Beyond the Reach: Horror and Phenomenal Life

Abstract

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.