The Sublime In Everyday Life

Notions of the sublime are most often associated with the extraordinary, and include the intra-psychic, high-cultural and exceptional occurrences of elation and exaltation as part of the experience. Using psychoanalytic and aesthetic theories, this book aims to revitalise the sublime by re-evaluating its significance for contemporary life and, in a unique and fascinating endeavour, opens up a space that explores the sublime in the ordinary, everyday and quotidian. Through the exploration of familiar (i.e. love, death, art and nature) and unfamiliar (pornography, education and politics) threads of the sublime experience, this book posits the sublime as invoking an ordinary human response which contains minute, inter-psychic, inclusive and even mass-media cultural elements, and carries within it therapeutic and political potential. It explores loving and caring, as well as hateful, traumatic and destructive encounters with the sublime, demonstrating how it can overflow and destabilise our psychological and social symbolic structures and expose their fictional and constructed nature, but also shows it as something we can engage with in order to re-create and heal ourselves, above and beyond what any 'given' form of reality can offer us. Demonstrating the urgent need to understand the sublime as something that is immanent in our everyday life, a source of energy and inspiration that can be invoked to support our mental health and well-being, this book will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and art therapists, as well as scholars and students of philosophy and popular culture.

An important work offering a viable theory for the concept of "Sublime" in philosophy. This is a work of quite unusual philosophical interest, original and deeply insightful. Dr. Tsang argues on the one hand that sublimity is not a property of objects regarded as sublime, but belongs to our construal of objects, while on the other he also argues that when we so construe an object we are giving expression to some limit to our life, not an external barrier, but a limit internal to it. But what lies at the limit cannot be represented. So the sublime can be evoked by language, but not represented in it. This leads Dr. Tsang on to a philosophical analysis of evocation and of the evocative possibilities of a sublime object. What he says about evocation presupposes and requires for its completion an account of how affective elements are involved in the experience of the sublime and what he claims here is that there is no one feeling or type of feeling involved in the experience of the sublime, but that a wide range of different feelings may be involved on different occasions. The quality of the feeling is closely bound up with the character of the experience of the sublime as a limit-experience. Finally Dr. Tsang considers the cultural and social context of experiences of the sublime, both what is universally recognized as sublime, because bound up with the general conditions of human life, and what is specific to particular cultural and social contexts. He then moves to the conclusion to examine the relationship of the sublime to human willing. As a postscript there is an excellent treatment of Kant's theory of the sublime.

In the last twenty years the concept of the quotidien, or the everyday, has been prominent in contemporary French culture and in British and American cultural studies. This book provides the first comprehensive analytical survey of the whole field of approaches to the everyday. It offers, firstly, a historical perspective, demonstrating the importance of mainstream and dissident Surrealism; the indispensable contribution, over a 20-year period (1960-80), of four major figures: Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes, Michel de Certeau, and Georges Perec; and the recent proliferation of works that investigate everyday experience. Secondly, it establishes the framework of philosophical ideas on which discourses on the everyday depend, but which they characteristically subvert. Thirdly, it comprises searching analyses of works in a variety of genres, including fiction, the essay, poetry, theatre, film, photography, and the visual arts, consistently stressing how explorations of the everyday tend to question and combine genres in richly creative ways. By demonstrating the enduring contribution of Perec and others, and exploring the Surrealist inheritance, the book proposes a genealogy for the remarkable upsurge of interest in the everyday since the 1980s. A second main objective is to raise questions about the dimension of experience addressed by artists and thinkers when they invoke the quotidien or related concepts. Does the 'everyday' refer to an objective content defined by particular activities, or is it best thought of in terms of rhythm, repetition, festivity, ordinariness, the generic, the obvious, the given? Are there events or acts that are uniquely 'everyday', or is the quotidien a way of thinking about events and acts in the 'here and now' as opposed to the longer term? What techniques or genres are best suited to conveying the nature of everyday life? The book explores these questions in a comparative spirit, drawing new parallels between the work of numerous writers and artists, including André Breton, Raymond Queneau, Walter Benjamin, Michel Leiris, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault, Stanley Cavell, Annie Ernaux, Jacques Réda, and Sophie Calle.

This book explores the aesthetics of the objects and environments we encounter in daily life. Thomas Leddy stresses the close relationship between everyday aesthetics and the aesthetics of art, but places special emphasis on neglected aesthetic terms such as ‘neat,’ ‘messy,’ ‘pretty,’ ‘lovely,’ ‘cute,’ and ‘pleasant.’ The author advances a general theory of aesthetic experience that can account for our appreciation of art, nature, and the everyday.

Applying Aesthetics to Everyday Life surveys current debates in the field of everyday aesthetics, examining its history, methodology and intersections with cognate research areas. Lisa Giombini and Adrián Kvokacka bring together an international team of renowned scholars who are shaping the present and future of the discipline. They demonstrate how the historical origins of everyday aesthetics emerges across the history of Western aesthetic thought, from Renaissance thinkers to the modern German philosophers Baumgarten, Kant and Heidegger. Chapters shed light on the field's methodological underpinnings, tracing its theoretical foundations back to epistemology and ethics and assess the potential of everyday aesthetics as a theoretical tool. They reveal its interdisciplinary nature and how it assists various fields of inquiry, including environmental and urban aesthetics, conservation ethics and the philosophy of art. Through fresh explorations of its origins, background and contemporary developments, this collection advances a new definition of everyday aesthetics and provides a cutting edge reflection on the world we inhabit today.

This biography of statesman Edmund Burke (1730–1797), covering three decades, is the first to attend to the complexity of Burke’s thought as it emerges in both the major writings and private correspondence. David Bromwich reads Burke’s career as an imperfect attempt to organize an honorable life in the dense medium he knew politics to be.

Unique and fascinating account of English working-class life at the turn of the nineteenth century by celebrated historian Carolyn Steedman.

Theoretically innovative and empirically wide-ranging, this book examines the complex relations between technoscience and everyday life. It draws on numerous examples, including both mundane technologies such as Velcro, Post-it notes, mobile phones and surveillance cameras, and the esoterica of xenotransplantation, new genetics, nanotechnology and posthuman society. Technoscience and Everyday Life traces the multiple ways in which technoscience features in and affects the dynamics of everyday life, and explores how the everyday influences the course of technoscience. In the process, it takes account of a range of core social scientific themes: body, identity, citizenship, society, space, and time. It combines critique and microsocial analysis to develop several novel conceptual tools, and addresses key contemporary theoretical debates on posthumanism, social-material divides, process philosophy and complexity, temporality and spatiality. The book is a major contribution to the sociology of everyday life, science and technology studies, and social theory.