Horror

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Horror:

"Old French horror (12c., Modern French horreur) and directly from Latin horror "dread, veneration, religious awe," a figurative use, literally "a shaking, trembling (as with cold or fear), shudder, chill," from horrere "to bristle with fear, shudder," from PIE root *ghers- "to bristle" (source also of Sanskrit harsate "bristles," Avestan zarshayamna- "ruffling one's feathers," Latin eris (genitive) "hedgehog," Welsh garw "rough").

Also formerly in English "a shivering," especially as a symptom of disease or in reaction to a sour or bitter taste (1530s); "erection of the hairs on the skin" (1650s); "a ruffling as of water surface" (1630s). As a genre in film, 1934."

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Ab-hor:

"mid-15c., from Latin abhorrere "shrink back from, have an aversion for, shudder at," from ab- "away" + horrere "tremble at, shudder," literally "to bristle, be shaggy," from PIE *ghers- "start out, stand out, rise to a point, bristle"."

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"Phrike is the spirit of horror in Greek mythology. Her name literally means "tremor, shivering" (i. e. from fear, horror), and has the same stem as the verb φρίττω (phrittō) "to tremble". The term "Phrike" (personified or not) is widely used in tragedy.

Her Latin equivalent was Horror."

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Eugene Thacker is a post-Xt. Dis-anthrope, trying to re-call the original horror of a meaningless universe before the world turned into a for-human world.
While Metanthrope could be again mistaken for a transhumanism and cybernetics, Dis-anthropy is more closer to the idea of his Horror that is not that of vampires or zombies, but of the sheer magnitude of the unknown, of the black vastness amidst which we live, "the subharmonic murmur of black tentacular voids", that drapes and seeps through us, and us in partial oblivion of this dis/ease, an un/ease pushed back but never eliminated.

Cinematically, I think his idea of Horror, is best captured in the 1968 film 'Solaris'.

Thacker wrote:

"The horror of philosophy: the isolation of those moments in which philosophy reveals its own limitations and constraints, moments in which thinking enigmatically confronts the horizon of its own possibility – the thought of the unthinkable that philosophy cannot pronounce but via a non-philosophical language. The genre of supernatural horror is a privileged site in which this paradoxical thought of the unthinkable takes place. What an earlier era would have described through the language of darkness mysticism or negative theology, our contemporary era thinks of in terms of supernatural horror.

What is more important is how all of these interpretive lenses – mythological, theological, existential – have as their most basic presupposition a view of the world as a human-centric world, as a world “for us” as human beings, living in human cultures, governed by human values. While classical Greece does, of course, acknowledge that the world is not totally within human control, it nevertheless tends to personify the non-human world in its pantheon of humanoid creatures and its all-too-human gods, themselves ruled by jealously, greed, and lust. The same can be said of the Christian framework, which, while also personifying the supernatural (angels and demons; a paternal God by turns loving and abusive), re-casts the order of the world within a moral-economic framework of sin, debt, and redemption in a life after life. And the modern existential framework, with its ethical imperative of choice, freedom, and will, in the face of both scientific and religious determinisms, ultimately constricts the entire world into a solipsistic, angstridden vortex of the individual human subject. In short, when the non-human world manifests itself to us in these ambivalent ways, more often than not our response is to recuperate that non-human world into whatever the dominant, human-centric worldview is at the time.

However, one of the greatest lessons of the ongoing discussion on global climate change is that these approaches are no longer adequate. We can, instead, offer a new terminology for thinking about this problem of the non-human world. Let us call the world in which we live the world-for-us. This is the world that we, as human beings, interpret and give meaning to, the world that we relate to or feel alienated from, the world that we are at once a part of and that is also separate from the human. But this world-for-us is not, of course, totally within the ambit of human wants and desires; the world often “bites back,” resists, or ignores our attempts to mold it into the world-for-us. Let us call this the world-in-itself. This is the world in some inaccessible, already-given state, which we then turn into the world-for-us. The world-in-itself is a paradoxical concept; the moment we think it and attempt to act on it, it ceases to be the world-in-itself and becomes the world-for-us. A significant part of this paradoxical world-in-itself is grounded by scientific inquiry – both the production of scientific knowledge of the world and the technical means of acting on and intervening in the world.

Even though there is something out there that is not the world-for-us, and even though we can name it the world-in-itself, this latter constitutes a horizon for thought, always receding just beyond the bounds of intelligibility. Tragically, we are most reminded of the world-in-itself when the world-initself is manifest in the form of natural disasters. The discussions on the long-term impact of climate change also evoke this reminder of the world-in-itself, as the specter of extinction furtively looms over such discussions. Using advanced predictive models, we have even imagined what would happen to the world if we as human beings were to become extinct. So, while we can never experience the world-in-itself, we seem to be almost fatalistically drawn to it, perhaps as a limit that defines who we are as human beings.

Let us call this spectral and speculative world the world-without-us. In a sense, the world-withoutus allows us to think the world-in-itself, without getting caught up in a vicious circle of logical paradox. The world-in-itself may co-exist with the world-for-us – indeed the human being is defined by its impressive capacity for not recognizing this distinction. By contrast, the world-without-us cannot co-exist with the human world-for-us; the world-without-us is the subtraction of the human from the world. To say that the world-without-us is antagonistic to the human is to attempt to put things in human terms, in the terms of the world-for-us. To say that the world-without-us is neutral with respect to the human, is to attempt to put things in the terms of the world-in-itself. The worldwithout- us lies somewhere in between, in a nebulous zone that is at once impersonal and horrific. The world-without-us is as much a cultural concept as it is a scientific one, and, as this book attempts to show, it is in the genres of supernatural horror and science fiction that we most frequently find attempts to think about, and to confront the difficult thought of, the world-without-us.

