In the first volume of his Horror of Philosophy trilogy—In the Dust of
this Planet—Eugene Thacker calls 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 wider genre of “horror” encompassing such genres as
literature, cinema, and the arts exposes its viewers/readers/audience to a
world of conflict between the selfsame subject and the of the ‘other’ which
involves the element of horror. The genre has invariably aided in a
metaphorical confrontation with the genre consumers’ systemic confrontation
with a reality outside that of the perceived. Stephen King had produced a
definition of “horror” as “the unnatural, spiders, the size of bears, the dead
walking around, it’s when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you
by the arm.” While the above statement does not present a wholesome definition
of what could constitute a philosophy of horror, it establishes the groundwork
for the same—a philosophy of horror is not a definitive introspection into the
genre, or an intervention into it, but rather an attempt to amalgamate the
multifarious roles of the genre into presenting a deeper understanding of human
psychology while it enters into a transaction with a hyperreal/surreal
“reality”. Whether we discuss, at this juncture, Mary Shelley’s manufacture—an
in-human contraption—or that of Poe’s blend of the gothic or Lovecraft’s
alienating cosmic horror, or, moving into the screen, the shadows of Nosferatu
or the veiled sociopolitical satirical horror that is The Night of the Living
Dead, horror as a genre has been an adherent to the notion of genre-bending and
genre-warping in order to comprehend the realities beyond, or underlying the
real.
Freud asserted that horror its based on the “other” that is rooted in
the subconscious, formulating the foundations for his concept of the “uncanny”
(unheimliche)—something strangely familiar—settling the genre of horror firmly
within the individual recipient’s familiar milieu (one may well recall the
Mariner’s fright at the spectres of his former friends rising from the dead, or
how the homefront becomes a space of/for terror in Strangers, Straw Dogs, or
Funny Games), or how the ‘interior’ becomes the site of the horror (Haute
Tension). This psychological element of horror is highlighted and further elaborated
upon by Lacan, Deleuze, Žižek, the semantic element by Derrida, or philosophers
such as Noël Carroll who have endeavoured to produce a philosophical context of
horror. While Carroll believes that fantasy and horror operate by challenging
and dissolving perceived limits of reality and so violate our normal
perspective (The Philosophy of Horror), for Žižek it is the science of
psychoanalysis that pieces together our ‘dissociated knowledge’ into the truth
that threatens us with madness: the kernel of reality is the horror of the
real. Or we may revert to Lovecraft, for whom the ‘dissociated knowledge’ of
the cosmos threatens us with its infinite possibilities. In almost all of these
generic and critical/theoretical instances, the genre of horror remains loaded
with meanings and critical/crucial interventions into our perceived
realities—whether it is through our desire to apprehend the absent real in Dark
City, or the absence of social illusions and the overpowering anxiety in
Possession, the literal “angst” of Angst, the regressive obliteration of human
senses of the real and fictional in The Exorcist, Evil Dead, or The Conjuring,
or, if we venture into the grotesque and the macabre of gore, Cannibal
Holocaust, The Human Centipede, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Hostel, Wrong Turn, or
Saw, and the myriad reiterations of the above as well as the several sub-genres
of horror, the genre manages to suspend the receiver’s sense of disbelief by
metaphorically ‘getting under our skin’.
The proposed volume undertakes to read into this phenomenon, of horror,
as a philosophical statement. We are interested in essays that look into the
genre of horror and its sub-genres (body horror, disaster horror, horror drama,
psychological horror, science fiction horror, slasher, home invasion,
supernatural horror, gothic horror and others) across the mediums of
literature, cinema, digital cultures, and the arts from a philosophically
informed perspective, or those that develop a philosophical perspective of
their own. Essays (within 8000 words) are to be submitted on, but not
restricted to, the following themes:
- Philosophers on Horror
- Philosophies of Horror
- Horror genres/sub-genres and philosophy
- Horror and psychology/psychoanalysis
- The sociology of Horror
- The politics of Horror
- The aesthetics of Horror
- Philosophy and literatures of Horror (genres, authors)
- Philosophy and Horror cinemas (genres, directors)
- Philosophy and Horror comics
- Philosophy and Horror digital cultures (video games, digital dissemination of horror etc)
- Philosophy and Horror in the arts (performing, presentative)
The deadline for abstracts between 200-400 words is December 16, 2019
(complete essays between 5000 to 8000 words long -excluding Works Cited- will
be welcome as well). Please, submit your abstract with a brief biography.
Queries and submissions may be directed to both,
subashishbhattacharjee@gmail.com and citeron05@yahoo.com.
Feel free to contact the editors with any questions you may have about
the project and please fell free to share this announcement with any colleague
who may be interested in the volume.
Edited by Subashish Bhattacharjee (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
subashishbhattacharjee@gmail.com and Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns
(Universidad de Buenos Aires) citeron05@yahoo.com
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