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This chapter presents some concluding thoughts. It argues that a feminist account of the sublime is important today because the dominant framework for encountering the sublime is one that leads precisely to the fated efforts toward sovereignty and invulnerability we see all around us. But other responses are possible. The sublime might also be an occasion for the affirmation of relations that are both inevitable and ethically binding. These other sublimes will require a different kind of courage, one that is able to linger with grief when it swells to unmanageable proportions, when it overtakes and overthrows pretensions to a power so grand that it borders on omnipotence. They will require the courage to face the pain that we must live in our encounters with beautiful nature, and with powerful nature, in spite of the fact that this pain takes the punch out of the spectacles of invulnerability we create with ourselves at the center.

This chapter describes one type of sublime experience that often tears open the sealed worlds that tend to mark our contemporary life, called the “the natural sublime”. Natural sublime shows us that while the two realms of necessity and freedom are distinct, they are not separate. Either eliding the distinction between them or treating them as quite separate results in the misunderstanding of both realms.

This chapter focuses on the notion of the postmodern sublime. It considers Lyotard's late work to illustrate what is disturbing and what might be important in feminist appropriations of the sublime. It begins by contextualizing Lyotard's treatment of the sublime in terms of his broader project of developing a “philosophical politics” of “bearing witness to the differend.” It then looks more closely at Lyotard's reading of the Kantian sublime and at his discussion of language using the famous example of “Albert.” The chapter addresses the following questions: what happens to place in Lyotard's philosophical politics? What political possibilities are opened or closed in the process? Finally, one of Lyotard's essays on feminism, or as he terms it “women's struggles,” is discussed, which paves the way for looking at how the postmodern sublime is at work in feminist thinking in the next chapters.

This chapter focuses on Judith Butler's early work in order to clarify some central stakes (or mis-takes) of feminist postmodernism. It begins by acknowledging and responding to her insistence that the term “postmodernism” is misleading and masks a “ruse of authority” that distorts rather than clarifies the issues at hand. It is argued that establishing the feminist postmodern over and against a foreclosed“essentialism” amounts to a disavowal of the realm of necessity. A dual conception of “nature” as “human nature” and the natural world is foreclosed at the moment that inaugurates the textual space in which feminist postmodernism sets to work. This disavowed realm returns on the inside of Butler's theory as a discursive “nature,” which makes constant trouble in regards to the subject's agency, the subject's freedom. It is shown that Butler's approach to the relation between extradiscursive being and speech authorizes the displacement of feminism from its foundation, but not a foundation in the unitary subject so much as a foundation in a certain set of historical projects. The return of the repressed realm of necessity (or otherwise said, the repressed relation to the earth) in Butler's early texts, its return as discursive determinacy, pushes toward exactly what Butler turns to in her later work: the theme of embodied vulnerability in relation to other persons.

This chapter focuses on feminist notions of pornography. It argues that feminist celebrations of pornography make no effort to dismantle the Euro-masculinist projects of mastery, nor to dismantle the master narratives that support the subordination of women to men. The melting away of the social world that occasions entrance into the discursive universe of pornography becomes both its justification and purpose, fulfilling as it does the imperative to be anti-essentialist at all cost. Just as Lyotard's “philosophical politics” failed to become a politics at all by eliminating the possibility of political solidarity with victims of historical wrongs, pro-pornography feminism fails to be feminist when it offers women no place to stand outside the pornographic text from which to bear witness to the harm pornography does to women.

This chapter describes one type of sublime experience that often tears open the sealed worlds that tend to mark our contemporary life, called “the liberatory sublime.” The liberatory sublime is the aesthetic experience of the opening of worlds onto a space between, in which the claims of one woman on another, of one person on another, can be heard and lived. It is the aesthetic experience of the other's presence as a person that interrupts the comfort of a world organized to reduce other persons (women in relation to men, women in relation to one another) to mere functions. Sublime experience is orienting for feminism because it breaks open a space for feminist practice across all kinds of differences. And if that space is a ground of fierce contestation, then it is also a common ground, a ground on which we are called to give an account of how we live, think, and work in relation to one another.

This chapter focuses on so-called projects of regenerating agency in late modernity and postmodernity. It begins by recapping Taylor's diagnosis of the problem of agency in modernity: a diagnosis that turns out to be a revised version of the secularization thesis. It then moves to Taylor's suggested therapy for the problem of agency, namely, his invocation of the aesthetic and poetic as epiphanic, that is, as a revelation of held moral orientations, ideals, values, and ends. Taylor's treatment of the epiphanic is critiqued through a discussion of the relationship between the sublime and agency. It is argued that Taylor's invocation of the epiphanic as sublime remains a gesture, that is, a promising movement and hope for a glimpse of transcendence. The promise of the epiphanic and the sublime for projects of regenerating agency becomes clearer when interpreted as part of the ends and aims of the disciplines of self-cultivation and self-transformation.

This chapter rectifies shortcomings in the author's previous sustained treatment of this subject in his book The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art. The structure of Kant's account of the mathematical sublime is analyzed, suggesting that the role played by infinity should be regarded as contingent rather than necessary, and that an austere reconstruction of his theory is to be preferred over Kant's own rather baroque account. A similar exposition is performed in relation to Kant's account of the dynamical sublime. In revising Kant's theory, special attention is paid to the hitherto neglected question of the specific perceptual cues that trigger experiences of both varieties of the sublime. The theory is also extended to cover artworks, including some of an avant-garde nature.

This concluding chapter reflects on the idea of the sublime as crisis. It rejects the idea of the sublime as a pure experience and instead insists that the sublime is always constructed. This construction always involves crisis in the sense of the definition of new values and in the sense of a critical definition of the sublime itself. The chapter and the book end with the idea that the sublime should always be multiple: many anarchic sublimes, not one.

This chapter describes how agents' experiences on the ground in the Middle East strengthened their antiempirical disposition. In particular, their orientalist vision cast the region as a land of lying natives and ineffable and unmappable topography. Their invention of an intuitive intelligence epistemology, supported by an impressionistic reporting style, at once solved their practical difficulties and fulfilled their spiritual longings and literary aspirations. As intuitive experts, key intelligence agents gained a reputation for genius and superheroic qualities, they took charge of affairs in the region during the war, and their intelligence style was concretized as a set of official tactics. The intuitive mode was also being espoused at home by novelists and other artists experimenting with new ways of knowing. The agents' literary output was part of this genre.