In a sense, the real challenge today is not finding a new or improved version of the world-for-us, and it is not relentlessly pursuing the phantom objectivity of the world-in-itself. The real challenge lies in confronting this enigmatic concept of the world-without-us, and understanding why this worldwithout- us continues to persist in the shadows of the world-for-us and the world-in-itself. We can even abbreviate these three concepts further: the world-for-us is simply the World, the world-in-itself is simply the Earth, and the world-without-us is simply the Planet. The terms “world” and “worlding” are frequently used in phenomenology to describe the way in which we as human subjects exist in the world, at the same time as the world is revealed to us. By contrast, we understand the “Earth” as encompassing all the knowledge of the world as an object, via geology, archaeology, paleontology, the life sciences, the atmospheric sciences (meteorology, climatology), and so on.

What then is the “Planet”? The World (the world-for-us) not only implies a human-centric mode of being, but it also points to the fuzzy domain of the not-human, or that which is not for-us. We may understand this in a general sense as that which we cannot control or predict, or we may understand it in more concrete terms as the ozone, carbon footprints, and so on. Thus the World implicitly opens onto the Earth. But even “the Earth” is simply a designation that we’ve given to something that has revealed itself or made itself available to the gathering of samples, the generating of data, the production of models, and the disputes over policy. By necessity there are other characteristics that are not accounted for, that are not measured, and that remain hidden and occulted. Anything that reveals itself does not reveal itself in total. This remainder, perhaps, is the “Planet.” In a literal sense the Planet moves beyond the subjective World, but it also recedes behind the objective Earth. The Planet is a planet, it is one planet among other planets, moving the scale of things out from the terrestrial into the cosmological framework. Whether the Planet is yet another subjective, idealist construct or whether it can have objectivity and be accounted for as such, is an irresolvable dilemma. What is important in the concept of the Planet is that it remains a negative concept, simply that which remains “after” the human. The Planet can thus be described as impersonal and anonymous.

In the context of philosophy, the central question today is whether thought is always determined within the framework of the human point of view. What other alternatives lay open to us? One approach is to cease searching for some imaginary locus of the non-human “out there” in the world, and to refuse the well-worn dichotomy between self and world, subject and object. This is, of course, much easier said than done. In addition to the interpretive frameworks of the mythological (classical-Greek), the theological (Medieval-Christian), and the existential (modern-European), would it be possible to shift our framework to something we can only call cosmological? Could such a cosmological view be understood not simply as the view from inter-stellar space, but as the view of the world-without-us, the Planetary view?

Scientists estimate that approximate ninety percent of the cells in the human body belong to nonhuman organisms (bacteria, fungi, and a whole bestiary of other organisms). Why shouldn’t this also be the case for human thought as well? In a sense, this book is an exploration of this idea – that thought is not human. In a sense, the world-without-us is not to be found in a “great beyond” that is exterior to the World (the world-for-us) or the Earth (the world-in-itself); rather, it is in the very fissures, lapses, or lacunae in the World and the Earth. The Planet (the world-without-us) is, in the words of darkness mysticism, the “dark intelligible abyss” that is paradoxically manifest as the World and the Earth.

The term “horror” does not exclusively mean cultural productions of horror (or “art horror”), be it in fiction, film, comics, or video games. While the horror genre is an important part of culture, and while scholarly studies of the horror genre do help us to understand how a book or film obtains the effects it does, genre horror deserves to be considered as more than the sum of its formal properties. Also, by “horror” I do not mean the human emotion of fear, be it manifest in a fiction film, a news report, or a personal experience. Certainly this type of horror is an important part of the human condition, and it can be leveraged in different ways – ethically, politically, religiously – for the gain of different ends. This also deserves to be studied, especially for the ways in which reality and fiction increasingly overlap in our reality-TV culture. But “horror” in this sense remains strongly inscribed within the scope of human interests and the world-for-us.

Against these two common assumptions, I would propose that horror be understood not as dealing with human fear in a human world (the world-for-us), but that horror be understood as being about the limits of the human as it confronts a world that is not just a World, and not just the Earth, but also a Planet (the world-without-us). This also means that horror is not simply about fear, but instead about the enigmatic thought of the unknown. As H.P. Lovecraft famously noted, “the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is the fear of the unknown.” Horror is about the paradoxical thought of the unthinkable. In so far as it deals with this limit of thought, encapsulated in the phrase of the world-without-us, horror is “philosophical.” But in so far as it evokes the world-without-us as a limit, it is a “negative philosophy” (akin to negative theology, but in the absence of God).

"Horror” is a non-philosophical attempt to think about the world-without-us philosophically. Here culture is the terrain on which we find attempts to confront an impersonal and indifferent world-without-us, an irresolvable gulf between the world-forus and the world-in-itself, with a void called the Planet that is poised between the World and the Earth. It is for this reason that this book treats genre horror as a mode of philosophy (or, perhaps, as “non-philosophy”1). Certainly a short story about an amorphous, quasi-sentient, mass of crude oil taking over the planet will not contain the type of logical rigor that one finds in the philosophy of Aristotle or Kant. But in a different way, what genre horror does do is it takes aim at the presuppositions of philosophical inquiry – that the world is always the world-for-us – and makes of those blind spots its central concern, expressing them not in abstract concepts but in a whole bestiary of impossible life forms – mists, ooze, blobs, slime, clouds, and muck. Or, as Plato once put it, “hair, mud, and dirt.”" [In the dust of this planet]

Thacker akins his idea to the nigerospheric minimalist music of Keiji Haino in redefining the idea of the Daimonic:

"So, Black Is Myself. Wisdom that bless I, who live in the spiral joy born at the utter end of a black prayer.”

