'tweasing' is a meditation on the process of looking, in this case at painting, and the historical backdrop of that process: content, context, affect.
this process is imbued with the logic aesthetic control, and what Ranciere calls "the police" -the system of the distribution of the sensible. in this context the sensorial overtones of devotional imagery are appreciated in their context and via contemporary extrapolations, from transcription to connotation.
the notion of control through aesthetics, and an attempt at a resistance is the central focus of the book. where bodily forms are made visible through the composition of folds in fabric, an ideology is codified within an existing (religious, authorized) narrative. resistance here eroticizes the spiritual, and in doing so forms a model followed by successive generations of artists, ultimately producing a revelation in art: abjection, fueled by philosophers such as Bataille.