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The Qur’anic portrayal of marriage involves some tender imagery even as it establishes it as a social contract—seven centuries before it became so in Europe and 12 centuries before divorce terms were included in the latter. Monogamy is very much the norm as well as the ideal in the Qur’an, with polygyny only sanctioned in specific circumstances and under certain conditions. Muhammad’s personal story gives life to Qur’anic values in this regard, with 25 years of a monogamous marriage to his first wife followed by 12 years of polygyny after her death involving a total of 11 other women. Ten out of the 12 women he married over time were widows, unsurprising given the Qur’anic rationale for polygyny. Meanwhile, interfaith marriage is blessed in the Qur’an, i.e. without the non-Muslim party having to convert to Islam.

What happens to “God” after the death of God? It is hard to believe or disbelieve in God in any straightforward sense, and the answer to this question lies beyond “atheism” and “theism.” Nevertheless, three ways of thinking about God can be considered: First, God as an absolute ideal who personifies all the highest values that we aspire to. Second, God as the image of transcendence, and the absolutely other that is glimpsed in the infinity of another person, or the sublime. And third, God as the name for the spiritual dimension of life which corresponds to a higher or greater power that we are bound to defer to—in justice, nature, or truth, for example—and this is something that we can call “God.”

This chapter, Metaphors and Manoeuvres, examines the ways in which cricketing metaphors, motifs and terminology feature broadly, and sometimes unexpectedly, in Anglophone Caribbean poetry. The discussion returns to the “Preface” of Beyond a Boundary (1963) and James’ linking of cricket and Caliban before reading John Agard’s “Prospero and Caliban Cricket” and Agard’s other cricket poems. The chapter also analyses cricketing-religious poems by Bruce St John and Grace Nichols. It then considers poems that utilise cricketing imagery and playing positions to convey sociopolitical and economic critiques where, in some cases, an association with the land is articulated through the saccharine-ecological sublime. Finally, the chapter unpicks how cricket is used to envision personal relationships and intimate “googlies”. What is important, across this wide range of examples, is cricket’s enabling function as it creates a shared frame of reference through which different modes of critique, revelation and salvation can be explored.

To what extent is a disposition toward childhood always depressive, insofar as the depressive position “points to my not knowing how to lose” (Kristeva) the sense of the world I had as a child? What happens to the memories of childhood when the adult body begins to break down? And can our mourning be written out in the realm of friendship? This collaborative poetry-essay between Fan Wu and Hamish Ballantyne intermixes epistolary fictions with autoethnography with the imagery of a late ‘90s ornithology guide published by National Geographic. “Bird Says” overlays the depressive dissociation that is attendant to a newly ailing body with a series of sublime distances between the lyric speaker, his childhood geographies and his disintegrating communities.

This chapter studies how unpredictable change is understood through concepts like of fractals, chaos theory, catastrophe theory, perfect storms, and climate models in feature films from 1982 to 2019, both as narrative themes and as spectacular simulation-based animations. Positing a particular mode of visual effects spectatorship, the chapter observes how narrative, theme, and spectacular images represent these concepts in congress. Over the period surveyed, these representations shift from sublime overwhelming images of disastrous events to more recent examples that embrace chaos as a source of creativity and knowledge.

This chapter presents a theory I call “the sport model of horror”. By appealing to this model, I clarify the effectiveness of a number of horror’s quintessential plot, cinematic, and visual devices, and trace a logical trajectory of advances in horror’s scare value, one that ultimately tends towards increases in representations of indiscriminate violence (and arbitrary harm) within the genre. The chapter explores a number of peculiarities and important expansions concerning the model. A Neo-Santayanan doctrine of expression factors into these expansions, and supplies a novel framework by which to understand how horror films are themselves proper aesthetic objects despite the fact that it is an activity of the percipient that is the primary aesthetic object, according to this model.

“The Sublime Words of the Third Ennead” considers the sense in which Plotinus’ thought serves to illustrate the inherently relational understanding of concepts set out in the previous chapters could be taken as a phenomenological account of ‘the Art of Least Distances’.

