Readers of the American Journal of Theology and Philosophy may be confused by James Williams's The Egalitarian Sublime: A Process Philosophy if they are looking at the “Process Philosophy” of the title as having something to do with Whitehead, Hartshorne, and their followers. None of the process thinkers familiar to the Anglo-American audience make their way into The Egalitarian Sublime. Among Process Philosophy's better known European expositors, Bergson is mentioned only once. Rather, Williams engages more recent continental and analytic discussions of the sublime along with the main traditions of the sublime running through European thought from Burke, Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. The mention of Bergson points to one connection between Williams and what Anglo-Americans normally think when they think of Process Philosophy and that is Gilles Deleuze. James Williams is a leading expositor of Deleuze in English having written several important expositions of Deleuze's thought. The lone endorsement on the book's fly jacket is from a Deleuzian with a Bergsonian bent, Keith Ansell Pearson. Despite all this, Deleuze is rarely mentioned in The Egalitarian Sublime. But he is immanent in the text.In 1988 Jean-François Courtine, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean-Luc Nancy, and others published a set of essays Du Sublime. The text was translated into English as Of the Sublime: Presence in Question (SUNY, 1993). The text made the provocative claim that the sublime has always been the secret truth of deconstruction and postmodernism in general. More recently the sublime has returned to discussions in the Anglo-American tradition. In 2012 Timothy M. Costelloe edited the influential set of essays: The Sublime from Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2012). Along with Emily Brady's The Sublime in Modern Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2013), these texts are examples of a dizzying variety of works on the sublime. Williams discusses many of these in The Egalitarian Sublime. In fact, my main criticism of The Egalitarian Sublime would be that no one can discuss so many thinkers as Williams attempts to cover in 180 pages. I cannot begin to mention them all.The book is divided into five chapters and a conclusion. In the first, Williams introduces us to the most important notion for his equalitarian sublime. It will need to be anarchic, which he defines as: multiple, creative, self-critical, and self-destructive (1). Williams claims an alternative, anarchist version of the sublime runs counter to its tendencies to inequality and that there should be many different sublimes. Each of these arise from the tension in almost all descriptions of the sublime claiming the sublime evokes in us both attraction and repulsion. This anarchist sublime should not only be critical of other versions of the sublime but of itself. Each sublime should be self-destructive, only a passing transformation, rather than the foundation for eternal values and permanence (180).In chapter 2, Williams points to the vagueness of the idea of the sublime. Emily Brady has argued that the idea of the sublime has lost its core meaning, that, like other “big” ideas, the sublime has become vague through its many transformations. Like many ageing concepts, the sublime is mired in its own history. Despite this, it is still a “big idea.” Its history has affected thought in ways of which we are not fully aware. And even though it is vague, it still matters and is taken to matter (8). Throughout The Egalitarian Sublime Williams introduces us to more than a few of its many versions. For example, in their discussion of the religious sublime in the Costelloe collection, Chignell and Haltman list four main types of religious sublime and each of these have many subdivisions (12).Williams seeks a sublime that is egalitarian. It aims at difference rather than division, multiplicity rather than hierarchy (17). To achieve this Williams thinks the best approach is what he labels “microcritique.” Microcritique is related to microhistory, the effort of historian to critique universal stories by the use on microanalysis, pointing exceptions to generalizations. To explain microcritique Williams borrows from film theory. Siegfried Kracauer's “theory of levels” claims no conclusion attained apropos a determinate sphere can be transferred automatically to the more general. The closeup, for example, fails to capture the fragmented detail of the individuals that it should apply to it (25). Williams does not adopt all the methods of microhistory. Microhistory is anchored by historical evidence and given impetus through speculative narratives. Microcritique employs many of the same procedures, but on conceptual material and problems. It resists the conclusion that the overview is sufficient (33).Chapter 3 focuses on Nietzsche. Williams sees Nietzsche as the most important thinker of the sublime (46). For Nietzsche the sublime is not determined by pain but by joy in