[b]Nick Land on the Sublime in “Delighted to Death”[/b]
In [i]Delighted to Death[/i], Land treats the Kantian sublime not as moral elevation or freedom, but as a scene of [b]disciplined violence[/b] exercised by reason against animality.
For Land, the sublime stages a [b]splitting of the subject[/b]. Sensibility and imagination are overwhelmed and incapacitated by something they cannot synthesize. Kant names the resulting feeling a “delight,” but Land argues this delight is a [b]perverse pleasure in trauma[/b]: satisfaction derived from the humiliation of imagination and the enforced supremacy of rational law over bodily and animal life.
This pleasure is inseparable from pain and abasement. The sublime allows the subject to relive the foundational trauma of transcendental reason — the evacuation of intuitive, sensuous content — and to experience this loss as morally or spiritually uplifting.
Land connects this structure directly to [b]asceticism and capital[/b]. The sublime rehearses the same logic as disciplined labour and bourgeois morality:
[list] [[i]]Reason proves itself by enduring suffering
[[/i]]Animal dependence and finitude are negated
[*]Self-denial becomes a virtue
[/list]
In this sense, the sublime functions as [b]psychic training[/b]. It conditions subjects to accept abstraction, obedience, and repression as sources of meaning. Kant’s philosophy, Land argues, fuses Christian mortification with capitalist rationality — “the saint with the bourgeois.”
Land also reverses Kant’s explanatory order. For Kant, reason precedes the sublime and reveals its superiority. For Land, the process runs the other way:
[list] [[i]]Animality is first intimidated and crushed
[[/i]]Reason is constructed through this violence
[*]The sublime is the affective trace of that coup
[/list]
The excessive force of the sublime betrays reason’s insecurity rather than its confidence. As Land asks in effect: if reason were truly sovereign, why would it need such theatrical displays of domination?
[b]In short[/b], the sublime in [i]Delighted to Death[/i] is:
[list] [[i]]A traumatic affect, not a liberating one
[[/i]]A ritualized assault on imagination and animal life
[[i]]A libidinal reward for repression
[[/i]]A mechanism for conditioning subjects for moral law, labour discipline, and abstract exchange
[/list]
The Kantian sublime is therefore, for Land, [b]the pleasure reason takes in its own cruelty[/b] — a delight inseparable from death, denial, and the suppression of the non-human within us.
Re: Nick Land on the Sublime in Delighted to Death
Posted: Sun Feb 01, 2026 3:27 am
by kFoyauextlH
"
5.Anxiety: The Sublime as Trauma and RepetitionThe sublime is not only duplicitous in its paradox of pleasure and pain, butalso in its ‘‘double mode’’ of a quieter and a more violent sublime: whatJohn Baillie called the sedate sublime and the sublime mixed with pathos—and what Kant, of course, called the mathematical and the dynamical sub-lime.1Usually, critics interpret these two varieties of the Kantian sublimeexperience as pertaining to theoretical or speculative and practical reasonrespectively. They can, however, also be elucidated by pointing to the eigh-teenth-century cult of the sublime as being a cult of empty and vast but alsoof wild and violent nature: nature that appears boundless, without end, andnature that appears threatening, without shelter; nature that cannot begrasped, and nature that cannot be controlled. In a Kantian setting, encoun-ters with these spectacles of apparent otherness are only superficially fateful.Like the pool of Narcissus, they are in the end the reflections of a desiringsubject. Indeed, these spectacles are but reifications of the boundless scopeand stern autonomy of reason—real and unreal at the same time, inflatedlike the subject who, as Adorno once remarked, ‘‘puffs himself up as if inspite of everything, as the bearer of spirit, he were absolute. He thus be-comes comical.’’2He becomes a bloated reversal of his own fragility andnothingness.And yet—one always senses a fatal subtext in Kant’s thirdCritiquethreat-ening to undermine the grand gesture of self-delusion that decides the sub-lime, warring forces of pain and pleasure. This fatal subtext is, of course, theirresolvable breach between imagination and reason: the impassable bridgebetween the sensible and the supersensible. In Kant’s analytic, however, thisbreach is nonetheless passed over under the law of subjective finality—it isconveniently reversed into a flexible change in perspective.Lyotard, we have seen, tries to retrieve this subtext by rewriting the sub-lime affect in terms of the figure of thediffe ́rend: an irresolvable conflict oropposition. Conversely, however, I would here like to redress the Kantiananalytic by rereading the movements of the mathematical and dynamical
"
"
From the Sublime to the Monstrous. Two Interpretations of Kant
DANIELA ANGELUCCI
University of Roma Tre, Italy
« L’abject est bordé de sublime »
Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur. Essai sur l’abjection
The root of the noun monster (monstrum), derived from monere, to admonish, to warn,
holds together the meaning of warning, to announce something that is out of the ordinary,
against the natural order of things, with the meaning of showing, exposing – the root of
monstrum is the same of the Italian verb mostrare (to show). Something announces itself,
manifests itself as extraordinary, outside the normal course of events. On the other hand,
the etymology of the noun prodigy (prod-igium) also expresses the sense of something that
is ‘placed before’, exposed, shown. Which means that something particular, something that
differs from the usual and natural order of things is exhibited, placed in front of a subject,
causing astonishment and fear, disrupting one’s ability to represent. Starting from these
two aspects – the feeling of fear and the break in the subject’s ordinary representational
schema – the following pages aim to investigate the relationship between the monstrous
and the concept of the sublime, linking them primarily as moments that challenge our
cognitive possibilities.
