Beyond the Reach: Horror and Phenomenal Life

Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/rbsp20 Beyond the Reach: Horror and Phenomenal Life Daniil Koloskov To cite this article: Daniil Koloskov (11 Sep 2024): Beyond the Reach: Horror and Phenomenal Life, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, DOI: 10.1080/00071773.2024.2396635 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00071773.2024.2396635 © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 11 Sep 2024. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rbsp20 THE JOURNAL OF THE BRITISH SOCIETY FOR PHENOMENOLOGY https://doi.org/10.1080/00071773.2024.2396635 Beyond the Reach: Horror and Phenomenal Life Daniil Koloskov Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences, University of Hradec Králové, Hradec Králové, Czech Republic ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY The goals of this paper is to offer a phenomenological analysis of the phenomenon of horror and argue that horror displays an organization of experience that cannot be traced back to the activity of the constituting subject. The main claim is that the essential feature of horror consists of its unintelligibility, which is neither reducible to the psychoanalytical repression nor to the complete breakdown of intelligibility but should be rather conceived as counter-intelligibility: horror occurs when anomalies and irregularities that are normally seen as disrupting the phenomenal field and undermining everyday intelligibility turn into positive principles of a new organization of experience. The confusion and perversion of horror consist of transforming the negativities and counter-forces of the cultural phenomenal field into a positive way of being. Horror is an optimal way of bringing non-optimality and disarray, which is characterized by self-exclusion from the cultural domain of intelligibility. Received 30 November 2023 Accepted 20 August 2024 KEYWORDS Horror; phenomenology; affectivity; Heidegger; Levinas; backrooms Introduction: Methodological Attunement Over the past century, the phenomenological tradition has offered several attempts to methodologically privilege a certain modality of affectivity for the sake of reaching this or that particular philosophical goal. We could think of Heidegger’s and Sartre’s respect­ ive investigations of anxiety as a basic attunement (Heidegger Sein und Zeit; Sartre 1993), which has helped them to clarify the way of being of Dasein/consciousness; we could think of Heidegger’s investigation of boredom in the context of his analysis of tempor­ ality (Heidegger 1996). We could also recall Levinas (Levinas Existence and Existents) and the way the affectivity of horror provides him with a guiding threat into the “event of Being.” Another example is Binswanger’s and Maldiney’s respective analyses of psychosis; while Binswanger uses psychosis in order to investigate the continuity of one’s own experience (Binswanger), Maldiney approaches it in the context of his inves­ tigation of an event, i.e. genuinely transformative experience (Maldiney). Alternatively, we could also think of Romano’s investigation of despair (Romano) in his own analysis of eventuality. This approach has proven to be fruitful in twofold manner: while pursuing the particular goals that are acceptable and clear within the phenomenological tradition, CONTACT Daniil Koloskov [email protected] nám. Svobody 331/2, 500 02 Hradec Králové 2, Czechia © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. 2 D. KOLOSKOV they have managed to substantially enrich and deepen the general understanding of our affective dispositions, a discussion that extends beyond the narrowly conceived phenom­ enological tradition. The goal of this paper is reversed and, in this sense, much more modest. Its first and primary goal is not to make a contribution to the phenomenological scholarship as such but to apply its conceptual tools and provide a phenomenological analysis of the phenomenon of horror. By discussing both particular cases of horror along with some of the most prominent approaches to horror, I will seek to outline the essential structures of the phenomenon of horror while preserving the continuity between those idealizations and the factual, lived experience of horror. Given the limitation imposed by the form of this investigation, I will not argue in support of the phenomenological method on which I will rely (particularly as developed by Merleau-Ponty 1958; 1968). The analysis will proceed under the assumption that the goal of explicating the self-standing meaning of horror and the rules of its organization is sufficiently meaningful in order to be pursued for its own sake. The secondary and auxiliary goal of this paper consists of supplying an “affective illus­ tration” of the general shift of attention that happened in modern phenomenological research and especially in French phenomenology. Speaking as broadly as possible, we could say that the modern scholarship puts a greater emphasis on the eventual character of human existence; it stresses the inadequacy of approaching subjectivity in terms of its power to “constitute” and explain phenomena arguing instead that the subject should be seen as “receiving” itself from phenomena, which “happen” to it (see, for instance, Mal­ diney; Marion 2002; Romano; Barbaras Being of the Phenomenon; 2021 etc.). The inves­ tigation of horror will arrive at the conclusion that the appearance of horror presupposes its fundamental unintelligibility to the subject of appearance; at the same time, I will demonstrate how despite being unintelligible to the subject, the phenomenon of horror displays a distinct meaning of its own. So, instead of referring to the constituting subject, the phenomenon of horror will be explained in terms of the dynamics of the phenomenal field. This, in turn, would turn horror into a methodologically privileged phenomenon in the context of the investigation of unconstituted and unconstitutable aspect of the phenomenal life. 1. Phenomenologies and Philosophies of Horror In this section, I will provide a survey of some of the most relevant contributions to the debate surrounding the phenomenon of horror while emphasizing the typical problems that follow from such contributions. This survey