Ep. 203: Kristeva vs. Lovecraft on Horror and Abjection (Part Two)

0:00 Mark: That we've spent the whole first half of our discussion here and we are

0:04 Seth: up to page six sometimes. That's the way it goes, man.

0:11 Mark: Clearly we could easily spend another hour

0:15 Dylan: getting up to page 11 just walking

0:17 Mark: slowly through this text. Yeah, exactly. But let's not do that. I want to make sure we get to the Lovecraft, which I spent a good amount of time on. I got rather sucked into. But let's. Is there anything left over that you felt like we need to finish this story? I mean, there's going to be a lot of nuance to her story that we're just not going to be able to fit in here, and we probably don't understand anyway, so it's fine. I feel like we've gotten most of the story out. There was a little bit about narcissism and primal versus secondary repression that would be nice to talk about, but I don't really care that much. Are there any other quotes that you folks had or big holes that you wanted to fill in in Kristeva before we not put her aside, but at least put her slightly in the background?

1:05 Seth: Well, I think we ought to talk a little bit about if and how she constitutes a feminist critique. I mean, we've talked a lot about the mechanism of abjection and how that might function. But I think it. We should probably try to just say something, if we can, about how is this a feminist criticism of the Freudian Lacanian model? If we're even qualified and in a position to say that. And then secondly, somebody that I work out with at Pilates on Monday nights is a sociology professor at ut. And last week when we were talking about. I was telling them about what we were doing the podcast on and she said, oh, yeah, yeah, that function of the father.

The role gets played by different types of males in different societies, there's always a father figure, there's always a male figure that plays a certain kind of role. But different societies have different. Could be the brother, could be the uncle, could be this, could be that. And she sent me some articles about the whole notion of the development of the family. Like, how did primates get to the point where they had families? And what do those families look like in all these different primate societies? And what are the various gender roles that are played and that sort of thing.

And I thought that was kind of interesting. Not because I want to, like, shit on the Oedipal complex or whatever, but because it sheds some interesting light on that as the primary metaphor for this notion of the development of the subject and individuation from the mother.

2:38 Mark: So looking back at this Stanford article on psychoanalytic feminism, you know, I already mentioned at the beginning how this whole rejection of the mother can translate very easy into misogyny. But another thing mentioned in here, this is a quote. Women, on Kristeva's view, suffer the loss of creativity, incapacity for sublimation more severely than men. Women's access to language and creative self transformation is more vulnerable to disturbance, both because of the inexorable repression of their pre Oedipal relationship to the mother, because they have greater difficulty establishing a primary identification with the father.

Whereas the loss of the archaic bond with the maternal body is potentially sublated by men into the rhythms of language. For women, it often becomes a dead space where once there is life filled only with loss and emptiness, imprisoned by an undead, unmourned mother, excluded from language or representation, women are often vulnerable. Women are vulnerable to the devastations of symbolic sacrifice without recompense. So I'm just translating that into. Just as we were saying that women could identify naturally more strongly with the mother, who is being rejected in this process.

And that can translate into some sort of self alienation. Conversely, if you buy this basic picture of you resolve, you enable the healthy rejection of the mother and establishing the self by hooking on to the superego, the father figure, essentially, language, women's access to language, creative self transformation, is more vulnerable to disturbance because they have greater difficulty establishing a primary identification with the father. Right. So if you take this literally, and not just that it's civilization generally, which it seems like men or women would have equal access to, but that this actually involves gaming the superego, merging with the superego to reject chaos, to reject the primal oneness of where yourself is subsumed into the universe, in other words, into the mother's personality to the mother's physical body, then that actually involves real psychological identification with the father, which could be more difficult for women.

I'm not sure how to evaluate that.

4:42 Dylan: I also read that article on feminism, but I. This particular reading from Kristeva doesn't seem to be. It's not explicitly about feminism. And so it requires a level of interpretation that, at least for me, I'm not familiar enough with the different schools of theoretical thought there to really say anything about it. I mean, Seth, did you have something in particular that you wanted to bring out in that regard, since you thought it was important that we bring it up?

5:12 Seth: Yeah, I guess. And this is, again going back to the same article, is this notion that there are multiple waves of feminist responses to Freud and Lacan. Right. So the first is, well, there's a path of subjectivity for the feminine that doesn't require the name of the father or the law. The father's law, something like that. That's the first response. That there's female subjectivity, which is not described by the Freudian construct. He just got it wrong. And he's a misogynist. And maybe he's describing male subjectivity, but he's not describing female subjectivity.

And that that type of subjectivity would not require the rejection of the mother. That's Simone de Beauvoir, according to this article. That's phase one. The article then positions Kristeva as being part of a second phase, along with Luce Irigaray, and basically saying that Kristeva does believe that both male and female require the rejection of the mother to create subjectivity. So it's sort of a counter revolution in psychoanalytic feminist thought. I think we mentioned last time that I, or I mentioned anyway that I felt like her criticism that the Freudian Lacanian structure begs the question that it requires this structure of lack, which requires subjectivity in order for subjectivity to come into play.

Seemed like a pretty strong criticism in that her notion of abjection makes a lot more sense to me and feels a lot more sort of organic as a descriptor of the developmental process. But in reading what we did, the first three chapters of that book, I did not get the sense that she was on any kind of a. She was developing any kind of a feminist critique, that it felt like a straight up philosophical critique from within the framework of the. Of the psychoanalytic context.

7:09 Dylan: Yeah, Lacan revised Freud and Kristeva revised Lacan.

7:12 Seth: Yeah, it didn't feel explicitly feminist to me.

7:16 Dylan: No, me neither.

7:17 Mark: But it does provide language for saying why some of the problems with misogyny happen. So it's not a feminist critique of these guys. I think actually we were saying earlier just how she tweaks the Oedipal triangle, and it's possible that that constitutes a feminist critique, but yeah, not in any really obvious way.

