The Aesthetics of Democratic Power: Sensibility, Normativity, and the Sublime

Many today believe that our aesthetic-affective sensibility can enliven our thinking and thus enhance our capacity to perceive how existing attitudes, practices, and institutions may be undermining the imagination of a better political world.1 However, when we ponder such an admirable role for our sensibility, this also tends to reawaken a venerable concern in political theory: in according a substantial a role to affect and imagination, we may be undermining the role of normative reason and thereby implicitly legitimating dangerous forms of collective power. In Western history, this concern has taken a multitude of forms from the 16th century until today. In the period of the English Civil War, the more radically democratic revolutionaries came to be excoriated for embracing a dangerous “enthusiasm,” whereby religious belief, instead of providing restraint, was fused with vivid imagination envisioning radically new possibilities for political power, something critics saw as fomenting protracted violence and fanatical behavior.2 In the 20th century, it was the secular myths of fascism that fired popular imagination in many countries. This concern is hardly remote today, as right-wing populism flourishes in a variety of democratic societies. Given this extensive and unsettling background, we today face a situation where we seem to be moved simultaneously to admit a greater role for aesthetic-affective sensibility in political life and yet also deeply question it. How should we begin to get our bearings in these cross currents?

In recent years, many of the issues surrounding sensibility have been gathered under the term social or political “imaginary,” with this meaning something like how figures of the imagination intertwine with explicit political orientations.3 But the increasing acceptance of the force of imaginaries is usually not followed by reflection on how they ought to be related to normative ideals we wish to explicitly affirm. I want to cut into this knot of issues. How should the features of a political imaginary or mythic resonate with ideals reflecting a more rational normative basis? And, more particularly, how does a fuller acknowledgement of a role for our aesthetic-affective figurations avoid the dangers noted above? In other words, can we conceive of an imaginary of political power whose cultivation encourages, rather than undermines, the core associations and ideals of democracy?

Crucial to any such exploration is an aesthetic-affective notion traditionally tied to democracy, namely, the sublime.4 Since the 18th century, sublimity has been associated with an elevating enthusiasm for vehement collective action animated by the grand ideals underlying the revolutionary emergence of democratic power. Section 1 provides a brief historical overview of this connection, focusing specifically on how Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant unpacked its character. This background is necessary not just for contextual reasons, but also because it allows one to recognize how their views of the sublimity of political phenomena were so conceived as to also affirm certain moral-political values and de-legitimate others. Although the values appealed to by Burke and Kant are different, in each case they help constitute what these thinkers consider to be an authentic sublime versus distorted or false variants.5 Engaging these arguments is important for understanding the relation of politics and sublimity in general and for specific task of understanding how our aesthetic-affective sensibility might be understood as positively, rather than negatively, intertwined with the values of democracy.

After this historical sketch, I turn to consider an admirable contemporary effort to present a positive conception of sublimity. Jason Frank's account of a “democratic sublime” (2021) illustrates how a feeling of the sublimity of democratic power is evoked by the awe-inspiring and enthusiasm-generating appearance of popular uprisings in the streets. Significantly, his account aims to ward off fears that any such association of democracy and the sublime will entangle itself with an affirmation of popular, but anti-democratic, uprisings (2021, 68–69, 93–94). I argue, in Section 2, that his effort does not, on its own, provide an adequate way of addressing the problem I laid out a moment ago: distinguishing democratic manifestations of power from authoritarian ones. For that we need to think of the democratic sublime as a phenomenon that is more multi-valent than Frank imagines. Section 3 attempts to do this by retrieving a sense of how the sublime is connected not just with the enthusiasm of emergent popular power in the streets, but also with the acknowledgement of human finitude, our vulnerability or precarity. When the sublime is envisioned in this fuller, twofold sense, encompassing not just an “enthusing” dimension but also a “sobering” one, it helps differentiate a democratic imaginary from a right-wing populist or fascist one. Additionally, it offers valuable insight into how time and memory should be construed within the democratic imagination. I take up that issue in Section 4.

