The Weird and the Eerie

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This kind of symptomatic cultural criticism can sometimes feel instrumental — how many times have you heard a version of the complaint that Žižek is simply incapable of grasping the basic syntax of a film, mangling it to rip out its political organs?

Okay, it's nice to be able to pigeonhole genres, or whatever, but surely there must be more to it than that? The ‘weird’ and the ‘eerie’ are closely related but distinct modes, each possessing its own distinct properties. As Lovecraft put it in his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” the weird is “a certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces.The uncanny, Fisher says, puts the “strange within the familiar” and “operates by always processing the outside through the gaps and impasses of the inside. Lovecraft’s fictions, at their evocative best, are about a steady dethronement of anthropocentric models.

THIS BOOK WAS PUBLISHED in the United Kingdom on December 15, 2016; Mark Fisher died on the January 13, 2017. Only Fisher can enthuse about old Quatermass TV shows in terms of their “cosmic Spinozism” and still (mostly) make sense. Mark Fisher (1968-2017) was a Visiting Fellow in the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths, University of London. Fisher retains a soft spot for that Žižekian mode of cultural criticism that links Marx to the medium of Lacan’s “weird psychoanalysis. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.He wrote three books, Capitalist Realism, Ghosts of My Life and The Weird and the Eerie, and was based at the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths, University of London. However, of the familiar things, I was given a bit more to chew on with how I think about and consider them. It makes sense of these quieter emotional ranges of creeping dread or inevitable doom which Gothic criticism, screaming about body horror and torture porn, has largely failed to address. Numerous times as I read, I remembered Brian Aldiss's novel "Frankenstein Unbound" as an example of various parts of Fisher's thesis.