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Günther Anders: Schriften zu Kunst und Film. München: C.H. Beck 2020. 9783406747717

For some influential advocates of the “affective turn,” the concept of affect stands for a spontaneous, collective, subjective and progressive becoming-other that promises “new possibilities” that are never quite articulated. This perspective has great potential, but risks lapsing into a naïve celebration of affect that is ill-equipped to grasp the negative aspects and uses of experiences of becoming (i.e., liminal experience). A liminal occasion is an occasion of passage between categories during which, for whatever reason, the forms of process associated with modes of being are subject to metamorphosis. A focus on liminality, it will be argued, has two chief advantages. First, it allows us to focus on the affectivity that comes into play when we, or our circumstances, are in the process of transformation. This highlights the fact that many of the positive, exciting, desirable features attributed to “affect” are characteristics of liminal occasions, but also that these occasions can have a darker side. A second advantage is that it encourages us to recognize the long history through which different “technologies” have emerged to manage, generate and communicate the liminal affectivity typical of liminal occasions. The oldest of these “liminal affective technologies” is ritual, which dates back to prehistoric times. Without denying the distinctiveness of the present moment, in which affectivity is routinely summoned and manipulated by a host of new technological means, this argument opens up new ways of locating our present within a broader genealogy.

In recent discourse, notably concerning speculative realism and accelerationism, the sublime is redis- covered as an epistemological and aesthetic tool. This “comeback” of the sublime is deeply rooted in the attempt to think of the world in a non- anthropocentric manner and to establish a kind of alien thinking. Even today the notion of the sublime challenges the concept of semiomorphic knowledge. A sense of amazement interwoven with fear and terror is an integral aspect of the sublime—not only as an aesthetic but as an epistemological category. It is related to philosophical traditions of thinking the unthinkable and grasping the limits of rationality and subjectivity.