ABSTRACT
Bion’s work is a resounding example of intertextuality. It makes recourse to a multiplicity of thematic and methodological premises that enable him to open up new fields of experience and to produce surprising constellations of meaning. The aesthetic of the sublime established itself in Europe in 1674 with Nicolas Boileau’s translation of the treatise On the Sublime, written between the end of the first century BCE and the first decades of the next. Theorists of the sublime have drawn up a rich and detailed catalogue of places and situations that arouse the feeling of the sublime in art, identifying it in the ‘highest’ points that offer the spectacle of nature. Edmund Burke theorizes the effect of the sublime as a function of the distance between subject and object. As a theory of unison, the aesthetic of the sublime is an extraordinary model for showing precisely how Bion imagines the development of the psyche.