Edmund Burke's early work, “A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful” (1757) (Burke 1990), does not treat politics specifically, but it delves into the aesthetic-affective roots of political authority, and this frame guides his perception of politics for the rest of his life.6 The sublime had always been associated with things that give one a sense of elevation and awe, but Burke gave this a distinctive turn in several ways. He wanted to portray our reactions to certain experiences as rooted in our nature. In short, it was natural to feel certain things to be sublime. This affect helped vivify the reality of the divinely authorized Great Chain of Being. In short, our sensorium is congruent with the theologically authorized structure of the world.7 In terms of the social-political order, one who is at the bottom of that hierarchy should naturally feel some sense of sublimity in the presence of one who is higher up (servants in relation to masters, commoners to aristocrats, women to men). Thus, Burke sees a positive association of sublimity with politics, but only if that politics is deeply hierarchical. Such an account has certainly not made Burke a popular source for contemporary thinking about the sublime. This association is further solidified by Burke's later, hostile account of the French Revolution. In his “Reflections” (1790) on that event, he famously excoriates the revolutionaries for their toppling of all aspects of social and religious order. He was horrified that such acts were seen by many of his contemporaries as objects of a new kind of secular sublime enthusiasm. For him, they constituted rather what he considered to be a “false” or unnatural sublime, something to be sharply contrasted with the authentic variety of experience he had earlier identified.8

The extreme one-sidedness of Burke's condemnation of democratic revolution—even before the Terror—leaves one with the clear sense that his thinking on politics and the sublime is unlikely to provide any valuable insights today. That is almost entirely true. I will show in a moment that his twofold conception of the sublime can, with modifications, be useful for thinking about how our aesthetic-affective sensibility might be brought into a productive alignment with democratic values.

First, though, let me turn to the other major source of philosophical reflection on the sublime in the 18th century, namely Kant. He wrote extensively about this topic, but I am interested only in how he relates it to politics. Most relevant for present concerns was how he tried to bring his analysis into engagement with the French Revolution. He was worried that the sense of elevation so many Europeans felt at the outbreak of that event would devolve into the passion of sheer “enthusiasm” (Enthusiasm), thereby fueling violence. He argued that authentic sublimity was a feeling that balanced this affect with a sense of awe at how the events in France manifest growing respect for human dignity. This powerful sense of respect for individual rights and freedom, grounded in our metaphysical status as moral beings, would, he hoped, encourage self-limitation on the part of those who sympathized with the Revolution (Clewis 2009; Kant 2000, 154–157; Kant 1997, 182–184). Kant's uneasiness about a sublimity couched entirely in enthusiasm was later validated when leaders like Robespierre appealed to the “sublime enthusiasm” of his compatriots’ embrace of ever more violent uses of their new, revolutionary democratic power (quoted in Huet 1994, 61).

Thus, even though Kant puts enthusiasm for a democratic republic into the scope of sublimity, he also wants to preclude our aesthetic-affective sensibility from possibly animating any motivation that might override moral reason. He worries that our passions will not just be elevated by political events but also generate an uncontrollable enthusiasm that will overwhelm the restraining influence of our moral sense. Hence, he leaves us with the enduring concern that I noted earlier: lingering ambivalence about how exactly our sensibility and its attendant motivations are ultimately to be related to the phenomenon of modern democratic power. This concern has remained since Kant. In the mid-20th century, it was, as we noted, validated for contemporary political reflection in the quite conscious way in which fascism entwined its mass appeals with myths that fired the imagination and enthusiasm of its followers.