Thacker wrote:

"In contrast to what Schopenhauer calls a privative nothing (the nihil privativum; dark as the absence of light, death as the absence of life) there is a negative nothing (the nihil negativum; nothingness without any positive value). The opaque last words of The World as Will and Representation encapsulate this paradoxical affirmation of nothing:
…what remains after the complete abolition of the Will is, for all who are full of the Will, assuredly nothing (Nichts). But also conversely, to those in whom the Will has turned and denied itself, this very real world of ours with all its suns and galaxies, is – nothing. Schopenhauer is unparalleled in this sort of metaphysical misanthropy, this type of cosmic pessimism.

Even a thinker such as Nietzsche, who otherwise lauds Schopenhauer as one of his “educators” and great anti-philosophers, chooses to recuperate Schopenhauer’s pessimism into a more vigorous, vitalistic, “Will-to-Power.” Schopenhauer’s pessimism is less about a human pessimism (e.g. the alltoo-human despair of an identity crisis or a lapse in faith), and more about the way in which thought in itself always devolves upon its own limits, the hinge through which positive knowledge turns into negative knowledge. To find an equal to Schopenhauer, one would have to look not to philosophy but to writers of supernatural horror such as H.P. Lovecraft, whose stories evoke a sense of what he termed “cosmic outsideness”:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
In summary, then, another meaning of the word “black” – not Satanism with its opposition/inversion and dark technics, not paganism with its exclusion/alterity and dark magic, but a Cosmic Pessimism, with its dark metaphysics of negation, nothingness, and the non-human.

What do these different conceptual aspects of “black” mean in relation to black metal culture? On the surface, it would seem that black metal bands would fall into one of these three meanings of the word “black.” For instance, old school Norwegian black metal would seem to fit the Satanic meaning of black, as evidenced by albums such as Darkthrone’s Transylvanian Hunger, Emperor’s Wrath of the Tyrant, Gorgoroth’s Pentagram, and Mayhem’s De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas. Likewise, it would seem that other black metal bands might fit the pagan meaning of black, as exhibited by Ulver’s Nattens Madrigal, Ildjarn’s Forest Poetry, Striborg’s Mysterious Semblance, and Wolves in the Throne Room’s Diadem of Twelve Stars. One could even suggest that some of the formal experiments in black metal, from the minimalism of Sunn O’s Grimmrobe Demos to the wall-of-noise in Wold’s Stratification might offer musical equivalents of the Cosmic Pessimism meaning of the word black. I would suggest, however, that this third kind of “black,” that of Cosmic Pessimism, is actually implicit in all of the above examples, though in differing degrees.

In this sense, the most striking example of Cosmic Pessimism comes from outside of the metal genre altogether. It is by the Japanese multi-instrumentalist, poet, and mystic Keiji Haino. Haino’s album So, Black is Myself employs a subtractive minimalism that is beyond that of Sunn O))) or dark ambient artists such as Lustmord. Haino’s approach is eclectic, borrowing techniques from everything from Noh theater to Troubadour singing. Clocking in at just under 70 minutes, So, Black is Myself uses only a tone generator and voice. Its sole lyric is the title of the piece itself: “Wisdom that will bless I, who live in the spiral joy born at the utter end of a black prayer.” The piece is brooding, rumbling, deeply sonorous, and meditative. Sometimes the tone generator and Haino’s voice merge into one, while at other times they diverge and become dissonant. Haino’s voice itself spans the tonal spectrum, from nearly subharmonic chant to an uncanny falsetto perhaps produced only by starving banshees. Haino’s performance is an example of the radically unhuman aspect of Cosmic Pessimism, the impersonal affect of dread described by Kierkegaard as “antipathic sympathy and sympathetic antipathy.” So, Black is Myself also manages to be mystical at the same time that the individual performer is dissolved into a meshwork of tones – voice, space, and instrument variously existing in consonance and dissonance with each other. So, Black is Myself is a reminder of the metaphysical negation that is also at the core of black metal, as if Schopenhauer’s nihil negativum were rendered as musical form, ultimately negating even itself in a kind of musical antiform.

One way of understanding the non-human aspect of the demon is to understand the demon less in a strictly theological sense, in which the demon is an intermediary creature between the supernatural and natural, and to understand it in its ontological function as a way of thinking about the relation of the human to that which is non-human. This vague, latter term – the non-human – can, of course, have a wide range of meanings, from the rock or the chair to the black depths of the cosmos itself. And we as human beings certainly have a panoply of ways of relating to the non-human, be it via science, technology, politics, or religion. But the non-human remains, by definition, a limit; it designates both that which we stand in relation to and that which remains forever inaccessible to us. This limit is the unknown, and the unknown, as genre horror reminds us, is often a source of fear or dread." [In the Dust of the Planet]

Cosmic Pessimism: The need for a Demontology.

