Marc Richir and the transitional area of sublime

Abstract

This paper attempts to elaborate the notion of the transitional area of sublime. To accomplish this task, I will first draw on the works of Marc Richir, in which he correlates the concept of the transitional area with the experience of sublime, albeit without insisting on their possible conjunction. Therefore, my task would be to prove how the relation between the transitional area and the experience of the sublime can be considered a consequence of Richir’s developing thought. Richir has drawn on Immanuel Kant’s aesthetics, concerning the former’s theory of sublime, while the transitional area is a concept borrowed from Donald Winnicott’s psychoanalytical framework. To demonstrate how the transitional area of the sublime functions, I will provide an account of what Richir calls the phenomenon of celebration. I will argue that, for Richir, the celebration resonates with Winnicott’s transitional area, which can represent a hybrid zone where imagination fuses perpetually with the world and the world appears as a coherent dream, this being rendered possible by the experience of the sublime. Finally, I will retrace Richir’s steps back to the theories of Kant, Winnicott and Merleau-Ponty, to show how these authors influenced his conception of the transitional area of sublime.

Keywords: sublime, dream, reality, celebration, phenomenology