Abstract

AbstractThis essay considers the political economic ideology in recent popular cinematic depictions of finance in terms of Immanuel Kant’s aesthetics of the sublime. Think, for instance, of the contingent and risky peaks and valleys of the stock market’s price paths as the jagged mountains that inspire the fear and terror necessary for sublime feeling. I give a sustained reading of how the Kantian sublime operates in Neil Burger’s 2011 film Limitless. By subordinating both the technics of neuro-augmentation and the contingency of the economy to an innate human reason, the protagonist shows audiences what it might mean today to experience sublimity – but not without hinting at a latent anti-Kantian fissure that would reorient us against this bourgeois discourse.