Can't wait for the Tumblr discourse on whether Xi has 729 times the wealth of the average Chinese person or only 728, held entirely in English and without the input of a single person living in China
Officially, I'm not a philosopher. I don't even have an associates degree. I married an "official" philosopher, and I am a philosophical person for sure, but I can't claim the title because I simply don't have the education to back me up. Respectfully, I have no fucking idea what I'm talking about.
So when The Silt Verses roosted in my brain and refused to leave - I don't even like horror, okay? I'm so easily spooked and so sensitive to depictions of people's discomfort that it's baffling for me to be this obsessed with a property like this - all I could do was marvel at the writers' clear philosophy, and be a little frustrated that I'm just not educated enough to write anything decent about it.
I tried jotting something down, but I got self conscious and hid it under a private post because, again, I am completely fuckin out of my depth. Also I don't want to be yelled at for my takes on religion as a lifelong atheist. But I'm still fascinated and needed more from smarter people than me, so I tracked down a philosophy book about this stuff instead. Golly, they're much more eloquent than I am.
I couldn't find the complete text of The Philosophy of Horror by Thomas Fahy, published by the University Press of Kentucky 6/1/2012, at my local library's Libby. I DID, however, get access to the overview and I had some downtime at work today. So instead of typing up what are my surely bad takes, here is a real actual philosopher on the subject of horror!
There is so much of what I am finding in TSV in this text. It makes my brain all tingly, and nobody in my life is into anything even approaching whatever you'd call TSV, so I wanted to share it with you instead of infodumping it at one of my innocent bystanding loved ones.
Abridged excerpt of the Overview, under the jump.
[Philip J. Nickel] argues that the good of horror comes from its ability to challenge our commonplace assumptions about safety and security: “The idea of security in the everyday is based on an intellectually dubious but pragmatically attractive construction. We can hardly resist relying on the world not to annihilate us, and we can hardly resist trusting others not to do so.” Using Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and Psycho as examples, Nickel argues that horror’s power comes from a “malicious ripping-away of this intellectual trust, exposing other vulnerabilities in relying on the world and on other people.” So what is good about this experience? Nickel concludes that the value of horror comes from reminding us of this vulnerability, demonstrating the importance of acting in the presence of fear, and making us aware of the ways in which we have constructed a safe worldview in order to function.
Philip Tallon’s “Though a Mirror, Darkly: Art-Horror as a Medium for Moral Reflection” also investigates the ways that horror disrupts and challenges our perceptions. The value of art-horror, Talon argues, comes from “reminding us of our inner moral frailty and…forcing us to take seriously the moral reality of evil.” Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein offers a portrait of this frailty through Victor Frankenstein. She uses his hubris to expose the dangers of scientific rationalism and exploration in the Enlightenment era. Tallon juxtaposes Victor’s moral weakness here with postmodern horror. Just as the Romantic era questioned Enlightenment attitudes about progress, postmodernism has attacked similar assumptions about progress in contemporary society. Even though the postmodern era has given rise to moral relativism, it has not removed a longing and desire for order. This is what makes horror so effective today: it offers audiences “a sense of moral, social, and aesthetic stability.” As Tallon explains through Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot’, “it seems, then, that horror not only provides a critique of our optimism about the world, but also expresses our pessimism about any sense of order: horror horror helps to illuminate aspects of our commonly held, if explicitly denied, underlying objective view of morality.”
The extreme violence of torture-horror films, however, makes it difficult for many viewers to find the kind of moral value that Nickel and Tallon propose. But Jeremy Morris argues that understanding the moral issues at play in works like Saw, Hostel, and The Devil’s Rejects is essential for appreciating them. Like other works of horror, these types of films strive to elicit fear in the audience, but they do so through torture. Some of the essential features of torture-horror include a role reversal between torturer and victim, realism, retributivist elements, narratives that seek an appropriate code of punishment, and sadism. These aspects ultimately raise questions about justification and pleasure: Is torture justified? Is the audience’s enjoyment of torture justified? Putting these questions in dialogue with Kant’s ideas about autonomy as they relate to retribution and sadism, Morris concludes that the audiences pleasure comes from the ways in which the torturer’s pleasure is infectious. “Here is the genius of sadistic torture-horror: it transforms the source of fear from a distant other to something familiar in ourselves. The terror of the victim is supplanted by the delight of the torturer, which is being consciously shared by the audience: that is the source of horror.” Torture-horror, therefore, requires an audience both to empathize with the victim and to share in some of the unsavory joy of the torturer/killer. This response is not a way of condoning torture; it merely acknowledges that an empathetic person can share in the pleasure of both moral and immoral acts.
Just as torture-horror films collapse this distance between self and other, Truman Capote suggests that violent crime can make us interrogate our own capacity for brutality as well. My essay, “Hobbes, Human Nature, and the Culture of American Violence in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood,” explores some of the disturbing questions raised by this novel: How and why were Dick and Perry capable of such brutality? Could you or I do such things? These questions resonate with Thomas Hobbes’s philosophy about the innate aggression and brutality of human beings. His pessimistic outlook can provide some insight into the source of terror in Capote’s work – that such violence, resentment, and anger are in all of us. Before discussing this connection, I argue that In Cold Blood taps into the conventions of the horror genre by focusing on its use of a horrific event and the imagined encounter with the monstrous. I then discuss Hobbes’s notion of human nature and th sovereign – a figure that promises to provide moral justice and prevent mankind from being in a perpetual state of war. But what happens if this source of moral authority (the sovereign) is absent? If the veneer of civilization is removed? Capote’s answer, like the one offered by Hobbes, is clear: we will all act in cold blood.
