Elie During

Dagmawi Woubshet

Dropped jaws, widened eyes, raised eyebrows, goose bumps and shivers. Volcanoes awakened, skies ignited, storms unleashed. Crowds enthusiastically rising up. The Ocean with its towering waves. The abyss beneath. The Ocean again, but now still as death, stretching as far as the eye can see. Vastness, grandeur, elevation. But also, hyperbole, accumulation, saturation, excess. All this causing a mix of wonder and awe, admiration and terror —  “delightful horror”.

The aesthetic, moral and affective tropes commonly associated with the rhetoric of sublimity point in seemingly opposite directions: the sublime is at once overwhelming and elating, empowering and destructive. It evokes the eternal silence of the sidereal void as well as formless matter. Promoted as a new critical idiom, it poses a special challenge as there appears to be several competing discourses or regimes of the sublime (classic, romantic, modernist, post- or hyper-modern). Turning to philosophy, things only get worse. Kant raised the game to a new level by severing the sublime from its roots in the poetics of nature and spelling out the metaphysical implications of its dynamics. But once the sublime has been redefined as an inward movement of the mind performed by the subject in relation to the suprasensible – or the ‘unpresentable’ –, anything seems possible. In this respect, Hegel’s concern is still with us. Abject and sublimated, excessive and subliminal, antimimetic and hyperreal, opaque and void, or ‘ultrathin’: the contemporary sublime can take on all these features in turn, or simultaneously, as it freely moves between the intensities of the sensing body, the flights of the imagination, and the plane of moral and rational ideals. And so the abyss of representation can be interpreted as an initimation of the Thing in itself, a collapse of the symbolic function signalling the subject’s encounter with truth, or an avatar of Lacan’s ‘object a’…

To avoid hermeneutic overkill, this seminar will focus on a few invariants beneath the varieties of sublime experience. Two core intuitions will serve as guiding threads. (1) What the sublime achieves through the combination of pleasure and terror, sensory shock and anesthesia, is an immanent formalization of the ambivalence inherent in certain reflective dispositions of the subject. (2) This ambivalence can be apprehended at different levels of abstraction, suggesting unexpected connections between disparate domains. As a formal operator, the concept of the sublime acts as a bridge between heterogeneous fields of meaning: ethics and aesthetics, but also science, technology, politics, psychonalysis, theology, ecology, etc.

We’ll find ample confirmation of this in a history that runs through Longinus, Burke, Kant, Richter, Schiller, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Vischer, Benjamin, Bataille, Adorno, Lacan, Kristeva, Derrida, De Man, Jameson, Lyotard, Nancy, Deleuze, Zizek, Rancière… The available literature is abundant. Our focus will be on a few seminal texts by Kant, Hegel, and Lyotard. We’ll approach them with one question in mind: what inventive operations does the category of the sublime allow us to perform in a given context? For instance, if the sublime is dialectically related with the ridiculous and the comical, if the kitsch can be viewed as a form of reified sublime, what does this tell us? On a different chapter: how does the metaphysics and phenomenology of the unpresentable contribute to a politics of the Event? Is there such a thing as an egalitarian sublime? A digital sublime? A flat sublime? Finally, do these figures suggest a new idea of beauty? And what purpose could this serve?

This seminar provides a critical introduction to contemporary Black literary and cultural studies.  Through a set of literary, visual, and theoretical texts, we will explore key themes and methodologies animating the field. In the first half of the seminar, our focus will be on new approaches to the study of transatlantic slavery—including experimental works likeSaidiya Hartman’s theoretical essay, “Venus in Two Acts,” and M. NourbeSe Philip’s book of poems, Zong!—which contend with slavery and its archive in innovative ways that have broad implications for how we study archives, aesthetics, history, and politics. In the second half, we will turn to another key area of scholarly focus in contemporary African American literary and cultural studies—the study of Black interior and intramural life. Using Kevin Quashie’s The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture and Black Aliveness, Or a Poetics of Being, we will examine new methodologies that go beyond ideological critiques of race and racism and also beyond nationalist discourses of resistance to animate Black life.