Psychoanalytic thinking conceives of sublimation as the gesture that elevates the ordinary into the sublime. This is primarily thought of in terms of sexual desire or its offshoots. This essay contends that sublimation is the basic mechanism of the subject’s freedom, a freedom that depends on the elevation of an object into a position of transcendence. Through sublimation, we lift ourselves out of the determined empirical realm into a position where we freely choose our objects.