Overview

Stephen Zepke tracks the sublime art movement from its beginnings in Kant to its flowering in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He shows that the idea of sublime art waxes and wanes in the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Ranciere and the recent Speculative Realism movement. With it, a visionary politics of art seeks to give it the most creative power possible: the power to overcome our conditions and embrace the unknown.

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9780748669998

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Reviews

A remarkable book that explores the reception of Kant's theory of the sublime in Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari, Rancière and Derrida, as well as in more recent philosophical movements such as Speculative Realism and Accelerationism. But Zepke is an equally astute observer of the art world, and he simultaneously examines the role that this ""sublime aesthetics"" has (or has not) played in contemporary artistic production and political struggles. Sublime Art is not only the definitive analysis of the reception of the Kantian sublime, but a visionary manifesto for the aesthetics of the future.​-- ""Daniel W. Smith, Purdue University"" Stephen Zepke is already known as a considerable philosopher of the new. In these pages he expertly navigates the inconsistent legacies of Kantian aesthetics with the goal of regaining the political and philosophical potentialities of sublime art and its role in difficult eruptions of the new. Zepke's analyses range across a continuum of discomfort attributed to the sublime through exquisitely crafted chapters that counterpoise Lyotard, Deleuze, Derrida, and Rancière. This book may have absorbed its subject so well that its readers will be left in tatters.-- ""Gary Genosko, University of Ontario Institute of Technology""

"A remarkable book that explores the reception of Kant's theory of the sublime in Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari, Ranci�re and Derrida, as well as in more recent philosophical movements such as Speculative Realism and Accelerationism. But Zepke is an equally astute observer of the art world, and he simultaneously examines the role that this ""sublime aesthetics"" has (or has not) played in contemporary artistic production and political struggles. Sublime Art is not only the definitive analysis of the reception of the Kantian sublime, but a visionary manifesto for the aesthetics of the future.​-- ""Daniel W. Smith, Purdue University"" Stephen Zepke is already known as a considerable philosopher of the new. In these pages he expertly navigates the inconsistent legacies of Kantian aesthetics with the goal of regaining the political and philosophical potentialities of sublime art and its role in difficult eruptions of the new. Zepke's analyses range across a continuum of discomfort attributed to the sublime through exquisitely crafted chapters that counterpoise Lyotard, Deleuze, Derrida, and Ranci�re. This book may have absorbed its subject so well that its readers will be left in tatters.-- ""Gary Genosko, University of Ontario Institute of Technology"""

Author Information

Stephen Zepke is an independent researcher living in Vienna. He has published numerous essays on philosophy, art and cinema. He is the author of Art as Abstract Machine, Ontology and Aesthetics in Deleuze and Guattari (Routledge, 2005), and co-editor with Simon O'Sullivan of Deleuze and Contemporary Art (Edinburgh University Press, 2010) and Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New (Bloomsbury Academic, 2008).

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