means. The “floating figure”, a humanized and singular marginalium, underlies the different motifs, evoking the infinitude of human potential.

International audience; The chapter analyzes a set of narratives referring to a long period of exploitation of the world’s largest forest, the Amazon forest: A Selva (1930) by the Portuguese author José Maria Ferreira de Castro ; Un viejo que leía novelas de amor (1989) by the Chilean (and ecologist) writer Luis Sepúlveda, a novel adapted for the cinema by Australian director Rolf de Heer in 2001. It highlights a double dynamic in the presentation of the forest. On the one hand, a grandiose and overwhelming representation of the forest is linked to the concept of sublime that was already associated to the forest in literature and the arts at the turn of the 19th century. On the other hand, the call to let live the forest, considered as a complex entity, appears as a form of ecocritical commitment that has not yet been often explored.; Consacré aux figurations de la plus grande forêt du monde, ce chapitre analyse et met en perspective un ensemble de récits renvoyant à une large période d’exploitation de la forêt amazonienne : A Selva (1930) de l’auteur portugais José Maria Ferreira de Castro ; Un viejo que leía novelas de amor (1989) de l’écrivain écologiste chilien Luis Sepúlveda, adapté au cinéma par le réalisateur australien Rolf de Heer en 2001. Il s’agit ainsi d’éclairer les modalités, articulations et enjeux d’une double dynamique : d’une part, la représentation à la fois grandiose et écrasante de la forêt, traduisant une reconfiguration du sublime déjà lié aux espaces sylvestres dans les littératures et les arts du tournant du XIXe siècle ; d’autre part, l’appel à laisser vivre une forêt envisagée dans toute sa complexité, qui relève d’une forme d’engagement écocritique encore peu explorée.

One of the characteristics of the “lyric essay” – a recently detected hybrid genre that mingles elements from various literary forms – consists in a peculiar linguistic use of the “I”: on the one hand, the “I” shares an intimate privacy with the reader that resembles the one of the personal essay, thus eliciting an autobiographical correspondence between the “real” authorial person and its diegetic projection; on the other hand, this “I” appears «more reticent, almost coy» (Tall-D’Agata 1997), that is, nearer to the poetic transfiguration operated by the “lyrical I” of modern poetry. This ambiguous statement reveals an intrinsic tension of the voice in the lyric essay, in a perennial oscillation between the external world and the inner self, essayistic clarity and lyrical obscurity. The “I” becomes more fluctuant when it comes to its encounter with the landscape, namely one marked by borders and geographical margins: a descriptive and “documenting” aim conflagrates with an experience often close to the sublime and the subsequent dissolution of the autobiographical “I” into metaphoricity, with important consequences both on the diegetic and the mimetic level. This literary and epistemological phenomenon, which may be synthetized in homophonic pun “I/eye”, will be observed in the writings of two contemporary authors working with hybrid forms: Anne Carson and Antonella Anedda., Linguæ & - Journal of Modern Languages and Cultures, Vol. 22 No. 2 (2022): Border cultures

After identifying some of the aesthetic, rhetorical, and ontological pitfalls of the nuclear or atomic sublime (the over-aestheticization of nuclear risks and the resulting absence of any sense of responsibility) this essay undertakes narratological and rhetorical analyses of one novel, Gerald Vizenor’s Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 (2003), and one creative memoir, Lindsey A. Freeman’s This Atom Bomb in Me (2019). As this article shows, the two works offer alternate ways of representing and critiquing the beguiling but dangerous nuclear sublime while shedding light on a wide array of notions that are intimately associated with atomic culture but have yet remained understudied from this perspective, at least in the fields of (American) literary studies, ecocriticism, and the environmental humanities. These include the dichotomies invisibility/visibility (or absence/presence) and whiteness/color, and the related trope of silence. By engaging with non-dominant traditions and cultures (Anishinaabe; Japanese) and elaborating complex metaphors in the case of Vizenor, or in multisensorial experiences which draw on theories from new materialisms in Freeman’s, the two works converge to suggest that experimentation in the contemporary novel and memoir can lead to an ecocritical revision of the dominant and ocularcentric nuclear sublime, and of the risks it aestheticizes and conceals. ispartof: Épistémocritique : revue de littérature et savoirs vol:21 status: Published online