will not be aimed at an exhaustive dis­ cussion of various approaches to horror; by discussing them and their problematic points, I will demonstrate the need to outline an alternative conception that will be pro­ posed in section two. One peculiar thing about the investigation of horror is that very different researchers – ranging from Heidegger to Kristeva – seem to agree on what constitutes the most funda­ mental trait of horror. Speaking on a very general level, the consensus sets horror as a sort of a threat, which itself remains unknown; it comes from somewhere or from something that resists clear identifications and challenges clearly established boundaries. The very subject of the debate surrounding horror arises from the attempt to make sense of this JOURNAL OF THE BRITISH SOCIETY FOR PHENOMENOLOGY 3 unknowablenessof horror, which proves to be a much more resilient task than defining horror (at least on a general level). That the unknown of horror has indeed a puzzling nature can be first demonstrated based on Heidegger’s brief remark in Being and Time. While discussing fear, he notes that horror is a modality of fear where abträglich, i.e. harmful, has the character of the unknown (Heidegger Sein und Zeit 142). Unfortunately, Heidegger skips this topic quickly, evidently showing little interest in the phenomenon of horror. Instead, he quickly proceeds to the discussion of anxiety (Angst), for which he reserves a crucial methodological role. However, if investigated more closely, Heidegger’s claim will appear less trivial than it would seem at first sight. Of course, we could explain the unknown of horror away as a lack of information, which is, in principle, rectifiable (like, for example, when I am not sure exactly what kind of animal is running at me). This, however, obviously goes against our constitutive intuition about horror, which indicates – however obscure and preliminary this indication might be – that something can appear to me exactly as unknown rather than something that is to be known better. If our goal is to investigate the phenomenon of horror, we need to treat this unknown as a positive determination of an appearance. Thus, we should ask ourselves how something could positively resist the very attempt at identification and retain its positive indetermi­ nacy. What is the structural unity of such an appearance? Posing the question this way, we could notice an intriguing proximity between horror and Heidegger’s description of anxiety (Angst); the “positive unknown” of the former appears to have some similarity with the “nowhere” (Heidegger Sein und Zeit 186) of the latter. As is well known, anxiety confronts Dasein with recognition of its own freedom and its own way of being in general. Facing anxiety Dasein realizes that it cannot pretend that its own ways of doing and saying things, its own identities and pre­ ferences are objective determinations for which it is not responsible because Dasein itself exists as the ecstatic openness to the world. Its essential determinations follow from its free relation to the world, not otherwise. Since according to Heidegger “average intellig­ ibility” or “everyday disclosure” is created in an attempt to hide this authentic self-rec­ ognition, anxiety reveals something that by definition cannot be “known” or meaningfully given (i.e. that is “nowhere” to be found) by the standards of everyday intel­ ligibility of Das Man. Anxiety remains unknown because it belongs to a different order of intelligibility. And yet, as Grundbefindlichkeit, i.e. fundamental attunement of Dasein (Heidegger Sein und Zeit § 40) anxiety is presupposed by average intelligibility as the condition of its possibility: even an attempt to avoid the recognition of its own way of being itself presupposes this very way of being along with the anxious recognition that no one will “choose my choices” (Heidegger Sein und Zeit 268) for me. Anxiety always haunts everyday intelligibility, which has no words and no place for it. It would seem that the unknown of horror can be approached in the same way: some­ thing can appear as unknown because this something is at the same time unintelligible by particular standards of intelligibility and presupposed by them nonetheless. In this sense, horror, just like anxiety, could be seen as something like a call for a different type of intel­ ligibility (“disclosedness”). The problem, however, is that this analogy between anxiety and horror is partial. There also is a crucial asymmetry: while anxiety eventually brings us to the recognition of our own way of being and awareness of the incomplete­ ness of everyday intelligibility, horror does not presuppose any reconciliation. If 4 D. KOLOSKOV unknowingness of horror is indeed constitutive of it, then transforming it into something that makes sense – even if what makes sense is, in the end, the abyss of ground (Ab-grund) of Dasein’s freedom (Heidegger 1998, 174) – would lead to the disappearance of horror as a phenomenon. The unknown of horror appears to be deeper and stubborner than the unknown of Heideggerian anxiety. Early Levinas bases his account of horror exactly on this asymmetry. In order to expli­ cate it, let me first briefly reconstruct the philosophical context in which Levinas’s discus­ sion arises. In his early work, Levinas takes over Heidegger’s ontological problematics: just like the latter, he seeks to explicate and clarify the meaning of Being (e.g. Heidegger Sein und Zeit § 1; Levinas Existence and Existents 18). Unlike Heidegger, however, Levinas opts for a more traditional usage of the term. While Heidegger uses it in a sense that is closer to intelligibility or meaning of entities (“that which defines entities as entities, that on the basis of which entities … are in each case already understood”; for a more detailed discussion see, for example, Sheehan 2014 or Carman 2003), Levinas opts for a more traditional usage of the term that is more closely related to notions of “existence” or “presence.” Consequently, for him, the phenomenon or the “event of being,” (Levinas Existence and Existents 18) which he describes with the term “there is (il y a)” (Levinas Existence and Existents,19), signifies primarily the funda­ mental positivity of Being that exceeds and surpasses our ability