7:40 Seth: So I think where it cashes itself out and where we hit the limits of what we're capable of speaking intelligently or intelligibly about is that she was a practicing psychoanalyst. And so her revision of the, of the framework had practical implications for the way that she treated, for example, neuroses and her understanding of how neuroses came to play and how she would treat it. Her revision of the, of the model and the way it cashed itself out in her practice and the way she treated that, I think less so than, say, a feminist revision, but more so in terms of a therapeutic revision. And that's kind of where I feel like we hit the wall of what we're capable of talking about in this podcast in this context, just because none of us have any experience with therapeutic psychoanalysis.

8:33 Mark: Well, just to read one other thing that I think will be a good bridge to the Lovecraft, maybe also from the Psychoanalytic feminism article just a few paragraphs earlier. It addresses the political angle, which we brought up a little bit in our discussion with Kelly. Although this is not primarily Kristeva's concern, abjection can also be understood as a social phenomenon, one with political implications. The psychically primitive experience of egoic instability can be propelled into the political realm and be socially accentuated or reinforced.

In abjection, subjects confront what they must exclude or expel in order to maintain identity. That is, they confront their own dependency, mortality, finitude, and materiality. This strangeness experienced at the porous edges of identity can rebound into troubling relationships with others, troubling relations with others, including especially with others who are perceived as lacking intelligible identity, socially marginal, or refusing cultural assimilation. While Kristeva's own focus is less on what is abjected than the process of abjection, that is less on the expelled non object than on the violence of separation that brings the objects and others into being, her work provides the theoretical underpinnings to ask questions.

But who bears the burden of abjection? How and why some are figured as inhuman, animal, or alien? Her analysis of abjection exposes the ways in which social life is dependent on jettisoning or containing disorder and disruption and managing the fear of contamination. So yeah, I mean, there's the blueprint right there of, like, how you could use this to talk about immigration, say, or racism.

10:03 Dylan: Any form of political trouble that amounts to us versus them. Fear of the other. Right.

10:10 Mark: So that said, we have a number of ways of attacking Cthulhu with this framework, and I think I'm doubting that we're going to give a lot of quotes from the story. I mean, people can bring up whatever they want. But I want to just refer folks right now to the Phi Fic podcast episode, another member of the Partially Examined Life podcast network that covers this story, where they do very little besides just read a lot of quotes. So if you've never read the story, you might want to take on that. I mean, we can give a vague outline before we dive in. Does it. Anybody else want to take that, or do you want me to do that?

10:46 Dylan: Oh, Mark, you got to do it. You've been in at the deep end of the pool for a while, so.

10:52 Mark: Sure. This was my idea to throw this in here. I proposed this two days before we recorded. Wes initially said, yes, he would do this. Then when it got down to it, he had too much going on, but also just said he wasn't that interested in extending this to talk about horror. But of course, once I got involved, I read Lovecraft. I know. I read a short story collection a long time ago. I didn't remember very much of it. I've certainly seen a lot of movies based on or rooted in Lovecraftian kind of things. I'd never seen a version of Cthulhu. I know there are a couple versions out there.

11:25 Seth: Really?

11:26 Mark: Well, apparently one is like all a black and white silent movie made by the Cthulhu Historical Society. I don't know if that really counts. I don't know if there are any.

11:33 Dylan: There's a role playing game called Call of Cthulhu.

11:35 Seth: Sure. No, no, no, that. That, of course.

11:37 Mark: But I have played that actually as well as. Well, that was talked up to me, and I played that once where you kind of roll. Every. Every character is slowly going insane and you're kind of rolling to see if you can keep your sanity level above a certain point as you go through. But yes, plot wise. So this is. This is kind of like found footage, one of those movies where it's found the characters might all be dead because it's. It's found footage, but in this case, it's. Since it's before the age of movies, it's letters. So a guy has written an account largely of his research into what his uncle was researching.

It's his summary of these other things. But it's kind of presented as this is a package. Here's the articles that my uncle found, here's accounts that I'm going to summarize in this little tract here. But it is a bunch of different. That's supposed to give it its. Its realism and provide sort of explain why it's not a regular narrative. That it's not just. There's a narrator that either knows everything or we're experiencing everything from his point of view. It's more. This is pieced together. And in fact, that weird structure very much goes with how unintelligible the phenomena that are being discussed are supposed to be.

12:53 Seth: So I'll leave it to the Phi Fic people to parse that all out. But I believe that that's a trope of romanticism or romantic literature. I stumbled across this tome and it was curious and forgotten. And then I. I began to explore and I came, you know, I ended up in London at a bookstore. And there was this. It's that kind of. It's like indirect or convoluted first person narrative. There is a first person narrative, but you're not hearing it from the first person. That's that notion of the found footage you talk about.

13:24 Dylan: Yeah. Part of that is the discovery of secrets, which is intrinsic to the whole story. The whole story is about the discovery

13:34 Mark: of secrets or the discovery of secrets to the limit or slightly past.

13:39 Dylan: Yep.

13:40 Mark: How much you want to discover about them. That if actually we should. I might as well read this quote. That's the most famous one, just right at the beginning. The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live in 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 hemmed us little. But someday 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.

14:14 Dylan: So when I read that paragraph, I had never read Lovecraft, ever. And when I read that paragraph, I thought, oh, now I understand why Mark wanted to read this. After having read Kristeva and discussion of the abject. That all makes sense. It didn't go that swimmingly from there on, but I understood it after that first Paragraph.

14:34 Mark: Yeah, I should add another thing that I just read earlier today, the past couple days was one of the things the guest, many guests that was pitched to us to have on was this guy named Eugene Thacker who wrote some things for Zero books, the series the Horror of Philosophy. And so volume three, that is Tentacles Longer Than Night, where he talks specifically about Lovecraft and about many other horror authors and relates them to philosophy. The idea of like read horror texts as if they were philosophy. And you can see just in this quote here, how that relates to.

Is sort of a response to the kind of stuff when we're reading Descartes or Kant or just all these people trying to, you know, we've got the mass of the blooming, buzzing confusion. And we, our experiences first and then our sciences more systematically create a little, a little island of knowledge, create order. And as we got from Lacan, you always have the leftover real. And the way that we were talking about that is like, you know, we live in a language world. Language hems us in on every side. And that it's just this little bit that's left over this residuum that is called by Lacan the real.

