Month: July 2019

Contents
Part I – The Powers of Terror: Toward A Gothic Image of Thought
Part II – Subterranean Passages: The Gothic Structure of Thought
Part III – A Deep Anonymous Murmur: The Gothic Subject of Thought

Part III – A Deep Anonymous Murmur: The Gothic Subject of Thought

I: Turning the Gothic inside out

The conventions of the Gothic are doubly divided. The first division is the structural separation of inside from outside: In Eve Sedgwick’s account this inside-outside disjunction may structure thematic elements, such as the topography of the setting or the psychology of the characters, or it may describe the layered texts and narratives of Gothic fiction itself. In the preceding essay, I proposed that the Gothic’s inside-outside disjunction may also be read in epistemic terms, describing not only the dramas of characters navigating social space or fictions charting a textual topography, but also the inner and outer limits of the human subject. The inside and outside are in this sense not empirical markers of spatial or social division, but transcendentally interior or exterior to the faculties of the human mind. The transcendental outside is therefore “not just a matter of something being distant in space or time, but of something which is beyond our ordinary experience and conceptions of space and time itself” (Fisher 2016, 22).

The second division of the Gothic is generic, separating two modes of Gothic writing, and two types of Gothic plot. My study of Schopenhauer placed him within the context of only one of these traditions, namely that of Gothic horror or the masculine Gothic. In his investigation into the limits of knowledge, Schopenhauer writes a veritable Schauerroman—or shudder novel—that follows thought down through the catacombs of the noumena, where the seemingly discrete and free human subject is revealed as the puppet of a monstrous and exterior will. The end of self-knowledge for Schopenhauer is the horrified realisation that “‘we’ ‘ourselves’ are caught up in the rhythms, pulsions and patternings of non-human forces [and that there] is no inside except as a folding of the outside” (Fisher 2016, 11-2). The question then remains, if the outside has thus far signalled either horrified abjection or the ascetic embrace of death, what thinking subject can possibly pass through the Gothic topography and return to tell of it?

Continue reading “A Deep Anonymous Murmur: The Gothic Subject of Thought (Part III)” →

Contents
Part I – The Powers of Terror: Toward A Gothic Image of Thought
Part II – Subterranean Passages: The Gothic Structure of Thought
Part III – A Deep Anonymous Murmur: The Gothic Subject of Thought

Part II – Subterranean Passages: The Gothic Structure of Thought

According to Eve Sedgwick’s The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, the Gothic form is composed of three principle components—the inside, the outside, and what divides them. The inside and outside may be geographical, architectural, moral, or psychological, just as the boundary between them may be composed of brick, earth, fabric, or something more socially malleable. The present essay proposes that this inside-outside disjunction may also be conceived transcendentally, as a means of describing not only empirical instances of isolation and repression but also the grand enclosure of the transcendental subject away from “the unthinkable and unspeakable regions beyond possible experience” (Fisher 2001, 223). Additionally, with this tripartite topography of the Gothic in mind, there remains the question of how these elements interact with one another, and how their composition in the Gothic scene develops into a model of thought. What follows are five principles on the workings of the inside-outside disjunction accompanied by examples from Schopenhauer to lead us through the dark passageways of thought, toward a final horrific confrontation with the outside. Continue reading “Subterranean Passages: The Gothic Structure of Thought (Part II)” →

Contents
Part I – The Powers of Terror: Toward A Gothic Image of Thought
Part II – Subterranean Passages: The Gothic Structure of Thought
Part III – A Deep Anonymous Murmur: The Gothic Subject of Thought

Part I – The Powers of Terror: Toward A Gothic Image of Thought

They told me that the night and day were all that I could see;
They told me that I had five senses to enclose me up;
And they enclos’d my infinite brain into a narrow circle,
And sunk my heart into the Abyss, a red, round globe, hot burning,
Till all from life I was obliterated and erasèd.
(Blake, “Daughters” 53-7)

The Gothic formula isn’t hard to spot. Characters cycle through a handful of archetypes: the wicked priest, the young lovers, the veiled virgin and the men who covet her, the demonic seductress, the wandering damned, and the list goes on. At the level of plot much is the same: imprisonment, live burial, profaned sanctity, hidden parentage, broken taboos, and shocking reveals are all to be expected. But what unites these disparate elements under the single and pre-eminently recognisable title of the Gothic? In The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick proposes an answer to this question in the formulation of a “particular spatial model” which unites the core structures and themes of the Gothic style. This spatial model is comprised of three components, “what’s inside, what’s outside, and what separates them,” which severs the individual self from something crucial to it (Sedgwick 1986, 12). This desired object can lie outside the self, or it can be hidden impossibly within, what is essential is the third component, the force or barrier which imposes that separation. Prisons, veils, and secret identities all come naturally to this structure, as all have to do with the intimate yet severed relations between insides and outsides. Continue reading “The Powers of Terror: Toward a Gothic Image of Thought (Part I)” →