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

SHIFTING SHAPES OF THE WEREWOLF
proliferation of explanations for lycanthropy that circulated in the
nineteenth century.
In modernity, the werewolf has also been uniquely implicated in
elaborating ways of thinking about selfhood. A distinct focus on the
self (or subject) emerged with the Enlightenment, through the new emphasis
on human rather than divine agency, often termed ‘humanism’.
Enlightenment philosophy emphasized selfhood as a project that could
be directed through the conscious exercise of reason and morality, and
in this sense projected a vision of an ideal or ‘universal’ subject. This
vision was predicated, however, upon the conceptual separation of
‘body’ and ‘mind’, sometimes referred to as ‘Cartesian dualism’ after
the philosopher René Descartes, whose famous statement Cogito ergo
sum — traditionally translated as ‘I think, therefore I am’ — suggested
such a separation. This conceptualization of the self was reinforced and
elaborated within Enlightenment philosophy through further, parallel,
oppositions: particularly that of nature–culture.
The wolf has long been associated with nature in Western thought;
as Barry Lopez remarks, ‘What men [sic] said about one, they generally
meant about the other.’ 1 Accordingly, the symbiosis of human
and wolf in the figure of the werewolf has presented the opposition
of nature (represented by the wolf) and culture (represented by the
human) in potent terms; terms that were further developed in the
romantic period, which witnessed the emergence of a subjectivity
imaged through an internal–external or depth–surface duality. This
spatialization of subjectivity resonated with the human exterior–lupine
interior (or vice versa) imagery of the werewolf, and has been one of
the lasting legacies of romanticism. Building on such visualizations of
the ‘divided’ self, representations of lycanthropy have also been consistently
conceptualised around the related poles of civilized–primitive,
rational–instinctual, public–private and masculine–feminine. In this
sense, the werewolf has modelled the dualistic subjectivity that emerged
through the Enlightenment in graphic, exaggerated — or monstrous
— terms. Yet, as Slavoj Žižek has argued of monsters more generally,
the werewolf also appears as a bridge between nature and culture, by
exceeding both categories and representing slippages between them.
3