Dans le Tiers et le Quart Livre, Rabelais revient trois fois sur la mort de son protecteur Guillaume Du Bellay, mort héroïque associée au désastre historique, ce qui préfigure la façon dont Montaigne devait méditer les derniers instants de La Boétie, et « l’humeur mélancolique » fondant l’ethos de l’essayiste. En rapprochant ces deux figures de l’impossible renaissance d’un héroïsme à l’antique, cet article propose d’éclairer le rapport au temps mélancolique qui découle de cette impossibilité.

In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Immanuel Kant argues that the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good. This paper argues that this claim is valuable as a conceptual connection between aesthetics and morality due to its ability to account for our intuitions while also not falling into the various conceptual issues into which other ways of connecting the two subjects fall. In the first chapter, the paper argues that four central characteristics of beauty which Kant argues for can be grounded with minimal relation to Kant's overall system. In the second chapter, the paper expands upon the sparse discussion Kant gives of symbolism, for the neglected purpose of having a clearer sense of the original claim Kant makes. In the course of this chapter, the largely undetermined Kantian category of 'ideas of reason' is retooled with respect to the possibility of having notions that require a sense of agency in others and an aside on aesthetic ideas and their connection to art and symbolism is considered. In the third chapter, the paper gives a brief exploration of certain core characteristics of morality before arguing first that the beautiful is a symbol of the morally good and second that the beautiful is (in a strong sense) the primary symbol of the morally good. In the course of this argument, the paper considers the possibility of the sublime (as posited by Paul Guyer) and aesthetic ideas being alternative symbols of the morally good, but finds that each has a different relationship to the morally good. The third chapter ends with some thoughts about the implications of the beautiful being the symbol of the morally good for moral education, and these considerations carry over into the conclusion. The paper concludes with some comparisons between the proposed symbolic relationship between beauty and morality and other possible ways of connecting the two, as well as a final discussion about the value of a sense of the beautiful for our moral lives.Also included are two appendices. The first discusses beauty with an eye towards Kant's systematic philosophy, while the second considers a possible radical implication of the paper's newly refined notion of ideas of reason and a certain quality of beauty --- subjective universality --- for the foundations of Kant's moral theory.

This paper interrogates the connection between entities that hover in the liminal state between life and death (such as vampires and spirits) and the manner in which these entities relate to Alaya Dawn Johnson’s conjurings of alternate political structures and hierarchies in her Spirit Binders series. Johnson’s alternate hierarchies are compelling primarily because they are both flawed and liminal. These hierarchies contain gateways between life and death, between material reality and spiritual reality. An ecoGothic lens is applied to these texts as they deal with climate-related disasters and the ways in which the texts instigate not just heroism but also monstrosity. In Gothic fiction, supernatural tropes such as the Vampire, spirits, and intermediaries are often signposts towards psychological states such as Terror and its relation to the Sublime. In Gothic fiction, very often, vampires, spirits and other similar creatures are connected to a hierarchy or community of sorts. A postcolonial Gothic reading of Gothicized texts, however, interrogates the power relations, the sense of haunting underscoring the text as well as the discourse of Terror in relation to the Other. I argue that Johnson’s writing enables the reader to peer in between the veils of life and death to unearth the darker sides of human nature, but very often these glimpses are not just about personal choices. These glimpses reveal strategies and missteps that guide the ways in which those hierarchies shape those choices,which Johnson then subverts in her tales.