Thacker wrote:

"If the demon is taken in this anthropological sense as the relation of the human to the non-human (however this non-human is understood), then we can see how the demon historically passes through various phases: there is the classical demon, which is elemental, and at once a help and a hindrance (“the demon beside me…”); there is the Medieval demon, a supernatural and intermediary being that is a tempter (“demons surround me…”); a modern demon, rendered both natural and scientific through psychoanalysis, and internalized within the machinations of the unconscious (“I am a demon to myself…”); and finally a contemporary demon, in which the social and political aspects of antagonism are variously attributed to the Other in relationships of enmity (“demons are other people”).

in contrast to the anthropological interpretation of the demon, we can consider another one that is mythological. By this term we imply more than the human understanding of the human, and instead move outwards to the human understanding of the world. The mythological interpretation of the demon takes place less by the use of metaphor, and more by the use of allegory, in which the very story of our ability or inability to comprehend the world is encapsulated in the ritual acts of invasion, possession, metamorphosis, and exorcism.

This comes through more clearly in one of the classic Biblical accounts of demonic possession, that of the so-called Gerasene demon. Slightly different accounts are given in Mark 5 and Luke 8, but the basics of the parable are the same: Jesus, with his followers, travels from Galilee to the Gerasene region (in northern current-day Jordan). There Jesus is met by the local villagers, who appeal to him to heal an old man possessed by demons. The possessed man, it is said, roams about the tombs without clothing or shelter. When the villagers shackle him, he enters into a frenzy and breaks free. At night he screams aloud and cuts himself with stones. Jesus confronts the possessed man, who likewise appeals to Jesus to cure him. As part of the exorcism, Jesus commands the name of the demon possessing the old man: “Then Jesus asked him, ‘What is your name?’ ‘My name is Legion,’ he replied, ‘for we are many.’”

The name “Legion” (λεγων) is tricky, for it is not clear from the passage whether it is a single demon speaking in many voices, or if it is a multitude of demons speaking in a single voice. Indeed, the very name “Legion” appears to devolve upon itself, the name of the Many naming itself as One. Jesus then casts the demons out of the body of the old man, and into a herd of swine in a nearby hill. The herd of swine, now possessed, are driven into a state of frenzy and rush over the side of a cliff into the sea below to their death. After this rather dramatic episode, something interesting happens: the villagers, witnessing the entire spectacle, become fearful of Jesus and his healing powers. With some urgency they politely ask Jesus and his followers to leave the village. In this parable the demons manifest themselves in three ways, each an example of the limits of the human to comprehend the non-human. First, within the possessed man are a multitude of demons.

Demonic possession itself transgresses the normal relationship between the One and the Many (one person = one body). It is also an affront to and parody of the Trinity, in which a single One is incarnated in Three. God as Creator creates many creatures. As creatures they are linked to God through the act of creation. Yet, as creatures, they are also separated from God in their being mortal and rooted in the changes associated with temporality. The multitude of demons in the parable above occupy the individual human creature – that highest of creatures – and turn him into a mere animallike thing. The iconography of the passage is striking – the true nature of the demons, we presume, is revealed by the choice of their receptacle in a herd of lowly beasts. But throughout the parable, the only real indication we have of this multitude of demons is this enigmatic resounding of the word “Legion.” In a philosophical sense, that the demons choose to present themselves via voice and sound – at once present and absent – is noteworthy.

These two manifestations of the demon – the demons in the old man and the herd of animals – lead to a third type, which is the word-of-mouth among the people, which itself spreads like a disease. Jesus’ demonstration of his sovereign and medical powers instills a certain horror in the people, resulting in his effectively being deported. We might take a decidedly modern view of this scene and suggest that the threat posed by the demons is not simply a topological one having to do with the proper relation between the One and the Many, and neither is it to do with the proper relation between Creator and creature. There is another element here, which is the way in which the demonic also challenges divine sovereignty. The demonic challenges the divine in its refusal to be organized at all. We do not know how many demons there are, nor even if it is more than one voice that speaks “Legion.” We only know that it is more than one, and that it may be something other than “Many,” the latter term still denoting a potentially countable entity. The demons are, in a sense, more than Many, but never One.

Examples of demonic activity occur throughout the New Testament, though in it demons are by no means represented in the same way. For example, the famous scene of the apocalypse in Revelations not only features a battle between angels and demons, but it also portrays avenging angels that tend to look a lot like demons. These supernatural creatures are anthropomorphized, and they even have their own technology: trumpets, tempests, and “bowls of plague” come forth in the apocalyptic upsurge. In these scenes the demons/angels have as their sole function a religious-juridical relation to the human (either to damn or to save them). The various symbolic devices, from scales and seals to bowls, are technologies for the end of the world. Here the demons are a form of mediated presence.

By contrast, the exorcism scene from the Gospels portrays a demon that is unmediated and yet only embodied – the demons called “Legion” are never present in themselves, but only via some form of earthly embodiment (the old man, the herd of pigs, the wind, the sea). In a sense, they are strangely pantheistic, announcing themselves only indirectly. Hence their embodiment is also a disembodiment, in the sense that they are wandering spirits – their movement happens more by demonic contagion than by divine inspiration. Demons are here a form of immediate absence.

While the anthropological meaning of the demon remains ensconced within its human-centric, therapeutic solipsism (e.g. “why do we do the things we do?”), the mythological meaning focuses on the limits of the human ability to know the non-human. At its limit is the idea of the absolutely “dark” demon – the demon that remains absolutely unknowable to use as human beings, but which nevertheless seems to act upon us, perhaps through a malevolence we can only call “bad luck” or “misfortune.”