288
CON-TEXTOS KANTIANOS
International Journal of Philosophy
N.o 15, June 2022, pp. 287-296
ISSN: 2386-7655
Doi: 10.5281/zenodo.6591049
Daniela Angelucci
Sublime vs. monstrous?
The modern history of the concept of the sublime begins with Nicolas Boileau’s French
translation of Pseudo-Longinus’ Perì Hypsous in 1674. In his introduction, Boileau speaks
of a dichotomy between the sublime of style and the sublime tout court, that which is
extraordinary, surprising, marvelous, only alluded to in the ancient treatise. The concept of
the sublime changes, becoming more similar to how we understand it today in
philosophical terms, when the term is no longer ascribed to the dimension of ethos to
indicate what is noble and elevated (an aspect testified to by its etymology, as sublimen is
composed of sub, ‘under’ and limen, ‘threshold’, ‘door’, so originally “sloping up to the
lintel” and by extension referring to what is elevated), but to the dimension of pathos. Also
following the French reception of the English aesthetics of genius and sensibility, the effect
of the sublime is no longer described as elevation of the mind, but as the act of shaking,
upsetting the person contemplating (for an in-depth historical reconstruction of the concept
see Saint Girons 2006). Already in its first modern appearance, the concept refers to the
disorder of the faculties experienced by a subject, now more radical, when faced with the
monstrous. In his well-known A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful, Burke moves beyond both the rhetorical aspects that are central in
Pseudo-Longinus, and Boileau’s classicist approach, clearly distinguishing the sublime
from the beautiful and introducing the element of terror, the sense of ‘delightful horror’ as
a specific characteristic of the sublime. What is new is the emphasis on the negative
character of this experience.
A few years later, Kant addressed these same concepts in his Observations on the Feeling
of the Beautiful and Sublime, later expanding them and subjecting them to his critical-
transcendental analysis in the Critique of Judgment. In the latter the sublime (das
Erhabene) is no longer characterized empirically as in Burke’s Enquiry and in his own
1764 work: sublime is not something psychological or physiological, nor a style, but a
critical moment par excellence, an experience of the transcendental subject in the
encounter with something that upsets the ordinary exercise of the faculties. Or rather, to
put it in Kantian terms, it is a feeling arising from the apprehension of an object that proves
to be the occasion for a purposive relationship between the faculties of a subject. The
simultaneous experience of pleasure and displeasure, of wonder and respect of the subject
contemplating the greatness or power of nature, disproportionate to the sensible faculties,
differs from beauty, it is an alternative experience, in that it is also negative. Put more
explicitly, although perhaps simplifying a little, Kant theorizes the sublime when he
realizes that the category of beautiful, as the free play of the faculties, is not sufficient to
describe a certain experience of nature, which is neither theoretical, cognitive, nor
aesthetic, as is the case with the judgment of taste that defines beauty. If from the point of
view of the history of aesthetics this shift towards the sublime is not problematic, since the
concept of the sublime is to be frequently found in the eighteenth century, the way it is
From the sublime to the Monstrous
289
CON-TEXTOS KANTIANOS.
