Toward a Multicultural Gothic Aesthetics - Concentric

Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 33.1 

March 2007: 177-98 

Adorno, Foucault, and Said: 

Toward a Multicultural Gothic Aesthetics 1 

Andrew Hock Soon Ng 

Monash University 

Abstract 

This essay attempts to answer the question, albeit tentatively, “what is the 

Gothic aesthetics” and then to suggest how this aesthetics might serve as a 

critical apparatus for the reading and appreciation of narratives not usually 

associated with the genre. I first appropriate Adorno’s theory of ugliness to 

map out some initial coordinates of a Gothic aesthetics, and within this 

framework I look at the recurring Gothic themes of loss and transgression. 

Secondly, I re-examine the relations between psychoanalysis and the Gothic: 

deeming psychoanalysis vital to an understanding of Gothic aesthetics, I 

defend it from recent claims that it lacks historical specificity, in its 

“Gothicizing” approach to texts, by turning to Foucault’s “What is an 

Author” and Said’s Freud and the Non-European. Finally I endeavor to show 

how Gothic aesthetics, in its capacity to make clear on a foundational level 

how various kinds of transgression occur, can be a “multicultural” aesthetics, 

that is, can help us to elucidate not only Western literary texts but also Non- 

Western ones. This de-Westernizing (or de-colonializing) of Gothic aesthetics 

is indeed inevitable once we assume that it (perhaps like any aesthetics) must 

be prepared to face resistance from, and undergo transformation by, any of the 

narratives whose deep structures it attempts to illuminate. I also use Karatani 

Kojin’s notion of aesthetic “unbracketing” in support of my claim that the 

Gothic aesthetics may be multicultural. 

Keywords 

the Gothic, aesthetics, the ugly, Adorno, Foucault, Said, 

psychoanalysis, multiculturalism 

1 I would like to thank my two anonymous readers for their insightful comments and helpful 

suggestions. This essay is an extension of my meditation on the Gothic as a multicultural 

aesthetics, which was first conceived when writing the introduction to my book, Interrogating 

Interstices (forthcoming 2007).

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Concentric 33.1 

March 2007 

The Gothic as Aesthetics of Ugliness 

In the tradition of Plato and Kant, aesthetics (aesthesis means “perception” in 

Greek) has been concerned with our perception of “beauty” (and thus too of what is 

“not beautiful”). However, theorists like Berel Lang and Emory Elliot have 

observed that such a power to evaluate (or to “judge” to use Kant’s term) 

historically belongs to those “in a dominant position politically, legally, or 

economically over the other”; thus their aesthetic judgments may “demean and 

subordinate the other by pronouncing [a] person or his or her cultural production to 

be inferior, beneath consideration, or objectionable” (Elliot 3). Aesthetics in this 

formal, academic sense thus became “a tool of divisiveness, enmity and oppression” 

(3), presupposing universal standards of beauty and thus the ugliness (or more 

generally abnormality) of whatever does not meet these standards. Therefore in an 

era of cultural studies, multiculturalism, and glocalization, formal aesthetics has 

been considered highly suspect—at the very least, Eurocentric. 

A recent revival of aesthetics has thus shifted its focus away from the 

beautiful to “a specific kind of human experience” (Farber 2). An aesthetic 

experience, according to Alan Goldman, is fuelled by the object’s (whether manmade 

or “natural”) challenge to “our perceptual and emotional capacities. To meet 

these challenges simultaneously is to experience aesthetically” (Goldman 188). 

Therefore what is pre-defined by a given culture as “ugly,” “grotesque” or even 

“obscene” can still have aesthetic “value” (Zemach; not in the Works Cited). 

Indeed, for Theodor Adorno, beauty cannot be conceptualized without presupposing 

the ugly. For Adorno, the very fact that there are standards for what is art-worthy 

already suggests the “permanent return of the archaic [that is, the ugly], intertwined 

with the dialectic of enlightenment in which art participates” (Adorno 47). 2 In this 

rather Freudian configuration—the Unheimlich (uncanny) as “return of the 

repressed”—it seems ugliness is the original site of aesthetics, yet one which must 

2 Adorno is not the first theorist to see the mutual dependence of beauty and ugliness. The 

concept of the sublime in Burke and Kant (to whom Adorno of course refers) addresses the notion 

that the beautiful and terrible are dialectically intertwined, and that the former is always tinged 

with a threatening proportion of the latter. The interdependence between beauty and ugliness in 

aesthetics is not an unfamiliar one in Eastern philosophy. For example, the Tao Té Ching (around 

600BC) records that the dialectical relationships between binary opposites constitute “the Way”. 

Specifically regarding beauty and ugliness, it is written that “Since the world points up to beauty 

as such / There is ugliness too. / If goodness is taken as goodness / Wickedness enters as well” 

(Lao Tzu 54).

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be subsequently repressed by a rationalizing (“conscious”) Enlightenment thinking 

in order for the fantasy or “spell” of the beautiful to unfold: 

Beauty is not the Platonically pure beginning but rather something 

that originated in the renunciation of what was once feared, which 

only as a result of this renunciation—retrospectively, so to speak, 

according to its own telos—became the ugly. Beauty is the spell over 

the spell, which devolves upon it. The ambiguousness of the ugly 

results from the fact that the subject subsumes under the abstract and 

the formal category of ugliness everything condemned by art: 

polymorphous sexuality as well as the violently mutilated and lethal. 

(47) 3 

Beauty in Adorno’s view, then, is modern art’s struggle for independence 

from pre-Enlightenment aesthetics. The modern emphasis on rationality and 

empirical certainty dictates that art, for it to have any worth, must disavow the 

ambiguity and inchoateness of anything which cannot be explained and classified in 

order to qualify as “art.” Anything that suggests the shapeless and the anomalous is 

immediately relegated to the ugly, and placed outside the domain of modern 

aesthetics. But as Adorno argues, the ugly can never finally be eschewed: it remains 

the unacknowledged “site” of aesthetics, awaiting its moment of return. In this 

formulation then, an aesthetic experience is not one from which pleasure is derived 

but one which unnerves and disorients. As a reflection of ugliness, art, Adorno 

argues, “could not disavow remembrance of accumulated horror; otherwise its form 

would be trivial” (Adorno 324). 