to make sense of it. As he puts it, the “there is” of being is what is left after imagining “all things beings and persons, returning to nothingness” (Levinas 1987, 46): even after all intelligible entities are wiped out, there would still be something left, an irremovable surplus of Being, which Levinas describes as “atmospheric density” or the “murmur of silence”. So he speaks about “exist­ ence without existents” (Levinas Existence and Existents 57) where Being loses its orga­ nized and differentiated character to which we are accustomed and transforms into the hovering bulk, the pure “there is.” When describing this state of undifferentiation, he speaks of “darkness of the night which is neither an object nor the quality of an object. . . . There is no longer this or that; there is not ‘something’” (Levinas Existence and Existents, 58). This phenomenon of Being, he says, “is essentially alien and strikes against us” (Levinas Existence and Existents, 23). The state of undifferentiation also concerns the subject itself. The absolute homogen­ eity of Being threatens the individuality of the subject, leaving for it no room for escape. The personal character of my own existence is swept away by the homogeneity, “sub­ merged by the night, invaded, depersonalized, stifled by it” (ibid., 58). However, the sense of pure existence is not. It is this experience of losing one’s own personality and submerging in the positivity of Being, which Levinas identifies as the essence of horror: “[t]he rustling of the there is … is horror” (ibid., p 60). Horror, in other words, is an experience of the complete obliteration of all the names, all the possible indi­ viduality that “carries out the condemnation to perpetual reality, to existence with ‘no exits.’” (ibid., 62). And by inserting me in the hovering bulk of “there is,” horror becomes an ultimate manifestation of Being rather than of particular beings. So, if Hei­ deggerian anxiety confronts me with the recognition that nothing positive in the world can unburden me from my way of being, horror reminds me that even this mineness is inescapably bogged down in the positivity of Being as such. Heidegger’s anxiety “indivi­ dualizes” (Heidegger Sein und Zeit 188) Dasein by reminding it of the possibility of dying; Levinas’s horror, on the contrary, wipes out any hint of individuality and JOURNAL OF THE BRITISH SOCIETY FOR PHENOMENOLOGY 5 proclaims the “death of death” denying even this fundamental possibility of escaping Being. Commenting on the difference between anxiety and horror, Levinas says that “[t]he pure nothingness revealed by anxiety in Heidegger’s analysis does not constitute the there is. There is horror of being and not anxiety over nothingness, fear of being and not fear for being; there is being prey to, delivered over to something that is not a ‘something’” (Levinas Existence and Existents 62). In this way, Levinas explains to us how “something” can appear threatening while remaining unknown at the same time. On the one hand, as an experience of the oblitera­ tion of all names and identities, the “there is” of Being remains fundamentally unknow­ able; it is not just a threat that is unintelligible, it is a threat posed to intelligibility as such. On another, this unknowable something lies at the foundation of the ability to know any­ thing: the brute, undifferentiated positivity to which we ourselves belong remains a con­ dition of possibility of any differentiation and individuality. Horror, in this sense, haunts us as a non-human foundation of being a human (see also Trigg 2014, 47–54 on explica­ tion of this line of thinking). But despite making this important contribution to the dis­ cussion of horror, Levinas’s account remains insufficient. It might be argued that taking as his starting point the extreme case of horror, Levinas confuses particular extremal fea­ tures of this experience for an essential trait of horror as such. Postulating the radical breakdown of intelligibility as constitutive of horror becomes problematic when applied to more subtle cases of horror, which appear more as a perversion of intelligibility rather than its breakdown. As a result, rather than reaching the “idealization” of horror in which we can “recognize” ourselves (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 87), Levinas ends up imposing certain characteristics on the lived experience of horror. Take, for example, Levinas’s night metaphor: he employs the figure of the night in order to describe how the all-encompassing and monotonous positivity of the phenom­ enon of Being abruptly overtakes and envelops the differentiated, intelligible world. However, by regarding this experience as a constitutive trait of horror as such, Levinas goes as far as to suggest that the actual terror of nights must have the same motivation. The real reason why individuals are terrified of nights is that the night somehow reminds them of this suffocating positivity of being. A quick survey into the lived experience of being terrified at night will demonstrate, however, that we are not afraid of the night because it threatens to dissolve our identity. Normally, it is due to creatures that might live there – the malicious, twisted beings that want to grab us and tear us to pieces. Something like a marginal and quite abstract concern for one’s own identity can only be added here as a second-order logical complementation that reconstructs rather than describes the phenomenon of horror. Similarly, the real reason why we are terrified of ghosts, says Levinas, is because they remind us of the impossibility of dying and departing from the positivity of being. Once again, this seems to be quite far from the lived experience of horror: the threatening and malicious creatures who enjoy inflicting pain and suffering on us just for the sake of it offer us far more immediate reasons for concern. In both cases, Levinas places the horror in the face of Being as an underlying motive of an actual horror, which naturally blocks him from accessing the self-standing meaning of the phenomenon. If we, contrary to Levinas, rely on this more subtle perversion as constitutive of the intelligibility of horror, we would be able to satisfactorily account for a wider sample of lived experience. Indeed, while the