moments of creative transformation (50). The creative sublime is an attack on conservative values. Williams maintains that where Edmund Burke's conservativism is a desire to protect rather than create Nietzsche's sublime is a destructive desire to create (55). This may not be altogether right about Burke's characterization of the beautiful and sublime. For Burke, beauty is delicate but weak, where the sublime is vital. Corey Robin, for example, has claimed that conservatives like Burke seek not to preserve the beautiful old regime, but to create a vital new “old regime.” Reactionary thinkers are critical of the old conservative regimes for being decadent. Thus, for Robins, Nietzsche is a link between Burke and later reactionaries like Hayek and Schumpeter. Reactionaries like Burke, de Maistre, Nietzsche, and later Hayek and Schumpeter seek a “new old regime” that is as hierarchical as the old, old regime but with different players, the geniuses. This is the meaning of Schumpeter's notion of creative destruction.1Williams is correct that Nietzsche sees “the goal of humanity cannot lie in its end but only in its highest exemplars” (56). The sublime is eternal in its creativity and change over the whole of time (60). Thus, the Nietzschean sublime is “untimely.” It arrives “too soon.” The madman declares the death of God is further than the farthest star and yet we have killed God ourselves. The sublime as truth is not available to all, only to sublime individuals, because the eternal truth is in creation, not a finished work or an idea to be consumed or assented to but creative destruction (62). For Nietzsche “Great human beings ‘redeem’ nature and evolution . . . not for the benefit of the majority” but for the joy of creation alone (73). This is hardly egalitarian, and Williams admits this. The preference for the radically inegalitarian Nietzsche is thoroughly Deleuzian and also necessary to Williams's claim that the egalitarian sublime is a process philosophy. Bergson may be a better choice. Bergson emphasized creativity, but the Bergsonian mystic sought equality, unlike the Nietzschean Übermensch.Chapter 4, “The Return to the Sublime,” begins with Derrida's Truth in Painting, which Williams calls the most thorough deconstruction of Kant's theory of the sublime (82). He notes many of the essays in Costelloe's collection return to Kant, but Williams, though he has reservations, favors Nietzsche (84). His preference for Nietzsche over Kant is to favor an anarchic over a universalist sublime. The problem with Kant is that his universality is static and prone to deconstruction (114). Williams argues Nietzsche associates the sublime with the process of transformations rather than the sublime revelation of the highest values of a given society and epoch. He argues Kantian universality establishes a hierarchy and refers to the famous example of the superiority of the artist who appreciates the sublimity of the Alps over the Savoyard peasant who does not. Williams spends considerable time discussing the pre-critical Observations on the Feeling of the Sublime and the Beautiful to illustrate the hierarchical character of Kantian universalism (169). There are Kant scholars like John Zammito who have argued for the strong presence the pre-critical sublime in the Critique of Judgment. But others like Brady (2013) have argued against this position. I think Brady is right, but this detour into the pre-critical writings is not necessary to Williams's claim. If anything, it weakens it. The sublime is always destructive of all universalist positions. A Kantian could say the same. This is the anarchic element inherent in theories of the sublime.The most interesting chapter is chapter 5: “Sublime Miseries.” In this chapter Williams discusses Kant and Burke but focuses on Schopenhauer, Slavoj Žižek, Lyotard, and Julia Kristeva for whom the sublime becomes a matter of misery (112).Burke and Kant famously described the sublime as both attractive and repellent, exciting feelings of pleasure and pain. Kant called the experience of the sublime a negative pleasure. The sublime has always been described in terms of shock, awe, terror, and pain. Williams notes how this description of horrifying power is used in propaganda and displays of power as a source of suppression. This is how it makes its way into conservative thinkers. Burke speaks of martial displays of splendor and power as examples of the sublime. The sublime, as a value, has given some reasons to harm others, other creatures, and even things, when they are judged to be against it, or the values associated with it (108). The sublime does not lead us to any kind of empathy; rather, it smashes any kind of sensus communis. The sublime becomes a kind of sense of power contributing to order and disorder.Brady has argued the sublime for Kant gives us both a respect for nature but also returns us to our freedom, transcending nature. Humanity, according to Kant, in its freedom can overcome the sublime in us. For Kant this is the human superiority