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COLLAPSE Philosophical Research and Development VOLUME IV COLLAPSE IV COLLAPSE Philosophical Research and Development Published in 2008 in an edition of 1000 comprising numbered copies 1-950 VOLUME IV and 50 hors-commerce copies. Edited by Robin Mackay Electronic version published in 2009 ISBN 978-0-9553087-3-4 Published by Urbanomic, The Old Lemonade Factory Windsor Quarry Falmouth TR11 3EX United Kingdom Printed by Athenæum Press All material remains © copyright of the respective authors. Please address all queries to the editor at the above address. www.urbanomic.com URBANOMIC FALMOUTH COLLAPSE IV May 2008 EDITOR : Robin Mackay ASSOCI A T E EDITOR : Damian Veal Editorial Introduction..........................................................3 GE OR ge SI eg Infinite Regress into Self-Referential Horror: The Gnosis of the Victim....................................................29 EU ge N E TH A CK E R Nine Disputations on Theology and Horror...................55 RA F A NI Czech Forest.......................................................................93 CHIN A MIÉVILL E M. R. James and the Quantum Vampire: Weird; Hauntological: Versus and/or and and/or or?....105 RE Z A Nega R E ST A NI The Corpse Bride: Thinking with Nigredo......................129 JA K E A ND DINOS CH A P ma N I Can See.................................................................................162 MICH E L HOU E LL E B E CQ Poems..............................................................................173 Jame S TR A FFORD The Shadow of a Puppet Dance: Metzinger, Ligotti and the Illusion of Selfhood.................185 THO ma S LI G OTTI / OL eg KULIK Thinking Horror / ‘Memento Mori’ – Dead Monkeys.....208 QU E NTIN ME ILL A SSOUX Spectral Dilemma.............................................................261 BE N jam IN NOYS Horror Temporis...................................................................277 1 COLLAPSE III IA IN Ham ILTON GR A NT / TODOSCH Being and Slime: The Mathematics of Protoplasm in Lorenz Oken’s ‘Physio-Philosophy’ / Drawings.........................286 ST E V E N SH ea R E R Poems.............................................................................323 GR A H am HA R ma N / KE ITH TILFORD On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl / Singular Agitations and a Common Vertigo..........332 KRIST E N ALV A NSON Arbor Deformia...................................................................366 Notes on Contributors and Acknowledgements.............391 2 COLLAPSE IV Editorial Introduction Robin Mackay Surveying a century in which experience has taught us that man is capable of inventing ever more atrocious forms of violence and horror, is it necessary to remark that much of modern thought offers little to soothe, and much to exacerbate our disquiet? Nietzsche famously observed that the psychic well-being of the human organism is predicated, minimally, upon a drastically partial perspective, and ultimately upon untruth. Human cognitive defaults continue to cry out against the insights which modern physics, cosmology, genetics, neuroscience, psychoanalysis and the rest seem to require us to integrate into our worldview. As for philosophy, it has largely replaced wonder, awe, and the drive to certainty with dread, anxiety and finitude. Moreover, despite the diverse technological wonders they have made possible, the modern sciences offer little existential respite: There is no consolation in the claim that (for instance) I am the contingent product of evolution, or a chance formation of elementary particles, or that my ‘self’ is 3 COLLAPSE IV Editorial Introduction nothing but the correlate of the activation of neurobiological Such experiments are already being undertaken – not phase-spaces. Yet mundane thought, whether through for the most part by philosophers, but by those working in obstinacy or inertia, maintains its stubborn course literature and the arts who, drawing upon the resources of regardless, as if oblivious to their consequences, or at modern thought, have devised means by which to produce most allowing them to subsist at a safely delimited, solely experiences of the conceptual upheavals characteristic of theoretical level. the post-Enlightenment age. It is the scenarios of weird What if, prising the more disturbing elements of modern and horror fiction, the excessive existential sufferings of thought loose from their comfortable framing as part of an literature, the abstract emotional engineering of sound-art intellectual canon, we were to become fully attentive to and music, and the poetical extrapolations of artists, that their most harrowing consequences? What if, impatient are apt to put us in the place of individuals set loose from with a