Conrad’s “The Tale” is far removed from the sublime ideals of Felski’s postcritique. The story compels readers to reflect on how different types of literature may offer different modes of affect. “The Tale” works within the negative affect register and mediates experiences that may be more pronounced in times of trauma. Conrad shares the negative affect of dread by placing his commander in a position that feels rather like our own: as a critical, even paranoid, reader of his environment. I conclude by maintaining that if scholars are going to think about literature in a postcritical way, they must view the space that Conrad opens up as one in which fear and terror are presented as serious affect and a real, concrete condition of modernity.

The chapter engages with the ways in which Lynch creates feelings of fear. It takes up Freud’s theory of the uncanny (das Unheimliche), but also goes into Freud’s predecessor Ernst Jentsch’s discussion about the uncanny, just as it outlines the rich discussion concerning Freud’s reading of E. T. A Hoffmann’s novel “The Sandman” (Der Sandmann). One point is to demonstrate that the theoretical explanations of what brings about the uncanny can usefully be combined with close textual analysis. Thus, this part of the chapter involves a short shot-to-shot analysis of two of the famous mirror scenes in Twin Peaks. The last part of the chapter’s discussion of the uncanny goes into the notion of the “home”, das Heimliche, in Twin Peaks: The Return. The second part of the chapter is about the sublime and Lynch. It engages with some of the concept’s classic positions and discuss different examples of sublime imagery in Lynch’s work with a focus on the White Sands atomic bomb explosion in Twin Peaks: The Return. Besides being a mind-blowing, fantastic piece of audio-visual art, it shows the way Lynch creates feelings of fear and awe by aesthetically combining an uncanny sense of claustrophobia with the sublime’s sense of the vertiginous vastness.

The fiction of Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte (E.D.E.N.) Southworth is replete with haunted Southern houses tucked away in secluded vales set against sublime rural American backdrops, but the spirits haunting these homesteads are not all of the same type. On the one hand, Southworth gives us narratives in which seemingly spectral phenomena resolve into real-world causation. On the other hand, Southworth spins Gothic melodramas focused on the haunting legacies of racism and patriarchal violence. This chapter will focus on the four haunted house stories that comprise Southworth’s 1860 The Haunted Homestead: And Other Nouvellettes. Taken together, these tales exemplify Southworth’s dual approach to haunting: ghosts may not be real, but homes are haunted nevertheless.

The angel as rendered by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) is a sublime and terrifying divine figure, especially in his Duino Elegies (1989; first published 1923). Influenced by Henrich von Kleist’s model of ‘a progression of consciousness,’ the Duino Elegies envisions angels as lacking human self-consciousness, and so are beyond ordinary selfhood. British writer Gwyneth Lewis (born 1959) explores the angel and the act of going beyond oneself (ekstasis) as a means to heal depression. Lewis’ memoir Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book about Depression (2006), and her poetry Chaotic Angels (2005) draw on the writer’s experience of Zen Buddhist practices and her reading of Julia Kristeva’s theoretical writings on depression. Lewis draws especially on Kristeva’s theorising in Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1989), where Kristeva views the subject’s repudiation of the mother as key to healing depression.. This essay asks, however, whether this misogynist and matricidal scenario is the only one possible? Lewis finds an answer in grafting Kristeva’s theories to Zen Buddhist practices, so the angel becomes an allegorical hypersign for ekstasis. When hovering over a hypertext online, the browser knows that there is more beyond the link in front of us waiting to be discovered, and the hypersign similarly signals a body of knowledge, currents of knowing beyond what is initially seen. Lewis’ angel allegories work as hypersigns to suggest the possibility of things unseen and unspoken connected to the sacred. Using Black Sun and Zen Buddhist practices promoting ideas of nothingness, Lewis describes the painful process of being in the thralls of depression, but the emptiness it creates also allows a new and complex awareness of what is marginalized, hidden, minimised, or discarded.

The heart is a sublime instrument of nature keenly touched by the emotions as well as by physical demands. It responds swiftly to fear, love, anxiety, illness, and exercise. As such it has played a central role in mysticism and religion and still does in many civilisations. However, whatever we may think of the role of the heart it is irrefutably a muscle pump. Until the wide acceptance of the circulation, postulated by William Harvey, and even after that time, in the absence of any understanding of the metabolism of the body, it was considered the source of body heat, heating the blood by churning it within and between the ventricles. The Galenic theory required a degree of valve incompetence to allow mixing and churning of the blood which through friction generated heat. However, some two millennia earlier philosophers such as Erasistratus, recognised that the presence of the valves prevented the free reflux of blood. Indeed, this trans-generational inconsistency of thought about the role of the valves inhibited rational thought and understanding. One man, Leonardo da Vinci recognised their real role but never published his work. Once the theory of circulation became accepted the fundamental need for competent heart valves was made. However, it has only been in very recent times that the integrated nature of function between the atrioventricular valves, in particular the Mitral valve, and the ventricle, as a machine complex has been realised. Each needs the other for complete function. This chapter reviews the progress in knowledge towards this more complete understanding of the functional anatomy of the mitral valve.

