I have suggested that there is a problem with how Connolly connects aesthetic-affective sensibility in general with the motivation of democratic insurgency. At the heart of this deficiency is his neglect of what is, historically, the most salient orientation to conceptualizing the aesthetic-affective dimension of collective action. Here, I refer to the tradition of comprehending the visceral appeal of popular movements through the notion of sublimity. As noted above, the distinctively modern version of this was highlighted in the eighteenth century with the emergence of democratic revolutions. The first prominent philosophical characterizations of what we might call, following Jason Frank (2021), the “democratic sublime,” were either cautiously measured in their judgment (Kant, 1991, pp. 182–184) or downright hostile (Burke, 1987, pp. 9–10, 15, 57, 134). Neither of these thinkers wanted to be seen as encouraging what Robespierre lauded as the “sublime enthusiasm” of violent revolutionary action—the ‘volcanic’ eruptions of democracy, as it were (quoted in Huet, 1994, p. 61).

The association of the sublime with natural phenomena like volcanos or vertiginous mountain peaks was a familiar one; but it must be remembered that the concept of the sublime in politics was always entangled with our moral character. In Burke, it is our character as mortal creatures of God who are embedded in social hierarchies; in Kant, it is our character as noumenal beings.^Footnote6 Both believed that the significance of these moral frames can be heightened through cultivation. Of course, each of them thought that their way of perceiving these foundational values—noumenal in Kant and hierarchical, theistic in Burke—merely reflected something intrinsic to the metaphysical character of the world. Thus, each in his own way differentiated (even if not entirely explicitly) between something like a “real” or “authentic” (eigentlich) sublime and a “false” sublime, with only the former involving “true enthusiasm.”^Footnote7 The question of how exactly we should draw that distinction and cultivate it was approached differently by these two philosophers, as they witnessed the violence of the French Revolution.

What I want to suggest is that Connolly needs to better engage the knot of questions that is highlighted by those who have grappled with the entanglement of democratic insurgency, foundational values, and the sublime. As I suggested above, this whole terrain of reflection becomes salient to Connolly when he appeals to the idea of a general strike as the culmination of the micro-politics of the self and the politics of “swarming” between diverse groups that he hopes will gather momentum toward a culminating volcanic eruption (2019, pp. 43; 2017, pp. 6, 123–129).

The general strike is an image, not a blueprint for action. Like Sorel, Connolly promotes the idea of a general strike as a novel addition to our political mythic. In short, it needs to be part of the aesthetic-affective imaginary that generates enthusiasm for vehement democratic movements. But Connolly, unlike Sorel, is quite clear that his idea of a general strike is to be one of restrained violence not involving substantial “bloodshed.” This limitation is stated in relatively categorical terms. But the only reason Connolly gives for his position is that recourse to bloodshed on the left is strategically bad in the sense that it is likely to give those on the right the excuse to raise the level of their own violence (2017, pp. 131–132). This is no doubt a serious consideration today; but I would question whether purely strategic reasoning here is adequate to comprehending the issue of bloodshed as it emerges at this point in the discussion of democratic insurgency.

One of my reasons for highlighting the importance of discussions of the sublime and politics becomes clearer in the light of this concern. That is because the issue of violence, as I noted above, has always been at the center of discussions of modern democratic insurgency. Concern about violence in the French Revolution led Kant to affirm the feeling of sublimity when experienced by one observing that novel emergence of popular politics, but he did not allow that to extend to any enthusiasm that might draw one toward participation in revolutionary violence. (Kant, 1991, pp. 182–184). Such caution became vivid condemnation in Burke who believed that the French Revolution was awash in a “false” sublime: One powered by awe and enthusiasm in the face of scenes of human willfulness un-leashed from all the hierarchical social and political bonds of the ancien régime, as well as from the humility embodied in Christian values. Unlimited willfulness—human infinitude—was displacing a proper appreciation of our character as finite creations of an infinite deity atop the Great Chain of Being. This, to Burke, was at the core of the felonious assault on western civilization ushered into history by popular insurgency; and when The Terror emerged, Burke could say he told us so.

