Halloween Special: Heidegger, H.P. Lovecraft, and Weird Realism

Hello Everyone, welcome to this Halloween philosophy meetup which will last one night only. But what a night! I honestly do not know if this meetup will be mostly fun like a Halloween party, or mostly serious. I am fine with either direction.

Feel free to wear a costume or (equally acceptable) to describe yourself as wearing a costume. I (as you all expected) will be dressed up as "The night in which all cows are black".

This meetup is based around the book:

• Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (2012) by Graham Harman (a pdf is available here.)

This is a serious book which is also a lot of fun, and perhaps our meetup will be both as well.

If you just want to listen and engage in party chit chat, you do not have to read the book. However if you want to make actual philosophy points during the meetup, you have to read the book (or at least parts of the book).

1. The first part (up to page 52) is Graham Harman's rather Heideggarian account of why Lovecraft matters to philosophy.
2. The second part (pages 53 to 229) contain 100 short excerpts from Lovecraft's writings and brief comments by Harman.
3. The third part (pages 231 to 269) returns to Graham Harman's Heideggarian account of why Lovecraft matters to philosophy, and deepens this account in the light of the excerpts in part 2).

If you want to make philosophy points in this meetup, you have to read parts 1) and 3). You do not have to read all of part 2) but you do have to read some of it in order to get the flavour of what Harman is doing. This meetup was posted more than a month before Halloween, so there is plenty of time to get the reading done.

I will read the whole book, but then again, I want to get an A+ in meetup (and I am a notoriously hard marker). So I have almost no chance of getting an A+ ... but I will try!

The format will be a variation on my usual "accelerated live read" format. I will start by giving a basic overview of what Harman is up to in his book. We will then read and discuss two passages from part 1) of the book (selected by participants who have read the book). We will then read and discuss a few of the excerpts from part 2) of the book. After that we will try to get a handle on what is going on in part 3) of the book.

Then we will go back to part 2) and continue to read and discuss the excerpts until we all die from a malady to which Germans are especially prone called "Toddurchphilosophiediskussion" and return as Undead remnants of ourselves. We will then continue to discuss the book ad infinitum, this time as Undead Immortals.

BTW I just made up the word "Toddurchphilosophiediskussion" - German is cool that way.

Enjoy!

UPDATE:

Here is a link to by far the best edition of Lovecraft's selected work (published by Library of America): https://www.amazon.ca/H-P-Lovecraft-Tales-LOA/dp/1931082723/

And here is the link to a truly magnificent complete edition of Lovecraft in audiobook form. The blooper reels are hilarious: https://www.audible.ca/pd/The-Complete-Fiction-of-H-P-Lovecraft-Audiobook/B07NRSYGDV

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Blurb about Weird Realism from the publisher:

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 the work of Lovecraft, yielding a weird realism capable of freeing continental philosophy from its current soul-crushing impasse. Abandoning pious references by Heidegger to Hölderlin and the Greeks, Harman develops a new philosophical mythology centered in such Lovecraftian figures as Cthulhu, Wilbur Whately, 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.