Horror of Philosophy Vol. 3: Tentacles Longer Than Night

Tentacles Longer Than Night

The horror genre—especially supernatural horror—operates philosophically by suspending the principle of sufficient reason: its defining feature is not fear but the hesitation between two equally untenable explanations (the uncanny and the marvelous), a moment Todorov calls ’the fantastic,’ which reveals the limits of human knowledge and the possibility that the world is radically indifferent to human understanding. The author proposes ‘mis-reading’ horror as philosophy, treating works by Poe and Lovecraft not as fiction but as non-fictional meditations on the limit of thought.

• Both Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’ and Lovecraft’s ‘The Shadow Out of Time’ open before their narratives even begin with narrators who cannot decide whether terrifying events were real or imagined—and crucially, the horror lies not in insanity but in the possibility that the events really happened, which would destabilize all rational frameworks.
  • Poe’s narrator hopes some ‘more calm, more logical’ intellect will explain events that he cannot, illustrating that the demand for rational explanation is itself the source of dread.
  • “If the thing did happen, then man must be prepared to accept notions of the cosmos, and of his own place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest mention is paralysing.” —Lovecraft
  • The dilemma is: either I stick to what I know and forcibly reduce everything to illusion, or I accept what is real—but then because it is so alien to what I know, I really know nothing at all.
• Todorov’s concept of ’the fantastic’ precisely names the brief, unstable moment of uncertainty between two mutually exclusive explanations—either the supernatural event can be rationally explained (the uncanny) or it cannot and reality must be reconceived (the marvelous)—and supernatural horror’s philosophical value lies in sustaining this hesitation rather than resolving it.
  • “The person who experiences the event must opt for one of two possible solutions: either he is the victim of an illusion of the senses, or the event has indeed taken place and reality is controlled by laws unknown to us.” —Todorov
  • The Twilight Zone episode ‘Nightmare at 20,000 Feet’ (1963) sustains the fantastic almost entirely, since viewers see the creature on the wing while simultaneously doubting protagonist Bob Wilson’s mental stability.
  • South Korean film A Tale of Two Sisters (2003) similarly oscillates between the uncanny (Su-Mi acting out a projection of her stepmother) and the marvelous (actual supernatural events), never fully resolving the ambiguity.
• The horror genre operates on at least four simultaneous allegorical levels—literal narrative, human drama through the lens of monsters, the genre reflecting on itself, and a fourth ‘religious horror’ level in which the encounter with the wholly unknown mirrors mystical experience—and the literalness of horror is what makes it philosophically significant rather than a mere vehicle for symbolic meaning.
  • Horror is ’low’—it is flesh and fluids, mud and material formlessness—and the literalness of horror forces language and thought to stop dead in its tracks; the allegorical is in the service of the literal, not the other way around.
  • Rudolf Otto’s concept of the ’numinous,’ an encounter with the ‘wholly other’ at the horizon of human understanding, parallels the structure of supernatural horror’s confrontation with the unknown.
  • Contemporary horror stories are written after Nietzsche’s ‘death of God,’ in a world where religious fanaticism extinguishes religious experience, making the genre’s fourth, ‘religious horror’ level especially charged.
• The author proposes ‘mis-reading’ horror as philosophy—treating Poe and Lovecraft as non-fiction philosophers rather than fiction writers—because what is unique about supernatural horror is its indifference to human drama and its focus on the fragmentary testimony of the human being confronting its lack of ‘sufficient reason’ in a vast cosmos.
  • The typical concerns of the literary critic—plot, character, setting, genre—are less relevant than the ideas contained in horror stories, whose central thought is the limit of thought itself: human characters confronted with the limit of the human.
  • Reading ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ revealed to the author that horror is as much driven by ideas as by emotions, as much by the unknown as by fear—Poe had written an abstract horror story, a meditation on finitude, time, and death.
  • Roger Corman’s Poe film adaptations achieved through images what Poe had done with language: abstract horror that is idea-driven rather than plot-driven.
• The horror genre is defined by the space between its two poles—supernatural horror (what you cannot see) and extreme horror (what you can see all too well)—and its most interesting works move between these poles, blending genres and destabilizing both rational and irrational frameworks simultaneously.
  • Films like Kubrick’s The Shining show the supernatural becoming natural (haunting drives a man to homicidal mania), while Carpenter’s Halloween shows the natural becoming supernatural (the masked killer ‘The Shape’ takes on near-superhuman qualities).
  • Authors like Clive Barker and China Miéville take readers from one pole to the other, creating rich story worlds that also incorporate fantasy, science fiction, the detective genre, and historical fiction.

