In the contemporary sublime: Newman, Lyotard, Leopardi
Abstract
The article presents and connects three moments of the contemporary reflection on the aesthetic-philosophical idea of the sublime: Giacomo Leopardi’s seminal thinking, at the beginning of XIX century; Barnett Newman’s poetics and pictorial work; Jean François Lyotard’s philosophical research, productively inspired by Newman himself. It traces a substantial convergence in the rethinking of the sublime as an essential property of each event occurring for the subject in an aesthetically significant way. The echo of Longinian and modern approaches, in particular the Burkean idea of a co-presence of delight and terror, thus finds the way to a re-elaboration that opens up to the most recent evolutions of the reflection on the sublime, in spheres that transcend aesthetics and extend towards psychology, ethics, sociology, politics and metaphysics.
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References
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