Abstract

Properly speaking, the sublime “cannot be contained in any sensible form, but concerns only ideas of reason”. Moreover, for the sublime to take place—Kant affirms—we must abandon sensibility. To some extent, the sublime is a negation of the sensible world. Therefore, in contrast to Kant’s approach, I will focus instead on the non-sublime aspect of the sublime, i.e., that sensible element that plays a critical role in the experience but is not considered worthy of the label “sublime”. After all, it is the Analytic of the Sublime that highlights what it tries to overshadow: the intractable excess of the sensible realm and imagination’s non-subservience to the mandates of reason. Unlike the properly sublime, art is not intended to serve a shielding function (the sublime comfort us by reassuring us of the purposiveness of our moral vocation); rather, like the non-sublime, it promotes the disruption of what is well formed.