GUISEPPE VACCA
Sublime as Time Reversal: Reading the Kantian Sublime through Hölderlin and Deleuze
Through the concepts of caesura and time-image, Deleuze conceives tragedy and cinema as modes of experiencing time which, in a way analogous to the Kantian sublime, unsettle and interrupt the ordinary experience of temporal succession, opening the subject to a simultaneity in which time emerges both as a limit and as the pure form and condition of experience, and which reflects the modern consciousness of time. This idea of the sublime, which has been traced to a later stage of Deleuze’s engagement with Kant, appears to continue and develop certain aspects of his reading of the Critique of Judgment in his early writings on Kantian philosophy, where he emphasizes the role of the sublime for its genetic function, entirely unprecedented in Kant’s argumentative framework. It also seems possible to regard this particular form of consciousness of time produced by the sublime as a kind of reflection which, although typically associated with philosophy, does not take place through conceptual tools but rather through the formal and technical elements proper to tragic and cinematic representation.