Turning to Husserl’s phenomenology as a test case, Harman suggests that reading its insistence on the excessiveness of intentional objects against Lovecraft’s descriptive delirium might provide some pointers towards the type of ‘weird realism’ he advocates.
Problematising a Kantian reading of Lovecraft, Harman concurs with Miéville that a hallmark of weird writing is that it takes on the ‘unspeakable’ with an ‘excess of specificity’ in description; adding that, rather than suggesting a noumenal ‘backworld’, this is the excess of a phenomenal realm pregnant with the menace of ‘malignant beings’ which are threatening precisely in so far as they stalk the very same web of experience whose threads we too clamber along, attempting to ignore their more ominous vibrations.
Using literature’s manufacture of unassimilable and inexhaustible objects as a model for the production of philosophical concepts, Harman insists that the latter’s excess over any definition makes them, too, excessive phenomena, intentional objects whose properties can never be exhaus¬tively enumerated – precisely the model proposed by Husserl’s sensitive and meticulous phenomenology.