If the anthropological demon is an attempt to reveal the nature of the human to the human, then we can say that the mythological demon is an attempt to reveal the non-human to the human. Both, however, come across certain limitations, due to the human point-of-view. The human is always relating either to itself or to the world. And these two types of relations overlap with each other: the human can only understand the human by transforming it into an object to relate to (psychology, sociology), while the human can only relate to the objective world itself by transforming the world into something familiar, accessible, or intuited in human terms (biology, geology, cosmology).

This leaves one avenue open, which is the perspective of the non-human itself. As thinking, embodied beings unable to fully detach ourselves from the subject-object relations that constitute us, this is undoubtedly a paradoxical move. In fact, it is doomed from the start. Nevertheless it deserves to be stated, even if beyond it there can only be silence. In the parable of the Gerasene demons, the demons named “Legion” were, in themselves, defined by several properties: they were neither One nor Many but somewhere in between; they were fully immanent with the world (almost pantheistically); and, most importantly, they in themselves were never present, never a discrete thing that one could point to – the demons named “Legion” were really, in themselves, “nothing.”

Perhaps there is a meaning of the demonic that has little to do with the human at all – and this indifference is what constitutes its demonic character. If the anthropological demon (the human relating to itself) functioned via metaphor, and if the mythological demon (the human relating to the non-human) functioned via allegory, then perhaps there is a third demon, which is more ontological, or really “meontological” (having to do with non-being rather than being). As the 6th century mystic Dionysius the Areopagite notes, commenting on the paradoxical existence of demons, “evil is not a being; for if it were, it would not be totally evil…evil has no place among being.”

Given that, for us as human beings, there is no simple “going over” to the side of the non-human, it would seem that the mode best suited to this third type of demon is something like metonymy (with the demon as a stand-in for the abstract, indifferent, non-being of the world). The demon is, then, a way of talking about the perspective of the non-human, with all the contradictions this implies. For the meontological demon, affirmation is negation, and thinking about its being is the same as thinking about its non-being.

This is brought forward with great subtlety in Dante’s Inferno, one of the classic depictions of the demonic. However, there is not simply one type of demon in the Inferno; indeed, the central drama of the Inferno is not good vs. evil, but in the tensions within the Inferno itself. For instance, one can identify at least three types of demons in the Inferno. First there is, at the center and lowest point of the underworld, the figure of Lucifer, the arch-demon. This takes place in the final scene of the Inferno, where Dante (who is both author and character in the story) is led by his guide Virgil to the center of the underworld. Dante (the author) uses the word Dis in the poem, an alternate name for Pluto, the god of the classical underworld, to refer to the giant, grotesque, brooding arch-emperor (“emperor of all these realms of gloom”).

In a dramatic passage, Dante (the character) is lead by his guide Virgil to a precipice where, for the first time in the narrative, he encounters the strange and dark atmosphere of the demonic:
To this place the lustful have been sent, all “those who make reason slave to appetite.”

The mass of bodies, blown back and forth by the wind, prompt a comparison to the swarming of birds:
We soon learn that this tempestuous scene is not the backdrop for some new genre of demons, but that the wind, the rain, and the storm itself is the demon. This “black wind” (aura nera) is at once invisible and yet dramatically manifest, coursing through the swarming bodies of the damned. One of the images from Doré’s illustrations depicts the well-known scene in which two of the spirits – Paolo and Francesca – emerge from the swarm of bodies to tell their tale of tragic love.

Dante the character, moved by the scene and their story, is overcome and faints next to Virgil, who is by his side. But what is equally interesting in the image is the way that Doré visually depicts the bodies of Paolo and Francesca: they barely stand out from the amorphous background of swarming spirits, which seem to recede back into infinity. Indeed, in certain areas the bodies appear to merge into the backdrop of the storm itself.

In this scene there is neither a fixed and majestic counter-sovereign, nor a roving gang of Faustian demons. There is only the strange, immanent, and fully distributed “life-force” of this black wind. The spirits of the Lustful in this circle dissolve into the elemental swarming of the storm and the wind. It is paradoxically the most manifest form of life (indeed, Dante the character faints before its force), and yet it is also the most empty (the demonic storm is not a discrete thing, much less a discrete body; it is everywhere but nowhere). Arguably, this last scene puts forth the most difficult view of the demon – not a transcendent, governing cause, and not an emanating, radiating flow – but a concept of the demonic that is fully immanent, and yet never fully present. This kind of demon is at once pure force and flow, but, not being a discrete thing in itself, it is also pure nothingness.

Generally speaking, the Inferno is of interest not simply due to the panoply of monsters that inhabit its pages, but because of the way in which it carefully stratifies different types of demonic being and non-being. Within the paths, rivers, caverns, and fortresses of the Inferno all boundaries collapse:

there are human bodies melting into dead trees, rivers flowing with blood, and entire cities populated with the living dead. The motif of possession in the Inferno demonstrates this: demonic possession is not just the possession of living beings, but includes the possession of the non-living as well. Demons possess not only humans and animals, but also the very landscape, the very terrain of the underworld. Demonic possession in the Inferno is not just teratological, but also geological and even climatological." [In the Dust of the Planet]

Geomantic shifts in the nature of thought.

Thacker wrote:

"Let us introduce a new terminology to talk about the ways in which the magic site – as opposed to the magic circle – creeps forth. The magic site manifests the hidden world revealed in two forms: as mists and ooze. Mists evoke many things – drizzling rain, a dense fog, or surreal clouds in the overcast sky. Natural formations like clouds or rain are, certainly, entities inscribed within the scientific study of atmospheric conditions. But the term “mists” may also refer to any inanimate entity that lies somewhere between the air and the ground. For instance, nephrology, the scientific study of clouds, considers clouds not only on the Earth but on any planet where conditions are conducive to cloud formation – indeed in interstellar space, where gravity fields may attract cosmic dust into nebulae. The ethereal nature of mists means that while they may appear solid and to have distinct forms, they are also immaterial, and can readily become formless.

