The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference [Paperback]

Christine Battersby is a leading thinker in the field of philosophy, gender studies and visual and literary aesthetics. In this important new work, she undertakes an exploration of the nature of the sublime, one of the most important topics in contemporary debates about modernity, politics and art.

Through a compelling examination of terror, transcendence and the other in key European philosophers and writers, Battersby articulates a radical female sublime. A central feature of The Sublime, Terror and Human Differenceis its engagement with recent debates around 9/11, race and Islam. Battersby shows how, since the eighteenth century, the pleasures of the sublime have been described in terms of the transcendence of terror. Linked to the feminine, the sublime was closed off to flesh-and-blood women, to Orientals and to other supposedly inferior human types. Engaging with Kant, Burke, the German Romantics, Nietzsche, Derrida, Lyotard, Irigaray and Arendt, as well as with women writers and artists, Battersby traces the history of these exclusions, while finding resources within the history of western culture for thinking human differences afresh

The Sublime, Terror and Human Differenceis essential reading for students of continental philosophy, gender studies, aesthetics, literary theory, visual culture, and race and social theory.

Acknowledgments Table of Contents Abbreviations  1: A Terrible Prospect  2: Terror, Terrorism and the Sublime  3: Kant and the Unfair Sex  4: Kants Orientalism: Islam, Race and Ethnicity  5: Egypt, Parerga And A Question Of Veils  6: Ourself Behind Ourself, Concealed  7: Antinomies of the Female  8: Nietzsche and the Genealogy of the Sublime  9: Nietzsches Naked Goddess: Reconfiguring The Sublime  10: Terror Now and Then Notes Bibliography Index