The Curse of the Wer.. - Site de Thomas - Free

60 THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF
In the context of the convergence of ideas about evolution and the
unconscious (which demanded a ‘thinking together’ of such pairings),
representations of body–mind slippages within fin de siècle
Gothic became ‘more graphic than before’. 57 Significantly, spiritualist
discourse also contributed to the exploration of this territory. C.W.
Leadbeater’s explanation of lycanthropy as a form of astral projection,
for example, sought to draw a connection between the body and the
mind: ‘When a perfectly cruel and brutal man [projects the astral
body], there are certain circumstances under which the body may be
seized upon by other astral identities and materialized, not into the
human form, but into that of some wild animal — usually the wolf.’ 58 By
positing a relationship between spirit and material nature, Leadbeater
also echoed the logic of the romantic philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm
von Schelling, who declared that ‘Nature is visible Spirit, Spirit is
invisible Nature.’ 59 Schelling’s statement apparently encapsulated the
romantic idea that an organic whole or unity could be constituted
through antagonistic but complementary polarities. But, as Slavoj
Žižek points out, it also
drove a wedge … between Inside and Outside, between Spirit and Body,
between the ideal and the real … by calling attention to the double
surplus that ‘sticks out’. On the one hand, there is the spiritual element of
corporeality: the presence, in matter itself, of a non-material but physical
element, of a subtle corpse, relatively independent of time and space,
which provides the material base of our free will (animal magnetism,
etc.); on the other hand, there is the corporeal element of spirituality: the
materializations of the spirit in a kind of pseudo-stuff, in substanceless
apparitions (ghosts, living dead). 60
Žižek argues that these ‘surpluses’ that escape the system of neat
polarities are the spectral manifestations (such as the werewolf) that
‘complete’ reality. 61
In this context, the werewolf becomes less amenable to an analytic
strategy which interprets it primarily as an expression of oppositional
discursive frameworks (such as nature–culture, masculine–feminine,
Self–Other). In Žižek’s schema, the werewolf is rather an expression
of the overflow, surplus or excess that escapes attempts to contain