The Sublime Today The Sublime Today: Contemporary Readings in the Aesthetic Edited by Gillian B. Pierce The Sublime Today: Contemporary Readings in the Aesthetic, Edited by Gillian B. Pierce This book first published 2012 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2012 by Gillian B. Pierce and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4189-7, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4189-4 CONTENTS Preface.......................................................................................................vii Introduction The Sublime Today: Aesthetics and the Postmodern Mediascape..............1 Gillian B. Pierce Of Gods and Dogs: The Postcolonial Sublime in Coetzee’s Disgrace, or, David Lurie’s Aesthetic Education......................................................13 Jana M. Giles “Blinded by the Book”: Metafictional Madness and Sublime Solitude in the Works of Paul Auster......................................................................49 Alex E. Blazer Nature Revisited: Post-Ironic Sublimity in Dave Eggers..........................67 Stephanie Sommerfield “Plush Darkness”: Play and the Sublime in Recent Participatory Art.....101 Katarzyna Zimna Abject’s “Ideal” Kin: The Sublime..........................................................119 Defne Tüzün The Sublime Revisited: The Political Sublime in Amartya Sen, Sri Aurobindo, and The Namesake..........................................................143 Ashmita Khasnabish The Sublime Dimension of 9/11..............................................................163 Marie-Christine Clemente “Unthinkable Complexity”: The Internet and the Mathematical Sublime....................................................................................................191 Rowan Wilken Contributors.............................................................................................213 PREFACE The idea for this collection emerged first from a panel at the Northeast Modern Language Association in Boston in 2009, also entitled “The Sublime Today.” The aim of the panel, like that of the current volume, was to investigate how the Peri Hypsos of Longinus or writings by Burke, Kant, Hegel, de Man, Lyotard, Jameson, Nancy, Badiou, and others help to frame or contextualize the current relevance of this aesthetic category. Is the sublime a “cultural dominant” in a postmodern mediascape of simulation and simulacra, or rather a singular aesthetic “event,” in Lyotard’s sense? In what other ways should one consider the relevance of the sublime in a post-9/11 world? In their sheer diversity, the papers on the panel—which ranged from discussions of the sublime elements of both 9/11 and its media portrayal to the idea of performativity, from Harold Bloom’s “literary sublime,” which draws on Freud’s idea of the uncanny, to readings of postmodern fiction— uncovered the wide and fascinating range of thinking on the sublime that defines the current critical landscape. The lively discussion that followed further revealed the active interest in the sublime across disciplinary lines taken by thinkers in the fields of history, film theory, politics, women’s studies, literature, art, and popular culture, all of which I have tried to represent in this collection. The authors of these essays draw from a core body of texts by the thinkers listed above to provide careful readings of examples from contemporary art, film, literature, and culture. Taken as a whole, the essays explore the central question of the place of the human in an increasingly “immaterial” set of relationships with technology and an increasingly nostalgic relationship with the natural world. If the project of modernity was founded on a centered, Cartesian subject capable of “mastering” and “possessing” nature, how is this relationship altered by the existence of the new conditions of globalization and what Lyotard calls “technoscience”? Many thanks go to all who participated in the original panel, and to all who have worked with me since then to make this collection a reality. I would like to thank James I. Porter, who first drew my interest to writing on the sublime, and all who contributed essays. Sumita Chakraborty provided expert copyediting and editorial assistance, and Bill Pierce provided both technical and moral support. I am enormously grateful to them both. INTRODUCTION THE SUBLIME TODAY: AESTHETICS AND THE POSTMODERN MEDIASCAPE GILLIAN B. PIERCE Why the sublime? Given the magnitude of the problems confronting us today in the political, financial, and economic spheres, this dynamic, which describes the experience of the human subject confronting and trying to make sense of that which lies beyond the horizon of his or her comprehension, seems particularly relevant. And yet, grounded as it is entirely within the mind of the experiencing subject, the category of the sublime may also seem like a retreat into the “merely” aesthetic, one that we must reject on moral grounds. In the rhetoric of postmodernism, we are frequently confronted with discussions of the eclipse of nature, the death of the humanist, positivist project associated with modernism, and the end of mastery by man of his destiny through knowledge. The intent of the current volume is to interrogate the range of ways in which the rhetoric of the sublime might be used to describe our current situation and to help formulate constructive responses to it. But if we are to consider aesthetics as a possible response to our contemporary predicament, why not choose the beautiful? Tobin Siebers has taken up this question of which category from Kant’s Third Critique— the sublime or the beautiful—is best suited to describe the political and aesthetic climate of postmodernism. Criticizing Jean-François Lyotard’s reading of the sublime as a nostalgic return to the pre-modern categories of the sacred and the ineffable, Siebers suggests that postmodern critics might more usefully turn to the communal and communitarian ideal of the beautiful as a political and ethical model. Suggesting that such readings of the politics of the beautiful “have been largely ignored by postmodernists, who tend to brood about the sublime,”1 Siebers rejects the idea that the