On Moral Repugnance

I won't use it and you can't make me

Mar 06, 2026

undefined — The Leader of the Luddites, 1812.

This year is nine years since I finished my Ph.D -- a thesis which for all its flaws would eventually go on to be the book Theology, Horror and Fiction: A Reading of the Gothic Nineteenth Century. I ended up leaving academia in 2022, after writing a couple of books, around a dozen book chapters and articles and winning around $200,000 of research funding. By most measures of the neoliberal academy, I think I had started to build something pretty solid in terms of an academic career, but it wasn’t enough. What’s interesting is one of the most common questions I get when someone finds out about that particular chapter of my professional life: “do you miss it?” Over the initial couple of years -- actually until relatively recently -- my reaction was a visceral and emotionally raw ”yes,” but as time has wound onwards, there really is only one major thing I find myself still grieving. For all of the problems of academia as a place to work there is something that remains really valuable. Time. Whittled away though it might be by an overbearing managerialism, the idea of academic work as one that requires time to read, write, think and teach remains true.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately as much of my current work doesn’t really depend on finishing, completing or posting things, but reckoning with all the things I want to do, but don’t have the time for. The series on the Haunted House on Film needs a new installment, there are new episodes of Horror Vanguard to try and make, (go listen to the episode on Red Rooms) I desperately want to get a couple of book proposals finished (perhaps even accepted somewhere), there are books and exhibitions I want to write about (go see the Emin retrospective at the Tate Modern, I beg) and I have Youtube scripts sitting in a computer folder that need finishing, gameplay capturing and editing. The thing I find myself muttering to myself again and again is that I don’t have time for this.

So much of life, mediated as it is by the monopoly platforms of digital capitalism, seems to boil down to an inescapable feeling of always being behind, and of always apologizing that the thing I said I was really excited about doing months ago hasn’t yet appeared. The structures of the internet further incentivize thinking of any kind of writing as a matter of production rather than process. Internalize this deeply enough and time becomes something to be managed, its flow optimized and the human, all too human inefficiencies of being become something that one should condition out of existence.

This is the promise of AI in a nutshell. The now-ubiquitous predictive models of language generation promise greater output, promise immediacy and promise an eradication of the friction that exists between the idea and the actual. The problems with them are fairly well known by now: the exploitative, psychologically tortuous labor of data annotation, the environmental racism of data centers, the structural intensification of algorithmic racism and so on and so on. I’ve had all of my books stolen by mega-corperations and their excuse is that now I can generate as many books in my tone of voice as I ever could wish. On a deep-seated level, whenever I see this shit, whenever I’m told I should be using it, whenever another discursive cycle around it kicks off, the only thing I can feel is a deep seated moral repugnance. It’s why reading Becca Rothfeld’s latest newsletter installment was so appealing. Becca’s piece is so good and helpful because it correctly identifies two really important things. Firstly, even if AI has some specific, focused and generally quantifiable use cases, generalized mass adoption is predicated upon artificial demand, and secondly the use of AI in this way is profoundly anti-human. Write me a card, tell me how my co-worker might feel, release me from the burden of my own sense of freedom. I do not wish to live this way. I remember reading the work of my friend and comrade Nolen Gertz on the philosophy of technology. The problem of technology for Gertz, was not that it would take away our freedom, but that we would all too willingly just give it up because we cannot think of being otherwise.

Something that’s often flung at critics of so-called AI is that they’re simply anti-technology but the technology isn’t the primary issue - rather, the wider problem is the structural imposition of artificial demand. There is no general bottom up demand or interest in AI - we’re told over and over again that the technology is simply inevitable, that the only thing to do is to adapt or be left behind. AI is less a technology for generating text and more a disciplinary mechanism for keeping employees on a short lease while inculcating in them a sense of their own inherent disposability. Bosses love AI, while actual workers recognise it for what it is - a machine for the escalation and acceleration of the demand to be ever more productive or else. But writing is not an output based activity - what the writer Richard Seymour would call the scripturiant impulse for ever more unspooling amounts of text. Rather, writing, like so many other forms of creativity, is not really about the end point or output, but the unquantifiable, qualitative process by which human consciousness projects itself out into our shared life-world.