to nature that Pascal spoke of in his metaphor of the thinking reed. Humans, in their freedom, rise above nature. Williams is critical of both Brady's attempt at a Kantian environmental sublime. It creates a hierarchy where the human is prioritized over nature (120). Despite the power of Schopenhauer's analysis of the human condition, he follows Kant in this respect. Humanity may be reduced to Nichts by the sheer vastness of the universe, but, as with Kant and like Pascal's thinking reed, we have the pleasure of knowing we are “beyond” nature (122). We know we are crushed by the universe. Thus, Schopenhauer doesn't really take us beyond Burke and Kant who say we relate to the sublime through terror and delight (125).At this point Williams gives us what I think is the central thesis of the book. Though we will never escape the sublime, equality is a political value that is necessary to critique the sublime.There is no sublime purity, only a construction in history, with varying degrees of negative and positive effects that should be subservient to a politics of equality. The sublime should be a multiplicity, rather than the single glue holding together an ecological aesthetics. Each path through each strand of the sublime should always include self-critique and self-destruction. The sublime is too deceptive, confused, and dangerous to be taken as the foundation for a politics or aesthetics with general, let alone universal, claims (128).Williams moves to Žižek and Kristeva. His discussion of Žižek is a Deleuzian takedown of a witty, but cynical thinker. Žižek, contra Schopenhauer, says that we don't even get to think that we have seen the great truth of our nothingness. We are much more confused than that. We are not the thinking reed transcending nature. The sublime is not a negative pleasure, but rather, a negative misery. There is no redemption in sublime misery whereby its negativity could be turned into a positive value (135). Sublime power is negation. Williams quotes Tarrying with the Negative: the sublime is “the divine power of absolute negativity (145). He views Kristeva's abject more positively. It is a process philosophy. No individual emerges but rather a process of transformations. There is no closure, just joy and transformation. The interaction with the sublime is a process (152).The final chapter, “Defining the Egalitarian Sublime,” returns to the idea that the egalitarian sublime depends on these systematic political forms of equality (156). The sublime needs to be subordinated to statements of equality like the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. An egalitarian sublime is anarchic and demands multiple sublimes. This is maintained through commitment to political principles. He writes: “A lot turns here on the ‘we’ of the statements” (163). But this should also include moving away from human-centered monisms. The Egalitarian Sublime is a process philosophy because the sublime is creative, but also negative. It is the negativity of the sublime that liberates from the oppressive strictures of hierarchical systems. Williams takes up this problem in his conclusion.In the conclusion, “The Sublime as Crisis,” Williams writes that his aim was to consider whether the sublime had even been or could be reconstructed to be egalitarian. He concludes that this goal was too optimistic. The uses of the sublime have led to deep inequalities. The sublime divides (177). But neither can we rid ourselves of the sublime. The sublime is a crisis, but also a response to a crisis. The process character of the sublime calls into question previously held values. This creates a crisis, but here is why an egalitarian sublime must be a process philosophy. The sublime should be multiple, in the strong sense that there are many different sublimes, each one understood as a source of a different and transformative value, stemming from a tension between attraction and repulsion. This anarchist sublime should also be critical, not only of other versions of the sublime with their unequal, repressive, and violent tendencies, but also self-critical, seeking out those same negative aspects within itself. However, since each sublime should be self-destructive, only a passing transformation, rather than the foundation for eternal values and permanence, equality must be the condition of the sublime. Williams concludes, “The sublime must be secondary to political and social equality, understood as the aim of making societies equal in rights, freedom and opportunity. Equality is a condition for the sublime and not the other way round. Egalitarian philosophies should always be wary of the sublime. It will always undo their aims by introducing new kinds of division and distinction” (180).The Egalitarian Sublime: A Process Philosophy is an important work. It not only summarizes important historical and contemporary theories of the sublime; it offers an alternative theory of the sublimes that helps to rescue the “big idea” from the vagueness associated with its multiplicity.