From Kant to Jean-Luc Nancy: Notes on the problem of the sublime

Abstract

This essay addresses the status of the philosophical category of the sublime in the spectrum of the contemporary reflection on aesthetics. Its argument is developed in three steps: First, we will a brief archeology of the concept is attempted, emphasizing its appearance in Kant’s thinking, as well as in the influential re-readings of Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard, clearly marked by a problematic adjustment of the sublime in reference to the philosophical categories of the impossible and of the unpresentable, i.e., of the sublime as the culmination of an experience that no form or concept can fill. Second, under the lens of Jean-Luc Nancy, we will try to account for a decisive inflection in the contemporary framework of the problem, from now on referred to, according to the philosopher, no longer to the donation of an impossible, an unpresentable, but to an unlimited that perpetually persists on the edge of a figure. Third, we will briefly examine the conditions of reversibility of Nancy’s assumptions of the sublime in Pedro Costa’s cinematographic space. In that regard, we will try to frame the presentation of human bodies in the director’s work accordingly to the generative impulse that crosses them and finally distinguishes them as sublime figures.