ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a reading of the sublime in Kant, Schiller, and the early Schelling. Tracing this development helps place Freud within the aesthetic tradition to which Schelling belongs, one that draws heavily on the idea of the unconscious in order to protect rather than to deny freedom. The suggestion is that Schelling’s departure from Kant here prefigures the psychoanalytic worldview, where freedom is imagined no longer as a form of repression but rather as a radical opening up, as an activity where the limits between subject and world are continuously recreated. By way of Schelling, the Kantian sublime is transformed into the Freudian uncanny, marking the possibility for a metaphysics that can ground psychoanalysis.
