Zizek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime

[Terrance]

Both the Critique of Judgement and Benjamin's essay deal
with the tensions
between a dominant mechanical paradigm and an organic model
of cohesion. But
while Benjamin finds no viable reconciliation between a
fragmented modernity
(carried by mechanisation), and a lost pre-modern idyll of
holistic coherence (home
of the traditional work of art), Kant creates a third term
between the organic and the
mechanical which is precisely the aesthetic. 

Or indeed the "machinic". Kant's beauty is too easily
reduced to a languid reflection
on natural forms. It seems to be this Benjamin has in mind
when he uses as a model
of pre-modern aesthetic contemplation, a "man, who, one
summer afternoon,
abandons himself to following with his gaze the profile of
the mountainous horizon
or the line of a branch which casts its shadow upon him" 2.
But what is "form", and
by what power does it distinguish itself, demand and grip
attention? (To say
"because it is beautiful" just begs the question.) Kant's
beauty is much better
"dramatised" by Deleuze's "spiritual automaton", whose
encounter with a chance
singularity suspends the world and sets off a chain reaction
in which a new power of
thought is engendered. The problem of modernity itself is
dramatised through these
competing figures of the "individual" and what it means for
them to think. 



http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/visarts/globe/issue3/bewdy.html


http://www.wdog.com/brian/Scriptorium/sublime_etym.htm

http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/patten/sublime.html

http://www.uoregon.edu/~nateich/Kant_Sublime.html

http://www.engl.virginia.edu/~enec981/Group/zach.sublime1.html