Thomas De Quincey

A mildly chronological overview of the philosophers who may have been inspired by the use of psychoactive chemicals, inc. Plato, de Quincey, Davy, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, James, Bergson, Benjamin, Jünger, Paz, Marcuse, Sartre, Foucault; and a mention of the Outsight project.

This article was based on a talk given for the University of Exeter Philosophy Society (video: https://youtu.be/X2eY4n37FC0) and at the ICPR2016 conference. It was published in the popular HighExistence magazine on August 2nd 2016, and has received over 90 000 social media shares (http://highexistence.com/hidden-psychedelic-influence-philosophy-plato-nietzsche-psychonauts-thoughts).

Reference:
Sjöstedt-H, P. 'The Psychedelic Influence on Philosophy', HighExistence.com (2nd-08-2016)

This article proposes a periodisation of the narrative work of Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). Two meta-literary notions guide the first period: that of an absolute text and that of a text governed by chance, in which the former is linked to the Kabbalah and the latter to Gnosticism. The next period, which is the focal topic of this study, is governed by the notion of figure in the biblical sense of the term. Borges introduces this notion in his 1949 essay "The Mirror Of Enigmas" that summons texts by Léon Bloy, Thomas de Quincey and Novalis. Through these influences, Borges sketches a figurative poetics whose apocalyptic character situates the work thus produced in the indecision between the eschatology and the scatology.
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Este artículo propone una periodización de la obra narrativa de Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). Dos nociones metaliterarias signan la primera etapa, la noción de un texto absoluto y la de un texto gobernado por el azar, vinculadas, la primera a la Cábala, la segunda al Gnosticismo. La etapa siguiente, tema principal del presente estudio, está gobernada por la noción de figura en el sentido bíblico del término. Borges presenta esta noción en "El espejo de los enigmas", ensayo de 1940 en el que son convocados textos de Léon Bloy, Thomas de Quincey y Novalis.  A través de estas influencias, Borges esboza una poética figurativa cuyo carácter apocalíptico deja la obra así producida en la indecisión entre las dos acepciones del término "escatología"
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Cet article propose une périodisation de l’œuvre narrative de Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). Deux notions métalittéraires signalent la première étape, celle d’un texte absolu et celle d’un texte gouverné par le hasard, liées pour l’une à la Cabbale, pour l’autre au Gnosticisme. L’étape suivante, objet principal de cette étude, est gouvernée par la notion de figure dans le sens biblique du terme. Borges présente cette notion dans « Le Miroir des énigmes », essai de 1940 où sont convoqués des textes de Léon Bloy, Thomas de Quincey et Novalis. À travers ces influences, Borges ébauche une poétique figurative dont le caractère apocalyptique laisse l’œuvre ainsi produite dans l’indécision entre l’eschatologie et la scatologie.

1. The >Bildungsroman« (novel of formation): Towards a definition -- 2. The Bildungsroman in the High Romantic mode - 2.1 Beginnings: Goethe's »Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre« (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship Years, 1795/96) - 2.2 Novalis's »Heinrich von Ofterdingen« (1802): A radical version of the »Bildungsroman« in the High Romantic mode - 2.3 The genre-type and its variants (Wordsworth, »The Prelude«; Thomas Carlyle, »Sartor Resartus«; Gérard de Nerval's »Aurélia, ou le Rêve de Ia Vie«) -- 3. From the Bildungsroman to the novel of disillusion - 3.1 » Weak« variants of the Romantic Bildungsroman: »Romance« vs. »novel« (Thomas De Quincey's »Confessions of an English Opium-Eater«, »Suspiria de Profundis«; Charlotte Bronte's »Jane Eyre«; Edgar Allan Poe's »The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket«) - 3.2 Towards the »novel of disillusion« (Stendhal's »Le Rouge et le Noir«; Balzac's »Illusions perdues«) -- 4. Conclusion: The Bildungsroman in the genre-system of Romantic fiction (with a short note on the »artist novel«)