3 Despite Adorno’s comment that the “psychoanalytical theory of art is superior to idealist 

aesthetics in that it brings to light what is internal to art and is not itself artistic”(Adorno 8-9), he 

is critical of Freud’s stance on art. “For Freud”, argues Adorno, “artworks are not immediate wish 

fulfillments but transform unsatisfied libido into a socially productive achievement, whereby the 

social value of art is simply assumed, with uncritical respect for art’s public reputation” (10). 

Such a view deprives artworks, according to Adorno, 

of their antithetic stance to the not-I, which remains unchallenged by the 

thorniness of artworks. They are exhausted in the psychical performance of 

gaining mastery over instinctual renunciation and, ultimately, in the achievement 

of conformity. . . . The conformist psychoanalytical endorsement of the 

prevailing view of the artwork as a well-meaning cultural commodity 

corresponds to an aesthetic hedonism that banishes art’s negativity to the 

instinctual conflicts of its genesis and suppresses any negativity in the finished 

work. (12)

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But Adorno’s aesthetic theory goes beyond the mere proposition that beauty 

is always haunted by some ancient ugliness that is ever threatening to “return.” This 

tension between the beautiful and the ugly is what, for Adorno, precipitates or 

“explodes into” (84) art itself: 

Even this volatilization of aesthetic transcendence becomes aesthetic, 

a measure of the degree to which artworks are mythically bound up 

with their antithesis. In the incineration of appearance, artworks break 

away in a glare from the empirical world and become the counterfigure 

of what lives there; art today is scarcely conceivable except as 

a form of reaction that anticipates the apocalypse. Closely observed, 

even tranquil works discharge not so much the pent-up emotions of 

their makers as their works’ own inwardly antagonistic forces. (85) 

Thus the “return” of the ugly is rather the force of the archaic as it disturbs the 

surface stability of the beautiful than the artist’s mimetic impulse to free his/her 

work from the tyranny of established aesthetic standards. Aesthetics for Adorno is 

an engagement with antithesis, deliberately breaking away from empirical reality to 

delve into the unspeakable space of the unconscious where perversion, violence, 

and of course ugliness preside; it entails our experience of the critical tension that a 

particular artwork represents. Artworks must “[strain] towards a synthesis 

develop[ed] in the form of their irreconcilability” (234). In psychoanalytical 

parlance the perceiving subject, by apprehending this tension, is able to break 

through the spell of “reality” to confront what transpires, horribly, beneath its 

veneer 

Adorno’s concept reminds us that the Gothic is in the first place a powerful 

perceptual or aesthetic experience. Like the mimetic discharge of which Adorno 

speaks, the Gothic can be construed as a violent defiance of the ideals of Romantic 

literature, forcing the latter to face its own “dark side.” Indeed, as Michael Gamer 

observes, Romantic writers were very often Gothicists themselves (Coleridge and 

Byron, for example) or at least tended to pick up “the conventions and practices of 

their Gothic contemporaries,” a fact which “exemplifies something more fundamental 

about Romantic aesthetic practice itself” (Gamer 102). The very qualities 

which Romantic ideology ostentatiously rejects return through its cracks to haunt 

the pages of Romantic writings before becoming a “low-brow” offshoot, one which 

in time became even more popular and marketable than its “host.” But more than 

just a parasitical double of Romantic aesthetics that takes on its own independent

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life, Gothic aesthetics invites a critical tension in the act of apprehending an artwork 

(in this case literary work): signifiers now proliferate into monstrous proportions 

and interpretations become ambivalent. As an aesthetic enterprise, then, the Gothic, 

I would argue, can be both a type of writing and a way of reading, one that is 

particularly useful in responding to “ugliness” in its broadest sense (which includes 

the experiences of trauma, horror, and death). In this sense Gothic literature cannot 

really be separated from Gothic criticism: together they outline the project of 

Gothic aesthetics. The critical, extra-literary sense of the Gothic vitally depends on 

the Gothic text’s literariness. 

Various critics have noted that Gothic literature evokes anxiety in the reader 

because it disrupts his or her familiarity with her world. Coral Ann Howells, for 

example, argues that “instead of a sense of stability and harmony, what we find in 

Gothic fiction is a dreadful insecurity in the face of a contingent world which is 

entirely unpredictable and menacing” (Howells 5). There is an affinity here with 

Adorno’s theory since Gothic aesthetics, like ugliness, is precisely the tension 

invoked by a failure to negotiate with an otherness that persistently threatens 

familiarity. 4 What especially marks the Gothic nature of a particular narrative is the 

accumulation of this threat as the narrative progresses, intensifying rather than 

muting its element of horror: 

Rather than canceling the significance of the original event by 

displacing it, the horror story increases that event’s significance, 

multiplying its effect with each repetition. It articulates a paradox of 

reversibility and irreversibility in the given social shape of death. For 

while death is irreversible in the nonfictive world, in the horror story 

it may threaten an infinity of reversibility; it becomes the finale 

which is not final, whose limits are determined by its narrative 

possibilities. (Stewart 36) 

Both critics emphasize that the Gothic-aesthetic “effect” on the reader is 

derived from the narrative itself. The sense of ontological disorientation and the 

4 Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall view the horror of the Gothic as lying in its “emphasis on 

anachronism . . . the threat derives from Gothic vestiges which survive into the present and 

threaten the values of modernity” (224). This reading need not (though it could) be taken to 

circumscribe the Gothic within a particular historical period: perhaps these “vestiges” are more 

suggestive of a prehistorical or ahistorical (trans-temporal), primitive or barbarian force that 

might even recall Adorno’s reflections on the aesthetic tension and explosion.

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infinite deferral of actual death are experiences that are not just thematically but 

narratologically grounded. 