In the social sciences, secrecy is seen as a power relation of inclusion–exclusion, between those 'in the know' and dispossessed 'outsiders'. This is translated spatially as enclosure – shaping outsiders by cordoning off certain social relations – and embodies a social theory of mystification, where domination involves masking reality's oppressiveness from those exploited. Historical and more recent military fortifications, including modern U.S. military bases abroad, have been studied as creating this social effect. This article argues that today's counter-terrorism challenges this spatial model of secrecy and power. In order to project authority and disempower outsiders, enclosure must first be represented as the appropriation and hiding of space. In post-colonial spaces of secretive U.S. counter-terrorism, this projection of meaning encounters social relations that shape space differently. Using theories of colonial archives, the article analyses a new U.S. drone base in Niger, tracing its representation in news coverage as an important hub of U.S. military activities. Repeated media attempts to demonstrate sublime secrecy and U.S. authority over the Nigerien desert were complicated by patterns of environmental vulnerability, local indifference, and images of underwhelming emptiness. These incongruities undercut any representation of U.S. secrecy as effective and the base as an anchor of military power. This analysis suggests new ways of understanding secrecy’s spatial dynamics and the legitimisation of counter-terrorism.

Edgar Allan Poe’s eerie short story “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” is a particularly noteworthy example of the sublime, a psychological state in which one is overwhelmed by the magnitude of that which is perceived by the mind. Valdemar exemplifies the sublime in that his death has somehow been suspended in time because he was under hypnosis as part of a medical experiment at the moment of his passing. However, the story also draws particular attention to the means by which insight into the nature of death is acquired by the hypnotist who narrates the story. For a more comprehensive understanding of the sublime experience, one may turn to the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan and the postmodernist work of Slavoj Žižek, which lead to the conclusion that the dramatic chain of events in “Valdemar” is an example of the sliding signifier, and, moreover, that the instability of the signifier may explain the sublime effect.

The article analyzes the aesthetic views of Friedrich Hölderlin, and, first, his understanding of the categories of the Beautiful and Sublime. Particular attention is paid to the comparison of Hölderlin's views with the aesthetic teachings of Plato and Immanuel Kant, who had a great influence on the German poet. The author of the article concludes that Hölderlin sought to unite the Platonian and Kantian understanding of beauty, seeing the similarity between the concepts of Plato and Kant in the question of the source of the beautiful. The central for aesthetics of Hölderlin was the problem of combining the spheres of aesthetic and ethical, to solve which he relied on the idea of Kant about beautiful as a symbol of the moral good and the Teaching of Plato on the climbing of the soul to the Good. Hölderlin pays less attention to the theoretical development of the category of the Sublime than to the comprehension of the category of the Beautiful, however, in his writings, the Sublime is present implicitly, and Hölderlin's understanding of this category is close, on the one hand, to Platonian, bringing together the Beautiful and the Sublime, and, on the other, to Kantian understanding, which brings the Sublime together with the idea of infinity, God and the sphere of morality. The conclusions to which Hölderlin comes, are far from Platonism, and from Kantianism. The poet concludes about the central and leading role of poetry and poetic gift in the knowledge of the world, which should be aesthetic. This indicates a romantic way to interpret Hölderlin's aesthetic concepts of Plato and Kant.

Everyone in this globe wants to become happy in one’s life. But very few becomes successful in doing so. On careful pondering it is apparent that it is possible only after the acquisition of physical, mental, social and spiritual well being. One of the obstacles in attaining it is non-communicable diseases. Available country-level evidence indicates that these diseases pose a tremendous economic burden that can be felt far beyond the health sector. In fact, according to the World Economic Forum’s annual risk report, non-communicable diseases have been determined a major risk to economic loss by global business leaders and decision makers. The efforts made by Government of India and the States have not been able to check rising burden of non-communicable diseases owing to limited scale of implementation. There is an urgent need for a comprehensive scheme that should focus on health promotion and prevention of these diseases and their risk factors at various levels across the country. Ayurveda, the most ancient Indian healing science, describes a lot of measures to prevent and manage diseases like these. Achara Rasayana is one amongst these measures, which is a code of conduct helpful in attaining a healthy and disease-free living. This article details the various aspects of this priceless measure capable of reducing the Health Budget considerably in the interest of national prosperity.

