Misosophy: The Shadows of the Transcendental
by Laurence Kent
Thought is primarily trespass and violence, the enemy, and nothing
presupposes philosophy: everything begins with misosophy.
—Gilles Deleuze1
A philosophy of horror inevitably reaches transcendental limits; it is thought itself which is born in
the shadowy depths of a horrific sublime. Nick Land screeches in the void that “horror first
encounters ‘that’ which philosophy eventually seeks to know”, and we will trace this prephilosophical trauma of thinking in the abstract spaces of German Expressionist cinema.2
The Discordant Harmony of the Sublime
For Kant, the sublime is a form of aesthetic judgement that arises when the faculty of imagination is
stretched beyond its limits. This violence done to the imagination in the face of a formless presence
of ungraspable immensity or power creates a negative pleasure. In the wake of imagination’s
inadequacy, the Ideas of reason take over, proving that “the mind has a power surpassing any
standard of sense”.3 Kant divides the sublime into mathematical and dynamic variants, depending
on whether the encounter is with an immense magnitude, stretching our “cognitive power”, or if an
unimaginable might is presented, stretching our “power of desire”.4
However, the concept of the sublime is not merely an aesthetic category in Gilles Deleuze’s reading
of Kant, and in fact provides support for the transcendental faculties. The sublime marks an
important step in the communication between faculties; it confronts us with a direct subjective
relationship between imagination and reason. What makes this relationship important is that, unlike
the free play of imagination and understanding that takes place in the judgement of the beautiful,
the sublime brings the faculties into a discordant harmony. The sublime points to the genesis of the
faculties’ accord in discord. The third critique grounds the first two critiques, but at the same time
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undermines the presence of a stable ground or natural harmony between our thinking faculties. The
sublime indexes the groundless ground of apperception.
We thus find a violence at the birth of thought, a traumatic encounter with an outside that cannot
be assimilated — something that can only ever be problematic to thinking; as Land writes, “the
sublime is only touched upon as pathological disaster”.5 Something is sensed which is
imperceptible, something is thought which must remain unthought. This is the transcendental
exercise of the faculties: when a faculty takes its own limit as its object – not empirical or part of
the given, but the genesis of the empirical, that by which the given is given.
Gothic Geometry
To flesh out some of these claims, we turn to Deleuze’s analysis of German Expressionism in
Cinema 1, and especially his take on Robert Wiene’s 1921 film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
Deleuze’s analysis of German cinema lies in the shadows of art historian Wilhelm Worringer. Art, for
Worringer, exists because it fulfils certain psychic needs, and this will to form of artistic creation
shifts with historical epoch depending on the relationship between humans and their environment.
Worringer theorizes two urges that dominate the history of art: empathy and abstraction. The
psychic condition that gives rise to artworks displaying the urge to empathy is “a happy pantheistic
relationship of confidence between man and the phenomena of the external world”; empathetic art
features naturalistic and organic aspects that allow the perceiver to enjoy their inner feeling of
6
vitality. Abstract art, on the other hand, is created to fulfil a psychic need arising from “a great
inner unrest inspired in man by the phenomena of the outside world”.7 Abstraction soothes these
psychological stresses through an encounter with a geometrical absolute where in the
contemplation of abstract regularity the perceiver is delivered from tension, finding happiness in
the presence of the “ultimate morphological law”.8
This culminates in a bizarre synthesis of empathy and abstraction that Worringer discerns in the
Gothic. In the art and ornaments of pre-Renaissance Northern Europe, Worringer observes a
rejection of the organic that does not fully align with the abstraction and regularity of earlier artistic
periods. There is vitality but no trace of organic and naturalistic features, an indication of the inner
disharmony and unclarity of the psychic landscapes in Northern Europe, a “restless life contained in
[a] tangle of lines”.9 This is the aesthetic basis for Expressionism, defined by Worringer as “that
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uncanny pathos which attaches to the animation of the inorganic”.10
Worringer’s Gothic line is of utmost importance to Deleuze-Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus as they
use it to underline their concept of the nomadic or abstract line, and more broadly their theory of
art as abstract machine: the creation of striated and smooth spaces.11 For Deleuze-Guattari: “the
abstract line is the affect of smooth spaces, not a feeling of anxiety that calls forth striation”.12
Smooth space is the space of pure intensities, in contrast to the transcendental illusion of striated
space, which is segmented and ordered. Smooth space is an aesthetic model that explicates the
way abstraction can express intensities, and opposed to any idea of abstraction as purely
rectilinear geometric absolutes. Abstract lines do not represent anything, but are lines of pure
expression, abstract productions that uncover the transcendental conditions of production itself.