International Journal of Philosophy
N.o 15, June 2022, pp. 287-296
ISSN: 2386-7655
Doi: 10.5281/zenodo.6591049
developed in the Third Critique points to a shift in Kant’s reasoning (see D’Angelo 1997;
D’Angelo 2019, pp. 136 ff).
Paragraph 23, the first paragraph of the Analytic of the Sublime, presents a brief summary
of the differences between the beautiful and the sublime. Both experiences presuppose a
reflective judgment, which is not determining. I will try to illustrate them briefly, only in
order to clarify how the concept of the sublime is subsequently addressed and to better
understand how it resonates with the theme of monstrosity. The category of beauty is
connected to the ideas of limitation and form, the sublime to limitlessness and
formlessness; what is beautiful causes an intensification of vital forces; the sublime, on the
other hand, is an emotion of both attraction and repulsion, therefore not of joy but of
astonishment and respect; beauty is characterized by the free play between imagination and
understanding, the sublime is serious, it is a confrontation, a clash between imagination
and reason. However, according to Kant, as we know, this impediment of the vital forces
that characterizes the experience of the sublime in relation to beauty leads to a superior
kind of pleasure: because of this ability to think such greatness and power, the sublime
attests to the existence of a faculty of the mind which surpasses every standard of sense,
i.e. reason.
This first description of the sublime, which I have intentionally simplified, (for a more
detailed discussion of the sublime in Kant see Feloj 2012), allows us to stress two
important aspects in our discussion. First, the formlessness (formlos) of the sublime, not
yet deformed or monstrous, but lacking form: “For the sublime, in the strict sense of the
word, cannot be contained in any sensuous form, but rather concerns ideas of reason,
which, although no adequate presentation of them is possible, may be aroused and called to
mind by that very inadequacy itself which does admit of sensuous presentation” (Kant
2007: 76). A fundamental theoretical consequence can also be derived from this aspect,
namely that the sublime object “lends itself to the presentation of a sublimity discoverable
in the mind.” (Kant 2007: 76). What is sublime, therefore, is not the stormy ocean, Kant
writes, but the feeling that induces the mind to turn to what has a superior purpose: the
sublime, in other words, is more subjective than beauty.
Secondly, the failure of imagination, which leads to discard sensibility and to the
intervention not of the understanding but of reason, in the awareness of a “supremacy of
our cognitive faculties on the rational side over the greatest faculty of sensibility” (Kant
2007: 88). Twentieth-century literature has concentrated on the failure of imagination, on
the disorder of the faculties: “which […] excites the feeling of the sublime, may appear,
indeed, in point of form to contravene the ends of our power of judgement, to be ill-
adapted to our faculty of presentation, and to do violence, as it were, to the imagination”
(Kant 2007: 76). In other words, it is true that the limit of the imagination, experienced
with the sublime, is the first step towards a superior kind of pleasure, awakened by this
inadequacy (it is possible also to speak of a “productivity of the negative” in Kant, see
Failla 2019), but the counter-purposiveness of the sublime that Kant seems to struggle with
also unsettles the whole system: it is no longer an object for the intellect, and therefore
290
CON-TEXTOS KANTIANOS
International Journal of Philosophy
N.o 15, June 2022, pp. 287-296
ISSN: 2386-7655
Doi: 10.5281/zenodo.6591049
Daniela Angelucci
determines a type of experience that, although it does not fall completely outside of
rationality, can nonetheless – leaving behind Kant’s terminology – be defined as a
threshold experience.
Kant mentions the monstrous (Ungeheuer) in the section dedicated the mathematically
sublime, where he speaks of a magnitude that is disproportionate to human faculties. Kant
had already addressed this theme in the pre-critical period, in 1766, but with a different
tone. In Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, for example, the deformed, the monstrous, is that which
goes against the natural order, creating disharmony. Here the evident comparison, although
only hinted at, is with the mystic’s imagination. In Observations on the Feeling of the
Beautiful and Sublime, the monstrous also returns as an attribute of the grotesque and the
Gothic, insofar as they are asymmetrical and not harmonious. This disruption of the natural
order of things had to and could be repaired, however, and illuminated by the light of
reason, and could therefore be considered as something negative that nevertheless
anticipates a positive moment. From 1781 onwards, however, Kant’s way of considering
the monstrous changes. In the new topography that defines the limits of reason, the
monster has no place; from this moment, Kant strives to expel the monstrous, to erase it:
now the monstrous is no longer simply something that destroys harmony, but something
beyond the limits of the human faculties (for a detailed analysis of the transformation of
the monstrous from the pre-critical period to the critical period see Lemos 2014).