Generations of scholars of both liberal and conservative persuasions have at least tacitly followed Burke in his suspicions about the role of aesthetic-affective empowerment of forceful democratic insurgency, even if they have not all wanted to endorse his nostalgia for a hierarchical world. Frank, in his The Democratic Sublime, has tried to show that this recurring suspicion amounts to a tendentious “democratic terror thesis” (Frank, 2021, pp. 68–69). As he argues, invocations of it simply tar every democratic manifestation in the streets with the brush of impending violence, terror, and authoritarianism. Although I agree with the bulk of Frank’s counterargument here, he nevertheless clears the field of obstacles to his categorical affirmation of a democratic sublime a bit too quickly. By this I mean that he succeeds in showing that there is no necessary slide to terror and authoritarianism in vehement popular manifestations, but he has not refuted the argument that such manifestations may slide that way, if we simply bathe our action-oriented attitudes in the accelerant of a supportive aesthetic-affective sensibility. In short, popular insurgencies whose motivation is enhanced by such a sensibility may track in a democratic direction, but they may also track in populist authoritarian ones as well.

This is hardly a minor academic issue today, as many democratic polities confront right-wing populist movements. More events such as the insurgency in Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021, are not a remote possibility. Clearly, that event was an authentic, vehement popular manifestation, fired by collective enthusiasm; in short, entangled with an elevating sense of the sublime. Many of the participants felt they were acting together to “stop the steal” and save democracy. Is their feeling of being part of a sublime and estimable event defensible? Or is it a stunted, indefensible manifestation of a democratic ethos?

As noted earlier, Burke’s account of the sublime is deeply unfashionable today. But I want to suggest that there may yet be something partially valuable in his critique of political insurrection, once we detach it from his affinity for hierarchy, both theological and social-political. We might then begin to reconfigure his critique of modern, systemic political willfulness as calling valuable attention to a forgetting of our mortality, our finitude.^Footnote8

But how exactly might the cultivation of a sense of finitude infuse a feeling of the sublime, after one has given up the more familiar, apparently necessary, contrasting figure of divine infinitude? Burke was struck by the way in which some experiences of pain or the closeness of death can bring not just fear or terror, but also a curious sense of pleasurable elevation.^Footnote9 Of course, if one is immediately threatened with death, there is nothing positive about it; it is merely terrifying. But if one is somewhat removed from the danger, that space may allow for a subtle sense of elevation that, however, remains in tension with the “sobriety” evoked by the coerced vividness of our mortality experienced against the background of God’s immortality (Burke, 1990, p. 32). But if we relinquish that transcendental anchor, however, the compound sense of both pleasure and sobriety must be comprehended as emerging somewhat differently. It can arise, I would suggest, from experiencing our real but precarious, capacity to challenge and temporarily exceed limits in pursuing our ideals, in this case the collective ideal of a sustainable democratic world. (This sort of experience would especially stand out if we were experiencing our finitude against the ontological background of an infinite becoming of the world around us, an idea at the core of Connolly’s own ontology, as I will show in a moment.)^Footnote10

The key issue here becomes how to conceptualize this in a way that does not inflate the exhilaration of challenging limits into a confidence in human limitlessness. The feeling of sublimity needs to be better associated with the evocation of an experience of finitude joined with an uplifting, exhilarating sense of the human spirit engaging its limits in a world of becoming. This means embracing what I called above the “sobering” dimension of the sublime. It contrasts with, but also should accompany, the more familiar sense of an “enthusing” sublime that Frank so admirably illustrates. Democratic life must cultivate a sensibility characterized by a tensional congruence of the two, if it is to adequately distinguish its own occasional resort to violence from that of fascism or of groups on the left for whom violence became simply an enthusiastically embraced strategy, like the Weather Underground or the Red Army Faction.

