“A tough bitch”: Lynn Margulis and the Gaian sublime
This essay challenges Bruno Latour’s elegiac pronouncement of the sublime’s death in the Anthropocene, proposing instead a “Gaian sublime” emerging from Lynn Margulis’s radical reconceptualization of planetary life. Analysis of Margulis’s scientific nonfiction reveals how her work on microbial agenc...
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| Tipo de documento: | artigo |
| Data de publicação: | 2025 |
| País: | España |
| Recursos: | Universidad de Alcalá (UAH) |
| Repositório: | e_Buah Biblioteca Digital Universidad de Alcalá |
| Idioma: | inglês |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:ebuah.uah.es:10017/65363 |
| Acesso em linha: | http://hdl.handle.net/10017/65363 https://dx.doi.org/10.37536/ECOZONA.2025.16.1.5559 |
| Access Level: | Acceso aberto |
| Palavra-chave: | Gaia theory Microbial evolution Planetary resilience Nonhuman agency Lynn Margulis Teoría de Gaia Evolución microbiana Resiliencia planetaria Agencia no-humana Literatura Medio ambiente Literature Environmental science |
| Resumo: | This essay challenges Bruno Latour’s elegiac pronouncement of the sublime’s death in the Anthropocene, proposing instead a “Gaian sublime” emerging from Lynn Margulis’s radical reconceptualization of planetary life. Analysis of Margulis’s scientific nonfiction reveals how her work on microbial agency and symbiosis disrupts traditional sublime theory’s emphasis on human transcendence and geological spectacle. The essay traces how sublime aesthetics, from Longinus through Burke and Kant to contemporary environmental thought, has historically reinforced racial hierarchies, gender binaries, and human exceptionalism. Margulis’s perspective offers acrucial corrective by revealing Earth’s smallest inhabitants as its most profound transformers, generating sublime experience not through nature’s brute force but through recognition of life’s collaborative creativity across scales and through deep time. This reframing moves beyond both conventional sublime theory and contemporary Anthropocene discourse, demonstrating how scientific understanding might enhance rather than diminish the capacity for awe and wonder. The Gaian sublime thus emerges as both aesthetic category and mode of attention, potentially enabling more ethically attuned relationships with our living planet. |
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