Der Beitrag untersucht die Langeweile auf klinischem Terrain und als literarisches/philosophisches Sujet in Abgrenzung zu benachbarten Phänomenen wie Muße, Müßiggang und Faulheit. Da sich das Phänomen Langeweile im Bedeutungsspektrum zwischen »horror vacui« (Kant) und »Windstille der Seele« (Nietzsche) einer definitorischen Klarheit entzieht, schlägt die Autorin anhand klinischer Vignetten vor, drei Qualitäten und regulierende Funktionen der Langweile zu differenzieren: eine vernichtende, mit »Desobjektalisierung« (Green) einhergehende Langeweile, eine als Abwehr eines traumabedingten Ich-Verlusts fungierende Langeweile sowie eine Langeweile als kreativer Übergangsraum. (...) Freuds Gedanken über die Existenz von »lustvolle(n) Spannungen und unlustige(n) Entspannungen« enthalten eine triebökonomische Perspektive, die einen Blick auf sehr unterschiedliche Lust- und Unlustqualitäten der Langeweile erlaubt. (shrink)

Este artigo visa investigar, através do modelo entropológico de inspiração lévi-straussiana elaborado pelo filósofo Marco Antonio Valentim na obra Extramundanidade e Sobrenatureza (filosofia quente-sociedade fria e filosofia fria-sociedade quente), os desafios lançados ao pensamento pela mitologia lovecraftiana. Interpretaremos para isso a obra H.P. Lovecraft: a disjunção no Ser, do filósofo argentino Fabián Ludueña Romandini, buscando posicionar a temporalidade no centro da análise entropológica. Contrastando a mitologia lovecraftiana com o pensamento das sociedades quentes, somos levados a sobrevoar as regiões da loucura, (...) do sonho e do trabalho, para finalmente alcançar um dos nódulos temporais da modernidade, expresso na imagem do tempo como intuição interna do sujeito transcendental da filosofia kantiana. Depois de uma breve comparação entre a filosofia lovecraftiana e a filosofia kantiana, seguimos em direção à filosofia aceleracionista de Nick Land, contrapondo o cosmos lovecraftiano ao cosmos tecnocrático do expoente contemporâneo das sociedades quentes e suas tendências entrópicas. Finalmente, retomamos a interpretação entropológica da mitologia lovecraftiana analisando as preocupações referentes ao horror vacui destacadas por Valentim na sua obra, apoiando-nos para isso no lugar outorgado às escolas filosóficas pelo filósofo argentino na sua obra sobre Lovecraft. (shrink)

In the first part of this paper I critically examine some of the main interpretations of “classical” Yogācāra philosophy of Maitreya, Asaṅga and Vasubandhu. Among these interpretations, based on extant textual and contextual data, I consider philologically unlikely both metaphysical-idealistic readings, which ascribe to these authors the view that ultimate reality is a mental or subjective stuff, and epistemological-idealistic readings which advocate that either Yogācāra suspends judgment on the existence of the extramental or that it maintains that the extramental exists (...) in itself and ultimately. Instead, I consider more likely the thesis that classical Yogācāra upholds an epistemological idealism that, while admitting epistemological priority of the mental over the extramental, rules out the ultimate existence of both the former and the latter. This exclusion, however, does not amount to the exclusion of every metaphysics, but rather to the adoption of a metaphysics of emptiness conceived, in fact, as absence of the mental/extramental dichotomy. In the second part of the paper this reading of classical Yogācāra is compared with the interpretation of Nāgārjuna’s philosophy that I elsewhere called “realistic antimetaphysical”, and I reach the conclusion that, while with respect to epistemology between early Madhyamaka and classical Yogācāra there is continuity, regarding metaphysics these two schools are deeply distinct and discontinuous: while Nāgārjuna conceives of emptiness as an extinction of any metaphysical view, Yogācāra emptiness actually presents itself as a metaphysical point of view. (shrink)

Los zapatos nos sirven y nos acompañan, testimonian diferentes verdades, dependiendo de su utilidad y su dueño. Pueden ser de vagabundos o de prisioneros, de militares, artistas o campesinos, de adultos o de niños, de asesinos o de asesinados. Muchos guardan un misterio, todos tienen una historia. El arte los ha acogido desde sus comienzos, vinculándolos a diferentes sucesos, como en las obras de Vincent Van Gogh, Can Togay y Gyula Pauer. A partir del trabajo de estos artistas se busca (...) vincular el vacío y el horror en el arte con el tema de la verdad, entendida como alétheia o desocultación, rememoración y acontecimiento, e indagar por la historia que se oculta tras ciertas obras artísticas. (shrink)