One might argue, however, that my suggestions about a distinctive democratic sensibility are not well grounded: Don’t all regimes, even fascist ones, attend in some way to our finitude? Those who die in the favored cause are exalted and remembered as martyrs. But here the enthusing valence of sublimity is consistently given effective priority; the other, sobering valence, plays a markedly subordinate, even disappearing, role. The fascist does not allow deaths to resonate with any real depth, but rather categorically locks them into a script in which they serve a grief-transcending purpose without limits: the further “hardening [of] oneself like steel” against the enemy (Junger, 2008, pp. 16–17). We have seen a similar, if milder, version of this strategy pursued by the Trump movement. Leaders radically reinterpret moments that might otherwise be interpreted as evoking a sense of finitude and humility. For example, the enthusiasm of an election contest juxtaposed to the sobering moment of acknowledging that your party has lost is a crucial, if often overlooked, moment in the experience of democratic life. But Trump and his circle consistently urged supporters to literally deny these moments in relation to the 2020 election; thus, a loss was not really a loss, but only the occurrence of fraud and conspiracy by opponents. Supporters are accordingly encouraged to harden their hostility toward the enemy and enthusiastically pursue their fight to retain power.

If one tries to think of a vivid example of how bivalent sensibility informs political protest in democratic polities, civil disobedience is likely to come quickly to mind given its notable highlighting of the sobering dimension. In his 1963, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King, Jr., speaks of the “sublime courage” of the protestors as they faced the violence of police dogs and batons with a spirited sense of collective empowerment and sobriety (King 1963). Although this characterization of the protests is apt, it is nevertheless important not to misinterpret the exemplary character of what went on in places like Birmingham, Alabama in the 1960s. These episodes quickly came to be distorted into narrowly restrictive models of how oppositional protest should be conducted in liberal, constitutional orders. This sort of idealized interpretation allowed many white Americans to see any sort of more vehement, “uncivil” protests on the part of blacks in that era as patently illegitimate. The latter were seen as unacceptable in a “reasonably just” society, as John Rawls characterized the existing order. (Pineda, 2021, pp. 22–52). But for blacks in America at that time, the U.S. hardly fit that description. Thus, while instances like Birmingham should indeed be seen as embodying an admirable bivalent sensibility, that judgment should not be equated with the further claim that this status simultaneously denies legitimacy to more uncivil modes of protest of the kind that tended to become prevalent in later years, both in the civil rights movement and in the anti-Vietnam war protests. The choice of a mode of protest always involves weighing the degree of injustice present in a regime against the degree of violence being entertained as appropriate by opposition actors. These are typically rough and fallible decisions in fraught contexts; and they may only find fuller justification after some passage of time (as I will explain further in a moment).

It is thus crucial not to confuse my claims about the significance of a bivalent sensibility with a narrow liberal position that accords certain actions like civil disobedience an overly idealized status without regard to context. My argument aims rather to highlight that democratic decisions about vehement protest should involve a range of ethical and strategic concerns infused with a sense of sublimity. It thus differs from both a narrow liberal argument mandating a blanket prohibition on violence, on the one hand, and a fascist one where the deployment of violence is animated merely by strategic calculations and a sense of enthusiasm for the deed, on the other.

The background orientation provided by such a bivalent sublimity is needed to provide coherence to a position like Connolly’s, with its somewhat perplexing notion of a violent general strike that is nevertheless to be “bloodless” (Connolly, 2017, pp. 128–129). In short, for actors to plausibly pursue his scenario of a vehement, but restrained, opposition, they would need to embrace something like this sort of sensibility. But further argument is needed for this claim to be sufficiently convincing. Toward that end, two additional issues have to be engaged.

First, any claim highlighting a sense of finitude in democratic life is likely to meet with some wariness. Bonnie Honig has warned against the danger of what she calls a “mortalist humanism” that threatens to turn attention too sharply away from admirable, contestatory upwellings of democracy (Honig, 2013, pp. 15, 19, 26–27, 30, 146–147). Following this sentiment, Frank similarly contends that a focus on finitude and the associated stress on human vulnerability efface “democratic contention” and “the importance of inspiring new assemblages of collective, demotic power” (Frank, 2021, pp. 9; 2009, pp. 670–671). In short, focusing on finitude means agonistic enthusiasm is being traded away for humility and quiescence. This feels like a bad exchange; and it would presumably worry Connolly as well, given the centrality of the notion of agonism to his work as a whole. Accordingly, my attempt to affirm the value of a “sobering sublime,” attached to a highlighting of finitude, would seem to be a dead end. Then again, maybe not.

