The Sublime Today: Re-partitioning the Global Sensible

Inspired by Immanuel Kant's analytic of the sublime and Jacques Rancière's Kant-influenced politics of aesthetics, this article focuses on a reading of the film Dirty Pretty Things, directed by Stephen Frears. In parallel with this reading, the article analyses the way politics can be construed, not on the basis of Kant's politics but in terms of how it can be thought as a result of the insights in his Critique of Judgment. The article concludes with the suggestion that two registers of a reoriented politics, both of which are exemplified in Dirty Pretty Things, may be derived from the subject-in-disarray that emerges from the Kantian sublime encounter. The first register bears on the partitions within the subject and the second on the wider issue of the global partitioning of political subjects.