Sublime Art
The book analyses recent philosophical discussions of Kant’s theory of the sublime, and the artistic examples these give or provoke, in order to construct a diagram of sublime contemporary art. This diagram will have the immediate aim of producing a new genealogy of post-war art that avoids the modern/postmodern rupture, in favour of a sublime art that can utilise both traditional and new media and has the production of the future as its political goal. The book will draw on both philosophical discourse and art history and theory in making its argument. The introduction will give an account of the historical emergence of the sublime, concentrating on Kant. The following five chapters will each discuss a contemporary philosopher’s reading of Kant’s sublime (Lyotard, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Rancière, Jameson), and also consider their artistic examples. From this will be drawn a diagram of sublime art that incorporates the most useful aspects of each thinker, and also outlines a new genealogy of post-war art. The sixth chapter will then use this diagram, and its artistic genealogy, to offer a theory of contemporary artistic practices as an aesthetic politics (ie., a biopolitics) that overcomes the current (postmodern) impasse between art and life. The conclusion will project this new diagram into the future.