Gene Ray History, Sublime, Terror: Notes on the Politics of Fear

Gene Ray

Origin: Static Issue 07
Content: Text

In his 1757 book on aesthetics, the young Edmund Burke proposed that anything connected to terror is potentially a source of the feeling of the sublime.  Six years into a so-called war against terrorism – catastrophe, indeed – we may ask whether this category from eighteenth-century aesthetics has anything relevant to say to us about the world we live in today.  Can this figure for excessive power or the power of excess contribute anything helpful to our political understanding at the beginning of the twenty-first century?  It is argued that it could, so long as we grasp how history has changed the sublime – how this traditional category has been profoundly transformed.  The crucial shift in the category occurs in the twentieth century, after 1945, in the wake of events of global and traumatic violence.  This shift is summarized and situated in its social context.  Then some implications are drawn, including some conclusions about the possible relevance of the sublime as an artistic response to the wars, atrocities and disasters that threaten us today.

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Contributor:

Gene Ray is a critic and theorist living in Berlin.  His essays at the intersections of art and radical politics have appeared frequently in Third Text and Left Curve; co-authored texts have been published in Analyse & Kritik, Monthly Review and Radical Philosophy.  The author of Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory (2005) and editor of Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy (2001), he is a contributor to Territories: Islands, Camps and Other States of Utopia (2003) and Signals in the Dark: Art in the Shadow of War (2008), as well as other edited volumes. Ray is a member of the Radical Culture Research Collective (RCRC).