TheLitCritGuy

Literary Criticism and Theory. Not just for the few but for everyone, everywhere

[thelitcritguy]

Kierkgaard on Calth: Continuing The Heresy | TheLitCritGuy

I am at present, just about to start Book 26 in The Horus Heresy. At this point, still quite some distance from being halfway through, I’m h

"Twenty-six books in I’ve reached the beginning of the middle of the journey and so these books reveal a universe in which every attempt at stability, whether that ethical, aesthetic, or theological, collapses under the weight of its own misrelation. The Ultramarines’ sudden confrontation with contingency, the Word Bearers’ catastrophic leap into a malformed absolute, and the Imperium’s refusal to acknowledge the Warp as constitutive of its own being are not discrete narrative beats but a mode of Kierkegaardian despair."

[thelitcritguy]

We’re All Trapped in Capitalism’s Backrooms

An internet urban legend, now a hit horror movie, shows the vast, meaningless maze behind modern life.

The great Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson once argued that capitalism produces spaces so vast, abstract, and systemically interconnected that individuals can no longer form what he called a “cognitive map” of the world they inhabit. We try to make sense of our present condition by situating ourselves within it, but the world in which we exist is marked by constant change, globalization, and the erosion of all traditional structures, leading to an existential and political sense of dislocation. This mapping is not simply about navigating a changing world, but allows for both the exercise of agency and the development of politics. After all, in previous generations we might find the world easier to navigate, or make sense of—you might live in a particular community, shop at the store you could afford to go to, and work in a specific location.

So a good example to understand the importance of cognitive mapping can be through the simple question: where do you work? In an era of gig-economy employment, insecure housing, and a 24/7 “just in time” economy, the answer to that question for many of us might as well be, everywhere and nowhere. So many of us are just like Clark, living and working in the same place—a place which isn’t really suited to either of those things. In the era of Slack and Microsoft Teams, work doesn’t stay “at work,” but follows us wherever we go. For Jameson, culture and art that was conducive to cognitive mapping was an essential part of any socialist or leftist politics, because it allows people to collectively grasp the truth of their political, economic and social situation. As he put it in his famous book Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism: “‘Cognitive mapping’ was nothing but a code word for ‘class consciousness.’” In other words, you can’t participate in a class struggle if you can’t even see the dimensions of the battlefield.

[thelitcritguy]

“Obsession” and the Horror of Treating People Like Products

In director Curry Barker’s hit indie horror film, we can see the fundamental ghastliness of consumer society.

"What would you do if you could get anything that you ever wanted? Not through some act of blood-soaked violence, but simply through the force of your desire. What if you could manifest it, just make a wish for that thing you really wanted more than anything else? What if all you needed to do was tap a button on a screen and any product you could think of would be with you in just a day? What would you rationalize and excuse away? You could do everything and anything you wanted, able to outsource your sense of responsibility or justice to an abstract and impersonal force, able to be a monumental coward and still indulge your own desire."

[thelitcritguy]

logging on, to continue being a "freelance writer" of some description.

[thelitcritguy]

Hegel Contra The Primarchs: On the Horus Tragedy | TheLitCritGuy

Hegel Contra The Primarchs: On the Horus Tragedy by TheLitCritGuy on Patreon. Join TheLitCritGuy's community for exclusive content and updat

Can you understand Hegel through the medium of Warhammer 40,000 novels? I don't know but I am absolutely going to try and find out.

"The precipitating incident is a crisis of sovereign legitimacy, or in other words, a conflict between the military and political forms of sovereign power.  After the Emperor and his sons secure a great victory at Ullanor, he retreats from military modes of power and retreats to Terra, to take up an at-first-unspecified great work. This can be seen as a move from the material to the Ideal, or, in other words, from the realm of power as immediate force to one in which power is understood as politics. It is this which triggers the inevitable collapse of the Imperium into civil war, and Horus forsaking his father. After all, the Emperor's "Imperial Truth" is an attempt at absolute secular sovereignty: banning religion while claiming god-like authority (the classic Schmittian sovereign who decides on the exception). The Primarchs are his homunculi, designed to be extensions of sovereign will, yet granted semi-autonomous personhood. This creates an immediate legitimation crisis: they are both sons and tools, individuals and gene-wrought weapons. Horus' "abandonment" (the Emperor's secrecy, the withdrawal to Terra) exposes the paternal fiction and their own inherent disposability under the Imperial regime. For these genetically perfected soldiers, the end of the war is the end of meaning itself, an unforgivable subordination of the real to the Ideal."

