Ligotti, Kracauer, Hofmannsthal

Abstract

Literary creation under the productive conditions of capitalism has been fully part of what classical critical theory called the culture industry: the formal and then real subsumption of certain human activities usually called “cultural” under the logic of mercantile production (modalization of writing under the seriality and preeminence of the commodity-form over any given content, subsumption of the demands of the sphere of circulation and consumption, dynamics of ideological reproduction, etc.). In this context, modern fantasy and horror literature has occupied a paradoxical position: on the one hand, they are an integral and perhaps exemplary part of the culture industry (pulp publications destined for rapid and disposable consumption, exploitation fiction and fan-service, etc.); on the other hand, they are writings that have the capacity to affect the horror of an empty and interchangeable world that they themselves, as cultural commodities, contribute to reproduce. This article aims to delve into the (self-)critical power of this contradiction by looking at the stories of a contemporary horror author, Thomas Ligotti. For the elucidation of this author in the context of this juncture, a method not so much comparative as constellative will be used, in which Ligotti's particularities will be assembled or placed together with those of authors as different as Siegfried Kracauer and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, in the hope that from this critical disposition certain reciprocal intuitions and elucidations will emerge, not contained in any of the three authors in an independent way.