Masters of the Grotesque by Schuy R. Weishaar

Author:Schuy R. Weishaar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2018-03-09T05:00:00+00:00

The Politics of the Mythic

My interpretation of the film-worlds of Terry Gilliam has focused on elements of the mythic and the role it plays in Foucault’s construction of madness (before and after the dawn and reign of “reason” in the Western mind), and the ways in which both the mythic and madness contribute to interpreting the grotesquery in Gilliam’s films. As I pointed out earlier, the dynamics of these functions in Gilliam’s films, as in Harpham’s discussion, rely on a distinction between any number of related dualisms, many of which lead back to the relationship between “mythic,” “primitive,” “archetypal” thinking and patterns of thought that are conceived of as “nonmythic,” “modern,” “rational,” etc. And the concept of thinking, in whatever guise, when Gilliam is concerned, must lead back to imagination, which for philosopher Markus Gabriel, implies the notion of reflection, the act of thinking.

In Gabriel’s chapter on Schelling’s theory of mythology in his and Slavoj Žižek’s book, Mythology, Madness, and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism, he argues that mythology is, in fact, alive and well in our own age but that it conceals itself behind a mask of rationality. He terms this turn on mythic thinking “the mythology of de-mythologization”:

This story is one of the cornerstones of our mythology that believes in scientific, manipulatory rationality’s capacity to transcend historicity. It does blind itself to the possibility that the very era of the world as picture ready to be manipulated might itself be a world-picture, namely the world-picture of the world-picture. As Schelling, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein agree, reflection is inevitably bound to a set of finite, discursive expressions of itself generating imaginary frameworks, mythologies. Those frameworks are usually not reflected and cannot be fully reflected: any attempt to achieve such a totalizing reflection simply generates another myth, a different imaginary [18–19, ital. orig.].

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