And we've been discussing versions of that, relating that to. Abjection. That there is some part of it that is. It's not just that it escapes, you know, when you name something, then there's something that is between the lines, so to speak, that is left unnamed, but that there are things that are positively pushed out and purposefully unnamed.

16:05 Dylan: Well, in fact, it's not just some things. Right. Part of that we'll get to like what Cthulhu is and stuff like that. But I guess I would expect even the way the abject is defined and discussed by Kristeva, that in fact that's the larger of the piece, that the things that are governed by language, that are actual objects are an island of rationality in a giant sea of the undefined, the non object. So there are two things that happen. One is the definition of self based upon the abject. The things that we reject, which are not rejected in terms of being objects, but reject rejected in an unobjectified way through which we define self.

But there's also that sort of blooming, buzzing confusion is a source. Right. Because things cross over the border, they become objects out of that and they affect us. There's a quote in the Kristeva, which was my favorite quote in it that relates to this. It was on page 10. If I am affected by what does not yet appear to me As a thing, it is because laws, connections and even structures of meaning govern and condition me. And that is the contention that that blooming, buzzing confusion, that vast ocean of non objectified real, actually affects me in concrete ways.

17:34 Seth: Yeah, Mark, you said something about language and whatever creating a bulwark or a boundary protecting us. My impression of the dynamic here is that, and I think this is the psychoanalytic application, is that the symbolic or language is a drive to consume the real or the non objectified. And to objectify truly is the rawest, most fundamental drive of subjectivity, which is to create objects of everything and its path. So the frustration of not being able to objectify, or maybe anything you turn your attention to, you can find a way to objectify.

But the fact that there's just this unending, bubbling, confusing mass of the real, it does not objectify itself. That that's what's the real challenge here, is that your subjectivity is predicated on being able to objectify things. And when you come to the realization that you cannot objectify everything, there will always be some things that impact and affect you pre objectively. That that's what drives this abject terror and this horror, this fear. Yeah.

18:50 Mark: I sometimes think about Kant, you know, when you have that image of him as like, you put on the glasses, you put on the glasses, everything looks green or whatever, and in this case it's the glasses of the categories. So everything looks like an object, everything is countable, everything is measurable. And it would be easy to think of Kant as having a very kind of cold view of human nature, that we just put these on and then we're satisfied in our little conceptual worlds. But Kant's whole reason of giving these critiques is because reason inevitably wants to jump beyond what actually is conceptualized and make sweeping generalizations and talk about things in themselves.

So even he says that the things themselves, the things beyond the filter, have some sort of temptation upon us. And you could interpret his whole critique of Practical Reason as saying, actually we have to have certain comportments toward the things in themselves in order for sort of life to make sense. We have to assume there is a God. We have to assume that, you know, morality is real. You know, I can see very clearly in that general structure, you know, Schopenhauer's view of nature as this chaotic mass was very much like what we're seeing in Lovecraft here, that, yeah, we've got the world as we perceive it, which is nice and orderly, it's conquered by language, but then sort of just beyond that and for Schopenhauer it was like in our experience of art, just like for Kristeva, we were talking that to write anything that you're sort of playing with the world beyond what can be symbolized when you write creatively about something.

So, yeah, there's all these ways for both Kant and especially Schopenhauer and then Kristeva, where the non conceptual affects us directly or indirectly with its horribleness.

20:39 Dylan: So I really agree with that and that characterization. And that's certainly the way in which Lovecraft's story works along. Trying to skate around without talking about it too specifically. This thing that is horrible beyond words, terrifying and unimaginable. And in order to make it palatable enough to communicate something about it, there's all this ancillary stuff about secret native rituals and all kinds of other activity. People and societies who are foreign have direct access to it. And so it makes it another step away until at the end, of course, there's a visualization of Cthulhu and a kind of concreteness of it that is meant to be so horrible and gigantic and powerful. And that objectification of it, once it became like that, I was like, well, okay, so it's a big giant cephalopodic whale that does nasty stuff.

21:44 Seth: Yes.

21:46 Dylan: So maybe in the end, because it became objectified, that I found it less powerful. Like, oh, was that all right?

21:54 Mark: Just like every movie that does this kind of thing.

21:56 Dylan: And then the other thing. Did you mention Mark Lovecraft having a reputation as an inveterate racist? I was very interested to find that out because I didn't read anything about who Lovecraft was. I just read the story. When I was reading it, I felt like, gosh, this whole environment is really demonizing all dark people and non white people and native people. All of them are in touch with evil and they all have like a direct conduit to evil and they are the ones who are going to unleash that evil onto the world. Somehow. When I heard that comment from Reena. Oh, well, that makes a lot of sense because it just felt that way in the story.

22:40 Seth: Yeah, I listened to the audio version of the book and I don't know where I was looking at the comments, YouTube or something like that. The Lovecraftian defenders say he wasn't a racist, he was myopic, he had no experience of the world and he was articulating what were the common tropes of the time. And he died tragically young. And towards the end of his life he was traveling and dispelling the difference here is that, okay, so you can think of like Heart of Darkness or this idea that you have to travel deep into the jungle and you encounter primitive societies that are somehow connected to a rhythm of life and to.

23:21 Dylan: They're more real. They're connected to the real.

23:23 Seth: They're connected to the real. Right. That. That's not unique to Lovecraft. It's this view that somehow that civilization, AKA the name of the father, AKA the symbolic order, distances you from the real.

23:36 Dylan: It's Rousseau.

23:38 Seth: That's exactly where I was going. Yes, exactly.

23:42 Mark: And so I guess it's just the question of is that good or not? If you're Thoreau or Rousseau, maybe this is something noble about this. But if you're these guys, then at least you could see why abjection could provide an explanation for why you could romanticize primitive life. But if you actually come face to face with primitives, it's scary. It's like, for me, the comparison would be to being around drunk people. Like, they're like wild animals. Like, you don't want to say anything to them. You know, they could just suddenly start beating on you, like their humanity. The name of the father is very weak when alcohol is heavy in their veins.

