This article presents a reconstruction of the political potentials of Viktor Šklovskij's thought regarding the device of estrangement, or ostranenie. The device of estrangement will be approached from the perspective of the critical traditions of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, relying in particular for a horizon of comparative inquiry on conceptualizations of the sublime in works of Edmund Burke (in connection both with aesthetic experience and with political reflections regarding the French Revolution). In both the case of the sublime and that of estrangement one encounters perplexity danger, and traumatic experience that transform both the subject's own receptive apparatus and comprehension of the mechanisms of historical movement.