Crisis of Sublimation

The "crisis of sublimation" names a historical-structural condition in which the sublimatory operation — defined in Lacanian terms as raising an ordinary object to the dignity of das Ding — loses its force, such that the gap it normally maintains between the social order and the Real progressively collapses. Sublimation, in Seminar VII, functions by preserving a productive distance from das Ding: it gives the Thing a semblance of presence through a contingent object without collapsing the distinction between that object and the impossible Thing itself. When this sublimatory mechanism weakens or fails, the "beyond" that sublimation gestures toward — the infinite, the Thing, the dimension that exceeds any positive state of affairs — can no longer be sustained. What remains is a flattened reality whose contingent configurations appear as natural, necessary, and inevitable.

Zupančič's formulation, as mobilized in this passage, directly links this crisis to ideology: the inability to invest one's surroundings with sublime meaning is not merely an aesthetic or cultural impoverishment but an ideological operation. When the gap between the current order and a "beyond" (the infinite, das Ding) is foreclosed, the status quo presents itself as the only possible reality — which is precisely how ideology, in the Lacanian sense, functions at its deepest level. The reality principle, far from being a neutral corrective, here becomes the dominant register: a world without sublimation is one governed entirely by the reality principle's demand that we accommodate ourselves to what is given. Genuine ethics — understood as fidelity to desire and to the Thing — consists, against this, in actively preserving access to that dimension which the crisis of sublimation forecloses.

This concept appears in the source psychoanalytic-interventions-lacan-jacques-lacan-jacques-ruti-mari-the-singulari (p.168), where it is attributed to Zupančič and deployed within a broader argument about ethics, ideology, and the Real. It sits at the intersection of several canonical concepts: it presupposes the Lacanian account of Sublimation (raising an object to the dignity of das Ding), invokes das Ding as the structural "beyond" that sublimation keeps alive, and cashes out its consequences in terms of both Ideology and the Reality Principle. The crisis of sublimation is, in this sense, a specification of how ideological closure works at the level of desire rather than belief — it is what happens when the libidinal mechanism that sustains a sense of the infinite (the Sublime) ceases to operate, leaving only the ideological function of the reality principle.

Relative to the canonical concepts, the crisis of sublimation can be read as a pathological limit-case of sublimation's normal operation, and as the condition that makes the Ethics of Psychoanalysis most urgent. If sublimation normally preserves fidelity to das Ding by holding open the gap between any given object and the Thing itself, then the crisis of sublimation is precisely the condition against which the ethics of psychoanalysis must intervene — the moment when "giving ground relative to one's desire" has become structurally enforced rather than merely tempting. The concept also resonates with the corpus's account of the Infinite: the bad infinite of capitalist repetition thrives precisely when the true infinite — the self-limiting, desire-sustaining beyond — can no longer be sublimatorily accessed. In this way, the crisis of sublimation names the subjective and cultural correlate of what the corpus elsewhere theorizes as capitalist realism or the closure of ideological critique.

The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal WithinMari Ruti · 2012 (p.168)

Zupančič describes this as a 'crisis of sublimation': our increasing inability to invest our surroundings with sublime meaning.

The phrase "inability to invest our surroundings with sublime meaning" is theoretically loaded because it identifies the crisis not as a cognitive error but as a failure of libidinal investment — the very operation by which sublimation raises mundane objects toward the register of das Ding and the Sublime. The word "surroundings" (rather than "objects of art" or "cultural products") suggests that it is ordinary reality itself, the entire field of the subject's world, that loses its sublimatory charge — making the foreclosure total rather than local.