In the third Critique, as we know, the mathematical sublime does not concern a quantity
that we can compare or measure with units of measurement – a measurement that can
therefore proceed without encountering any limitations for the imagination – but a
magnitude that Kant defines as absolute. In the aesthetic evaluation of a magnitude, that of
simple intuition, the imaginative faculty encounters its own limits very early on, and these
limits, this ‘maximum’ that is reached, is what provokes an emotion not connected to a real
danger, but to the voice of reason. Conversely, the encounter with the monstrous does not
produce the pleasure and respect derived from rational ideas. Kant writes that “An object is
monstrous where by its size it defeats the end that forms its concept.” (Kant 2007: 83).
Here, to experience the limits of the imagination, beyond which the comfort of accord with
the ideas of reason is no longer possible, as in the case of the sublime, provokes neither
identification nor pleasure, however negative. As Feloj has commented, in Kant the
recognition of counter-purposiveness always prevents the possibility of representation:
“either the lack of accord of faculties is annulled and the initial sense of displeasure is
experienced as being part of a more general feeling of pleasure, as is the case with the ugly
in beautiful art, which is also the case with the sublime, or what is counter-purposive is
excluded altogether and gives rise to neither judgment nor representation, as is the case
with disgust” (Feloj 2017: 106). The space of rationality depends on the recognition of the
limit beyond which the monstrous is located.
From the sublime to the Monstrous
291
CON-TEXTOS KANTIANOS.
International Journal of Philosophy
N.o 15, June 2022, pp. 287-296
ISSN: 2386-7655
Doi: 10.5281/zenodo.6591049
Monstrous filiations and aberrant turns
Given Kant’s definition of the monstrous as something so great it nullifies its purpose, it
would seem that the monstrous is conceived in opposition to the sublime as a critical
feeling, which allows and implies the intervention of reason. And yet, it could also be said
that in the experience of the Kantian sublime, there is always an initial monstrous moment,
which, however, could not exist if there were no initial guarantee of its being overcome.
Moreover, this monstrous that critical philosophy expels beyond the boundaries of thought
thus becomes an absolute ‘outside’, and thus seems to gain a new power. As Lemos writes:
“The Monster withdraws from this new topography of Reason. However, the elimination
of this figure from the field of critical philosophy seems to confine it to a slightly more
threatening place: it begins to inhabit an exterior that we cannot see, perhaps because we
maintain a more fundamental relationship with it” (Lemos 2014). It is indicative that
twentieth-century interpretations of Kant insist above all on the failure of the representative
faculties in the Kantian experience of the sublime, on dissent, on disagreement. This aspect
of Kant’s thought, though immediately tamed by Kant himself, seems to be the most
promising for philosophy starting in the twentieth century, so much so that today, if we
consider the work of Donna Haraway and other authors (who certainly do not claim to be
Kantian), it is reasonable to speak of a “monstrous turn” (Haraway 1992: 304). ‘Monster’
is intended as a figure representing hybridization, able to refute all claims concerning
primeval purity. According to non-anthropocentric posthumanism, in fact, nature is a
“cosmos of monsters”, and the encounter with the monster, with the absolute other, is
described in terms of interconnectedness and kinship (see Braidotti 2005). The
investigation underway is primarily epistemological, as Timeto notes: “The monster as an
aberration has always been first and foremost an aberration of the concept, a sign of the
decline of representational epistemology and its instruments” (Timeto 2018: 128).
