The Political Sublime: An Oxymoron

Abstract

The sublime has been a categorical refuge in a number of important `postmodern' critical and theoretical projects, most of which are aimed at retrieving or inventing a more radical, liberating, or progressive politics. Using Kant's theory of the sublime, an übertheory for postmodern thought, this essay argues that the political sublime is self-defeating because it precludes differentiation, a sine qua non of politics. Furthermore, I argue that where the sublime takes on political purchase it slips into the beautiful — the `political sublime' is a form of the beautiful. The political sublime is a means of pronouncing the limits of one set of political practices and displacing them with another, purportedly stron ge r, politics. I make this argument through two distinct but interconnected approaches: (1) through a reading of theories of the political sublime in Jean-François Lyotard and Hayden White, and (2) through a reading of CNN's live US coverage of the 11 September 2001 attacks.