My Own Public Germany: Notes on Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon (2009)

The White Ribbon Screening, University of Brighton, 15 April 2013

The subtitle of the German release of Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon (2009) is ‘a German Children’s Story’, and the film is set in a German village between 1913 and 1914. Clear enough. In an interview with Time Out Michael Haneke insisted:

But it’s not necessarily about that point in time.It could have been set at a different time about a different situation. Itcould have been set in an Arabic country even. It’s about the origin of evil,the origin of radicalism and terrorism. But since it’s a German film, this isthe best example of this situation in German society. I don’t want it to be understoodsolely as a film about German fascism.

This kind of displacement – from a specific cultural context to a more general context, or argument – is a signature of Haneke’s filmmaking. It is also, I’d suggest, a problematic gesture. In the case of The White Ribbon it is hard to escape the fact that this probing of childhood or teenage ‘fanaticism’ or ‘terrorism’ is highly-specific to the generation that will bring forth Nazism. This, I think, is one of the central equivocations of the film.

            If we take a contextual reading we can locate The White Ribbon in the wider genre that probes the psychopathology of Nazism. In his controversial two-volume work on the pathological fantasies of the Freikorps – the post-World War One veterans groups – Klaus Theweleit also probed the structures of childhood that, for him, conditioned the emergence of Nazism. This speaks to the context of The White Ribbon. Theweleit notes that: ‘The fascist state needed, and this reinforced, the family in its capacity as ordering force and ego boundary; but the family remained more or less an obstacle to the fascist will to world domination.’ (1989: 252) The result was what he called the ‘fascist double-bind’ (1989: 252) – the family as essential to the new order and also, as in The White Ribbon, a structure to be contested or exceeded. What we might call the inchoate campaign of the children (if, in fact, the children are responsible, which is only heavily implied) in the film will later be canalized, we could assume, by the Nazi state, as ‘the child was encouraged to take action against its parents as an informer in the service of the Führer.’ (1989: 252)

            Thewelheit’s analysis is remarkably suggestive of the psychopathology probed by the film: ‘Their aim is to annihilate what they perceive as absolute falsity and evil, in order to regenerate their ego in a better world.’ (Theweleit 1989: 253) These are fanatics of the ‘good’, so to speak, fanatics of the immanent and unfulfilled morality by which they are abused and constrained. They ‘punish the sins of the father(s)’: the doctor, the Baron, the steward, and the pastor. Although we should add that in the case of the pastor this authority is not merely authoritatian, but a creepy combination of reasoned discourse and violence. It is this discourse the children turn against the fathers.

            Eric Santner considers the psychopathology of Nazism through the lens of the case of Daniel Paul Schreber, the German jurist who fell into a paranoid psychosis after being elected to a senior judicial role in 1884. For Santner this disorder is a result of a crisis of investiture and Schreber’s psychosis provides an x-ray of the disorders of Germany itself – Santner’s book is entitled My Own Private Germany. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, Santner suggests that what is revealed is the perverse enjoyment (jouissance) at the heart of symbolic authority: ‘Schreber discovers that symbolic authority in a state of emergency is transgressive, that it exhibits an obscene overproximity to the subject: that it, as Schreber puts it, demands enjoyment.’ (1997: 32) Schreber’s ‘pathology’ reveals the raw matter of ideology before it is processed or gentrified into official ideology. This raw state of ideology is the galvanizing effect of enjoyment that ‘powers’ the ideological field.

            We could link this to Haneke’s film, as it probes a certain ‘crisis’ or ‘emergency’ in generational transmission which generates what Santner calls a ‘sense of surreal corruption’ (1997: 43). What Haneke implies is that the transgression of the children lies in their extreme obedience, which, to continue with Santner, implies ‘getting too close to this [drive] dimension of social reality.’ (Santner 1997: 43) Taking seriously Old Testament morality resutls from and produces a crisis in authority. This getting ‘too close’ produces the scenes of ‘surreal corruption’ – sexual abuse, violence, disturbance – that emerge in the film. This is realism turned studied and phantasmagoric.

