Notes
1. Derrida cannot be pinned down to one historical period of interest or expertise, though it would be hard to overestimate the importance of Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel for his thinking. On Derrida and Romanticism, see two issues of Studies in Romanticism 46:2 and 46:3 (Summer and Fall 2007), both edited by David L. Clark.
2. The rediscovery of Longinus launched by Boileau's translation (1674) marks the sublime of European modernity as initially a Baroque event, even if its full-fledged philosophical treatment comes at the end of or after the Baroque as understood in terms of most periodizing schemes.
3. Explicit discourse about the sublime, however, postdates the experience or performance of it. That the sublime was not a prominent category in Milton's time did nothing to prevent him from writing what many would consider the most sublime poem in the English language. Samuel Johnson (when the category was much in fashion) thought sublimity to be the defining characteristic of his poetry.
4. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997), 194ff.
5. Christopher Braider notes most pointedly the conjunction of related terms Bestimmung (vocation, determination), Stimmung (mood, sentiment) and one could add Stimme (voice) not least in Kant where the remarkable thing about feelings in the experience of the beautiful and the sublime is how quickly they get translated into or at least prompt verbal judgments of the sort "X is beautiful," "Y is sublime," even if Kant specifies that one cannot properly call anything sublime.
6. For the classic analysis of this, see Neil Hertz's superb essay "A Reading of Longinus," in his The End of the Line (New York: Columbia, 1985) or in the new expanded edition of that book (Aurora, Co.: The Davies Group, 2009).
7. For Paul de Man's analysis of this "complicated and somewhat devious scenario," see "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant," in his Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 86.
8. In this McCarthy runs parallel to Siane Ngai's explorations of what she calls "stuplimity" in her Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 2005) and earlier in Sianne Ngai, "Stuplimity: Shock and Boredom in Twentieth-Century Aesthetics," Postmodern Culture 10.2 (January 2000) un-paginated.
9. See Nicholas Halmi: "From Hierarchy to Opposition: Allegory and the Sublime," Comparative Literature, Vol. 44, No. 4: 337-60; Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1964), esp. 243-252; Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 47 inter alia.
10. Shelley is distinctive for not insisting on a Burkean, or early Kantian, sharp distinction between the beautiful and the sublime —not everyone would be able to invoke "awful Loveliness" the way he does—because the intensity of the experience of beauty easily tips over into its supposed opposite or quasi-opposite.
11. In a good deal of ‘sublime' European art one sees an insistence on this pointing motif, from Leonardo's "St. John the Baptist" to Jacques-Louis David's "Napoleon crossing the Alps."
12. Auerbach, Erich. "Camilla, or, The Rebirth of the Sublime." In Literary Language and its Public in Late Antiquity and in the Middle Ages. Trans. Ralph Mannheim (New York: Pantheon, 1965), 181-234.
13. I broached a reading of this thesis and the "Theses" more generally in "Reversal, Quotation (Benjamin's History)," in MLN (Modern Language Notes), German Issue, (April 1991), 622-45.
14. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology. Trans, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. [Corrected Edition] (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 5.
15. Heinrich Wölfflin, Kleine Schriften (1886-1933), ed. Joseph Gantner (Basel: Benno Schwabe & Co, 1946), 165.
16. It's not as if Bentham, however anti-sublime like Hume, is a pure empiricist of the sensual. In his thinking on language, for example, he emphasizes the pressing need for names for "immaterial or pneumatical objects," even if they all have their roots in materiality.