The planetary-scale challenges posed by the climate crisis and the destruction of natural ecosystems in the Anthropocene call for a rethinking of the fundamental categories that define the relationship between nature and culture. The post-industrial era, marked as it is by climate crises and the looming threat of planetary collapse, evokes feelings of anxiety, dread, and powerlessness in the face of the uncontrollable forces of nature. In the field of aesthetics, such feelings may be understood through the concept of the sublime. In Romanticism, the sublime referred to the feelings of elation that accompany the experience of nature—feelings that combine delight with dread in the face of the loss of (self-)control in an imaginary fusion with nature. In the modern and postmodern eras, the concept of the sublime is no longer associated with the representation of nature; it has come instead to signify the infinite, the unimaginable, and the abstract. Lyotard’s definition of the sublime employs the concept of negative presentation and the temporality of the event, while Jameson, by contrast, sees the postmodern technological sublime as the inability to think, or represent, the spatial totality, especially in the context of multinational capital. While the changes in technological and geopolitical circumstances in the 1990s spurred discussions of the “nuclear sublime”, associated with the dread at the awesome destructive power of atomic fission, the modern context of ecological crises and global climate change has given rise to the concepts of the “chemical” or “ecological sublime”, in which the notion of the sublime is reinterpreted through the lens of posthumanist critiques of the Anthropocene. The paper examines the mutations of the concept of the sublime in the era of the Capitalocene (Bourriaud), hyperobjects (Morton), and ecological aesthetics (Hitt, Chua, Bennett).
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