SUBLIME CORONAVIRUS
With the arrival of Covid-19 human history has finally collided with nature.
As I’m interested in the concept of the sublime, I can but see the current crisis through the lens of the ‘negative sublime’. The concept of the sublime describes the experience of standing on a borderline, threshold, or boundary and therefore finding oneself in an unfamiliar and vulnerable position.
Etymologically, the term derives from the Latin sublimis (‘elevated,’ ‘lofty’), from the preposition sub, meaning ‘up to,’ and limen (the threshold, surround, or lintel of a doorway), and it also relates to limes - a boundary or limit. The concept of the sublime is therefore an attempt to map experiences characterized by bodily displacement and confusion onto phenomena that are obscure, complex, immense, and awe-inspiring, onto cognitive and emotional states associated with fear and terror. The sublime has two valences – positive and negative. In its positive mode, the sublime describes a destabilizing but invigorating experience of transcendence. In its negative mode, by contrast, the experience is one in which we are humbled and diminished by an encounter with something overwhelming. Both valences explore the role of pain rather than pleasure within the economy of the self.
The concept of the sublime is therefore an attempt to address humanity’s troubled relationship with nature from a secular point of view. Through drawing attention to existential limits va analogies to expansive horizons, stormy oceans, immense geological formations, and diffuse and indistinct atmospheres, the sublime is about the transformation of ontological situations caused by extreme situations.
The Covid-19 pandemic can be usefully described in terms of the ‘negative sublime’. Seeing it in this context is significant not least because we thought we had successfully divested nature of its troubling sublimities. We thought the sublime in nature was a hackneyed cliché associated with the vacation snap-shot and advertising copy. We thought it had been completely assimilated to mass culture, and become an ersatz sublimity designed to stimulate a jaded consumer. The now all too familiar images of ‘sublimity’ were routinely exploited to sell everything from new cars to male perfumes, and it features harmlessly in countless ‘end-of-the-world’ and sci-fi movie entertainments. The domestication and commodification of the sublime as a feature of our relationship to nature seemed total.
But we were wrong, and it’s very sobering.
