Abstract
These are the words of Oskar Schell, the eleven-year-old protagonist of Jonathan Safran Foer’s 9/11 novel.2 He expresses perfectly what I thought to discuss and argue in the previous chapter, namely, that aesthetic sources are particularly suited to provide insight into a range of powerful and often seemingly contradictory emotions triggered by terrorism: fear of death and suffering, awe at the sheer magnitude of a traumatic event; anger at whoever or whatever caused the tragedy, relief for having survived it; hatred towards those deemed responsible, compassion for those who died or are in pain.
There are so many times when you know you’re feeling a lot of something, but you don’t know what the something is … Right now I am feeling sadness, happiness, anger, love, guilt, joy, shame, and a little bit of humor … My insides don’t match up with my outsides.
Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close1
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Notes
Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005), pp. 163, 201.
Many of the themes I present in this chapter have emerged in conversation with my colleague Martin Leet. I am grateful to him for his intellectual stimulation as well as for allowing me to draw on material from a collaborative project published as Roland Bleiker and Martin Leet, ‘From the Sublime to the Subliminal: Fear, Awe and Wonder in International Politics’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 34, No. 3, 2006, pp. 713–38.
W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘The Unspeakable and the Unimaginable: Word and Image in a Time of Terror’, ELH, Vol. 72, No. 2, 2005, p. 298.
Lean-Luc Nancy, ‘The Sublime Offering’, in Jean-François Courtine et al., Of the Sublime: Presence in Question, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1993), p. 25.
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), pp. 187–228;
Vanessa L. Ryan, ‘The Physiological Sublime: Burke’s Critique of Reason’, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 62, No. 2, 2001, pp. 265–79;
Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla, ‘Introduction’, in Ashfield and de Bolla (eds), The Sublime: a Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 1–16.
For instance, Jean-François Lyotard, ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’, Art Forum, Vol. 22, No. 8, 1984, pp. 36–43.
Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (Frankfurt: Surhkamp, 1974), p. 185.
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (London: Penguin, 2004), pp. 164–5.
Hugh J. Silverman, ‘Introduction’, in Silverman (ed.), Lyotard: Philosophy, Politics and the Sublime (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 1.
Karlheinz Stockhausen, cited in Georg Kateb, ‘A Life of Fear’, Social Research, Vol. 71, No. 4, 2004, p. 880.
For an excellent recent account that stresses this point see Barry Heard, Well Done, Those Men: Memoirs of a Vietnam Veteran (Melbourne: Scribe Publications, 2005).
Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare (New York: Basic Books, 1999), pp. 1, 18–19, 31, 59.
For various engagements with this issue see Anthony Burke, ‘Just War or Ethical Peace: Moral Discourses of Strategic Violence after 9/11’, International Affairs, Vol. 80, No. 2, 2004, pp. 332–3;
James Der Derian, Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001);
Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics, trans. G. Burchell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Douglas Klusmeyer and Astri Suhrke, ‘Comprehending “Evil”: Challenges for Law and Policy’, Ethics and International Affairs, Vol. 16, No. 1, 2002, pp. 27, 29, 35, 37;
Roxanne L. Euben, ‘Killing (for) Politics: Jihad, Martyrdom, and Political Action’, Political Theory, Vol. 30, No. 1, 2002, p. 4.
Richard Devetak, ‘The Gothic Scene of International Relations: Ghosts, Monsters, Terror and the Sublime after September 11’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 31, No. 4, 2005, pp. 621–44.
See also Jef Huysmans, ‘The Question of the Limit: Desecuritisation and the Aesthetics of Horror in Political Realism’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 27, No. 3, 1998, pp. 569–89.
See, for instance, Judith Butler, Precarious Life: the Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), pp. 1–18;
James Der Derian, ‘Decoding the National Security Strategy of the United States of America’, Boundary 2, Vol. 30, No. 3, 2003, pp. 19–27.
Al Gore, ‘The Politics of Fear’, Social Research, Vol. 71, No. 4, 2004, p. 779.
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 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002);
Stephen Chan, Out of Evil: New International Politics and Old Doctrines of War (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005).
Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, p. 185, as translated by James Creed in ‘The Critique of Judgment’, in Richard Kearney and David Rasmussen (eds), Continental Aesthetics Reader: Romanticism to Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 26.
See, for instance, Joanna Bourke, Fear: a Cultural History (London: Virago, 2005), pp. 357–91;
Joanne Zylinska, ‘Mediating Murder: Ethics, Trauma and the Price of Death’, Journal for Cultural Research, Vol. 8, No. 3, 2004, pp. 232–5.
See Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 111;
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 279;
David L. Eng, ‘The Value of Silence’, Theatre Journal, Vol. 54, No. 1, 2002, pp. 85–94.
Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), pp. 1, 120.
For elaborations on this point see Thomas Huhn, ‘The Kantian Sublime and the Nostalgia for Violence’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 53, No. 3, 1995, pp. 271–2;
Terrence Des Pres, ‘Terror and the Sublime’, Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 2, 1983, pp. 138–42;
Lyotard, ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’, p. 40; Charles H. Hinnant, ‘Schiller and the Political Sublime: Two Perspectives’, Criticism, Vol. 44, No. 2, 2002, pp. 123–6.
See, for instance, F. R. Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics: Political Philosophy Beyond Fact and Value (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), p. 203.
See also Tony Myers, Slavoj Zizek (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 26.
Linda M. G. Zerilli, ‘No Thrust, No Swell, No Subject?’ Political Theory, Vol. 22, No. 2, 1994, pp. 324–6;
Drucilla Cornell, ‘The Sublime in Feminist Politics and Ethics’, Peace Review, Vol. 14, No. 2, 2002, pp. 143–5;
Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 90.
For a contextual discussion see Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (New York: Basic Books, 1987).
Simon Critchley, Very Little … Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 100, 106.
Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Reinen Vernunft (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1996), pp. 28–9.
See Stephen K. White, Edmund Burke: Modernity, Politics, and Aesthetics (London: Sage, 1994), p. 89.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 5.
See Martin Leet, Aftereffects of Knowledge in Modernity: Politics, Aesthetics and Individuality (Albany, NY: SUNY, 2004).
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann (London: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 37.
Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
See also Roxanne L. Euben, ‘Travelling Theorists and Translating Practices’, in Stephen K. White and J. Donald Moon (eds), What is Political Theory? (London: Sage, 2004), pp. 145–73;
And Marguerite La Caze, ‘The Encounter between Wonder and Generosity’, Hypatia, Vol. 17, No. 3, Summer 2002, pp. 1–19.
For a very brief synopsis see Philip Merikle, ‘Subliminal Perception’, in Encyclopaedia of Psychology, vol. VII (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 497–9.
John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thought on Humans and Other Animals (London: Granta, 2003), p. 59.
William Connolly, Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
William Connolly, Why I am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 148.
Stephen White, Sustaining Affirmation: the Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 11–12.
Nicholas Mirzoeff, ‘What is Visual Culture?’, in N. Mirzoeff (ed.), The Visual Culture Reader (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 9.
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© 2009 Roland Bleiker
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Bleiker, R. (2009). The Sublime Nature of Global Politics. In: Aesthetics and World Politics. Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230244375_4
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