Updating existing treatments of the sublime in the eighteenth century, this book addresses the nature of the sublime experience itself and the functions that experience has played, and continues to ...play, within aesthetic discourse.
O presente artigo toma como ponto de partida as reflexões decoloniais realizadas por Maria da Glória de Oliveira e visa tematizar como contemporaneamente os campos da teoria da história e da história ...da historiografia no Brasil são confrontados a responderem às linguagens do trauma, do luto e da cura que desafiam os cânones disciplinares. Em um primeiro momento, procuro situar a especificidade da discussão promovida por Maria da Glória de Oliveira em meio a reflexões (in)disciplinares que tematizam as historicidades espectrais. Em um segundo momento, defino o que estou categorizando como linguagens do trauma, do luto e da cura, que se inscrevem enquanto desafios à domesticação imposta pela historiografia disciplinar. Por fim, propondo tensionar os limites do paradigma correspondentista da representação inspirado pelas intervenções de Oliveira, argumento como as possibilidades de subjetivação e abertura para a diferença em nossos contextos de ensino/aprendizagem nas Universidades públicas são atravessadas pelas referidas linguagens, que ensejam a rearticulação de afetos e a abertura para experiências estéticas disruptivas, como a do sublime decolonial.
This article departs from decolonial reflections developed by Maria da Glória de Oliveira and pursues to thematize how, contemporaneously, the fields of theory of history and the history of historiography in Brazil are impelled to respond to the languages of trauma, grieving, and healing that challenge disciplinary canons. At first, it situates the specificity of the discussion promoted by Maria da Glória de Oliveira amongst the (in)disciplinary reflections that thematize spectral historicities. In a second moment, it defines what is categorized as languages of trauma, grieving, and healing, which are inscribed as challenges to the domestication imposed by disciplinary historiography. Furthermore, it aims to defy the paradigm of correspondent representation inspired by Oliveira's proposal, since it argues how the possibilities of subjectivation and openness to difference in our teaching/learning contexts in Brazilian public universities are crossed by the referred languages, which invites the re-articulation of affections and the display of disruptive aesthetic experiences, such as the decolonial sublime.
Stephen Zepke tracks the sublime art movement from its beginnings in Kant to its flowering in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He shows that the idea of sublime art waxes and wanes in the work ...of Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Rancière and the recent Speculative Realism movement. With it, a visionary politics of art seeks to give it the most creative power possible: the power to overcome our conditions and embrace the unknown.
El presente trabajo se divide en dos partes. La primera sección propone una lectura en clave latinoamericana de la interpretación figural teorizada por Erich Auerbach en el libro Figura. En vistas a ...reconstruir su itinerario conceptual y haciendo hincapié en los puntos significativos para su abordaje suramericano, se analizan: 1. la vertiente materialista del concepto de figura, 2. la fórmula sublimitas humilitatis, 3. la figura y su conexión con lo sublime. La segunda sección aborda, desde la interpretación figural, los casos específicos de cuatro escenas suramericanas donde la lengua en sus diferentes instanciaciones cumple un papel fundamental, a saber: el encuentro en Cajamarca (1532), el suceso conocido como “el beso de la Barbarella” (1975), la juramentación de las primeras congresistas indígenas en el Congreso de la República del Perú (2006) y el caso de Reina Maraz, mujer quechua hablante juzgada en español por la Justicia argentina (2010). Partiendo de la concepción figural y en conexión con el método histórico de Walter Benjamin, se ahondará en la humillación como pathos característico de estas figuras paradigmáticas y el vínculo específico que cada una mantiene con la lengua.
This article is divided into two parts. The first section offers a Latin American reading of Eric Auerbach's theory of figural interpretation, as posited in his book Figura. With a view to reconstructing its conceptual assemblage and addressing the points most relevant for a South American perspective, the following items are analyzed: (1) The materialist aspect of the concept of figura; (2) the formula sublimitas humilitatis; (3) the figure and its connection with the sublime. The second section addresses, by way of a figural interpretation, the specific example of four South American cases in which the Spanish language in its multiple instantiations plays a key role; i.e.: the meeting at Cajamarca (1532); the event known as “the Barbarella kiss” (1975); the swearing-in of the first indigenous congresswomen of the Republic of Peru (2006) and the Reina Maraz affair, concerning a Quechua-speaking woman who was sentenced to prison in Spanish by an Argentine court (2010). Following the figural conception and in connection with Walter Benjamin's historical method, in this article, I attempt to explore humiliation as the characteristic pathos of these paradigmatic figures and the specific link that each holds with the Spanish language.
