[Text and images for a talk on the virtual sublime at Ulster University, April 29, 2020. The talk itself became virtual due to global pandemic] A virtual sublime? Why ever not? The second question should guide any response to the confident dismissal of this or that as sublime, but it…
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The Egalitarian Sublime, Chapter 1
The argument from my 2019 book on the sublime is that the sublime always has effects leading to inequalities. Given here in final draft form, The first chapter of the book introduces a succinct version of the argument, its critical consequences and how an anarchist approach to the sublime can…
Continue ReadingDemocracy and Emergencies: Philosophy and Covid-19
Seven years before the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, Tom Sorell considered the conditions under which freedom might be restricted in a state of emergency, from the point of view of a ‘sober Hobbesian approach‘: The neo-Hobbesian framework I am outlining gives people legal latitude to become very attached to costume, literature,…
Continue ReadingSigns and Democracy
In this post I argue that signs are necessarily democratic. My reasoning depends on the definition of process signs from A Process Philosophy of Signs. It expands the meaning of democratic beyond a narrow political sense, before returning to the interdependence of two types of democracy: democracy of intervention and…
Continue ReadingRevisiting Style in Literary and Cultural Studies
My chapter ‘Do Signs have Styles?’ is now published in the collection Revisiting Style in Literary and Cultural Studies edited by Jasmin Herrmann, Moritz Ingwersen, Björn Sonnenberg-Schrank and Olga Ludmila Tarapata. Their volume is a fascinating selection of recent academic work on style. You can find a draft of my…
Continue ReadingLanguage and Process: Words, Whitehead and the World by Michael Halewood
If you are interested in process philosophy and language, I recommend Michael Halewood’s new book on Language and Process. The book is the first in my new series as editor (with Jeffrey A. Bell and Paul Livingston) for Edinburgh University Press, Intersections in Continental and Analytic Philosophy. We have other…
Continue ReadingThe Nostalgic Sublime
There is a strong argument against the idea of the nostalgic sublime. If the sublime leads to a drive to act in new ways, due to the enthusiasm released by simultaneous feelings of terror and attraction to a strange and inexplicable event, then the backward looking and stultifying qualities of…
Continue ReadingMetaphysics: Deleuze│Spencer-Brown
Some philosophers, struck with the recent discovery that no one set of metaphysical assumptions is necessary to communication, have fallen into the fallacy of thinking that we can communicate without any metaphysics at all… It is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of discoveries in 2000 years to…
Continue ReadingManifest Destiny and the Sublime – Part 3: Necessarily Dangerous
In this final blog on the sublime and manifest destiny I will argue that the sublime is always at risk of leading to the violence of manifest destiny. I’ll also give more precise definitions and respond to a series of objections, referring back to the connection of manifest destiny to…
Continue ReadingManifest Destiny and the Sublime – Part 2: Reversing Perspectives
Having made the case for the connection between the sublime, fascism and imperialism in Arnold Fanck’s film SOS Eisberg, Lill-Ann Körber reverses perspectives and considers ‘sublime icebergs today’ in the Greenlandic film Nuummioq. These icebergs do not fit the conventional sublime of overawing size and power, sought out by the…
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