Since the time of the anonymous late antique treatise “On the Sublime,” this aesthetic category has meant something majestic that is open to the senses and at the same time goes beyond the limits of sensory experience. We can be elevated by novelty, an event, a free act, a sovereign decision, but also war, death, loss, trauma—anything that refers to the unrepresentable or unrepresentable. Therefore, it is no coincidence that the concept of the sublime attracts special attention in the modern era, when the experience of constant renewal - “coming out of minority” (I. Kant) and at the same time the loss of tradition (E. Burke) becomes fundamental for Western culture. Already in the 20th century, T. Adorno and J.-F. Lyotard connects the sublime with the problem of the status of art “after Auschwitz.” Using these examples, the outstanding Russian philosopher and art theorist Valery Podoroga shows how our understanding and experience of time depends on the concept of the sublime. At each new stage of history, the sublime takes on new contours and in a sense guarantees that there can be nothing final in history: “So it remains a mystery where and when, to what extent and with what intensity the feeling of the sublime can manifest itself, and what it, manifesting itself, reveals it in us.” Valery Podoroga (1946–2020) – philosopher, anthropologist, art critic, author of more than twenty monographs on modern Western thought, Russian literature, cinema and the phenomenon of physicality.