Given this recurrent concern about the danger of having aesthetic-affective sensibility play a role in generating and authorizing democratic power, is it possible to allow the imagination a greater role without opening ourselves to these traditional problems? Frank's The Democratic Sublime offers a distinctive and powerful treatment of this question. Other political theorists who have engaged aesthetic issues recently have tended not to focus directly on the aesthetic character of manifestations of collective democratic power. Rather they have focused on how our aesthetic sensibility can help us to create the “dissensual” and thus undermine the dynamics of power structures.9 This is undoubtedly a significant concern, but it is somewhat different from Frank's and mine, since it only highlights ways in which our sensibility can be mobilized to unsettle undemocratic phenomena of power, but implicitly defers direct exploration of the character of a possibly positive sensibility associated with democratic manifestations of power.

Frank constructs his account by examining French politics during and after the Revolution, arguing that we can find there both the heart of an authentic democratic sublime, as well as the reason such a phenomenon of power does not necessarily have to slide toward any sort of anti-democratic fate. Despite my admiration for this account, I will argue that although Frank has shown us a necessary part of any persuasive account of this topic, he fails to characterize adequately the full range of sensibility and normativity that should be included when reflecting on the aesthetics of democratic power. Below, I will try to show just what is still needed to achieve a more adequate account of the sublime, meaning one that will resonate more fully with the core norms of democracy in the 21st century.

For Frank, our sense of the sublimity of democracy is at the heart of a “democratic political imaginary.” This sense centers on the “sublime spectacle” of the power of the “people themselves on collective display” (Frank 2021, 2, 56). Crucial here is the appearance of the people in eruptive public gatherings—“mass protests, insurgencies and revolutionary upheavals”—where individuals come together, are awed and elevated by seeing themselves in public, mutually instill confidence in their emergent collective power, and simultaneously evoke fear in the agents of the state. Such tumult puts on display a “concrete materialism” of “the vital surplus” of the people; in short, the true embodiment of the spirit of democracy. In such spectacles, the thwarted life of ordinary people experiencing oppression blossoms into enthusiasm, “enchantment,” and a sense of collective capacity, which together provide an essential “regenerative vitality” to democratic ideals (Frank 2021, xii–xiii, 3, 8–9, 19, 63–64, 151). This kind of sublime embodiment of democratic power in the streets has been at the heart of all great insurgencies since the 18th century.

Here, the traditional role of a religious or metaphysical ground for sublimity has been replaced by the immanent “miracle” of the people's unlimited capacities to will a new world again and again, unpredictably and uncontrollably. The feeling of elevation associated with sublimity comes now not from something that also creates a possible tension with human willfulness (God or the noumenal self), but rather from the unlimited, spectacular, self-authorizing power of popular will (Frank 2021, 14). The contrast with the authentic sublime in Burke and Kant could not be clearer. They were crucially concerned with limiting political will.

One does not have to agree with the specific way that Burke and Kant envisioned what should be the proper ground for limits on political willfulness to admit the importance of that general issue as it bears on Frank's account. The question to pose is as follows: does the character of his democratic sublime contain any resources that might, first, help us to recognize when the willfulness of vehement democratic action might be taking on an undemocratic populist character and, second, thus begin to induce some dampening of pure enthusiasm?

Frank engages this question, but he dismisses it too easily, associating its concerns with those of the venerable “democratic terror thesis” that was expressed not just by Burke and other critics of the Terror in revolutionary France, but by succeeding generations of liberal and conservative thinkers (Frank 2021, 68–69). This indictment accords a kind of necessary, deleterious logic to vehement democratic insurgencies and mass affect. But that is not the charge I am making. Mine is not about a necessary momentum toward anti-democratic terror or totalitarianism, but rather only about whether the criteria Frank identifies as constituting the sublimity of democratic power allow, on their own, any basis for beginning to differentiate emergent democratic revolts from anti-democratic ones. Could the characteristics that Frank associates with the sublimity of democratic power also fit, say, the attempted insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021? I would argue that this event, about which many Americans on the right remain deeply enthusiastic, would qualify, on Frank's criteria, as an instance of the democratic sublime. The protestors displayed a unifying sense of self-righteousness and absolute certainty, convinced that they were the “real people,” redeemers of an America threatened by enemies who had stolen their political order. On Frank's interpretation, a democratic sublime is embodied by just such a unifying, uplifting, collective sense of an emerging “miracle” of unconstrained popular power. What I want to suggest is that to help sensitize us to the dangers of such a mischaracterization, Frank's “enthusing” sense of the sublime needs to be reconnected with a “sobering” sense, the latter drawing us to reflect on the danger of stances in politics that threaten to submerge all concerns about limits in the affective rush of righteous certainty. Without that alignment, Frank's perspective strips sublimity of the traditional twofold character it maintained in Burke or Kant, where the pull of self-limitation was provided by, respectively, God or our metaphysically secured noumenal character.

