Artigo Revisado por pares

Reading the Lisbon Earthquake: Adorno, Lyotard, and the Contemporary Sublime

2004; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 17; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/yale.2004.0007

ISSN

1080-6636

Autores

Gene Ray,

Tópico(s)

Postmodernism in Literature and Education

Resumo

The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 famously shook the metaphysical optimism of Europe's leading philosophers. Immanuel Kant would eventually manage its threat in "The Analytic of the Sublime" of his 1790 Critique of Judgment. In the twentieth century, human-inflicted catastrophes have supplanted the natural disaster as the source of sublime feeling. Auschwitz, however, is the name of an "event" that permits no compensatory retreat to an ostensible human dignity and is not recuperable within a transcendental tale of progress and greater good. The essay traces the qualitative transformation of the sublime across the texts of Kant, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and Jean-Fran�ois Lyotard.

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