ABSTRACT
In evoking destructive powers in literature, both Jung and Lacan enter the disputed and ambivalent territory of the sublime. Variously located in art, psychology, philosophy and theology, this chapter compares the sublime in C. G. Jung and Jacques Lacan as they each struggle with the dismembering of meaning in literature. It is important that re-membering Dionysus recognizes the disciplines as dismembered parts, as parts. Moreover, by comparing Jung with Jacques Lacan, a contrasting theorist within the psychologies of the unconscious, the chapter distinguishes their distinct approaches towards the feminine and the non-human. Jung's late commentary within The Red Book is explicit about Elijah as an image of masculine logos needing a relationship with what is for him a feminine Eros. Jerome McGann notes a gendered division within literary modernism between notions of art as formal, structural and making, versus a female anti-aesthetic of telling, entailing an explicitly rhetorical view of language.
