The sublime and the subliminal: Modern identities and the aesthetics of combat

The article considers some aspects of the problem of both individual and collective identity in the context of the development of different kinds of warfare in modern western society. The elucidation of these relations requires an unexpected application of aesthetic ideas; in particular the notion of the sublime. It is argued that the experience of combat is one possible `real' form of the sublime. It is further suggested, paradoxically, that sublime combat cannot actually be experienced; it is an `inexperience'. The historical significance of modern western war literature, thus, is just that it fills the `gap' left by the destructive inexperience of combat and it allows those who endured it, as well as those who did not, to construct a `memory' of the events themselves.