I want to further illuminate Adorno’s notion of aesthetic tension by focusing 

on two closely-related elements of Gothic writing, loss and transgression. The 

return of the repressed (whether historical or psychical) already insinuates the 

unremitting presence of loss, as well as a boundary violation effected by a 

recurrence of something which should not recur. Gothic aesthetics is the aesthetics 

of loss and/or transgression not just as “theme” but as actual (life and/or narrative) 

experience. “Gothic aesthetics is located at the interstices between the “subject’s 

Gothic spirit [and] its Gothic flesh in a way that privileges neither” (Bruhm 2). 

Bruhm specifically traces this tension between, on the one hand, a “proliferation of 

language that borders on obsession-compulsion” (page ) and attempts to make 

visible what is otherwise “hidden, buried, or lost from view,” and on the other the 

slipperiness of “otherness” that confounds language: “such legibility only increases 

the horror within each novel, as it points even more forcefully to the presence of the 

supernatural, that which can never be captured in language” (2). 5 For in Gothic 

narratives: 

loss is a kind of revenance in that the very recognition of loss (or 

even, some might say, the unconscious experience of loss) is itself an 

exercise of language or image-making. However, the image or the 

word which is produced by loss and desire also generates loss and 

desire in that the word is never fully able to complete the subject’s 

dismembered body [or ruptured psyche, I may add] or to lay his/her 

ghosts to rest. The Gothic subject is always a “subject in excess,” 

desiring more than the signifying systems [especially language] can 

provide.” (Bruhm 3) 

If as Adorno says the aesthetic quality of an artwork is precisely its own 

contradictions, then one of these contradictions may be this split in the Gothic 

“subject”—whether taken as author, character and/or reader. In a sense here we are 

taking the text itself as a “body”; if in a Gothic narrative author’s/narrator’s/ 

character’s/reader’s “flesh” cannot “sublimely transcend” (Bruhm 3) its corpore- 

5 The problem with this reading, however, is that Bruhm seems to neglect the fact that many 

Gothic narratives are actually short stories (Bruhm’s essay heavily privileges the great Gothic 

novels), and that many contemporary Gothic novels are linguistically rather minimalist (for 

example, the narratives of Chuck Palahniuk).

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ality to attain the spiritual, then this is true of the body of the text. And here 

“spiritual” also means being at one with (“in spirit with”) a particular ideology or 

community which the “Gothic flesh” desires but fails to realize. This failure may 

result in a violent retaliation by the body against the spirit which renders the body 

“abject” or “monstrous.” If then the narrative text itself is likened to a body, the 

proliferation of linguistic markers signals its inability to articulate the unspeakable, 

finally rendering the whole narrative “monstrous.” The endeavor to “mean” leaves 

the text ultimately meaningless. 

The Gothic quality of a narrative, then, is not derived from specific episodes 

of trauma or horror but rather a lingering presence of loss which refuses to dissolve, 

and of which both trauma and horror are effects. The inability of the subject to deal 

with this loss threatens her sense of coherence and directly relegates her to a liminal 

space of being. The subject is then left with two alternatives: to embody the liminal 

and risk becoming a “monster” or to dissolve the self (as in death) as a mode of 

resignation or renunciation (Frankenstein’s creature at the novel’s end) or strategy 

of resistance (Dr. Jekyll). This liminality (marginality, in-betweenness) already 

presupposes that transgression is at work. Whether deliberately or as the result of 

circumstances, the Gothic subject’s experience of loss involves an inevitable act of 

“crossing over” into a heterotopic, unheimlich space—one that is at once familiar 

and unfamiliar, real and unreal. The heterotopia, according to Foucault, is a 

“placeless place” which, like a mirror, 

exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. . . . [The 

mirror] makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at 

myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the 

space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be 

perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there. 

(“Of Other Spaces” 24) 

This has a direct relation to Gothic aesthetics. As Fred Botting puts it, the “mirror of 

fiction . . . [not only] transports readers into remote and unreal places, but it is read 

in a specific place in the present, thereby disturbing a sense of reality along with the 

aesthetic values supposed to sustain it” (“In Gothic Darkly” 9). Once again, this 

argument recalls Adorno’s notion of tension. As noted earlier, the aesthetics of 

beauty cannot be divorced from ugliness—the former is, in fact, premised on the 

latter—in the same way that “realist” fiction and its attending aesthetic values 

cannot be separated from its Gothic countersite and (anti-) aesthetics.

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It is in this sense that Gothic writing is transgressive, not in the sense of 

“challenging” or “resisting” but more in the sense of stretching reality to its limits, 

and from there fissuring reality with its own limitations. As Foucault argues in his 

“Preface to Transgression”: 

Transgression is an action that involves the limit, that narrow zone of 

a line where it displays the flash of its passage, but perhaps also its 

entire trajectory, even its origin; it is likely that transgression has its 

entire space in the line it crosses. The play of limits and transgression 

seems to be regulated by a simple obstinacy: transgression 

incessantly crosses and recrosses a line that closes up behind it in a 

wave of extremely short duration, and thus it is made to return once 

more right to the horizon of the uncrossable. But this play is 

considerably more complex: these elements are situated in an 

uncertain context, in certainties that are immediately upset so that 

thought is ineffectual as soon as it attempts to seize them. (73) 

Although I am decontextualising Foucault’s point here, his view that 

transgression is a form of persistent recurrence (a repeated crossing-and-recrossing 

of the line, a play of limits at/on the line) suggests the obsessive-compulsive mode 

that Bruhm observes in Gothic narratives, and is useful for my formulation of 

Gothic aesthetics. 6 The Gothic novel proliferates linguistically in its attempt to utter 

(or cross over to) the unspeakable, but always in différance, because the unspeakable 

cannot ultimately be apprehended—thus necessitating a return to “the horizon 

of the uncrossable.” Transgression presupposes an attempt to breach the limit while 

ultimately failing to do so: the subject arrives at the limit, momentarily violates it, 

and then becomes reabsorbed within the limit; this results in her being trapped on 

the threshold of that very limit. In this sense then, the counter-action of the Gothic 

is not so much resistive as it is transgressive. 7 It brings to the fore certain psychological, 

social and/or cultural constraints and the ways in which subjects negotiate 

with and transgress them, often harrowingly. 

