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Graham Harman

Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy Paperback – September 16, 2012

by Graham Harman (Author)

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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 Hölderlin's Caucasus gives way to Lovecraft's Antarctic mountains of madness.

Print length

277 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Zero Books
Publication date

September 16, 2012
Dimensions

5.44 x 0.63 x 8.54 inches
ISBN-10

1780992521
ISBN-13

978-1780992525
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Graham Harman is Associate Provost for Research Administration and Professor of Philosophy at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. He was born in Iowa City, Iowa in 1968, the first of three sons of hippie parents who met at a Rolling Stones concert in Chicago. He received his undergraduate degree from the classical liberal arts program at St. John's College, Annapolis (1990). His Master's Degree was done at Penn State (1991) under the renowned philosopher Alphonso Lingis, and focused on Levinas. He completed his Ph.D. at DePaul University in Chicago (1999), with a dissertation that became his first book. While finishing his doctoral studies, he worked as a Chicago sportswriter from 1996-98. In September 2000 he began work in the Department of Philosophy at the American University in Cairo. Egypt has become his base for travel to more than 60 countries and the composition of ten books in less than a decade. He is very fond of animals, and became a vegetarian for ethical reasons at the age of 7.

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Zero Books (September 16, 2012)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 277 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1780992521
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1780992525
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.44 x 0.63 x 8.54 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,129,469 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #776 in Philosophy Criticism (Books)

Customer Reviews:
35 ratings

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Graham Harman is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Southern California Institute of Architecture.

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Stephen

The philosophers discover HPL!

Reviewed in the United States on April 4, 2018

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I'm happy that Prof Harman finds HPL's work useful for his philosophical ruminations. And he does occasionally have interesting things to say. But to claim that HPL is a great literary artist or to hint that he might be even better than Joyce or Proust is ludicrous. Lovecraft is not even as good as Poe, much less Joyce. Look, you don't have to share someone else's taste but you do have to have standards, and to flatten out the quality of literary craftsmanship to such a degree betrays a certain myopia. HPL is not a great writer simply because he's useful to your philosophy. But I suppose the temptation is to make every insight into a revelation and every pleasure into a toe-curling orgasm. But when you do that you inhibit your ability to appreciate the genuine revelations.

3 people found this helpful

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Matthias Goertz

Weird

Reviewed in the United States on July 28, 2019

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How Lovecraft plays with our horror or fear of the hidden, obscure Real by veiling (and thereby exposing) it with weird sensory data is indeed admirable, and Graham Harman does a good job, notably in the first 50 or so pages of this book, in analysing Lovecraft's style in the context of (select elements of) Phenomenology. So far so good. The book's second part becomes repetitive and tedious; the third part rehashes key points from Harman's work 'The Quadruple Object.'

Reviewed in the United States on October 22, 2015

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I enjoy reading philosophy especially the kind that can take a unique topic and use philosophy to have a deeper and interesting look into it. Which Harman does with this book, I think Harman has done a good job, the book is concise and to the point as far as his philosophical approach is concerned. And the man definitely knows his Lovecraft.
The only gripe I have is that it is a bit repetitive and tedious, as after the beginning introduction, we slowly but methodically work through many of Lovecraft stories, comparing lines of interest, this gets to be a bit monotonous after a while, so it began to get a bit boring, but the book is top notch and I would certainly recommend it!

2 people found this helpful

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walter menon

all pages blank

Reviewed in the United States on July 28, 2020

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I bought the same book twice. And Amazon sent me copies with almost all the pages blank. Therefore, I cannot say whether the content of the book is good. I can only say that I cannot understand how Amazon sent me two damaged copies of the same book.

Walt.

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Andrew Clarke

Purchased as a Lovecraft fan with no prior knowledge of Mr. Harman's writings.

Reviewed in the United States on March 4, 2018

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The first part of the book ("Lovecraft and Philosophy") and the third part of the book ("Weird Realism") are moderately interesting. I suspect I would find them more compelling if I had previous knowledge of and interest in Graham Harman's own philosophical system.

The second, and by far the largest, part of the book is "Lovecraft's Style at Work" where the author analyzes the style of 100 sentences or short paragraphs from Lovecraft's stories. Although individually interesting these quickly become repetitive and tedious, and could easily have been cut down to a dozen examples without weakening the book's arguments. When phrases like "We have already seen", "We have already discussed", and "Here again" start popping up, it shows the author is well aware he is covering the same ground over and over again.

One person found this helpful

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P K

A great book

Reviewed in the United States on July 27, 2013

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The combination of philosophy and literary criticism is very interesting and original. I thought I knew a lot about Lovecraft, but this opened new ways of reading.

2 people found this helpful

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Juan Duchesne-Winter

A philosopher thinks with a literary work

Reviewed in the United States on November 24, 2012

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I give five stars to this book because it is an instance of a philosopher really thinking with a literary work instead of applying his philosophical system on it as some kind of testing instrument of truth, or using the work to illustrate a point or two about his system. Philosophy and Literature converge here on a tangential, but fruitfull encounter.

