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4 THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF
For Žižek, this is the source of the Gothic monster’s ‘modernity’;
because the oppositional logic of the Enlightenment schemata cannot,
ultimately, contain reality, ‘spectral’ manifestations such as the werewolf
emerge to ‘complete’ the representations of reality facilitated by
frameworks based upon polarities.
Not surprisingly, studies focused on monstrosity as it materializes in
the modes of the grotesque, the carnivalesque, the Gothic, the uncanny
and horror have also proved sensitive to the manner in which figures
such as the werewolf reveal patterns of subject- and identity-formation
in Western discourse. The existentialist insight that the self has been
defined negatively by its ‘others’ has been widely adopted in such
contexts, with the Gothic, grotesque or uncanny being understood as
a mode devoted to exploring the threat posed by the other to the self.
Working within such a theoretical framework, a number of critics
have identified two different strands of Gothic or grotesque imagery,
organized around an exterior–interior polarity. Put simply, some Gothic
monsters are constructed as an externalized other threatening the self,
while others are shown to well up from within the realm of the self.
As Chapter 2 demonstrates, the werewolf has embodied both kinds
of grotesque imagery. In its monstrous lupine form, it is usually represented
as an entirely alien other threatening the social collective. In
representations of this type, the werewolf’s otherness is constructed
as the negative of a normalized social identity. In its human form,
however, (when its otherness is interiorized), and during its transformation
(when its hybridization of self and other becomes visible), the
werewolf is a consummate expression of the internalized grotesque. In
these latter representations of lycanthropy, the subjective experiences
of the ‘universal’ subject are shown to be susceptible to contamination
by the other. The werewolf’s facility for embodying both versions of the
grotesque draws attention to the Gothic mode’s positioning as a site
where sociological processes associated with the production of social
‘reality’ and psychological processes associated with the production of
selfhood intersect, and demonstrates the extent to which each category
produces and authenticates the other within modernity. In this context,
Žižek’s understanding of the modern monstrous is useful, because it