Presentation Schedule
The Woman that Exists: Horror, Jouissance, and the Obscene God in Eggers’ Nosferatu (102589)
Session Chair: Artchil Daug
This presentation will be live-streamed via Zoom (Online Access)
Wednesday, 7 January 2026 18:00
Session: Session 3 (Parallel)
Room: Live-Stream Room 1
Presentation Type: Live-Stream Presentation
– click here to convert to your timezone
This presentation argues that Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu (2024) is not simply a gothic revival but a philosophical staging of the collapse of the Symbolic order. Drawing on Lacan’s account of feminine jouissance and Kristeva’s concept of abjection, the film is read as dramatizing the impossibility of sexual relation, the fragility of providence, and the obscene underside of divinity. Ellen Hutter’s convulsions become the privileged site of this collapse, echoing the ecstatic seizures of Teresa of Avila, Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi, and the Manila beatas, whose bodies historically bore what culture could not integrate. The recurrence of convulsion and ecstasy across contexts reveals that horror’s true object is not fear of death or monstrosity but the eruption of excess—jouissance—that culture disavows while depending upon it. The analysis develops in three movements. First, it situates Ellen within Lacan’s formulas of sexuation, showing how women occupy the not-all position that unsettles the fantasy of providential order. Second, it contrasts this with Irigaray’s proposal of a female God, arguing that Ellen’s seizures do not await redemption but insist as immanent jouissance. Third, it turns to the theological register, contending that Orlok is not God’s opposite but God unveiled in his obscene truth. Horror here functions as philosophy by other means: it stages the Real where the Symbolic falters, revealing that the Woman—denied by Lacan as a universal—does exist, and that this Woman is God.
Authors:
Artchil Daug, Mindanao State University, Philippines
About the Presenter(s)
Artchil C. Daug is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the Iligan Institute of Technology, Mindanao State University.
See this presentation on the full schedule – Wednesday Schedule
Conference Comments & Feedback
Place a comment using your LinkedIn profileShare this Presentation
Comments
Powered by WP LinkPress