В монографии исследуется феномен художественной репрезентации личного опыта автора, понимаемого как сложный симбиоз «биографического» и «воображаемого». На материале европейского романа XVIII–XX веков рассматриваются проблемы памяти, экзистенциального самообретения «Я», здоровья и безумия, обыденного и поэтического миросозерцаний. Структура книги отображает вехи, проделанные жанром от
эпохи Просвещения (И.В. Гете, К.Ф. Мориц) до романтизма (Т. де Квинси) и модернизма в широком понимании (В. Вульф, Дж. Конрад, Т. Бернхард). Топография «Я» предстает во всей полноте эстетических воплощений – от внутренних ландшафтов до архитектурных метафор, от исповедального солипсизма до карнавала нарративных масок.
Книга предназначена для филологов, культурологов и всех тех, кто интересуется вопросами истории европейской литературы.

La figura de John Milton influyó enormemente la literatura y el pensamiento del siglo XIX. A partir de la figura de Satán en "El Paraíso Perdido" estableció un nuevo orden de héroe romántico y una percepción novedosa del mundo desde la Caída. A partir de su obra, una hermandad de parias, unidos por las líneas de un nuevo pensamiento sobre la Imaginación y por el consumo de opio, trazarán otro camino dentro de la construcción estética del Romanticismo a partir de la creación de lugares comunes en sus obras.

Este libro expone el cine de Quentin Tarantino haciendo uso de la violencia como hilo conductor. El autor argumenta que Tarantino hace estética a la violencia al separarla de la realidad y separándola de sus consecuencias reales. Al convertirla en algo evidentemente ficticio, permite que los espectadores la disfrutemos estéticamente.

Çeviren: Murat Erşen
Bölüm: Korku Politikaları

Lars Fr. H. Svendsen
REDİNGOT KİTAP
Güvenlik kameraları. Havaalanı güvenlik şeritleri. Kepenkleri indirilmiş mağaza vitrinleri. Toplumsal korkunun tezahürleriyle her gün karşılaşıyoruz. Haber bültenleri sürekli dört bir yanımızı kuşatan binbir türlü tehlikeden ve içimizdeki kötü bir şeyler olacak hissini durmadan körükleyen artan terör tehdidinden bahsediyor. Korkunun Felsefesi bu güçlü duygunun altında yatan fikirleri ve arkasında saklanan sorunları araştırırken, korkunun nasıl ve neden modern hayatın her çatlağından içeri sızdığını soruşturuyor.
Korkunun doğasını keşfetmek için bilimi, politikayı, sosyolojiyi ve edebiyatı didik didik ediyor. Yüzünü siyasi ve toplumsal âleme çevirerek Machiavelli ile Hobbes'un felsefelerinde korkunun rolüne eğiliyor. Süregiden "terör savaşları"nda korkunun politik kullanımı ve çağımızı tanımlayan daimi alarm halinden kendimizi kurtarmanın mümkün olup olmadığını sorguluyor.
Svendsen, hümanist iyimserliğin izlerini taşıyan daha aydınlık, daha az ürkütücü bir geleceğin imkânını tartışıyor. İsabetli ve kışkırtıcı saptamalarıyla kendi insanlık halimizi ve çağımızın mevcut durumunu düşünmeye iten Korkunun Felsefesi, hayali ve gerçek tehlikeleri sarmalayan örtüyü kaldırarak bizi korkularımızla yüzleşmeye zorluyor.

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, autobiographical narrative by English author Thomas De Quincey, first published in The London Magazine in two parts in 1821, then as a book in 1822. The self-confessed purpose of the first version of the Confessions was to warn the reader about the dangers of opium. The writer gives his own personal accounts and addresses to his readers. The essay is like a journalistic report in which there is depiction of how a common man becomes an addict, the essay combines the depiction of a social evil, and essay is told from an addict's point of view, with a somewhat contrary and tempting picture of the personal inclinations of drug [Opium] addiction. The essay begins with an autobiographical account of the author's addiction. It then describes in effective detail of the joyful and highly symbolic daydreams that he had experienced through the drug's influence which he narrates by giving details of horrible nightmares that sustained the use of drug.

