From the sublime to the subliminal: Fear, awe and wonder in international politics

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

Volumn 34, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 713-737

  Bleiker, Roland ^a   Leet, Martin ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND   (Australia)

^b The University of Brisbane   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33748914708     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/03058298060340031201     Document Type: Article

References (92)

1. Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005), 163, 201.
2. W.J.T. Mitchell, 'The Unspeakable and the Unimaginable: Word and Image in a Time of Terror', ELH 72 (2005): 298.
3. Lean-Luc Nancy, 'The Sublime Offering', in Of the Sublime: Presence in Question, eds. Jean-François Courtine, et al., trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 25.
4. For discussions of the differences between Burke and Kant, and about how both of them have been subjectively appropriated by subsequent authors, see, for instance, Paul Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom: Essays on Aesthetics and Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 187-228;
5. Vanessa L. Ryan, 'The Physiological Sublime: Burke's Critique of Reason', Journal of the History of Ideas 62, no. 2 (2001): 265-79;
6. Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla, 'Introduction', in The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, eds. Ashfield and de Bolla (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1-16.
7. For instance, Jean-François Lyotard, 'The Sublime and the Avant-Garde', Art Forum 22, no. 9 (1984): 36-43.
8. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), 185.
9. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (London: Penguin, 2004), 164-5.
10. For an exploration of the relationship between the Gothic and the sublime and their residues in international politics see Richard Devetak, 'The Gothic Scene of IR', Review of International Studies 41, no. 4 (2005): 621-43.
11. Hugh J. Silverman, 'Introduction', in Lyotard: Philosophy, Politics and the Sublime, ed. Silverman (New York: Routledge, 2002), 1.
12. Karlheinz Stockhausen, cited in Georg Kateb, 'A Life of Fear', Social Research 71, no. 4 (2004): 880.
13. For insightful engagements with this issue, advanced from multiple vantagepoints, see Anthony Burke, 'Just War or Ethical Peace: Moral Discourses of Strategic Violence after 9/11', International Affairs 80, no. 2 (2004): 332-3;
14. James Der Derian, Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network (Boulder: Westview Press, 2001);
15. Debbie Lisle, 'Gazing at Ground Zero: Tourism, Voyeurism and Spectacle', Journal for Cultural Research 8, no. 1 (2004): 3-21;
16. Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics, trans. G. Burchell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
17. 'You are either with us or against us', CNN, 6 November 2001.
18. Douglas Klusmeyer and Astri Suhrke, 'Comprehending "Evil": Challenges for Law and Policy', Ethics and International Affairs 16, no. 1 (2002): 27, 29, 35, 37;
19. Roxanne L. Euben,'Killing (for) Politics: Jihad, Martyrdom, and Political Action', Political Theory 30, no. 1 (2002): 4.
20. See, for instance, Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 1-18;
21. James Der Derian, 'Decoding the National Security Strategy of the United States of America', boundary 2 30, no. 3 (2003): 19-27.
22. Al Gore, 'The Politics of Fear', Social Research 71, no. 4 (2004): 779.
23. For two of many analyses of this issue see Ken Booth and Tim Dunne, eds., World in Collision: Terror and the Future of Global Order (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002);
24. Stephen Chan, Out of Evil: New International Politics and Old Doctrines of War (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005).
25. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, 185, as translated by James Creed in 'The Critique of Judgment', in Richard Kearney and David Rasmussen, eds., Continental Aesthetics: Romanticism to Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 26.
26. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 101, 127, 166.
27. See, for instance, Joanna Bourke, Fear: A Cultural History (London: Virago, 2005), 357-91;
28. Joanne Zylinska, 'Mediating Murder: Ethics, Trauma and the Price of Death', Journal for Cultural Research 8, no. 3 (2004): 232-5.
29. See Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 111;
30. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 279;
31. David L. Eng, 'The Value of Silence', Theatre Journal 54, no. 1 (2002): 85-94.
32. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 91-2.
33. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 1, 120.
34. For elaborations on this point see Thomas Huhn, 'The Kantian Sublime and the Nostalgia for Violence', The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53, no. 3 (1995): 271-2;
35. Terrence Des Pres, 'Terror and the Sublime', Human Rights Quarterly 5, no. 2 (1983): 138-42;
36. Lyotard, 'The Sublime and the Avant-Garde', 40;
37. Charles H. Hinnant, 'Schiller and the Political Sublime: Two Perspectives', Criticism 44, no. 2 (2002): 123-6.
38. Jean-François Lyotard, 'Note on the Meaning of the Word "Post" and answering the question "What is Postmodernism?"', in, Continental Aesthetics Reader: Romanticism to Postmodernism, eds. Richard Kearney and David Rasmussen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 368.
