On Spiders, Cyborgs and Being Scared: The Feminine and the Sublime

An exploration of the concept of the sublime.

'Posing questions for the sublime of earlier theorists such as Longinus, Kant and Burke, Joanna Zlyinska explores the consequences of feminism and its re-thinking of sexual dfference for this tradition. She argues that what is generally considered aesthetics can nowadays be more productively thought in terms of ethics.
But Zylinska does more than expound her 'theory'. Inspired by the spiders work, which evokes the traditional activity of spinning and modern technologies of networking, she weaves her text together from a web of seemingly hetergeneous discourses - Orlan's carnal art, philosophies of the everyday, the French feminism of Cixous and Irigary, as well as the gender theory of Judith Butler, the European philosophy of Levinas, Lyotard and Derrida and the music of Laurie Anderson....The result is a distinctive book which blurs the boundaries between cultural theory and textual practice to produce an ethics of the feminine sublime.'