Meditations on the Demonic

Dante’s Inferno functions as a foundational text for the horror genre and for political philosophy simultaneously, presenting an ‘architectonics of power’ in the form of an inverted body politic—one defined not by its ideal principles but by disease, dissolution, and the living dead—revealing that the body politic concept is always constituted against the threat of its own decomposition, a necrology enacted by sovereign power managing multiplicities.

• Dante’s Inferno is structured as an ‘architectonics of power’—a stratified inverted cone dividing Upper Hell (excess passion), Middle Hell (perversions of nature), and Lower Hell (excess reason)—that simultaneously inverts the classical body politic, presenting not an ideal political theology but a ‘political demonology.’
  • The spatial design of the Inferno maps Aristotelian ethics corporeally: Upper Hell correlates to the nether regions of the body (animal excess), Middle Hell to the heart and torso (perversions of nature), and Lower Hell to the ‘head’ (instrumental reason at its most dangerous).
  • Dante’s Hell is an inverted body politic standing literally on its head: the infernal cavern replaces the divine cathedral, and the apex of Hell—where Satan sits frozen—inverts the apex of sacred architecture.
  • Visual diagrams of Hell’s structure, from Wilfrid Scott-Giles’ illustration for Dorothy Sayers’ 1949 translation to the 1506 Benivieni edition, adopt an ’engineer’s approach’ that reveals Hell as a habitable architectonic world.
• The anatomical body politic presented in the Inferno’s Lower Hell—through figures like the split Mohammed and the decapitated Bertran de Born—demonstrates that the greatest threat to the body politic always comes from within, and that the punishment of internal dissent is itself a form of political anatomy.
  • Mohammed, blamed for splitting Church unity, is ripped from hips to head, his body re-healing itself only to be punished again—the implication being that any internal subversion of the hierarchy can only destroy the body politic by dividing it.
  • Bertran de Born, who turned a prince against his father, is condemned to decapitation and to walk eternally holding his head—signifying that usurpation of the ‘head’ of family or city-state ends in the decapitation of the body politic altogether.
  • The Falsifiers in the following bolgia, afflicted with diseases including plague and leprosy, represent a third aspect of the anatomical body politic—the ‘sick body’—in which rumor and false language circulate like contagion through the polity.
• The body politic concept, traced from Plato through medieval Scholasticism to Hobbes, is constitutively defined by four principles: it responds to the challenge of political order through a living analogy; it is grounded in the analogy between body natural and body politic; it is expressed retroactively in political theology; and despite its formal coherence, it inevitably produces logically coherent monstrosity.
  • Hobbes’ Leviathan provides the clearest articulation: sovereignty is the ‘artificial soul,’ magistrates are ‘joints,’ rewards and punishments are ’nerves,’ concord is ‘health,’ sedition is ‘sickness,’ and civil war is ‘death.’
  • Ernst Kantorowicz shows how the figure guaranteeing sovereign continuity shifts from Christ-centered to Law-centered to ‘polity-centered’ rulership across the later Middle Ages, the corpus mysticum of the realm replacing earlier guarantors.
  • The body politic concept produces ‘aberrant logics’—modes of thinking that make sense logically but result in teratological images such as the bicephalic body politic found in Dante, Ockham, and Giles of Rome.
• The body politic is, by definition, that which withers and decays – like the cadaver. Something that decomposes and yet that is living.
• A ’necrology of the body politic’—the study of the disease, decay, and decomposition inherent to the body politic concept—reveals that the corpse (nekros) is not the body politic’s opposite but its constitutive other: the body politic is always constituted against dissolution, and it is the management of ‘multiplicities’ (figured as epidemic, plague, pestilence) that defines sovereign power.
  • Foucault’s three epidemic diagrams—leprosy (juridical sovereignty divides and excludes), plague (disciplinary power includes and organizes), and smallpox (an ‘apparatus of security’ that regulates flows)—each pose the political problem of how to manage circulations while preventing disease.
  • Multiplicity is the ‘disease’ of the body politic: it is constituted by flows, circulations, and contagion that are simultaneously the constitution and dissolution of the body politic.
  • In George Romero’s zombie films, the massing living dead—slowly seeping through fences, barricades, and bunkers—visualize the necrological challenge to the body politic, a multitude that persists through sheer contagious movement.
• Dante’s City of Dis—a necropolis populated by living graves where heretics (those who spread disorder from within the polis) are managed as politicized living dead—exemplifies the twofold challenge of the body politic: establishing sovereign power while simultaneously regulating and managing the flows of multiple bodies.
  • The heretics in the City of Dis are explicitly politicized: they are those who have spoken against theological and political order from within that order, linking them to the ‘sowers of discord’ and ‘falsifiers’ of Lower Hell.
  • Within Dante’s mortified body politic, two forms of power coexist: a sovereign power that judges and punishes, and a regulatory power that manages the flows and circulations of multiple bodies, their parts and fluids.
  • Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s film Kairo (Pulse, 2001) transposes Dante’s architecture of the dead into modern technology, framing video chat rooms as dark portals to the realm of the dead through which the underworld ‘comes through.’
• The body politic concept persists even when its language is obsolete, because contemporary debates over the ‘state of exception,’ ‘biopolitics,’ and the ‘multitude’ are continuous with its historical problematic—and the proliferation of zombie narratives in popular culture is a symptomatic, necrological expression of this persistence.
  • Maurice Blanchot’s phrase ‘The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact’ captures the condition of contemporary global threat—climate change, pandemics, bioterror—in which the body politic approaches planetary scale while its conceptual apparatus crumbles.
  • Today the body politic is global, networked, viral, and informatic—and its limit would be the image of a living dead planet, crumbling cities and quarantined zones expressing the ongoing precariousness of bare life.