            Taking another contextual approach, one not licensed by Haneke, we can also connect The White Ribbon, strangely perhaps, to the genre of the horror film. More specifically we can connect this work, and other Haneke films (especially Benny’s Video and Funny Games) to the horror genre of ‘the terrible child’, or teenager. The literary terrible child emerges in works like Tom Tyron’s The Other (1971) and Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967), both rapidly made into films.

            Robin Wood argued that these films of ‘the terrible child’ are ambivalent: on the one hand, they are reactionary, affirming the patriarchal family as bulwark against the ‘horror’ of the younger generation. On the other hand, as in The Omen (1978), they stage the extinction of this family (Wood 1986: 88). Wood remarks, channelling Walter Benjamin, that ‘The Omen would make no sense in a society that was not prepared to enjoy and surreptitiously condone the working out of its own destruction.’ (1986: 88) It’s striking that Robin Wood planned to write a book on Michael Haneke, but died in 1989, the same year as the release of The White Ribbon. While Wood respected Haneke’s achievement the bathos of my comparison of The White Ribbon with The Omen is intended to suggest the problematic status of the ‘horror’ of the ‘terrible child’.

            We could recall Omen II’s use of the military school as ambiguous structure of authority – even trying the patience of the child of Satan. In The White Ribbon we can ponder this fear of the child, especially if we follow Haneke’s generalising argument that it might apply to all children, or all 'fanatical children'. This use of the idea of fanaticism (to follow Alberto Toscano (2009)), risks the usual reactionary tropes of the fear of abstraction and equality, as the children refuse to respect the ‘moral texture’ of the community. On the other hand, their attacks might seem well deserved, bringing down this immoral ‘moral community’ by revealing and disrupting its ‘obscene underside’. The fathers burn with enjoyment, such as the doctors sexual abuse, but also the Baron's anger, pastor's hypocrisy, and steward negligence. The baronness notes this is a community of envy, apathy, and brutality. This is the equivocation that links to the equivocation of the terrible child film, which suggests it is not so original and equally problematic.

            The generalization of the structure of the fanatical child seems, to me, to end up in metaphysical problems. In a laudatory discussion of the film John Orr remarks that ‘[Haneke’s] pessimism about the human condition goes beyond its very specific Adornian incarnation – the aphoristic savaging of commodity capitalism.’ (2011: 263) In this way we fully detach from any context, and this is also evident in Orr’s claim, which I don’t find convincing, that ‘Haneke has systematically uncoupled all the links in the causal chain’ (Orr 2011: 261). The detachment of Haneke allows him to generate a metaphysical thesis of evil, which both plays to the horrors of Nazism and occludes them. At the same time it collapses together all ‘fanatical’ instances into a metaphysical refusal and evil that runs very close to the ideological uses of the idea of fanaticism against any politics of abstraction or equality. In doing so, of course, it becomes abstract in turn.

            This, I think, is one of the puzzles of the film. In many ways detailed and textured it is also abstract and schematic, deliberately and at the same time. Haneke’s use of schematic ‘Brechtian’ character names and his use of back-and-white are, he points out, deliberate ‘distancing’ and abstracting strategies. So, we have a decontextualization that is supported aesthetically and by a practice of metaphysical claim or abstraction.

What concerns me is not equivocation per se, but the tendecy and structure of how these equivocations fall in the film. The film is, at once, not abstract enough (in its particular but insufficient evocation of context) and too abstract (as it spirals into 'higher' levels of abstraction, all the way up to evil itself). It is not adequate as a thesis about Nazism, nor about generalised fanaticism. What it is perhaps best at is the resonance of its probing of abusive forms of power and control, the petty forms of authority, and Haneke's usual refusal to align 'correct' responses to events. But the floating forms here threaten to become attached to prenicious ideaological tropes and to push us not into autonomy, but into well worn anxieties concerning fanaticism and power. After all isn’t this just another horror film? But not even that, as this is a dishonest horror film.

Conjunctural Cthulhu

There is absolutely no need for Marxist cultural criticism when the working of the geist provides riches like this.