24:19 Seth: I don't think that's the case. I think the more apt analogy is that it's this infantilization of the non European or the non civilized person. So that's really what it comes down to is that if abjection is somehow fundamentally the mechanism that the child has in order to create subjectivity, and that abjection is somehow the distinction of the relation from the real to the symbolic, then to say that there are these primitive societies that I don't even know if the right term is. Or pre. Abjection. Or something like that is you're infantilizing. You're not acknowledging them as co. Equal subjects. You're saying essentially that they're children because they haven't embraced the symbolic and rejected or bracketed out the real as much as you have because you're fucking European and white or whatever it is.

25:14 Mark: See, I would maybe buy that, but I think there's so much actual perversion in both Lovecraft and in Kristeva's description that to be abject, to act abjectly is not just to be. When she jumps from disgust with things to disgust with certain behaviors and attitudes, then the idea of corruption comes in. So it's not primordial innocence, it's being aware of the law and twisting it in an intelligent, horrible way.

25:47 Dylan: Yeah. So there's that whole section of Kristeva in which it reminded me most of the deliberate evil deceiver in Descartes. It isn't just someone who is wantonly amoral, it's someone who is purposefully immoral, who is going contra to the morals of the time or the place on purpose, sticking their thumb in the eye, so to speak.

26:14 Seth: Huh. Okay, so amoral versus immoral.

26:18 Mark: And even if amoral, is it amoral out of innocence of morality, or is it amoral out of. What Lovecraft seems to be pointing at is that the universe is fundamentally not human, that there are greater forces at work that just don't give a shit about us, that that's kind of what's so scary about it, is that exactly how wrong the Kantian filters that make everything appropriate to us and on our level and inexperienceable. If you say, ultimately, if you could get behind the veil, what you would see there is just so foreign and so crazy, you would just go mad. And so morally, it would just have nothing to do with these things that we've made up called morality, either in promoting it or even in perversely, you know, in an Augustine way, rejecting it.

27:09 Dylan: Well, those are two sort of different things. But the section in Kristeva that I was being reminded of was on page four. It is thus not the lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection, but what disturbs identity system order. So it's not just merely the amoralness, but that which is immoral. That's the way I would read it. What does not respect borders, positions, rules, the in between, the ambiguous, the composite, the traitor, the liar, the criminal or the good conscience, the shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is the savior.

Any crime, because it draws attention to the fragility of the law, is abject. But premeditated crime, cunning, murder, hypocritical revenge are even more so because they heighten the display of such fragility. He who denies morality is not abject. There can be grandeur in amorality and even in crime that flaunts its disrespect for the law. Rebellious, liberating and suicidal crime. Abjection, on the other hand, is immoral. Sinister, scheming and shady. A terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it.

A debtor who sells you up, a friend who stabs you. That's to me, the difference between amoral and immoral. The purposeful, contrariness, to the rules. And I guess in the abjection, it's that actively going contrary to the rules to flaunt it, which is such a display of abjection as opposed to just sort of there being something I'm not aware of. And in the parallel in the horror in Lovecraft is the notion of this purposefully demonic evil. You don't know what it's going to do, but it's only going to do horrible things. Entity, Cthulhu.

29:03 Seth: Right. So I'm trying to warm up to the idea of seeing the abject in this Lovecraftian thing. Okay, let's just say for the sake of argument that his attempt to reify Cthulhu ultimately objectifies the horror and I think undermines the story. Like, okay, so he's a giant octopus headed thing that shows up and runs into a boat or whatever. The idea that what the old gods represent is something that's outside of the symbolic order it's prior to, it's not something that you can conceptualize. So in other words, if you could conceptualize it, you could have an amoral relationship to it.

Right. You could attempt to manipulate or ironically appropriate or whatever, as opposed to having just the pure, raw, abject horror of the experience, which would be more akin to the immoral experience of it. And so it's this sense in which amorality involves a form of objectification that gives you some control. It gives you that framework of subjectivity. And not necessarily Mark, not at the intentionality of philosophy, but the intentionality of psychoanalysis. The object of psychoanalysis versus the object of philosophy. I'm sorry, I couldn't resist, but I think maybe his literary powers failed him at a certain point where structurally, what he was trying to accomplish with the story maybe didn't.

30:39 Dylan: I mean, there's a way in which the main force of it is the fact that people were driven mad by it. Right. Not the ultimate picture of it.

30:47 Seth: Yes, yes. And that's the whole thing about, like I mentioned this in the last episode, this idea that if you watch movies that are about psychological terror and horror, like the Vincent Price films or English horror movies, it's all about the suggestion of horror in order to elicit that feeling in you. And at some point people realized, well, visual medium is just not the way to try to. I mean, it's much more terrifying to read a story than it is to watch it on film. So they just gave in and everything became visual. Maybe the best example of the abject or the horror, the Blair Witch Project, which also a Found footage trope.

Right, Mark? You know, you never actually see the thing. There's only the suggestion. And it tries to make you connect to that abject part of yourself, as opposed to, you know, the Human Centipede or whatever it's called. The. It's just straight up explicit, visceral horror, which is a very different kind of thing.

31:46 Mark: Yeah. So a Lovecraftian story. Occurs to me that I think a movie was made of it, since a movie is made of every single Stephen King work ever from a Buick 8. It's extremely Lovecraftian. It's like there's a portal which just happens to be in a car to this other dimension, and things will go through, you know, show up from the other dimension. So some creature shows up, and everybody that's there just has this feeling like this thing does not belong in our universe. And just immediately they kill it. They just rip it to shreds. And that's the kind of thing that you can't portray on screen.

You really can't. And there's something like that in here. So the third act, which is the narrator reading this news story about these people on a boat that actually run into Cthulhu himself, even though this all happened at the same time as the stuff described in the earlier acts, it's just. He's finding out about this later that the shipmate Johansen was the only one who survived this sea voyage, and they run across this other ship that attacks them, and they just kill everybody on the other ship. And they regard it as, like, their duty. And in fact, when they're prosecuted, when they come back, the few survivors that there are, they just find this surprising.

