Easing the sublime: Flow,daoism,and being-nature

Abstract

Comparative Literature brings to Possibility Studies the toolbox to closely read the generative materiality of things, and the resonances between them, from a plurality of cultural, temporal, affective, and critical perspectives. What is the agency of things in making people think and feel “otherwise”? In this article, I try to answer this question with a view to the idea of the sublime. I revise this idea within a Daoist theoretical perspective of wuwei (doing not-doing)—carefully differentiating it from Czíkszentmihályi’s idea of flow— and self/no-self: of entanglement. I call this re-vision easing the sublime, and I argue that such easing is crucial to the continued relevance of this esthetic category in Possibility Studies. As I conclude, easing the sublime ultimately boils down to an attitude of a being-at-ease with (without being indifferent to) the eternal transformation of things (wu hua).