Este ensayo explora un aspecto de los usos de Thomas De Quincey como fuente de legitimidad del “proyecto creador” de Borges, en particular de su escritura de ficción en la etapa clásica. Podemos llamar a ese aspecto la cuestión de la intoxicación textual. El trabajo sopesa la circunstancia de que en Borges la imagen de De Quincey como escritor aparece desvinculada del opio, un elemento que sin dudas fue para central De Quincey. Ofrece notas, a partir del texto intoxicado de De Quincey, para una relectura de lo que Barrenechea llamó ¡al inicio de la época beat! la “irrealidad” de la obra de Borges. Como parte de esta misma tarea, describe previamente la “narcotización del romanticismo” que cabe leer en las referencias de Confessions of an English Opium Eater; being an Extract from de Life of a Scholar (1821) a la Biographia Literaria (1817) de S. T. Coleridge. Esta operación es fundamental para comprender la imagen del escritor como “Opium-Eater” y el significado que De Quincey atribuiría a la palabra “literatura” en otros textos.

Literature and Medicine 38, no.1 (Spring 2020)                                                                   
What light can De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) shed on its author's later advocacy of the First Opium War? To what degree did De Quincey's and other contemporaneous accounts of opium use in Britain influence metaphorical connections between bodily energy and national power in the 1830s and 1840s? Placing Confessions alongside John Brown's 1780 treatise, Elements of Medicine, this essay argues that De Quincey "nationalized" opium-eating by transforming mental exceptionality in British Romanticism into a medical body's connection with internal energies and external stimuli from China and "the Orient." The essay concludes that opium serves in De Quincey's Confessions as a crucial bridge between Romantic sublimity, in which it purportedly acted as a mysterious technology for self-strengthening, and Victorian consumerism, when the drug became a popular commodity among national and global users.

Borges escribió alguna vez que “los libros congregados e interrogados por un hombre constituyen también un aspecto de su obra y el mapa y espejo de su personalidad”.
Las páginas de este volumen procuran explorar esos aspectos de la obra del escritor que son su lectura de Nietzsche y Carlyle. En distinto grado y con diverso cariz, el escocés y el alemán son parte importante de su mundo de lecturas y de sus creaciones. Borges los juzga por la “entonación” de sus trabajos, en la que su sensible oído crítico descubre la clave de una actitud elemental frente al mundo y la vida: un estilo. No lo celebra, antes bien lo deplora: su lectura del Zarathustra de Nietzsche y de las mayores obras de Carlyle entrañan una verdadera crítica del estilo enfático que las caracteriza.
La sombra del nazismo ha jugado su papel en esta valoración. También, en las antípodas, la imagen de una cultura que salvara los valores de la razonabilidad del hombre; una razón que aceptara la contingencia de su condición humana y no eludiera las responsabilidades de una vida sin garantías últimas, asumiendo el desafío de no trocar las perplejidades e incertidumbres inherentes a la finitud por los dogmas deshumanizadores que la rehúyen. En ello, el escéptico Borges habría visto las alternativas entre las que ha de optar el hombre.

Kézirat: Jelen tanulmányunkban környezetpszichológiai szempontból elemezzük egy droghasználó fiatalember (Kubiszyn Viktor) drogfüggő életszakaszait, a férfi önéletírása alapján. A környezetpszichológia az épített/természeti/virtuális környezetek és a humán viselkedés kölcsönkapcsolatát, tranzakcióját tanulmányozza.
A személy–környezet tranzakció azt jelenti, hogy a humán megnyilvánulások és színtereik egymás nélkül nem  értelmezhetőek. Ebben az értelemben a  környezet-pszichológiában szociofizikai környezetekről beszélünk. A fizikai környezet hatása pszichológiai tekintetben legalább olyan erős, mint az intra- és interpszichikus tényezőké. A személy(ek) –
környezetek folyamatos kölcsönhatásában alakul ki a személy–környezet összeillés, ami a környezet jellemzőinek (kényszerek, lehetőségek) összehangolódása elemi szinten a személyes észleletekkel, szükségletekkel, választásokkal, magasabb szinten a személy önmeghatározásával, identitásával.
A végső tanulmány elérhetősége: Kiss Orhidea, Dull Andrea, Rácz Katinka és Rácz József (2015): Droghasználat és a felépülés terei, útvonalai. In: Keszei András és Bögre Zsuzsanna (szerk.): Hely, identitás, emlékezet. L’Harmattan Kiadó, Budapest, 116-138.

