Book cover for Weird Realism

Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy

Author:

Rating: ★★★★★


Language: en-US

Genre: Philosophy

Themes: Speculative Realism, Phenomenology

Format: eBook

Finished: November 28, 2023

ISBN: 9781780999074

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2012

Edition: First

Pages: 277

About The Book

As Hölderlin was to Martin Heidegger and Mallarmé to Jacques Derrida, so is H.P. Lovecraft to the Speculative Realist philosophers. Lovecraft was one of the brightest stars of the horror and science fiction magazines, but died in poverty and relative obscurity in the 1930s. In 2005 he was finally elevated from pulp status to the classical literary canon with the release of a Library of America volume dedicated to his work. The impact of Lovecraft on philosophy has been building for more than a decade. Initially championed by shadowy guru Nick Land at Warwick during the 1990s, he was later discovered to be an object of private fascination for all four original members of the twenty-first century Speculative Realist movement. In this book, Graham Harman extracts the basic philosophical concepts underlying the work of Lovecraft, yielding a weird realism capable of freeing continental philosophy from its current soul-crushing impasse. Abandoning pious references by Heidegger to Hölderlin and the Greeks, Harman develops a new philosophical mythology centered in such Lovecraftian figures as Cthulhu, Wilbur Whately, and the rat-like monstrosity Brown Jenkin. The Miskatonic River replaces the Rhine and the Ister, while the Caucasus of Hölderlin gives way to the Antarctic mountains of madness of Lovecraft.

My Thoughts

Lovecraft is a guilty pleasure of my childhood. A pleasure because at the time the cosmic horror and existential dread at the center of his work was right up my alley. Guilty because well, Lovecraft was an unrepentant white supremacist and vile racist that even other racists and white supremacists of his time thought went a bit too far.

Speculative Realism also has a problem. Two problems really. The first is named Nick Land. The second is attempting to distance themselves from both Nick Land and from established academic philosophy at the same time.

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