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Embers of the Sublime: Sacrifice and the Sensation of Existence

Moore, Gerald

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Contributors

Michael Syrotinski
Editor

Abstract

In The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation (2007), Daniel Heller-Roazen traces the history of what one might call a feeling of being alive, before drawing attention to twentieth-century philosophers' fascination with an apparent dimming of vitality. The work of Jean-Luc Nancy offers something of an exception to this, since what Nancy has called the “withdrawal of the gods” exposes us to an end of sensation that also renews it, by revealing “sense” to consist in our “sublime” and joyful exposure to nothing. In his reworking of the Kantian sublime, Nancy diagnoses sacrifice, in particular, as a disenchanting relic of metaphysics, which contaminates and attenuates any prospective encounter with our sublime finitude. But there is a crucial ambiguity over what this reworking entails. Nancy seems to imply the prospect of increasingly coming into contact with a sublime “évanouissement du sensible,” a fading away of the sensible encountered at the limits of experience. In saying this, he comes into contact with what Bernard Stiegler has described as a “catastrophe du sensible”—a vitiation of affect that is anything but sublime, and which, following the mass-murderer Richard Durn, he identifies with “the loss of the feeling of existing [la perte du sentiment d'exister].”

Citation

Moore, G. (2013). Embers of the Sublime: Sacrifice and the Sensation of Existence. The Senses and Society, 8(1), 37-49. https://doi.org/10.2752/174589313x13500466750886

Journal Article Type Article
Publication Date Mar 1, 2013
Deposit Date Sep 26, 2012
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal Senses and Society
Print ISSN 1745-8927
Electronic ISSN 1745-8935
Publisher Taylor and Francis Group
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 8
Issue 1
Pages 37-49
DOI https://doi.org/10.2752/174589313x13500466750886
Keywords Nancy, Stiegler, Sublime, Sensation, The sensible, Sacrifice.

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