Meditations on the Gothic

Lautréamont’s Maldoror is read as a philosophical text on animality, in which animality is not reducible to animals but names a form-giving and form-destroying principle of life that follows a mystical itinerary from normative humanist order through metamorphosis and hybridity to an apophatic dissolution of all form—including the human form and the literary form itself—ultimately constituting a ‘gothic bliss’ of negation that the chapter extends through a meditation on gothic anatomies, hair, shadow, and the limits of matter.

• Lautréamont’s Maldoror (1868), which defies all generic classification, stages an anti-humanism at once corporeal and textual: not only do human characters undergo monstrous animalization, but the text itself behaves like an animal—predatory, teratological, devouring itself—so that the animality in the text and the text as animality converge.
  • Critics from Mario Praz (who called it ’late but extreme cannibalistic Byronism’) to André Breton (who saw ’the expression of a revelation so complete it seems to exceed human potential’) all inadvertently treated the text as alive, as animal.
  • Lautréamont’s authorial identity is itself unstable: Isidore Ducasse, born in Montevideo in 1846, died under mysterious circumstances in his Parisian hotel room in 1870, and the text is composed of extensive appropriations from Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, and Jean-Charles Chenu’s Encyclopédie d’histoire naturelle.
  • In Maldoror, humans don’t merely resemble animals; they undergo metamorphosis and become animals, so that where La Fontaine portrays life as representation, Lautréamont portrays life as presentation—animality as an explosion of affects rather than a set of behaviors.
• Bachelard’s analysis of Maldoror identifies two poles of its animality—tearing (claw, beak, horn) and sucking (fang, mouth, sucker)—which are laterally transferable across bodies and objects, constituting a vigorous ‘appetite for forms’ that is at once the most material and the most spiritual dimension of the text.
  • Lautréamont grasps animals not as forms but as direct functions—their aggressive functions—so that animals in Maldoror never simply are, they always do: moving, pouncing, devouring.
  • The action of tearing or sucking can be transferred laterally from claw to tusk to beak to stinger, and its object transferred from amphibian skin to marble statue, producing an almost animistic propensity for the formation and deformation of forms.
  • Bachelard detects in Maldoror a ‘bliss of metamorphosis’ in which animality passes through successive stages toward an ‘almost anarchic freedom of spiritualization,’ suggesting that at the core of the text’s animality is really a mysticism.
• Against the vitalist ‘bliss of metamorphosis,’ Maldoror also contains an apophatic animality—an animality of absence, opacity, and the negation of form—figured through anamorphosis (the breakdown of part-whole relations through decay) and amorphosis (pure formlessness, as in swarming behavior), constituting a ‘gothic bliss’ that is less heroic affirmation and more tragic poetry of negation.
  • The passage in Canto IV where the narrator describes being colonized by lice, toads, chameleons, hedgehogs, a viper, and jellyfish—sitting frozen for four centuries, feet rooted in soil—presents a body that is decaying yet fixed, a monstrous version of both the body natural and the body politic.
