Dictionary

desublimate en · VERB

Etymology

From de- + sublimate.

Meanings

1. (intransitive) To undergo desublimation; to change directly from a gas to a solid.
2. (transitive) Make explicit that which has been sublimated or obscured because it is not socially acceptable.
   • The practice of pornography teaches its subjects to desublimate the sensuous apprehension. 2000, Allison Pease, Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity, →ISBN, page 85:
   • However, the question remains as to why the text does not desublimate the hard-boiled genre's investments around gender, sexuality, race, and nation with the same sort of scrupulous rigor that it demystifies the economic and social ideology of the form. 2005, Christopher Breu, Hard-boiled Masculinities, →ISBN, page 81:
   • When we desublimate the things we have repressed, we create a space in which we feel liberated to be as monstrous as we wish. 2012, Luke Howie, Witnesses to Terror, →ISBN, page 121:

Forms