At Physics IV,8, 216a26-7, Aristotle cracks a joke. It is one of the relatively few deliberate jokes in the corpus, and its occurrence here is not without significance. Aristotle in these chapters is arguing against those who believe in the existence of the void, or vacuum, or empty space; he says, ‘even if we consider it on its own merits the so-called vacuum will be found to be really vacuous.'To be sure, this is not a very funny joke; what is (...) interesting about it, though, is that it underlines the general attitude of dismissive flippancy that seems to run through Aristotle's consideration of the void. He seems to refuse to take the hypothesis of the void at all seriously. He never argues directly that the void does not or cannot exist, but contents himself with criticizing the arguments that other thinkers had advanced in its favour. (shrink)

Procuro mostrar neste artigo que o niilismo persiste como um problema sem solução nos escritos de Nietzsche até agosto de 1888. O niilismo como vontade de nada emerge como um problema, principalmente no escrito O niilismo europeu e na terceira dissertação da Genealogia da moral, ambos de 1887. Investigarei como Nietzsche ainda permanece enredado ao problema da verdade, após vincular o niilismo ao horror vacui. Defendo que as soluções propostas no ano de 1888 giram em torno de propostas (...) diversas da transvaloração dos valores, mas não conseguem romper o círculo da “magia do extremo” que anima o pensamento do Filósofo Solitário. Na arte estaria a saída mais promissora, mas o Filósofo da Transvaloração não a radicaliza até as suas últimas consequências. (shrink)

This article develops the hypothesis that the intensified self-portraying and self-exhibition so characteristic of many of today’s social-media practices do not correlate with intensified self-reflection but, on the contrary, indicate a tendency towards self-loss. However, it would be wrong-headed to blame the social networks for distracting from real life. Rather, it is the loss of reality in the real life of contemporary life-worlds that renders social networks an enticing narcissistic way out of an existential horror vacui manifesting itself (...) in new ways within digital culture. In diagnostic terms we can speak of a cultural change towards a posthuman narration of the self. Three vectors of this posthuman narration of the self are distinguished: From word to number, from mechanism to automatism, and from option to obligation. (shrink)

El presente artículo pretende mirar a Latinoamérica desde la perspectiva de la ontología. Y como hay algo que no acaba de encajar, busca en el inexplorado terreno de la meontología y el no-ser a partir de dos pensadores políticos latinoamericanos recientes, Dussel y Laclau. Por un lado, la Filosofía de la Liberación asocia el centro con la ontología y el ser, así como la periferia con lo Otro y el no-ser. De esto se desprende que, aun y asumiendo el heideggeriano (...) “olvido del ser”, la ontología helenocéntrica se basa en la negación aún más originaria y fundamental de la nada. A continuación, se intenta demostrar cómo esta renegación ha ido de la mano de la exclusión de lo bárbaro, lo popular y lo femenino, principalmente. Tras un breve ex cursus sobre Schmitt en tanto que la forma más acabada de horror vacui dentro de la ontología política europea, el artículo concluye con un análisis pormenorizado de la reconceptualización del vacío en la obra de Laclau, que puede permitir una mejor comprensión del populismo en general, y de su vertiente latinoamericana en particular. (shrink)

Die Überprüfung des Falsifikationismus kann im Lichte einer neuen Methodologie anhand wissenschaftsgeschichtlicher Beispiele erfolgen. Um 1640 wurde das Fallgesetz nicht aufgrund seines empirischen Gehalts, sondern aufgrund seiner logischen Beziehungen zu metaphysischen Annahmen als ernstzunehmende Hypothese betrachtet, die es empirisch zu prüfen galt; ferner wurde eine Falsifikation für die Verwerfung der horror-vacui-Theorie weder als hinreichend noch als notwendig angesehen. Diese wissenschaftsgeschichtlichen Tatsachen sind mit Hilfe der Methodologie der Forschungsprogramme, nicht aber mit Hilfe des Popperschen Falsifikationismus, rational interpretierbar und bestätigen (...) damit die methodologische Kritik, die in den letzten Jahren am Wissenschafts- und Fortschrittskriterium Poppers geübt worden ist. (shrink)

