Thanks, too, for your rendering of the Kant/Freud connection, which begins to make a new kind of sense to me.  So rather than suggesting that the sublime is a containment of terror by beauty, it’s instead the moments at which the world’s beauty rends and we can see the horror that always resident under the surface?  Sort of a momentary glimpse into the Lacanian real?  That would imply, yes, an oppositional relationship between the sublime and sublimation, I think, as in my reading Freud associates sublimation with the productive channeling of the id into superego-approved pursuits, something that is at one and the same time traumatic (in the repressions that it works and the symptoms that it produces) and absolutely necessary to the production of “culture.” Does this make sublimation (what I think you’re referring to when you say “the overeager reconstruction of that apparatus”) not the process of making-sublime but the process of defending oneself against the sublime?  The containment of the sublime?

I’m fascinated, but am still sure I’m missing something…

As for the relationship between the sublime and sublimation, there is certainly a connection at the surface level, but you seem to be reading Freud via Kant rather than the other way around. It seems to me that for Kant the sublime experience is necessarily traumatic.

In other words, for Kant it seems that the sublime represents a rending of the liminal shell, violence to our perceptual apparatus. Freud doesn’t focus as much on this experiece of the sublime, as on the damage that occurs in the overeager reconstruction of that apparatus. Perhaps we should associate Freud more with DEsublimation.