El “efecto Piranesi” es un efecto literario especial creado en el primer cuarto del siglo XIX para ligar la representación de la mente humana a la experiencia del infinito en el contexto de la difusión de las poéticas románticas en los nuevos medios periodísticos y como una variante de la estética de lo sublime. La invención tuvo lugar en un fragmento de Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), de Thomas De Quincey, en el que se nos presenta una placa a la manera de las Carceri d’ Invenzione de Giovanni Battista Piranesi: en ella se retrata al veneciano como héroe delirante de su propia imaginación arquitectónica. El término “efecto Piranesi” fue acuñado en 1963, a partir de dicho
pasaje, por el crítico estadounidense Hillis Miller, con el objeto de designar un procedimiento/experiencia general en la obra de De
Quincey. Más de cien años después de que De Quincey inventara el efecto y veinte antes de que Miller le pusiera ese nombre, Jorge Luis Borges incorporó el efecto Piranesi como técnica de sus experimentos ficcionales de la década de 1940 en Argentina. Para Borges este “efecto” romántico adquirió el papel de un arma literaria en el contexto de la Segunda Guerra Mundial. En este artículo repasamos momentos de esta historia del efecto Piranesi con el objetivo de echar luz sobre la singular escena de importación que supuso la apropiación borgeana.

Abstract
The “Piranesi effect” is a special literary effect created in the first quarter of the Nineteenth Century to connect the representation of the human mind to the experience of the infinite in the context of the popularization of Romanticism in the new media of the 1820s, and as an instantiation of the aesthetic of the sublime. The invention took place in a fragment from Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-eater(1821), presenting a plate after the manner of Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Carceri d’Invenzione that shows Piranesi himself as a
delirious hero of his own architectonic imagination. The term “Piranesi effect” was coined in 1963, after this very same passage, by the Northamerican critic Hillis Miller as the name of a general device-experience in De Quincey’s work. More than a hundred years after De Quincey invented the effect, and twenty before Miller named it, Jorge Luis Borges introduced the Piranesi effect as a technique in his experiments in fiction of the 1940s in Argentina. For Borges, this romantic effect acquired the role of a literary weapon in the context of World War II. In this article we retrace relevant moments of this history in order to project some light on the singular scene of importation implied in the Borgesian appropiation.

A short piece on Thomas De Quincey's affection for the morbid and the macabre, and his influence on 19th century gothic literature, originally published in The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Gothic (2012) edited by William Hughes, David Punter and Andrew Smith:

Thomas De Quincey (1785 – 1859) was a prolific periodical writer. He is usually aligned historically with the early English Romantics, and is best known for his remarkable autobiography Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821), and the satirical treatise ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’ (1827). De Quincey rarely wrote gothic fiction, but he radiated gothic sensibility. To the Victorians, the identification of De Quincey with the mad, morbid and macabre was so absolute that he is cited, along with Poe, in the The Times’ original coverage of the Jack the Ripper murders.

De Quincey was a sensitive child, and the death of his sister, Elizabeth, in 1792 was a trauma from which he never recovered. The following year he lost his father to tuberculosis. The memory of the family awaiting the dying man’s return home, listening to the slow approach of the carriage in the dark, fused with his imagination forever. Sombre processions and ill omens, particularly the leitmotif of the dying girl, recur throughout De Quincey’s writing. Her shade is present in the figure of the doomed prostitute, ‘Anne of Oxford-street,’ in the Confessions, in the epiphanic account of his sister’s viewing in Suspiria de profundis (1845), ‘standing between an open window and a dead body on a summer day,’ and in the death of Catherine Wordsworth (De Quincey, Works: I, 43). ‘Little Kate’ was De Quincey’s favourite, and for several weeks he haunted the child’s grave, often passing the night there, and claiming to see her in visions.

