Of caves and caving: towards an understanding of the art of sublimation

ABSTRACT Mobilizing Herbert Marcuse’s argument that modern leisure has been desublimated, which means it represses creativity, imagination and freedom, this article explores the idea that some forms of leisure can be paralogical. This is the suggestion that leisure can be a way of contradicting the legislating rules of consumer culture despite existing within (and therefore being part of) its language game. Using the example of caving, together with Peter Sloterdijk’s celebration of anthropotechnics which is a term he uses to refer to the labour of self-shaping and the practice of self-creation, the article reveals how cavers might disrupt and challenge the normal temporal, spatial and existential orders found in present modernity and caving. Beginning with a discussion that challenges both the old language of caving and figures of control and authority who created it, an attempt is made to reinterpret caves as sites of potential resistance as they are used by some people to find an unstable state known as the differend. The article concludes with the observation that seeking sublimation in the natural underground is in the end all about experiencing feelings of sublimity which occur only after the differend has been located.