Today, H. P. Lovecraft is both more popular and controversial than ever: the influence of his ‘Cthulhu mythos’ is everywhere in popular culture, his cosmic pessimism has reemerged as a major theme in contemporary philosophy, and his racism continues to spark controversy in the media.
The Love of Ruins takes a fresh look at a figure widely acknowledged as the father of modern horror or ‘weird’ fiction. In these pages, Lovecraft emerges not as the atheist and nihilist he is often claimed to be, but as a kind of ‘psychonaut’ and mystic whose stories, through their own imaginative rigor, expose the intellectual bankruptcy of their author’s racism.
The Love of Ruins is itself written in the form of letters, in order to do homage to Lovecraft’s love of the form of the personal letter (he wrote more than 100, 000), and to emulate Lovecraft’s lifetime practice of thinking-as-corresponding.
Содержание
Preface
1. Prayers
2. Warnings
3. Psychonautics, Sublimity, Love
4. Love and Ruins
5. Ruins and Race
6. Ruins, Sublimity, Laughter
7. Race and Writing
8. Writing and the Love of Ruins
9. Race, the Fourth Dimension, Apophasis
10. Race, the Love of Wounds
11. Wounds, Race, Music, and Noise
12. Race, Orientalism, Writing
13. Time Travel, White Mythology, the Library
14. Cities in Ruins
15. The Late City, the Decline of the West
16. Basalt Towers, Trapdoors, Taboos, Nameless Beings
17. Apophasis, Science Fiction, Visibility and Racism, Im-Possible Politics
18. Archive, Irruption, Eruption, Basalt
19. The Great Race, the Archive
20. Comedy and Laughter
21. Class, Socialism, Politics
22. Doubling, Indirect Racism, the Gift of Vision, Nonknowledge
23. The Fourth Dimension, Community
24. The Fourth Dimension, Community, Unworking
25. Community, Sacrifice, Cults
26. Racial Degeneration, Police, Sacrifice
27. Sacrifice, Madness, One Blood, the Invention of the White Race, Frogs
28. Untimeliness, Sacrifice, Religion
29. Religion after Religion, Dread
30. Religion, the Wholesome, Faith and Knowledge
31. Kindness, Wonder, Horror
32. Hauntology, Religion, Science, Race, and Racism
33. Modern Apophasis
34. The Weird, the Future, the Open
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Об авторе
Scott Cutler Shershow is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis, and author of
Deconstructing Dignity: A Critique of the Right-to-Die Debate
Scott Michaelsen is Professor of English at Michigan State University and coauthor (with David E. Johnson) of
Anthropology’s Wake: Attending to the End of Culture.