Lovecraft Event Part 3

Agreeing with Houellebecq we could say that racism is at the core of Lovecraft’s texts, although this molten core of jouissance is unstable and even illusory. In this way Lovecraft’s texts can capture the chaotic effect of the promise of jouissance, incarnated through the surplus “value” of capitalism in what Lovecraft calls “amusement value”. For Lovecraft horror at this demands the response of a

psychology of non-calculative, non-competitive disinterestedness, truthfulness, courage, & generosity fostered by good education, minimum economic stress, and assumed position, & just as achievable through socialism as through aristocracy. (Lovecraft in Joshi, 2000)

It is racism, however, that still plays the factor of embodying the degeneration and horror of the “chaos” of capitalist relations, which is of course linked through the concept of the “alien” to his cosmic horror. In this sense Lovecraft disavows the loss of jouissance that he recognises as the function of a deceptive “amusement value.”

Therefore the “Lovecraft event” remains poised on this fault-line of chaos, at once registering horror and trying to constrain or limit this effect of chaos to the racially Other or to his own weird fictions. In a sense we could say that unregulated capitalism and quantum physics both feed the destabilising effects that Lovecraft “diagnoses” in his fiction. It is not a matter of reducing one to the other, and offering either a social or a naturalistic “explanation” of this chaos. Neither, I would say, is it a matter of complete separation between them, but rather a matter of tracing a continuity or entanglement between them in terms of matching the impasses of the “social” and the impasses of “nature.” Chaos is the limit of both, and marks the point where neither can provide a stable prop to the other. In that sense it is the point of mutual collapse, where both “nature” and the “social” no longer function consistently. Allied with the sense of horror at this inconsistency we can suggest a refusal to simply celebrate chaos, which could slip all too easily into the celebration of the symmetry of “chaotic” nature with the deregulated forces of free-market capitalism.

The celebration of chaos is also found in those reversals of Lovecraft, which play on his own texts’ attraction to horror to suggest we love the alien. In this way Lovecraft’s horror at and fear of chaos is passed off as the effect of his reactionary position, whereas today our avant-garde references support the chaotic. This is explored in Grant Morrison’s excellent short story “Lovecraft in Heaven” (1994), which skilfully traces Lovecraft’s monsters in terms of his anxieties concerning miscegenation and femininity. Morrison stages an exchange between a dying Lovecraft and his character Professor George Angell from “The Call of Cthulhu”. Where Lovecraft decides that a world of chaos is a nightmare Angell replies “Only if you fear it” and Lovecraft’s hallucinatory recitation of his misogynist horror, which he names as hell, is, for Angell “Quite the reverse” (18). In this narrative the character of Angell “opens Lovecraft like a door” (18), a door leading to a new perception where what was seen as horror is no longer seen as such. Morrison’s anarchist aesthetic shifts away from Lovecraft’s reactionary fear of chaos into an embrace of chaos and the richly archetypal resonances of Lovecraft’s anti-mythology.

This gesture is common to a number of contemporary readings and elaborations of Lovecraft (such as those by Alan Moore and a number of other occultists and “chaos” magicians). It develops from the re-positioning of his work within the context of contemporary avant-garde experimentation in both the arts and the sciences. In art we have seen the emergence of new forms of body art or abject art that probe the potential of human bodies to be transformed, whether biologically or technically. This is what the film director David Cronenberg has called “the new flesh,” which only appears as horrible from within the confines of the traditional image of the secure and fixed boundaries of the body. Also, in science, there has emerged the new “paradigm” of chaos, which emphasises the complexity that can be generated by simple systems. Although “chaos science” might equally be described as a science of order, because it traces the emergence of order from chaos, in the popular imagination it has come to suggest instability, unpredictability, and disorder. The new valorisation of the body and the chaotic marks a shift towards what we could call the optimistic reading of Lovecraft.

Certainly this is an attractive vision, after all who wants to be a reactionary racist and old positivist like Lovecraft? However, I want to make a qualified defence of Lovecraft’s sense of horror at chaos and the body. Although Lovecraft was a reactionary (despite a shift to the centre-left in his political views later in his life), the question concerns what he was reacting against? His horror of chaos could be seen as not simply a rejection of hybridity, femininity, and new perceptual modes, but also the rejection of new forms of dominance that take on a chaotic form – the lure of “amusement value” as promised realisation of jouissance. Alain Badiou has remarked the emphasis on the powers of the body might present itself as revolutionary but it mirrors the ideology of contemporary capitalism. The body that transforms itself is the body that conforms to the chaos of market capitalism, which demands a malleable body open to new desires and new patterns of consumption. At the same time, chaos science and the merging of machines and biology have been promoted as consonant with the free-market ideology of cyber-capitalism (this is particularly evident in the work of those around the US computer journal Wired, and has been nicknamed “the Californian ideology”).

