Episode July 16, 2025 20 min 45s

Justice, Dissent, and the Sublime

Explores the relationship between aesthetics—specifically the concepts of beauty and the sublime—and notions of justice, politics, and social organization. It argues against the common association of beauty with social justice, reciprocity, and shared identity, proposing instead that the sublime, with its emphasis on asymmetry and disagreement, offers a more compelling framework for understanding dissent and social critique. The book analyzes how these aesthetic principles operate in Romantic-era literature, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and works by Coleridge and Charlotte Smith, as well as in contemporary critical theories, including queer theory, cosmopolitanism, and animal studies, highlighting how prevailing ideas of beauty often implicitly reinforce normative social structures and exclusions. Ultimately, it suggests that a sublime perspective can foreground individual and collective challenges to established norms, fostering a broader conception of justice.

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