Perceiving the Universe almost identically to a later concept of Gilles Deleuze’s “plane of immanence”, that is, as resting on the ground of boundless chaos, represented by the Lovecraftian entity named Azathoth, Lovecraft infused his fiction with an apophatic mode of discourse, utilizing textual strategies and devices invoking paradoxes, meaninglessness, confusion, inability to signify or conceptualize, to create mounting tensions between what is and what is perceived, which makes Lovecraft a forerunner to the school of Speculative Realism, whose core is a double barrier between things in themselves and things as they appear to us, whereby we are allowed only a very limited access to the actual reality which is inherently alien to us. Being one of those few who suspect that rather the opposite is true, that is, that there is no inherent meaning and order within Universe, Lovecraft built his stories around instances wherein the Nomos is forced into a contact with an extra-nomic element which deconstructs the former’s self-proclaimed notion of being the source and origin of reality as such. The problem however is that the Nomos is prone to a totalizing immanent hegemony of positing the whole of Being as only what the Nomos deems it to be – meaningful, ordered, recognizable, anthropocentric – thereby suppressing anything that exists outside of it, as evidenced by mankind conceiving other entities as well as other modes of reality in a priori similar-to-human, and thus relatable, terms. Its core argument revolves around Peter Berger’s concept of Nomos, a human-constructed world, that mankind is existentially necessitated to create. The purpose of this thesis is the analysis of the key works of the American author and founder of the so-called “weird” fiction Howard Philips Lovecraft in terms of their incorporation of the notion of ontological Negativity.
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