19 people found this helpful

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Brazos

Extraordinary. Exciting. Original and .... Weird

Reviewed in the United States on December 10, 2019

Though educated and a clinician in the same Phenomenological tradition as the author comes from, I’m a new-comer/late-comer to Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology. But better late than never because this work is a masterpiece. The ontology that underpins it, at least as I understand it, like a Cretan bull-dancer acrobat, vaults over ‘correlationism’, the Kant/post-Kantian idea that mind and object, the known and being known are inseparable, to see the mind itself, the ‘human’ as an object among others, all objects intersecting, interlocked, pool balls spinning after the break, a blooming, buzzing cornucopia and confusion, revealed but inexhaustible and receding, happenings occasioned rather than strictly caused, but all real, “a great outdoors” as one Speculative Realist has put it, Speculative Realism itself a prison break, from the imprisonments of post- modern, constructivist, deconstructive as well as the Realism that is the other side of Idealism. And as risible as it might seem to elevate Lovecraft to the ranks of Joyce and Proust, this book makes a convincing case that he belongs there, his ‘style’ of broad, sweeping, general allusive statements and descriptions in which the metaphors pour out like clowns from a clown car, bumping, rolling, somersaulting over each other succeeds as no other writer has in keeping faith with reality not exactly ‘as it presents itself’ but as it is. Exciting, extraordinary, extreme — extreme or at least in its presentation which is cinematic, a succession of brief essays that thicken insight and multiply perspectives like a hall of mirrors alive with images the source of which is forever undiscoverable. Lovecraft was weird. Reality is Weird. So, too, is Speculative Realism. For fun, for challenge, for the challenge and excitement of original philosophizing, this book is hard to beat.

2 people found this helpful

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PETER BENSON

A Philosopher Contemplates the Crawling Chaos

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 20, 2015

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This is a book for people who are interested in Graham Harman's philosophy, rather than for people interested in Lovecraft. Harman is a better philosopher than he is a literary critic. He uses Lovecraft's writing to illustrates the ontological distinctions he makes in his own philosophy, and this is a useful clarification of his ideas. However, the long middle section, in which he analyses passages from Lovecraft's stories is repetitive and monotonous (the very criticisms often levelled at Lovecraft himself). He could have varied his discussion by looking closer at the narrative structures of the stories, with their oblique approaches to an unspeakable core. He might also have expanded his discussion beyond the longer stories of the Cthulhu Mythos. In seeking to reclaim Lovecraft from the opprobrium of critics such as Edmund Wilson, he overstates his case, suggesting that Lovecraft is a better writer than Joyce or Proust. As well as being a foolish judgement, this obscures the fact that Proust's own linguistic techniques, as they probe an evanescent reality, could have been used just as easily to illuminate Harman's ontological concerns.

6 people found this helpful

Mr. Nadim Bakhshov

How to Read Lovecraft

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 30, 2015

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I’d like to start with Edmund Wilson. He said Lovecraft “was not a good writer”. Unlike Harman, I would not even attempt to refute this statement. I understand why he feels a need to. But why bother. Was Lovecraft a good writer? The critical concept here is ‘idiom’. It’s so easy to dismiss someone not because of the actual work but because you cannot get inside their idiom, you struggle to tune into it. A way into Harman’s book is as a ‘how to read Lovecraft’ guidebook. He puts some real effort into helping the unwary reader enter Lovecraft’s idiom. For example, Harman talks about the 'bad' paraphrase. It’s a big deal to him – when he discusses Lovecraft’s actual words he keeps on saying: pay attention to Lovecraft’s constant disavowal of the precision and adequacy of language. The Lovecraftian monsters are in the main material entities – except for the alien presence in ‘colour of space’, of course. Lovecraft wants you to be aware that his words are approximations and falsify as much as disclose. This is really fascinating stuff and full of philosophy. Around here Harman really levers his own philosophical insights well, without sounding academic or getting lost in technical jargon. Lovecraft was a pretty impressive science fiction writer. One of his classics – ‘The Colour out of Space’ – is a brilliant work of alien invasion, but told in such a freakish and odd way that deserves real praise. Harman chooses to focus on the attempt to ‘describe’ the alien presence and the way its presence distorts colours and mutates living forms. Harman works really hard to detail out concrete examples to support his core thesis without distorting Lovecraft. To his credit he gets across this sense that Lovecraft wanted to portray an alien presence that somehow defies the familiar categories of our language. A good recent example of touching the Lovecraftian idiom is in the latest Evil Dead film – which I saw a few years back in San Francisco. Leaving aside the obvious presence of that fictional masterpiece ‘The Necronomicon’ the alien presence – especially out there in the woods is genuinely unsettling.

Thoroughly recommended.

