Weird Materialism: H.P.Lovecraft, Weird Fiction, & the Problem of Matter

Professor Benjamin Noys, University of Chichester

Please send an mail to tombunyard@gmail.com if you would like to attend, and for copies of the texts for the seminar.

Abstract

Weird fiction – that unstable generic hybrid of horror, science-fiction, and fantasy – has often been dismissed as a signature example of ‘bad art’ (Edmund Wilson); today it has claimed an unlikely place at the centre of philosophical concern. Speculative realism, object-oriented philosophy, and accelerationism, have all made use of H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction of cosmic horror to indicate a writing of matter beyond anthropocentric concern. This interest in weird fiction has been reinforced by both artistic and literary forms of the New Weird. Here I want to return to the Haute Weird, of the period 1890-1940, to probe the philosophical concern with matter that runs through these fictions. I trace a schematic division between those fictions that spiritualize matter, positing a spiritual materialism of a universe crowded with entities both malign and benignant, and the mechanistic and desolate universe of ‘absolute materialism’ found in Lovecraft. This division dictates the unstable position of weird fiction in contemporary philosophy, as it drifts between vitalism, animism, and nihilism. At issue here, however, is also the politics of this metaphysics of matter – the ways in which these conceptualizations of ‘matter’ also activate a range of often reactionary political positions. The question of matter turns not only on metaphysics, but also on which lives ‘matter’ dictated by violent hierarchizations of the spiritual and material. The persistent treatment of ‘matter’ as beyond anthropocentric concern risks minimizing and occluding the embedding of ‘matter’ within ‘human, all-too-human’ socio-political forms of racism and class politics.

Professor Benjamin Noys is Professor of Critical Theory at the University of Chichester. He is the author of Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction (2000), The Culture of Death (2005), The Persistence of the Negative (2010), and Malign Velocities (2014).