Adorno, Foucault, and Said: Toward a Multicultural Gothic Aesthetics

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.