The spider, this eight-legged, hairy creature with its mysteriously immobile eyes, which has lived in caves and on trees for more than 300 million years, has nestled deep in our real and imaginary cellars and attics – and not least in our unconscious. It is their physique that makes them a completely different creature.
Regardless of whether they are webs of lies, figments of the imagination or webs of metaphysical speculation – the silken thread that the spider is able to secrete at lightning speed from glands on its hindquarters inspires us to read this behaviour as a metaphor for diverse and also contradictory practices. And so Lothar Müller weaves a dense web of illuminating and obscure, in any case dazzling interpretations of these strange yet omnipresent animals in his portrait, which is rich in associations: from Kierkegaard, who speculates with them about existence, to Spiderman, who nevertheless never becomes a spider, from Marx, who develops his labour theory of value with a view to the ‘Spinning Jenny’, the first spinning machine, and to automatic looms, to the Arachne myth as the origin of narrative as resistance, to the artist Louise Bourgeois, who turns them into the great protector as ‘Maman’ in giant sculptures, whose cocoon offers space for us all.
Non-fiction
Lothar Müller writes for the feature section of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, magazines and Deutschlandfunk. He has been an honorary professor at the Institute for German Literature at Humboldt University in Berlin since 2010. In 2022, he received the Heinrich Mann Prize from the Berlin Academy of the Arts. His most recent book was Adrien Proust und sein Sohn Marcel. Beobachter der erkrankten Welt (2021).