consideration of their claims solely from the point the protective envelope of consensual reality, forced to of view of their explanatory power and formal consistency, integrate directly the lacerating force of thoughts usually we yielded to the (perhaps ‘unphilosophical’) temptation blunted (even – or, sad to say, especially – in philosophical to experiment with their potentially corrosive effects upon discourse) by the knowledge that they are, after all, ‘only lived experience? If the overriding affect connected with thoughts’. It is through them that we identify ourselves what we ‘know’ – but still do not really know – about the with tormented individuals compelled – even if only universe and our place in it, would be one of horror, then, momentarily – to live the problem of the rational corrosion inversely, how might the existing literature of horror inform of our cherished self-image, to viscerally absorb thoughts a reading of these tendencies of contemporary thought? ‘whose merest mention is paralysing’ (Lovecraft). These are some of the questions with which this In the twentieth century, SF , weird fiction, and horror in volume of COLL A PS E sets out to grapple, imagining for a particular have furnished a laboratory for shaping narratives moment a philosophy absolved of humanistic responsibili- pointedly informed by the conceptual paradoxes produced ties, devoting itself to the experimental marshalling of all by modern science and philosophy. And increasingly, possible resources in the service of a transformation that philosophy itself, and the high arts which so long looked would no longer be circumscribed within the bounds of the with disdain upon such pulp fictions, are realising with what purely theoretical, and thus striking an alliance with those anticipatory clarity these genres have formulated problem- affects which, for the most part elided, nonetheless haunt atics which are becoming ever more pressing, not only philosophical thought like its very shadow. A philosophy, conceptually and aesthetically, but even politically (given then, bound to experiment with the employment of horror, what is at stake in our maintenance of a naïve, comfortable that its insights might begin slowly but effectively to erode self-image even as the most speculative theoretical insights anthropic automatism. are immediately and ruthlessly operationalised throughout the sociopolitical and commercial spheres, from advertising to healthcare, from warfare to banking). 4 5 COLLAPSE IV Editorial Introduction Given this discursive intersection between the attempt commonplace – the Zoroastrian concept of druj as to rethink reality through contemporary science and xenophobia turned inward. However, in order for horror philosophy, and the tropes of the horror ‘genre’, then, to flower, he emphasises, another element is necessary – there is a certain logic in examining together conceptual a thoroughgoing materialism, in which the knowledge armature and artistic dramatisation. It was this double- of non-apparent conceptual distinction – the sensitivity edged approach that we decided to take in the present towards hidden otherness – is prevented from diffusing into volume, by bringing together contributions from authors mysticism: The very birth, one might say, of the distinction of weird fiction, artists, and philosophers – only to discover between philosophy and religion, is also the birth of horror. ourselves vindicated by the impossibility of determining It is this compaction, suggests Sieg, which finally blocks all where the concept ends and the horror begins. The theme exit from a self-referential universe pregnant with horror thus presented an opportunity to bring more fully to fruition and yet (or precisely because it is) entirely rational – a COLL A PS E ’s vision of an integration of elements originating universe in which the innocent victim is defenceless before from very different spheres, mutually catalysing so as to the monstrous knowledge which invades them. produce a series of conceptual ‘interzones’. In his contribution EU ge N E TH A CK E R details how GE OR ge SI eg ’s contribution ably demonstrates how, in theology has, nevertheless, maintained a consistent historical examining the nature of horror as an affect, a rich inter- relation to horror. His ‘Nine Disputations on Theology and section of cognitive, conceptual, existential and political Horror’ examines the extent to which the concept of ‘life’ stakes comes into view. Firstly, unlike the essentially animal owes its integrity to an immanent ‘after-life’ which is the responses of fear and terror, horror attaches especially to proper object of horror. If life is defined by a duplicity– the the conceptual abstraction and reflexivity attendant upon distinction between the living being and life