The Dread of Space
In Cinema 1, Deleuze analyses the themes and aesthetic strategies of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
through the production of space in the film, the “striated, striped world” created through set design
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and lighting.13 By drawing lines of flight between Deleuze and his work with Guattari, these
concerns can be understood alongside the framework of the striated/smooth demarcations of space
conceptualized in A Thousand Plateaus. It is impossible to truly separate processes of striation and
smoothing, and Deleuze-Guattari instead state that the two spaces exist only in mixture. However,
they identify a de jure distinction between the two processes of space production. It is this abstract
distinction that we will trace by first focusing on the methods of striation to be found in Dr. Caligari.
From the moment that the story flashes back to the town where the protagonist, Francis, used to
live, the painted and artificial nature of the set is obvious. The jagged lines abstract from any
possible reality a strange terror, the pointed houses themselves forming a pointed hill of impossible
proportions. The first image of the town is clearly an abstract depiction of a setting, and the lack of
depth in the image can be understood through Worringer’s conception of the “dread of space”. This
kind of abstraction works by marking an attempt to escape from reality and is what Worringer
terms an “emancipation from all the contingency and temporality of the world-picture”.14 However,
it is clear that the affect of this crooked image is far from a respite for the spectator, and could
more accurately be described a space of dread. This is where Worringer’s hybrid of abstraction and
empathy is important. The abstraction present in the backdrop of Dr. Caligari displays a
contradictory urge: both to abstraction but also to the embrace of a form of vitality. Allowing no
distinction of form and background to arise, the crooked shapes and the broken lines are imbued
with a twisted life of their own, a strange inorganic vitality that produces oppressive atmospheres
and violent affects.
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The way the characters move in Dr. Caligari can be understood as an extension of these design
principles; indeed, Lotte Eisner observes that the acting is “like the broken angles of the sets” with
movements that “never go beyond the limits of a given geometrical plane”.15 This is thus a different
kind of stratification of space, where the lines from set to character leave no separation of set and
figure intact. A scene which displays the geometries of horror in the actors’ performances is the
first awakening of the somnambulist Cesare. Interestingly, the background set of the stage in
Caligari’s spectacle is relatively bare, with only a few jagged lines on Cesare’s coffin displaying the
expressionistic impulse. But it is these lines that become intermingled with the crooked movements
of both Caligari and his captured performer. Cesare slowly emerges from his box, Caligari watching
him and presenting his spectacle to the audience with his rigid arms, extended and emphasized by
the use of sticks in both hands. Cesare slowly walks from his box, his eyes seemingly on us the
audience, a shock of self-reflexivity as we participate in the spectacle. Caligari edges out of the
way, his legs straight and pushed together, his artificially extended arms pulling limited geometric
poses. This is interspersed with reaction shots of the audience, the characters Francis and Allen
picked out by the lighting. Their acting is more naturalistic, a trace of the organic contrasting
heavily with the inorganic vitality that finds expression in the rigid movements of the characters on
stage. Caligari’s and Cesare’s acting is described by Rudolf Kurtz as achieving a “dynamic synthesis
of their being”, and it is the ability they have to striate the space of the image that synthesises the
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terror of the set design and the tension inherent in the actors’ small deliberate movements;16 each
body part is separate, and the organic totality of the human is lost to unknown forces controlling
the characters. Cesare is the puppet of Caligari, Caligari is being controlled by madness, and
perhaps both are on the strings of delirium from Francis’ troubled mind.
