Phenomenology of the Alien

Aaron B. Daniels, PhD, is an associate teaching professor, mindfulness fellow, and leader of the Psychological Humanities Research Group at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts.

• List of contributors; Acknowledgements; Foreword: Nietzsche and Nihilism: Opening to the Dimension of the Other; Chapter 1: Introduction: The Abcanny: Encounters with the Inscrutably Alien; Chapter 2: The Divinalien: On Divine Alterity; Chapter 3: The Alien Other: Cosmology and Social Transmission of UFO Narratives; Chapter 4: The Human and the Smart House: Speculative Psychology and Systems of Attachment; Chapter 5: Repetition and Return in Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast Trilogy; Chapter 6: Alienation, Obsession, and Enthrallment in Thomas Ligotti's “The Small People,” “Nethescurial,” and other Weird Fiction; Chapter 7: The Alien Inside: Jean Laplanche’s Internal Other in the Fiction of Brian Evenson and the Case of Ana; Index.

"Picking up this volume is the equivalent of being seated in a darkening movie theatre only to realize that you are sitting alongside both many of the luminaries of Western thought—Plato, Nietzsche, Levinas, Derrida, Kristeva, Heidegger, Freud—and many of the masters of science fiction and horror cinema—Kubrick, Spielberg, Lucas, Burton, Nolan, et al. This book thrums with life—of both terrestrial and extra-terrestrial varieties (!)—weaving together theological, philosophical, socio-cultural and psychoanalytic lines of discussion with our quest for, and engagement with, the many forms of that which is ‘intractably alien.’ It redefines what can be achieved philosophically, conceptually, when the psychological humanities thoroughly immerses itself in the cultural archives of science fiction and horror." Derek Hook, PhD, Professor of Psychology, Duquesne University, Author of Six Moments in Lacan (2017) "This volume explores the question of aliens—real and imaginary—with compelling and original scholarship. Through an interdisciplinary dialogue with philosophy, literature, cinema, and religion, it interrogates the uncanny phenomenon of the stranger as human, animal, landscape, and divine. Ranging from mythology and magic to technology and politics, its questioning of the limits of the human is both topical and timely." Richard Kearney, PhD, Charles Seelig Professor in Philosophy, Boston College