  • Amorphosis is exemplified by the passage on swarming starlings in Canto V—itself appropriated from the Encyclopédie d’histoire naturelle—where form is pushed to its limit in collective, ungoverned movement that is at once tightly organized and utterly formless.
  • The apophatic tradition of Dionysius the Areopagite—negation as superlative rather than privative, the ‘darkness concealed from all the light’—provides the philosophical framework for understanding Maldoror as a text of ‘apophatic animality.’
• The gothic anatomy—decomposing living bodies, detached heads, faces become masks, hair outliving the corpse—constitutes a philosophical challenge to both anatomical science and Enlightenment rationality, forming a teratological logic of its own centered on the contradictions of gothic fecundity: the fecund ruin, the living corpse, enclosures of vastness.
  • Films like Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1960), where a surgeon grafts young women’s faces onto his scarred daughter who must wear a porcelain mask, and Poe’s ‘The Oval Portrait,’ where a painted portrait becomes a death-mask as the sitter dies, explore the gothic ‘head-mask’ in which all heads are already artificial.
  • Hair—that part of the body estranged from the body—carries ambivalent relations to death in horror films: in Kobayashi’s Kwaidan (1964), the dead wife’s black hair seems alive and moving while the body decays, draining life from the horrified samurai; in Margheriti’s The Long Hair of Death (1964), Steele’s hair threads a curse across generations.
  • Pascal’s parable of ‘a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death’—the image of humanity as a floating abattoir—is given visual form in Franju’s documentary The Blood of the Beasts (1949) and the 2012 film Leviathan, both of which combine horror with documentary to render the human body as raw material subject to inhuman processes.
• At the furthest limit of the gothic, matter itself dissolves into shadow and abstraction—as in Bava’s Black Sunday, Merhige’s Begotten, and Brakhage’s Delicacies of Molten Horror Synapse—such that horror becomes not about content but about the composition and decomposition of matter itself, including the material of film.
  • Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (1960) is a sustained study of shadow and darkness as film itself, with entire scenes filmed in absolute blackness so that the castle and its characters seem lost in the material blackness of the film medium.
  • E. Elias Merhige’s Begotten (1990) uses innovative black-and-white film processing to make the material of film—gelatin, crystal, camphor—feel identical to the anonymous flesh, mud, and soil that populate the film’s primordial images of embodiment and dissolution.
  • Stan Brakhage’s Delicacies of Molten Horror Synapse (1991), a sequence of hand-painted abstract film frames, is described as an abstract horror film about composition and decomposition, ’the almost metaphysical corrosion that is at the core of being’—it does not represent these themes but is them.

Meditations on the Weird

The ‘weird tale’ tradition, exemplified by Blackwood and Lovecraft, produces a philosophical mode the author calls ‘frozen thought’—a state in which the limit of thought becomes identical with thought itself—that moves beyond both the Kantian paradigm (horror as fear recuperated by supersensible reason) and the Heideggerian paradigm (horror as Being-towards-Death) toward a ‘black illumination’: the enigmatic, apophatic, and anti-humanist thought of the unhuman’s indifference, which parallels the negative mystical tradition and challenges philosophy’s principle of sufficient reason.