De Quincey ran away to London in 1802, and he first took opium as an analgesic while at Oxford. By 1813 he was hopelessly addicted, taking up to 480 grains a day (the equivalent of 3 grams of morphine). He never took his degree, and relocated to Grasmere where he became a close friend of the Wordsworths. He married Margaret Simpson, a local farmer’s daughter, in 1817. It was the need to support a family that led De Quincey towards journalism, beginning with the editorship of the Westmoreland Gazette in 1818. The London Magazine published the critically acclaimed Confessions in 1821, making its author a literary celebrity overnight. He joined the rival Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1826, moving to Tait’s in 1833. Despite his productivity the threat of debtor’s prison was always present, leading to a fugitive life of false names and fake addresses, with articles delivered to editors in secret by his children. De Quincey’s writings were not collected until 1850, and he was still revising the final volume of Selections Grave and Gay when the opium finally caught up with him in 1859...

In this 10-minute paper I briefly outline the relationship between De Quincey's treatment of the philosopher Immanuel Kant and his fascination with negation-or, as he puts it, the 'horrid inoculation upon each other of incompatible natures.' Although he began as an enthusiastic supporter of Kant, whom he initially credited with creating a new birth in human thought, De Quincey later turned against the German philosopher as the author of a fundamentally destructive system. In De Quincey's account, this disappointment stemmed from his realisation that by replacing substantial subjectivity with transcendental functionality, the constitutive ego with the purely regulative 'I,' the 'world-shattering Kant' had un-essenced the self, rendering the subject as a mere void. Consequently, De Quincey came to associate Kant with what he identified as the 'dreadful ulcer lurking below in human nature': the parasitic dependence of the self upon its own negation. As Slavoj Žižek argues, this most fundamental disparity or disconnection lies at the heart of the 'ontological catastrophe' of human existence: the emergence of the self from nature. In his commentary on Wasianski's account of Kant's physical decline, De Quincey confronts this catastrophe as an entropic relationship between part and whole, whereby the void in Kant's thought, like a diseased stomach, ultimately consumes his identity and life, excreting the self as an 'abject animal.' As a synecdoche for the void within Being, the decaying Kant becomes what Žižek terms a disgusting 'null representation' that threatens to consume De Quincey's sublime aesthetics of the unrepresentable.

In this essay, I examine works of literature which present themselves as psychological curiosities by using dreaming as a modality of displaced, unintentional, or even reluctant authorship. What is it to write in, of, or like a dream? Who has the right to dream and who, conversely, is burdened with the nightmare of history? Themes to be considered include: dream-composition and the composition of dreams; narrative vs. lyrical form; the mediation of colonial commodities like opium or travelogues as what Nigel Leask calls "psychotropic technology"; artistic autonomy vs. discursive formations of and cultural influences on dream mentation; the yoking of opposites and extremes in the compacted economy of the dream. The literary and critical works discussed are Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan"; Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of An English Opium-Eater; Charles Dickens's "An Italian Dream"; Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke; and Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams.

Alfred Kubin as a figure is still a question marked over the development of aesthetic thinking in the 20th Century. His novel, 'Die Andere Seite', has been studied up until the date as a psychoanalytical process of creation without paying attention to its consequent weave of philosophical and symbolical ideas which are far more profound. This weave also connects with the main 17th Century mystical schools of thought, at the same time it connects with William Blake’s cosmogony and with the imagery created by the poets affected by the bad of opium –who got consolidated, at their moment, a stylist sign related with the process of expressing soul and perception estates. In the scenario of the sunken city of Perle, some creative processes join together –those which, gazed after this new approach, connect the German artist and the symbolic though of the 19th Century even deeper than psychoanalysis. This insert Alfred Kubin into the lengthened shadow of John Milton’s figure, especially into the theme of his most renowned work 'Paradise Lost'.

Este texto apresenta os resultados da tese de doutorado Castlevania Symphony of the Night e a Invenção do gótico, defendida em 2018 e orientada pela professora Dra. Viviana Mónica Vermes no Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras da UFES. A pesquisa foi amparada pela FAPES. Aqui, tecemos reflexões sobre memória, colagem, nostalgia e como os jogos de videogames, em destaque Castlevania Symphony of the Night, transpiram esses conceitos.

