Kant’s sublime frames aesthetic feeling as subjection to commanding violence

Evidence

Nowhere is this clearer, perhaps, than in the recurring descriptions of the Gewalt (force, violence, and dominion) exercised by reason over imagination and sensibility. 18 The feeling of the sublime, Kant writes, is “a feeling that the imagination is deprived and robed of its freedom,” accompanied, among other things, by a feeling of”the cause to which it is subjected” (section 29). — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 602

Categorization

• XREF: The idea that aesthetic experience is a mode of subjection resonates with the book’s larger meditation on submission (‘faithful resignation’) as the political-religious posture both Jews and Muslims are assigned. — connects to: Contemplative serenity in prose conceals a hidden violence of authority. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 113; Kantian disinterested aesthetic pleasure descends from magical fetish worship — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 250; Modern art’s drive came from Kant’s gap between the conceivable and presentable — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 74 (+1 more)