Alien Thinking: On the Return of the Sublime as an Affective Medium

Abstract

In recent discourse, notably concerning speculative realism and accelerationism, the sublime is redis- covered as an epistemological and aesthetic tool. This “comeback” of the sublime is deeply rooted in the attempt to think of the world in a non- anthropocentric manner and to establish a kind of alien thinking. Even today the notion of the sublime challenges the concept of semiomorphic knowledge. A sense of amazement interwoven with fear and terror is an integral aspect of the sublime—not only as an aesthetic but as an epistemological category. It is related to philosophical traditions of thinking the unthinkable and grasping the limits of rationality and subjectivity.