The moral repugnance I feel when reading AI generated material isn’t from some knee-jerk Luddism, or lack of knowledge or fear of the technology. Rather, the feeling is a symptom of the ways in which the time and space for people to think and to write and to create is snatched in fleeting bursts from the demand to be ever more productive. The imperative to use AI to create is an attempt to frame a problem of politics as a problem of efficiency. I do not need to be more efficient, I need time and freedom to read and to think and to write and to fail as we all do. Writing is the visible sign of thought in motion, and the freedom to pursue thought is not one granted through centralised tech monopolies. I spent a couple of years after leaving academia writing about the philosopher and Utopian Ernst Bloch, and in his work, as with many Marxists, there was a strong strain of Prometheanism - the idea that technology could be a liberatory force. Like so many of the Utopian ideas of the twentieth century, the horizon of modernity is necessarily more modest now. I think it starts with insisting on the necessity of friction and boredom and struggle to bring something from the isolated imagination onto that page. Show me a model that can generate writing and all I can think is I don’t have time for this.

The Haunted House on Film Part V

Vivarium (2019) dir. Lorcan Finnegan

TheLitCritGuy

Feb 21, 2026

Putting Vivarium into this series is maybe a slightly leftfield choice but I think it makes for a fascinating haunted house movie precisely because it cuts against so many of the generic expectations of what a haunted house story should be. Traditionally, the haunted house was about the intrusion of a long-thought-buried history, reintroducing itself back into a present which has forgotten it.

In contrast, Vivarium is about the place without history - suburbia - and the degree to which capitalist ahistoricity is both policed and naturalised. The film follows primary school teacher Gemma (Imogen Poots) and gardener Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) who are looking for their first home. After a strange meeting with Martin, a realtor who is perhaps a little too interested in whether the couple have children, they are shown to an estate called “Yonder” full of identical houses. Martin vanishes. The two, relieved and somewhat creeped out by the real estate agent, try to leave but every seemingly endless road brings them back to the home. There are no other people visible and no way out -- Tom even burns down the house and the next day it’s restored. They end up having to stay, and then a child turns up on the doorstep along with a note telling them that if they raise the child, they will be released.

The child goes through accelerated growth and it becomes clear he isn’t quite human, staying up to watch strange fractal broadcasts on the TV. Driven by some obsessive impulse, Tom starts to dig a hole in the garden, eventually choosing to sleep out there before growing sick and eventually dying -- what the child calls “being released”. He is placed inside a plastic bag and buried in the hole he had dug for himself. The estate, it turns out, is built on the bodies of the dead. Soon, Grace too will die, zipped into another one of those plastic bags, and the now full grown creature goes to work in a real estate office to start the entire cycle over again. The whole promise of suburbia is that it is the place outside time - the suburbs is the place with no history, with no ghosts. This might initially represent a problem, after all, with no sense of history what space is there for the ghost, but there are so many horror films devoted to proving that behind the facade, everything is built on death - the stand out example of this is absolutely something like Poltergeist or even something like Beetlejuice. Alternatively, the other side of suburbia in horror is that it is a void - a no-place, riven by some ontological evil (Carpenter’s Halloween and Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return both understand this in their own ways).