6 Foucault is mainly discussing the mutual dependence of transgression and the limit, which has 

arguably become the normal state of affairs since the Nietzschean declaration that “God is dead.” 

7 After all, many traditional and modern Gothic narratives may seem “revolutionary” in their 

challenge of the status quo, but in the end they are, as Baldick and Mighall have noted, rather 

conservative in their approach and especially in the way they resolve difficult issues (Baldick and 

Mighall 212). See also Botting’s essay, “The Gothic Production of Unconsciousness” (28-31).

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Foucault further notes that transgression de-stabilizes notions of certainty by 

revealing the irreconcilability between the subject apprehending and the object 

apprehended. What results from such a tension is the breakdown of the former’s 

psyche to expose a fundamental void residing within the “I.” The inability to 

surmount the object apprehended ruptures the certainty of the self, rendering it 

“ineffectual.” Reading this view against Adorno’s aesthetic theory, we note an 

interesting correlation between the two theorists with regard to art and how it 

should work aesthetically. For although Adorno does not use the term “transgression” 

in his argument, what he has to say about aesthetic tension, and the 

straining toward a “synthesis of irreconcilability,” certainly echoes Foucault’s point. 

From the above discussion we see that transgression and loss are closely related, 

and that Gothic aesthetics (at least when we approach it via Adorno and Bruhm) lies 

between or encompasses the two. A subject transgresses because she is confronted 

with, and attempts to apprehend, an object; but she fundamentally cannot do so, and 

the result is a collapse of her sense of being-in-the-world. Unsurprisingly, for the 

subject it is death, or madness, or trauma which ensues. 

Psychoanalysis and the Gothic 

What I am calling the Gothic aesthetics has much to do with the critical 

apparatus that has gone into shaping its discourse. Traditional Gothic literature 

would not have experienced resurgence today if it were not for the collective 

theories that have given it a new lease on life. The return of the Gothic repressed is 

occasioned by a reinvestigation of the issues raised by contemporary theoretical 

perspectives. And certainly these issues and these theories are also instrumental in 

motivating a new generation of writers to deploy the Gothic in their work, as 

evidenced in the writings of Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie. Of the various 

theories, it is psychoanalysis (tampered variously by feminism, postmodernism, and 

more recently postcolonialism) that has had the most profound influence on 

contemporary Gothic criticism. And yet, as much as psychoanalysis has helped to 

rejuvenate Gothic studies, it is also itself a kind of “Gothic discourse.” In other 

words psychoanalysis, despite foregrounding itself as a scientific (psychological) 

enquiry into the unconscious, is in the final analysis an aesthetics (or more precisely, 

an anti-aesthetics). Terry Eagleton claims that “it is perhaps more accurate to 

characterize Freud as a thinker who, while inheriting something of the great tide of 

aestheticizing thought which we have followed through the nineteenth-century, 

receives this legacy in a deeply pessimistic spirit, as a heritage gone sour” (268).

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Psychoanalysis disturbs the confidence that traditional aesthetics can represent 

mankind’s “unity of spirit and sense, reason and spontaneity” (Engleton 265), and 

instead reveals the self to be fissured by unspeakable desires. At such, it borrows 

the readily available vocabulary of the Gothic to articulate its inquiry into the 

uncharted territories of the human mind and body. For like the Gothic, 

psychoanalysis is a discourse of loss and transgression, “[telling] us that the free 

individual is in fact caught up in an over-determined chain of relations; moreover, 

the temptation to remain or return to previous stages impedes individual change. 

Rather than being a tool for explaining the gothic, then, psychoanalysis is a late 

gothic story which has emerged to help explain a twentieth-century experience of 

paradoxical detachment from and fear of others and the past” (Kilgour 220; see also 

Castle 237). 

Thus to argue, like Baldick and Mighall, that the emphasis on a psychological 

model in recent Gothic criticism is misguided certainly suggests a limited view of 

Gothic narratives (or any literature, for that matter). Baldick and Mighall’s primary 

concern is that contemporary Gothic criticisms tend to obfuscate Gothic writings’ 

historical trajectory by over-emphasizing their psychological significance. 8 I agree 

that much psychoanalytically-inflected Gothic criticism tends to ignore a work’s 

historicity as a potential site for theoretical analysis. Yet to argue that “Gothic 

Criticism is condemned to repeat what it has failed to understand and so reproduces 

in its own discourse what we call the trope of ‘Gothicising’ the past, typically 

casting the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie in the melodramatic light reserved for 

the Italian aristocracy or the Spanish Inquisition by Radcliffe and Lewis” (Baldick 

and Mighall 210) is certainly a myopic way of approaching literature; for this is 

tantamount to saying that the Gothic novels must always be read against their 

historical moments, which suggests that these works cannot signify beyond those 

moments. This, according to the two critics, is what current Gothic criticism has 

failed to understand; they accuse Gothic criticism of “falsifying” (“Gothicising”) 

the texts’ histories, and directly making the narratives serve the critic’s analytical 

ends rather than allowing them to demonstrate their “true” historical affinities. 

However, in my view, Baldick and Mighall’s historical approach fails to consider 

8 In my view the main shortcoming in Mighall and Baldick’s thesis is that, again, they limit their 

discussion to a very narrow selection of canonical Gothic works. Also, they seem to have missed 

the point that Freud’s work often draws on history. To cite one example, in his The Interpretation 

of Dreams, Freud notes that his argument has a foundation in the “prehistoric view of dreams”, 

especially in “classical antiquity” (36). He then goes on to discuss, among others, Aristotle’s 

understanding of dreams (36-39). Psychoanalysis as theory often considers the historical context 

of ideas; as practice it looks for the influence of the past and of memories.