This chapter draws on Fredric Jameson’s concept of the hysterical sublime originally coined in his writing on postmodernism. Moving between the concept of the sublime in Kant and Hegel, as a way to approach the subject’s relation to nature and to reality, and the hysterical sublime, which relates the subject to products of its own making, such as technological objects and machinery, a Lacanian approach to the twin dilemmas of climate change and automation is proposed. Here, the role of the hysteric is leveraged as an agent central to the production of knowledge. The hysteric’s discourse is posited as a medium for approaching the historical conjuncture that intersects the end of nature and the end of humanity.

In this chapter I will demonstrate how Kant’s theory of race switches to the pragmatic understanding of the notion of the “Charakteristik.” The “orthodox reading” has always argued that Kant wrote three essays on race (1775, 1785 and 1788). It is my contention in this book that apart from these essays, it is worth taking into account two other writings: Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime of 1764, which is the foundational book of his racial philosophy, and Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View of 1798, which is the completion of his theory. As I have already demonstrated why Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime is the foundational writing of the theory, in this chapter I will show why Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View is the completion of his theory. Kant, on the one hand, asserts the unity of human nature and, on the other, he insists on the inner and outer features of the “Charakteristik” of the human species (person, gender, nationality and race). In the second part of Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, the “Anthropological Charakteristik,” he reaffirms the role that “character” plays in human destiny, a role he had already defined in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. He reconfirms that the definite and efficient meaning of the concept of race is reflected in both the empirical and moral character through its natural predispositions. It is precisely in the circumstance of natural predispositions that Kant sustains his theory of race with his racial hierarchy. In this chapter I will show, through a historical investigation of Kant’s account of natural predispositions, that Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View completes Kant’s theory and also offers a definitive answer as to whether Kant changed his mind on race. To prove my point, I will come back to Kleingeld’s claims that have not received sufficient attention. These are: (1) that Kant “makes no mention of a racial hierarchy anywhere in his published writings of the 1790s” and (2) that (2) “The oft-defended thesis that Kant’s racism remained constant thus needs correction, and one should not use evidence from the 1780s in support of claims about his views in the 1790s.” I will refute these claims and demonstrate first that, with regard to claim (1), the “Anthropological Charakteristik” in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View encompasses racial hierarchy through Kant’s consideration of human natural predispositions which remained unchanged throughout his writings, and therefore expresses Kant’s two moral problems described in Chap. 2. Second, if the preceding is true, no corrections should be made regarding claim (2). My underlying assertion is that because of Kant’s concept of natural predispositions (potentialities which are responsible for both the inner and outer features of the “Charakteristik” of the human species including the racial hierarchy), in order to claim that Kant changed his mind on race and hence on racial hierarchy, it is necessary to first prove that he changed his mind on his account of natural predispositions. However, Kleingeld fails to prove this point. She does not note the role of “Charakteristik” in Kant’s theory and furthermore even admits that his conception of natural predispositions did not change in the 1790s. Consequently, I argue that her claim regarding Kant’s changes of mind on race and racial hierarchy is demonstrably inaccurate.

