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. Anxiety: The Sublime as Trauma and Repetition The sublime is not only duplicitous in its paradox of pleasure and pain, but also in its ‘‘double mode’’ of a quieter and a more violent sublime: what John Baillie called the sedate sublime and the sublime mixed with pathos— and what Kant, of course, called the mathematical and the dynamical sublime .1 Usually, critics interpret these two varieties of the Kantian sublime experience as pertaining to theoretical or speculative and practical reason respectively. They can, however, also be elucidated by pointing to the eighteenth -century cult of the sublime as being a cult of empty and vast but also of wild and violent nature: nature that appears boundless, without end, and nature that appears threatening, without shelter; nature that cannot be grasped, and nature that cannot be controlled. In a Kantian setting, encounters with these spectacles of apparent otherness are only superficially fateful. Like the pool of Narcissus, they are in the end the reflections of a desiring subject. Indeed, these spectacles are but reifications of the boundless scope and stern autonomy of reason—real and unreal at the same time, inflated like the subject who, as Adorno once remarked, ‘‘puffs himself up as if in spite of everything, as the bearer of spirit, he were absolute. He thus becomes comical.’’2 He becomes a bloated reversal of his own fragility and nothingness. And yet—one always senses a fatal subtext in Kant’s third Critique threatening to undermine the grand gesture of self-delusion that decides the sublime , warring forces of pain and pleasure. This fatal subtext is, of course, the irresolvable breach between imagination and reason: the impassable bridge between the sensible and the supersensible. In Kant’s analytic, however, this breach is nonetheless passed over under the law of subjective finality—it is conveniently reversed into a flexible change in perspective. Lyotard, we have seen, tries to retrieve this subtext by rewriting the sublime affect in terms of the figure of the différend: an irresolvable conflict or opposition. Conversely, however, I would here like to redress the Kantian analytic by rereading the movements of the mathematical and dynamical   The Sublime as Trauma and Repetition sublime as movements of liminality: movements at the limit that do not accommodate an eventual breakthrough because they are split and halted by an internal duality. Thus, building on recent readings of the sublime in terms of trauma, I reconsider the dynamical sublime in terms of a traumatic encounter that cannot be retrieved and transcended. Not because the subject is invaded by an external presence that its mnemonic networks cannot handle , but because the boundaries between subject and object have dissolved: the latter is subjected to openness, to an absorption or total identification that briefly suspends the possibility of the subject. Aesthetically, such traumatic effects are only virtually possible: literally at one remove and mediated as special effects—framed, designed, created. Yet as I show, it is precisely this aspect of formality that allows us to understand the break of trauma as a break that requires a form or frame to effect its undoing in the first place. As the irruption of otherness, the traumatic feeds on the context it displaces; the one cannot be thought without the other. This is perhaps why, artistically, traumatic events may be impossible to capture as such, but at the same time the movement of trauma as a break in the context of ‘‘ordinary’’ experience can be most accurately performed. Indeed , as a dislocation of familiar, controlled practices of experience, trauma may defy representational limits and conventions yet at the same time parallel the disruptive movements of modern art that tend to scatter the registers of their very conditions of possibility. In view of this typical double bind, I have chosen to analyze the interruption of the traumatic as an aural event in a romantic musical work I have here dissociated considerably from its historical footing. I have done so for three reasons. First, since it is part of my project to involve romantic music in postmodern rewritings of the sublime , and in turn to show how our present-day conception of the postmodern sublime can be reshaped by looking at romantic music, it is necessary that I frame my rereading of a postmodern musically sublime with a romantic musical instance—and vice versa. Second, and as part of the above consideration, in my analysis I address (though never more than...

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