• Blackwood’s ‘The Willows’ and Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness produce ‘frozen thought’—extended scenes of absolute stillness in which the only movement is the characters’ thoughts of the unthinkable—marking a shift from horror as a stimulus-response system of fear to horror as a state of suspended thought that Rudolf Otto called the mysterium tremendum.
  • In ‘The Willows,’ when the narrator and the Swede encounter something vast and alive in the willows, the Swede’s advice—‘don’t think, for what you think happens!’—inverts self-help rhetoric to reveal the horror of thought’s own power over reality.
  • Lovecraft’s Shoggoths in At the Mountains of Madness—‘formless yet geometric, oozing with malefic intent and swarming with temporary eyes’—freeze explorers into ‘mute, motionless statues,’ rendering the senses absurd and making thought ‘strangely equivalent to silence.’
  • The characters in Lovecraft’s stories resort to apophatic language—’the utter, objective embodiment of the fantastic novelist’s thing that should not be’—reflexively referring to the genre in which they are unknowingly embedded.
• Lovecraft’s central contribution is to shift the emphasis in horror from ‘fear’ to ’the unknown’—moving from the Kantian paradigm (horror as emotional response recuperated by supersensible reason) to a conception of horror as the limit of thought itself, where the supernatural functions via a double negation (neither/nor) that has no positive content and no relation to the natural world.
  • While Kant is concerned with the limit of thought (a relative, regulatory gesture of boundary management), Lovecraft is concerned with limit as thought—the horror is that all thought is paradoxically constituted as limit, a strange abyss at the core of thought itself.
  • “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” —H.P. Lovecraft
  • Lovecraft’s ‘cosmic horror’ positions itself against both anthropomorphism (the world in the shape of the human) and anthropocentrism (the world instrumentally made for the human), ultimately pointing toward ‘indifferentism’—the world as simply indifferent, neither for us nor against us.
• Against the Heideggerian paradigm—in which horror is ultimately defined by Being-towards-Death, conferring meaning and authenticity on human finitude—Lovecraft’s supernatural horror insists that horror has no truth to tell vis-à-vis humanity, and defines itself precisely by its anti-humanism and the indifference of the cosmos to human existence.
  • In Heidegger’s framework, Death opens onto the ‘call of conscience,’ care, and authenticity—a humanist consolation that makes horror therapeutic, revealing human finitude as existentially unique.
  • “Common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large; when we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown, we must leave our humanity and terrestrialism at the threshold.” —H.P. Lovecraft
  • Lovecraft’s ‘indifferentism’ proposes that the interplay of cosmic forces has nothing to do with human wishes or tastes—pessimists and optimists alike retain the primitive concept of a cosmos that ‘gives a damn one way or the other.’
• Supernatural horror takes up a set of concerns that have traditionally been the provenance of mysticism and religion. But supernatural horror also operates in a secular, scientific, and skeptical world, and one that ultimately questions the ability of human beings to know anything at all.
• Supernatural horror’s mystical core derives from the apophatic or ‘darkness mysticism’ tradition—Dionysius the Areopagite’s ’negation beyond every assertion,’ Eckhart’s ’nothingness of God’—producing a ‘black illumination’ that is a degree zero of thought: inaccessible to the senses, unintelligible to thought, but persisting as the residue of an enigmatic epiphany.
  • Dionysius distinguishes kataphatic (positive) from apophatic (negative) mystical theology, where the latter treats the divine as superlatively beyond human comprehension—‘a negation beyond every assertion’—and what can be known is only a ’negative knowledge,’ the thought of the limit of thought.