[…]
Lorena Russell moves the discussion from individual to familial identity. Specifically, her reading of two versions of The Hills Have Eyes considers the complex and often contradictory ideologies surrounding family and “family values” in America. By presenting the family under siege theme, both films question these culturally constructed ideologies and explore the repercussions of state-sponsored violence. Using the post-structuralist theories of Althusser and Foucault, Russell first argues for the importance of cultural criticism in film studies (a claim that some philosophers reject) because it challenges us to recognize the sociopolitical significance of a work like The Hills Have Eyes. It also invites us to consider the ambiguities surrounding the production of meaning and the power that operates through ideological formations. In these ways, “film can at once further and challenge ideological struggles around complex political concepts like ‘family values.’” The critique of government-sponsored violence and deception in The Hills Have Eyes, for example, comes from the ways in which the film invites us to sympathize with the murderous outlaw family and, through Doug, Bobby, and Brenda’s transformation into warriors, to see our own capacity for violence. The inversion of self/other and “civilized”/”savage” suggests and ambivalence about family that Russell sees as in line with the complexities found in the horror genre
[…]
Russell’s use of cultural criticism provides an effective segue for the next three essays, which focus on cultural history. In “Zombies of the Word, Unite: Class Struggle and Alienaton in Land of the Dead,” John Lutz explores the similarities between the economic system in George Romero’s Land of the Dead and Karl Marx’s view of capitalist society, arguing that the fil is an allegory for “America and its relationship to the underdeveloped, exploited nations on the periphery of empire.” […] Lutz also argues that the allegory of the film functions as an indictment of America’s central place in global economic imperialism – a place that is maintained by violence and exploitation. This violence not only operates on a global scale, but domestically it also protects those of wealth and privilege. Ultimately, the living dead become metaphors for the working classes, who have been dehumanized by brutal working conditions, hunger, and poverty. And Romero’s film uses the zombie revolt as an image for socialist revolution; it even presents a revolutionary consciousness as essential for the working class (zombies) to regain their humanity. ‘In an interesting parallel to Marx’s description of class consciousness as a product of revolutionary struggle,” Lutz points out, “the zombies begin to regain their humanity only when they revolt against the wealthy denizens of Pittsburgh who have been appropriating and consuming the commodities taken from their territory.”
[…]
The impact of past violence on the present is also examined in the novel and film versions of The Shining. John Lutz’s essay “From Domestic Nightmares to the Nightmare of History: Uncanny Eruptions of Violence in King’s and Kubrick’s Versions of The Shining” pinpoints in these works three interrelated elements of what Freud called the “uncanny” – the domestic abuse story, “the postcolonial narrative of American expansion at the expense of nonwhite victims, and the desire for power and control that underlies commodification and the social hierarchies that reinforce it.” Specifically, Kubrick draws on a crucial moment in King’s novel when Danny compares his own feelings of vulnerability to a picture that challenges viewers to “find the Indians.” This image, Lutz argues, becomes the visual puzzle that Kubrick uses in his adaptation of the book to critique “the inability of America to acknowledge or come to terms with the genocide of Native Americans.” While King’s novel focuses on domestic abuse, Kubrick gives the film a broader historical scope. The film “maintains the core elements of domestic violence but widens the scope of the past to incorporate European and American history.”
The uncanny also operates in Patrick Süskind’s Perfume through the protagonist, Grenouille. As Susann Cokal explains in “Hot with Rapture and Cold with Fear’: Grotesque, Sublime, and Postmodern Transformations in Patrick Süskind’s Perfume,” Grenouille is a quintessential figure of horror – a malevolent, deformed, ugly, and odorless monster who is associated with the grotesque and the sublime. Cokal argues that his quest for identity, which leads him to “destroy and deconstruct beauty in order to create something sublime, is part of the book’s ultimate horror, as Perfume’s readers (or moviegoers) hover between feelings of revulsion and the hope inspired by beauty.” In this way, Süskind invokes different aspects of the sublime – contrasting its understanding in the eighteenth century (as influenced by Kant) with that of the postmodern era – to contemplate the plight of the artist. The tragedy and horror for Grenouille, as well as for the eighteenth-century philosopher and for artists in general, are that he can recognize the sublime, can reproduce and even communicate it in his work, but he always remains aware of his own limitations. As a result, he can never experience his creation as others do.
[…]
[The multiplicities of Narrow Rooms] yoke together opposites and combine the horrific with the beautiful, inviting us to embrace the former: “While horror is often configured or understood in our culture as an impulse that turns us away from encounters, [James] Purdy constructs an acceptance of horror as an expansion of our possibilities.” It ultimately “strengthens our ability to live creatively” and gives us insight into certain experiences without having to go through them ourselves.
ive been thinking abt plagiarism and ai and stuff recently and honestly i dont think plagiarism is as big an issue as it's made out to be in a lot of contexts. like not to deny the ethical issues with art stealing or ai or the like but it's amazing how purely constructed most of our moral norms surrounding plagiarism are (and how many of them are just copyright law turned into some kind of universal norm)
I'm kind of obsessed with the recurrence in Greek dialogues of using Socrates as a character in them. Reading Aristophanes' The Clouds right now and imagine my surprise to find he's got Socrates hanging in a basket as the stage directions. Plato is guilty of this also. #obsessed
