PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

The Sublime is a framework for overwhelming emotions in a neuronal-physiologic und psychological sense. And since Burke's Enquiry it has been established as a constitutive part of the discourse of aesthetics. With Kant, his empirical exposition took a decisive transcendental turn, unfolding the dichotomy of the Mathematically and the Dynamically Sublime. Whereas in the former case, we are stunned by the incomprehensible vastness of impression, in the latter we enjoy the mighty, threatening and extinguishing power of nature once we ourselves are safe. Both feelings are generated by the cinema as a dispositive of artificial experience in which it becomes sensually evident why imagination fails in its ability to comprehend the whole. But although perceiving its diminutiveness, the subject masters this failure by raising itself up in being able to think - as opposed to imagining - the Greatness. Lyotard interprets this hubris as an act of self-empowerment, tending to extinguish the experience of nature. Therefore, his interest in the Sublime bears on abstract, amorphous art and lighting installations. This article, however, argues that especially with regard to the film as mass media, the categories and concepts of the sublime as deployed in the 18th century are still appropriate in order to grasp a major form of our aesthetic experience.