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Art at War
investigation. Their function is to show something more than this or that
concrete, empirical incident; they produce the universally valid images of the
political sublime. The notion of sublime is associated for us in the first place
with its analysis by Kant who used as examples of the sublime images of the
Swiss mountains and sea tempests. It is also associated with the essay by Jean-
François Lyotard on the relationship between the avant-garde and the sublime.
But, actually, the notion of the sublime has its origin in the treatise by
Edmund Burke on the notions of the sublime and the beautiful—and there
Burke uses as an example of the sublime the public beheadings and tortures
that were common in the centuries before the Enlightenment. But we should
also not forget that the reign of the Enlightenment itself was introduced by
the public exposure of mass beheadings by guillotine in the center of revolutionary
Paris.
In his Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel writes of this exposure that it
created true equality among men because it made perfectly clear that no one
can claim any more that his death has any higher meaning. During the ninetieth
and twentieth centuries the massive depoliticization of the sublime took
place. Now we experience the return not of the real but of the political
sublime—in the form of the repoliticization of the sublime. Contemporary
politics no longer represents itself as beautiful—as even the totalitarian states
of the twentieth century still did. Instead, contemporary politics represents
itself as sublime again—that is, as ugly, repelling, unbearable, terrifying. And
even more: All the political forces of the contemporary world are involved in
the increasing production of the political sublime—by competing for the
strongest, most terrifying image. It is as if Nazi Germany were to advertise for
itself using images of Auschwitz, and the Stalinist Soviet Union using images
of the Gulag. Such a strategy is new. But not as new as it seems to be.
The point Burke had originally tried to make is precisely this: a terrifying,
sublime image of violence is still merely an image. An image of terror is
also produced, staged—and can be aesthetically analyzed and criticized in
terms of a critique of representation. This kind of criticism does not indicate
any lack of moral sense. The moral sense comes in where it relates to the
individual, empirical event that is documented by a certain image. But at
the moment an image begins to circulate in the media and acquires the symbolic
value of a representation of the political sublime, it can be subjected
to art criticism along with every other image. This art criticism can be
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