Levinasian phenomenon of Being comes off 6 D. KOLOSKOV more like a crude denial of intelligibility (the radical Other that is “essentially alien and strikes against us”), the “liminal creatures” of night display more inconspicuous signs of confusion and perversion. If investigated on their own terms, their horns, the dispropor­ tionally long limbs, their glowing eyes and endless lust for violence do not point towards absolute unintelligibility but rather towards a different order of intelligibility that remains, nonetheless, inaccessible to us. In horror, the identity of things is not annihi­ lated completely but twisted and pushed to the limit; here we can see the interplay of intelligibility where the familiar elements become confused up to a point where they are no longer fully recognizable but still remind us of their identity. A more systematic emphasis on this constitutive confusion of horror can be found in a now-classic study The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart, by N. Carroll. Here, Carroll offers us a technical definition of horror as an “abnormal, physically felt agitation (shuddering, tingling, screaming, etc.)” (Carroll 27) caused by the presence of a particular type of objects (or by the thought of their “possible” presence), which he calls horror-monsters. What is essential about those objects, he claims, is that they at the same time combine “the property of being physically (and perhaps morally and socially) threatening” and “impure” (ibid.). The latter category performs the most impor­ tant explanatory work. Realizing that horror cannot be sourced directly from the literal dirtiness, Carroll treats impurity rather as a symbol of the transgression of cultural norms. He claims that “an object or being is impure if it is categorically interstitial, categorically contradictory incomplete, or formless” (ibid., 32). The literal impurity, in this sense, is only an illustrative example of this “categorically interstitial.” Crossing boundaries of cul­ tural identifications, monsters become an expression of confusion per se; they “are unnatural relative to a culture’s conceptual scheme of nature” (ibid., 34). As such, the danger that is coming from monsters is not reducible to the possibility of inducing phys­ ical damage. It comes from becoming a complex threat: in addition to being physically threatening, they also are “cognitively threatening” as they “challenge” and “violate” the very “foundations of a culture’s way of thinking” (ibid.). This aspect also finds its expression in the typical places of residence of horror-mon­ sters: “monsters are native to places outside of and/or unknown to the human world. Or, the creatures come from marginal, hidden, or abandoned sites: graveyards, abandoned towers and castles, sewers, or old houses—that is, they belong to environs outside of and unknown to ordinary social intercourse” (ibid., 35). Again, the link to the abandoned sites should not be considered literally: graveyards and old houses, claims Carroll are only “a figurative spatialization or literalization of the notion that what horrifies is that which lies outside cultural categories and is, perforce, unknown” (ibid.). Both the impurity and the deserted places are meant, in the first place, to embody this confusion, which cannot be clearly put in terms of the culturally established system of signification. The fact that monsters settle in places which defy usual living conditions and which are supposed to be normally avoided refers us in the first place to the “placeless place before language, law, or cognition proper” (Kearney 196), which then receives its symbolical expression. Their geographical and normative outsideness symbolizes the lack of concepts that could help us to locate and identify them. Thus, the constant underlying motive of horror is its anonymity. Monsters are “something,” they are a nameless force that lacks a properly identifiable “face;” “[b]y means of pronouns like “It” and “Them” suggests that these creatures are not classifiable according to our standing categories” (ibid., 33). In this JOURNAL OF THE BRITISH SOCIETY FOR PHENOMENOLOGY 7 sense, we could say that the unknowingness of horror-monsters is produced by the cul­ tural matrix; while negating and undermining the categorization and systematization of ordinary life, monsters remain its intimate products. Carroll’s account, however, remains substantially limited in its own way since his explanatory strategy hinges entirely on providing such symbolic expressions of horror. It doesn’t offer any account of the rule of formation of such an expression; thus, when referring to typical objects of horror such as graves and impurity, Carroll rather presup­ poses our grip on horror than explains it. For we can ask ourselves: what does it mean to be a “figurative literalization” of horror? When an impure object becomes such a litera­ lization instead of being plain dirty? When and why does a confusion become horrifying confusion? Those questions remain at least partly unanswered because Carroll’s concep­ tual tools are only sufficient to indicate facts of horror and, thus, provide a starting point for the analysis of the structure, dissemination and typical aesthetics of horror. Nonethe­ less, it stops short of explaining the genuine meaning of this fact; while Carroll is able to point out certain typical features of horror, he is unable to emphasize its essential struc­ ture. As a result, his distinguishing features of horror, if taken at face value, are clearly insufficient. By themselves “formlessness” and “incompleteness” – and not even a “cat­ egorical contradictoriness” of certain objects – can distinguish horrifying objects from non-horrifying ones since we can easily imagine something that could be formless (even categorically) but that wouldn’t be horrifying. One particular attempt at explaining this aspect further, which I would like to discuss briefly before proceeding to the phenomenological analysis of horror in section two, is offered by psychoanalytically oriented authors. Developing Freudian insights, they largely agree on the fact that horror, in the first place, refers us to this “categorically inter­ stitial.” To give a couple of examples, Kristeva stresses that horror comes from a situation where