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

A MANIFESTO FOR WEREWOLVES
In this frieze of imagery, the magical, accelerated process of individuation
experienced by the werewolf Messiah is accompanied by rapid shifts
of weather and season, suggesting that the project of selfhood, while
important in its own right, is also indissolubly linked to nature.
In this sense, this passage owes much to the romantic conceptualization
of the sublime, in which spiritual enrichment is attained
through an immersion in or connection with nature. This focus on
the interdependency of ‘spirit’ and nature is common in fantasy, in
which protagonists frequently achieve spiritual fulfilment through
intimacy with nature. New Age philosophy also tends to draw on
such associations, as in alt.horror.werewolves participants’ notion
of ‘spiritual therianthropy’, which is explained as an experience of
connection with the animal world, which ‘contacts us through totems,
through dreams, through our very souls’. 50 In more critical contexts,
critiques of modernist subjectivity (with its emphasis on reason — ‘I
think’ — rather than spirit) have also led to a resurgence of interest in
spirituality, despite an ingrained resistance to the discussion of such
themes in the discourses of rationalist science.
Indeed, as Philippa Berry observes, some recent theorizing has
begun to present ‘a new understanding of spirit, not as the opposite
term of a binary couple, but rather as facilitating a wholly new mode of
awareness’, an awareness ‘which not only invites the thinker to abandon
their residual attachment to dualistic thinking, but also offers a potent
challenge to their desire for subjective mastery and knowledge’. 51 In
such contexts, spirituality, like the werewolf, draws attention to the
impossibility of separating nature from culture, the human person
from the subject. A return to Žižek’s reading of Friedrich Wilhelm
von Schelling’s work can suggest how spirituality operates in this way;
for Žižek, Schelling’s declaration that ‘Nature is visible Spirit, Spirit
is invisible Nature’ called attention to a ‘double surplus that “sticks
out”’; the fact that there is a ‘spiritual element of corporeality’, but
also a ‘corporeal element of spirituality’. 52 In this sense, discourses
about spirituality register the absurdity of the Enlightenment attempt
to divorce the subject or ‘I think’ from the body or human person,
by insisting on their connectivity. Accordingly, just as the ‘spectral’
143