The same applies to ooze. Again, the term “ooze” evokes more that which oozes than a discrete, static thing. What oozes can be slime, mud, oil, or pus. Ooze can ooze on the body, in the ground, in the sea or space. Slime, for instance, can be understood in a scientific scene (for instance in plant microbiology or prokaryotic biology), but slime is also something between a liquid and a solid. Ooze may also be metamorphic and shape-shifting, as with the organisms classed as myxomycota, which, during their life cycle, may alternately behave like plants, fungi, or amoeboid organisms. Despite their differences, mists and ooze are two examples of the ways in which the “hidden” world reveals itself, and often with strange and weird effects.
Mists and ooze populate many of our speculative fantasies about the end of the world.

Clearly there are no easy answers here. The “hiddenness of the world” is another name for the supernatural, exterior to its assimilation by either science or religion – that is, exterior to the worldfor-us. But these days we like to think that we are much too cynical, much too smart to buy into this – the supernatural no longer exists, is no longer possible…or at least not in the same way. In a sense, it is hard to escape the sense of living in a world that is not just a human world, but also a planet, a globe, a climate, an infosphere, an atmosphere, a weather pattern…a rift, a tectonic shift, a storm, a cataclysm. If the supernatural in a conventional sense is no longer possible, what remains after the “death of God” is an occulted, hidden world. Philosophically speaking, the enigma we face is how to confront this world, without immediately presuming that it is identical to the world-for-us (the world of science and religion), and without simply disparaging it as an irretrievable and inaccessible world-in-itself.

Thus the problem of non-Being is not simply that of a fear of nothingness or the vacuum. Rather, it is the quite gothic fear of a something whose thingness is under question. “This impersonal, anonymous, yet indistinguishable ‘consummation’ of being, which murmurs in the depths of nothingness itself we shall designate by the term there is…The rustling of the there is…is horror.”

The pinnacle of this type of horror – really a kind of concept-horror – is the evisceration of all noological interiority:
“horror turns the subjectivity of the subject, his particularity qua entity, inside out.”
What is the “there is” of Life? Is the concept of Life already a “there is,” and therefore already enveloped in the gothic horror of absolute otherness and anonymity? If “Life,” as opposed to “the living,” is always receding into the anonymous “there is,” does this then mean that Life is really Lifewithout- Being?

Granted, there is a certain absurdity in asking about the non-being of Life; one might as well inquire into non-existent creatures…which is, of course, precisely what the domain of supernatural horror does. Horror film is replete with examples of the horror of the “there is…” The titles of such films are telling: The Being, The Creature, The Entity, It’s Alive!, It Lives Again, Monster Zero, The Stuff, Them!, The Thing, and so on. Such films imagine the monster in a decidedly different way from the classical creature-feature films (Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf-Man, The Mummy). In these films, the site of horror is not simply that of a physically threatening monster, for at least these can be given names (Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, Wolf-Man), and thereby included within the sphere of moral and theological law. This also means they can be destroyed. But what of the creature that cannot be named, or that is named in its unnamability? The unnamable creature is also the unthinkable creature.

This would be the B-horror version of Beckett’s L’innomable (The Unnameable). In some cases the unnamable creature is without form, the intrusion of a raging, inverted hylomorphism. Cold War films such as The Blob and Caltiki the Immortal Monster exist in a state of oozing, abject, borderlessness. In other cases the unnamable creature is without matter, existing as pure (demonic) spirit, an inverted theophany. In Fiend Without A Face, human beings are besieged by immaterial, brainstem-like entities, suggesting telepathy as a form of contagion.

The anthropological category of man, the psychological category of mind, and a general biology of the organism all presume a Being of Life. Where Heidegger leaves off, however, is at the question of whether Life is a species of Being, or whether the ontology of Life in effect transforms Life into Being. His last words on the topic are at once suggestive and opaque: “Life has its own kind of being, but it is essentially accessible only in Dasein.”

The infamous question “What is Life?” appears to always be eclipsed by the question of “What is Being?” And yet the very idea of Life-without-Being would seem to be an absurdity for philosophy…though, as we’ve seen, not for horror.

On the one hand we as human beings are the problem; on the other hand at the planetary level of the Earth’s deep time, nothing could be more insignificant than the human.

This is where mysticism again becomes relevant. But the differences between this contemporary mysticism and historical mysticism are all-important. If mysticism historically speaking aims for a total union of the division between self and world, then mysticism today would have to devolve upon the radical disjunction and indifference of self and world. If historical mysticism still had as its aim the subject’s experience, and as its highest principle that of God, then mysticism today – after the death of God – would be about the impossibility of experience, it would be about that which in shadows withdraws from any possible experience, and yet still makes its presence felt, through the periodic upheavals of weather, land, and matter. If historical mysticism is, in the last instance, theological, then mysticism today, a mysticism of the unhuman, would have to be, in the last instance, climatological. It is a kind of mysticism that can only be expressed in the dust of this planet." [In the Dust of this Planet]

"I Spite, therefore I Am."

