Artistic self-harm, a staple of performance art internationally since the 1960s, polarizes, disturbs, and primarily raises questions about the motivations behind such actions. Rosemarie Brucher interprets this radical phenomenon as an attempt to cope with threatened autonomy and thus primarily as an empowerment strategy. In this ambivalence of subject empowerment and submission to nature, artistic self-harm can be understood against the backdrop of Immanuel Kant's aesthetics of the sublime, which the author exemplarily illustrates through VALIE EXPORT and Stelarc. Such a reference not only opens an innovative approach to this art form but also sheds new light on Kant's conception of the sublime.