Desde el umbral de las palabras: sobre lo sublime a partir de Pseudo-Longino

Abstract

The category of the sublime, which has been amply discussed but not well defined and which is a central category to modern and contemporary aesthetics, was first exposed in detail in a treatise on rhetoric dating from the first century, AD. This document, written by an anonymous author – probably a Pseudo-Longinus, a Greek exiled from Rome – would become, after its translation into French by Bileau (1674), a determinant starting point for the introduction to modern aesthetic reflections on the experience of the sublime. This paper presents a journey that seeks to analyze the rhetoric treatise “On the Sublime [Peri hypsos]” by Pseudo-Longinus, highlighting those places where the sublime, in its most classical presentation, is already related to some of the most interesting traits of its rise as a modern aesthetic category, foreshadowing the twist it will acquire in contemporary interpretation. The motivation is to corroborate, from a specific interpretative reading of Pseudo-Longinus’ text, how the path towards aesthetics originates in classical rhetoric and to show that the history of aesthetics has inherited a question that has particular resonance in contemporary thought: the question surrounding how language, image, and work of art can only be presented or represented in the vague limit between what is shown and what is hidden, making evident, and transforming into experience, the limits of their own communicability.