To move forward, Kant argues, we must distinguish between phenomena – the world ‘as it appears’ – and noumena, or things-in-themselves. The minds of human beings utilise a priori categories of understanding in order to cognise phenomena, but the thing-in-itself remains always elusive.
This iron-clad emphasis on the way that objects conform to our thinking, in which we cannot know anything of the world outside this correlation, is critiqued by the speculative realists. Meillassoux urges us to wake from the ‘correlationist slumber’ induced upon us by Kant, to try to know the world as it exists in-itself, rather than confining ourselves to the correlates of our own consciousness.11 As Steven Shaviro recently put it, speculative realism calls on philosophers ‘to do precisely what Kant told us that we cannot and must not do’:12 namely to move beyond the bounds of the world as we perceive it, to leave behind what Ben Woodard evocatively describes as ‘the dead loop of the human skull’.13 The problem, of course, is the vicious correlationist circle which inextricably seems to circumscribe all thought and so doom us to ignorance of the world-in-itself. As Thacker explains, ‘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’.14 The second the world-in-itself is thought, it passes into the realm of consciousness and becomes enmeshed in the world of representations.
The responses of various speculative realists to the seemingly ineluctable correlationist ouroboros have been multifarious, to the point where some have disputed the very coherence of the ‘speculative realist movement’ altogether. Meillassoux, fighting back against the correlationist circle and the Kantian transcendental subject, turns to the idea of ‘contingency’ and David Hume’s denial of the necessity of the laws of nature. He ultimately comes to view the laws of nature as merely contingent and endorses a vision of reality as a churning ‘hyper-Chaos’, which he describes in terms suitable for a Lovecraftian abomination: a ‘menacing power… capable of destroying both things and worlds, of bringing forth monstrous absurdities, yet also of never doing anything, of realizing every dream, but also every nightmare’.15 Others, such as Harman and other adherents of ‘object-oriented ontology’ or ‘OOO’, while sharing Meillassoux’s antipathy towards correlationism, argue against the idea that philosophy can ever produce knowledge itself, claiming instead that philosophy ‘aims at objects… that can never be successfully defined but only indirectly approached’.16 Accordingly, OOO has set about exploring the gaps between objects and their qualities.
Adjacent to speculative realism is new materialism or neo-materialism, another loose philosophical movement, in many ways an outgrowth of ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. New materialism is championed by thinkers like Jane Bennett, Manuel DeLanda, Rosi Braidotti and Karen Barad, and finds its roots in an eclectic range of philosophers including Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Henri Bergson and Baruch Spinoza, combining vitalist and immanentist ideas about the ontology of life with the ways that actor-network theory calls on us to rethink the boundaries and distributions of agency between human and non-human. Like the speculative realists, the new materialists grapple with the relation between the human and the non-human in a non- anthropocentric fashion.
Many books have explored the various speculative realist and new materialist rejoinders to metaphysical antirealism and correlationism. This study is not among them, precisely, since it is not primarily a work of philosophy but of literary criticism: my intent here is not to persuade readers of some specific metaphysical system or to critique antirealism directly, but rather to show that weird fiction engages with philosophical quandaries pertaining to metaphysics that still vex philosophers today and which are becoming increasingly relevant in an age struggling to come to grips with the idea of a world that is not ‘for us’. Speculative realist philosophers have also shown an interest in fiction – particularly horror and weird fiction. Harman has considered Lovecraftian ‘ontography’ – the way that, in his view, Lovecraft’s writing presents reality as structured by tensions between objects in their full actuality and their sensual properties. Thacker’s three-volume series, The Horror of Philosophy, touches on weird fiction, black metal, Japanese film and more, exploring the intersection between horror and philosophy. Thacker begins the first volume with a discussion of demonology, presenting the demon ‘as a limit for thought’, unfettering the demonic from its theological origins and repurposing demonology ‘as a philosopheme’ that negotiates problems of being and the unhuman.17 My project is both an extension of Lovecraft’s suggestion that weird fiction concerns ‘the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space’, and, in a sense, a demonology of the sort Thacker envisions, which he suggests has not yet been fully realised.18 This study is thus aligned with many of the perspectives of speculative realist philosophy even if its aims pertain to literary criticism rather than metaphysics itself per se.
At the same time, however, some of the literary claims of the speculative realists have run the risk of reducing weird and horror fiction to allegory – philosophy dressed up with tentacles and fangs. This approach marginalises the affective power of the weird, which so many of its authors have specifically identified as the very ‘point’ of their work. Beginning with the stories of Poe and his ‘Philosophy of Composition’ (1846), weird authors have afforded emotional effects tremendous primacy. Machen, Blackwood and Lovecraft all uphold aesthetic attitudes broadly similar to Poe’s, looking also to aestheticism and decadence and largely endorsing the idea of l’art pour l’art while criticising didacticism; Lovecraft insists that ‘a weird story whose intent is to teach or produce a social effect, or one in which the horrors are finally explained away by natural means, is not a genuine tale of cosmic fear’.19 Though many of Thacker’s claims in The Horror of Philosophy are illuminating, he returns repeatedly to a vision of horror fiction as fundamentally idea-driven rather than emotion-driven. At one point, Thacker argues that for Lovecraft ‘horror is less defined by emotion and more by thought’.20 I am not denying that horror fiction has ideas in it – ideas worth exploring. Indeed, much of this study will be spent unpacking the ideas voiced by various weird authors. But by foregrounding ideas at the expense of aesthetics, Thacker and his fellows neglect what seems to me the real engine of horror – affect.
This study intervenes in philosophical readings of weird fiction by privileging affect: the affective states of both characters and readers. In weird fiction, I suggest, affect and metaphysical speculation become intimately intertwined. Specifically, I argue that disgust is especially important for the weird, serving to impart a certain frisson of aesthetic pleasure while serving as a way of knowing – or, at least, of speculating. This is because disgust is centrally concerned with boundaries and borders – demarcations of selfhood and category. My project is to bring together two ways of thinking about weird fiction: one emphasising the weird’s metaphysical speculations, and another foregrounding the paradoxical aesthetics of disgust. In doing so, I aim to expand the study of weird fiction as a genre and to explore the unexpected aesthetic value of disgust.
Disgusting thoughts
Disgust and metaphysics may seem strange bedfellows. The former, intuitively, might be associated with the gut, while the latter clearly belongs to the brain, the abstract province of reason. Yet time and time again the things-from-beyond depicted in weird fiction seem calculated to repulse even as they arouse speculation around the contours of the self, the cosmos and the relationship between them. Noël Carroll observes that horror fiction typically