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The lighting in Dr. Caligari works in a similar way to the acting and set design, creating spaces full
of jagged lines and confusing angles. Although making a distinction between the effect of the
lighting and other aspects of the mise en scène is not truly a feature of the film itself, it is through
the use of lighting that we can explicate the creation of smooth space, the space of intensities. To
do so, it is important first to understand the metaphysical ramifications of intensity for Deleuze as
propounded in Difference and Repetition. Deleuze posits that “intensity is the form of difference in
so far as this is the reason of the sensible”.17 Intensity is difference-in-itself, the production of the
sensible that, being its genesis, cannot be sensed. Thus, not being actual or actualisable, the notion
of intensity refers to virtual events wherein any variation produces a change in the whole. This is
prior to the transcendental illusion that produces measurements of extensity where quantities can
be added on to each other (say time or distance). An intensive difference cannot be divided or
added up in the same way. Instead, intensity marks a difference in the quality of the whole.
However, we never experience intensity as, being virtual, it is only through the actualization of
intensive quantities in extension or quality that intensity is grasped. Intensive quantities thus
express a smooth space, away from the striation of things in terms of extension and against the
understanding of the world as multiplicities upon a stable ground, the transcendental illusion of
unchanging whole to which things take positions that do not change their sense.
For Deleuze, light in German Expressionism is “a potent movement of intensity, intensive
movement par excellence”.18 Light expresses an intense contrast with shadow, wherein darkness is
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not the negative of light but black as intensity=0. Light is thus an intensive quantity wherein the
differences between light and shadow mark a virtual struggle on the scale from the zero-point of
negation, and every variation expresses and actualises these virtual events in a change in the
quality of the whole of the image. In Dr. Caligari, this manifests itself in the increasing tension and
terror of sequences involving the somnambulist Cesare. As Cesare sneaks through the town,
making his way to Lucy to commit murder, he emerges from the shadows near the door to her
house. His body retains the darkness, dressed completely in black; he sticks to the wall as he
advances, his shadow indistinguishable from his figure, the virtual flip-side of his actual materiality.
Cesare enters Lucy’s room through a window, and his shadow skirts the lit wall as he slowly
approaches Lucy’s bed, a spread of virginal white. His movements and body are a function of light
and darkness, and every movement affects the whole of the image, heightening the violent affects
in this intensive battle of light.
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Thus, although the world of dread created in Dr. Caligari is full of striated spaces, these spaces are
always on the verge of smoothing out, expressing the intensive quantities of light to produce the
movements of affect in the image. The actors intrude on the sets as forms of striation, but as they
become indistinguishable from the background there is a smoothing of their organic forms — but
this process is one of constant oscillation as the characters dissolve from extended figures to
intensive movements and back again, different forms of striation emerging from the smooth with
bizarre new impetuses. To return to the aesthetics of Worringer, just as the abstraction of the sets
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and characters is imbued with the strange vitality usually enacted under Worringer’s conception of
empathetic art, the striated and smooth are in constant mixtures, strange hybrids. As the organic
representation of a world of divisions and striations starts to crumble under the non-organic life
which rumbles in the virtual lines of smooth spaces, the film affects us in a more profound sense; it,
argues Deleuze, “unleashes in our soul a non-psychological life of the spirit”.19 This is the point
where horror becomes sublime.
The sublime violence done to our imagination is the destruction of the organic, it is what Deleuze
calls “difference as catastrophe” that acts “under the apparent equilibrium of organic
representation”.20 Organicism in cinema is defined by Deleuze as a sense of the whole: “a great
organic unity”.21 However, with cinema such as German Expressionism, which instead privileges the
inorganic vitality of things, this sense of the unchanging whole is lost. Not only is the organic
conception of the image undone but by doing violence to the spectator’s imagination in presenting
an impossible whole, an intensity that can never be contained in sensibility, this invokes a
destruction of the spectator’s organic being: the inorganic life overwhelms us in a dynamic sublime.