Interestingly, Vivarium works on both levels. The estate in which the two are imprisoned has no history and neither the estate nor anything in it is real -- dig into the earth and all you’ll find is plastic once you go down far enough. In essence the film functions as a horror story about the naturalization of a specific configuration for social reproduction under capitalism. The very opening of the film shows a cuckoo in the nest - the outsider who appears to take up the resources and care of the mother and father, and who will throw their “true” offspring out of the nest to make room for itself. So it unfolds for Grace and Tom: they need a house, and so end up in suburbia mostly because that seems like what you are supposed to do. Grace is interestingly ambivalent about the idea of having children, but a child just appears, delivered as if by stork, or magic. The horror of suburbia which can be individualised in a morass of paranoia and surveillance is here universalised. Get out? Where to? Everything is the same. Besides, why would you want to go outside when food is delivered for you? Just this a couple of months ago the Telegraph were reporting that Brits were increasingly “voluntarily housebound” - driven by a combination of the slow erosion of third spaces, anxiety around the messiness and risk of social interaction and the ever expanding convenience of delivery.

This process of naturalization is why I’m a little skeptical about claims this is an eco-gothic film. The use of nature footage, and references to natural behaviour contrasted with the surreal and constructed environment serve only to underscore how artificial that which is taken to be “natural” really is. The whole bleak joke at the film’s heart is that none of this is natural - the suburbs are a vivarium, a constructed environment in which the only way out is death. All of the naturalised steps of capitalist social reproduction are highlighted as horrifyingly alienated, conducted as some bizarre experiment through which a non-human force seeks to perpetuate itself.

Strikingly, Tom and Grace have no chance of grasping what that force is - the alien creatures remain totally inscrutable to them - not only is the world in which they are trapped not natural, it can’t even be understood as political either. As I watched the film this latest time, there was something I noticed for the first time -- they don’t pay for the house. Price is never discussed. Getting on the housing ladder seems like a good idea -- again, it’s one of those things which you are supposed to do, it is only natural to want a place of one’s own, but the actual transaction remains occluded and hidden away.

Of course, that is partly because it isn’t necessary -- after all, the true cost is their lives but perhaps the other aspect is that recognising the home as a site of purchase makes it something less than natural, rendering the occultic force by which use value is transformed into exchange value more visible. Ultimately, the film makes me think of what Mark Fisher wrote, that: “emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency.” That in essence is the true horror of the film, nothing has to be like this, but right now, we can’t find any way out.

The Haunted House on Film Part IV

Personal Shopper (2016) dir. Oliver Assayas

TheLitCritGuy

Feb 10, 2026

The last installment in this series was a less straightforward and conventional haunted house film, with its focus on the essential erasure or subsumption of the domestic into the service industry economy. I wanted to keep that theme going with this week’s entry, Oliver Assayas’s Personal Shopper. The story follows Maureen Cartwright, played by Kristen Stewart who works as a personal shopper and assistant to a famous super model called Kyra. Maureen is also a medium or spiritualist of sorts, waiting for some sign from her recently departed twin brother Lucas. Lucas died because of a heart defect - the same defect that she herself suffers from.

Maureen’s life in Paris is marked by a paradox - she is constantly in motion and yet going absolutely nowhere, making no progress. The film follows her on a constant litany of errands for Kyra. Collecting jewelry, collecting high-end couture, zipping across Paris on a moped and being left messages from her absent boss who doesn’t even allow her assistant to try on the clothes. There’s a great small moment on a train: Maureen is on her way back from London to Paris and has to ask her boss to pay her in the right currency pointing out the practical possibility that her driver could just stop for her at the atm. There’s so much communicated in Stewart’s face, frequently framed in tight close up as she knocks back endless cups of cheap black coffee and cigarettes rather than food. She manages to get across her character’s bone-deep exhaustion, not just from a lack of sleep and tiresome, circular work but from having to manage the feelings and caprices of someone so much more powerful than she is. Kyra is late for a shoot, and the photographer is both frustrated and relieved. “Are you frightened of her,” asks Maureen. She’s a monster, comes the reply. At the same time, Kyra is both beautiful and successful. She has something that Maureen doesn’t. She has glamour. As John Berger puts it, in Ways of Seeing:

The happiness of being envied is glamour. Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you. You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest - if you do, you will become less enviable. In this respect the envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power. The power of the glamorous resides in their supposed happiness: the power of the bureaucrat in his supposed authority.

