Loving the Alien

“Lovecraft’s most ardent recent lovers have been philosophers like Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, and Eugene Thacker, who approach his work with a new kind of intellectual intensity. These philosophers see Lovecraft as effecting a kind of Copernican revolution. In story after story, he depicts the invasion of the human world by a monstrous perspective, embodied in hideous forms of alien life. But what makes Lovecraftian horror genuinely cosmic is the capacity of the monstrous perspective to put humans in their place.”

“The philosophers believe that Lovecraft’s fictions dramatize the truth about the universe. To understand the world we find ourselves in, we need to “unhumanize our views a little,” in words of Lovecraft’s contemporary, the poet Robinson Jeffers.”

“The philosophers imitate Lovecraft by resolutely pushing to the margins our own interest in the world, our own desire for the world, our own experience of the world. They tell us that we should strive to see ourselves as the puny and fundamentally insignificant beings we are. We need to abandon our comforting illusions of a human-centered world and orient our thought to the vast cold universe of things.”

“We must inquire how things look from the perspective of the things themselves; we must attend to the world without us.”

“As Thacker writes, those who desire truth should lose interest in their own experience, and instead track “that which in the shadows withdraws from any possible experience.””

“We will thereby overcome the Kantian human revolution and become soldiers of Lovecraft’s inhuman revolution, on the horrific path to the things in themselves.”

“Ligotti psychologizes the phenomenon of cosmic horror, showing us the human appeal of inhuman vision. He suggests that our desire for knowledge of the world beyond the human conceals our desire to lose ourselves in it.”

“Today one often hears the call to surrender our anthropomorphic vision as an ethical challenge. Being less anthropomorphic will enable us to care for the environment better; it will advance animal rights. Such calls confuse inhuman vision with human empathy. Empathy might be a door leading to inhuman vision, but inhuman vision is not empathy. To unhumanize our vision involves a disintegration of the world where such things as “care of the environment” make sense. When one truly sees the world inhumanly, there is no environment. Nor is there care.”

“Ligotti gives this wild impulse to surrender our human way of seeing things its proper name: vice.”

“His protagonists voluptuously give themselves over to it. They seek disciplines and practices that will give them the capacity to see the human world as a deceptive veil, “an ornamented void.” They wish to live, as the speaker of the lines quoted above lives, “in unwavering acceptance of the spectral nature of things.””

“Organic and inorganic matter pushes through the familiar shapes of the human world and warps them. Our world dissolves in fantastic shapes and unreal colors, “appearances cast out of emptiness.””

“To understand the allure of the vice of posthumanism, you must empathize with the workers in the quotation. Have you ever felt the things of the human world like a burden you carry?”

“In the human view of things, appearance is welded to reality. Things are what they seem. The appearance of the streetlamp is welded to the function of lighting streets, which is welded to the effort to prevent crime, which is welded to the concerns of middle-class suburbanites, and so on. This is human reality.”

“But if you can short-circuit the connection between appearance and depth, between thing and meaning, you can open a little hole in reality. You can make this human world suggest another.”

“Things are not what they seem. This is the mantra and the practice of cosmic horror.”

“While the focus in Lovecraft is always on the alien reality below the appearances, Ligotti is fascinated by the simple capacity of changing appearances to suggest a different reality. He pursues the inhumanist psychology of the process in which appearances come loose from their anchor in the human world.”

““everything in the unreal points to the infinite.” The unreal is “unbounded by the strictures of existing.””

“the key modernist aesthetic strategy, which Viktor Shklovsky in his classic 1917 essay “Art as Technique” termed defamiliarization, is also the key strategy for producing the unreality of cosmic horror. Defamiliarization cancels the habituated meanings of the human world, and allows appearances to float free.”

“We might approach this experience by asking: Who is it that feels liberation when the weight of life is lifted? Who is it that feels infinity flower as the appearances of the human world drift free of the things?

If in Ligotti’s cosmic horror “unreal” names the desired object of perception, then “unborn” names the desired subject of perception. The one who opens himself to the uncanny experience of the disintegration of the human world, discovers in himself a trace of someone or something that is not human.”

“Lovecraft says: There are people who like this kind of thing. Ligotti says: And you are one of them. You who love cosmic horror are one of them, one of us.”