The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present, ed. Timothy Costelloe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 118-131. THE POSTMODERN SUBLIME PRESENTATION AND ITS LIMITS David Benjamin Johnson Loyola University Chicago In the last three decades of the twentieth century, the philosophical concept of the sublime underwent a renaissance among a number of “continental” philosophers, after having fallen largely out of favor around the end of the preceding century. Many thinkers who turned to the concept of the sublime at this time were associated in one way or another with the then-nascent and fiercely debated categories of “postmodern theory” and “postmodernism” in general; 1 accordingly, this trend in continental thought quickly became identified by the name “postmodern sublime.” 2 In this chapter, we will examine the work of four influential thinkers of this postmodern incarnation of the sublime: Jean- François Lyotard, Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze, and Fredric Jameson. Other writers also contributed to this discourse, but the work of these four encapsulates effectively its central themes and issues, while at the same time illustrating the wide range of its elaboration and use. 3 1 Not all late-twentieth century continental philosophers of the sublime can be associated with postmodernism, however one might construe the term. Theodor Adorno, for example, is not generally considered a postmodernist, but wrote on the sublime at the end of the 1960s. See Theodor Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (New York: Continuum, 1997). 2 We must note here that the term “postmodern sublime” denotes not only a philosophical discourse on the sublime, but also a trend in art, architecture, and literary criticism and practice. The present chapter will focus on the philosophical, and not the more specifically art-, architecture-, or literary-critical uses of the “sublime” in postmodernism. 3 For some articulations of the postmodern sublime that are not considered directly in the present chapter, see Jean-Luc Nancy, “L’Offrande sublime,” in Jean-François Courtine et