This is the violence from which thought is born. We now see how the sublime is connected with the
aesthetic strategies of intensive quantities: the unity of representation as a form of common-sense
— in other words, apperception under the aegis of the imagination — is shown as the
transcendental illusion that it is, and our higher faculties encounter the intensive movements
beneath, the smooth spaces underlining the striation of thinking is revealed, forging in us an
empathetic link to non-organic forces that give vitality to abstract lines.
Misosophy
The aesthetic regime of horror becomes metaphysical as it traverses the problematic origin of the
faculties. Horror is important and, indeed, enjoyable as it uncovers the discord beneath the
harmony of thinking that we classify as good and common sense. This harmony is thus not preestablished, but instead produced from an original contingent trauma. The non-necessity of our
common-sense opens up the possibility of a different harmony, a different image of thought. Horror
may not appeal to us on the surface (it is of course horrible) but it appeals to us as a “people to
come” — the pain of the present being ungrounded and the pleasure of a world of pure difference:
the future ravages the now.
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If philosophy can never clearly think the unthought limit of thought, we find in horror a misosophy;
the discord from which knowledge flows is an original rejection of knowledge, a hatred of wisdom.
This does not mean that philosophical approaches to horror are futile though, but instead entail an
acceptance that alongside any philosophy or horror is, what Eugene Thacker calls, a horror of
philosophy, an original trauma at the birth of thought with which we must engage in order to
grapple with the arbitrary nature of our philosophies: “Thought that stumbles over itself, at the
edge of an abyss”.22 Noël Carrol says that “monsters are not only physically threatening; they are
cognitively threatening”,23 and, through the aesthetic hybrids of abstraction/empathy,
smooth/striated space, extensity/intensity, something foreign to our common-sense forces us to
think the possibility of thinking completely differently. Horror opens the gap in our cognitive
geometry, the rupture between the transcendental illusions of apperception and a possible
noumenal realm of intensive difference. Encountering this undercurrent of inorganic force bring us
face to face with the contingency of thinking but there is pleasure in our ability to think absolute
alterity — Deleuze writes that “we lose our fear, knowing that our spiritual ‘destination’ is truly
invincible”.24 This destination of thinking is also its origin and its limit: the endless possibility of
difference, where new harmonies can sound in the spectator, born from the discordant affects of
horror. And, since each new image of thought must reside in the shadows of an arbitrary
transcendental, terrifying yourself becomes the experimental vector of a practice of misosophy.
1. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (1968; New
York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 139.
2. Nick Land, “Abstract Horror (Part 1),” Outside In (blog), August 21, 2013,
http://www.xenosystems.net/abstract-horror-part-1/
3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Mary J. Gregor and Werner S.
Pluhar (1790; Indianapolis, Ind: Hackett Publishing, 1987), 106.
4. Ibid., 101.
5. Nick Land, “Delighted to Death,” in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings
1987-2007, ed. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier (Falmouth, UK:
Urbanomic, 2011), 135.
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6. Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the
Psychology of Style, trans. Michael Bullock (1908; Mansfield Centre,
Conn.: Martino Fine Books, 2014), 15.
7. Ibid., 15.
8. Ibid., 36.
9. Ibid., 77.
10. Ibid.
11. For
a
reading
of
Worringer’s
influence
on
Deleuze-Guattari
that
completely excises empathy, see: Mark Fisher, “Flatline Constructs:
Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction,” PhD Thesis, University
of Warwick, 1999.
12. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (1980; Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987), 497.
13. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Barbara Habberjam (1983; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1986), 50.
14. Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, 44.
15. Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German
Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt, trans. Roger Greaves (1969;
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 25.
16. Rudolf Kurtz, Expressionism and Film, trans. Brenda Benthien (1926;
Herts, UK: Indiana University Press, 2016).
17. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 222.
18. Deleuze, Cinema 1, 49.
19. Ibid., 54.
20. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 35.
21. Deleuze, Cinema 1, 30.
22. Eugene Thacker, Starry Speculative Corpse: Horror of Philosophy Vol. 2
(Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2015), 14.
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