The Political Sublime

Quinquennial Terror: Machiavelli’s Understanding of the Political Sublime

This paper argues that far from advocating fear of violence as a continuous source of civic provocation Machiavelli’s ideal ruler employs an aesthetic approach to civic violence; one that actually harms few citizens and moderates their fear with admiration through carefully considered psychological imperatives similar to those articulated two hundred years later in theories of the sublime. Such...

From the Sublime to the Political: Some Historical Notes

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 ...

Mendelssohn’s Theory of The Sublime

The present research addresses Mendelssohn’s theory of the sublime as one of the significant figures in German rationalist aesthetics. Our research obtains its significance primarily from the fact that there has been no research prior to this about Mendelssohn’s aesthetics in Persian; and secondly that even in the Continental philosophy researchers have often focused on other areas of Mendelsso...

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 ...