Kant defines the sublime as an accord-discordant emotion of attraction and repulsion

Evidence

It has long been noted that Immanuel Kant’s discussion of the sublime involves a movement and a motion (“the mind feels itself moved”), indeed, an emotion, wherein not agreement (as in the beautiful), but a certain disagreement occurs (“accord-discordant” writes Gilles Deleuze) . “The satisfaction in the sublime does not so much involve a positive pleasure as admiration or respect, which rather deserves to be called negative pleasure” (Critique of judgment, section 23). This affective (affected and affecting) disagreement is itself carried within a general movement of dissymmetric distinctions and “divisions,” as Kant calls them, beginning with the sublime itself, which is divided between “the mathematically and the dynamically sublime” (section 24). The division of the mind, its movement, says Kant, “may be compared to a vibration, i.e. to a quickly alternating attraction toward, and repulsion from, the same object” (section 27). Hence, in the sublime, the “subjective purposiveness of the mental powers” (imagination and reason) is generated “by means of their conflict.” — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 594

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distills Kant’s doctrine that the sublime is a conflict-induced ‘negative pleasure’ of attraction and repulsion, not agreement.
• XREF: connects to: Kantian disinterested aesthetic pleasure descends from magical fetish worship — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 250