language, in a sense of customary categories of judgement “give[s] up” (Kristeva Powers of Horror 11). It refers to a domain that is placed beyond what can be meaning­ fully described and that follows from “a non-assimilable alien, a monster … that the lis­ tening devices of the unconscious do not hear” (Ibid.). Commenting on Kristeva’s account, Oliver claims that horror is “what is on the border, what does not respect borders … what threatens identity; it is neither good nor evil, subject nor object … but something that threatens these very distinctions” (Oliver 60). R. Kearney writes in a similar way that monsters “defy our accredited norms” (Kearney 3); “‘monsters’ are signal borderline experiences of uncontainable excess reminding the ego that it is never wholly sovereign.” Unlike Carroll, however, those authors offer more explicit explanations of why certain categories can be seen as challenging our accepted ways of judging and thinking. Kristeva for example, claims that horror “takes the ego back to its source on the abominable limits from which, in order to be, the ego has broken away – namely, the non-ego realm of archaic drive” (Kristeva Powers of Horror 15). According to this account, horror appears to be a counterpart of socialization, which she identifies through the prism of our ability to signify and place identities on the world around us and ourselves. Our ego dismisses this realm of archaic drive as horrifying and irrational left over, something she describes with the Platonic term khora – the “strange place” where our archaic “drives hold sway” (Kristeva Powers of Horror 14) and where “elements are without identity, and without reason” (Kristeva 1987, 235). Horror, in such a way, is a reminder of what we had 8 D. KOLOSKOV to abandon and supress in order to become this socialized, language-using ego. As such, it also nostalgically reminds us of what we have lost, “the height of harmony with the promised land” (Kristeva Powers of Horror 18). According to a different account offered by Kearney a monster “remains a personification of repressed Other. It functions as a negative mirror image of ourselves which we project onto a fantasy world” (Kearney 118). Kearney additionally sees horror as provoking an ethical challenge. As “tokens of fracture within the human psyche”, monsters leave us with a choice between trying “to understand and accommodate our experience of strangeness” or repudiating “it by pro­ jecting it exclusively onto outsiders” (Kearney 4). While this approach can be true in many respects, we should generally indicate its insufficiency when it comes to the investigation of the meaning of horror. Horror might indeed have an intimate connection to traumas, phobias, repressions, counter-cul­ tural forces, abjection and radical otherness; we might well agree with such authors as McConnell who claim that a “psychic history of culture … could be written very efficien­ tly from the morphology of its monsters, the history of those personifications of the void which successive generations have selected as their central nightmares” (McConnell 136– 37). From the standpoint of investigating the phenomenal meaning of horror, however, those elements can only be considered as a necessary condition of horror. Treating them as a sufficient condition, however, effectively eliminates the very phenomenon itself. The only reason why we speak about the phenomenon of horror as such is because horror is not traumas or phobias; monsters do not appear to us as repressions, traumas or “tokens of fractures.” “Phenomenalization” of horror, i.e. the deployment and unfolding of this appearance, signalizes exactly the fact that it is no longer just a projec­ tion of symbolic contradictions “which exists in the unconscious of each one of us” (Kearney 120). On the contrary, horror announces itself when traumas and contradictions are trans­ formed into something else, something that doesn’t make us sad, nostalgic, lonely or even agonizing but uncanny.1 This is an aspect that is especially familiar for horror-prose and -film: most authors are well aware that traumas, crises and phobias only set the stage for horror but not themselves horrifying; traumas and isolation lay at the very beginning of horror’s deployment. So, monsters settle in token of fractures, traumas and phobias without being reducible to them. Jumping ahead, we could agree with Kearney that horror is just an attempt to put “a face on phobia” (Kearney 121) with one exception: for an investigation of the self-standing meaning of horror, it would rather mean a starting point of explanation rather than the explanation itself. What we should ask ourselves here is what does this “acquiring a face” means exactly, how does it restructure the appearance of an object and why does it push the appearance “outside” of the cultural matrix? 2. Counter-Intelligibility of Horror So, the constitutive feature of horror, which we have emphasized in the previous section, and which we will further explicate in this section, consists of the profound perversion 1 This usage of the term “uncanny” differs from Freud’s, who linked it with the imposition of the social taboo (we have discussed the insufficiency of psychoanalytical approach above). I’m using the term in an everyday sense, meaning something like an unsettling experience, mysterious unease that has an unclear but intuitive link to the supernatural. JOURNAL OF THE BRITISH SOCIETY FOR PHENOMENOLOGY 9 that throws horrifying phenomena “outside” of the system of cultural significance, while nonetheless retaining the reference to such a significance. To do so, let me first offer an example of horror that would serve us as a model of dis­ cussion. In particular, I would like to turn to a genre of internet folklore known as “cree­ pypasta,” which is a collaborative online story-telling where users copy and paste (hence, “pasta”) short horror stories or texts frequently altering the story or adding elements to it. One of the outstanding examples of such story-telling is a story called “The Backrooms.” “The Backrooms” was initially inspired by a single photo of an empty corridor with an unpleasantly bright light that made people feel somewhat “off.” Elaborating on this weird feeling, they came up with a story about a “place” – the backrooms – where “people can slip” (or “noclip”) into and become lost or trapped. This place is “unreal” or “parallel” to what is real – the bottom line is that it does not belong to a common, shared space of ordinary life. In the beginning, the uncanny did not follow from “mon­ sters” or any other tangible threats; the backrooms just “appear to be simply unoccupied office space of banal manilla walls, long corridors and ugly carpets.” The sense of uneasi­ ness follows from the inescapability of this place: the monotonous office spaces appear to be endless and offer no exit, which creates an uncertain feeling that whoever finds himself or herself trapped in the backroom will never find his way out. As the story developed, another element emerges that solidifies the sense of horror. In the backrooms, there also are other “things” and anyone who finds himself or herself locked in this place risks facing its original inhabitants. As the frequently copy-pasted sentence puts it, “God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.” By itself, the narrative expresses very clearly the constitutive element of horror that we have specified above. We could take the terms “unreal,” “parallel reality,” “irreality” as expressing exactly this intuition of being outside of the domain of intelligible or, to borrow Heideggerian term, being outside of “significance” (Bedeutsamkeit) i.e. the orga­ nized holistic whole that ascribes place and function (“in-order-to”) to every particular entity and event. But most importantly, we can also see clearly that the phenomenal expression of this sense of “falling outside of intelligible” follows from the perversion of the familiar, intelligible situation. To start with, “the Backrooms” have an understand­ able spatial structure: it consists of a maze of interconnected rooms that reminds us of a typical office space. Unlike the office space, however, the backrooms cannot be linked to the system of other places to which we are accustomed. It is not clear how we got here or how we can get out. There are no signs, windows or exits that would provide us everyday orientations. Reminding us about the ordinary spatial configuration, it constitutes a space that is isolated from it nonetheless; it is a place like all the other places, yet, in a different, so far unexplained sense, it is definitely not like all the other places. This oddity becomes more obvious and clear if we concentrate our attention on the very content of the backrooms, which appears distorted as well. Backrooms contain fam­ iliar, well-understood elements: by themselves, the yellow electric light, the monotonous sound of ventilation, dull wallpaper, empty rooms and dusty wool carpeting pose no challenge to our understanding. But the organization of those elements throws us off course. Those elements are referred, in the first place, to a corresponding field of smoothly operating work space and bourgeoning activity. Their intelligibility relies on people running back and forth with stacks of pages in their hands, on the sound of 10 D. KOLOSKOV ringing telephones and a background chattering. The lack of this appropriate phenomenal field or, simply put, appropriate context inflicts systematic damage on the meaningful­ ness of those elements. Each of them calls for a different setting and for a different organ­ ization of the phenomenal field where they would appear as more optimal elements (“as they are”) and make more sense. Until then, I find myself surrounded by a bunch of dis­ parate things, which are thrown outside of their context of significance and that do not appear as themselves for the most part. Exploring the backrooms, in such a way, I find myself confronted with a sense of profound confusion; I am placed in the midst of ruins of meaning where things rather remind us of their sense than make sense in a given situation. We could try to express this decay of meaningfulness by introducing the following conceptual distinction. Namely, we might describe a normal, everyday situation where things and events are situated within the appropriate phenomenal field and appear as fully belonging to their own context as a “cultural height.” A cultural height situates things, events are identities where they are supposed to be making it possible to reach a certain optimal point of intelligibility. On the contrary, the situation of disorder or anomaly, where things and events call for rearrangement and further explanation, could be described as a “cultural cavity”; by anomaly here, we don’t mean something marginal and rare in the first place but rather something that disrupts and undermine the established intelligibility. A cultural cavity indicates the actor’ inability to respond to the call for rearrangement; they are unable to situate things and events where they are supposed to be even despite such a call. While the cultural heights give entities appro­ priate settings to fully reveal themselves as they are, cultural cavities only let me encoun­ ter entities in their constricted appearance; cavities only reveal the residues and reminders of phenomena instead of letting them appear in a full sense of the word. Naturally, every culture seeks to organize its “system of significance” (Bedeutsamkeit) in a way that optimizes its phenomenal field(s): it takes care of the infrastructure by pro­ viding the appropriate background and formulating the basic principles of its phenom­ enal life. A cultural system of significance seeks to avoid events that are disruptive for a given system of significance or seeks to downplay or explain away the phenomena that are unavoidably disruptive (e.g. death as a “demise” (Heidegger Sein und Zeit 247)). If we accept this general distinction, then we might explicate the exact nature of the “con­ fusion” that induces horror in the following way. The backrooms start being terrifying not just when I find myself surrounded by the cultural cavities, i.e. by the disorder and decay of meaningfulness. It occurs when I obtain a first unclear feeling that here cav­ ities are not anomalies but the constitutive principles of organization of this situation. A horror-situation, i.e. a setting where horror can meaningfully appear, is characterized by an inversed setting where something like a cultural cavity