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Abstract: Maupassant's short horror story Horla (1887) contains a treatment of anxiety that can be analyzed in the context of Existentialist philosophy: Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Levinas or Cioran all observed the anticipatory trait of this affect. From a psychological point of view, anxiety leads to neurosis and/or psychosis, to the splitting of the principle of identity. This inner duality is famously expressed in the short story's scene of the "empty mirror", where the main character fails to see his own reflection. The descent into madness of Horla's diarist makes us think that he experiences the possession of the monster in terms of radical alterity, something that Cioran has called the not-man. I argue that through the lenses of this category of (psychological and theological) inhumanity we can understand Horla as a Nietzschean evolutionary tale that cautions against the end of mankind as we know it.
Keywords: existential anxiety, inner duality, radical alterity, inhumanity, (d)evolution, demonic possession, psychosis, Maupassant
Anxiety is present in one of the earliest entries of Guy de Maupassant's Horlds diarist. On May 16 he writes: "I am constantly aware of a feeling of imminent danger, and I sense some impending disaster or the approach of death, and it all amounts to a presentiment which is quite likely the first sign of some illness which has yet to declare itself, but is already germinating in my blood and in my flesh" (Maupassant 1998, 277). That sense of impending disaster [un malheur qui vient] reminds us of one of Kierkegaard's statements, which marks the birth of the phenomenology of anxiety ("a more precise and correct linguistic use links anxiety with the future" -Kierkegaard 1981, 197) or of the paradoxical Cioranian intuition ("anxiety [...] a sort of remembrance of the future? - Cioran 1999, 76). Moreover, the anticipatory characteristic of the affect described by Maupassant can be analyzed in the context of Heidegger's treatment of the concept in Being and Time: "That which is detrimental, as something that threatens us [...] is coming close" [Das Abträgliche [...] als Drohendes [...] naht] (Heidegger 1978, 179-180).
One can claim that the distance which must be covered by the Drohendes (the displacement of the future trauma) in its way to the Dasein (the fact that "I" am here...