The present book explores a variety of fundamental questions that all of us secretly share. Its twenty-one chapters, written by some of the world’s leading Melville and Conrad scholars, indicate possible directions of comparativist insight into the continuity and transformations of western existentialist thought between the 19th and 20th centuries. The existential philosophy of participation—so mistrustful of analytical categories—is epitomized by the lives and oeuvres of Melville and Conrad. Born in the immediacy of experience, this philosophy finds its expression in (...) uncertain tropes and faith-based actions; rather than muffle the horror vacui with words, it plunges head first into liminality, where logos dissolves into a “positive nothing.” Unlike analytical philosophers, both Melville and Conrad refrain from talking about reality: they expose those who would listen to a first-hand experience of participation in an interpretive act. Employing literary tropes to denude the essence of the human condition, they allow their readers to transgress the limitations of language. Mistrustful of language, they accept the necessity of discourse which, to make sense, must be actively reshaped, endlessly questioned, and constantly revised. And if uncertainty is the only certainty available to us, our lowly human condition also necessitates compassion: an existential cure against the liquid, capricious reality we are afforded. (shrink)

Resumen El postmodernismo no es una ideología, más bien, nace como un movimiento enantiodrómico que busca anular todo aquello venerado en la modernidad. La unidad, homogeneidad y singularidad, valores de la Modernidad, han sido sustituidos reactivamente, por la postmodernidad, por la fragmentación, heterogeneidad y multiplicidad. Careciendo de alguna ideología sustentadora, el postmodernismo precariamente sólo es capaz de proporcionarle al hombre canales de escape para actuar su evasión ante el horror vacui. Este ensayo busca arrojar una luz sobre la (...) presente “Civilization and its Discontents”. Palabras clave: postmodernismo; modernidad; ideología; civilización; descontento. Post-modern SymptomsPostmodernism is not an ideology; it is born rather as an enantiodromic movement seeking to annul all of that which has been worshipped in Modernity. Unity, homogeneity and singularity, values of Modernity, have been reactively replaced, by postmodernism, by fragmentation, heterogeneity and multiplicity. Lacking any grounding ideology, postmodernism is precariously capable only of providing man escape routes to act out his evasion in the face of the horror vacui. This paper seeks to cast light on the present “Civilization and its Discontents”. Keywords: Postmodernism; Modernity; Ideology; Civilization; Discontent. (shrink)

The article places Game of Thrones within a tradition of pessimism, reaching back to Blaise Pascal and coloured by Nabokov’s vision of birth as a separation between two voids. This lineage provides a philosophical thread to analyse the motivations and actions of the protagonists of Game of Thrones, in particular their relation to child-killing. The void looms large in the world of Game of Thrones as the unchartered space beyond the wall. It is the awareness of the reality of this (...) void and the horrors it harbours which is shown to propel those who have it, to go to the greatest lengths to preserve the life of a child. (shrink)

Pascal’s protean genius beggars description. Though most widely known today for his apologetic and/or polemical work in Christian theology, he was also a philosopher of enduring importance, a noted mathematician, and a physicist who undertook important experiments in support of Toricelli’s claim that nature exhibits no horror vacui. On a more practical level, he invented, patented and massproduced a calculator, helped establish public transit in Paris, etc.

An analysis of Japanese horror films from the 1990s and 2000s using Deleuzian concepts.

Horror is a popular genre or style in many different forms of art. In this essay I propose a definition of horror that is meant to capture our intuitions about the extension of this category over a variety of forms of art. In particular, I claim that horror is individuated by a specific atmosphere and mood, rather than by any singular entity in the horror representation.

