ABSTRACT
From the prohibition of the graven image to Lyotard’s stress on the ‘sign of history’, the sublime has always, in some way, wavered in its relation with the material. While the efforts of poststructuralism have been directed towards reducing the sublime to an effect of language, a number of post-Freudian critics, including Ronald Paulson, David Weiskel, Harold Bloom, and Neil Hertz, have attempted to refigure the sublime in psychological terms, despite Kant’s comments on the limitations of this approach (1987: 139). And in a related move, critics such as Christine Battersby, Patricia Yaeger, and Barbara Freeman, observing the gendered nature of the sublime, have approached the concept from a feminist perspective. But whether feminist, psychoanalytic, or deconstructive, what is common to each approach is the desire to trace the transcendental dimensions of the sublime to the effect of some ‘thing’. In the wake of these materialist assaults on the sublime, the return to a religious experience of the sublime would appear nonsensical.