Maureen is a whirl of motion, an invisible worker of both professional and domestic labour -- a boundary that is easy to cross given that the maintenance and projection of glamour depends upon an appearance of effortlessness. She moves seamlessly between Paris, London, Milan, New York, Kyra’s beautiful apartment and the ateliers and retailers of Paris. She slides seamlessly between the signs of luxury - Cartier, Chanel, YSL, the various high-end hotels across Paris. She is always in motion, and always invisible. Kyra only appears in the flesh a small handful of times -- which is only correct. The glamorous aren’t supposed to be real - they are beautiful objects that others are paid to maintain.

At the same time, all of this motion leads nowhere. On the phone to a friend or a former lover who is now working in Muscat he asks her what she’s still doing in Paris. She meets Inge, with whom Kyra is having an affair, and the same questions gets asked. Why are you here? Why are you doing all of this for someone else? She’s waiting for something. She can’t leave. Maureen wants a sign that Lucas is not gone. She wants to be haunted.

The ghost is always an object of loss - they are always bound up in memory. Just as with The Innkeepers, Maureen doesn’t really have a home - we see her apartment maybe twice in the whole film. But Lucas did - it’s a beautiful old house, seemingly on the outskirts of Paris. The film opens with Maureen coming on a visit with an ex of Lucas’s. She walks the house, opening every door. She’s looking for him - some sort of sign that he’s still there. There’s a couple -- old friends of Lucas’s -- who want to buy the house but only if there’s some sign from Lucas.

To be haunted is an attempt to memorialize. What’s left behind when someone dies is simultaneously both so substantial as to be overwhelming (how much to go through, how to go on surrounded by all these things) and at the same, woefully insufficient. You can have every object accumulated through the life of a loved one and yet feel their absence so keenly as to be willing to destroy it all if it would bring them back to you for even a moment. And yet there remains a trace of them, indelible in the ephemera. But how often do we find ourselves saying, like Maureen does when she thinks it’s Lucas rattling the faucets in his old house, “that isn’t enough. I need more from you.”

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But the whole point of haunting is that it would never be enough, would it? Because even if there was confirmation - even if Maureen were to receive her sign -- they are still an absent presence. Midway through the film, Maureen starts to get messages from an unknown number. Lucas, perhaps? She’s encouraged to give into some forbidden desires like wearing Kyra’s clothes, imagining herself as the one with glamour. As the messages pile up she gets invited to various hotel rooms which are empty of others. She has to pick up some jewelry from Cartier and bring it to Kyra’s apartment. She does so and finds Kyra’s corpse. This jolts Maureen into action and she agrees to go to see her friend in Muscat. The social circle that surrounds her are moving on, trying to find some closure. Lucas’s girlfriend has a partner and Maureen wants them to be happy. In maybe the best shot of the film, she sits in the garden as behind her we see a ghostly figure hold a glass before they vanish and the glass shatters on the floor.

At the very end of the film Maureen makes it to a Muscat guesthouse. Another glass smashes on the floor and she asks some yes or no questions aloud to whoever, or whatever might be there. One thump comes as a yes, then two as a no. She asks if it’s Lucas. No response. “Is it just me?” One thump. The ending was booed when it debuted at Cannes (which Assayas took somewhat in stride from what I can tell) but the response makes sense when confronted with the unresolvability of loss. Ghosts are sometimes insufficient even if they are all we have left. Mary wept at the tomb of Christ: “And they say unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? She saith unto them, Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him.” Where are the dead, those we have lost? I know not. Back to John Berger, his short piece on The Economy of the Dead:

How do the living lie with the dead? Until the dehumanization of society by capitalism, all the living awaited the experience of the dead. It was their ultimate future. By themselves the living were incomplete. Thus living and dead were interdependent. Always. Only a uniquely modern form of egotism has broken this interdependence. With disastrous results for the living, who now think of the dead as eliminated.

