ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how three key postmodernist thinkers, namely, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Jean-Francois Lyotard, reconceptualise the Immanuel Kantian sublime in relation to the visual arts. Derrida's deconstruction of the Kantian sublime hinges on a fleeting reference in the third Critique to the concept of the parergon. The work of Derrida's friend and colleague Gilles Deleuze maintains an uneasy relationship with Kantian thought. For Deleuze, the deregulation of human identity reaches its apogee with the Critique of Judgement. Lyotard's distinction between modern and postmodern sublimity is relevant also to the visual arts. In 'After the Sublime: The State of Aesthetics', a paper delivered towards the end of his career, Lyotard approaches the 'something happens' in terms of the relation between form and matter. Whether demonstrated in the postmodern aesthetics of Barnett Baruch Newman, or in the refusal of the signs of history to succumb to narrative representation, the resistance of the sublime is ultimately political.