Advocates of the “democratic terror thesis” predict a deadly outcome from any vehement manifestations of democracy that challenge normal procedures of institutionalized political order. I agree with Frank's rejection of this claim and affirm his valorization of insurgency; however, one also needs to contextualize that valorization within a more capacious notion of a democratic sublime than he provides. More specifically, we need to articulate a richer understanding of how we can bring our sensibility and imagination into play to help sustain the motivations implicit in a democratic way of life.

Given his deep antipathy to any sort of vehement democratic manifestations, Burke would seem to be an absolute non-starter for addressing this issue. That is true if we stick with his full conceptual apparatus. But I want to draw out and affirm only one aspect of Burke's account of the sublime in his early work on aesthetics; more specifically, the way he associates a feeling of the sublime with our mortality, finitude, and vulnerability.10 Of course, for him, this association is deeply entangled with his theism and affirmation of social hierarchy. This emphasis on our limitedness should manifest in a feeling of humility in relation to God's limitlessness and in not challenging social hierarchy. This order was shattered by the French revolutionaries who, for Burke, disastrously substituted visions of human limitlessness or infinitude for God's.

Now, if we relinquish the theism and attachment to social hierarchy, what might we make of an association of human finitude with the democratic sublime? Frank clearly wishes to cast doubt on any efforts to entangle democratic motivations with “a common bond of shared mortality, physical vulnerability, and fragile interdependent embodiment.” His stance here draws on Bonnie Honig's critique of “mortalist humanism” (Frank 2021, 9).11 For Honig, a primary emphasis on mortality threatens to turn theoretical attention and practical motivation too sharply away from the potential for democratic “natality” in Arendt's sense. The latter focuses us on the unpredictable, contestatory upwelling of the demos, something that gets lost too easily when finitude is given center stage. A focus on finitude effaces “democratic contention” and “the importance of inspiring new assemblages of collective, demotic power” (Frank 2010, 670–671).

But, significantly, neither Frank nor Honig end up demanding an exclusive priority for the natality of demotic power. Frank admits the possibility of a “critical counterbalance” between that emphasis and finitude (Frank 2010, 670–671), and Honig (2013, 19, 30, 147) speaks of replacing “mortalist humanism” with some option that might vivify “a combination of mortality and natality.” Thus, both accept that a one-sided emphasis might be, by itself, inadequate for a democratic sensibility. But, in The Democratic Sublime, Frank seems nevertheless to want (as I showed above) to exclude the topic of finitude from being part of our understanding of the aesthetic-affective dimension of democracy. What costs might that exclusion entail?

As noted, Frank worries that a democratic sublime conceived in terms of the sobering effect of vivifying finitude will induce a dampening of the likelihood of emotions emerging that are supportive of demotic political action. If one accepts the validity of that concern, there remains however the contrasting one flowing from a democratic sublime conceived purely in terms of the enthusiasm and self-elevation of popular insurgency, namely, its inability to distinguish itself from a similar aesthetic-affective formation evoked by anti-democratic manifestations. What I argue below is that if we incorporate finitude into our conception of the democratic sublime, we will have a useful basis for drawing such a distinction.

