Framing the Abyss – The Deconstruction of the Sublime

Sublime Art ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 164-201
Author(s):  
Stephen Zepke
Keyword(s):  
Transcendental Philosophy ◽  
The Sublime

Both Derrida and Deleuze develop transcendental philosophy in the direction of difference, and both use the sublime to dissolve the bridge it supposedly forms between the sensible and supersensible, just as both see the foundation of experience to be transcendental difference. As well, they share a conception of difference that rejects the principle of contradiction, a difference that conditions everything but is not itself given. Perhaps it is this that inspired Derrida to claim ‘nearly total affinity’with Deleuze’s philosophical ‘theses’ (2001: 192). Nevertheless, there are fundamental differences between their respective accounts of difference. For Derrida, transcendental différance deconstructs the possibility of any supersensible ‘outside’ emerging from the sublime experience (différance is the condition of its impossibility, we might say), and so poses itself against any form of empiricism, including Deleuze’s ‘superior’ or ‘transcendental’ version.

De Quincey's Crazy Body

PMLA ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 114 (3) ◽  
pp. 346-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Youngquist
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Transcendental Philosophy ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Specialized Diet ◽  
As Effects

De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater evaluates life from the perspective of digestion instead of cognition. The text mounts a critique of Kant's transcendental philosophy that tests the freedom of reason against the fate of eating. De Quincey's “The Last Days of Immanuel Kant” relates details of the philosopher's life and diet that corroborate this critique. Opium becomes the hero of the Confessions because eating it changes De Quincey physiologically, forcing him to confront the body's materiality. From the opium eater's perspective, the beautiful and the sublime occur as effects, not of representation, but of incorporation, giving rise to the possibility of material thought. A specialized diet also challenges the norms of public medicine, such as those expressed in Thomas Beddoes's Hygiea, which grounds public health in private reflection and responsibility. De Quincey's Confessions affirms a subjectivity that is the effect of daily dosing.

Deconstruction as Critique of Ideology: Paul de Man’s Reading of The Critique of Judgment

1970 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonia Arribas
Keyword(s):  
Transcendental Philosophy ◽  
Critique Of Judgment ◽  
Paul De Man ◽  
Separate Spheres ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
De Man ◽  
Critique Of Ideology

ResumenEn este artículo se lleva a cabo una reconstrucción de la deconstrucción que realiza Paul de Man de la célebre distinción kantiana entre la filosofía transcendental y la metafísica, tal y como ésta es expuesta en la Crítica del Juicio. En lugar de considerar que pertenecen a dos esferas separadas, en el artículo se muestra cómo, según de Man, se da una transición entre ellas que sólo se puede explicar bajo la forma de un cortocircuito tropológico o lingüístico que Kant mismo realiza, pero de manera inconsciente. También se pone de relieve que la noción kantiana de lo sublime, escondida bajo la categoría de lo esct Ttético, cumple la función ideológica de reprimir la constitución inherentemente lingüística de todo conocimiento.Palabras clave Crítica, deconstrucción, estética, ideologÍaAbstractThis article carefully reconstructs Paul de Man’s deconstruction of Kant’s distinction between transcendental philosophy and metaphysics, as the latter appears in The Critique of Judgment. Instead of posing these two as belonging to two separate spheres, the paper shows how, according to de Man, there is a transition between them that can only be accounted for in terms of a tropological or linguistic trick that Kant himself realizes, yet unaware of it. The paper also discusses that Kant’s notion of the sublime has an ideological function disguised under the category of the aesthetic, and which amounts to a denial of the inherently linguistic constitution of all knowledge.Key wordsCritique, deconstruction, aesthetics, ideology

scholarly journals The relation of the imagination and the infinite in Kant’s transcendental philosophy from the perspective of the analytic of the sublime

KÜLÖNBSÉG ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gábor Tóth
Keyword(s):  
Transcendental Philosophy ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Kantian Philosophy

This paper points out the relation between the notion of the sublime and the notion of the infinite in Kant’s transcendental philosophy. In Kant the philosophical functions of the sublime can be related to the notion of the infinite as an idea. The paper investigates whether the imagination can be extended by the infinite, as this is not evident from Kant’s definition of the sublime. Also, the paper addresses the problem if the infinite has a role beyond the purely aesthetic dimension of Kantian philosophy.

Lucan and the Sublime

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry J. M. Day
Keyword(s):  
The Sublime

Interpassivity and Misdemeanours: The Art of Thinking in Examples and the Žižekian Toolbox

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Pfaller
Keyword(s):  
Specific Role ◽  
Slavoj Zizek ◽  
Slavoj Žižek ◽  
The Sublime

Starting from a passage from Slavoj Žižek`s brilliant book The Sublime Object of Ideology, the very passage on canned laughter that gave such precious support for the development of the theory of interpassivity, this chapter examines a question that has proved indispensable for the study of interpassivity: namely, what does it mean for a theory to proceed by examples? What is the specific role of the example in certain example-friendly theories, for example in Žižek’s philosophy?

‘Machinic Desire’: Wyndham Lewis, Masculinity and the Sublime Horror of Technological War

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 488-514
Author(s):  
Udith Dematagoda
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Wyndham Lewis ◽  
World War ◽  
Technological Society ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Post War ◽  
First World

This article explores Wyndham Lewis's experience of the First World War, and its influence on his varied artistic output. It interrogates how Lewis's initial ambivalence towards an emergent technological society shifted through direct encounters with mechanized warfare, and speculates on the effect of these upon his post-war writing and criticism. By contrasting Lewis's thought against that of his Italian Futurist contemporaries, I will demonstrate the centrality of their divergent conceptions of masculinity in accounting for this opposition – and how Lewis's critique of technological society prefigures contemporary opposition towards the post-humanist philosophy of Accelerationism.

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