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June 25 - June 30, 2023
the thought of the unthinkable that philosophy cannot pronounce but via a non-philosophical language.
In short, when the non-human world manifests itself to us in these ambivalent ways, more often than not our response is to recuperate that non-human world into whatever the dominant, human-centric worldview is at the time. After all, being human, how else would we make sense of the world?
Even though there is something out there that is not the world-for-us, and even though we can name it the world-in-itself, this latter constitutes a horizon for thought, always receding just beyond the bounds of intelligibility.
In the context of philosophy, the central question today is whether thought is always determined within the framework of the human point of view. What other alternatives lay open to us?
Scientists estimate that approximate ninety percent of the cells in the human body belong to non-human organisms (bacteria, fungi, and a whole bestiary of other organisms). Why shouldn’t this also be the case for human thought as well? In a sense, this book is an exploration of this idea – that thought is not human.
I would propose that horror be understood not as dealing with human fear in a human world (the world-for-us), but that horror be understood as being about the limits of the human as it confronts a world that is not just a World, and not just the Earth, but also a Planet (the world-without-us). This also means that horror is not simply about fear, but instead about the enigmatic thought of the unknown. As H.P. Lovecraft famously noted, “the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is the fear of the unknown.” Horror is about the paradoxical
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It is for this reason that this book treats genre horror as a mode of philosophy (or, perhaps, as “non-philosophy”1). Certainly a short story about an amorphous, quasi-sentient, mass of crude oil taking over the planet will not contain the type of logical rigor that one finds in the philosophy of Aristotle or Kant. But in a different way, what genre horror does do is it takes aim at the presuppositions of philosophical inquiry – that the world is always the world-for-us – and makes of those blind spots its central concern, expressing them not in abstract concepts but in a whole bestiary of
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The demon is as much a philosophical concept as it is a religious and political one. In fact, the “demon” is often a placeholder for some sort of non-human, malefic agency that acts against the human (that is, against the world-for-us).
In a way, there is no better starting point for the “horror of philosophy” than black metal.
Milton’s Paradise Lost.
“Les Litanies de Satan” (1857).
Joris-Karl Huysmans’ novel Là-bas (1891; Down There)
both meanings of the term “black” point to one thing they have in common, and that is an anthropocentric view towards the world. The world is either there for us to use as a tool, or it is there inside us as a force for our benefit.
Beyond these specters there is the impossible thought of extinction, with not even a single human being to think the absence of all human beings, with no thought to think the negation of all thought.
We have to entertain the possibility that there is no reason for something existing; or that the split between subject and object is only our name for something equally accidental we call knowledge; or, an even more difficult thought, that while there may be some order to the self and the cosmos, to the microcosm and macrocosm, it is an order that is absolutely indifferent to our existence, and of which we can have only a negative awareness.
(the nihil privativum; dark as the absence of light, death as the absence of life)
…what remains after the complete abolition of the Will is, for all who are full of the Will, assuredly nothing (Nichts). But also conversely, to those in whom the Will has turned and denied itself, this very real world of ours with all its suns and galaxies, is – nothing.2
“cosmic outsideness”:
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.3
One could even suggest that some of the formal experiments in black metal, from the minimalism of Sunn O)))’s Grimmrobe Demos to the wall-of-noise in Wold’s Stratification might offer musical equivalents of the Cosmic Pessimism meaning of the word black.
Here the political aspects of the demon, as the stand-in for a threatening Other, come to the fore.
Elaine Pagels’s widely-read The Origin of Satan
all follow this motif of naming an Other.
The demon is not really a supernatural creature, but an anthropological motif through which we human beings project, externalize, and represent the darker side of the human to ourselves.
the non-human remains, by definition, a limit; it designates both that which we stand in relation to and that which remains forever inaccessible to us. This limit is the unknown, and the unknown, as genre horror reminds us, is often a source of fear or dread.
Hence their embodiment is also a disembodiment, in the sense that they are wandering spirits – their movement happens more by demonic contagion than by divine inspiration. Demons are here a form of immediate absence.
the demons named “Legion” were really, in themselves, “nothing.”
Perhaps there is a meaning of the demonic that has little to do with the human at all – and this indifference is what constitutes its demonic character.
“evil is not a being; for if it were, it would not be totally evil…evil has no place among being.”6
Dante’s Inferno,
As Weyer ominously notes, real demons do not need us to carry out their acts of ill will – in fact, it is the height of vanity to suppose that we as human beings are in any way necessary for them.
“such rare and severe symptoms often arise in diseases that stem from natural causes but are immediately attributed to witchcraft by men of no scientific experience and little faith.”8
Similarly there is Blake’s famous statement about Milton’s Paradise Lost – that the latter was of the Devil’s party without knowing it. Here one finds the problem of “being-on-the-side-of” the demonic, when the demonic is unknown and, perhaps, unknowable. However, the failure of the demonic antagonists in literary examples like these is perhaps less a testament to the victorious nature of good, and more an indication of a certain moral economy of the unknown.
Perhaps the only thing for certain is if something like a demontology could exist, it would not be made any more respectable because of its existence – for nothing is more frowned upon than nothing…
groups such as the Golden Dawn and the Theosophical Society.
Junji Ito’s manga series Uzumaki.
In a kind of perversion of Kantian philosophy, Lovecraft and Ito suggest that the world-in-itself is only “hidden” to the extent that our phenomenal experience of the world is determinatively a human one.
“Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests are emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form – and the local human passions and conditions and standards – are depicted as native to other worlds or other universes. To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called
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“oil had waited for hundreds of millions of years, dreaming its black dreams, sluggishly pulsing beneath Earth’s stony skin, quivering in lightless pools roofed with marsh gas and in top-filled rocky tanks and coursing through a myriad channels…”61
What we are presented with in “Black Gondolier” is the suggestion that thought has always been unhuman.
What if “horror” has less to do with a fear of death, and more to do with the dread of life?
If horror – as we’ve been discussing it – is a way of thinking the world as unthinkable, and the limits of our place within that world, then really the specter that haunts horror is not death but instead life.
There is no better guide to the after-life than Dante.
At the center of blasphemous life is this idea of the living contradiction. Blasphemous life is the life that is living but that should not be living.
Who is the witness of extinction? In the case of the extinction of all human beings, who is it that gives testament to this extinction, to the very thought of extinction? In this sense extinction can never be adequately thought, since its very possibility presupposes the absolute negation of all thought.
“why do human beings expect an end to the world at all? And if this is conceded to them, why must it be a terrible end?”106 Hence the real question is not whether or not the world will end, but how this horizon of thought can be thought at all.
Heidegger
In Book III, Eriugena puts forth a notion of “divine darkness,” in which the divine is nihil precisely because of its superlative nature: “For everything that is understood and sensed is nothing else but the apparition of what is not apparent, the manifestation of the hidden, the affirmation of the negated, the comprehension of the incomprehensible...”
the after-life is not about the dichotomy between life and death, but about a more fundamental relation – that between Life and Being.
If “Life,” as opposed to “the living,” is always receding into the anonymous “there is,” does this then mean that Life is really Life-without-Being?