A bi-valent sensibility would be one that is attuned not only to the enthusing dimension of sublimity, as illuminated by Frank, but also to a sobering one. Put simply, the sensibility associated with the former valence helps solidify our conviction of the rightness of popular actions in politics and enliven the motivation to achieve our collective goals. We feel an exhilarating and elevating certainty about what we are doing. The latter, sobering sense of sublimity shadows that stance of empowered, collective enthusiasm with an acknowledgement that iron conviction and an elevating feeling of one's unlimited capacities in politics are always entangled with potentially dangerous closures.

How might one make plausible the idea of such a sobering dimension of sublimity? If we return to Burke, holding aside his affirmation of divine and social hierarchy, what stands out about the experience of the sublime? In simple terms, Burke was struck by the way in which some experiences of the closeness of death or pain can also bring a sense of elevation or “delight.” The latter term sounds rather strange to us when it is associated with death. Burke admitted that his usage was a departure from ordinary language (1990, 33–34). But the core idea he was getting at is not strange at all. Of course, if one is immediately threatened with death, there is nothing pleasurable about it; it is merely terrifying. But if one is somewhat removed from the danger, that space may allow for a peculiar sort of pleasure or elevation of feeling. For him, that pleasure in a near confrontation with the ultimate human vulnerability was a reminder of the contrast with God's infinitude and limitlessness. If we relinquish that transcendental anchor, however, the sense of elevating pleasure must come from something else. It emerges, I would suggest, from experiencing our capacity to challenge and temporarily exceed limits in pursuing democratic ideals, while also experiencing our inescapable finitude. The core issue now becomes how to cultivate this two-dimensional feeling in a way that highlights the danger of inflating the exhilaration of challenging limits into a confidence in human limitlessness. The sublime is fully experienced when a sense of finitude is intertwined with an uplifting sense of the human spirit actively engaging its limits.

As an initial illustration, consider what is perhaps the most classic example of a painting representing the natural sublime, namely Caspar David Friedrich's “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog” (). A man stands precariously on the edge of a high cliff and gazes out. He has struggled to climb to the top of a mountain and now stands, no doubt exalted by his hard-won achievement, but also close to the mortal danger of falling from the precipice.12 Now take a parallel, real-world example from political history. Consider the sense of exhilaration that is awakened for many by the story of Dunkirk in World War II, when the defeated British forces, threatened with total annihilation on the beaches around that city, were evacuated by an extraordinary effort involving not just British naval vessels, but also hundreds of small private boats. That story still resonates deeply, as evidenced by the continual retelling of it in books and films (most recently the 2017 film). Of course, when seen in a film many decades later, the sense of mortal danger is rather more muted and vicarious than it was for the English in 1940. At that time, the event was experienced in a more powerfully sublime fashion with far more “uneasiness” and “sobriety”: the enthusiasm for a great human achievement was intertwined with a humility engendered by a vivified sense of human vulnerability, our limitedness (Burke 1990, 32, 43; White 1994, 8).

Hence, Burke's association of finitude with the sublime is perhaps not as patently peculiar as some contemporary interpreters presume. But the substantial problem remains of conceptualizing that association in a more convincing, non-theistic fashion. What this might involve, and how it might be kept in alignment with the enthusing dimension of sublimity, remains to be elucidated.

Here, it is necessary to further clarify the aesthetic-affective sense of pleasurable elevation that is attached to the sublime, especially in its political form. Where exactly does that feeling come from? In Burke, it comes from experiencing the contrast between our finitude and the sense of an elevating infinitude of God who benevolently looks over us. In Kant, it comes from the contrast between our natural limitedness and our elevating noumenal status as moral beings. In Frank's enthusing sublime, it comes from the exhilarating experience of our capacity to collectively “make the world anew.” Now, if one imagines the sobering aspect of sublimity in my sense—unattached to God, noumena, or radical world-making capacity—it would seem to have no source of elevation at all, rather only subdued feelings of humility, self-limitedness, and grief related to our existential condition. How might this one-sidedness of monotonal sobriety be reimagined as elevated as well, without having recourse to any of the sources just referenced?

