“A delightful stillness and amazement in the soul” – the tragic sublime and commoditised communication

This paper explores the significance of the emergence of an aesthetic of the sublime in the same context as that in which, according to Habermas, the modern public sphere emerged. The necessity to rethink the sublime beyond its classical rhetorical instrumentalisation, its Kantian interpretation and the post-modern rhetoric of totality (the sublime of ideology) is examined and defended.A paper given at the European Communication Conference (European Communication Research and Education Association) University of Barcelona, November 2008.