Abstract

This project examines possibilities for preserving the potential for both change and accountability by exploring articulations of sublimation, sublation and the sublime in the context of debates about the relation between ethical and aesthetic judgment. Bringing rhetoric to bear in assessing aesthetics features the dialectical tension between invention and judgment. The theories considered here resist determinate resolution, and illustrate the value of retaining openness to contingency. Sublimation, where individual desire takes on social form, represents one term used to theorize mediations between individual and social. Focusing on sublation highlights the possibility of social change, which rests on individual change. Utopian visions of social transformation appeal to radically different relations, subject-positions, and social orders that cannot be represented in conventional terms and are thus sublime. Sublation, sublimation, and the sublime thus lie at the core of attempts to understand creativity and the possibility of motivating and evaluating social change. Attempts at theorizing possibilities for social change face a seeming paradox: we must change the individual to change society, but we cannot change individuals until we change the conditions of subject-formation. Of course, social conditions change all the time---but in large part through contingency. Later chapters examine different treatments of various relations between individual and social, change and stability, accepted commonplaces and incongruous perspectives. They do so by assessing Homer's Odyssey, Kantian aesthetics, social contract narratives of the self, and by comparing Marx, Freud, and Adorno in their concern for sublation, sublimation and the sublime. The value of such analysis lies in promoting a sense of wonder while also preserving appreciation for commonplaces and practical wisdom