It is useful at this point to think in terms of something roughly comparable to how Kant draws upon the animating ideal of moral dignity, but without simultaneously our taking on his metaphysical commitment. This would mean conceiving of human dignity as tied to our capacity to both acknowledge finitude and yet creatively struggle against this fate in pursuit of our democratic ideals. A bi-valent sublimity would require us to cultivate a sense of elevation emerging from the ability to act with the conviction that our deeds can sometimes, at least temporarily, triumph over our final condition, while nevertheless also allowing such achievements to remain shadowed by an awareness of existential vulnerability.

This sobering aspect of sublimity manifests itself especially in actions and aesthetic representations which, when contrasted with those eliciting a more exclusively enthusing sublime of spectacular collective insurrection, highlight a kind of resilient, sober determination of people to act, even though faced with substantial threat. This sobriety is joined with a sense of elation comes from witnessing, participating in, or imagining acts of courage and humanity in situations of vivid precarity.

For example, consider the anonymous man caught on video during the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989 who, entirely alone and separated from the enthusiasm of the burgeoning demonstrations, walked in front of a line of tanks and refused to move aside, even as they bore down on him. Here, a sense of the sublime is evoked not so immediately by the emerging collective event of a mass of demonstrators confronting an undemocratic regime, but rather by the addition to it of a solitary, sober, determined challenge manifesting solidarity with popular aspirations, despite the vivid threat to the life of the individual involved.

At any given time or place in the course of political events, one of the two valences of sublimity may be experientially more prominent. That is perfectly acceptable as long as it is remembered that democratic politics needs to cultivate a capacious sensibility that does not allow either to be backgrounded too thoroughly. A robust orientation to democracy requires that, at least over time, both continue to infuse our aesthetic-affective reactions.

The bi-valent character of sublimity is related in important ways to the temporal dimension of politics. In the immediate struggle and turmoil of democratic insurrection, our receptiveness to the sobering side of sublimity may appropriately remain in a secondary role. But when, over time, political conditions are less extreme in an authoritarian sense, a receptiveness to this aspect of the sublime should take on a more prominent role in orienting political reflection. This does not mean that one necessarily challenges less and backs away from collective confrontation, but that the themes of vulnerability and precarity may move more into the foreground and begin to infuse democratic actions more consistently and vividly.

In situations of severe oppression, it is the enthusing dimension of the sublime that immediately motivates and sustains insurgent rebellion to serve admirable democratic ends. Political reality may require suppressing sustained reflection and second-guessing regarding what are perceived to be immediately required courses of action. But, over time, proponents of democracy need to embody more consistently a sobering sensibility that encourages reflection on how cognitive and emotional certainty about our world-making capacities can draw us in undemocratic directions as we consider extended courses of action. Thus, the idea of a bi-valent sublime reflects a certain longue durée in the way we should comprehend the aesthetics of democratic life.

In established democracies or milder authoritarian regimes, the place of the sobering dimension in the democratic sensorium should thus expand, without however displacing the role of enthusiasm. We can see this in certain types of action, such as civil disobedience which can display and evoke simultaneously the full twofold quality of sublimity. If we think of such action during the civil rights struggle in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, there is a striking combination of the enthusiasm of collective empowerment with a more sobering, lingering image of vulnerable bodies violently assaulted by police dogs and batons.

But, significantly, even if one can point to such examples of simultaneity in politics, it is probably true that equally balanced conjunctions of enthusiasm and sobriety are more easily found in aesthetic representations of political life. There, the full two-dimensional character of the democratic sublime can be simultaneously displayed and thus play a potentially distinctive role in reminding us how an acknowledgement of vulnerability constitutes a core feature of any full comprehension of the character of a democratic sensorium. Two examples help illustrate this claim.

