The Kantian sublime’s emotional dynamics frame the Jew-Islam political-religious comparison

Evidence

I want to argue here that Kant’s “Analytic of the Sublime” articulates a disparate, emotional, and conflictual unity (an “accord discordant”) that will eventually lead us to G. W. F. Hegel and beyond. This argument should also illuminate a series of conflicts (active or dormant) and comparisons that articulate themselves in the highly particular configurations that occupy me here between Judaism (“the Jewish people”) and Islam (“Mohammedanism”), religion and politics, as they relate to yet another series, this time of affects and emotions. Here, the Kantian sublime, and most particularly “enthusiasm” and “pride,” will point toward political and religious feelings (the “absence of affection,” Affiktlosigkeit, among them) which may or may not bear a necessary relation to sublimity. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 596

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s broader project of reading Europe’s construction of ‘the enemy’ through Jews and Muslims as conceptual-ideological twins.