The Old Abnormal: Continuous Experiencing of Terror and the Negative Sublime
The Old Abnormal: Continuous Experiencing of Terror and the Negative Sublime

Summary/Abstract: This article examines the aesthetic dimensions of prolonged Russian aerial terror in Ukrainian rear cities. Moving beyond the dominant paradigm of terror as spectacle, it argues that contemporary Ukrainian experience is shaped by what Tina Polek terms the new abnormal, now solidified into an old abnormal in which disruption becomes a permanent condition of everyday life. Drawing on Arnold Berleant’s theory of negative aesthetics, Kant’s notion of the monstrous, and everyday aesthetics (Saito, Bachelard), the art icle conceptualises civilian life under bombardment as an engaged, embodied, and ethically charged aesthetic condition. It proposes the concept of an anti-sublime to describe how practices of care, repair, and dwelling resist the aesthetic and moral erasure produced by repeated terror. In this framework, meaning arises not from the spectacle of destruction but from the fragile persistence of everyday life under conditions of continuous threat.

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