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296 pages, Paperback
Published April 28, 2019
The aesthetic category of the sublime (Erhabenheit) and how it relates to the incomprehensibility of the ocean, its opaqueness and how all of this relates to society but also the “observing subject” (using old-school terms here, but really it’s about actors or mediators for me). The ambiguity of the ocean might be read as our own blindness before an incomprehensible actor or a network of those, rather than simply unanswering darkness (think: finally realizing the darkness you see is your own reflection from a big mirror; the ocean has been seen as the mirror of the soul for some philosophers). It’s all very useful for my own theoretical concept of thalassophobia (“an intense and persistent fear of the sea or of sea travel…”), which I use as a metaphor to express certain observations about doing field work in non-academic scholarly work on the internet[^1], namely, that the opaqueness of any scholarly venture risks uncovering the horror of incomprehensibility if the environment of the medium to be researched is different enough.