Joanna Zylinska (2001) On Spiders, Cyborgs and Being Scared: the Feminine and the Sublime (Manchester University Press: Manchester)

On Spiders, Cyborgs and Being Scared is an innovative exploration of one of the most important concepts in contemporary cultural debates - the sublime. Posing questions for the sublime of earlier theorists such as Longinus, Kant and Burke, Joanna Zylinska explores the consequences of feminism and its rethinking of sexual difference 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 merely expound her 'theory'. Inspired by the spider's work, which evokes the traditional activity of spinning and modern technologies of networking, she weaves her text together from a web of seemingly heterogeneous discourses - Orlan's carnal art, philosophies of the everyday, the French feminism of Cixous and Irigaray, as well as the gender theory of Judith Butler, the European philosophy of Levinas, Lyotard and Derrida and the music of Laurie Anderson - in an actual 'performance' of her argument. The result is a distinctive and fascinating book which blurs the boundaries between cultural theory and textual practice to produce an ethics of the feminine sublime.

Contents

Introduction: 'a point of view' (available online)

Why the sublime?'

The feminine and the sublime

Desperately seeking novelty

On the brink of feminism and deconstruction

Unweaving the spider's web, or, a summary of chapters

1 Décriture féminine: the discourse of the feminine sublime

Preambles

Woman does not believe in truth

The vertigo of deconstruction

Men on sublimity

Peter de Bolla's sublime vortex

Sublime overflow

The feminine sublime

Revisiting écriture féminine

Décriture féminine: an ethical proposal

Webwords: what's sublime about spiders?

2 Between aesthetics and ethics

'Ethics and aesthetics are one'?

Respect for radical alterity

The 'feminine' of sexual difference

The ethics of the feminine sublime

After the subject

The economy of the gift

This economy which is not one

In praise of moderation

Love as a hyperbole of friendship

'Love, if there is such a thing, if there were such a thing'

Eros Pteros: blinded by love

Love as a problem of sight

Feminism beyond the gaze

Choosing blindness

Webwords: from the spider's web to cyberspace

3 Micro-spaces of the everyday: 'the [feminine] sublime is here and now

Minimal perspective

Wittgenstein's philosophy of ordinary language

The everyday and the uncanny

Metropolitan encounters

Ethics in the cybercity

Love is in the air…

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