Lovecraft’s horror might well be inflected, or re-evaluated, today by anti-capitalists as straining to represent the “unrepresentable” horror of capitalism – particularly in its “chaotic” form. Therefore fidelity to the “Lovecraft event” involves the rejection of the ideological dominant of a capitalism that exploits avant-garde strategies. At the same time, perhaps seemingly paradoxically, it involves us welcoming the destabilisation hyper-chaos inflicts on reality and ontology; not for its supposed consonance with market capitalism but for a destabilisation in which reality disturbs the humanist dominated conceptions of philosophy and imposes a real impasse. While this chaos seems to only offer radical disorientation it also demands the making of new forms of orientation without any guaranteed structure of discipline and orientation. Not jettisoning “reality” or, which amounts to the same thing, leaving it as the infinitely malleable result of human “construction” or perception (itself consonant with a capitalist ideology of “perpetual transformation”). The pass through this impasse is the Lovecraft event.

References (Part 3)
Alain Badiou, “Democratic materialism and the materialist dialectic.” Trans. Alberto Toscano. Radical Philosophy 130 (2005): 20-24.
Michel Houellebecq, H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life (1991). Trans. Dorna Khazeni. Intro. Stephen King (San Francisco: Believer Books, 2005), pp.105-109.

S. T. Joshi, ‘H. P. Lovecraft’, The Scriptorium 2000.
Grant Morrison, “Lovecraft in Heaven.” In The Starry Wisdom: A tribute to H. P. Lovecraft. Ed. D. M. Mitchell (London and San Francisco: Creation Books, 1994), pp.13-18.

Lovecraft Event Part 2

Although the common, and false, image of Lovecraft is as a reclusive antiquarian obsessed by a heavily idealised New England past, we have seen how he is familiar with the most advanced and experimental currents of his time in the arts and sciences. His relation to these currents is, of course, a reactive or even reactionary one. Does this preclude formal inventiveness? Alain Badiou states, ‘[t]o resist the call of the new, it is again necessary to create arguments of resistance adjusted to the novelty itself. From this point of view, every reactive disposition is contemporary with the present against which it reacts’ (in Clemens 290). In the formation of “reactionary novelties” (Badiou) Lovecraft can be aligned with those forms of “High Modernism,” such as T. S. Eliot’s, that constituted themselves, in Peter Nicholls words, as “an attack on modernity” (251). The difficulty, in terms of Badiou’s evental tracings, is how Lovecraft’s “novelty” is something artistically “new” while at the same time “politically” reactionary (and reactionary against other artistic innovations); it suggests the intersection or imbrication of events: in this case art, science, politics.

His reaction against these currents of the new produces a “reactionary novelty,” but actually also a true novelty of disruption that exceeds its primary evental site – Gothic fiction; this may be why that it only outside of the Gothic that we find Lovecraft’s true disciples: William Burroughs, J. G. Ballard, and Michel Houellebecq, artists like H. R. Giger and John Coulthart, and muscians like The Fall and Patti Smith. The Lovecraft event therefore problematises Badiou’s formulation of the artistic event by being a reactionary event that produces something new.

For the “Lovecraft event” the experimental forms of the “New” provide the points of resistance against which he forms his “images” of horror qua chaos. The “reactionary novelty” of his position is that is through this opposition “gratified by images” that Lovecraft forms an “image” of the real as the “structure” (or better said “anti-structure”) of the physical universe. His horror emerges precisely through the rupture with our usual perception of this physical universe as bound by law, and results from “a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.” (Lovecraft in Joshi 2000) This then is the moment of the suspension of the laws of physical reality itself. In Lovecraft’s own case such an intuition of horror emerges from his struggle with the damage inflicted on his mechanistic materialism by the new discoveries in quantum theory, as S. T. Joshi remarks “I do not know how well Lovecraft really came to terms with indeterminacy” (2000). I’d be tempted to add very well, if we conceive it under the sign of horror. At the same time this “reactionary novelty” is also what generates the true novelty in Lovecraft.

