![]() ![]() For writers of the seventeenth century, God was to be sought now not in orderliness, but in the scale and violence of creation. Very different from the stable, orderly and anthropocentric Ptolomaic cosmos which was the previously dominant model, these visions recast the universe as vast, formless, dynamic and violent, radically displacing humanity from its centre. Nicolson explains this monumental shift in sensibility in terms of a cosmographic revolution centring on new scientific theories: Galileo’s discovery that the earth does not lie at the centre of the solar system, or Descartes’ and Newton’s proposal of an infinite and centreless space, for example, or theories, such as those of Burnet or Agricola, about the earth’s surface being formed through processes of violent change. ![]() Hirst’s shark is more Steven Spielberg than it is Barnett Newman. This tradition of the commercialised sublime places Hirst as much in the company of the Hollywood blockbuster, with its concern for overawing its spectators, as it writes him into a history of the avant-garde. In this context, Hirst’s restaging of the Burkean sublime places him in a long tradition of the commercial exploitation of the tropes and themes of the sublime. Hirst, too, orients his production towards this maximum of affect. For Burke, such effects elicit ‘the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling’, 5 and it is in these terms that he defines the sublime. ![]() Hirst echoes Burke’s fascination, for example, with the body, mortality, violence, pain and power. It often appears as if he has taken Burke’s treatise on the sublime as a handbook for cultural production (which, of course, is exactly what it was). The sensibility for the sublime, it would seem to me, plays an important role in the formation of these images, and Hirst’s work is a locus where the histories of sublimity haunt contemporary culture. 4 If we find ourselves tangling with the sublime again today, the reason for this might be our embrace within a capitalist modernity whose form of capital has come once more to bear uncanny resemblances to the imperial, hyper-liquid and perplexingly spectral capital of the eighteenth century. 3 After all, parallel to the aesthetic revolution of the sublime ran the ‘financial revolution’ of the 1680s to 1750s. In such Freudian terms, haunting and Nachträglichkeit speak in turn of trauma and the trauma that I would argue lies at the heart of this haunting is the rise of the capitalist modernity in which, as Marx’s translators put it, ‘all that is solid melts into air’, a phrase itself redolent with alchemical notions of sublimation. Entwined as it is with a temporality of return, I understand the ‘contemporary sublime’ as a matter of our culture’s haunting by the history of sublimity. This insistent repetition of the sublime – like the return of the repressed – involves us in the temporality that Freud called Nachträglichkeit(sometimes translated as ‘afterwardsness’). ![]() Answering these questions is complicated by the peculiarly intermittent unfolding of the history the sublime, which has cycled repeatedly between being a key aesthetic or critical idea and becoming something seemingly irrelevant and outmoded, rising from its grave repeatedly, like those movie-monsters who are never quite killed off because they are already (un)dead. ![]()
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