By Graham Harman
Back Cover Text
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 Lovecrafts [sic]
work, yielding a “weird realism” capable of freeing continental philosophy from its
current soul-crushing impasse. Abandoning Heidegger’s pious references to Hölderlin
and the Greeks, Harman develops a new philosophical mythology centered in such Lovecraftian
figures as Cthulhu, Wilbur Whately [sic], 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.
GRAHAM HARMAN is Associate Provost for Research Administration and Professor of
Philosophy at the American University in Cairo, Egypt.
Contents
Preliminary Note
Part One: Lovecraft and Philosophy
- A Writer of Gaps and Horror
- The Problem with Paraphrase
- The Inherent Stupidity of All Content
- The Background of Being
- Not Unfaithful to the Spirit of the Thing
- The Phenomenological Gap
- A Lovecraftian Ontography
- On Ruination
- A Lonely and Curious Country
- Comic and Tragic Intentionality
- Style and Content
Part Two: Lovecraft’s Style At Work
- The Call of Cthulhu
- The Colour Out of Space
- The Dunwich Horror
- The Whisperer in Darkness
- At the Mountains of Madness
- The Shadow Over Innsmouth
- The Dreams in the Witch House
- The Shadow Out of Time
Part Three: Weird Realism
- Gathering the Threads
- Fusion
- Fission
- The Taxonomic Fallacy
- Weird Content
Reviews
Bibliographic Information
Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy. By Graham Harman. Winchester, UK and Washington,
USA: Zero Books; 2012; ISBN 978-1-78099-252-5; softcover; 278 pages.
Purchasing This Book
This book may be purchased in softcover from Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble or directly from the publisher, Zero Books.