HITS: From Trauma and the Sublime to Radical Critique

摘要

Attempts to rethink the sublime after 1945 have increasingly relied on the psychoanalytic category of trauma and with good reason, given the centrality of terror in the aesthetics of the sublime. But if trauma calls for mourning, then after Auschwitz and Hiroshima the process of mourning itself must be radically politicised. For these qualitative events of genocidal violence ultimately point to the social antagonism at the core of capitalist modernity. Any serious theoretical encounter with trauma and the sublime, then, must converge with radical social critique. This article explores the social and political contexts of the sublime and reveals the aesthetic category as a category in transition open to change and shaped by history. These insights are then brought to bear on the predicaments of art and the paradoxes of sublime artistic representations of traumatic history after 1945.