espanolEste articulo se centra en los testimonios griegos y romanos sobre Apolonio de Rodas, con el fin de aclarar lo que los antiguos sabian sobre el poeta de Argonautica. Al analizar un numero notable de autores, se descubre que los escritores antiguos se refieren rara vez a la vida de Apolonio o a la composicion del poema. Mas bien parece haberles interesado no solo las referencias a las leyendas de los Argonautas que contenia el poema acreditado, sino tambien las obras eruditas que no se han conservado (en particular, las κτίσeις). Algunos autores (el tratado De lo Sublime de Dionisio Longino, Quintiliano, Fronton, Gelio, Macrobio y Servio) mencionaron tambien a Apolonio en pasajes relacionados con cuestiones literarias y utiles para hacerse una idea de algunos aspectos de la recepcion antigua del poema. italianoThis paper focuses on Greek and Roman testimonies on Apollonius of Rhodes in order to clarify what the Ancients knew about the poet of Argonautica. By analysing a representative number of authors we find out that ancient writers rarely refer to Apollonius' life or to the composition of the poem. What rather seems to have interested them was not only the references to the Argonauts legends which the authoritative poem contained but also the not survived erudite works (in particular the κτίσeις). Some authors also (Dionysius Longinus' On the Sublime, Quintilian, Fronto, Gellius, Macrobius and Servius) mentioned Apollonius in passages concerning literary questions and useful to get an idea of some aspects of ancient reception of the poem. EnglishThis paper focuses on Greek and Roman testimonies on Apollonius of Rhodes in order to clarify what the Ancients knew about the poet of Argonautica. By analysing a representative number of authors we find out that ancient writers rarely refer to Apollonius' life or to the composition of the poem. What rather seems to have interested them was not only the references to the Argonauts legends which the authoritative poem contained but also the not survived erudite works (in particular the κτίσeις). Some authorsalso (Dionysius Longinus' On the Sublime, Quintilian, Fronto, Gellius, Macrobius and Servius) mentioned Apollonius in passages concerning literary questions and useful to get an idea of some aspects of ancient reception of the poem.

This article reconstructs Jean-François Lyotard’s theory of the sublime in contemporary art, focusing on his claim that such art ‘presents’ the unpresentable, and tracing its origins in Kant’s account of the sublime. I propose that Lyotard identifies a difficulty concerning Kant’s account: to understand why the disparate elements in the experience of the sublime (idea of reason, sensible representation) should be synthesized to form that experience. Lyotard recasts this difficulty as a pragmatic problem for artistic practice – how to ‘testify’ to the absolute in a non-absolute, sensibly perceivable object (the artwork) – that can be understood to drive avant-garde artistic experimentation.

The essay deals with the intersections between the representations of the origin and the expressive forms of the sublime, showing how these relationships have great aesthetic relevance in contemporary literature and art, especially in the development of the traditional concept of 'representation' towards the 'non-mimetic' and the 'unrepresentable', COSMO | Comparative Studies in Modernism | Rivista del Centro Studi Arti della Modernità | centroartidellamodernita.it, N. 21 (2022): Questioning the Origins in European and American Culture

ispartof: Climate Changes Global Perspectives pages:49-59 ispartof: Challenges of Modernity vol:1 pages:49-59 status: published