Chapter 4 is the beginning of the real exegetical work. A fundamental condition for Kant’s account of the “Charakteristik” of the human species is that of a formal division between descriptive natural history and progressive history of nature. Kant argues for natural history, which designates a science that involves historical movements that have taken place over time, which includes the cause of things. It implies historical changes, and it is also concerned with issues of the origins of the human species. Kant’s account of the human species is therefore concomitant with his wish to differentiate these two methodological approaches. I therefore address Kant’s theory as a scientific understanding of the “Charakteristik” of the human species. I confirm that Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime of 1764 is the foundational book of Kant’s theory because it constitutes the genesis of Kant’s “Charakteristik” thinking. Following this book, Kant wrote his first scientific essay on race in 1775, entitled “Of the Different Races of Human Beings,” which he revised in 1777. The essay is based on methodical observation. Kant defends the unity of the “Charakteristik” of the human species as predetermined by natural predispositions and manifested through different colours of skin that in turn signal four different races. The colour of the skin is the distinctive mark of the character of specific types of human beings (White, Yellow, Red and Black). Thus we talk about the “Charakteristik” of the human species and of the character of the human being. The character of human beings is passed on unfailingly within a given race, and when mixed with another race results in half breeding. Kant claims that there are two origins of the character of the human being: germs and predispositions. They are purposively placed in the original phylum by nature in order to make human beings fit for all climates. However, not all races possess them all or develop them perfectly. The natives of America, for example, have them incompletely, which is why they lack a drive towards activity. Only the White race possesses them all and perfectly. In this chapter, I also show also how Kant’s moral claims developed in Chap. 2 are attached to his scientific notion of “Charakteristik.”

In this chapter, our question is that of how exactly to comprehend Kant’s theory of race: both how to go about forming a better interpretation of his theory and more precisely how to appreciate the theory itself. I begin by situating Kant’s theory within the contemporary debate, which defines Kant as an inconsistent or consistent egalitarian. I display the major interpretations of the “orthodox reading” and in the process also uncover the assumptions that underline these interpretations. I argue that although Kleingeld’s interpretation is the most classy “orthodox reading” because it gives Kant an intellectual rebirth certification as it allows him to change his mind on race, it still falls short in providing real evidence for Kant’s rebirth since her analysis misses his notion of “Charakteristik.” Having done this, I expose what I perceive to be the real problems of Kant’s theory and argue that his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime is the foundational text of his theory for it not only introduces the content and form of the “Charakteristik,” the notion he will systematize later, but also exposes the two problems that are the cause of so much controversy. These are (1) the completeness of the character of the White race and (2) the dispossession of the character of the beauty and the dignity of the Negro race. Then I demonstrate that the “orthodox reading” has failed because it has adopted an apologetic approach. This approach, I argue, is misrepresentative in some significant respects. It ultimately leads to a failure to note that the notion of “Charakteristik,” which is predetermined by Kant’s conception of natural predispositions, is the cornerstone of the theory. The objective of this chapter is to show that the purpose of the “orthodox reading” is either to defend or to accuse Kant’s racial comments. Neither attempt is of much value in the understanding and interpretation of his theory of race in particular and his anthropology as a whole.

This chapter argues that The Secret Agent functions as a sequel that offers the “alternative frame of reference” sought by Chinua Achebe to Marlow’s imperialist and racist discourse in “Heart of Darkness.” Drawing on theories of the sublime from Longinus to Lyotard, I argue that Conrad shows how sublimity—rhetorical, natural, and artistic—is not recuperated by Romantic transcendence, but is merely an artifact of human limitation. The people—the beating heart—are both the source and the victims of sublime empire, and Conrad’s metropolitan readers are those capable of altering this state of affairs. Conrad effectively rewrites the aesthetic of the sublime as post-Romantic, post-imperial, posthumanist, and immanent, as appropriate for the dawning twentieth century and an ethics of care.

Paul Klee’s Ad Parnassum (1932) is a summing up of his explorations of new directions in painting, including Cubism, Pointillism, and “pure painting,” and his tenure at the Bauhaus. This large work (100 × 126 cm) is a complex composition of abbreviated geometric forms, dominated by a pyramid-shaped structure, color fields, a solid colored sun-like circle, and various substructures and under fields of color. Entirely constructed upon a pattern of white dots of different glazes, this mesmerizing painting creates a scintillating experience through these dots in relation to the color fields. As part of new movements that wished to reexamine the nature of painting itself, and ultimately ideas of time and space, Klee both broke down traditional temporal and spatial treatment in art and illuminated the subjective space of his paintings through color and form. He expanded the new techniques by developing his own ideas of geometric form and color modalities, which are finely expressed in Ad Parnassum. This paper also discusses Klee’s complex incorporation of language elements and the effect of his travels in North Africa. Ultimately, one notices a reckoning of subjectivity and objectivity in all this, with, in this key painting, a highlighting of the relationship between stasis and flux, at its deepest level, releasing an affect of the aesthetic sublime in its viewer.