Quando la vita è molto misera, l'ebbrezza è una delle ultime risorse che le rimangono. Questo è uno dei motivi per cui le Chiese non possono nulla contro l'alcolismo. L'alcolista non può essere soccorso né economicamente né moralmente; si tratta di problemi ontologici, per la cui soluzione la teologia si è rivelata sempre più inadatta. Il bevitore non beve solo perché vuole sfuggire al suo stato di bisogno. Egli vuole soprattutto avvicinarsi a sfere libere non solo dal suo bisogno individuale, ma dal bisogno in quanto tale; a sfere nelle quali non vi sia più dispiacere. Nella sua euforia si nasconde qualcosa di più di semplici sensazioni di benessere e di assenza di dolore. Dostoevskij ha colto anche questo con uno sguardo geniale. Altrimenti non avrebbe potuto mettere in bocca al suo triste eroe Marmeladov questa frase: «Bevo perché voglio soffrire ancora di più».

On the Question of Murder Considered as a Fine Art in Jean Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers With its open celebration of criminality, homosexuality, and murder, Jean Genet's 1943 novel, Our Lady of the Flowers, saw the author enter into an adversarial relationship with the reader, one in which aesthetic and moral judgments clash, and evil, in the form of beauty, triumphs over good, Genet's "mirthless bourgeois" reader. Such triumphs are invariably scandalous in

Prior to the Opium Wars, in 1840 and 1857, the celebrated English Opium Eater Thomas de Quincey published journalism that urged Britain to attack China. De Quincey claims that the Qing Empire displays ‘the demoniac hybris of Greek Tragedy’. While de Quincey’s citation of classical literature to support imperialism is a commonplace of Victorian politics, some of his references to the ancient world reflect a Romantic anxiety concerning the fragility of empire. De Quincey theorizes that classical literature yields social ‘power’, yet doing so reveals his own powerlessness. This article examines the transposition of ideas between de Quincey’s China articles and his ‘Theory of Greek Tragedy’. De Quincey relies on a classical literature of ‘power’ to assert his identity in defiance of the Oriental other, but the concept with which he characterizes Manchurian folly — the daimon — also symbolizes his own helplessness. The supposedly inexorable conflict between Apollonian Britain and Dionysian China, the Malay visitor amok in Confessions, and opium use all entail the loss of individual agency identifiable with daimonic influence. The daimon — a figure for his own addiction — indicates that the Opium Wars articles continue the work of Confessions, as an encoded expression of de Quincey’s plight as addict.

This chapter explores some legal and literary ramifications of "accident" in British law and society from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth century. This period saw changes in common law and legislation relating to accidents, including the emergence of negligence as a distinct tort and statutory provisions for employer liability and workplace compensation. The chapter turns on the institution of the deodand, a common-law rule that allowed inquest juries to assess liability for accidental deaths caused by non-humans. After such entities began to include industrial machines, the deodand was abolished by Parliament in 1846. Examining legal-historical cases and norms alongside literary-cultural representations, the chapter claims that the deodand's disappearance, and concurrent transition to fault liability regimes, marked a loss in the understanding of accident. If the nineteenth-century emergence of modern accident law tended to simplify accidents into surrogates for human interaction, the deodand qua institution grasped how reckoning with accidents demands an alertness to human entanglement with non-human causality. Literary representations of vehicular accidents afford a glimpse of what was coming to be lost in this changing legal-cultural dispensation. From Thomas De Quincey to Thomas Hardy to E. M. Forster, the complex non-human, material, and affective dimensions of accident dissipate into the background, where they continue to supply narrative and formal motivation even as they leave human obligations and institutions in the light.

Shows how the literary representation of dreams helped to enlarge the poetic repertoire of French and English Romanticism. Examples discussed include "Smarra ou les démons de Ia nuit" (1821) by Charles Nodier and "The Dream-Fugue" (1849) by Thomas De Quincey.

The paper addresses Thomas De Quincey’s The Last Days of Immanuel Kant with the goal of
underlining how the author constructed an image of the philosopher that transcends the strictly
biographical facet at which the title clearly hints. The core assumption of this analysis is an
acknowledgement of the essayistic nature of the text, in which the historical Kant is substituted
by a personnage conceptuel. This label, borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari, clarifies how De
Quincey’s Kant, far from representing a faithful avatar of the historical German philosopher (and
of his doctrine), is the result a literary process whose aim is producing a literary embodiment of
civil conversation. This multifaceted goal is achieved by De Quincey in a quite original manner,
since his last essayistic memoir builds on an apologetic memoir that Kant’s last disciple, Christoph
Wasianski,wrote just two decades before The Last Days was published.