Like that it. No, it was just. So these were basically people that were being called by the. The ancient city that had been brought up by the earthquake above the waves, and they wanted to go purposefully let Cthulhu out. So these were some variation of the servants of this cult, which different groups of these have been showing up in Act 1 and Act 2 of this story earlier. Various kinds of savages. And it's not even clear that these are. I think they're still racial descriptions of them, but. But why they would just be evil and hideous and deserving to be killed.

Right. Then is not easy to convey.

33:37 Seth: Well, but I. Maybe let's ignore the potentially overt racist things and just say, like, these swarthy cult fiends.

33:46 Mark: Yes. Okay.

33:47 Seth: Or the nautically influenced Negroes. Yes. This idea that there's a drive. Right. So these cultures have a drive to remember that What Cthulhu represents is. And he's not the only one, right? Or she, I think it's a he, but is that there's a whole cult of these old gods and their mechanism, right? So they ruled at one point, and then they disappeared into the ether. And then when human beings came along, they didn't have any direct physical, causal. They couldn't just show up and demand sacrifices and whatever. So they manipulated people mentally.

So the concept is, is that the less cultured, the less in the symbolic order you are, the more susceptible you are to the call of Cthulhu. And that this call is to draw you simultaneously to. I don't know if it's worship or release or something like that, but it also brings you to the brink of madness, right? So the. The whole point is that there is a drive. The call of Cthulhu is the drive to this real. As we're using the Lacanian term, the real. And in the Kristevian dialogue, I guess it would be the pre. Object of abjection. So the notion is that that call is always there.

It's like in the background, right? And if you attend to that call, you run the risk of madness. You run the risk of succumbing to abjection, which in the psychoanalytic framework would essentially be, you know, madness is the Romantic term for it, but neurosis or psychosis or whatever the term is, would be the psychoanalytic term that if you are unable to embrace the symbolic, to the extent that you immunize yourself against this eruption in your ordered experience of this horror and abject, you run the risk of madness or psychosis.

35:49 Dylan: So what's the nature of the call? Is it the call of the illicit? Is it the call of the undefined? You know, whatever attracts Pandora and every cat, Is it prurient curiosity? And in that way, it's a cautionary tale against the abuse of our reason to explore the world and don't look under too many rocks because of what you might find kind of thing.

36:18 Seth: Well, I think it's the call that creates desire for that which cannot be comprehended. You're drawn to this thing. You're drawn to.

36:27 Dylan: Well, why are you drawn to it? So it seems in both cases, whether it's just like the first sentence of the Nicomachean ethics, right? Every human being strives to reach out with their intellect, to know. And in this case, what is the thing that you most want to feast on is something that you don't understand, and you're drawn to it. That's something fundamentally Human. That would be the implication here, though. The horror is that it's both terrible and overwhelming, so that you cannot process, cannot be objectified and therefore pulled into our own identity. The consequence would be a eruption of yourself and some kind of psychosis associated with it because it was unprocessable.

37:19 Seth: Yeah, I think it's about kind of like the negation of your being that this call, remember, if you tie it back into the framework that we read in Kristeva, right? It's like, okay, you have this experience because you need to learn the mechanism of rejection. You need to learn the mechanism of abjection, which is to push something out of yourself, to distinguish yourself. In order to get to the point where you can be a subject which is able to position yourself against objects, you have to reject something from yourself. And then when you think about the mechanism of horror as described here, it's that you think, oh, I finally gotten all that stuff out of my system.

I am a completely whole and complete self sufficient subject and everything that is not me is something that I can grasp. So you have this ordered universe that is you as the subject and then the objects, and something interrupts that experience and just lets you know, hey, guess what? Not everything that's not you is objectifiable. And if it's not objectifiable, that means not only that it might not be you, it might still be a part of you, or that you might need it and so you might be drawn to it and it's that unhealthy, self destructive. Like, I have to go see this thing.

I need to go into the black hole of Calcutta and I need to see this and see that. Because I can't conceive of what it is. I can't be satisfied without knowing, without understanding.

38:51 Dylan: It isn't part of that call because of this notion that it is the real. I mean, this story, the Lacan, maybe even philosophy in general, and science too. One of the common themes is trying to uncover what truly is in the world, what the forces really are, the way we are as human beings or can be, what the world is like in all those dimensions. And so it's going to appeal to us and it might actually be more than we can handle and deeply horrible.

39:24 Seth: Well, just the fact that to go back to kind of where we started this conversation, is the idea that the whole experience of being ego, the whole experience of subjectivity, is the attempt to create order, create symbolic order, to put language to things, and the fact that that effort itself is ultimately futile. Even if it were possible to create symbolic order for everything there were. You just don't have enough. There's not enough. You. There's not time. You know, there's always something that's going to interrupt and challenge that. So if your whole notion of yourself, which by the way, is a notion of order, symbolic order, is built on the idea that that's possible.

And then you find out that it's not possible, everything starts to fall apart. The descent into madness is obvious, or I should say at least that path to, oh, my God, my teleology. The reason that I exist, I realize, is not possible. And there's some sort of apophantic moment where I come to realize that from some experience of not being able to accomplish this activity of subjectivity. But if you embrace it, then it's a completely different direction. Instead of this psychoanalytic neurosis or this madness of Lovecraftian thing, then you get some kind of like Timothy Leary, 60s experience.

There's a different way to go with this based on how you want to interpret it.

40:53 Mark: So strangely, I had not considered before you brought this up what the call actually means, because it's introduced in Act 1 here, it's that the narrator is reading about how his dead uncle met with this young artist who had carved a little wooden picture with some hieroglyphics on it. This is why they got in touch with it, because he went, his uncle was an expert in reading hieroglyphics, and this artist had just had a dream and basically drawn this Cthulhu image right there. Already Cthulhu is being objectified. And the image that is described there is what the stuffed Cthulhu's and stuff look like.

