Sublime Art

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).

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.​

• AcknowledgementsAbbreviationsIntroduction. Exiled from oneself: Art and Other Strange Migrations…1. 'Contempt for the world': Kant's Aesthetics and the Sublime 2. 'A stranger to consciousness…': Lyotard and the Sublime3. 'My whole structure of perception is in the process of exploding': Deleuze and Guattari and the Sublime 4. Framing the Abyss: the Deconstruction of the Sublime5. For those who disagree: Rancière and the SublimePostscript: 'Art after experience': Speculative Realism and the SublimeReferences