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the reciprocal relationship between the Gothic and psychoanalysis, and restricts the 

number of interpretative possibilities. After all, is not the yardstick of good 

literature its ability to invite innovative interpretations that go beyond its authorial 

and historical boundaries To adhere to these two critics’ viewpoint is to say that 

Gothic novels have nothing new to tell us beyond what they reveal at and of their 

own historical moments. Another problem with this kind of argument is that it does 

not tell us why and how Gothic (or for that matter any) literature can invite certain 

emotional responses from the reader. Baldick and Mighall’s injunction, useful as a 

reminder that literature must always be carefully contextualized, falters when it 

comes to treating a literary work as an aesthetic representation. 

For Foucault, critical theories, when applied to texts, enable “an endless 

possibility of discourse” (“What Is an Author” 114). Thus Freud and Marx (whom 

Foucault calls the “founders of discursivity” [114]) are very different from the 19 th - 

century literary authors in that their works produce “the possibilities and the rules 

for the formation of other texts” (114). At one point in “What is an Author” 

Foucault writes: 

The founders of discursivity (I use Marx and Freud as examples, 

because I believe them to be both the first and the most important 

cases) make possible something altogether different from what a 

novelist makes possible. Ann Radcliffe’s texts opened the way for a 

certain number of resemblances and analogies which have their 

model or principle in her work. The latter contains characteristic 

signs, figures, relationships, and structures which could be reused by 

others. In other words, to say that Ann Radcliffe founded the Gothic 

horror novel means that in the nineteenth-century Gothic novel one 

will find, as in Ann Radcliffe’s works, the theme of the heroine 

caught in the trap of her own innocence, the hidden castle, the 

character of the black, cursed hero devoted to making the world 

expiate the evil done to him, and all the rest of it. 

On the other hand, when I speak of Marx and Freud as founders of 

discursivity, I mean that they made possible not only a certain 

number of analogies, but also (and equally important) a certain 

number of differences. They have created a possibility for something 

other than their discourse, yet something belonging to what they 

founded. (114)

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Although Foucault does not attempt to draw a relationship between 

psychoanalysis (and Marxism) and the Gothic, it is surely a tacit understanding of 

their association which leads him to compare Freud and Marx with Ann Radcliffe. 9 

When a literary text, for instance a Gothic novel, is read against a theoretical 

discourse (or against several of them), what results is the dual performance of what 

we might call “literary aesthetics” and “critical aesthetics.” The former is what 

Foucault attributes to Radcliffe: what makes a Gothic novel “Gothic” are certain 

characteristics, analogies, models, paradigms that are shared with other Gothic 

works. This usually occurs on a thematic or imagistic level (such as the barren 

landscape, the old mansion/castle), but resemblances in deep structures are also 

useful points of reference. These deep structures, however, can only emerge 

through the deployment of a critical apparatus such as psychoanalysis, Marxism, 

and/or poststructuralism. Thus, taking into account Kilgour and Castle’s claims that 

Freudianism is itself a kind of “Gothic story,” we could argue that Gothic narratives 

and psychoanalytic readings of them share a dialectical relationship, each fostering 

the other’s “aesthetic” force. 

Having established the aesthetical dimension of psychoanalysis, I want to now 

address its efficacy as a theoretical framework for reading non-Western narratives. 

Insofar as psychoanalysis is a Western-centric “aesthetic” story-theory, its application 

to non-Western narratives remains problematic because of a potential 

predilection toward literary-theoretical “colonialism.” Foucault’s view provides a 

tentative resolution to this dilemma: as important as it is to elicit the deep structures 

of desires inherent in non-Western literatures when “psychoanalyzing them,” it is 

equally important to pay attention to the way in which psychoanalytical principles 

are reshaped by these literatures. This is (at least partly) what I take Foucault to 

mean by the “otherness” that is inherent in any discursive enterprise. Within such a 

framework, psychoanalysis is no longer used prescriptively but rather reflexively, 

becoming transformed by the very object which it seeks to illuminate. Such a view 

is in line with Edward Said’s assessment of the endurance of Freud: 

Freud is a remarkable instance of a thinker for whom scientific work 

was, as he often said, a kind of archaeological excavation of the 

buried, forgotten, repressed and denied past . . . . Freud was an 

explorer of the mind, of course, but also, in the philosophical sense, 

an overturner and a re-mapper of accepted or settled geographies and 

9 The classic Marxist reading of Gothic writings is now surely Franco Moretti’s essay, 

“Dialectic of Fear,” in his Signs Taken for Wonders.

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genealogies. He thus lends himself especially to rereading in different 

contexts, since his work is all about how life history offers itself by 

recollection, research and reflection to endless structuring and 

restructuring, in both the individual and the collective sense. That we, 

different readers from different periods of history, with different 

cultural backgrounds, should continue to do this in our readings of 

Freud strikes me as nothing less than a vindication of his work’s 

power to instigate new thought, as well as to illuminate situations that 

he himself might never have dreamed of. (Said 27) 

For Said, then, Freud’s theories transcend temporal, cultural and geographic 

boundaries precisely because they are malleable enough to accommodate the 

“otherness” of the “other” even as they shed light on the way this “other” functions. 

In illuminating the Gothicity of non-Western writings, a psychoanalytical reading 

does not reject their cultural underpinnings but rather carefully negotiates them. 

This strategy might perhaps satisfy Baldick and Mighall’s “historical” predilections, 

as well as allowing extra-literary paradigms to operate. 

Speaking of criticism in general, and Gothic criticism in particular, David 

Punter writes that “there would be no possibility for criticism to isolate a single text, 

a non-duplicitous textual act; instead criticism would only be able to realize itself 

by entering into the ‘hall of absence’, the clinic for chronic originary doubt. Like a 

ghost tied to, and doomed to return to, an already inscribed location, criticism itself 

would be doomed to haunt a site which can never be fully recaptured” (“Spectral 

Criticism” 261). Here Punter is discussing the proliferation of what he terms 

“spectral criticism” which, in his view, seems to characterize much recent 

theoretical work dealing not just with literature but with cultural studies as well. 