In this paper, I address the relationship between Lyotard’s account of the sublime in art and Kant’s own attempt at considering sublime art as a possible counterpart to fine art. Lyotard recognises ...the roots of modern art - and avant-garde particularly -in Kant’s account of the sublime.This is interesting, forit is generally assumed that Kant didn’t devise the notion to be applied to art as such. In the lack ofany explicit consideration of artistic sublime in Kant’s text, what (if any) could be the background for Lyotard’s analysis? My contention is that this reading of the Third Critique is only partially correct. Unlike what is commonly believed, much room is left in Kant’s text for consideration of the sublime in art. Kant himself envisages the possibility that the sublime be found in art and considers artistic representations of the sublime possible for art-forms. How can twentieth-century art be sublime in a Kantian way? And what role does Kant’s notion of aesthetic ideas play in Lyotard’s own account?
While the complicated scheme of the philosophical sublime may at first hand seem mere platitude when brought to life in computer games, this article claims that the action/adventure game World of ...Warcraft wedges open a space in which to operate the sublime and navigate radically “other” subjectivities. The hypothesis is that the assembly of fantastic elements in World of Warcraft duplicates the Kantian sublime while at the same time commenting upon and even radicalizing it. The Romantic tradition of the sublime as it unfolds in Immanuel Kant's third Critique is outlined followed by an attempt to topologize elements of the fantastic in Blizzard's game design philosophy leading to a clarification of what we call “the knotted point of play” where game object, game interaction, and game subject intervene. Finally, we explore how the notion of the technological sublime relates to World of Warcraft and beyond.
In a deep reflection recorded in his Zibaldone in 1829 – in five interconnected short notes written between mid-April and the end of May – Leopardi examines the conditions that can affect our faculty ...of imagining poetically and creatively, and even tragically extinguish it. He carefully considers the minute circumstances of human existence, which, in the context of his general theory of conformability, can either determine the sinking of the self into a state of death-in-life, far worse than death itself, or facilitate a vital life, rich in illusions, feelings, magnanimous actions, and poetry. Against the backdrop of this striking representation of the precariousness of existence, Leopardi develops an original reworking of the notion of sublime. This, in turn, appears to provide the conceptual foundations upon which his reflection on the tenuousness of imagination and feeling may be systematised as part of his thought.
This article proposes a reflection on the aesthetic experience of the sublime, today, in the practice of butoh dance performed in wild environments, and how this experience can help us to appreciate ...nature, something very important due to the ecological catastrophe which we face and for which we are responsible. First, we will approach to the category of the sublime from Longinus, Burke, and Kant. Second, we will review and update this category by applying it to a contemporary artistic context: butoh dance. We will be guided by three ideas to establish the relationship between the sublime and butoh: absolute, dissolution and death. Third, in order to get closer to the meeting space between butoh and sublime experience, we will offer a definition of «wild environment», trying to overcome the dichotomy between nature and artifice, thus bridging the separation between human and nature. Precisely, we will come to the conclusion that the communication or union of the body with the environment (both wild) is the gateway to the experience of the sublime as part of a state of consciousness and perception that entails admiration for the mystery of the forces that animate the world.
French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard’s changing concepts of the sublime (after Immanuel Kant) are traced here. Overriding normative responses to Lyotard’s Artforum texts on the sublime of the ...later 1980s, I argue for a fulcrum moment shared with painter Jacques Monory in California in the later 1970s, and the collision of astronomy, the digitalisation of data, the microprocessor and neuroscience. Lyotard’s exhibition Les Immatériaux (Pompidou Centre, 1985) exemplified interdisciplinarity at the parameters of knowledge, shunning postmodern irony. Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime: Kant’s Critique of Judgement, §§ 23–29, (1991, English 1994), a resumé of Lyotard’s courses, stands in perpetual tension with his art world engagement. The genre of the vanitas in art and its long time-axis challenges classical philosophy — likewise a genre and set of procedures. Might not philosophy also confront its own ‘death’ or epistemological obsolesence? A coda takes Lyotard’s ‘techno-sublime’ into the era of bitcoin.