Many of the most popular and critically acclaimed horror films feature grief as a central theme. This article argues that horror films are especially suited to portraying and communicating the phenomenology of grief. We explore two overlapping claims. First, horror is well suited to represent the experience of grief, in particular because the disruptive effects of horror “monsters” on protagonists mirror the core experience of disruption that accompanies bereavement. Second, horror offers ways in which the (...) experience of grief can be contained and regulated and, in doing so, may offer psychological benefits for the bereaved. While our focus will be squarely on film, much of what we say applies to other media. (shrink)

Lucrèce débute son livre III du poème De rerum natura par l’éloge des enseignements d’Épicure - qui effacent la peur de la mort, des fantômes et des dieux - et la description des sentiments suscités par les principes épicuriens. Il écrit, dans les vers 28-30, qu’il ressent à la fois une volupté divine (divina voluptas), allusion probable au plaisir catastématique qui permet d’approcher la quiétude de la divinité, et l’horreur (horror). La formule est énigmatique, voire même contradictoire. En effet (...) les occurrences d’horror dans le De rerum natura démontrent que le terme est lié surtout à la crainte de la mort, des fantômes et des dieux, autrement dit la même peur que les épicuriens veulent éliminer pour donner accès à la volupté divine. Dans cet article, nous étudions cette formule de DRN III, 28-30 et nous proposons une nouvelle solution à sa contradiction interne, qui n’est qu’apparente. Cette solution est fondée sur l’hypothèse d’un emploi thérapeutique de la poétique du sublime. (shrink)

I argue that a solution to the paradox of horror should accommodate the possibility of enjoying an aesthetic experience partly in virtue of its being painful. This possibility is typically thought to be ruled out by the very nature of pleasure and pain. I argue that this is not so for adverbial accounts of pleasure. Using Aristotle's theory of pleasure as an example of an adverbial account, I show that it is possible for to enjoy an aesthetic experience partly (...) in virtue of its being painful. (shrink)

Powers of Horror is an excellent introduction to an aspect of contemporary French literature which has been allowed to become somewhat neglected in the current emphasis on para-philosophical modes of discourse.".

Emmanuel Levinas is often thought of as a philosopher of ethics, above all else. Indeed, his notions of the face, the Other, and alterity have all earned him a distinguished place in the history of phenomenology as a fundamental thinker of ethics as a first philosophy. But what has been overlooked in this attention on ethics is the early work of Levinas, which reveals him less a philosopher of the Other and more as a philosopher of elemental and anonymous being, (...) a speculative metaphysician whose ethical voice was still in the process of forming. In this paper, I explore the early Levinas, specifically with an aim of assessing what he can tell us about phenomenology in its relation to the non-human world. I make two claims. One, Levinas’s idea of the “il y a” (the there is) offers us a novel way of rethinking the relation between the body and the world. This idea can be approached by phrasing Levinas as a materialist. Two, the experience of horror, which Levinas will place great onus on, provides us with a phenomenology at the threshold of experience. As I argue, it is precisely through what Levinas terms “the horror of the night,” that phenomenology begins to exceed its methodological constraints in accounting for a plane of elemental existence beyond experience. (shrink)

In this article, following a trajectory set out by Noël Carroll, Matt Hills, and Andrea Sauchelli, I propose a definition of horror, according to which something qualifies as a work of horror if and only if it centrally and demonstrably aims at provoking one or more of a particular set of negative affects. A catalog of characteristically negative affects is associated with horror—including terror, revulsion, the uncanny, and the abject—but which cannot be collapsed into any single affect. (...) Further complicating matters is that the set appears to be constantly, if slowly, mutating, so that the affects aimed at in the horror of the 1920s do not entirely overlap with those aimed at horror today, or which we might expect horror to aim at a century from now. As such, while we use “horror” as a blanket term across eras, whether some work is a work of horror will always be time-indexed. (shrink)

Horror – that is the invasion of something unbearable. In many films its starting point is a common, even idyllic every-day-scene: in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, we see an ear lying on a freshly mowed lawn which is surrounded by an immaculate white fence. In the following I raise the question if the common place could be seen as the breeding ground for the unbearable rather than serving as a contrast to the invasion of it. What if the endless (...) repetition of every- day-life itself quietly generates the monsters and their excesses as a kind of antidote and wake- up-call for the lethargy and lifelessness which creeps upon ordinary people in their ordinary lives? Should this motif work, then one finds rather surprising structural common features across the genre boundaries such as from a horror film to its apparent antipode, the romantic comedy (Pretty Woman meets Norman Bates). (shrink)

Are horror films immoral? Gianluca Di Muzio argues that horror films of a certain kind are immoral because they undermine the reactive attitudes that are responsible for human agents being disposed to respond compassionately to instances of victimization. I begin with this argument as one instance of what I call the Argument from Reactive Attitudes (ARA), and I argue that Di Muzio’s attempt to identify what is morally suspect about horror films must be revised to provide the (...) most persuasive interpretation of the ARA. I then argue that the ARA provides a compelling standard for evaluating the moral permissibility of creating and viewing horror films, yet I note that it is an exceedingly difficult practical task evaluating the risk that these films create for our reactive attitudes. My conclusion is that the ARA provides a useful way or orienting ourselves to the complicated details of evaluating the moral status of horror films. (shrink)