Interpretation, in the final analysis, occurs “only within an encircling horizon of 

mistranslation, of uninterpretability” (264). The tension (Punter uses the term 

“dialogue” [264]) between the subject and object of interpretation results in what I 

am calling “critical aesthetics”—which in the end cannot be divorced from an 

artwork’s inherent aesthestic worth. And it is in Gothic criticism that the spectralization 

of interpretation is most profoundly realized. Because of the Gothic concern 

with various forms of repression, the unspeakable (ranging from supernaturalism to 

psychological fissures), and abjection, to discuss it is always to do so in tremulous 

abeyance; to interpret its concerns necessarily “ghosts” them, revealing the fact of 

their signifier’s (or signifiers’) irretrievability in the very act of enunciation.

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Interpreting Gothic narratives is always a paradoxical act, at once a criticism in 

excess and a reading of loss. 

That psychoanalysis has played such an important role in Gothic criticism is 

precisely because of their uncanny association. Like the Gothic, psychoanalysis is a 

discourse which always implies more than it enunciates. Both Foucault’s and Said’s 

reading of psychoanalysis suggests that there is something inherently excessive in 

appropriating it in the act of criticism since what it attempts to articulate is always 

already in trace, or irretrievable. Psychoanalytic criticism is a performance that in 

attempt to retrieve will always disappoint. To elaborate this point further, I turn to 

one of the most important concepts of psychoanalysis, and one which recurs (in one 

form or another, in more or less “spectral” forms) in every Gothic novel: the 

unconscious. In fact, as Botting informs us, while psychoanalysis has helped to 

“unearth” the unconscious in Gothic literature it has always been a part of the 

Gothic’s repertoire, “waiting to be discovered by the penetrating gaze of science 

[that is, psychoanalysis]: it lies waiting to be glimpsed amongst the condensed 

association produced in the un-black continent of modernity’s literature” (“The 

Gothic Production” 16). 10 For as in most things psychoanalytical and Gothic, the 

unconscious “is not reducible to language. A space of metaphoric substitution, it 

lies in excess of the final paternal word” (“The Gothic Production” 31). Following 

Lacan, Botting goes on to associate the unconscious with the “un-black,” claiming 

that the latter 

lies beyond the darkness populated by Gothic images and metaphors, 

the very space of the Thing, the absence inimical to discourse and 

constitutive of its reproduction after the fact. The un-black darkness 

remains to be illuminated and resists all light; it is repeatedly filled by 

images and yet returns no knowledge. The metaphors around which 

the double narratives of Gothic fiction are knotted emerge in the unblack 

but never conceal it. Indeed, the proximity of two chains of 

signification in Gothic novels, entwining law and transgression, 

power and desire, disclose a gap that narrative cannot close. (“The 

Gothic Production” 32) 

This “double narrative” of the Gothic corresponds with its critical trajectory 

that, perhaps because it “plays at the limit” (in Foucault’s phrase) or “on the line,” 

10 Interestingly, Botting cannot seem to decide whether psychoanalysis is science or 

“modernity’s literature,” an ambivalence shared by several theorists.

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is always in excess. Thus it is in the light of psychoanalytic criticism that the 

manifold significances of the Gothic can best become resonant. However, rather 

than say (like Botting) that the “un-black darkness” of the unconscious “is filled by 

images yet returns no knowledge” I would suggest that the knowledge it returns is 

ambivalent and tentative, becoming a trace even as meaning is inscribed upon it. 

Multiculturalizing Gothic Aesthetics 

The Gothic, in its traditional sense, is fundamentally a Western literary genre, 

but my recasting of it as an aesthetic mode, one bolstered by the polymorphous 

trajectory of psychoanalysis (itself an aesthetic story-theory), can significantly 

broaden it, I would suggest, so that it may function as a critical apparatus for the 

reading of multicultural literatures. Instead of being territorialized by a distinct 

historical and cultural heritage (i.e. the West), this re-constellated approach to the 

Gothic would then significantly open it up so that it might embrace the literatures of 

other lands, thereby also adding to its own critical sophistication. 

So what does a multicultural literary aesthetics entail At the beginning of this 

essay, I highlighted some views which question the efficacy of aesthetics as a 

philosophical enterprise. I argued that part of the problem with traditional Western 

aesthetics is its tendency to inscribe upon the artworks of another culture what are 

essentially its own local standards. Karatani Kojin, the renowned Japanese literary 

historian, calls this “aestheticentrism.” According to Kojin, the Orientalist attitudes 

of “looking down on the other [that is, the East] as an object of scientific analysis 

and looking up to the other as an aesthetic idol are less contradictory than 

complicit” (147). Drawing on Kant’s judgment of taste, and especially his theory of 

“disinterestedness” in aesthetic experience, 11 Kojin identifies an insidious predilection 

of the Orientalist gaze even when that gaze is expressing love and respect 

for another culture (146). The West is able to appreciate Eastern art simply by 

“bracketing various reactions to the object [of the gaze]” (151). That is, to deem an 

Eastern artwork aesthetically worthy—which, for many Orientalist aesthetes 

amounts, incorrectly, to loving and respecting its culture—the work must be 

bracketed against its local significance. This is how, according to Kojin, certain 

Japanese handicrafts were suddenly labeled art despite their lowly status amongst 

11 In his third critique Kant defines “beauty” in relation to the pleasure we naturally get from the 

perception of certain objects. Thus here there is no question of practical use or value (as in ethics) 

or of logical, scientific knowledge (epistemology); aesthetics is concerned only with perception in 

itself, as something detached and disinterested, and with the (beautiful) “form” of this perception.

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the Japanese people up to the time of Western influence. In other words, 

aestheticentrism achieves its objective not by neglecting the other but by 

transforming that other into an aesthetic province; in this way aestheticentrism can 

“appear” to be anti-colonialist when, in fact, it is deeply colonialist (153): 

“Aestheticentrism refuses to acknowledge that the other who does not offer any 

stimulative surprise of a ‘stranger’ lives a life ‘out there’” (153). What the 

Orientalist aesthete cannot aestheticize is ignored or disregarded. As Kojin correctly 

ascertains, aesthetics is valuable, but it must always involve a conscious effort to 

“bracket it against” external, local concerns—that is, to “bracket out (as 

phenomenologists say) those concerns, or to become “disinterested.” 

