desublimate

English

Etymology

de- + sublimate

Verb

desublimate (third-person singular simple present desublimates, present participle desublimating, simple past and past participle desublimated)

  1. (intransitive, physics) To undergo desublimation; to change directly from a gas to a solid.
  2. (transitive, sociology) Make explicit that which has been sublimated or obscured because it is not socially acceptable.
    • 2005, Christopher Breu, Hard-boiled Masculinities, →ISBN, page 81:
      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.
    • 2000, Allison Pease, Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity, →ISBN, page 85:
      The practice of pornography teaches its subjects to desublimate the sensuous apprehension.
    • 2012, Luke Howie, Witnesses to Terror, →ISBN, page 121:
      When we desublimate the things we have repressed, we create a space in which we feel liberated to be as monstrous as we wish.
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