Black Matters: The Cosmic Horror of Thomas Ligotti
Lee-Price, Simon (2023) Black Matters: The Cosmic Horror of Thomas Ligotti. In: London Conference in Critical Thought, 30 June to 1 July 2023, London Metropolitan University, London, UK. (Unpublished)
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Abstract
The philosophically savvy weird fiction of Thomas Ligotti expounds a deeply pessimistic view of human existence in a universe that is ultimately unknowable. Among its recurring themes are ruination, social deprivation, precarity, persecution, mental disorder, and sickness. In 2011, Ligotti published The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, a nonfiction work in which he elaborates his philosophical pessimism and antinatalist convictions. In my presentation, I will discuss two of Ligotti’s short stories, ‘Purity’ and ‘The Shadow, the Darkness’, which bookend the collection Teatro Grottesco (2008). Set among a small community of misfit artists and intellectuals, ‘The Shadow, the Darkness’ exposes the phenomenal world as the deceptive creation of an utterly alien and inscrutable force, evocative of Kant’s noumena, Schopenhauer’s Will and the hypothetical dark matter of physicists. ‘Purity’ features a poor white family and Candy, one of the very few explicitly ‘black’ characters to appear in Ligotti’s fiction. Candy inhabits ‘another world altogether . . . a twisted paradise of danger and derangement’ and the hunting ground of a child-murderer, who is revealed to be a white police detective. Through the figure of Candy, Ligotti’s treatment of a universal antihuman conspiracy is grounded in the lived experience of violent antiblack oppression and glaring racial disparities in the USA. In my consideration of Ligotti’s pervasive use of ‘blackness’ and its cognates to represent metaphysical outer limits and his portrayal of negated black lives, I will draw on Afropessimist scholar Calvin L Warren’s Heidegger-inspired Ontological Terror (2018). Warren provocatively proposes that ‘Heideggerian anxiety transforms into antiblack violence when Dasein flees the anxiety nothing stimulates and projects it as terror onto blacks.’ I will argue that Ligotti’s brand of cosmic horror can be read as a distinctly white (supremacist) ontometaphyiscal nightmare.
| Item Type: | Conference or Workshop Item (Paper) |
|---|---|
| Depositing User: | Dr Simon Lee-Price |
| Date Deposited: | 19 Jul 2023 08:23 |
| Last Modified: | 19 Jul 2023 08:23 |
| URI: | https://bnu.repository.guildhe.ac.uk/id/eprint/18698 |
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