From time to time in Connolly’s recent work, the theme of finitude surfaces. In Facing the Planetary, for example, he affirms “Nietzschean explorations of mortality…in a world of becoming” (2017, pp. 190; 2019, 88). But such statements are relatively few and scattered. To grasp the full importance of this topic for him, we need to return to his earlier, pathbreaking Identity\Difference (1991). There our anxiety about mortality is at the core of an ontology that continues to animate Connolly’s thought today. Significantly, that book is also where his distinctive take on agonism is first developed. Given the suspicions just noted about the danger that a stress on finitude represents for agonism, it is useful to recall its insights.

Connolly claims there that our identity takes shape through its constitutive relation with what it is not; in short, I don’t exist as a purely self-constituting being which then goes out into the world to encounter what is different. This means that I am not the ontological sovereign of myself. I am constitutively entangled. That is the source of an underlying existential ressentiment. Why is that the case? It is because this underlying anxiety is cathected with awareness of my mortality. The closer I can feel to being sovereign, the freer I feel from the bondedness of my finitude. If so, then I will continually resent the fact that the would-be sovereignty of my identity is always already constrained by its entanglement with others. That resentment of my condition manifests itself in a persistent “temptation” to transfigure what is “different” into what is “other,” with the latter being the object of abiding hostility, underlain by a wish that this other’s impeding of my/our will could be erased from the world (1991, pp. ix-x, 1-3, 8-9).

The existential relation of identity\difference is thus a deep source of agonism in human affairs. And it is resilient because our anxiety about mortality is ineliminable. Although we may not be able to free ourselves from it, we can resist the persistent temptation to assuage that anxiety and resentment by indulging the desire to dominate the other, especially in political life, where that hostility can manifest itself in such horrendous ways. Connolly’s hope is that we can cultivate our sensibility in such a fashion as to temper this dynamic, so that we do not allow politics to slide from a “agonism of respect” to an imperial agonism of annihilation (1991, pp. x, 10, 33, 166–167, 170).

This would seem to indicate that an investment in agonism is not at all incompatible with a deep embrace of mortality. It should, of course, be emphasized here that this relationship is, for Connolly, not conceived in theistic terms, in relation to which our mortal condition stands out; rather it appears against the background of an ontological picture of non-theistic being as becoming.

This ontology is crucial to the second issue that must be engaged if my Connolly interpretation is to be convincing. A critic might suggest that I am inappropriately bringing aspects of his early work on human identity\difference to bear on issues related to his later work that focuses on non-human nature and a radical politics of democratic response to the climate crisis. The claims arising from the former, including the crucial place of finitude, are, it might be argued, simply not related to the latter. But there is in fact a close relationship between the two. To grasp its character, one must attend to how the ontological background structures Connolly’s thinking on the latter issue, as well as the former. Although Connolly originally developed the identity\difference conception primarily to think about self and human other, this relation should not be understood as only having a purely inter-human dimension. Its embeddedness in his encompassing ontology of becoming has significant implications for the relation of self and non-human otherness. And this connection allows one to see how his earlier reflections open into the concerns of his later work on the climate crisis, with its focus on how we need to reconceptualize our understanding of non-human nature in order to adequately comprehend and respond to that crisis.

Understanding the process of becoming as applying to non-human nature means seeing the latter as characterized by a powerful and increasing dynamism. Following recent scientific opinion, Connolly wants to expand our comprehension of both the scope and speed of change in nature to include how things like ocean currents are being rapidly transformed by human-caused climate warming. The processes of non-human, natural becoming are not as fixed or slow as humans have typically imagined them in the Anthropocene.

