Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
The Sublimity of
the Hyperreal
NOVEMBER 18, 2014 / LEAVE A COMMENT
“When we get too close to the desired object, erotic fascination turns into
disgust at the Real of the bare flesh,” here Zizek’s argument is aesthetically
charged. John Milton describes the sublimity of Death as, “the other shape…had
none distinguishable in member…shadow seem’d…black it stood as night,
fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell” (Milton, Book 2). This parallels the idea of
“fascination” turning into “disgust” and revulsion at the real once upon
approaching the object. To this effect, in Nihilism and the Sublime
Postmodern, William Slocombe states, “we can discover meaning in the
hyperreal—that which resists all meaning. Baudrillard’s sublime does not stem
from the production of meaning, however, because it is the very denial of
meaning implicit in the hyperreal that creates the sublime feeling.”
Slocombe determines that the “hyperreal is sublime because of its status as
something that exceeds the boundaries of the self.” Perhaps the troubled barrier
between the real and hyperreal is akin to the barrier between the sublime and the
non-sublime/beautiful. When an object or experience reaches a
sublime/hyperreal stasis, it is not apprehendable by the human confines of
reason. Rather, we are intended to marvel in its grandiosity with reverence as
we attempt to untangle it. At this point, the sublime, and by extension the
hyperreal, takes on a quality of the divine, which too may be contemplated but
never fully understood.