Kristeva vs. Lovecraft on Horror and Abjection (Part One)

More on Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror (1980) plus H.P. Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu" (1928).

What is the object of fear? In our last episode, we outlined Kristeva's view that it's ultimately the disintegration of self. Our purpose in this further episode (featuring Mark, Seth, and Dylan, who couldn't attend last time) was to clarify her account of how self-integrity is accomplished and then to use Lovecraft's unnameable (OK, he's named Cthulhu) and undepictable (well, OK, the story has lots of depictions of him; he's even a plush doll) object of fear as a case study exploring how well Kristeva's notion of abjection captures what we understand fear to amount to."

#philosophy #horror #abjection #psychoanalysis #neurosis #subjectivity #individuation #freud #lacan #lovecraft

Go to the blog: https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2018/11/19/ep203-1-kristeva-lovecraft/