Extático es un proyecto de investigación-creación que surge a raíz de un interés personal por la experiencia extática -también llamada sublime, numinosa u oceánica- y que cristaliza en una serie de obras que buscan acercar al espectador a este tipo de experiencia, a través de la percepción de elementos como la luz, los fluidos, la geometría y el sonido. En el presente documento, se desarrollan una serie de postulados, ideas y reflexiones, tanto teóricas como personales, que fueron centrales durante el proceso creativo y desencadenaron materialmente en las tres obras centrales que componen este proyecto: Komorebi, Nebulae y Numinous. Pará ello, inicialmente se presentan una serie de postulados teóricos y conceptuales que permitirán acercar al lector a aquello que se ha enmarcado como experiencia extática. Así mismo, se habla acerca la importancia psicológica que dicha experiencia ha tenido para el ser humano a la largo de su historia y se desarrollan una serie de ideas acerca del modo en que es posible alcanzarla a través del contacto con la creación artística. En segundo lugar, se indican las aproximaciones metodológicas que resultaron fundamentales para aproximarse a la experiencia extática desde un paradigma de investigación-creación basado en las artes. Por último, se presentan una serie de reflexiones y hallazgos en torno a los elementos materiales, formales y conceptuales presentes en las obras desarrolladas. Magíster en Artes Plásticas, Electrónicas y del Tiempo Maestría

This article frames dark tourism experiences employing the geographical concept of sublime-as-affect. We contend that the sublime has features that allow us to analyse it as an affect, an intensity of feeling that circulates in-between bodies, which can be experienced poignantly in places of death, and lead to transformative experiences. By presenting accounts of tourism-related stakeholders in post-disaster Tohoku, Japan, devastated by an earthquake, a tsunami, and a nuclear meltdown, we overview moments in which the sublime-as-affect is experienced. Findings suggest that while the dilapidated and abandoned landscapes of Tohoku evoke a negative representation, they also demonstrate a potential for generating transformative affects, which can become a vehicle for meaning in post-disaster tourism encounters.

In the Critique of practical reason, Kant develops the foundation of moral law in its objective and subjective aspects. After claiming that it is plausible to postulate the determination of will only through pure reason, it was necessary for the philosopher to demonstrate how it becomes conscious and acceptable to the moral agent. In this step, he examines the feeling of pleasure and displeasure, to which he associates, at first, the humiliation of the will given to the satisfaction of the senses, so that in the subject emerges a new quality of feeling, respect, also called moral sentiment. The same strategy is found in the third critique, where the constraint, this time, acts on the imagination, unable to encompass the sublime immensity with the help of understanding. The displeasure that comes from it leads to the recognition of reason as a higher faculty and, from it, to the pleasure that comes from the conscience of the moral law as a higher destination. To consider the way in which the subjective assimilates the moral law, here it is intended to think it under the hypothesis of being it, rather, through embarrassment and displeasure, not only founded on the freedom, but also on the humiliation of presumption. The argument follows Kant’s works on ethics, beginning with the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, then follows the path of the second to the third criticism. In this journey, we intend to examine the place that the feeling of pleasure occupies in the a priori foundation of the moral law, whether in the analytical of practical reason or in the analytical of the beautiful and the sublime. Na Crítica da razão prática, Kant desenvolve o fundamento da lei moral em seus aspectos objetivo e subjetivo. Depois de afirmar ser plausível postular a determinação da vontade tão somente por meio da razão pura em seu uso prático, foi necessário ao filósofo demonstrar como ela se torna consciente e aceitável para o agente moral. Neste passo, ele examina o sentimento de prazer e desprazer, ao qual associa, de início, a humilhação da vontade entregue ao agrado dos sentidos, de modo que no sujeito emerge uma qualidade nova de sentimento, o respeito, também denominado de sentimento moral. A mesma estratégia encontra-se na terceira crítica, onde o constrangimento, desta vez, atua sobre a imaginação, impossibilitada de abarcar a imensidão sublime com o auxílio do entendimento. O desprazer daí proveniente conduz ao reconhecimento da razão como faculdade superior e, desta, ao prazer proveniente da consciência da lei moral como destinação superior. A considerar a forma como o subjetivo assimila a lei moral, pretende-se aqui pensá-la sob a hipótese de ser ela, antes, por meio do constrangimento e do desprazer, não apenas fundada na liberdade, mas também na humilhação da presunção. O argumento segue as obras de Kant sobre a ética, a começar pela Fundamentação da Metafísica dos costumes, em seguida, segue o caminho da segunda para a terceira crítica. Neste percurso, pretende-se examinar o lugar que o sentimento de prazer ocupa no fundamento a priori da lei moral, seja na analítica da razão prática seja na analítica do belo e do sublime.

