1 The Event That Cannot (Not) Happen Adrian Ivakhiv The call for this anthology included reference to a profusion of things that could be considered, or rendered, sublime: indexicality, the transcendental, the poetic, the chemical, the pathological, the gothic, the prosaic, the neural, the cinematic, and others. Such a list adds to an already lengthy list of “sub- limes” that have been long noted by cultural observers—the industrial, the technological, the nuclear, the ironic, the postmodern, and so on. 1 Together, these suggest that we live in an age of proliferating sublimity. Identifying, describing, and comparing this variety of sublimities can in turn suggest that we, human observers, are capable of assimilating, making sense of, and thereby containing and rendering safe any and all forms of sublimity— which is ironic and paradoxical insofar as the sublime is precisely supposed to be that which eludes such assimilation. In this chapter, I wish to question the notion of proliferating sublimes, or at least of the identifcation, classifcation, and comparison of them, by proposing a typology of events that gesture toward something that is radi- cally inassimilable. A list of such “sublimes” suggests that the sublime is produced in much the same way as anything else is. Modernity, it has been argued, was premised on the production of objects and of representations, and postmodernity on sheer productivity through mixing, recombination, and hybridization. But sublimity, to the extent that it is more than a mere effect—a kind of Wizard of Oz phenomenon whose power fades when its trickery is revealed—has always been taken as that which eludes under- standing or assimilation. In this sense, while a perception of sublimity can be produced in a conventional manner, sublimity itself—if there is such a thing—can only come from outside any known system of production or reproduction. 2 Another way of saying this is that any term affxed as an adjective to the noun “sublime” dredges up its own history of associations, such that the adjective is elevated to “sublimity” yet never attains it, while sublimity itself is downgraded, delimited, reduced, and brought to earth. Sublimity becomes humanized by one of its mediators—technology, pathology, the neural network, the atomic bomb, and so on. Assuming that a genuine sublimity is possible, it would have to elude such humanization. For we live TRIFANOVA PRINT.indd 50 06/04/2017 08:38