Re-contemplate the apocalyptic sublime of images of genocide

From the contemplation of beauty, understood as a disinterested experience of the work of art, to the neutralization of reason in the face of an image that petrifies it, prevents its revolution, the sublime has joined, with Lyotard, the postmodern categories of the contemporary aesthetics. He oscillates between the infinite of an inhibited aesthetic experience and the dynamics of the gaze, which is being skewed, rightly and wrongly, into the data of an intelligible real. In the case of figurative narrations of genocide, the genocidal subject of fiction, as much as the reader-spectator or reader-contemplator, returns to the scene of the event to reactivate his memory. In doing so, he plunges back into the darkness of incomprehension, of the indeterminacy of a past that refuses to be grasped by the senses, which goes beyond the categories of the sensible. How is this singular mode of sublime modulated by the image? What happens to the image of genocide when the sublime pushes it out of its contours? This project will help to understand how investigating the apocalyptic sublime can give a better understanding of images of genocide in our global mediascape.

Faculty Supervisor:

Daniel Vaillancourt

Student:

Partner:

Université Bordeaux Montaigne

Discipline:

Sociology

Sector:

Education

University:

Western University

Program: