The Edge of Cognition: Asymptotic Reenchantment in Lovecraftian Weird Fiction

Abstract

My project aims to explain the enduring influence of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, especially among authors opposed to his racist and reactionary politics, by arguing that Lovecraft’s work presents a philosophy of “asymptotic reenchantment.” Discourses of asymptotic re-enchantment begin as realism or science fiction but then progressively approach the boundary between these naturalistic genres and fantasy, without ever crossing the border. To illustrate this epistemological shift, I use Topic Modeling to isolate characteristic topics (including “Creation,” “The Past,” and “The Apocalypse”) from a set of 12 fantasy novels and then track the prevalence of these topics across Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness” (1936) and Reza Negarestani’s Lovecraftian treatise/novel Cyclonopedia (2008). My results suggest that the magical character of these texts rises and falls periodically, cyclically disenchanting and reenchanting the world. This discourse provides an alternative epistemology to the racialized scientism and secularism of neoliberalism without abandoning science wholesale.