Where are the dead - where are the ghosts of those we’ve lost? Are they here with us, is it just us? Yes.

Farewell, 2025

TheLitCritGuy

Jan 1

2025 in Review

A roundup from the haunt

TheLitCritGuy

Dec 28, 2025

Happy Christmas friends and comrades. Taking some inspiration from xenogothic, whose blog and wider intellectual work I’ve deeply admired for years now, I thought it would be interesting to try and wrap up the year and collate all of the writing I’ve managed to publish this year. Much of the year I spent wracked with what is no doubt a very familiar feeling for anyone who writes, namely that I wasn’t writing enough but collecting everything has been a good reminder, if only for myself that even in moments where writing seems hard, distant or simply insufficient it was still possible. Much of what’s linked below is scattered across a plethora of different platforms and if I have any aims for the next 12 months I think I want to consolidate and condense where I’m writing, and spend more time doing it.

Much of the later half of the year was taken up with recording a frankly ridiculously long podcast episode (for the love of God, please listen it took so long) and much of the first half of the year was taken up with reading The Magic Mountain. The space in between was taken up with finishing a book proposal, which is now in the stage of refining, editing and polishing ideas and themes into something more coherent for a publisher. (If you are an editor at a publishing house with an interest in non-fiction and in the market for a book on haunted houses, I would love to hear from you).

In a way, looking back at this year is a useful exercise in as much as writing is always a reckoning with one’s own failures -- this isn’t a bid for sympathy but a more banal point that writing is about the transformation of the possible into the actual and the concrete, ergo, it has to contend with the inevitable gap between the idea and its realization. What gets thought is always far more promising or exciting than that which has to be laboriously brought into being. However, something I’ve been thinking about towards the end of the year is the value of friction in the act of trying to create something -- in an era where generative AI and LLMs promise a frictionless act of production (I won’t dignify their output as creative) there is something to be said for the struggle, the insufficiency and the visible traces of process that the links below constitute. If nothing else, a record of the friction of thought is something to celebrate.

The range of topics covered move from the early part of the year, where I wanted to originally write something more personal - inspired by Kate Wagner’s excellent essays on Wagner -- but I can’t help but feel I fell short, lapsing back onto the familiar and safer ground of an exegesis of Lukacs, Jameson and the problem of realism. However, just a few days ago I read Brandon Taylor’s newest and very Lukacsian novel Minor Black Figures --a novel that moved me greatly and one I’ll almost certainly write about in the next few months when it’s published here in the UK. It seems this year has brought me back to Lukacs in a way that I could never have predicted after Capitalism: A Horror Story. As pleased as I am with it, one of the major (and correct) critiques of the book is that’s a little too quick to dismiss Lukacs, so perhaps next year it’ll final be time to tackle this.

Capitalism A Horror Story was also translated into another language this year which is a good reminder to please continue the boycott against the English language publishers. I also wrote about haunted houses a lot, and this is a series I’ll be continuing as much as I can through the coming year, and expanding it out to be more about the properties of property. I gave a couple of talks I’m quite proud of: one at the ACLA which went very well, on the political character of body horror, and the second was a kind of coda to my work on Bloch from 2024. I’d love to do more talks in ‘26 so if you, or your organization needs a talk on horror, philosophy, politics, theology or some combination of all of the above, please do get in touch. And finally, the last link on this list represents my final piece of “academic publishing” some three years after leaving academia proper. There is still some grief on that front, but if there is one thing this year hasn’t been short of, it’s been itsreasons for grief.

Here’s to the future and more ghostly thoughts from the haunt.

As always, thank you so much for reading.

Some of the links below are paywalled over at patreon.com/thelitcritguy – if you’d like to read them, and an archive which goes back a decade now, you can do so for just $1.