Cioran wrote:

"Indefinite Horror

It is not the outbreak of a specific evil which reminds us of our fragility: there are vaguer but more troublesome warnings to signify our imminent excommunication from the temporal. The approach of disgust, of that sensation which physiologically separates us from the world, shows how destructible is the solidity of our instincts or the consistency of our attachments. In health, our flesh echoes the universal pulsation and our blood reproduces its cadence; in disgust, which lies in wait for us like a potential hell in order to suddenly seize upon us afterwards, we are as isolated in the whole as a monster imagined by some teratology of solitude.

The critical point of our vitality is not disease—which is struggle—but that indefinite horror which rejects everything and strips our desires of the power to procreate new mistakes. The senses lose their sap, the veins dry up, and the organs no longer perceive anything but the interval separating them from their own functions. Everything turns insipid: provender and dreams. No more aroma in matter and no more enigma in meditation; gastronomy and metaphysics both become victims of our want of appetite. We spend hours waiting for other hours, waiting for the moments which no longer flee time, the faithful moments which reinstate us in the mediocrity of health . . . and the amnesia of its dangers. Greed for space, unconscious covetousness of the future, health shows us how superficial the level of life is as such, and how incompatible organic equilibrium is with inner depth. The mind, in its range, proceeds from our compromised functions: it takes wing insofar as the void dilates within our organs. We are healthy only insofar as we are not specifically ourselves: it is our disgusts which individualize us; our melancholies which grant us a name; our losses which make us possessors of our . . . self. We are ourselves only by the sum of our failures." [A Short History of Decay]

Associated with Horror is the colour black, the colour of the unknown…

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] gives a fabulous lecture on the forgotten history behind the colour…

Michael Pastoureau wrote:

"In the beginning was the night, the vast originary night, and it was by emerging from darkness that life took form. Greek mythology, for example, made Nyx, goddess of the night, the daughter of Chaos, the primordial void, and the mother of Uranus and Gaia, the sky and earth. Her dwelling place was a cave located far in the west; she withdrew there during the day before crossing the sky, clothed in black and mounted on a chariot drawn by four horses of the same color. In certain traditions the horses had black wings; in others Nyx’s dark appearance was so frightening she scared Zeus himself. In the archaic period, throughout Greece, entirely black ewes or female lambs were sacrificed to her. Beyond heaven and earth, Nyx, a chthonic divinity, gave birth to numerous entities, the list varying according to the source, but all of whom were more or less closely associated with the color black: sleep, dreams, anguish, secrets, discord, distress, old age, misfortune, and death. Some authors even present the Furies and the Fates, those mistresses of human destiny, as daughters of the night, as well as the strange Nemesis, a complex personification of divine vengeance, responsible for punishing crimes and all that could disrupt the orderly world. Her principal sanctuary was found in Rhamnonte, a small city in Attica where a giant statue of the goddess stood, carved in the fifth century B.C. by the great Phidias from a block of black marble.

The picture hardly changes if divine creation is replaced with the big bang and if it is moved from the theological to the astrophysical plane. Here as well darkness precedes light and a kind of “dark matter” passes for having been the first site of the expansion of the universe.2 At least that is true in a simplified version of the big-bang theory, which holds that the big bang was the explosion of an atom or a primitive mass. Of course now, after hardly having its hour of glory, that idea has been abandoned by most physicists; undoubtedly there never was a first moment. However, even if we admit that history has no beginning and that the universe is eternal and infinite, a primal image of a world made of darkness asserts itself nonetheless—that is to say, a world made of a material that absorbs all the electromagnetic energy it could receive: a world perfectly black, matrix on the one hand, terrifying on the other. A dual symbolism will accompany the color black throughout its history.

This originary black is also found in other mythologies, not only in Europe but also in Asia and Africa. It is often fertile and fecund, as the Egyptian black that symbolizes the silt deposited by the waters of the Nile, with its beneficial floods that are anticipated hopefully each year; it is the opposite of the sterile red of the desert sand. Elsewhere, fertile black is simply represented by big dark clouds, heavy with rain, ready to fall upon the earth to make it fruitful. In still other places it either graces the statuettes of the protohistorical mother-goddesses or adorns certain divinities associated with fertility (Cybele, Demeter, Ceres, Hecate, Isis, Kali); they may have dark skin, hold or receive black objects, and demand that animals of that color be sacrificed to them.

Fertile black leaves its marks until the middle of the Christian Middle Ages by means of the symbolic color system associated with the four elements. This system itself constitutes one of the most durable of legacies: fire is red, water is green, air is white, and earth is black. Endorsed by Aristotle in the fourth century B.C., this symbolic system was readopted by the great Latin encyclopedists of the thirteenth century, notably Bartholomew the Englishman.4 It was still appearing in books of emblems and iconology treatises printed at the end of the sixteenth century.5 This earthly black is a fertile black; it is often associated with the vital power of red, which can be either fire or blood. Neither color is negative or destructive in this case. On the contrary, these two colors constitute the sources of life, and their combination sometimes increases their value exponentially.

The fertile nature of primordial black also leaves its mark in the tripartite organization of many ancient and medieval societies: white is generally the color of priests; red the color of warriors; black the color of artisans. In early Rome the association of these three colors with the three social classes was particularly pronounced.6 But we also encounter it in many Greek works describing the ideal city.7 Later, at the height of the Middle Ages during the feudal period, it appears in chronicles and literary texts, sometimes in images: white for those who pray (oratores); red for those who fight (bellatores); black for those who work (laboratores).8 Clothing, furs, emblems, and attributes testify to this division, although obviously not systematically.9 Certain scholars have identified the social function of this color triad as Indo-European in origin.10 That seems credible, but simply considering black as it relates to production and fertility we may certainly go back even further.