The article starts from Gilles Deleuze’s assumption of film being a philosophy in its own right and applies it to the horror genre. It reads Stanley Cavell’s concept of genre, Timothy Jay Walker’s work on the Horror of the Other (1) and Eugene Thacker’s understanding of philosophical horror (2). It researches horror film as philosophically relevant access to nothingness (3) and shifts to the operations of assigning places to nothingness according to its respective place of access (...) (off screen, on screen, behind the screen/behind the camera) (4). It then gives short analyses of Midsommar (5), Hereditary (6), Tarantula (7), and The Conjuring (8). In Tarantula, the screen functions as a shield against the agent of nothingness residing behind it. Once surmounted from behind by nothingness, the screen is finally purged. In Hereditary and Midsommar, nothingness is always already here, in full light, constantly transforming everything into nothing. In The Conjuring, the morphings and vectorial movements have nothingness evaporate from the screen to what lies behind it, namely (digital) picture technology. The screen turns into a membrane between nothingness and its condition, technology. As a consequence, we have to switch from philosophical horror to technological horror as access to nothingness (9). (shrink)

Horror is not the same as fear, and while fear contains an essential action tendency horror does not. And while we can enjoy fear there is no enjoying of horror.

In all the Alien films, the environments are gloomy settings originally inspired by Gothic architecture, but it's the creature design, which leaves the most profound mark on us. The interaction between these art‐horror monsters and the sterileturned‐ grotesque environments of the Alien films can produce disgust or revulsion in the viewer. In Alien a fair amount of time is spent on the relationships between the crew members. One of the most horrific moments of the series is the cry of (...) “kill me” that emerges from the half‐conscious hosts as the space Marines explore the former colony of Hadley's Hope. Central to Carroll's theory on art‐horror is revulsion at the suggestion of physical contact with the fusion‐figures. At the end of Alien: Resurrection, Ripley lies in the middle of the Queen's huge mass. It is the most striking image in an otherwise cartoonish film. (shrink)

What do horror films reveal about social difference in the everyday world? Criticism of the genre often relies on a dichotomy between monstrosity and normality, in which unearthly creatures and deranged killers are metaphors for society's fear of the "others" that threaten the "normal." The monstrous other might represent women, Jews, or Blacks, as well as Indigenous, queer, poor, elderly, or disabled people. The horror film's depiction of such minorities can be sympathetic to their exclusion or complicit in (...) their oppression, but ultimately, these images are understood to stand in for the others that the majority dreads and marginalizes. Adam Lowenstein offers a new account of horror and why it matters for understanding social otherness. He argues that horror films reveal how the category of the other is not fixed. Instead, the genre captures ongoing metamorphoses across "normal" self and "monstrous" other. This "transformative otherness" confronts viewers with the other's experience-and challenges us to recognize that we are all vulnerable to becoming or being seen as the other. Instead of settling into comforting certainties regarding monstrosity and normality, horror exposes the ongoing struggle to acknowledge self and other as fundamentally intertwined. Horror Film and Otherness features new interpretations of landmark films by directors including Tobe Hooper, George A. Romero, John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, Stephanie Rothman, Jennifer Kent, Marina de Van, and Jordan Peele. Through close analysis of their engagement with different forms of otherness, this book provides new perspectives on horror's significance for culture, politics, and art. (shrink)

Within cinematic horror, trauma as a concept has often been used as an allegorical strategy to work through collective anxieties. This article on It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2014) and Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017) strikes another note. It argues that, by their aesthetic qualities, both films are rendered traumatic in their affective orientation, both toward the cinematic world and toward the spectator. It analyses the two films through trauma as an affective-aesthetic strategy that puts emphasis on the edge (...) of the frame as well as on the offscreen space. This strategy evokes a sinister mood that exists independently of the protagonists, allowing us to meaningfully feel the effects of their trauma as we engage with the film. Especially the use of the offscreen space in both films contributes to the “traumatic mood” of the films, but it also functions to immerse the spectator in the invisible filmic world. In this way, It Follows and Get Out embody trauma as a denial of relief from dread, which we both recognize in the characters' experience, and feel in our own bodies through the effective creation of ever-present threat. (shrink)