Among the many interpretations of the third Critique, two French authors of the twentieth
century stand out who seem to radicalize the epistemological scope of Kant’s sublime,
viewing it not only as a cognitive possibility, but as the necessary starting point of a
thought that is neither conventional nor abstract. Both authors speak of this feeling as
being caused by a violent encounter with the Outside, as an experience of the limit. This
experience is out of the ordinary and is violent, it borders on the experience of the
monstrous. Deleuze’s Kant’s Critical Philosophy offers such an interpretation of Kant’s
philosophy. Throughout the 1960s, Deleuze defined the German philosopher as an author
devoted only to the study of the ordinary use of the faculties – for this reason Kant is an
“enemy” and his theoretical assumptions must be refuted. The text written in 1963 focuses
on the relationship between the faculties in the three Critiques; here Deleuze makes a
distinction between the first meaning of the term faculty in Kant’s writings, understood as
a type of relation between subject and object: from this point of view, it is possible to
identify the faculty of knowing, referred to the object from the point of view of conformity;
the faculty of desiring, referred to the object in a causal relation; and the feeling of pleasure
292
CON-TEXTOS KANTIANOS
International Journal of Philosophy
N.o 15, June 2022, pp. 287-296
ISSN: 2386-7655
Doi: 10.5281/zenodo.6591049
Daniela Angelucci
or displeasure, in which the representation has a certain effect on the subject, enhancing or
damaging its vital force. Kant’s objective is to determine the higher form of such faculties,
that is, the situation in which the faculty is autonomous and gives the law to itself. There is,
however, a second meaning of the term faculty, which designates not the various
relationships of representation, but the sources of the representations. This is the role of the
three faculties as sources of representations: imagination, understanding, and reason. The
relationship between these two meanings of ‘faculty’, with their systematic variations,
produces what Deleuze defines as “the real network which constitutes the transcendental
method”. For instance, understanding legislates in the faculty of knowledge, which does
not, however, exclude the role – described as “original” by Deleuze – of imagination and
reason.
It is in this framework that the faculty of feeling in the third Critique stands out in
Deleuze’s work, since its higher form presents two “paradoxical characteristics”. First,
unlike knowing and desiring, the feeling of pleasure and displeasure does not define any
interest of reason, neither speculative nor practical, but is completely disinterested.
Secondly, it does not legislate over objects, being indifferent to their existence, it only
legislates over itself, i.e. the faculty of feeling is not autonomous but “heautonomous”. As
regards the faculties understood in their second, higher sense, i.e. as the source of
representations, according to Deleuze the third Critique presents a further particularity:
here imagination, in its free agreement with the indeterminate concept of the
understanding, does not schematize in the proper sense, but reflects the form of the object,
becoming productive and spontaneous. Aesthetic common sense is thus “a pure subjective
harmony where imagination and understanding are exercized spontaneously, each on its
own account. Consequently common sense does not complete the two others; it provides
them with a basis that makes them possible” (Deleuze 1984: 49-50), since it shows that the
faculties are first and foremost capable of such harmony. This statement, however, poses
another problem, which concerns whether the free accord of faculties that grounds
common sense should be presupposed, or produced, generated. This problem is the subject
of another article by Deleuze written the same year, The Idea of Genesis in Kant’s
Aesthetics. To solve this problem Deleuze considers the second kind of aesthetic judgment,
the sublime. Already in this text the relevance (and the problematic nature) of the concept
of the sublime emerges: the particular relationship between imagination and reason
produced by the sublime, in its immensity or power, shows how the accord of faculties is a
point of arrival, generated in the disagreement and contradiction between the demands of
reason and those of the imagination typical of the experience of the sublime. If in the
sublime reason places the imagination before its own limit, the imagination, by
reawakening reason, overcomes its subordination to a determining faculty (the intellect,
whether it legislates over it or harmonizes with it) and thus increases its power.
Deleuze returned to Kant more times in the course of the years, each time with greater
admiration (on the Kant-Deleuze relationship see Palazzo 2013), to the point of claiming
From the sublime to the Monstrous
293
CON-TEXTOS KANTIANOS.
International Journal of Philosophy
N.o 15, June 2022, pp. 287-296
ISSN: 2386-7655
Doi: 10.5281/zenodo.6591049
that in his late work Kant becomes “sensitive to catastrophe”. The catastrophe in which
aesthetic understanding is compromised is the experience of the sublime, highlighted in the
lectures on Kant delivered by Deleuze in Vincennes in 1978 (Deleuze 2004) and connected
to a notion of time described as “out of joint”. The point of arrival of the Deleuzian
interpretation is that at any moment phenomena can occur in space and time that disrupt
aesthetic understanding, that is, the basis of any imaginative synthesis, destroying its
rhythm, that is, the agreement between things to be measured and the very units of
measurement. The “adventure of the sublime” exhibits the fragility of the ground on which
the activity of the imagination rests, which is blocked and left speechless before the
immensity of the ocean, the infinite skies, the avalanches, the storms. This threat, however,
is the beginning of something more powerful and necessary.
