ABSTRACT
For a briefbut intensely traumatic moment, the Romantic sublime suspends personal identity. It induces “a sense of self-annihilation” according to Coleridge; Percy Shelley talks of a “trance sublime”; and Wordsworth believes its narcotic effects virtually place the body in a state of hibernation: “the motion of our human blood / Almost suspended, we are laid asleep / In body.” 1 This experience of self-loss has been variously interpreted. It has been politicised as a deprivation of civil liberty, gendered as a subversion of male selfhood and pathologised in terms of hysteria and obsessional neurosis. 2 Burke's physiological account, however, suggests a more pervasive impact on human subjectivity that reaches well beyond our political, sexual or psychological identities and that transforms how we see ourselves not just as individuals but also as biological beings. His sublime sends us back into survival mode. We become vacantly transfixed by the source of danger, our frontal cortex shuts down and we fall back on our amygdala—that primitive part of the brain where our fight-or-flight responses are elicited. Burke's sublime, it would seem, temporarily robs us of those qualities that are typically, if often wrongly, regarded as uniquely human, such as speech, a sense of personal identity, self-reflective consciousness and intentional agency. We become animals. That is also what the French naturalist Comte de Buffon suggested in his eighteenth-century encyclopaedic study Natural History. In his view, intoxicating bouts of panic and excitement are profoundly dehumanising and supply us with a rather accurate insight into the mental state of non-human animals:
We may, perhaps, acquire some notion of the consciousness of existence which animals possess, by reflecting on our own condition, when strongly occupied with any object, or so violently agitated with passion as to preclude every reflex idea of ourselves. This condition is expressed by saying, A man is absent, or out of himself. We are out of ourselves when fully immersed in actual sensations, and especially when these sensations are violent, rapid and leave the mind no leisure to reflect…. This condition, in which we have momentary impressions of our existence only, is the habitual state of animals; deprived of ideas, and furnished with sensations, they know not their existence, but they feel it. 3