  • Supernatural horror operates in a secular, godless world after Nietzsche’s ‘death of God,’ pointing not to a secular reaffirmation of religious faith but to what Schopenhauer called the nihil negativum—a ‘mysticism without religion, a mysticism without God.’
  • The genre of supernatural horror is an attempt to think the unhuman via a philosophical core of the impossibility of all thought—horror turns back on philosophy revealing its principle of sufficient reason as contingent.
• Junji Ito’s manga Uzumaki stages four progressive stages of encountering the unhuman—anthropic subversion, anthropic inversion, ontogenic inversion, and misanthropic subtraction—culminating in the ‘black illumination’ in which what is thought is only absolute inaccessibility and indifference, affirming that only negation can be affirmed.
  • The spiral in Uzumaki moves from a human obsession to a force using humans for its own reproduction, then to a revelation that all human categories (living/non-living, human/non-human) are simply one manifestation of the unhuman—and finally to a pure apophatic failure of language that can only use terms like ’nameless,’ ‘shapeless,’ ‘unnamable.’
  • Lovecraft’s two strategies for confronting the limits of language—minimalism (’the nameless thing,’ ’the shapeless thing’) and hyperbole (‘a pandeamoniae vortex of loathsome sound and utter, materially tangible blackness’)—regularly dovetail into a singular epiphany about the faltering of thought itself.
  • Black illumination does not lead to affirmation of the human within the unhuman, but opens onto the indifference of the unhuman—the unhuman neither exists for us nor against us, but is immanently within the human while remaining absolutely inaccessible.
• Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race exemplifies a ‘concept-horror’ that pushes supernatural horror fiction to its logical limit by abandoning narrative entirely in favor of philosophical pessimism—following Zapffe’s paradox that the height of consciousness is to reveal the uselessness of consciousness—while remaining aware that pessimism’s realization of worthlessness risks becoming worthwhile, a self-undermining ’ecstatic pessimism.’
  • Zapffe’s diagnosis holds that consciousness is an evolutionary blunder that confronts human beings with the ‘brotherhood of suffering between everything alive,’ and that the various strategies humans use to stave off this realization—isolation, anchoring in belief, distraction, sublimation—are all forms of self-deception.
  • “Consciousness is an existential liability, as every pessimist agrees – a blunder of blind nature, according to Zapffe, that has taken humankind down a black hole of logic.” —Thomas Ligotti
  • “Simply put: We are not from here. If we vanished tomorrow, no organism on this planet would miss us.” —Thomas Ligotti
• Algernon Blackwood’s nature horror and the cephalopod mythologies of Lovecraft, Miéville, and Flusser share a common structure: the encounter with a ’naturhorror’ in which what thinks in the human subject is also what is alien outside it—a Schellingian naturphilosophie turned horrific—where scientific knowledge-production produces not human mastery of the world but increasing alienation from it.
  • Schelling’s naturphilosophie—‘what thinks in me is what is outside me,’ self and world sharing a nature that is process and becoming rather than fixed essence—is inverted in supernatural horror into naturhorror: nature coursing through self and world indifferently, without aim or end, ‘invasive, contagious, over-running the human being like some kind of overgrown and dilapidated ruin.’
  • In Miéville’s Kraken (2010), the cephalopod becomes at once an object of religion and of science, its alterity matched only by its indifference: ‘What was squiddity but otherness, incomprehensibility. Why would such a deity understand those bent on its glory?’
  • Flusser’s Vampyroteuthis Infernalis proposes ‘biological existentialism’—‘disgust recapitulates phylogenesis’—suggesting that the more disgusting something is, the further removed it is from humans on the phylogenetic tree, making scientific taxonomy itself a rigorous articulation of human alienation from the world.

