After reading Michael J. Shapiro’s book, I was hard-pressed to imagine a more timely work in political theory. Our planet and its American geopolitical locations catastrophically continue to serve as host to two examples of the “political sublime” that Shapiro does not consider, but which readers will be better equipped to comprehend after studying his work. I will very briefly take up these examples at the end of my review.

First, however, it is important to note that The Political Sublime is not only timely but also the equal of the best examples of recent scholarship in the growing field of politics and aesthetics, which is populated by books in political and social theory, feminist theory, critical theory, critical race theory, literary theory, and film theory, among other theoretical genres. One of the many reasons for its quality deserves special mention. Readers in the humanities and creative social sciences who do not read and write in the aforementioned areas will not be put off by how Shapiro theorizes the sublime, which is extremely clear while also including a list of names whose works may be daunting for the uninitiated: Rancière, Lyotard, Deleuze, and Barthes in the theoretical foreground, with Kant’s voice constantly in the philosophical background.

Yet it is not only that Shapiro’s philosophical and theoretical allies are presented clearly with an aim to making their contributions and his argument dependent on those contributions accessible. To the contrary, that all-important authorial obligation of accessibility is carried out by his proliferation of examples, which both drive and support his argument even as they clarify and develop it for his readers, whose aesthetic responses will immerse them as they immersed me in the artworks—novels, short stories, film narratives and images, documentaries, paintings, commix, architecture, music, social media, and occasionally journalism, among others—that decipher his illustrations of the political sublime and shape reader-viewer-listeners’ apprehensions and comprehensions of its contemporary forms. Shapiro works very hard to provide examples that themselves work very hard to carry the burden of his argument and clarify it throughout.

To write a work like The Political Sublime, one must be a close reader of Kant, whose relentless analytic rigor trains us to miss the occasional self-reflexive intervention he deploys to turn his argument in possible novel directions. As such a close reader, Shapiro reengages Kant for the purpose of dramatizing the “ambivalence” he first discerned in Kant during an earlier engagement with his concept of the sublime: namely, whether humanity’s experience of the terror of the sublime could derail the shared community of sense (sensus communis), which, Kant held, issued from its experience of beauty. Developing the implications of this ambivalence by inflecting its terror in political directions, Shapiro’s political sublime takes all of the political forms and has all of the political dimensions or implications that worry, frighten, or terrify us past, present, and future.

Thus, Shapiro’s introduction and each of his five chapters are organized around particular examples of the sublime that are intrinsically or dimensionally or collaterally political—the terror of the San Francisco and Kobe earthquakes; the terror of the racialized sublime experienced daily by minorities of color; the terror of the nuclear sublime for the damages inflicted on American and global populations since its invention; the terrors of the industrial sublime for its human and natural ruinations; and the 9/11 World Trade Center catastrophe for the terrifying vulnerabilities and political revelations it gave birth to as well as the death it spelled. And there are other political sublimes attached to these, terrors within terrors, let us say, that deepen the depth and further complicate the complexities of the political sublime.

Now, quite deliberately, I have postponed spelling out Shapiro’s concept of the political sublime to make the point that, like his multiplicity of aesthetic forms enabling us to fathom our experience of the sublime, his examples of the political sublime itself also carry the burden of his argument. The meaning of the political sublime is already evident from the organizing events I noted for each chapter. They are terrible and terrifying experiences exceeding our comprehension, placing us desperately in need of their comprehension, and that framing and spinning by ordinary, everyday social and political institutions leave unexamined and uncomprehended, except insofar as their political interests, interventions, and involvements preserve and increase their own power and control. Here is where art and aesthetics play a unique political role in the way they interpretively engage the political sublime in opposition to the institutional media of established politics, whose constructions of the political sublime reproduce existing power relations and relations of domination.

As politically and theoretically rich as his political inflection of Kant and his strategic methodological alliances with aesthetic and literary theorists are for fleshing out connections between artworks’ aesthetics and their politics, Shapiro sustains interpretive engagements with the expanse of the earlier listed art forms to show how they premediate, mediate, or remediate the politically sublime events at the center of each of his chapters. To put this idea of mediation another way, each of these art forms in its many examples either enables its readers-viewers-hearers to make progress toward comprehension of its experience of sublime events or models such progress by offering aesthetic exemplars of individuals or groups doing so. Through artworks, aesthetic mediation occurs prior to, during, or in the aftermath of a sublime event to predispose, orient, or reconstruct sensibilities so that they become attuned to the meaning of the sublime and its consequences. Multiple artworks performing the political work of mediation produce a plurality of groups, each coalescing around an aesthetically encouraged development of shared sensibilities that form and re-form in response to the continued proliferation of aesthetic mediations of politically sublime events. From shared sensibilities emerge shared comprehensions, which, remediated by other artworks, form newer, revised sensibilities and comprehensions, hence oppositional communities of sense ever more newly and better equipped to politically challenge conventional mediations limited to reproducing established power relations. And shared communities of sense created through mediations of artworks become the ground of future politics.

So not only are individuals and their groups pluralized owing to the plurality of aesthetically mediating texts through which shared sensibilities are formed. Shared sensibilities of groups and their members are also disrupted and reconstructed around subsequent aesthetic mediations. Continuous formations and reformations of shared sensibilities place groups in continuously changing temporal and spatial relationships to one another, with all moving at different speeds through the formations and reformations of multiple sensibilities that inevitably defer the emergence of their comprehension of politically sublime events, or may negotiate its achievement for a brief time before it evolves into ever newer forms in response to further aesthetic mediations. All in all, then, for Shapiro, oppositional political communities of sense are radically and continuously pluralized—in their shared sensibilities, in the aesthetic mediations through which they form, in their differential spatial and temporal configurations (multiple coextensive and interacting durations, which is the topic of his brief “Afterward”), and eventually in the oppositional politics for which they become increasingly fertile soil.

Of course, there are always aspects of exceptional books that their reviewers can problematize, and Shapiro’s is unexceptional in this regard. Schiller is under appreciated for his contribution to the political sublime; shared communities of sense are, without shared ideas, perhaps too shallow ground for the politics required by the political sublime; the politics of the political sublime are underdeveloped, among others. But here I wish to recall my allusion to the two most urgent examples of the political sublime—the planetary and democratic sublimes—that Shapiro’s work prepares us to politically comprehend.

More serious of the two is the planetary, in the form of global climate change, evidence for the advance and implications of which for both human and nonhuman life is mounting hourly. So imminent, immanent, and possibly irreversible are its progress, consequences, and future that Elizabeth Kolbert has gone so far, in The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014, pp. 236–58), to speak of “the madness gene.” This serves as a possible explanation for the proclivity of human beings to destroy even beings resembling themselves, “the Neanderthals,” thus evincing humans’ utter disregard for the continuation of human life itself. Just as serious for his failure to mount a commensurate political response to the perils of climate change are the threats to democratic institutions worldwide posed by the American president and by a Congress not legally disabled from responding to the dangers he poses, but whose calculated political alignment for naked political self-interest has allowed him to proceed without fear of Congress’s oppositional resources.

In the absence of political will, in America in particular, to mount a political response to the terrors both political sublimes threaten, I would look to a politics in the private sphere, beneath the threshold of politics and the law, let me say, where political opposition can become rooted, draw inspiration, and find direction from the aesthetics of politics. For it is in the private sphere that art creates new sensibilities and shared communities of thought as well as sense very similar to those Shapiro theorizes.