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  • The Sublime, Terror, and Human Difference
  • Matthew Harris
Christine Battersby . The Sublime, Terror, and Human Difference. London: Routledge, 2007. 226 pp. ISBN 978-0-415-14811-5. Paperback, $35.95.

The sublime is an increasingly important topic in the wake of September 11, the shock of which has transformed the way many people see and understand the world. In relation to the political ramifications of aesthetics, Battersby investigates modern understandings of the sublime in the works of Arendt, Derrida, and Lyotard, as well as taking in the development of the term's meaning, paying particular attention to the contributions of Kant, Burke, the German Romantics, and Nietzsche. Different approaches to the sublime are outlined using the latter, older set of thinkers, culminating in what could be interpreted as an inversion of the oversimplistic and now outdated view that construes Kant as a pioneer of equality and Nietzsche, of its opposite. The contrast between these views is used by Battersby as the locus within which she orients her own position in relation to current cultural and political issues encountered among the perspectives of modern thinkers concerning the sublime.

Battersby follows Arendt in "finding an implicit politics in aesthetic judgement" (206) and argues against interpretations of the sublime that either are ahistorical or set up a self/other dichotomy that is prejudiced, adversarial, and appropriative. Kant, often seen "as a simple defender of reason" (16), is reinterpreted as constructing a notion of the sublime that embodies the values of the "male, Westernised 'I'" (16). This understanding of the sublime excludes women and certain races, as well as not factoring in bodily—and thus historical—differences. Given that the Kantian self creates nature, the sublime is not an external event impinging on a passive self but, rather, "a kind of thought experiment" that involves interplay between the faculties of imagination and reason. The imagi nation breaks down "trying to grasp an infinity or a power that is too great for comprehension" (32), leaving reason to take the "step back towards order" (32), gaining pleasure through reasserting control by realizing one's limits, transcending the fear generated by failing to grasp infinity. Battersby thinks that Kant denied this pleasure of the reassertion of the "I" both to women and to certain races (especially "Orientals"). Concerning the former, "Kant seems happy to leave woman at the level of the 'asthenic,' responding to emotion in a merely passive manner . . . leaving them incapable of . . . full moral personhood" (63). It is appropriate, Kant thought, for the female sex "to be timorous in the face of physical danger" (61), for women have to be concerned for the safety of the children they are bearing: "As Nature entrusted to woman's (weiblichen) womb her most precious pledge, namely the species (Species) . . . so nature . . . planted this fear into woman's nature" (62, Battersby's italics, quoting Kant, Anthropology, 7/360 corr.; Battersby attempts to provide an in-text reference to an existing translation into English, but corr. indicates where she has "made corrections to the cited text" [ix]). Therefore Kant thought women should not transcend or attempt to transcend terror through the assertion of reason, even if they could. Although the language of the feminine (such as Isis) was used by Kant and the Romantics to express "male alliances with the sublime" (16) through the rise of reason, the sublime was debarred to fleshly females.

Unlike Kant and the male Romantics (such as Schiller and Schelling), Battersby sees Nietzsche as not couching the pleasure of the sublime in terms that pertain to transcending the limits of the senses and the imagination. In other words, Nietzsche reacted against a conception of the sublime that was ahistorical and anti-matter and appropriated to it what was foreign. Later in his career Nietzsche would reconfigure the sublime, removing the term's spiritual connotations and instead linking the sublime to a physiological conception of health. This Nietzschean sublime is "a product of bodily energies, rather than a question of the self and its transcendence" (183). Battersby thinks that Nietzsche's drive for "three hundred foregrounds" (BGE 284) rather than a "beyond" that negates what is foreign and "other," is a "less appropriative" approach...

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