Now, I don't think when we actually get to Act 3 and these people that run into Cthulhu, I don't think it is described. It's described as like a gelatinous mass. Like there might be a mention of a tentacle in there somewhere. But the fact that it doesn't represent the image that in multiple places in the story folks have of it, that kind of, to me, makes Lovecraft more successful in, you know, that you can have an image of something that is essentially beyond any images and beyond language and beyond understanding. And yet that's normal for religions.

In fact, pictures of the cross or whatever, you know, that it's not a literal depiction, it's somehow representative. But anyway, this guy had a dream. And part of this act one again, is looking at press clippings and information his uncle collected on what dreams were other People having at the time. And it's the. The artists that were having these dreams. Like the more scientific people were immune. The more commerce oriented ones were too wrapped up in the ordered human world. But it's the ones who, following again, the way Kristeva describes the function of art, who let themselves play with the boundaries, who seem to be more.

More open to imagination then they're the ones who are getting this image of Cthulhu and the word Cthulhu, you know, something that is. Cannot really be pronounced, but like Cthulhu is as close as you get. And the name of the city that he can comes from. These are purposefully like things that no human tongue was meant to that did not originate with a human tongue. It doesn't feel like those people are being called. Right. They're not being told to do anything. I mean, there may be. This guy's driven to quickly carve this thing. So in that sense it's being called and he wants to find out about it.

But it's not. It doesn't sound like Cthulhu is calling them and directing them to do something in the first place. Directing them to worship me or find out about me or that it's their desire for the truth. God, it's just some sort of obsession that there's no rationale for it. It's just there.

43:19 Dylan: I didn't take the call of Cthulhu being Cthulhu in either voice or mind or something reaching out and grabbing a hold of people. I took it to be that people were drawn to Cthulhu despite themselves. So in that way, the call of Cthulhu comes from within every person. It's from within them, not Cthulhu pulling them out, but it's their own desire. And that's why I was saying not necessarily only truth, but whatever the desire is that underlies the desire to know seems to be what's going on. Why else would you go except that you wanted to know?

43:57 Mark: Right. The cult members have their own rationale, which they're again kind of depicted as that they've been made less than other than human from their activity here. So one of the stories in Act 2 is this policeman has told the uncle about how he went to the bayou deep in the Louisiana jungles and found these people, again, half breeds mongrels. They're not pure white people for the most part, but it's more their picture of mental and cultural degradation. And they're leaping around making animalistic noises and they've performed all these sacrifices. There's bodies they're writhing around. It's overtly sexual in a way that it's not just innocence of. It's purposively perverse.

44:40 Dylan: By saying it that way, they've become part of Cthulhu at that point, right? They're on the inside now. They're extensions of Cthulhu. In their depravity, they have been corrupted by Cthulhu. And in that way now, in their worship, in their manifestation of him, in their activity, in their reflection, in their depravity of his horror and evil, they are part of Cthulhu.

45:07 Mark: So the rationale given one of the people that was found at this. A lot of them were put in jail, more of them in asylums. But there's this one who is dead by the time our narrator actually goes down and does some researching, but had told the policeman, who in turn told his uncle, this guy named Castro. He whispered. Those first men formed the cult around small idols which the Great Ones showed them. Idols brought in dim areas from dark stars. That cult would never die till the stars came right again and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from his tomb and revive his subjects and resume his rule of Earth.

This time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the great Old Ones, free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile, the cult, by appropriate rights, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return. So that way of putting it, I think, explains why we are having trouble.

Like, is it immorality or is it amorality? Because it seems that it's both. That on this interpretation of Beyond Good and Evil, it really is like the master morality of shouting and killing and reveling in joy. There's a certain innocence. Again, maybe innocence is the wrong world, but there's a certain amorality about it. But the effect is certainly immoral from our. Our point of view. I don't want to see people reveling in joy. That offends my moral sense. Having new ways to enjoy yourself seems like it's just the old ways. If it's just reveling and killing and shouting and rolling around naked, what new ways are there?

They'll show you the Devil's Triangle and the Devil's Cube and the Devil's Hexagon.

46:53 Seth: I don't know.

46:53 Mark: That was the only thing that looked like a quote for me in there. What did this jump out as? Ooh, there's some philosophy entering here. Or is he just name dropping without the name but selectively quoting again?

47:04 Seth: I think this is kind of like one of the places where maybe this isn't an attempt to. It's the place where either his writing or the genre breaks down in terms of paying off the commitment to the abject or the horror. In that sense. I think, like Dylan mentioned earlier, this. If you stay focused on the descent into madness, the people encountering the thing that cannot be comprehended, the thing that cannot be objectified, and that this dissolving their bonds to reality. It's the notion that this development into subjectivity is tenuous. There's a risk.

It's not a linear path where you differentiate from the mother. You become a subject. And as long as you avoid some of the majorly severe neuroses, you can kind of live happily ever after. It's the idea that the whole process is fraught with peril. And the maintenance of it requires constant vigilance. And vigilance that may be denial or negation in some sense, that you can't voluntarily dive into the real and maintain your sanity. That subjectivity is a tightrope walk.

48:14 Dylan: That certainly seems to me the kind of. I don't know if it's philosophical content, but it's the world picture there against the reasonableness of the world. Not only is there a kind of vast array of irrationality, it's actually horrible and evil. It's the source of evil. That's sort of the picture that comes through here. I don't think that it's quite as enlivening source as it is in Kristeva's case. But I can see how the language of abjection makes it possible to talk about how horror works.

48:49 Mark: So there's the horror of the people in the story talking about this and experiencing it. And then there's the supposed horror, if the story is working, of the reader. And why we would be fascinated by this and related media, which when there is a good cinematic version of this, it's often because of the music setting a good mood. It's not the pictures the more kind of surreal. And I think that's what happens here. Is that so there's a lot of, I would say, negative theology going on that it's just like the thing that I described. We don't know exactly what the new ways of reveling Enjoying yourself. But it's not what we're familiar with.

