Des nouvelles figures de l’altérité à une mythopoïèse pour un monde-sans-nous

Abstract

Lovecraftian fiction gives many examples of objectification of unthinkable things, whose material factuality easily appears as a fictional culmination ensuring the expressive power of the fantastic based on a perpetual search of new figures of otherness and monstrosity. A text like “The Shunned House” seems, in this perspective, particularly interesting : indeed, this text strongly highlights the willingness to give a new direction to the horror story, playing with the stereotyped formulas of the gothic aesthetic and, in this way, proposing a new treatment of traditional fantastic themes. Monstrosity becomes a linguistic fact, in the sense that it exceeds the descriptive powers of language. And it also exceeds the limits of human thought. Thus, the very specific approach
of Lovecraftian cosmic horror finds its greatest fulfilment in the elaboration of a mythopoesis articulated around gigantic and non-anthropomorphic entities. The creation of this myth of separation then reveals a total non-adequacy between the human and the world, and the existence of a huge threat that confronts the human with the thought of a “world-without-us” (according to the
terminology of Eugene Thacker).