For Lovecraft the bulwark against this “chaos”, this horror, the “one anchor of fixity” (in Joshi 2000), is tradition. This is why this horror of chaos is not only figured at the level of physical matter but also folded onto a horror of mass democracy, not least through the dimension of racism. The forces of “democracy” threaten the eroding of tradition, although Lovecraft recognises the role played by capitalism in this process as well. These forces find their representation in the figures of the masses of alien Others that throng the spaces of the city (cf. “He” (1925) and “The Horror at Red Hook” (1925)). Rather than seeing Lovecraft’s racism as an inexplicable lapse (pace Joshi) I would suggest we see it as the “anchoring point” that meta-sutures tradition. As Lacan predicted in Television racism arises again in the competition over jouissance engendered by the fracturing of social relations and, as Miller puts it, “is founded on what one imagines about the Other’s jouissance.” (79) The monstrous imaginings Lovecraft has about the Other’s jouissance stabilise the forces of chaos outside and in opposition to the forces of tradition. It is just this schema which Lovecraft’s own fictions undermine and collapse through their admission of miscegnation, most effectively in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” (1931); in this story “chaos” is at once warded off but only to become the very foundation and origin of the universe, the world, the human race, and the Lovecraftian hero himself.

“The Call of Cthulhu” locates and stabilises the core of racism in the “degenerate” cultists who “worship” Cthulhu in the swamps of Louisiana. These cultists form an “indescribable horde of human abnormality,” composed of “hybrid spawn” (152); once again we can see the link with the fears of mass democracy and the crowd. Those captured during the police raid led by Inspector Legrasse are found to “be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type.” (153) This racism is also correlated with jouissance, not only in the ceremonies themselves but also in the state promised by the return of the Great Old Ones:

The 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 revelling 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. (155)

The result is a kind of Nietzschean materialist “heaven” on earth, recognisable later in the libidinal materialisms of Deleuze and Guattari or Lyotard. It is also, very probably, the result of a category error that supposes the Great Old Ones require “worship” and the mediation of humans to return – the story is somewhat ambiguous on this second point. This traditional topos of the rewards for the devil-worshipper is displaced by Lovecraft’s cosmicism of an indifferent universe.

References (Part 2)
Justin Clemens, 'Had We But Worlds Enough and Time This Absolute, Philosopher...', Cosmos and History 2 (1-2) (2006): 277-310.
S. T. Joshi, ‘H. P. Lovecraft’, The Scriptorium 2000.
H. P. Lovecraft. The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories. Ed. and Intro. S. T. Joshi (London: Penguin. 1999).
Jacques-Alain Miller, “Extimité.” In Lacanian Theory of Discourse. Eds. Bracher, Mark et al (New York and London: New York University Press, 1994), pp.74-87

Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995

Lovecraft Event Part 1

Fundamentally, my position comes down to the nonadmission of chaos as the ultimate referential figure of the universe.
Alain Badiou (“Matters of Appearance” 322)

The Lovecraft event is the result of a singular knotting of art, science, and politics that produces a new materialist fiction of chaos. Lovecraft writes:

The time has come when the normal revolt against time, space and matter must assume a form not overtly incompatible with what is known of reality – when it must be ratified by images forming supplements rather than contradictions of the visible and mensurable universe. And what, if not a form of non-supernatural cosmic art, is to pacify this sense of revolt – as well as to gratify the cognate sense of curiosity? (Lovecraft xvi)

Abandoning a semi-mystical discourse of contradiction, which would oppose another “weird” world to this one, Lovecraft insists on the supplemental and non-supernatural form of his art. These supplements do not contradict the laws of the known universe but they suspend them to re-inscribe chaos within law (prefiguring the work of Quentin Meillassoux).