This article aims to provide an explication of a new conceptualisation of God's defeat of horrors (i.e., horror-defeat), and a successful solution to the Problem of Horrors—which we can term the ‘Reconciliation Account’. This specific conceptualisation will be formulated in light of the work of Marilyn McCord Adams, with an original extension of her work being made by utilising the work of Richard Swinburne and Robin Collins (amongst others), which, in combination, will provide us with a more robust solution (...) to the issue raised by horrors. (shrink)

E allora - possiamo mantenere, anche nel nostro 'Horror Pleni' quotidiano, una consapevolezza?

¿Por qué volver a pensar Auschwitz? ¿Qué sentido tendría si ya se ha abordado innumerables veces? Por un intento de comprensión del horror que no descansa y en ese marco destacamos los aportes de Emmanuel Levinas y de Primo Levi. El primero en Algunas reflexiones sobre la filosofía del hitlerismo (1934) anuncia y denuncia la estructura de exterminio que esta implicaba. El segundo en Si esto es un hombre escrito en 1946 y publicado en 1947, bajo el imperativo del (...) testimonio, sostiene que sobrevivir tuvo sentido para poder contar lo sucedido. Ambos textos tuvieron dificultades para ser oídos y consideramos que esto se debe a la premura de sus denuncias. Esas experiencias inaudibles lo fueron tanto por el objeto del relato –un horror desconocido hasta entonces- como por un régimen de sensibilidad que aún no podía abrirse a semejante escucha. (shrink)

This article provides support for the argument that horror media “works” by activating evolved cognitive and affective systems that are flexibly tailored to local socio-ecological contexts. Guided by previous work using evolutionary theory to study horror literature (e.g., Clasen 2012, 2018, 2019), I investigate horror manga’s popularity and international market, which indicate a cross-cultural preoccupation with horror transmedia that is expli­cable in terms of the form’s ability to target evolved psychological systems. Specifically, these multimodal texts elicit (...) the evolved emotions of anxiety, fear, and disgust in response to culturally specific and evolutionarily relevant narratives, characters, antagonists, and environments. Thus, horror manga reflects the myths, folklore, and religious traditions of Japanese society in addition to salient ubiquitous evolutionary threats such as predators, antisocial conspecifics, and infectious diseases. (shrink)

Americans cherish the idea that good eventually triumphs over evil. After briefly arguing that a proper understanding of the moral harm of cruelty calls into question the credibility of popular American idioms of redemption, I argue that the epistemic dynamics of horror help account for the commanding grip of this rhetoric on the popular imagination, and I suggest that this idiom has morally problematic features that warrant the attention of feminists.

For over a century, philosophers have argued that philosophy is impossible or useless, or both. Although the basic notion dates back to the days of Socrates, there is still heated disagreement about the nature of truth, reality, knowledge, the good, and God. This may make little practical difference to our lives, but it leaves us with a feeling of radical uncertainty, a feeling described by Kolakowski as "metaphysical horror." "The horror is this," he says, "if nothing truly exists (...) except the Absolute, the Absolute is nothing; if nothing truly exists except myself, I am nothing." The aim of this book, for Kolakowski, is finding a way out of this seeming dead end. In a trenchant analysis that serves as an introduction to nearly all of Western philosophy, Kolakowski confronts these dilemmas head on through examinations of several prominent philosophers including Descartes, Spinoza, Husserl, and many of the Neo-Platonists. He finds that philosophy may not provide definitive answers to the fundamental questions, yet the quest itself transforms our lives. It may undermine most of our certainties, yet it still leaves room for our spiritual yearnings and religious beliefs. The final sentence of the book captures the hopefulness that has survived the horror of nothingness when Kolakowski asks: "Is it not reasonable to suspect that if existence were pointless and the universe devoid of meaning, we would never have achieved not only the ability to imagine otherwise, but even the ability to entertain this very thought—to wit, that existence is pointless and the universe devoid of meaning?" The answer, of course, is clear. Now it is up to readers to take up the challenge of his arguments. (shrink)

