The Everyday Sublime (J.-F. Lyotard’s Reading of Cinema)

Abstract

The article draws upon J.-F.Lyotard’s text L’acinéma, in which the French philosopher analyzes cinema as a ‘writing of movements’, i.e., as elements redundant with respect to form that are oriented toward an economy of desire. The author gives a reading of this text through Lyotard’s later lectures devoted to the analytic of the sublime. He shows that the libidinal economy of the image that has to do with the unrepresentable acquires its logic in the sublime, whereas the sublime proper appears to be more of an ethical category displaying a communicative dimension in the world of contemporary media-images.