Pričujoče besedilo se ukvarja s Schleglovo politično filozofijo, izpeljano iz njegove teorije ironije. Ironija je bistveni del romantičnega odnosa do sveta, kot se kaže v t. i. »progresivni poeziji« ter odprtosti in fragmentarnosti romantične biti in jezika. Toda ključen kritik koncepta ironije, Hegel, njeno igro nedokončanosti označi za samovoljnega subjekta oz. za zlo, ki uničuje skupnost, romantike pa razume kot protipol svoje spekulativne filozofije. Po drugi strani pa je Kant, kljub racionalizmu transcendentalnega idealizma, z estetsko sodbo o lepem in sublimnem veliko bližje romantikom, saj je prvo sodbo mogoče razumeti kot podlago intersubjektivnosti, potrebne za igro ironije, drugo pa kot tisto »nikoli spoznavno«, ki to igro sploh omogoča. Tako ironija ne onemogoča nastanka v – najširšem možnem pomenu – politične skupnosti. Taka skupnost vendar temelji na pluralizmu lokalnih narativov in decentraliziranosti, v čemer je treba iskati povezavo s poststrukturalizmom in postmodernizmom. S tem je Heglova kritika ovržena. Še več, daljnosežna povezava med romantiko ter poststrukturalizmom in postmodernizmom kot obzorji ironične skupnosti, kot se bo izkazalo, korenini ravno v njej. The following paper discovers Schlegel’s political philosophy derived from his concept of irony as the crucial segment of romantic ontological perception of the world. Romantic irony manifests particularly in the so-called “progressive poetry”, openness, and fragmentarity of romantic essence and language. The leading critique of such concept of irony is Hegel’s. It considers its playful openness and inexhaustibility an evil, arbitrary and isolated subject who undermines any possibility of community, based on universality of law. Nevertheless, Kant and his judgment of beautiful and sublime are of much closer proximity to romantic irony than Hegel’s speculative idealism – the former with Arendt’s further concept of intersubjectivity, essential for ironic playfulness, and the latter with its “revealing” of limits to our knowledge which in turn enables the game of irony. Hence, romantic irony does not disable any formation of political – in its broadest sense – community. An ironic community, that is to say, is founded on pluralism of local narratives and dispersion which bring us to 20th century poststructuralist and postmodernist paradigms. Hegel’s critique is then refuted. Furthermore, it will be argued in this paper that the very same critique represents the ground on which a far-fetched correlation between romanticism and postmodernism plus poststructuralism, respectively, as the horizons of ironic community, is actually based.

We are going through a very challenging period in human history. Not only has the COVID-19 pandemic had a disastrous effect on people and countries in all parts of the world, but also many other dangerous and life threatening problems have to be addressed and overcome, especially the environmental crisis, huge disparities in income and wealth, systemic racism, and conflicts between different genders, groups, regions, countries, and cultures. In order to come to grips with these problems, and others, it is imperative to make transcendental and not just transformational changes in our lifestyles, values, worldviews, actions, behaviour, and ways of life. The key to this lies in creating an effective balance between materialism and spiritualism, as well as placing a much higher priority on the cultivation of spirituality in our lives in the traditional and contemporary sense. Not only will this make it possible to reduce the colossal demands we are making on the natural environment – largely because most spiritual activities are "human intensive" rather than "material intensive" and therefore don’t consume as many natural resources as most other activities – but also it will enable present and future generations to experience a great deal more exuberance, exhilaration, and ecstasy in life without having to resort to drugs and other substances and devices to create "highs" and "peak experiences" because spiritual activities achieve this naturally. Many of these activities involve participating in causes that are greater than ourselves, joining protest movements aimed at creating more equality and justice in the world, going within ourselves to discover who we really are and what we were intended to realize in life, broaden and deepen our experiences in the arts, cultures, and the cultural heritage of humankind, and engage in explorations in nature and the natural realm that are capable of bringing us into contact with the sublime and possibly even the divine.