As If…

Through a series of fragmentary meditations, aphorisms, and vignettes, the chapter traces the intersection of Kantian ethics (the categorical imperative’s ‘act as if’), Lovecraft’s displacement of humanity from the cosmic center, mystical negative theology, and the horror genre’s ‘black illumination’ to argue that supernatural horror marks the point where philosophy’s principle of sufficient reason collapses into a non-philosophical residue—a ‘horror of philosophy’ in which thought is pushed to its absolute limit by the enigmatic indifference of the world.

• Kant’s categorical imperative—‘act as if the maxim of your action were to become a universal law of nature’—introduces an irreducible fictive element (‘as if’) into moral philosophy, acknowledging that unconditional moral law requires the impossible condition that everyone, including the non-human world, plays along.
  • Kant’s three formulations of the categorical imperative all contain the ‘as if,’ which acknowledges that universal moral law is not a fact of the world but a commitment: moral behavior requires acting as if one’s maxims were universally valid, even knowing they may not be.
  • Kant himself acknowledges the deeper problem: a rational being ‘cannot for that reason count upon the kingdom of nature and its purposive order to harmonize with him’—the non-human world may not play along, and objects, familiar places, and inorganic matter may stare back with alien indifference.
• Lovecraft’s opening to ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ proposes a ‘Lovecraftian turn’ after the Copernican and Kantian revolutions: not only are humans displaced from the cosmic center, but human cognitive faculties—including scientific rationality—now lead only to paradox and mystery, inverting the Enlightenment’s promise that reason would master the world.
  • “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” —H.P. Lovecraft
  • While Copernicus displaced the earth from the center of the universe yet restored humanity’s confidence by showing reason alone could achieve scientific explanation, Lovecraft suggests a further stage: the more we know, the less we know—a new ignorance born not of lack but of excess of knowledge, data, and theory.
  • Kant had already anticipated this in the ‘antinomies of reason’—the existence of God, the origin of the universe, life after death—questions that can be debated forever and never resolved, which he advised leaving to theologians and astronomers.
• The Kantian sublime—‘a negative pleasure’ produced by sensory overwhelm followed by the recuperative move of ‘supersensible reason’—is the philosophical precursor to horror’s ‘mysterium tremendum,’ but Rudolf Otto’s concept of the numinous and the horror genre’s ‘religious horror’ go further by refusing the humanist consolation: they register the ‘wholly other’ as a pure failure of experience rather than a redeemed failure.
  • Kant describes the sublime as simultaneously ‘delightful horror’ and ’tranquility tinged with terror,’ acknowledging its ambiguity—but ultimately his supersensible reason saves the day by allowing the subject to think the failure of thought, restoring human agency.
  • Otto’s ‘creature-feeling’—the humbling of the human before what is vaster and slower than entire empires—is, for the author, the core of religious phenomena: ‘The truly mysterious object is beyond our apprehension and comprehension… before which we therefore recoil in a wonder that strikes us chill and numb.’
  • Denys Turner’s distinction between ’negative propositions’ and ’negating the propositional’ in medieval Christian mysticism clarifies what remains of the sublime: not a recuperated failure but a residue of ’negativity of experience’ rather than ’experiences of negation’—an ‘impersonal sublime.’
• Holy matter in medieval Christianity—relics, bleeding hosts, incorruptible body parts of saints—reveals a pre-modern understanding of matter as organic, fertile, and alive that parallels the ‘unholy matter’ of supernatural horror: both involve matter behaving paradoxically, indifferently to human categories of animate and inanimate, living and dead.
  • Caroline Walker Bynum notes that medieval holy matter—including the head of Catherine of Siena, the tongue of Anthony of Padua, and the Shroud of Turin—presented a theoretical challenge: ‘how matter behaved, both ordinarily and miraculously, when in contact with an infinitely powerful and ultimately unknowable God.’
  • Medieval natural philosophers understood matter as ’the locus of generation and corruption,’ in contrast to the modern tendency to draw sharp distinctions between animal, vegetable, and mineral, or between animate and inanimate.
  • The ‘miracles’ of supernatural horror—living dead, human-animal metamorphoses, autonomous body parts, resurrected bodies—are secular variants of holy matter: matter behaving indifferently to the self-conscious human beings that it composes and decomposes.
• The fictional ‘forbidden books’ of the Lovecraft mythos—the Necronomicon, Book of Eibon, De Vermis Mysteriis, and others—embody the concept of a text that consumes its reader, extending the gothic logic of Maldoror into an entire intertextual tradition of shared occult bibliography that enacts bibliomania’s dark limit: being possessed by books rather than possessing them.
  • The forbidden books of supernatural horror are always mentioned with ominous ceremony—’the dreaded Necronomicon,’ ’the blasphemous De Vermis Mysteriis’—and their authors are said to have gone mad or mysteriously disappeared, making the books themselves agents of a kind of textual contagion.
  • Thomas Frognall Dibdin’s The Bibliomania (1809) and Holbrook Jackson’s Anatomy of Bibliomania (1930) trace the pathology of book-madness to its limit in the ‘bibliophages,’ who eat their books—effacing all distinction between the literal and the figurative in a material ’thing’ not unlike the nameless entities of forbidden occult volumes.