49:25 Dylan: And it's not good, right?

49:28 Mark: It's not orderly, it's not civilized. We keep going back and forth like what is the alternative to the symbolic order? Well, chaos is chaos, a definite thing. It seems like it's an open pallet for our imaginations. And we therefore do create and fixate. You know, this is the what chapter two of the Kristeva is on about, phobias that really. It's this raw fear that's not really directed at anything. That's ultimately what phobia is. But when it shows up, it's I'm afraid of a horses or whatever. And so when you break that down like no, you're not really afraid of horses or your fear of horses is based in this more primordial, less directed experience.

Or if it's directed to anything, then it's directed to that pre objective, you know, you unified with your mother time. But because that was a time in which there were no objects that were differentiated then referring to that objective situation means you're referring to nothing in particular. So that's the trouble that we keep having. And I think the story does a pretty good job in, you know, even that thing about Castro. Well, that's a whispered thing from a half mad guy that's being told fourthhand. You know, Castro told Legrand, the inspector who told the uncle.

And the narrator is summing that up for us. So like we're not getting a clear picture of what this thing is. And likewise with the actual. Definitely the city in which in Act 3, the monster comes out of is described in non euclidean ways. Somebody is killed by. There's something that seems convex, but it's actually concave or the other way around, you know, something dying in impossible ways. And then when this thing is revealed again, it doesn't resemble the statues that we've had so far in the story. It is gelatinous, it is formless. It is. Again we're given this third hand account which is itself, you know, the guy's doubting his own sanity, probably doesn't have much sanity left.

The people he was with were all either killed or certifiably insane and then died. Related to that, you know, the thing gets ran with a boat and then starts to reform itself like that. It is fundamentally foreign and cannot be taken in to the brain. So I think you can say that there's limitations in the medium itself. But I feel like there's a reason that he's famous for exactly this thing. And I think it's more effectively done in this story than in some of the other ones. You know, in fact, there's an earlier version of this story just called Dagon.

It's not quite the same story, but it's like a guy is at sea and he just wakes up and he's on this tremendous plane, and then he ends up seeing, basically, sea God. And his mind is just so boggled by, like, pretty much in any Lovecraft story, no matter how comparatively comparative to Cthulhu mundane. The thing is, it so boggles the mind. Like, it was an enormous cat. My mind is just boggled. I was pretty much driven insane. But so given that low floor of. Can we just get less definite than that level of objectification, I think this is something he was struggling with throughout his career, is how to.

How to depict the inherently undepictable. Yeah. So anything else? What do we take away from this? I mean, it's interesting that. So Kristeva, you know, at least the Freudian attempt to explain these things is a scientific attempt. And by the time we get to Kristeva, Kristeva's writing is very flowery and not very scientific seeming. You know, she's acting within that tradition. But I just don't think. I think by that point, she just accepts that what she's doing is some form of hermeneutics, some form of depicting what's going on in the psyche in a way that ends up being effective in treating patients.

And is she giving the literal truth of what's going on, or are there alternate explanations? Like, we did not read Kristeva on the philosophy of science, and I don't know if she wrote anything like that. But it's just interesting that Kristeva and Lovecraft could be kind of talking about the same thing, but in a way that Kristeva is ultimately trying to say, like, look, in our psyche, there are these vistas of craziness and chaos, but really you're just remembering kind of in the Platonic way. There's this funny connection to Plato. Right. With Plato, when you remember things from before your conscious life, you're remembering the divine, you're remembering, you're recollecting.

Yes, the contact with the form. It's basically your contact with God. Stuff that can't be put into, you know, it informs or how I can tell this chair from that chair, or justice from injustice. But there's something sort of expansive and beyond, you know, outside the cave of the real. It's the real that we're Remembering in both cases, but it's something wonderful and ordering something whose order is superior to our everyday experience. Whereas for Kristeva, the thing that we're remembering, well, it projects itself in the way Lovecraft describes as this vast chaos.

But really, if you buy Kristeva's scientific explanation, like, it's not that we actually live in a world of craziness, it's that we have this experience where we, before we could make language, where we were the same individual with our mother, and at some point there was a division there, and that was a primal loss. And we've just kind of dramatized that in our heads. So she's through. Her explanation is reducing this. Whereas I think if you actually take Lovecraft seriously, then you would be very much enlarging it to say, wow, it's almost like the evil demon or, you know, the Schopenhauer view of nature.

Like, that is actually the truth, and we are just kind of fooling ourselves to have this little scientific explanation that he papers over the great chaos.

55:10 Dylan: I can kind of see that in the Lovecraft mark. I. I find it kind of fetishizing the unknown as being deeply horrible. And I did not find that take on Cthulhu as enlivening. It felt like P.T. barnum, you know, going into a house of horrors. And, you know, he was trying, you know, in that deep, dark voice, trying to evoke our sense of dread out of it by appealing to our cultural fear of the other and the unknown and our cultural racist tendencies against foreigners of all sorts. And then the sort of abstract horror was things that defied the laws of physics and the laws of the way, our known morality that is infused with. Against our anything that would be good and wholesome debaucherous sex and perverted activity. Cthulhu feels like a sideshow to me,

56:08 Mark: an improper observance of the rituals. I'm just anticipating our next discussion on the Bhagavad Gita, where all this craziness is just lumped in with heresy.

56:19 Dylan: Yes. So for me, I found the Kristeva more rich in terms of thinking about the psychological space and the relation of the other and how that is related to how we form ourselves. I thought it was useful to have that juxtaposed with the Lovecraft.

56:40 Seth: I agree with Dylan on that one.

56:42 Mark: So what captured my imagination about the combination of these things? You know, I've always been interested in phenomenology and really what happens to metaphysics post Kant, that a phenomenologist like Husserl ontology is no Longer about are there actual mental substance and physical substance in the world? It's about categories within our experience. And then as you get more sophisticated phenomenologists, even you know, Husserl's own late period, then you're no longer talking just about the phenomenology of our conscious mindful experience.