How does this more rapid non-human becoming relate to the identity\difference dynamic? The solidity of my identity is fundamentally threatened by such becoming in nature, especially the acceleration that results from human intervention. A stable and systematically pliable non-human natural world is a crucial part of the imaginary embedded in modern life. Such a world helps sustain the continued assumption that we can achieve an infinitely increasing mastery of nature with relatively little cost. But nature now appears as something more precarious or fragile in relation to our efforts to manipulate it and more subject to rapid becoming, especially a becoming that also demonstrates the fragility of our frameworks for human planning. This threatens a core component of the imagined sovereignty of modern selves, just as does the existence of human others who challenge our identity (Connolly, 2013). For example, the human-caused warming of the climate is linked to increasingly intense storms and rising sea levels that threaten settled patterns of living necessary to the stability of the background conditions in which modern identity is anchored.

Moreover, when we see this link between Connolly’s early account of identity and his later work on the climate crisis, it helps us to better understand why climate change deniers manifest such dogged resistance to accepting scientific facts. What would otherwise seem to be an obviously irrational stance gains its sense from a low-grade rage at the idea that natural otherness seems to be willfully assaulting the stability of our identity as sovereign, modern selves. Determined, increasingly vehement denial and hostility toward those “others” who worry about fragility seem to be the only ways to protect the integrity of that identity and keep our finitude at bay.

If the argument in the preceding paragraphs is valid, then there is no reason that the “later” Connolly should not be able to find value in a bivalent conception of the sublime that embodies the centrality of finitude. Such a conception would encompass the feelings of elevation, awe, and enthusiasm that can attend and help motivate vehement popular manifestations but do so in a way that “tempers” or sobers the feeling of agonism directed at our political opponents (Scudder and White, 2023, pp. 71–106.).

Although I have suggested that some political phenomena, such as civil disobedience, can model a fully bivalent feeling of sublime, it needs to be acknowledged that vehement democratic manifestations at a given time may be characterized predominantly by enthusiastic turmoil, mixed with some sorts of violence, manifesting little apparent sense of sobriety. And that may not be inappropriate, depending on the intensity of the harms being contested and the goals being pursued. But, if so, doesn’t this mean that a feeling of the sublime in a fully bivalent sense will often not be readily apparent in tumultuous politics? Here, we need to recognize, as I noted above, that a sequence of decisions associated with collective insurgency may only be capable of adequate evaluation over extended periods of time, as democratic actions are reflected upon and moderated, thereby hopefully manifesting the increasing presence of a sobering component.

Taking temporality in this sense into account helps in clarifying the distinction between democratic insurgent actions and proto-fascist variants. The degree to which the former show characteristics of a sobering sublime will be crucial to this judgment. Over time, democratic movements should be able to modulate their self-image and behavior to better align their commitment to militancy with a capacious, bivalent sense of sublimity.

But if insurgent democratic actions are, on their own, often unlikely to immediately manifest a full sense of sublimity, where might we look for aid in vivifying and cultivating such a compound feeling that might then be brought to bear on our judgments of political action? There are, of course, vivid historical examples of full manifestations of a two-fold sublimity. It is important to keep these alive in public memory. Here, I have already mentioned civil disobedience in the 1950s and 1960s. Similarly, we can look to events like the Boston Tea Party, attending especially to how it represented great popular enthusiasm balanced with a remarkable attention to minimizing bloodshed.^Footnote11 But we should also attend to how aesthetic representations can provide us with images that can evoke both senses of the sublime simultaneously. As an example, consider the public enactments of the contemporary South African performance artist, Sethembile Msezane. In one of her works (Fig 1), she inserted herself into a setting of enthusiastic collective democratic action that occurred at the University of Cape Town during the dismantling and removal of a large statue of Cecil Rhodes in 2015.

Sethembile Msezane, Chapungu: The Day Rhodes Fell (2015). See “Standing for art and truth: A chat with Sethembile Msezane,” TED Blog; https://blog.ted.com/standing-for-art-and-truth-a-chat-with-sethembile-msezane/

Full size image

On one level, her appearance might appear to fit seamlessly with the crowd’s enthusiastic sense of sublimity at the toppling of this prominent figure in South Africa’s racist history. Clad as an eagle, she seems to soar triumphantly above the scene of Rhodes being toppled. And yet Msezane clearly wants to strike, as well, a note of sobriety. The bird she is mimicking is the Chapungu, a species that is threatened today in South Africa. And the easy enthusiasm of the crowd snapping photographs is juxtaposed to what Msezane clearly intended to be a long, grueling ordeal for herself. This and other performances she has staged portray a sense of the vulnerability, precarity, and pain of the human body, especially the black female body in the history of that country. The suffering is intended as part of the drama of these performances. As she said of her condition when she stepped off the plinth after hours in 90-degree-F weather: “By the time I came down, I was shaking and experiencing sunstroke. But I also felt a burst of life inside” (Msezane, 2020).^Footnote12

