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lucrèce it is also true that in the last decades of his work derrida drifted into a way of philosophizing and towards a spectrum of themes hospitality traveling the gift justice the secret forgiveness the promise spectres his cat that is legitimate for realists to find less directly pertinent to their philosophical agenda he indulged in his own personal obsessions so what must a philosopher be there just to fullfill your expectations fine the constant performative obliquity of his style is often tiresome even though this quoted passage looks pretty clear to me but that doesn t mean that one can just mock it and carry on i don t want everyone in fact anyone to turn derridean that s just stupid i despise any form of philosophical personality cult his work is interesting but like everyone else s limited and at points disagreeable i spend much less time than it might seem reading derrida but some forms of ignorance just irritate me beyond measure i d just like everyone to get the utterly banal point that principled rejections are as idiotic as fashions and fads are anyway i now probably should stop with the derrida quote of the day series 1 2 3 it s getting a bit boring posted in philosophy tags jacques derrida that s weird may 13 2011 6 comments yesterday i ve listened to the recording of china miéville s talk at kingston university on the weird in fiction and politics by the way i m not sure who runs the backdoor broadcasting company but they have my deepest respect for what they do given my sceptical stance towards the porting of weird tropes and language from fiction to non fiction including politics and philosophy i was somewhat prejudiced and was expecting from miéville an all round defense of all things weird i was wrong miéville defends his predilection for weird fiction both in its early twentieth century peak and in its contemporary resurgence of which he is of course a central herald but is very cautious in claiming any straightforward political relevance for the weird he similarly expresses scepticism regarding the now waning popularity of hauntology both in its metaphysical sense and in its political applications miéville sees hauntology as being concerned with that which comes back unexpectedly revealing itself as always already there on a par with the psychoanalytic return of the repressed and of course the horror spiritual trope of the revenant the re turner therefore i surmise offering limited resources to the political theorist seeking to formulate the possibility of radical novelty this is a classic criticism towards deconstructionist politics an orientation often indicted of political unassertiveness or straightforward passivity on the other hand though miéville didn t explain precisely how the weird fails as well to offer a viable theoretical alternative a discussion regarding the poltical poential if any of these two borrowings from fiction would be extremely interesting but it s way out of my competence and it s not my primary interest here however let me note that miéville seems highly sceptical of the sudden widespread interest in black metal among leftist intellectuals miéville observes that death of the author notwithstanding one just simply cannot ignore the intrinsically reactionary neo romantic nature of a musical genre whose practitioners are when not i would add just plainly politically ignorant too busy posing as more evil than thou to care about politics mostly openly placed on the far right of the political spectrum in general miéville doesn t seem to me to be particularly enthusiastic about the current let s turn weird all of our intellectual productions whilst at the same time staunchly defending the importance of this genre as a literary production i agree on both counts and once again let me clarify that i write this as an avid weird fiction reader science fiction aficionado enough to name my red cat jones and as someone that with a library of about 200 albums accumulated over the last 10 years knows a thing or two about black metal what is the weird anyway miéville prunes away misunderstandings weird fiction is not a genre populated by folklore inherited monsters ghosts vampires werewolfs does not employ the trope of the horror unleashed by human hubris and rationality gone wild frankenstein moreau and most importantly i would say does not employ its unsettling elements creatures places as allegories miéville is particularly fond of cephalopods in general and octopuses in particular which explains the one tattooed on his arm precisely for this reason they are spectacularly intelligent creatures which are virtually absent from western mythology and are either prone to non codified symbolic appropriations or seem to have no allegorical meaning whatsoever allegories miéville goes on arguing are most interesting when they break down when they stop working when they mean nothing and acquire a life of their own even though to be pedantic we could argue that such an allegory is no allegory anymore since strictly speaking what makes an allegory not just an over stretched metaphor is the possibility of its rational conceptual interpretation miéville cites lord tennyson s poem the kraken as an excellent example in fact a metaphor of how allegories die when overexplained below the thunders of the upper deep far far beneath in the abysmal sea his antient dreamless uninvaded sleep the kraken sleepeth faintest sunlights flee about his shadowy sides above him swell huge sponges of millennial growth and height and far away into the sickly light from many a wondrous grot and secret cell unnumber d and enormous polypi winnow with giant arms the slumbering green there hath he lain for ages and will lie battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep until the latter fire shall heat the deep then once by man and angels to be seen in roaring he shall rise and on the surface die the kraken dies when exposed to the gaze of humans and the light of day the allegory is at its most awe some power when its meaning is either absent or impossible to analytically decode and of course who else sleeps on the bottom of the sea and has cephalopod ish semblance good old cthulhu of course which is not just any monster wikipedia accurate as ever for anything related to geek culture rightly describes it as a fictional cosmic entity so crucially the weird resist allegorical meaning miéville exemplifies his point by stating that giger s alien is not weird why well because of its all too obvious camp is a word which miéville uses often in this context sexualization both in shape and in actions see the famous scene of the alien s tail creeping up lambert s leg conversely the weird indexes that which is utterly alien unsettingly resistant to conceptualization impossible for thought to metabolize as miéville notes however this concept proof constructions used as literary devices impose an interesting disjunction very noticeable in lovecraft on the one hand their complete transcendence while on the other the literary necessity and the human desire to get to describe them so we are told how utterly impossible the shapes seen by the terrorized witness were and yet these latter are still able to go on describing them in all their grotesque details this tension is even more evident miéville observes when lovecraftian creatures are tamed in order to be located in the economy of spin offs rpgs so how many hps does a shoggoth have i don t fully share miéville s passion for