J.L. Schellenberg argues that since God, if God exists, possesses both full knowledge by acquaintance of horrific suffering and also infinite compassion, the occurrence of horrific suffering is metaphysically incompatible with the existence of God. In this paper I begin by raising doubts about Schellenberg’s assumptions about divine knowledge by acquaintance and infinite compassion. I then focus on Schellenberg’s claim that necessarily, if God exists and the deepest good of finite persons is unsurpassably great and can be achieved without horrific (...) suffering, then no instances of horrific suffering bring about an improvement great enough to outweigh their great disvalue. I argue that there is no good reason, all things considered, to believe this claim. Thus Schellenberg’s argument from horrors fails. (shrink)

The horizon for feminists studying horror films appears bleak. Since _Psycho_'s infamous shower scene, the big screen has treated us to Freddie's long razor-nails emerging between Nancy's legs in the bathtub (_A Nightmare on Elm Street I_), De Palma's exhibitionist heroine being power-drilled into the floor (_Body Double_), and Leather-face hanging women from meat hooks (_The Texas Chain Saw Massacre_). Even in a film with a strong heroine like _Alien_, any feminist point is qualified by the monstrousness of the (...) alien mother, the objectification of Sigourney Weaver in her underwear, and her character Ripley's forced assumption of a maternal role. Despite all this, there has been some feminist work on horror, and I believe there is room for more. In the first part of this paper I shall survey and criticize currently dominant psychodynamic feminist approaches to horror. In the second part, I propose an alternative framework for constructing feminist interpretations of horror films by critically interrogating their gender ideologies. My proposal focuses less on the psychology of viewers than on the nature of films as artifacts with particular structures and functions. In the third part I illustrate my recommended framework by sketching readings of _Jurassic Park_ (Spielberg 1993), _The Fly_ (Cronenberg 1986), and _Repulsion_ (Polanski 1965). (shrink)

Three questions have occupied much of the philosophical literature on cinematic horror: What is horror? How is it able to frighten and disgust? Why do we seek out horror if it horrifies? Although there are numerous other important topics, this entry will focus on these three general questions, since they motivate the overwhelming majority of the philosophical writing on cinematic horror.

Words like "terrorism" and "war" no longer encompass the scope of contemporary violence. With this explosive book, Adriana Cavarero, one of the world's most provocative feminist theorists and political philosophers, effectively renders such terms obsolete. She introduces a new word—"horrorism"—to capture the experience of violence. Unlike terror, horrorism is a form of violation grounded in the offense of disfiguration and massacre. Numerous outbursts of violence fall within Cavarero's category of horrorism, especially when the phenomenology of violence is considered from the (...) perspective of the victim rather than that of the warrior. Cavarero locates horrorism in the philosophical, political, literary, and artistic representations of defenseless and vulnerable victims. She considers both terror and horror on the battlefields of the _Iliad_, in the decapitation of Medusa, and in the murder of Medea's children. In the modern arena, she forges a link between horror, extermination, and massacre, especially the Nazi death camps, and revisits the work of Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt's thesis on totalitarianism, and Arendt's debate with Georges Bataille on the estheticization of violence and cruelty. In applying the horroristic paradigm to the current phenomena of suicide bombers, torturers, and hypertechnological warfare, Cavarero integrates Susan Sontag's views on photography and the eroticization of horror, as well as ideas on violence and the state advanced by Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt. Through her searing analysis, Caverero proves that violence against the helpless claims a specific vocabulary, one that has been known for millennia, and not just to the Western tradition. Where common language fails to form a picture of atrocity, horrorism paints a brilliant portrait of its vivid reality. (shrink)

This chapter explores the relationship between ‘hardcore’ horror films, and the discursive context in which mainstream horror releases are being dubbed ‘extreme’. This chapter compares ‘mainstream’ and ‘hardcore’ horror with the aim of investigating what ‘extremity’ means. I will begin by outlining what ‘hardcore’ horror is, and how it differs from mainstream horror (both in terms of content and distribution). I will then dissect what ‘extremity’ means in this context, delineating problems with established critical discourses (...) about ‘extreme’ horror. Print press reviewers focus on theatrically released horror films, ignoring microbudget direct-to-video horror. As such, their adjudications about ‘extremity’ in horror begin from a limited base that misrepresents the genre. Moreover, ‘extremity’ is not a universally shared value, yet it is predominantly presented as if referring to an objective, universally agreed-upon standard. Such judgements change over time. Moreover, in contrast to marketers’ uses of ‘extreme’, press critics predominantly use the term as a pejorative. Although academics have sought to defend and contextualise particular maligned films and directors, scholars have focused on a handful of infamous examples. As I will explain, academic publishers implicitly support that narrow focus. As such, the cumulative body of scholarly work on ‘extreme’ horror inadvertently replicates print press critics’ mischaracterisation of the genre. These discursive factors limit our collective understandings of ‘horror’, its ostensible ‘extremity’. and of ‘extremity’ qua concept. Given that the discourse of ‘extremity’ is so commonly employed when censuring representations that challenge established genre conventions, it is imperative that horror studies academics attend to peripheral hardcore horror texts, and seek to develop more robust conceptual understandings of extremity. (shrink)