First, consider the public performance art of the South African, Sethembile Mezane (Figure 1). She presents the vulnerable body of a Black African woman, clad in traditional garb, standing beside a large bronze statue of a mounted hero of the apartheid regime of South Africa that remains in place today. The juxtaposition of the huge and hard metallic representation of the lingering force of apartheid with a soft, living female body that, however, stands in determined public protest (often motionless for hours in extreme heat) is arresting, evoking both a sobering sense of vulnerability and the enthusiasm of a democratic challenge to power.13 Mezane's public enactment seeks to draw together a moment of elevation of the viewer at experiencing the dignity of the anonymous, vulnerable body standing and suffering silently while also expressing a resilient attitude of political courage.

Such a scene enacts a plea to see and identify with the precarity of the common person, someone who represents humanity in the face of unjust power. Quite often (as in this case), this involves someone from an oppressed group who has been denied a rightful democratic status. The performance seeks to bring to life, through an aesthetic-affective experience, a minimal bond between the performer and the viewer—who may be a member of the majority—through the recognition of a common vulnerability. When the sobering dimension of sublimity is evoked along with enthusiasm, it typically fosters a greater concern for pluralizing and diversifying a democratic sensibility than when a more one-dimensional enthusiasm monopolizes our attention, highlighting only the sharp, bi-modal division between the emerging manifestation of some popular “us,” “the people”, versus those who, for whatever reason, don't align with the momentum of the movement; in short, the “them,” those who are impeding the uprising.

We also see an encompassing, twofold sublimity in Kehinde Wiley's monumental equestrian statue, “Rumors of War” (Figure 2), first exhibited in Times Square in 2019, and now permanently in Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy.14 This remarkable piece brims with the energy and motivating power of the enthusing dimension of sublimity. A young Black man is seated on a war horse, seemingly headed into battle. This statue mimics one erected in the Jim Crow era of a mounted, sword-wielding Confederate general commanding his troops forward that was part of the extraordinary series of huge monuments to the “Lost Cause” on Richmond's famous Monument Avenue. Like the general,

Wiley's audacious young man seems to be boldly headed into battle. And yet, he is curiously unarmed. Moreover, unlike the original Confederate statue, he is not ordering anyone into the fight; rather, he is depicted as sitting unsteadily in the saddle and turning back toward others who might follow him. There is therefore a counter-note of precarity and vulnerability that is interwoven with the more obvious features of a militant bearing that most catch one's attention, when the statue is viewed quickly from a distance.15 Thus, Wiley's creation works to vivify the sort of twofold association of sublimity and democracy that I am promoting and thereby to focus our perception and sensibility in ways that can potentially help shape the character of democratic motivations.

My earlier suggestion that attention to temporality is crucial to a full grasp of the democratic sublime is connected to the broad issue of memory and political life. On its own, an enthusing sublime does not suppress a sense of memory, but I would suggest that such a one-sided sublimity tends to foster a problematically constrained role for it. The upshot of remembering, when conceived only in relation to past oppression and a feeling of present enthusiasm in regard to our re-making of the world, may tend to engender a forceful imperative to redeem or avenge those who have suffered oppression. Memory in this vein generates righteous anger and admirable deeds that promise to redress past injustice. That can and should form a crucial part of the sensorium of legitimate democratic motivation, as Frank has shown. But a question remains as to whether this is, on its own, an adequate way of attending to the significance of past suffering and death. An enthusing sublime is likely to be drawn to a closure that may be too quickly achieved, as opposed to some mode of tending to the past that more persistently vivifies and abides with suffering and death in a fashion that carries valuable resonance for ongoing political reflection. In short, the politics of memory is another site where the importance of tempering a one-sided, enthusing sublime becomes evident.

Attention to the sobering side of sublimity helps us see the value of a slow, sustained remembering of past oppression and death by encouraging a tarrying engagement with diverse lived experiences of harm and human annihilation. Of course, in this engagement, one cannot literally relive the past pain and extinction of others, but it may be possible to represent them not just through the record of historical facts, but also through more imaginative efforts that consciously evoke a sense of the sobering sublime.