takes the position of cultural height and cultural heights are moved to the status of an anomaly that themselves call for an explanation and rearrangement; in backrooms, I myself become an anomaly. This unclear sense of inversion receives its final articulation in the second part of the story when it becomes complemented with a suspicion that something might live in this place. Finding myself in inversed scenery where I encounter only traces and reminders of phenomena, I start feeling that what appears to be an inversion or cavity for me might be upright for something. Something settles among those cavities of phenomena, something for which these bulges of phenomena wouldn’t be bulges anymore but phenomena JOURNAL OF THE BRITISH SOCIETY FOR PHENOMENOLOGY 11 themselves. i.e. it would represent its own way of disclosing the phenomenal field. A monster, an “unclean spirit,” a beast that rises “out of the sea,” is a densification of the inversion of a cultural matrix, an inversion which reaches a critical point where it trans­ forms into a positive principle. For a monster what counts as a cultural cavity becomes a positive determination of its way of being. Its way of being is anchored in the negativities and counter-forces of the cultural phenomenal field, its possibilities are a link between cul­ tural cavities. “It” – something that can no longer fit into the cultural categorization – is what finally reverses the polarity of the cultural matrix. Horror is an optimal way of bring­ ing unoptimality and disarray to the phenomenal field. Conceived this way, we might describe horror-monsters as evil; a horrifying evil2 as “‘the worst possible term of oppro­ brium imaginable’ (Singer 185). It is ‘supernatural’ (See Clendinnen 79–113; Cole Myth of Evil; “Deliver us from Evil”)” as it does not belong by definition to a cultural space. As such, horror originally doesn’t refer us to wrongdoings or specific dangers like ones that come from predators, murderers or natural disasters. Wrongdoings might violate particular norms but they do not threaten the phenomenal field as such. The confusion that is constitutive of horror, on the contrary, is irrevocably linked to the complete per­ version of a phenomenal field: if everyday intelligibility is organized around cultural heights seeking to secure the functioning of the phenomenal field, horror crystallizes in the decline and folding up of phenomena. It presupposes this downward trend of intel­ ligibility that distorts and disrupts the phenomenality but that at the same time claims for itself a certain positivity and a certain appearance of this positivity. Horror announces itself as a phenomenon at the cost of folding up the cultural phenomenality; being born out of the straining of the symbolic system of a given culture and pulling off its hor­ izons, horror swoops directly against the very deployment of a given cultural phenom­ enal field. Thus, we could describe the phenomenon of horror as a counterphenomenon: a counter-phenomenon deploys its phenomenality at the cost of a foreclos­ ing larger network of phenomena.3 It endangers, hunts down and exists as a constant reminder of the fragility of the cultural “phenomenal spectrum” (Koloskov). As such, it resonates with everything downgrading in a given culture. Horror lives in dirt and decay, it is malicious and violent, it thrives on blood, sufferings and disappears under the light. Monsters are, essentially, those “kings of flies” and the “great dukes of hell” who settle in the inversed settings living on what normally would be subjected to ostra­ cism and suppression. It is this combination of what is un-combinable, the possibility of something that can live counter our life, that can enjoy what we suffer and suffer what we enjoy that freezes the blood in our veins. The danger that comes from horror, in this sense, goes hand in hand with its oddity. Usual, mundane dangers are, in a certain sense, direct: diseases, murderers, disasters and animals are dangerous insofar as they threaten this or that specific aspect of human exist­ ence and as much as they threaten it (even in case of irrational phobias, the concreteness of danger can be explicated despite its irrationality). Since horror does not threaten this 2 3 Of course, this conclusion does not extend itself automatically to the problem of evil as such; the question of whether evil as such is horrifying or whether horror and evil are just an occasional combination is still open for further discussion. This term here is used in a different sense from the way it is used by, for example, Merleau-Ponty who stresses that our experience presupposes something that never appears but directly participates in enabling further appearances. I, on the contrary, use it in a more direct way indicating something that actively obstructs the phenomenality. In this sense, it is close in its meaning to Falque’s recent notion of extra-phenomenon (Falque 2018; 2022). 12 D. KOLOSKOV or that particular aspect of human existence but represents a structural threat to the deployment of the phenomenal field as such, the danger of horror comes from a different trajectory. A smiling murderer, an unproportionally composed ghost, a slowly moving murdering spirit are arguably less objectively dangerous than conventional assassins, apex predators or plain tsunamis. The danger of horror comes not from objec­ tive risks to which we are naturally exposed but from the total movement of winding down of our phenomenal field. In this sense, the threat of horror is indirect: a direct scare of being torn to pieces by a monster is just a culmination of the systematic challenge that the monster poses to a given phenomenal field. And as such a challenge, it always carries with itself some marks of distortion, which indicate that the threat that is coming from a monster is, in fact, much more expansive than any direct threat that we can think of. Extended limbs, a smile, horns are exactly those marks of perversion that indicate the systemic threat of horror. Their danger as well as their meaning in general remain, however, strictly speaking unintelligible. Crimes and immoral acts are intelligible transgressions because, again, they are still linked to the common-sensual frame of reference (for example, the sadistic