ABSTRACT
In Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, particularly where he treats mesmeric and vampiric phenomena, death, matter and the inorganic are imbued with a dark vitalism, revealing Poe’s concern with death as a living force and the inhuman. Poe’s dark materialism characterised by the monstrous merging of the organic and the inorganic, and his descriptions of a dark, mechanical and inhuman life, resonate with de Man’s inhuman materiality. Poe’s persistence to uncover a life beyond the limits of the body, through his treatment of mesmerism or in his depictions of the demonic life of the vampire Ligeia, underline his preoccupations with a materialism that is inhuman, impersonal and which disarticulates human certainties, subjectivity and the organic. In the decaying physiognomy of bodies and the shuddering sounds of the dead, Poe’s stories explore the limits of the human and the possibility of a life that transgresses those limits. With his unique blend of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s absolute identity, Poe’s horror, like the mask of the Red Death, disorganises human securities, by piercing the veil of reality and infecting it with the unspeakable horrors that lie beyond.