[thelitcritguy]

On the Dialectic of Nature and the Warp The Horus Heresy Thus Far | TheLitCritGuy

On the Dialectic of Nature and the Warp The Horus Heresy Thus Far by TheLitCritGuy on Patreon. Join TheLitCritGuy's community for exclusi

Driven by some dark, cthonic urge and due to the enabling of @laboring-leon I'm reading all sixty plus novels outlining the Horus Heresy and every ten novels or so I'm going to be writing about the story thus far. The first installment covers transmedia storytelling, a brief mention of Engels Dialectic of Nature and the irrational kernel at the heart of every rationalist project.

[thelitcritguy]

The Banal Horror of Jimmy Fallon

Under the sterile blue lights of his studio, Fallon laughs endlessly at the same pseudo-jokes, rubs elbows with Trump and Sam Altman, and us

Fallon presides over his rituals of play like a vampire, feeding not on blood but on enthusiasm. He doesn’t really converse with any of his guests; they all know what they are there for. Rather, he extracts. He demands “relatability” from them, draining the authenticity from the interaction until only the husk of a “viral moment” remains. The horror lies in the repetition: the feigned shock, the hysterical laughter at unfunny mishaps, the relentless “Golden Retriever energy.”

[thelitcritguy]

On The Retreat from Theory: Review of The Horror Theory Reader

Jon Greenaway Under Review:The Horror Theory Reader. Edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock. University of Minnesota Press, January 2026. The pu

By contrast, The Horror Theory Reader doesn’t provide new scholarship—the publication history at the back of the book lists the various places the material originally appeared. Without lapsing into cynicism, it would be easy to see this new reader as an exercise in opportunism, sourcing already-existing work to be packaged under a new label capitalizing on the current marketability of the subject. At the end of his book Marxism and Form, which did much to introduce what he termed “dialectical criticism” to Anglophone readers, Fredric Jameson writes this:

The literary fact, like the other objects that make up our social reality, cries out for interpretation, for decipherment, for diagnosis. It appeals to the other disciplines in vain: Anglo-American philosophy has long since been shorn of its dangerous speculative capacities, and as for political science, it suffixes only to think of its distance from the great political and Utopian theories of the past to realize to what degree thought asphyxiates in our culture, with its absolute inability to imagine anything other than what is. It therefore falls to literary criticism to continue to compare the inside and the outside, existence and history, to continue to pass judgement on the abstract quality of life in the present and to keep alive the idea of a concrete future. May it prove equal to the task!

The good news is that literary criticism does seem to be up to that task, for horror studies at least, though unfortunately not with The Horror Theory Reader. The exciting and generative work of horror theory continues apace, not necessarily within the confines of academia but in books, essays and in my experience, podcasts that are reaching new audiences and raising the quality of critical discourse beyond the tired moralistic question of why people might enjoy horror. In a time of capitalist crises, of rising fascist reaction, and of ecological catastrophe, our fears and nightmares have never had greater political valence or importance. Theory—speculative, political and liberatory thought—can be a tool for understanding these fears, not just exposing the nightmares of history but perhaps even glimpsing, through the dark, a potential future beyond the horror.

[thelitcritguy]

The Black Sun, or, Reflections on the Dark Sign | TheLitCritGuy

Get more from TheLitCritGuy on Patreon

"I came to Dark Souls too late. Appropriate really, given the ways in which all the FromSoft games have become synecdoche for a certain kind of games discourse. I mean, am I really trying to write about them now? Trying to squeeze something from this carcass, picked clean. Bones, bleaching under the rays of bright, black sun. What else is there to say?"