Feci erigere una colonna gigantesca sul fondo del mare. La sua cima svettava come un albero maestro fin quasi alla superficie. Presto presero a dimorarvi i balani, i polipi, i fuchi, le pattelle. Poi arrivarono lombrichi tubolari e anulari, conchiglie spinate, oloturie, stelle chiomate o tentacolari per celarsi in quell'intrico o nelle sue decorazioni, come si vede nei giardini corallini. In questo modo i contorni della colonna scomparvero presto; la vita vi si tesseva intorno. Le calcine colorate delle conchiglie e dei gusci di lumaca ne incrostavano la superficie arrotondata; il rosso muschio marino, e il velluto degli zoofiti la avvolgevano in un velo. Spire, steli d'alghe fluttuavano da essa come la barba di Nettuno. Quale nuvola d'api vi aleggiava attorno argentea la schiera dei piccoli insetti marini: gamberetti, sagittari, cinti di Venere, meduse. In cerchi più ampi turbinavano pesci di tutte le dimensioni, fino a quelli enormi; seguivano tutti le proprie traiettorie, come pianeti lontani. Non li percepivo più in base alle leggi dell'ottica, bensì secondo la loro forza di gravità. Osservando quella mia opera innalzata sui fondali del mare, mi prese un sentimento d'orgoglio, che presto cedette al disgusto. Vidi bene di aver eretto un monumento a Proteo, e mi volsi alle grotte.

Tacquero. Erio provò un senso di vertigine, come quando incomincia il mal di mare. Desiderava che Conero parlasse ancora: troppo gravoso andava facendosi per lui il silenzio. Si sentiva nel fuoco di una lente; aveva l'impressione che i raggi convergessero sul suo diaframma. Lì qualcosa si muoveva-la pressione insistente di un animale dai molti tentacoli che si contorce nella rete. Anche Irzio e Lunia erano pallidi. Tutto quell'agitarsi-come di folletti-in cortile, quel grattare e raschiare, quello spazzare e battere si fecero ancora più insistenti. In alto, al di sopra della nebbia, doveva esserci in volo uno stormo di uccelli, i cui gridi arrivavano fin sotto-al ritmo di lamentosi presagi, come profetiche sibille che remassero in un mare d'aria. Poi udirono una musica. Era l'orchestra di bordo su un bastimento che passava in mezzo ai banchi di nebbia? Era una radio accesa in cucina, oppure un juke-box? Era un'allucinazione acustica? Erio non sapeva dirlo con certezza. "Sono disorientato" pensò. Il suo udito era divenuto sensibile come un intreccio di corde che rispondesse prima ancora di essere sollecitato. Si sentiva potentemente chiamato in causa, come se i suoni, per una sorta di predeterminazione, raggiungessero il punto in cui loro sedevano lì tutti insieme, attorniati dall'acqua e dalla nebbia. Era un canto da Re degli Elfi. Un moto vorticoso lo trascinò negli abissi, dove gli venne a mancare il terreno sotto i piedi. Una donna dal volto velato lo attendeva. Con un braccio teso indicava una meta oscura. Ne seguì una danza: l'elemento tenuto a freno. Ma quel bussare si era fatto più sordo, più spaventoso; l'allentarsi della presa non bastava. Non era che un tessere la tela al di sopra degli abissi. Gemette. Sempre la stessa figura. Non ne sarebbe mai venuto a capo. Le cose cominciavano a caricarsi di energia e ad acquistare vita; sorgevano dagli oggetti, così come sempre gli erano apparsi, assumendo adesso un potere inquisitorio, anzi giudiziario. Era ancora in grado di respingerlo, ma non doveva lasciarsi coinvolgere di più: questo sentiva. Soprattutto non doveva guardare Conero. In modo analogo il bevitore, benché ormai

Sincerest thanks to Nancy Leonard, my project advisor, for her consistent support and enthusiastic assistance throughout the writing process, and for introducing me to both Slavoj Žižek and Julia Kristeva, who provided the theoretical framework for the entire project.

