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October 20, 2007
I became interested in an aesthetics of violence---after reading Monica Dux's There must be than hating Howard op ed in the Age. It reminded me of Edmund Burke early writings on the aesthetic and the sublime, which were intimately connected to his political concerns.
The heart of his aesthetic addressed itself to the experience of terror, a spectre that haunts Burke's political imagination throughout his career. Burke's preoccupation with violence, sympathy and pain actually allowed him to explore the dark side of the Enlightenment.
Isn't that dark side of the Enlightenment (social liberal version for Dux) what is disclosed by the deeper current of Dux---both her talk about hate, venom, intoxicated by blood lust etc---and the political violence in her 1990s feminism? Violence, pain and terror (Tampa and Howard's jackbook Intervention into the Northern Territory are Dux's examples) are all sitting there in her text---as Sandra saw. Isn't this terror the spectre that is haunting Dux and her Howard hating thirty somethings?
Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas on the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), introduces the idea that sublimity is constituted by a fear of alterity whereby the sublime is achieved artistically by a tantalizing obscuring of otherness. Burke argues:
Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind if capable of feeling. (39)
So we have aesthetics bound to politics and vica versa. Burk's text is one of the three theoretical "arche-texts of the sublime" ---ie., Pseudo-Longinos, Burke, and Kant
Dux, as an independent literary writer, is talking about the relationship between the sublime and terror in politics and her words --- hate, venom, intoxicated by blood lust ---refer to the experience of the sublime. If we dig back to the text of Pseudo-Longinos we find the sublime linked to ethics----which is what Dux is doing.
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Funny, I havent seen The Whitlams this election