Thus, for instance, to read non-Western literatures from the perspective of 

“Gothic aesthetics” as I am now conceiving of it, would be not merely to treat 

selected narratives as art (detached, disinterested, “l’art pour l’art”), reading them 

“against” their human, social-cultural-historical context, but also to read them 

together with or alongside their human concerns: for instance, the personal or 

collective traumas, the modes of racism and sexism that are expressed in them. 

Reading these narratives in such a way would not deny them their status as works of 

art; rather, it would deepen their aesthetic significance. Kojin, using sexual 

representation as an example, elaborates: 

For instance if, in a text, a woman is described mainly as an aesthetic 

representation of desire, the unbracketing of [focusing on] the sexual 

representation is not a simple denial of the work. If the text is strong 

enough, it will accommodate different interpretations. And when we 

commit ourselves to rereading the text from alternative positions, we 

would again bracket that particular critique. Yet the new reading, of 

course, is not, and should not be, an erasure of the critique. (154) 

In other words, when we look at any literary or artistic work from various 

perspectives (historical, postcolonial and psychoanalytical, for example) we can 

foreground each perspective in turn by bracketing out the other ones. The reason I 

am emphasizing psychoanalysis is again the fact that it can itself be taken as both 

(Gothic) “story” and “aesthetic theory,” which gives it a special sort of priority in 

the formulation of a multicultural aesthetic model like the one I am suggesting, a 

model that combines the modes of bracketing and unbracketing, one to be used for a 

new reading of non-Western art, more specifically literary-narrative art. By 

un/bracketing the various social and national concerns of a work and reading them

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against one another and against the work’s more purely aesthetic dimensions, the 

Gothic paradigm comes into play through the notion of the “unspeakability” of 

these concerns which now we are trying to “speak about,” however tentatively. 

Through this process of bracketing out and unbracketing, then, a more or less 

universalizing model based on “Gothic aesthetics” (as I am now defining or 

conceiving of it) could be a multicultural critical tool, one that could initiate our 

encounter with the uncanny otherness of cultures as well as of themes, ideas, minds 

and monstrous supernatural creatures. Indeed, for Hélène Cixous, reading fiction (of 

whatever sort) is always already a kind of uncanny encounter. In her rereading of 

Freud’s “The Uncanny” Cixous makes the interesting comment that literature is that 

which “resists analysis and, thus, it attracts it the most” (547). For her, fiction 

confronts the reader with something that cannot be ultimately surmounted even 

though it invites our attempt to surmount it. Here then the uncanny comes by way 

of the non-arrival of meaning, since a particular text offers multiple significations. 

(We might think of Botting’s “un-black darkness” here, which is “filled with 

images but returns no knowledge.”) In fiction, the reader enters the “world of 

doubles” (547), seeing plural meanings in what is allegedly a single (familiar) work. 

But if “familiar” fiction is already “uncanny,” how much more so would be fiction 

from another, from a strange culture. Spivak believes such an uncanny engagement 

is important, even necessary, in a comparative literature that has “planetarity” as its 

objective. 12 The work of the uncanny in comparative literary study occurs at the 

interface where the self allows itself to be imagined “without guarantees, by and in 

another [the other’s] culture” (Death 52). It is the pursuit of seeing the self as other 

12 Spivak argues that she is uncomfortable with the term “global” because it carries connotations 

of homogeneity—“the imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere” (72). Therefore 

she coined the term “planetarity” as a countersite to the global. Planetarity is more “humancentered,” 

familiarizing us with alterity through an encounter with the unfamiliar. Spivak 

elaborates, 

To be human is to be intended toward the other. We provide for ourselves 

transcendental figurations of what we think is the origin of this animating gift: 

mother, nation, god, nature. These are names of alterity, some more radical than 

others. Planet-thought opens up to embrace an inexhaustible taxonomy of such 

names, including but not identical with the whole range of human universals. . . . 

If we imagine ourselves as planetary subjects rather than global agents . . . 

alterity remains underived from is; it is not our dialectical negation, it contains us 

as much as it flings us away. And thus to think of it is already to transgress, for, 

in spite of our forays into what we metaphorize, differently, as outer and inner 

space, what is above and beyond our own reach is not continuous with us as it is 

not, indeed, specifically discontinuous. We must persistently educate ourselves 

into this peculiar mindset. (73)

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without reducing (or homogenizing) the other to the self that should inform the 

work of comparative literature. 13 

Reading a variety of non-Western literatures from the aesthetic perspective of 

the Gothic would open an unfamiliar textual space for the reader, but she would 

also come to realize that certain kinds of human responses to particular circumstances 

are not entirely alien to the reader after all, regardless of cultural and 

ideological variations. 14 Undergoing psychic and/or emotional as well as cultural, 

political and historical disturbances, encountering the (perhaps un-black) unknown, 

existing liminally—these are in fact experiences familiar to all of us, common to 

people in every culture. Here, of course, I am not attempting to homogenize what 

are obviously many very different cultures and literatures into a single one. For 

Gothic aesthetics to have a “productively remembering look” (Silverman 183), 15 it 

13 This view of literature as an uncanny enterprise and its viability as a multicultural aesthetics 

also finds support in Heinz Ickstadt’s argument that despite literature’s relation to and connection 

with the larger contexts of ideology and history, and despite the fact that “this interrelation and 

interaction is constantly up for cultural redefinition,” it is primarily aesthetics that “marks the 

literary text’s difference”: “[Aesthetics] is not theoretical, political, documentary, etc. but able, 

through the specific organization of its functions, to open up and test theoretical or political 

discourse by pushing it to its limits, by staging it in terms of lived life, i.e. in terms of practice and 

experience, of the concrete and the particular” (269). Ickstadt then views literature as necessarily 