This essay investigates diverging transatlantic attitudes towards mechanisation in the mid-nineteenth century by looking at the portrayals of steam engines in Anglo-American Romantic literary works by Wordsworth, Emerson, De Quincey and Dickinson. Wolfgang Schivelbusch notes how time and space are 'annihilated' with the speed of industrialization. Walter Benjamin, alternatively, indicates how the metaphoric dressing up of steam engines as living creatures was a retreat from industrialization and modernization. Those conflicting perceptions of what David Nye calls the 'technological sublime' became sources of joy as well as sorrow for these authors. The essay examines how the literary representations of transportation show various literary attempts to make sense of and rewrite the technological promise of the future into distinct aesthetic experiences of modernity. Their imaginative engagement with the railway showcases a genealogy of metaphorical as well as mechanic transportation that indicates an evolving process of Romantic thought across the Atlantic Ocean.

‘System of the heavens’: an examination of the concept of ‘Collusion’ through the case study of the fundation of the AIB’s centre in the city of Natal

This article aims to rework the concept of Collusion through the recovery of its etymological roots and of its use by the astronomy in the early nineteenth century. Our goal is to allow the concept of Collusion can be used to articulate an investigation of Islamic extremism in the transnational level. For this purpose we will test our results through the case study provided by the relationship between Catholicism and fascism in the city of Natal, Brazil, in the interwar period.
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‘System of the heavens’: un análisis del concepto de ‘Colusión’ a través del caso de la creación del centro de la AIB en Natal

Este artículo tiene como objetivo volver a trabajar el concepto de colusión a través de la recuperación de sus raíces etimológicas y su uso en astronomía de principios del siglo XIX. Nuestro objetivo es permitir que el concepto de colusión puede servir a la articulación de un examen del extremismo islámico en el nivel transnacional. Para este fin se pondrá a prueba nuestros resultados a través del estudio de casos proporcionada por la relación entre el catolicismo y el fascismo en Natal, en el período de entreguerras.

Le titre de cette étude fait bien sûr écho au poème de Milton qui, aux côtés de Coleridge et de Wordsworth, est en contrepoint du texte des Confessions of an English Opium-Eater . C'est Paradise Lost qui inspire l'épigraphe de la “Fugue de Rêve” et qui conclut les Confessions. Notre étude ne s'inscrit pas dans les analyses de l'“anxiété de l'influence” ouvertes par Harold Bloom , mais entend montrer comment Thomas De Quincey est fasciné par les paradigmes, c'est-à-dire les modèles, les formes et expressions qui sont originales parce qu'elles sont originelles – et comment cette fascination se traduit poétiquement dans les Confessions. Le mode de la confession, en tant qu'il participe du discours autobiographique, suppose la recherche de moments paradigmatiques, ces événements premiers, matriciels, qui ont modelé la personnalité du narrateur.

In the essay ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’ (1823), De Quincey refers to the void within the quotidian where murder occurs as the ‘awful parenthesis.’ In this paper, I aim to shed new light on this idea by examining its relation to De Quincey’s engagement with the work and life of Immanuel Kant. Though initially an enthusiastic supporter of Kant, whom he credited with creating a new birth in human thought and finding ‘the keys of a new and a creative philosophy,’ De Quincey later turned against the German philosopher as the author of a fundamentally destructive system. In De Quincey’s account, this disappointment stemmed from his realisation that by replacing substantial subjectivity with transcendental functionality, the constitutive ego with the purely regulative ‘I,’ the ‘world-shattering Kant’ had un-essenced the self, rendering the subject as a mere void. De Quincey’s dilemma in ‘Macbeth’ and Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822) over whether to approach this void or ‘parenthesis’ ontologically (as a thing of horror exposing human frailty and life in its most abject and humiliating condition) or aesthetically (as a ‘deep syncope’ that enables empathy) reflects an aporia within the discourse of the transcendental sublime: between enervating horror and edifying terror at the abyss within the self and the insufficiency of the real.