Description
We call sublime those things and experiences supposed to be the very best. But what if the best actually leads to inequality and exploitation? Williams critiques the sublime over its long history and in recent returns to sublime nature and technologies. Deploying a new critical method that draws on process philosophy, he shows how the sublime has always led to inequality. This holds true even where it underpins ideas of cosmopolitan enlightenment, and even when refined by Burke, Kant, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Zizek. Against the unjust legacies of the traditional sublime, James Williams defends a new, anarchist sublime: multiple, self-destructive and temporary; opposed to any idea of highest value to be shared by all but always imposed on the powerless.
Author: James Williams
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: 05/26/2021
Pages: 208
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.66lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.44d
ISBN13: 9781474439121
ISBN10: 1474439128
BISAC Categories:
- Philosophy | Political
- Philosophy | Aesthetics
- Philosophy | Social
About the Author
James Williams is Honorary Professor of Philosophy and member of the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalization at Deakin University. He has published widely on contemporary French philosophy and is currently working on a critique of the idea of extended mind from the point of view of process philosophy.