Em sua vasta obra, Jacques Rancière tem apontado com recorrência para modos de entendimento da noção de representação e suas normativas de organização do fazer, do ver e do julgar. Este texto procura esclarecer em que medida se torna possível estimar, nos registros do que Rancière denomina o “regime estético das artes”, a expressão artística de acontecimentos ditos impensáveis ou irrepresentáveis. Analisar nessa chave a obra (musical e visual) de William Basinski The Disintegration Loops, em torno doa atentados de 11 de setembro de 2001, permite pensar modos de inserção de uma arte não representativa no interior de um contexto de resposta afetiva à catástrofe, bem como questionar criticamente a valorização do conceito de sublime sobre o pano de fundo de uma suposta crise pós-moderna da representação.

Dans les Panégyriques de saint Gorgon, Bossuet exploite la topique du manger et du boire, et la recatégorise en fonction du paradigme du dogme catholique : elle ne participe plus à l'expression de l'abaissement, mais à l'expression de la grandeur du christianisme. Cette construction paradoxale du sublime chrétien sous-tend une conception du langage comme manducation et comme digestion : la construction topique fait émerger la dimension légendaire du récit du martyre - cas-limite de fiction narrative -, qui est une composante de la poétique du panégyrique., In the Panegyrics of saint Gorgon, Bossuet uses the topics of eating and drinking, and changes its meaning under the paradigm of catholic dogma : it doesn't help any more to express humiliation, but to express the greatness of christianism. This paradoxical construction of christian sublime forms the bedrock of an approach of language as eating and digesting : the topical construction raises the legendary aspect of the narrative of martyrdom - a border case of narrative fiction -, which is itself a component of the poetics of panegyric.

Just after World War II, mounting evidence marked the dawn of the geological epoch dubbed the Anthropocene . Nuclear explosions deposited radioactive debris in the geological strata, combined with an acceleration in resource extraction, population growth and energy consumption. In this light, this paper aims to explore the affective dimensions of the multiplicities of sounds that are interconnected to nuclear materialities. We argue that mediations of nuclear sounds in these forms of audio instances render nuclear sounds comprehensible and challenge existing representations of nuclear power. This paper will bring into conversation an archive of soundscapes of the nuclear epoch – for example the sound of beeping in a nuclear power plant that produces electricity, the Geiger-Muller counters that civilians used following the Fukushima-Daichii plant explosion, and the music composition by JLiat of the sonic representation of atomic testing on Bikini Atoll in 1946. Engaging with these sounds serves to make sense of the nuclear sublime and offer a possibility of connecting with the “otherness” of nuclear materials. These sonic instances also bind people in collective ecological experiences, whilst making us more attuned to voicing the modalities of a damaged planet. Sound can serve as an articulation of affects that emerge between human and non-human materialities in a damaged planet. These conceptualizations of sound are used to articulate the ways individuals or groups embody their relationships to ecological environments. Through an interdisciplinary lens, the paper aims to explore the mechanics of sound in nuclear infrastructures and devices to challenge common metaphors about nuclear energy. Through the analysis of these soundscapes, we demonstrate that exposing these entanglements between human and nuclear materialities can help us make sense of the sociocultural dimensions of living in a radioactive planet. How to cite this article: Pantsidou, Maria and Jade J. Li. "Nuclear Soundscapes: Exploring Sound in Radioactive Environments." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 25 (September 2021): 1-12. doi: 10.25038/am.v0i25.458 Article received: April 15, 2021; Article accepted: June 21, 2021; Published online: September 15, 2021; Original scholarly paper