Right. I'm actually staring out in front of me and describing the content. By the time you get to Heidegger, like as soon as you are staring and objectifying, that's not normal experience. So Heidegger is trying to describe like what our relationship to objects is just in our pre theoretical disposition, whatever that is. Yes. So I'm fascinated then what happens if you throw the idea of the unconscious into that.

57:42 Dylan: Sure.

57:42 Mark: That there could be not just the ontological structures of how we behave towards things, but what the mental landscape, including dreams and the stuff that we're not aware of and kind of what is it that we're projecting out there? And so Lovecraft is giving us a picture. Do we underlyingly feel like the world is crazy and evil in this way, or is it just some people who feel that way? You know, that's the problem with all phenomenology is like how universal it is. Especially if you're saying that some of this stuff comes out of the unconscious or out of ideology.

Right. Another thing, you're unconscious of your social influences. Then if somebody just says, well that's not my experience, then that gives you a way of saying, well, look deeper. It probably is like if you don't feel like you have this sense of abjection, you don't feel this way about your corpses and your feces and whatever. Maybe you care for an infant. And so you're hardly ontologizing and making evil out of baby feces. Like those become very mundane, very not mysterious, very not something that you could even say you're disgusted by anymore.

It's just like another object in the world. But there's got to be still something on the edge of, you know, something that if you would reflect enough on your life that you're underlyingly scared of. And some people are more scared than others anyway. So this idea of the psychological landscape, you know, not describing the structure of the psyche, but the structure of the world according to the psyche, that is, that's what kind of has fascinated me coming out of this. Because then you can look at. It's a new way to talk about. Just like Freud did to talk about religion.

Why you might posit such weird things existing out in the world is There some deep human need or characteristic of the way that we underlyingly conceptualize, imagize, otherwise refer to that we are tempted by the world that would call forth these crazy ass pictures that we then see in the output of art and perhaps dreams themselves. So that would be my closing. Yeah, thanks guys for indulging me on going this way. I know we are going to talk more generally about other kinds of horror, whatever bring our different experiences of that maybe we can.

There might be more to take up in some future episode if we found the appropriate reading. Certainly relating this more to the sublime, to ugliness, to We've now had a couple episodes analyzing specific emotions and even just how to talk about emotions. That's a cool philosophical issue. So this was time well spent as far as I was concerned. Even though Kristeva's hard and we're not really that equipped to deal with her. So. All right, as we said, next time we're going to talk about the Bhagavad Gita. Specifically we read the philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita by Keya Maitra.

It's a full translation with her commentary. It's pretty interesting. And we get to see the true face of Krishna, which is almost as crazy as the one of Cthulhu with his innumerably many mouths and eyes and things.

1:00:46 Seth: But no abjection, right?

1:00:48 Mark: No, apparently not. Apparently this is just brings you well, the guy who's witnessing this says could you just turn back to your human form? This is a little overwhelming. So there's no mortal terror going on. I guess he's glorious and virtuous enough to behold the form without freaking out too much.

1:01:06 Seth: Side note, I refrained from bringing in the Jewish the whole idea that in Judaism you. You can't create a one of the commandments is no graven images, right? No idols. Yeah. Because you cannot represent God. And there's a. There's a word for the pure form of God that you can't that manifests here on earth but you can't comprehend. Called the Shekinah. Again, a positive take on the abject.

1:01:32 Mark: Yeah.

1:01:33 Seth: Although there are plenty of people that if you believe Raiders of the Lost Ark, you don't want to open that ark, baby. Especially not if you're a Nazi.

1:01:44 Mark: So come back next time for the to have your face melted right off.

1:01:47 Seth: That's right.

1:01:48 Mark: Folks should go melt their faces off at us through the medium of typing at our website partiallyexaminedlife.com or on our Facebook group, or comment to us on Twitter or send us a message@peltiallyexaminedlife.com we would love to hear from you and hear what else you want us to to talk about. Today's closing song is by me. I'm so excited. My new album has been mostly mixed, should be available in a few weeks. This song is called the Other, directly influenced by the philosophy like Buber and Levinas that talks a lot about the Other with a dash of feminism here.

And I'm so pleased that I was able to get Lucy Lawless, one of our favorite guests, to sing lead on this doing the part of the Succubus. I'm sure you're gonna want to share this recording with other people. You can find it at patreon.com Marklint I'm posting all the songs as they are mixed up there. They are free for anyone to hear though of course I would love your actual support. This is not cheap to finish this thing so if you sign up to be a patron of my arts there I would be so appreciative and would not abject you. Speaking of fundraising, we are getting ever closer to the time where the partially examined life 2019 wall calendar will be up for pre order sale probably about a week from now, maybe a little longer than that.

We will announce it here when it is available. Thanks everybody and good night.

1:03:12 Seth: Good night Good. I am the other baby I will solve all your problems Fill me up with all your insecurities and flies I am another lady you're several's one and only Come to me I'm what you need Worship me and die a sentimental

1:03:41 Mark: death fulfilling every valentine cliche if you

1:03:45 Seth: never tried, you never know how it feels to be unmade I am the other baby. Project upon me all your fantasies and entreaties especially the weird ones Baby I am another crazy impossibly imperfect vessel for yourself Deceiving picture of your needs but it's the only game in the city

1:04:12 Mark: it filter up and love the shade

1:04:14 Seth: and if you never try you never know really from that's Malays.

1:04:27 Mark: Love love love that's all you need a break from what's desensitized you A not uncommon known condition should clear up in a year or so Love, love love. It's guaranteed to give you something for your journal A universal no religion so fulfilling, verifiable Moving towards the empty ache Bring on the insipid heartbreak it all comes with the territory I promise it won't be more than you can take I am the other baby Another force beyond your power Courage to change what

1:05:04 Seth: you can, your own death notwithstanding. I am the other baby, all wrapped up in too much cultural cliche to

1:05:13 Mark: run away as fast as you need. Reprimanding the other to your immature, the other to your heart's manure, the other to your narcissistic needs

1:05:29 Seth: sat.