Hartman's momentary, mini portrait retains the horror of the treatment and death of the girls but juxtaposes that with a “poetics of a free state” that imaginatively “liberate[s] them from the obscene descriptions” of the archive (Hartman 2016, 10, 25). One reads the imaginary description just quoted, and there is quiet exaltation in the portrayal of the beauty and resilience of the human spirit, but the vivid contrast with the background of atrocity attests as well to the necessity of a fuller aesthetic-affective reaction.

Hartman's approach thus helps us to see the value of a democratic imaginary that includes both an enthusing as well as a sobering side of sublimity. Its emphasis on the need for careful self-limitation and tarrying with scenes of trauma and death resists any temptation to reduce victims to simple, virtual characters in a one-dimensional process of homogenizing, democratic world creation. Her evoking of a sobering moment of sublimity thus slows the momentum of a pure enthusiasm that might otherwise threaten to submerge these harms in the unifying “regenerative vitality” of a secular redemption. That tarrying and attentiveness help foster a humility that remains more open to the depth and diversity of experiences of oppression, to losses that need to resonate in the democratic imagination and persistently ventilate it. When humility is understood in this way, it is not a virtue that encourages passivity, but rather one that encourages political sensitivity to both plurality and the potential costs of political actions, even democratic ones.

It is important not to overstate the independent influence of art like Mezane's and Wiley's or of the sort of fiction Hartman recommends. I am not arguing that the only, or most important, influence on our sense of self-limitation in democratic politics comes from engaging with such works. Rather, my suggestion is that they can be significant contributors to a constellation of sources within a democratic imaginary that can encourage the sensibility of bi-valent sublimity, thus helping to restrain the formation of populist imaginaries that slide toward fascism. There are clearly many other sources besides aesthetic ones. In the case of civil disobedience, for example, religion has often played this role. Of course, other non-religiously based exemplary scenes from a nation's history can also vivify such a sensibility, as the case of Dunkirk illustrates. Consider also the Boston Tea Party in American history. It was an event full of vehement, enthusiastic collective action, but there was also a sober sense of self-limitation. There was indeed violence to property and various scuffles involved in the dumping of the tea, but there were no deaths. This combination of features no doubt was part of the reason John Adams extolled the “Sublimity in this … Effort of the Patriots” (1964, 85–86). Finally, there is the important—and, as we increasingly now see, fragile—tradition in democracies of a political party in power giving that up voluntarily after an election loss.

In sum, my claim for the value of aesthetic representations is simply that they are one valuable source among many that can help cultivate an ethos of sublimity encouraging democratic self-limitation. If this argument is persuasive, then I have shown how the embrace of an aesthetic-affective sensibility may play an admirable and positive, rather than dangerous, role in democratic life. In doing so, I have made a place for an aesthetics of democratic power that draws us away from, rather than toward, a fascist sensibility.

An admirable democratic imaginary is one where an aesthetic sensibility of political life works in mutual congruence with the basic normative ideals of democracy. The animating force of this sensibility will embody the feeling of sublimity. But our understanding of a democratic sublime must be capacious, including not just the sense of enthusiasm but also a certain sort of sobriety. The enthusing valence of sublimity attaches to and enhances our motivations in relation to seeing and participating in popular manifestations of power that periodically leaven the weight of unjust or sclerotic political institutions and procedures. The sobering valence encourages a sense of democratic humility sensitive to the fallibility of political movements and goals, as well as an associated awareness of the dissonance of plural voices that sometimes gets occluded in a unifying, monological enthusiasm of a righteous, imagined “us” defining itself against a “them.” This dimension of the sublime is crucial, first, for helping us to resist attraction to anti-pluralistic currents in politics—something of particular importance today in combatting right-wing populism; and second, for our efforts to better attend to the memory of those who in the past have suffered great injustice in the long and difficult story of the enhancement of democracy.

The author declares no conflicts of interest.