Islam is not merely the set of religious rituals or beliefs but a complete way of life. There is not even a single matter, no matter how peculiar, awkward or dull it may seem, about which Islam does not deals or directs. In all behind every act, including tourism, there is sole purpose seeking the pleasure of God-Almighty Allah, by following His commandments. Islam encourages travel or tourism and hospitable behavior, and unlike west connects it with the most sublime and honorable values and morals. It is in this backdrop, the focus of the present study is ‘Tablighi Jamaat’- an Islamic revival movement, founded by Maulana Ilyas in Mewat region near Delhi-India, around 1920’s. This movement has come to establish its presence surprisingly in and over one hundred and fifty countries throughout the world with a large number of adherents in between 100 to 150 million. This is principally, because of its unique ‘travel and tourism’ approach, which it has adopted as a daw’ah (invitation towards Islam) methodology. Consequently and interestingly, because of this fact ‘the travel and tourism approach,’ the movement has also been named as ‘travelers in faith’. This paper is primarily based on secondary sources and the main objective of the paper is to provide an insight into the religious tourism of Tablighi Jama’at.

According to recent accounts, we experience the emotion of “being moved” when a situation brings into play our core values. What are the core values evoked by nonhuman landscapes, however, particularly as the distinction between man-made and natural environments becomes increasingly blurry in the so-called Anthropocene? That is the central question tackled by this article. I start by rethinking the sublime as an affect that, since Romanticism, has shaped Western attitudes toward nature. I argue that today's climate crisis calls for an expansion of our affective engagement with the nonhuman: the sublime can be part of our emotional repertoire, but only if it is complicated by feelings that point to constitutive human–nonhuman entanglement.

Like other spaces of the Enlightenment, the sublime was what Michel de Certeau might have called “a practiced place.” Its rhetorical commonplaces, philosophical terrains, and associated physical environments were cultivated, shaped, and framed by human action and habit. But can the sublime—epiphanic, quasi-spiritual, unmasterable, extraordinary—ever really become a habit? Is it possible, even natural, to become habituated to sublimity? Taking as its point of departure the Aristotelian claim that “habit is a second nature,” this article explores the counterintuitive relationship between habit and the sublime. It focuses not on that eighteenth-century “cultivar,” the natural sublime, but on sonic sublimity, exploring on one hand overwhelming sounds, and on the other a conceptualization of sound itself as a sublime phenomenon stretching beyond audibility to fill all space. As this exploration shows, both the sublime and habit were seen as capable of creating a second nature, and prominent writers connected habit, practice, or repetition to the sublime. Equally, however, there are points of friction between the aesthetic of the sublime and philosophies of habit, especially in the idea that habit dulls or removes sensation. This is a prominent idea in Félix Ravaisson's landmark De l'habitude (1838), a text currently enjoying renewed attention, and one that apparently stems from Enlightenment attempts to explain sensation, consciousness, and freedom. Similar concerns inform the eighteenth-century sublime, yet the logic behind the sublime is at odds with the dulling of sensation. The article closes by touching on the reemergence of “second nature” in contemporary art oriented toward the sublime, and on the revisions of Enlightenment nature this involves.

Em sua vasta obra, Jacques Rancière tem apontado com recorrência para modos de entendimento da noção de representação e suas normativas de organização do fazer, do ver e do julgar. Este texto procura esclarecer em que medida se torna possível estimar, nos registros do que Rancière denomina o “regime estético das artes”, a expressão artística de acontecimentos ditos impensáveis ou irrepresentáveis. Analisar nessa chave a obra (musical e visual) de William Basinski The Disintegration Loops, em torno doa atentados de 11 de setembro de 2001, permite pensar modos de inserção de uma arte não representativa no interior de um contexto de resposta afetiva à catástrofe, bem como questionar criticamente a valorização do conceito de sublime sobre o pano de fundo de uma suposta crise pós-moderna da representação.

John Rundell’s Kant explores the themes of imagination, anthropology and freedom across the entire Kantian corpus. The book casts a revealing light on Kant’s conception of the imagination. It does ...