“transgressive” (in the Foucauldian sense) because it compels theory and politics to confront their 

own limitations. By juxtaposing them with everyday practices and intimate experiences, literature 

reveals the inability of theory and politics to appropriately explain the amazing variations in the 

way different people respond to different circumstances. This is especially apparent with regard to 

those “excessive moments” which can be horrifying. The taboos that surround them result in their 

being ambiguous at best, and hidden and unspeakable at worse, thus forcing any theoretical 

articulation of such moments to consider its own limitations as well. If seen as an aesthetics which 

combines story and theory, the Gothic becomes a form of self-reflexive literature: a story about 

criticism and a critical “reading” of a story. Ickstardt also sees literary texts as aesthetically 

“potent” in that they can “[cross] boundaries, [go] off limits, imaginatively [take] the place of the 

Other, or [enable one to explore] oneself in the Other. . . . [E]ven though such exploration is 

inevitably also self-projection and self-invention, it nevertheless opens possibilities of 

understanding and of sharing” (273). Reading non-Western literatures via a framework defined in 

terms of Gothic aesthetics allows precisely such an exploration. When Ickstardt argues that 

literature enables us to take the place of the other, or to vicariously experience the other in oneself, 

this is an indirect way of saying that reading literature through a shared aesthetic paradigm allows 

us to confront the other as uncanny. And this has the potential to help us re-evaluate our subject 

positions learn to appreciate otherness as something both different and familiarly strange. 

14 I have attempted to put theory to use in my book, Interrogating Interstices: Gothic Aesthetics 

in Postcolonial Asian and Asian American Literatures (forthcoming, 2007). Here I deploy the 

aesthetic enterprise of the Gothic in order to interrogate the deep structures of selected 

postcolonial and Asian American fiction. 

15 Kaja Silverman’s “productively remembering look” is a mode of looking whose imperative is 

to “displace”: “The remembering look is not truly productive until it effects one final

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must always attend to alterity even as it delineates common threads. And after all, 

as Spivak writes, “recognition begins in differentiation” (Death 15), which I take to 

mean not only that we cannot “see” what is too close to us (or what we have never 

really looked at before), but also that only in accepting (not fearing or demonizing) 

“otherness” can we come to appreciate our own subjective positions. Indeed, in this 

sense any cross-cultural reading of literature will be uncanny: it will always mean 

simultaneously seeing the other in the self and the self in the other. 

Conclusion 

At the start of this essay, I argued that a careful attention to cultural and 

historical specificities of particular literatures would help eliminate the possibility 

of “colonial imposition,” when for example we attempt to apply “Gothic aesthetics” 

to the reading of non-Western writings. Yet Žižek says that “multiculturalism” is 

the ideal form of global capitalism, “the attitude which, from a kind of empty global 

position, treats each local culture the way the colonizer treats colonized people—as 

‘natives” whose mores are to be carefully studied and ‘respected.’” He goes on to 

say: 

In other words, multiculturalism is a disavowed, inverted, selfreferential 

form of racism, a ‘racism with a distance’—it ‘respects’ 

the Other’s identity, conceiving the Other as a self-enclosed 

‘authentic’ community towards which he, the multiculturalist, 

maintains a distance rendered possible by his privileged universal 

position. Multiculturalism is a racism which empties its own position 

of all positive contents but nonetheless retains this position as the 

privileged empty point of universality from which one is able to 

appreciate (and depreciate) properly other particular cultures—the 

multiculturalist respect for the Other’s specificity is the very form of 

asserting one’s own superiority. (44) 

displacement—the displacement of the ego. It does not fully triumph over the forces that 

constrain us to see in predetermined ways until its appetite for alterity prevails, not only over 

sameness but also over self-sameness” (183). For the Gothic to be an aesthetics of such a “look” it 

must be mindful of its potential to colonize the other, to absorb otherness into the same (into itself) 

or to marginalize it. The test of its aesthetic mettle will be shown in the ability of the Gothic not 

only to negotiate (with) cultural and ideological differences despite its being used to illuminate 

them, but to respect and accept those alterities which it senses are necessary to itself.

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While there may be some validity to Žižek’s point of view here, it also may 

seem, following a familiar dynamic of cultural studies, postcolonialism and 

globalization theory, to collapse the notion of the multicultural too neatly into the 

“universal.” But according to the model I am suggesting, the point of using “Gothic 

aesthetics” as a framework for reading literatures outside the West would be 

precisely to dislodge “the Gothic” from its Euro-Anglo-American centrism: this 

would mean that the meaning of “the Gothic” itself would also necessarily undergo 

a transformation in the course of this aesthetic project, one brought about through 

the inevitable resistance to this project which it would face from “others.” Gothic 

aesthetics seen in this light could hardly remained detached from the texts it was 

interrogating and interpreting, as a kind of superior mode of “reading,” one now 

being imposed upon its textual Others. For this (or for any) aesthetics to function 

multiculturally, that unbracketing of the “realness” of the “cultural other” of which 

Kojin speaks must involve not only acknowledging the socio-political, cultural, and 

historical forces that go into the construction of the other’s (the other, the uncanny, 

unheimlich, “not-at-home”) aesthetics, but also those potential monstrous 

prejudices (for instance Žižek’s “racism”) that may lurk deep within oneself, within 

the subject, preventing his/her multiculturalist gaze from “looking productively.” 

To see the Gothic as a multicultural aesthetics would be in this sense, then, not to 

universalize it (which we assume might be Žižek’s fear), but to exploit its vast and 

labyrinthine potential to problematize universality. 

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Ng, Andrew Hock Soon. Interrogating Interstices: Gothic Aesthetics in 

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About the Author 

Andrew Hock Soon Ng ( 黃福順 ) teaches contemporary fiction, postcolonial literature, and 

theories of authorship and writing at Monash University, Malaysia. He is the author of 

Dimensions of Monstrosity in Contemporary Narratives (2004) and Interrogating Interstices: 

Gothic Aesthetics in Postcolonial Asian and Asian American Literature (forthcoming 2007). 

His articles have appeared in journals such as Mosaic, Women Studies, and Commonwealth 

Essays and Studies. He is currently editing a book on Asian Gothic and another on the 

double motif in literary and philosophical works. 

[Received 21 September 2006; accepted 19 January 2007; revised February 15 2007]

Toward a Multicultural Gothic Aesthetics - Concentric

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