39. See, for instance, F.R. Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics: Political Philosophy Beyond Fact and Value (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). Meanwhile a very extensive body of postmodern, poststructural, feminist and postcolonial approaches to international relations has drawn attention to the contingent and inherently political nature of representation. We would like to acknowledge our debt to this literature, even though we are, for lack of space, unable to engage it here in detail.
40. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 203.
41. See also Tony Myers, Slavoj Žižek (London: Routledge, 2003), 26.
42. On the crucial but largely neglected role of emotions in political life see, for instance, Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004);
43. Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003);
44. Robert C. Solomon, The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993).
45. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 107.
46. Ibid., 105.
47. Kant, cited in Nancy, 'The Sublime Offering', 49.
48. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), xxvi, 15.
49. See W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994);
50. and What do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005).
51. Kate Nesbitt, 'The Sublime and Modern Architecture: Unmasking (an Aesthetic) of Abstraction', New Literary History 26, no. 1 (1995): 95-110.
52. Lyotard, 'The Sublime and the Avant-Garde', 37-40.
53. Nancy, 'The Sublime Offering', 50.
54. See, for instance, Roland Bleiker, 'The Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 30, no. 3 (2001): 509-33;
55. 'Why, then, is it so Bright? Towards an Aesthetics of Peace at a Time of War', Review of International Studies 29, (2003): 387-400;
56. 'Learning from Art, Global Society: Journal of Interdisciplinary International Relations 17, no. 4 (2003): 415-28;
57. 'Art After 9/11', Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 31, no. 1 (2006): 77-99;
58. Aesthetics and World Politics (Palgrave, forthcoming 2007);
59. and Martin Leet, Aftereffects of Knowledge in Modernity: Politics, Aesthetics and Individuality (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004).
60. Linda M.G. Zerilli, 'No Thrust, No Swell, No Subject?', Political Theory 22, no. 2 (1994): 324-6;
61. Drucilla Cornell, 'The Sublime in Feminist Politics and Ethics', Peace Review 14, no. 2 (2002): 143-5;
62. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 90.
63. For a contextual discussion see Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (New York: Basic Books, 1987).
64. Simon Critchley, Very Little... Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (London: Routledge, 1997), 100, 106.
65. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, 'Vorrede zur zweiten Auflage' (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1996), 28-9.
66. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, 189, translated as 'The Critique of Judgment', 27.
67. See Stephen K. White, Edmund Burke: Modernity, Politics, and Aesthetics (London: Sage, 1994), 89.
68. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 5.
69. See Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics.
70. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann (London: Penguin Books, 1984), 37.
71. Ibid.
72. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 6.
73. Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
74. See also Roxanne L. Euben, 'Travelling Theorists and Translating Practices', in, What is Political Theory?, eds. Stephen K. White and J. Donald Moon (London: Sage, 2004), 145-73.
75. Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life, 34.
76. Ibid., 4.
77. Ibid., 18-28.
78. Ibid., 28.
79. For a very brief synopsis see Philip Merikle, 'Subliminal Perception' in Encyclopaedia of Psychology, vol. VII (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 497-9.
80. John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thought on Humans and Other Animals (London: Granta, 2003), 59.
81. Ibid., 62.
82. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 44.
83. William Connolly, Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
84. Critchley, Very Little... Almost Nothing, 113.
85. William Connolly, Why I am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 148.
86. Stephen White, Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 11-12.
87. Nicholas Mirzoeff, 'What is Visual Culture?', in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Mirzoeff (London: Routledge, 1998), 9.
88. George Kateb, 'Aestheticism and Morality: Their Cooperation and Hostility', Political Theory 28, no. 1 (2000): 6.
89. Morton Schoolman, Reason and Horror: Critical Theory, Democracy, and Aesthetic Individuality (New York: Routledge, 2001), 4.
90. Gray, Straw Dogs, 61.
91. There are, meanwhile, numerous and highly convincing critiques of codified ethics in international politics. Our task here is not to engage them, but for a text that condenses many of the key contributions see David Campbell and Michael J. Shapiro, eds., Rethinking Ethics and World Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
92. See Fear and Trembling, trans. A. Hannary (London: Penguin, 1985).