To achieve this suspension of the law Lovecraft forces a pass through the avant-gardes of his time, in both art and science. The key text in which Lovecraft provides a kind of “manifesto” of this forcing is “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928). This point arrives reaches saturation in Lovecraft’s description of Cthulhu’s “home” – the ancient and alien city of R’lyeh:

Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close to it when he spoke of the city; for instead of describing any definite structure or building, he dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces – surfaces too great to belong to any thing right or proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention this talk about angles because it suggests something Wilcox had told me of his awful dreams. He has said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours. (Lovecraft 165-6)

What we find here is the precise combination of avant-garde art (futurism) with avant-garde mathematics (non-Euclidean) as the resources for the figuration of horror.

In the case of Futurism Lovecraft could not be further from the Italian Futurists enthusiastic endorsement of the new machine age and longing for a new type of “biomechanical man,” which can be found in a work like that of the second-generation Futurist Tullio Crali’s “Nose Dive on the City” (1939). While Lovecraft does not share this machine aesthetic he does share the Futurists’ anti-humanism and materialism. This link is most evident in the Futurists’ more cubist fragmentation of the body, such as in Severini’s self-portrait of 1912. In this image the figure of the face and body is broken down into multiple perceptual planes that disrupt the coherence of the face in particular – exploding it. This rupturing or expansion of human perception is typical of Lovecraft’s own references to alien realms “crowded with indescribably angled masses of alien-hued substance” and composed of “clusters of cubes and planes” (“Dreams” 118).

This gesture of fragmentation is reinforced by Lovecraft’s reference to the non-Euclidean geometries discovered by Gauss, Lobatchevsky, and Bolyai in the 19th Century. In the words of the historian of mathematics Morris Kline: “[i]t is fair to say that no more cataclysmic event has ever taken place in the history of thought” (Kline 478). This cataclysm is the result of severing the link, supposed by Kant for example, between Euclidean geometry and the actual geometry of the physical world. The fact that non-Euclidean geometries could be valid descriptions of physical space forced the slow recognition that Euclidean geometry was simply a system of thought, different from physical space. This also problematised the accepted truth status of Euclid’s axioms; these axioms were “true” but they were not the fundamental or absolute truth of the physical universe. Lovecraft would exploit this “cataclysm” in the cause of horror – with the non-Euclidean as “abnormal”: while the accepted truth of Euclidean geometry is that the sum of the angles of any triangle always equals 180°, for the non-Euclidean geometry of Bolyai and Lobatchevsky this sum is always less than 180° and for Riemann’s geometry always greater than 180°.

In “The Dreams in the Witch-House” (1933) Lovecraft actually cast a student mathematician named Gilman as his unlikely hero. With amusing understatement the story states:

Possibly Gilman ought not to have studied so hard. Non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension.
(“Dreams” 113-114)

Quite so. This quotation shows how Lovecraft integrates science with horror to demonstrate that his horrors have a scientific basis, with occult texts providing “terrible hints” (“Dreams” 114) of the new quantum order of reality – in the “suspension” of physical “laws” (at least in the mechanistic form of Lovecraft’s own materialism).

References (Part 1)
Alain Badiou, “Matters of Appearance: Interview with Lauren Sedofsky.” Artforum XLIV 9 (2006): 246-253, 322.
Morris Kline, Mathematics in Western Culture (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987)
H. P. Lovecraft. “The Dreams in the Witch-House.” In At the Mountains of Madness (St. Albans, Panther: 1968), pp.113-148
H. P. Lovecraft. The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories. Ed. and Intro. S. T. Joshi (London: Penguin. 1999).

The Horror, The Horror

For those not sated by Collapse IV Reza has a very fair-minded review of the issue coupled to a revised version of the paper he was kind enough to provide for the booklet for one of the weird event days at Goldsmiths. In particular I find these comments are valuable:

"Ironically nothing has been more disastrous for thinking horror than the overabundance of vacuous cruelties or absurd maladies; for it is relatively easy to mimic a battlefield, a bodily decomposition in a text, image or music. If horror is already everywhere, or in other words, if horror has already been culminated, thinking horror can easily turn into a case study, counting its countless manifestations."

"There is something profoundly wrong and terrible with humans"

"The openness of humans toward horrors is inevitably an economical venture for mining that which is affordable."

I hope to post a short series on Lovecraft that was distributed for one of the weird events shorn of their Lacanian elements. They provide a little clearer context for my paper in Collapse IV and indicate a rather primitive attempt to coordinate the political with a naturalism of horror.