If my reflections so far have lent the notion of a sobering aspect of sublimity some general plausibility, what exactly is its specific value for Connolly’s take on what is to be done to contest our current political threats? He points us to two general strategies: The “politics of swarming” and the “cross-regional general strike.”^Footnote13 The former refers to multiple forms of local knowledge-building, sensibility tuning, and organizing to draw together diverse constituencies who have a stake in combatting present ills. This idea seems plausible and admirable. But how do we imagine such a multifaceted “rhizomatic complex” of activity binding itself into the form of a vehement collective insurgency (Connolly, 2017, pp. 12, 120)? We need some way of animating the motivation of “dispersed participants” so that they coalesce into the “perfect storm” of a general strike. Such motivation “dissolves the sense of being neutralized by the everyday practices of capitalism” and vivifies “the prospect of acting collectively” (Connolly, 2017, pp. 129, 148).

Crucial to generating the needed motivation for such an eruption is the looming image of the general strike presented in Sorel’s Reflections on Violence, published in 1908. As Connolly says, Sorel makes clear “how such a … myth…can sharpen needed energies and divisions” between “us” and “them” and motivate insurgent collective action (Connolly, 2017, p. 130). Sorel looked to this myth to weld the working class into a monolithic “terrifying” weapon of “war” (1961, pp. 274–275).

Connolly thus turns to the general strike for its force as a mythic image of a political upheaval. He lauds Sorel for his “projection of a vision” intended to “mobilize [people] to act” (2017, p. 147). Sorel emphasized that the sense and power of this vision could not be transmitted by reasoned explication (1961, pp. 122–124). It was to move an audience of workers by its visceral, aesthetic-affective appeal to their imagination to enthusiastically take up the violent task of the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.^Footnote14

But immediately after announcing his investment in Sorel’s central idea, Connolly begins a process of significant qualification. This is where the trajectory of his thinking gets problematic. The reason is that we are first incited to cathect with a powerful, visceral image of a volcanic, lethal, explosion whose appeal exceeds reason; but then we are provided with an opposing list of reason-based cautions. We are accordingly told to look to insights from other thinkers like Gandhi on nonviolence, cautioned that such a strike must be “bloodless,” and informed that the unified fist of Sorelian opposition must rather take the form of “pluralist assemblages” moving in “slow motion” (Connolly, 2017, pp. 128–129). In sum, participants in Connolly’s general strike are incited to be furiously enthusiastic in collectively toppling the pillars of the contemporary economic-political order, but then abruptly told to restrain themselves with cautious, rational qualifications.

My point in emphasizing the sharp contrast between the visceral appeal to a mythic versus the subsequent rational chastening of it is not meant to question Connolly’s cautions themselves. In fact, I agree with them. Rather what I want to highlight is the striking divergence between his declaration of a need to move beyond reason alone by looking to the aesthetic-affective power of the mythic, on the one hand, followed by his announcement that we must radically deflate that aesthetic-affective force with reason alone, on the other. Here, ironically, Connolly could be his own best critic, given his assertions about the unpersuasiveness of any thinking that fails to acknowledge the persistent force of aesthetic-affective dynamics in politics. I want to suggest that we embrace an alternative way of proceeding here that might allow a better negotiation of this problem—but do so in a way that nevertheless respects the deepest commitments of Connolly’s thought. This will, however, require an openness on his part to embracing the language of sublimity.

