Anselm Kiefer and the Sign of the Sublime

This article aims to show what happens when certain of Anselm Kiefer’s images are brought under the sign of the sublime – when those works are read as instances that confront us with the discursive limits of language and the transience of the present. Beginning with a consideration of the nature of negativity, the article then relates this thinking to questions surrounding historical experience, repetition, and memorialization. Taking thinkers such as Hegel, Benjamin, Adorno, Freud, and Lyotard as guides, it suggests that Kiefer’s work drives towards a specifically ruinous kind of negativity that, always at odds with its symbolic representation, forms at once an expression of and a counterforce to myth.