desire of torturing people might be distanced from a socialized individual but it is still intelligible as it presupposes something like the shared principle of pleasure). Unlike them, horror indicates a more fundamental rupture that separates it from the ordinary – being constituted as a complete perversion turned into a positive way of being, horror burns every bridge to the shared reality. The positivity of horror remains, thus, inaccessible to us. We can only access horror as this Other whose essence is to threaten our phenomenal spectrum; instead of arriving at a clear grip on what kind of entity is horrifying, we are confronted with the feeling that there is this something that must harm us according to its very essence. Horror retains this character of indefinite some­ thing because we can know it only by suffering it. If expressed in clear-cut terms and situ­ ated in the system of cultural significance, horror loses its horrifying character and becomes transformed into a mundane phenomenon. So, instead of being clearly articul­ able, horror advances in spurts unclearly indicating the possible counter-cultural connec­ tions, identifying areas of tension and tacitly reversing their polarities. In the domain of horror, we can only move by groping our way forward from one such area to another. Here we also return to the border-like nature of the phenomenon of horror, which finds it a place “outside” of the world. The constitutive unintelligibility of horror indi­ cates exactly that it no longer belongs to the whole of significance: inverting the polarity of the phenomenal field, changing cavities into heights and heights into cavities, the horror finds itself on the flip side of the cultural space. The horrifying link between sig­ nificant, intra-worldly phenomena – between a smile and murder, between blood and thirst, between decay and prosperity – is not a link of this world. It can only be linked from this other side. Horror renders these counter-cultural connections conceivable exactly as unintelligible, as no longer belonging to the significant whole but to the flip side of this whole where horror dwells. Our ability to conceive the counter-cultural links, in such a way, goes hand in hand with excluding them from the ordinary reality and its common sense. The monster that consolidates the purely negative character of this inversion into something positive also causes dissection between the reality of every­ dayness and the “unreality” of horror; ordinary situations and horror situations are incommensurable and one can only be thought of as the “the other side” of another. JOURNAL OF THE BRITISH SOCIETY FOR PHENOMENOLOGY 13 So, if horror appears, it appears from this other side; it penetrates the reality of the every­ day world while not belonging to it for the most part. There is this movement of selfexclusion from the world of horror: the more it is manifested as horror, the less it belongs to a particular cultural world. It can only be given as haunting reality and threa­ tening our phenomenal spectrum, thus, being at the same time attached to and excluded from it. We could, thus, see the deeper reason why horror is at the same time banned “from entering its symbolic domain” and yet “not entirely absent” as haunting “the edges of the culture” (Santilli 175). Being separated from reality this way, horror needs some sort of special access in order to get into the world in its never-ending lust for perversion and destruction. As a fundamen­ tally incommensurable with everydayness phenomenon, horror cannot interact with other entities and events, first and foremost. For the most part, it accompanies, indicates the poss­ ible presence, whispers and hints – but does not occur. In order for horror to obtain a foot­ hold in the world, some special circumstances must take place. The monster needs an occasion, which would make the interaction between reality and unreality possible. This occasion might take even a nominal form. We have seen, for example, how the Backroom narrative simply expresses this special occasion with the term “clipping.” It might involve a verbal invitation, the ritual summoning of a spirit or a satanic mass, which reverses the Christian mass in order to imitate the presence of horror. It might require some special locations, which by definition are situated closer to the reversive nature of horror (think, for example, of mirrors with their natural reversive properties and how they are used in horror-fiction of all sorts), the arrival of aliens or an unsuccessful scientific experiment. The important thing is that border-like character, its position outside remains just as impor­ tant as its unintelligibility. Thus, every particular depiction of horror as a phenomenon has a natural motivation to explain how and why this border has been crossed. Conclusion We can see, in such a way, that horror deploys its own phenomenality by occurring outside of cultural significance and goes beyond individual abilities to make sense of the world. As such a counter-intelligibility, it demonstrates that our experience presup­ poses the phenomenal initiative that is not of our own making. Horror displays a trajec­ tory that goes contrary to any thinkable intentions of constituting subjectivity. Thus, it becomes a prominent illustration of self emerging nature of phenomenality or, as Bar­ baras puts it, of “phenomenalization without phenomena” (Barbaras Being of the Phenomenon 164): the phenomenal movement of horror that by definition avoids any kind of fixation by the subject and that is “always before or beyond the point where one seeks to arrest it” and effectively requalifies the subject into an “advenant”; occur­ rence of the phenomenon of horror can only be seen as a tendency of the phenomenal field, not activity of the constituting subject. Acknowledgment The publication was supported as part of the “Competition for 2024-2026 Postdoctoral Job Pos­ itions at the University of Hradec Králové”, at the Philosophical Faculty, University of Hradec Králové. 14 D. KOLOSKOV Disclosure Statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s). References Barbaras, R. The Being of the Phenomenon: Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology. 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