“A Tough Bitch”: Lynn Margulis and the Gaian Sublime

Abstract

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 a crucial 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.