Finite Agents, Sublime Feelings: Response to Hanauer

Response: Music, image and the sublime

At the end of ‘Passion and striving: The language of emotion and political hierarchy’, Susan James discusses Burke’s concept of the sublime, tracing its origins in his criticisms of Hobbes, Malebranche, and Hume, who, James informs us, ‘made the mistake of supposing that fear is invariably a negative affect’.1 On the contrary, for Burke the experience of fear can arouse pleasure provided that w...

(Sailing to) Byzantium: the Kantian Sublime

The Sublime

In the film Independence Day (Emmerich, 1996), hundreds of gigantic spaceships invaded the earth, their shadows slowly blocked out the light in the cities over which they flew and filled the cinema screen with darkness. A group of humans gathered on top of a skyscraper over which one of the space ships hovered, in the hope that contact with an alien civilisation would promote the dawn of a new ...

The Digital Sublime : Myth , Power

Myth, Power, and Cyberspace: When faced with these three words, what image comes to mind? Could the world conceived in the popular science-fiction movie ‘The Matrix’ be a likely illustration? The enormous potential of the Internet is, to some extent, predicted in this movie by its subtle integration of Myth, Power, and Cyberspace. Such potential can also be seen from the all-around penetration ...

Infinity and the Sublime

We are so used to think by ourselves that we almost forget how rare and strange this psychological feat actually is. The ability to retract ‘within’ oneself is a recent and culturally determined phaenomenon which was hardly available throughout the major part of human history.[9] To think is to think aloud. Even in our own Antiquity to think and to speak did largely coincide [7]. If we look at ...