If the failure produced by the appearance of formlessness in the sensible world is a
moment of arrest for Kant, who then proceeds to develop a new kind of accord, this failure
is the only possible starting point for Deleuze, who conceives of thought as the outcome of
a violent impact with the Outside. This description of the activity of thinking is, moreover,
present throughout Deleuze’s work, from his 1962 text on Proust to What is Philosophy?
written with Félix Guattari and published in 1991: the polemical target is classical
rationalist philosophy, which believes it can arrive at truth by means of decision and
methodical practice. Deleuze contrasts this idea with that of the involuntary quality of a
necessary thought, whose success depends precisely on its relationship with exteriority. In
Deleuze’s reading of Kant, the sublime is a decisive turning point, one in which dissonance
is emancipated from agreement, and it is only in this dissonance that thought can originate
for Deleuze. By reassembling the connections between the sublime and the monstrous, this
interruption in the accord that characterizes the sublime – albeit with the violence and with
the fear and disharmony it provokes, indeed precisely because of these – is the beginning
of philosophy. In a famous passage Deleuze describes philosophical practice, in its
relationship with the history of thought, as a “monstrous filiation”. Retracing the history of
philosophy means taking a thinker and transforming his concepts, manipulating them,
subjecting them to a “machination” (see Vignola 2018), developing a version of the history
of philosophy which is a counter-history populated by “monstrous offspring”, in line with a
conception of thought as a series of aberrant movements (see Lapoujade 2020), as an
irrational logic, a flight towards its borders.
"
"
ed.
The political impasses, which emerge promptly once the issues of power and
economy are no longer avoided, are part of the terror and belong to its experience.
Social terror had already become global by 1945, as seen above, in Adorno’s re-
writing of the Kantian sublime. But the subjects of modernized society could still
think they had succeeded in keeping terror at bay, if there were no new genocidal
relapses to Auschwitz or Hiroshima. In the so-called Anthropocene, however, we
are forced to face a further turn, another permutation of terror: now, merely the
everyday business-as-usual of modernity, if continued, will carry life on our planet
over a cliff. An earth warmed three or four or six degrees Celsius would be a
radically unknowable disaster, one that appears “visibly comprehensible” only in
the projected mastery fantasies of the geo-engineers, which offer to the strong-
holds of intransigence their needed path of political least resistance. But science
and technology development do not escape the social force field, and for this very
reason are not free to deliver salvation from social antagonisms and ecological
fallout. Society can save itself only by changing itself, radically and quickly
enough. In 2019, society is altering the course of evolution without precaution or
Gene Ray Terror & the Sublime
9
respect. Both the global public at large and the directors and beneficiaries of the
global economy know what capitalist modernity is doing; no one today can plau-
sibly claim much ignorance. Avoidance, denial, disavowal, addiction to modernity
and its lifestyles, and other psychological patterns may be symptomatic but are
still social facts. At this time at least, the imperatives of growth and accumulation
grip and control social subjects more effectively than the strongest of Burke’s
“passions of self-preservation.” Society’s heedless collision with the nature that
fostered and supported it is now an uncontrolled wreck. Capitalist modernity still
names the global social process today; “eco-genocide” names its wanton violence.12
The Persistence of Nature
Modernity’s impacts on the planet and its life forms are shaping new experiences
of terror. But as isotherms and climates migrate and living localities are increas-
ingly disturbed and displaced, how are the meanings of planet and nature af-
fected? The intellectual and emotional pressures of the so-called Anthropocene
are stimulating a deep reconsideration of given assumptions across the critical hu-
manities, social sciences, and the arts, if not yet in the boardrooms of power and
corridors of governance. By many approaches and with diverse results, scholars
and artists are struggling with the findings of the earth sciences and are rethinking
the categories of human and non-human, nature and the social, bios and geos.
Indeed, numerous thinkers in the sciences and critical humanities have felt justi-
fied in jettisoning the whole of category of nature.13 The arguments are various
and contentious, reflect deep differences with regard to metaphysics and episte-
mology, and often abound in technical subtleties. One simple claim, however, re-
curs frequently enough to indicate a new common sense: since there is no place
on the planet that is not now impacted and altered by human activities, we can
conclude that nature has disappeared into the social. The time has come, there-
fore, to dispense with the category, or sometimes the idea, of nature as something
separated or analytically distinct from society. For many thinkers, one meaning of
the Anthropocene is that the old nature/culture binary has become passé.