One person found this helpful

ghostfinder

ハーマンのラヴクラフト論

Reviewed in Japan on June 15, 2019

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例えばエドマンド・ウィルソンのような人がラヴクラフトは幼稚であると指摘することに対し、彼がいかにスタイリッシュで、文学として上等なことをやっていたかを事細かに分析した本。クトゥルフの呼び声、ダンウィッチの怪、インスマウスの影、異次元の色彩、超時間の影、狂気の山脈にて、などが俎上に上がる。文体の分析とともに、ラヴクラフトの書きぶりがいかにハーマンの哲学に沿うものかも語られる
　ちょっと微妙な印象。こういうのを喜ぶ人って現代思想畑の一部だけではないか。スリラーに興味のない人を説得できるとは思えないし、ファン（私）はファンで、名前を利用しやがってと言いたくなるんじゃないかな。ポーや泉鏡花には有無を言わせぬ美しさがあるが、残念ながらラヴクラフトに万人を頷かせるほどの物はない。ハーマンの擁護はちょっとテクニカルすぎるところがあり、その意味で的外れかなと思う

　ラヴクラフトの書き方、例えば「ぞっとする」だとか「不気味で名状しがたいもの」だとか、あるいは怪物の描写が新しい存在論好みの、「ものそのものに迫る」ラヴクラフトの全く新しい方法論によるもの、という説はどうなんだろう。私はこの部分でハーマンの、文学に対する勉強不足ぶりが明らかだと思うんだが
　ラヴクラフトの書き方は、ギルガメシュ叙事詩やオデュッセイアに近い。「毛むくじゃらのぞっとする姿」だとか「半分は鶏、半分は蛇の恐ろしい化け物」なんて表現が、古代の書物には満ちている。クトゥルフ神話は出てくる化け物もその描写も、まさに神話的なのだ
　ラヴクラフトのエッセイを読む限りでは、かなり保守的な文学観の持ち主だと想像される。古典に対して非常に高い価値を置き、その語りの技法を、彼の同時代の前衛的な小説群よりも上に見るのは当然だろう
　恐怖小説がいろいろな技巧を試しながら発展してきたその流れを、もう一度プリミティヴな表現に戻し、わかりやすい起承転結のついた物語に仕立てたことは功績としてよい。これが意図的なものなら一つの新しさといえるが、ラヴクラフトが方法論的であったならそれは単純に技巧として評価すべきだし、逆に全く無心に怪物を追求した結果であるなら、やはり彼が未熟であったというしかない
　もちろんこの先祖がえりを、一理屈こねて称賛もできよう。後期ハイデガーはソクラテス以前の哲学を、現代人よりも存在の秘密に精通しているとして持ち上げる。こういう冗談にもならない寝言を、改めて見直そうという風潮もある。つまり、より素朴なものを神秘化して有難がるということには、一定の賛同者があるのだ。ハーマンの本をたくさん読んだわけではないので、ハイデガーの使徒たる彼がどの程度後期に入れ込んでいるのかはわからないが、師匠と同様の錯覚に陥っているのは確かだ
　素朴さが称賛されるのは、たとえばシューマンのピアノ曲のように、単純さの中に真の洗練が隠されている場合だろう。しかしたいていの素朴さは、まず間違いなくレベルの低さではないか。レヴィ・ストロースが未開の思考の中の合理性を論じて注目されたが、その真の意味が誤解されたままだ。未開的思考が合理的であるなら、それは一つの合理主義、彼らなりの経験科学なのである。そして科学であるのなら、近代科学と比べてどちらがより合理的であるかという基準で判断が可能になる。ソクラテス以前の哲学も素朴な科学なのであり、それらは思弁的すぎて使い物にならない科学なのだ
　もっと重大な錯誤と思えるのは、ラヴクラフトを持ち上げることでハーマンのオブジェクト指向存在論がひどく怪しいものに見えてくる点だろう。なぜならラヴクラフトその人は、どんなに怪奇に入れ込んでいたにせよ、フィクションであり、作り物の夢物語であることを承知していて、そのことを最大限に意識して書いていたはずだからだ。ハーマンのフラットオントロジー、すなわちフィクション内の物にも、存在論としては日常接するものと同等の地位を与えるという全体の意図はわからないでもない。しかしここには何らかの論理的混乱があるように見える。原理的唯物論が言うほど現実が堅固なものとは思わないが、私が胡蝶になる夢を見たのか胡蝶が私になる夢を見たのかわからない、ということが真実になるとはさらに思わない。そのあたりのことが十分に説明されているとはいいがたいのではないか

　誤解のないように言っておく。私はラヴクラフトの、しかもかなり年季の入ったファンだ。しかし近年の、思想家や文学者たちからの持ち上げられ方は妙に気持ち悪いし、だいいち的外れだと思う
　私が彼を好きなのは、三流の作家であり、人生の落後者だからだ。しかし恨み言は表には出さず、一種宗教的ともいえる、怪奇小説への信仰の中に生きた。充分な教養があり、主流文学への理解もそれなりに持っていたが、作品の出来は崇拝者が言うほどではない。彼の生き方と作品のギャップは、何とも言えない味わいとして読者の心を打つ。それで十分ではないか？

3 people found this helpful

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