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More on Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror (1980) plus H.P. Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu" (1928).
What is the object of fear? In our last episode, we outlined Kristeva's view that it's ultimately the disintegration of self. Our purpose in this further episode (featuring Mark, Seth, and Dylan, who couldn't attend last time) was to clarify her account of how self-integrity is accomplished and then to use Lovecraft's unnameable (OK, he's named Cthulhu) and undepictable (well, OK, the story has lots of depictions of him; he's even a plush doll) object of fear as a case study exploring how well Kristeva's notion of abjection captures what we understand fear to amount to.
This first half is nearly all Kristeva, the Cthulhu goodness is in part two. Please support PEL to get the unbroken, ad-free Citizen Edition. This will also get you Mark's Close Reading on the first pages Kristeva's text.
Read along in Kristeva: Buy the book
Pixilated Kristeva is by Charles Valsechi. Cthulhu picture is by a friend of the podcast who wishes to remain unnameable.
This was so good. This and the enlightenment episode have been something I’ve been craving for years. If you wanna read more on this lovecraftian horror/sublime stuff. That’s exactly where Nick Land is helpful and fun!
just a head’s up for folks who don’t know nick is a dark enlightenment sith lord….
I awaited long and in vain to hear you give a considered view of the philosophical problem of distinguishing this lumpen Freudism from utter nonsense.
Listen to the strange combinations of literally meaningless sentences that the ghastly Kristeva text brought you to emit:
“pushing the mother homunculus below the surface into the land of death … and thereby a self in opposition to that, a subject would emerge that is literally identifying with the super-ego, the father…”
And so on.
Blimey.
Wes and I did spend some time talking about this methodology in the follow-up ep to 205. Criticizing psychoanalytic explanations as utter hooey actively makes Wes upset and elicits jeers of “you ignoramus!” from specialists (I did compare it to Scientology on our Lacan ep, which even elicited the feedback that I should not be allowed to do the show any more). So I think there is a certain amount of faith involved here: smart people do this for a living (Kristeva herself is fricking brilliant by any objective measure), so maybe I’d better try to figure out what’s being said before dismissing the whole enterprise.
This is a hermeneutic, a framework for interpreting human behavior, more of a literary than a scientific enterprise. I think of it as an alleged phenomenology of our unconscious fantasy lives. This might sound profoundly not worth investigating, or not something that we even COULD investigate if there is any such thing, but it allegedly has direct causal power into how we feel and hence how we act, and certainly there are therapists using these models to actually treat (fuck up?) patients, and also (a la Zizek) interpret what’s going on in the world, and these people have influence, so it seemed worth trying to understand what was being said, and this ended up being pretty fun (except insofar as Wes was stepping in and saying in essence “you actually can’t understand any of this without years of clinical training; your experience reading philosophy is useless.”).
This may be a losing endeavor, destined to please no one, and I don’t know how much of this I particularly want to do on the show any more, but we do have a smattering of it in 205, and 210 (?) will be on Frantz Fanon, another psychoanalyst, giving what I recall to be an equally dramatic though less technically elaborate account of race. So we’ll see if that drives you crazy as well. Thanks for slogging through this one!
you could offer some balance (correction) with more scientifically grounded and even philosophically accepted work like that being done by @anilkseth
Eugene Thacker has a trilogy of books on Horror & Philosophy that are fairly interesting if you are ever looking for further material along these lines.
See: https://books.google.com.au/books/about/In_the_Dust_of_This_Planet.html