The Revolutionary Sublime

Abstract

In The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton suggests that the extraordinary precedence of the aesthetic in European philosophy illustrates that, when speaking of art, one is also speaking of the struggle for political hegemony.1 When studying aesthetic judgment, one examines a privileged mode of cognition that is also related to the political. I have analyzed elsewhere the relationship between the ideology of the Terror during the French Revolution and the Kantian sublime.2 I would like to consider further the extraordinary appeal of the sublime for Revolutionary thought. I will not discuss influences. Rather, I will argue that the same philosophical and ideological concerns that produced the Critique of Judgment also framed Revolutionary reflections, more particularly Robespierre's, on the nature and role of the sublime in the creation of the new State. From this perspective, Kant's Analytic of the Sublime provides us with an essential key to the understanding of political thought during the French Revolution. Specifically, it helps us understand several recurring Revolutionary concerns: the injunction, repeated daily at the Assembly and in the newspapers, to tear away the veil of conspiracy, to unmask the traitors; and the desire to create a sublime State. At a deeper level, the Revolutionaries' obsession with the sublime reveals an anxiety about the nature of representation, a concept that had been radically challenged in Kant's Critique of Judgment. I will argue that the representation at stake in this case is, in fact, the very principle of political representation in its complex relationship to the (sublime) idea of the general will.