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ABSTRACT: This essay argues that Peri Hypsous (On Height or On the Sublime, traditionally attributed to "Longinus") marks an important moment in the history of rhetoric, as rhetoric is presented therein as an autonomous, sublime object. Through notions of hypsos (height) and physis (nature), and an amalgamation of Ciceronian/Isocratean and Gorgianic notions of rhetoric, "Longinus" frees rhetoric from the project of legitimation. He makes it a marvel that needs no justification-rhetoric "comes into its own." Even as I account for the emergence of this conception of rhetoric in Peri Hypsous, I question its helpfulness for rhetorical studies.
The "sublime" is a categorical refuge of a number of recent projects, most notably those of Jean-Francois Lyotard, in works such as The Postmodern Condition and The Inhuman, and Frederick .lameson in Postmodernism. ' These thinkers And in the sublime a means of displacing Enlightenment judgment even as they find the sublime in Enlightenment texts. For example, Lyotard, whose notion of the sublime is drawn in his readings of Kant, is concerned with artistic works that, "are not in principle governed by preestablishcd rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgment, by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work" (Postmodern Condition 81). This "postmodern sublime" refuses essential or ideological justincation. Kant's own interest in the sublime was related to the work of the French critic Nicholas Hoilcau-Dcspriaux, who was a critical catalyst behind the upsurge of interest in the sublime in the eighteenth century. Hoileau translated and interpreted in 1674 an ancient manuscript on style in poetics and rhetoric by a so-called "Longinus" entitled Peri Hypsous-literally translated On Height, but more commonly On the Sublime. Peri Hypsous is the most importunt ancient text with respect to the sublime. Inspired by this ancient treatise, Boileau wrote, "The sublime is not strictly speaking something which is proven or demonstrated, but a marvel, which seizes one, strikes one, and makes one feel" (qtd. in Lyotard, The Inhuman 97). Peri Hypsous offered Hoileau and his successors another route in the Enlightenment project of autonomy by offering the concept of the self-justified artistic object, the sublime object. From Longinus tu Boileau to Kant to Lyotard we can trace a ooiiocrn with freeing art und artistic objects...