tentacled creatures which i still find too easily sexualized so i think that in this respect cthulhu is the least successful of lovecraft s deities all too representable reason for its iconic popularity indeed miéville laments the capitalist mercification of cthulhu in plush form shame on me for having bought one as compared to other more thoroughly cosmic old ones even in fiction then abysmal incomprehensibility must give something in to representation just as an incredulous or terrified for that matters stare is not an argument a blank page is not a story the weird attempts to describe things so violently in themselves to shatter any attribution of meaning and scale down human self perception in this regard i was extremely pleased with miéville s claim that william hope hodgson was perhaps a worse writer but a more interesting one than lovecraft was since well i always thought that to be the case you want cosmic weirdness and ancestral isolation the breathtaking second half of the house on the borderland a book that is now over a century old still leaves me speechless at every re read if you got a kindle you can find a free copy in the kindle store do get it the weird is not the horror of the unheimlich re cognition but that of getting a glimpse of the unknown and realizing that it is operating according to meaningless rules rules which have been in place far before we appeared in the universe and will go on undisturbed after we ll depart it i am deeply enamored with thomas ligotti s short story in the story the astronomic blur part of sideshow and other stories in teatro grottesco a two pages long tale of a mysterious yet anonymous bland little store with a strange flickering light it s hard to convey the mood which ligotti builds up in just a few paragraphs but the last masterfully constructed one is a marvelous example of the getting a glimpse on the meaningless trope of weird fiction perhaps i had seen too deeply into the nature of the little store and it was simply warning me to look no further on the other hand perhaps i had been an accidental witness to something else altogether some plan or process whose ultimate stage is impossible to foresee although there still comes to me on certain nights the dream or mental image of a dark sky in which the stars themselves burn low with a dim flickering light that illuminates an indefinite swirling blur wherein it is not possible to observe any definite shapes or signs leave the unknowable alone or it shall annihilate your ambitions with the hazy banality of its meaninglessness having reached this point it is all too easy to leap from weird fiction to meillassouxian realism of contingency and related philosophical ideas for what is hyperchaos if not a name for those strange aeons during which even death may die this is a most delicate point since we are starting to walk the thin line between the careful comparison of certain kinds of sensibility of affine orientations of thought and the wholesale meaningless in the vulgar sense and often pretentious unregulated exchange of concepts between dark literature and philosophy when asked about style miéville concedes some ground to the critics that accuse lovecraft of over writing of employing a baroque faux 18th century and heavily adjectival style yet he defends the necessity of such a convoluted style for weird fiction to achieve its affective results i wasn t surprised since miéville quite obviously adores to use powerful and often cryptic words if you ask me occasionally indulging in this impressionistic practice too much see the quantity of things which ooze in perdido street station which don t get me wrong is a staggering novel in content and in style winds aerostats blood spit skin houses rivers flying creatures however in fiction a story has to be told and i wouldn t want miéville to change his trademark style where the vocabulary is skillfully employed to construct metaphors which buttress the weird on the other hand in philosophy which is not pace rorty just a kind of writing and in science there are good and bad metaphors i e those that facilitate an increase of knowledge and those that remain pure metaphors resisting any possible conceptual clarification philosophy needs the former breaking down metaphors those that die when brought up to the light of day meaningless metaphors are not the right material for philosophy even when such a philosophy is trying to track the consequences of the meaninglessness of the universe as a rule of thumb over writing is a mistake in philosophy i wouldn t go as far as williamson in arguing that pedantry is a fault on the right side because i believe it is perfectly possible to be good engaging and yet precise writers bachelard writes about science but insofar as philosophy and science aim at being modes of rational inquiry the point stands for both the danger of immediate metaphors in the formation of the scientific spirit is that they are not always passing images they push toward and autonomous kind of thought they tend to completion and fulfillment in the domain of the image the miévillian broken metaphors literary powerful don t do philosophical work but remain lost in a fuzzy world of affective ideality the central trope which weird fiction and philosophical speculation share that of the meaninglessness of the in itself is expressible without having to recur to wild metaphorizing incidentally it has always been my understanding that what meillassoux wants to do with mathematics is precisely this the in itself is only mathematically expressible and mathematics is the language of contingency a formalism of symbols devoid of meaning again an interesting parallel could be drawn here between meillassouxian mathematics and lovecraft s employment of mathematics to convey the utterly alien and the non linguistically conceptualizable the fact that both weird fiction writers and speculative realists are interested in the way in which the in itself is fiercely human concept proof does not imply that philosophers should buy into the affective style which writers employ in order to produce a sense of awe in the reader the architecture oozes out of its bounds is a powerful highly impressionistic literary metaphor which produces definite effects on the reader hence with a specific literary value on the other hand in a philosophical context a sentence like the noumena ooze back into the phenomenal world means nothing i e does no philosophical work in terms of clarification of concepts whatsoever having said that what i find most interesting is a certain cultural resonance between weird fiction and new realism specifically when it comes to the dialectic between the intelligible and the unknown unknowable and to the meaninglessness of the natural world i take it to be a central axiom of any realism that certain things or states of affairs in the universe are unknown and perhaps unknowable to make such a claim is not to be an anti realist but a consistent realist stathis psillos spells this out very clearly when he writes that despite their many differences with the early empiricists modern anti realists do share with them the view that existential claims should be tied to some possibility or other of verification a thesis which scientific realists deny since it is typical of scientific realists to argue that the content of the world can in principle exceed what human beings even ideal observers can access epistemically none of these moder...
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