Over the long term originary fecund black has consistently been associated with the symbolism of certain places, such as caves and all natural sites seemingly in contact with the bowels of the earth: caverns, grottos, chasms, underground passageways. Even though they are deprived of light, these are fertile crucibles, places of birth or metamorphosis, receptacles of energy and, by the same token, sacred spaces that must certainly have constituted the oldest sites for human worship. From the Paleolithic to the historical periods they sheltered nearly all religious and magic ceremonies. Subsequently, grottos and caves became the favorite birthplaces for gods and heroes, then places of refuge or metamorphosis; one went there to hide, to be restored, to perform some rite of passage. Later, perhaps under the influence of Nordic mythologies, forests took over the role of caves, but continued the tradition of making dark or private spaces sacred ground.

Nevertheless, as is always true with mythology and religion, the symbolism of such spaces is ambivalent and includes a powerful negative dimension. All obscure matrices are also places of suffering and misfortune, inhabited by monsters, confining prisoners, harboring all sorts of dangers, increasingly disturbing the darker they are. The most famous passage from Plato’s Republic—one of the great foundational texts of Western culture—presents such a cave, a place of pain and punishment where human souls are locked up and chained by the gods. On one wall they perceive a display of shadows symbolizing the deceptive world of appearances; they must break their chains and leave the cave to contemplate the true world, the world of Ideas, but they cannot do so. Far from being the source of life and energy, here darkness makes the cave into a prison, a place of punishment and torture, a sepulcher or veritable hell. Here black is deathly.

Since antiquity, the poets, in the image of Orpheus, have sung night’s praises, “mother of gods and of men, origin of all creation,” but ordinary mortals have long feared it. They have feared darkness and its dangers, creatures who live and lurk there, animals with dark fur or feathers, and night itself, the source of nightmares and perdition. There is no need to be an expert on archetypes to understand that these fears come from far, very far back—from periods when humans had not yet mastered fire or, in part, light.

We will never know what essential turning point the mastery of fire constituted in human history, approximately five hundred thousand years ago. It was the control of fire by Homo erectus that definitively distinguished human beings from animals. Subdued, domesticated, produced at will, fire not only allowed humans to warm themselves, to cook their food, and build their first altars, but also and most importantly to produce light. The immense fear of darkness began to retreat and with it the terror of night and dark or underground places. Blackness was no longer totally black.

Later, beginning in the Upper Paleolithic, when the uses of fire diversified, it even became possible to make artificial pigments by burning to a cinder plants or minerals. The oldest of these pigments was probably carbon black, obtained by the controlled combustion of various woods, barks, roots, shells, or pits.

For the blacks, manganese oxide tended to replace or supplement plant carbons. It was used abundantly, for example, at Lascaux (some fifteen thousand years ago) to paint most of the animals in the splendid and prolific bestiary, the star of which is the famous black bull. But carbon blacks did not disappear. Consider the excellently preserved cave paintings from a few millennia later in the Niaux (Ariège) grotto in the famous “black salon” located more than seven hundred meters from the entrance.

Over the course of the millennia, the palette of colors and number of pigments never stopped growing. Egyptian civilization produced a great number of them, and many were new. With regard to blacks, however, manganese oxide and especially the carbon blacks continued to occupy the primary position. Even ink, a recent invention, used a solution of carbon black or lampblack in water, with the addition of animal glue or gum arabic. The grays, practically unknown until then, made their appearance in Egypt, where they played an important part in funerary painting. They were obtained through mixing plant carbon and white lead.

Technology was less advanced with regard to dyes. Even though they appeared quite early, they did not generate actual activity until the Neolithic, when human populations became sedentary and developed textile production on a large scale. Dyeing required specialized expertise. The colorant materials derived from plants and animals were never usable as such. It was necessary to isolate them, remove their impurities, and make them react chemically. Then they had to penetrate the cloth fibers and be permanently fixed there. All these operations were long and complex. It was in the range of reds (madder, kermes, murex) that dyers were most successful early on, and that remained the case for many millennia. Dyeing in black, on the other hand, long remained an extremely difficult exercise, at least in the West.

Plant dyes held up poorly to the effects of the sun and washing or even to prolonged use. In some regions dyers learned early on to combine them with mud or silt rich in iron salts, which worked as a mordant. But that was not possible everywhere. In other places some dyers resorted to oak apple, a very expensive colorant material, extracted from a small spherical growth found on the leaves of certain oaks. Various insects lay their eggs on these leaves; after the eggs are laid, the sap of the tree exudes a material that gradually surrounds the larva and encloses it in a kind of shell; that is the oak gall, or oak apple. They had to be collected before summer, when the larva had not yet hatched, and then dried slowly. Thus they were rich in tannins and possessed remarkable colorant qualities in the black range. But their high price limited their use.

All these difficulties explain why for a very long time in Europe, from earliest antiquity to the late Middle Ages, the blacks produced by dyers were rarely beautiful, true blacks. Often more brown than black, indeed even gray or dark blue, they covered the fabric unevenly, were poorly fixed, and gave cloth and clothing a soiled, drab, displeasing look. Little prized, these black clothes were reserved for the lowest social classes, for dirty or degrading tasks, and for certain specific circumstances like mourning or penitence. Only the black of animal furs was valued, especially the sable fur, the most beautiful black to come from the animal kingdom." [Black: The History of a Colour]