Abstract

This essay rereads the Kantian sublime both as an epitome of humanism and as a lesson for posthumanist thought. First, I unfold “On the Dynamically Sublime” as a failed dialectic in which “reason” seeks to sublate the power of “nature.” But Kant’s sublime is irreducible to the “Analytic,” I argue: it exemplifies a quasi-dialectical relation between human and nonhuman that recurs across the third Critique and defines its humanist teleology as a whole. Rereading Kant against that telos, and heeding the natural-historical concerns animating his project, I uncover paths towards a posthumanist or “natural-historical” sublime of “nature” as anarchic phusis.