"
"
The pervasive sign of these contradictions is the idea of the detached yet invigorated spectator. In Kant’s theory, the sublime is for onlookers or bystanders. They are protected from immediate threat of destruction, yet also sense – then understand – a transition from the force of the sublime to the power of its rational overcoming:
Thus any spectator who beholds massive mountains climbing skywards, deep gorges with raging streams in them, wastelands lying in deep shadow and inviting melancholy meditation, and so on is indeed seized by amazement bordering on terror, by horror and a sacred thrill; but since he knows he is safe, this is not actual fear: it is merely our attempt to incur it with our imagination, and in order that we may feel that power’s might and connect the mental agitation this arouses with the mind’s state of rest. In this way we feel our superiority to nature within ourselves, and hence also to nature outside us insofar as it can influence our feeling of well-being.
Kant, Critique of Judgment, Werner S. Pluhar (trans.), Cambridge: Hackett, 1987, p 129
This is a deeply implausible account of spectators, because it depends on lack of concern for outcomes and on dispassionate detachment, at the very point where an intense experience is working on us. Kant gives us an overly simple account of spectatorship. He confuses a second-hand experience – to be an onlooker – with a third hand one – to reflect critically and morally about our states and the states of others as spectators. The problem is that these two states also haunt each other. This haunting has a characteristic condition: bad faith, or to treat oneself as oneself, but also as another.
Kant fails to take account of the unconscious effects of violence and action, and the deep traces that follow from them. We absorb threats, suffering from the destruction of places, people and ideas we hold dear and have sympathy for. Worse, we consume violence done to others, vicariously enjoying unjust victories, and feeling pride at unearned security. Even in delight, the sublime experience is a trauma, not a dependable occasion for the cool assessment of rational superiority.
The young Burke had been a spectator of sublime catastrophe, when the river Liffey flooded, threatening his family home. Luke Gibbons links this experience to his later philosophy of the sublime (Luke Gibbons, Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics and the Colonial Sublime, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p 2). Against Kant, to witness a flood is to be marked, even if we are in a secure position above the waterline. It is to absorb the force, deadliness and devastation of mud and water – to retain it deep within us for later recall.
It is possible that Burke was alluding to Lisbon in his observations on the sublime and London. His concern is not with immediate terror but with the sublimity of the ensuing ruins. Unlike Kant’s, this sublime is passionate, involved and formed directly by a wide range of experiences and sensations. The archetype for these sublime ruins is neither the English capital, nor Lisbon. It is the same for us as when Burke spoke of ‘her ruin’, in Reflections on the Revolution in France.
Rome’s ruins have long been the occasion for a nostalgic sublime in art and literature. Crowds come to see the remains of empire in ever greater numbers, collecting at the same viewpoint:
‘Se avessi meno nostalgia/saprei conoscere/godermi e crescere’ (If I had less nostalgia, I’d be able to know, enjoy myself, and grow) Niccolò Fabi, ‘Filosofia Agricola’, Una Somma Di Piccole Cose (Universal, 2016)
Regretful and nostalgic ruins cannot be sublime for Kant. His theory combines imagination and reason, but reason experiences a victory free of torment and guilt, as it rises above nature and guides moral resolve:
Hence nature is here called sublime merely because it elevates our imagination, [making] it exhibit those cases where the mind can come to feel its own sublimity, which lies in its vocation and elevates it even above nature.
Kant, Critique of Judgment, p 121
Against this elevation of reason, sublime ruins call us back and feed nostalgic imagination. Thinking of loss and decay, of the power of nature and of the natural forces in us that unleash war and destruction, we yearn for a return to past grandeur.
Emotions of sadness and regret, clinging to the past through its ruination, do not fit the progressive qualities of Kantian reason, as applied to morals and politics. Kant’s sublime drives towards a new world, not pictured through the imagination, but rather brought about through moral and political acts, given maxims and ideas by a form of reason independent of any empirical present.
To purify his rational sublime, Kant shows how it can be freed from sadness. He demonstrates this just before a respectful, yet ultimately formulaic, rejection of Burke’s empiricism. Starting with a remark by one of his favourite sources for sublime experiences, Kant distinguishes two kinds of sad feeling: ‘Saussure, as intelligent as he was thorough, in describing his Alpine travels says of Bonhomme, one of the Savoy mountains, “a certain insipid sadness reigns there.”‘ (277)
"