This book examines spectral haunting through the philosophies of Levinas and Derrida. Arguing that moral obligation can appear terrifying to the complacent self, the text interrogates ethical responsibility in contemporary horror genres.

Horror movies consistently reflect metaphorical associations between verticality and affect, as well as between brightness and affect. For example, bad events happen when movie characters are going downwards, or when lights go off. Monsters and villains emerge from below and from the darkness. And protagonists get lost and stuck in dark underground caves, dungeons, tunnels, mines, bunkers or sewers. Even movies that are primarily set above ground or in bright light have the most suspenseful scenes happening beneath the ground (...) and in the dark. An analysis of several horror movies highlights the striking consistency with which the two metaphors “EVIL IS DOWN” and “EVIL IS DARK” are used within this genre. I will argue that these metaphors help in creating fear. Moreover, I will outline how cinematic manifestations of metaphor elaborate and extend metaphorical concepts and ultimately may have a formative role in keeping metaphors alive within a culture. (shrink)

Where do a child’s morals come from? Interactions with other human beings provide arguably the primary contexts for moral development: family, friends, teachers and other people. It is the artistic products of human activity that this essay considers: literature, film, art, music. Specifically, I will consider some philosophical issues concerning the influence of folk and fairy tales on moral development. I will discuss issues of representation and reduction: in particular, how far should stories for children elide the complexities inherent to (...) many folk and fairy tales? Drawing on a distinction between a problematic reductionism and an appropriate pedagogical reduction, I suggest that pedagogical issues of representation require us to think about how to represent complexity in ways that are reductive without being reductionist, that can delight and engage without being horrifying or tedious. While there is a place for horror and for boredom, it is primarily a matter of timing... (shrink)

There is a growing interest in the role of non-cognitive affective responses in the philosophical literature on fiction and emotion. This flurry of scholarly interest is partly a reaction to cognitivist accounts of fiction and emotion that have been found to be inadequate. The inadequacy is particularly salient when this approach is employed to account for narrative horror. Cognitivist conceptions of the emotion engendered by narrative horror prove to be too restrictive. Cognitivist accounts also fail to give the (...) formal devices and stylistic elements deployed in narrative horror a proper place within the spectator’s emotional engagement with it. In this paper I propose an alternative conception of the emotion “horror” that incorporates non-cognitive affective responses. I argue that this conception of “horror” is more fine-grained than the one characterized as a cognitivist approach. It captures more literary examples of the horror experience and it accommodates better the fear of the unknown. It also makes possible an aesthetics of horror in which formal devices and stylistic elements are given their proper place. (shrink)

In “The Immorality of Horror Films,” philosopher and film scholar Gianluca Di Muzio proposes an analytic argument that aims to prove horror narratives, particularly slashers, unethical. His Argument from Reactive Attitudes contests slashers encourage pleasurable responses towards depictions of torture and death, which is possible only by suspending compassionate reactions. Doing so degrades sympathy and empathy, causing desensitization. This article will argue Di Muzio’s ARA, while valuable to discussion of art horror and morbidity, fails to meet its (...) intended aim. The ARA contains structural flaws in its logic, compounded by reliance on insufficient evidence. Additionally, Di Muzio does not adequately consider or rebut prominent aesthetic concerns, including ontological and moral distance of representations. Lastly, the argument utilizes a flawed classificatory schema that undermines its primary goal. Even narrowly confined to slashers, the ARA cannot explain alternative reasons for engaging with horror, nor does it account for those nuanced slasher works designed to foster compassion. The project concludes by offering a modified ARA with greater potential to accurately analyze the interrelation between art horror and morality. (shrink)