[thelitcritguy]

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Basilisk: Some Early thoughts on the Political Theology of AI | TheLitCritGuy

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"What these people want (influenced by the anti-democratic reactionary philosophy of Thiel and others) is a world in which politics itself is no longer thinkable at all."

On the political theology of AI, over on patreon.

[thelitcritguy]

On Moral Repugnance

I won't use it and you can't make me

"The imperative to use AI to create is an attempt to frame a problem of politics as a problem of efficiency. I do not need to be more efficient, I need time and freedom to read and to think and to write and to fail as we all do."

Some thoughts on my moral repugnance towards GenAI

[thelitcritguy]

A Series of Short Essays on The Haunted House Film

Over the past few months, in preperation for my next book, (provisionally titled Under the Floorboards) I've been getting back in to writing more direct film criticism. I've set myself a challenge of trying to watch haunted house film, write some thoughts and responses and to keep this habit going for as long as I can. It's essentially an attempt to build a research notebook in public and to keep my blog thehaunt alive (hey remember blogs, whatever happened there, we should bring those back)

The selection criteria, is at best, a little idiosyncratic, but I'm hoping this can build out into a useful guide to the haunted house on film if I can keep going long enough. At present, I've jumped around a little, and I'm always looking for films which are a little off the beaten path to fill in gaps in my own knowledge or just to find something new, strange, and interesting.

You can find all the parts thus far linked below - but I'm looking for suggestions or requests. If there's a haunted house movie (and take that as broadly as you like) you enjoy, do let me know and I'll add it to my slowly ever-expanding doc of movies i'm determined to work my way through.

Stay spooky

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Part Six

[thelitcritguy]

The Haunted House On Film Part One

Over the next few months I’ve decided to spend some time exploring the haunted house in horror film. Given the simplicity of the plots, and

In preperation for the next book project, I'm spending a lot of time writing about haunted houses in horror film. Some of this might be background or notes for the final book but if you'd like to read along, or catch up on previous installments you can find them all at thehaunt.blog -- go subscribe or, if you'd like early access to everything and to send me some suggestions, then you can get everything through patreon.com/thelitcritguy

[thelitcritguy]

On the new translation of Capitalism: A Horror Story

On my "monstrous progeny"

On the publication of a new translation of Capitalism A Horror Story, a reminder to boycott Watkins Media.

Boycott Watkins

[iwilleatyourenglish]

someone said you might be a good resource to ask about horror studies

do you have any recommendations for good academic papers about sexual violence in horror

I DO!! one of the components of my PhD thesis is actually going to be about sexual violence in horror!

here are some resources that may interest you:

Beal, E. and Greenaway, J. (eds.) (2019). Horror and Religion: New Literary Approaches to Theology, Race and Sexuality. 1st edn. University of Wales Press.

Clover, C.J. (1987). ‘Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film’, Representations, 20, pp.187–228. doi:https://doi.org/10.2307/2928507.

Clover, C.J. (2015). Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton Collections.

Harrington, E. (2017). ‘Roses and Thorns: Virgins, Vagina Dentata and the Monstrosity of Female Sexuality’, in Women, Monstrosity and Horror Film. 1st edn. Routledge, pp.33–87. doi:10.4324/9781315546568

Tait, S. (2008). ‘Pornographies of violence? Internet spectatorship on Body Horror’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 25(1), pp.91–111.

Williams, L. (1991). ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess’, Film Quarterly, 44(4), pp.2–13.

[gothicseverance]

We can see the Gothic as articulating the collective unconscious fears of what it means to live under capitalism at a particular time.

—Capitalism: A Horror Story

[gothicseverance]

Capitalism is, in Marx’s words, sodden with gore — a monster which emerges from the grave dripping with the viscera of those who are chewed to pieces in the gears of the machine.

—Capitalism: A Horror Story