With that goal in mind, let me begin by noting that although Connolly appeals to the power of Sorel’s aesthetic-affective framing, he curiously does not pick up on the latter’s explicit binding of his myth of collective action with the feeling of the sublime. For example, Sorel refers to the “sublime work” of revolutionary action and urges us to see how the myth of the general strike is “capable of inspiring sublimity” (pp. 139, 214–215, 275). I assume that Connolly’s inattention to this usage in Sorel is not intentional, but rather simply an oversight. Perhaps, however, instead of either overlooking Sorel’s sublime or simply adopting it, one could here embrace a bivalent notion of sublimity. This might help avoid enhancing the danger of freely accelerating violence and bloodshed in popular insurgency through the depletion of some dimensions of its motivational power; in short, we would be looking for an influence on our visceral, aesthetic-affective register, rather than solely to prudential dictates.

This criticism of Connolly is not a categorical claim that one cannot bring aesthetic-affective sensibility into a relation with rational-moral cautions. As my discussion of Burke and Kant noted, there has typically been an entanglement of the two in discussions of sublimity. And Connolly similarly promotes combining appeals to our sensibility with “refined processes of reflection” (2017a, pp. xxi-xxii, 84). My objection is rather that in his invocation of a general strike the aesthetic-affective force he appeals to is diametrically opposed to his rational-moral reflections. All of the force on the visceral register is on the side of Sorel’s sublime mythic image. It is no secret that his demotion of reason in this formulation of what I have been calling an exclusively enthusing sublime is something that undemocratic characters, starting with Mussolini, have found attractive.^Footnote15

Now Connolly, as noted above, is acutely aware that “there is never a vacuum on the visceral register of affective communication” (2017a, p. 17). But his formulations seem to leave just such a vacuum in the democratic sensorium that he wants so much to help cultivate. If one is to effectively fight fascism’s visceral strength, then one must draw some resources from that same register. Connolly clearly does not want to follow Sorel’s simple, enthusiastic embrace of violence, but his caution in this regard needs to be better supported by insights about the cultivation of an appropriate countervailing sensibility.

As Connolly says repeatedly, fascism is a threat we must “counter on the visceral register” (2017a, p. 19). But what then might provide the positive, aesthetic-affective source of such a counterforce? It is here that turning to the sobering dimension of sublimity can be helpful, especially when it is interpreted in terms of the ontological grounding that Connolly has so compellingly sketched in his earlier work. There the self is imagined as continually and consciously negotiating its finitude by resisting the temptation to transform difference into otherness, a tendency that is generated by our modern, perpetually renewed tendency to repress any abiding acknowledgement of our mortality. A resistant attitude here would reflect and help manifest an attachment to being as becoming, in the sense that our orientation to difference would now acknowledge that condition of the world by expressing a “presumptive generosity” and “agonistic respect” toward the continual becoming of difference (2005, p. 31;1991, p. x).

This ontological scene, and the proto narrative it supports, together provide a positive, existential framing for affirming and cultivating a sobering dimension of sublimity. And that cultivation would help us to feel motivated not just by sublime enthusiasm for collective action in the pursuit of democratic political goals, but also by an abiding resistance to the temptations to self-righteousness and certainty that feed a sense of unlimited, iron willfulness. As Connolly has noted, fascism revels in images of the “armored male” body imagining itself capable of annihilating any obstacle to its will (2017a, pp. 53–58, 84–86). He highlighted this deep association well before the January 6, 2021 insurrection in Washington, when we witnessed so many of Trump’s enthusiastic male co-conspirators proudly clad in full tactical military armor. Contrast that with the vulnerable, but courageous, body as it appears in Msezane’s performances.

The armored male of a fascist mythic has a clarifying, romantic, almost transcendental affinity for violence and bloodshed.^Footnote16 How might folding in a sensitivity for the sobering sublime help a democratic political mythic—Connolly’s as well as others—to resist the pull of such a sensibility in the context of engaging in vehement collective action? Being receptive to a sobering sublimity does not bring us to any absolute prohibition on violence and possible bloodshed. They may in fact become necessary in pressing circumstances. But the cultivation of a sensibility animated by a bivalent sublime might help lessen our propensity to imagine violent action as a pure medium for exhilaration, self-cleansing, and an iron transcendence of the complexities of politics. More precisely, it should better dispose us to feel the difference between violence and bloodshed as attractive lures, on the one hand, and as occasionally grim necessities, on the other.