Boyan Manchev

This   article   examines   the   structural   relationship   between Kant’s philosophy and the genre of Gothic literature, in view of the formation of the modern idea of the subject. The paradox of Kant’s idea of the sublime reveals the blind spot of the Subject: Reason does not (can not?) know itself. The phenomenon is noumenal at its very core insofar as the existential condition is not susceptible to objectification because the existential idea presupposes the inseparability of the subject from the object. From this point of view, the appearance of the figure of the gothic Double is inseparable from the emergence of the category of subject itself. Ultimately, the Subject is the Double. Duality is an ontological structure determining for Modernity – the Double is the matrix of reflexivity, and therefore of Reason and the Subject. This experimental hypothesis was developed by juxtaposing Immanuel Kant and Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s ideas of the determinism of nature and supernatural necessity.

The radicalisation of Kant’s critical philosophy by the Jena Romanticism and, above all, by Novalis, is decisive for the understanding of the modern relationship between philosophy and poetry (i.e. literature or, more generally, art), which is both a relationship of continuity and rupture: such is the starting hypothesis of the study. The shared horizon, but also a matrix of the ambiguous relationship of philosophy and poetry, is the turn I venture to describe as a transition from ontology to ontogony. After Kant, ontology became a field of modal orientation: the world is a necessary world. The world is becoming a task. The study delves into the conceptual depth of this turn, respectively of the relation between philosophy and poetry, based on the reading of Kant’s critical philosophy proposed by Gilles Deleuze. The analysis sets itself the task of highlighting unexpected yet crucial dimensions of the complex relationship between philosophy and literature, established in modern terms only in the second half of the 18th century. The figures of “Reason” and “Madness”, expressing the immanent tension of Kant’s productive power for imagination, will occupy a central place among them.