Paper Proposal for 2013 &Now Conference
Second proposal of the night. If it weren’t for the last second and all that. This one is for the 2013 &Now Conference, this September in Boulder. I wish this proposal was a bit more fleshed out, but that’s the way it is.
Horror after History: Glenn Duncan’s The Last Werewolf
Proposal for &Now 7
Benjamin J. Robertson
Jake Marlowe is, as the title of Glenn Duncan’s 2011 novel suggests, The Last Werewolf—and he dreams of suicide. Jake’s life, perhaps never meaningful, has become unbearable in its absurdity. Despite the pleas of his single friend, he prepares to end his centuries-long existence in the knowledge that his death will be as meaningless as his life.
According to Kojève, following Hegel, at culmination of modernity, the end of history, the human, having achieved its perfection and without the possibility of art and therefore meaning, will revert to animality. Similar to Marlowe’s understanding of his imminent death, the disappearance of the human has little consequence for the universe: “The disappearance of Man at the end of history is not a catastrophe: the natural World remains what it has been from all eternity. And it is not a biological catastrophe either: Man remains live as animal in harmony with Nature or given Being. What disappears is Man properly so-called.”
This paper investigates, through a consideration of The Last Werewolf, the horror genre in relation to questions of history, knowledge, and human being. Far from returning the human to a state of nature, in The Last Werewolf, the animal ‘inside’ the human takes the human out of sync with itself and undermines the notion of history’s end by undermining the notion of history itself in the manner that Kojève pace Hegel understood it, Specifically, I consider Marlowe’s statements, made with regard to his soon-to-be werewolf lover Talulla: “Thus she’s discovered the Conradian truth: The first horror is there’s horror. The second is you accommodate it. […] You do what you do because it’s that or death.” This short passage moves the horror genre beyond the knowledge practices of modernity, in which horror derives from a challenge to positive knowledge and rationality, a challenge to our deepest epistemological assumptions. Here, horror becomes the groundless ground of being, an ontological “truth” that renders all meaning impossible, including the meaning of one’s life and the meaning of one’s death.
evening redness 
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