Binary Opposition Quotes

Everything dies eventually. We all know that. People, cities, whole civilizations. Nothing lasts. So if existence was just binary, dead or alive, here or not here, what would be the fucking point in anything? My mom used to say that's why we have memory. And the opposite of memory - hope. So things that are gone can still matter. So we can build off our pasts and make futures.

Everything dies eventually. We all know that. People, cities, whole civilizations. Nothing lasts. So if existence was just binary, dead or alive, here or not here, what would be the fucking point in anything?" She looks up at some falling leaves and puts out her hand to catch one, a flaming red maple. "My mom used to say that's why we have memory. And the opposite of memory - hope. So things that are gone can still matter. So we can build off our pasts and make futures." She twirls the leaf in front of her face, back and forth. "Mom said life only makes any sense if we can see time how God does. Past, present and future all at once." I allow myself to look at Julie. She sees my tears and tries to wipe one away. "So what's the future?" I ask, not flinching as her fingers brush my eye. "I can see the past and the present, but what's the future?" "Well . . . ," she says with a broken laugh. "I guess that's the tricky part. The past is made out of facts . . . I guess the future is just hope." "Or fear." "No." She shakes her head firmly and sticks the leaf in my hair. "Hope.

Masculinity is part of a binary and requires its opposite, since, in the absence of femininity, masculinity would have no meaning.

By crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of truth, the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials - worse: with their artificial resurrection in the systems of signs, a material more malleable than meaning, in that it lends itself to all systems of equivalences, to all binary oppositions, to all combinatory algebra. It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and shortcircuits all its vicissitudes.

Journalists claim to be hearing “both sides” as though a binary opposition had been set down by some disinterested god. But it is the journalists themselves who are playing god—it is the journalists who decide which sides are legitimate and which are not, which views shall be considered and which pushed out of the frame.

It seems to me that the binary opposition that is so much embedded in Western thought and language makes it nearly impossible to project a complex response.

Politics of Friendship is, in other words, only a book between covers. For the real text, you must enter the classroom, put yourself to school, as a preview of the formation of collectivities. A single “teacher's” “students,” flung out into the world and time, is, incidentally, a real-world example of the precarious continuity of a Marxism “to come,” aligned with grassroots counterglobalizing activism in the global South today, with little resemblance to those varieties of “Little Britain” leftism that can take on board the binary opposition of identity politics and humanism, shifting gears as the occasion requires.

This assumption of the intrinsically repressive nature of collective experience and redemptive power of individuation is a staple of contemporary art theory and criticism. I would argue that a closer analysis of collaborative and collective art practices can reveal a more complex model of social change and identity, one in which the binary oppositions of divided vs. coherent subjectivity, desiring singularity vs. totalizing collective, liberating distanciation vs. stultifying interdependence, are challenged and complicated.

Healers and warriors are not opposites; they are complementaries. Moving beyond binaries, we need not embrace one and reject the other. We can hold them both as one.

So if existence was just binary, dead or alive, here or not here, what would be the fucking point in anything? My mom used to say that's why we have memory. And the opposite of memory--hope. So things that are gone can still matter. So we can build off our pasts and make futures.

Transgressions is the attraction of any dead boy, but as with openness of other more minor characters, this functions both to enlarge and restrict their potential as alternative gender representations. Dead boys exist through binary opposition; they are always already Other

For a long time, I believed that if I took care of myself, I would necessarily, organically move farther away from others. In the binary logic of individualism, you fortify the self at the expense of the other. But in filling the empty space of me, I have found that actually the complete opposite is true. The more I love myself, the more my heart opens, the more present and sensitive I become, so much so it hurts.

Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes, while their own person and reputation sat under shelter. I was the first that ever did so for his pleasure. I was the first that could plod in the public eye with a load of genial respectability, and in a moment, like a schoolboy, strip off these lendings and spring headlong into the sea of liberty.

Derrida… labels as ‘metaphysical’ any such thought system which depends on an unassailable foundation, a first principle or unimpeachable ground upon which a whole hierarchy of meanings may be constructed. It is not that he believes that we can merely rid ourselves of the urge to forge such first principles, for such an impulse is deeply embedded in our history, and cannot — at least as yet — be eradicated or ignored. Derrida would see his own work as inescapably ‘contaminated’ by such metaphysical thought, much as he strives to give it the slip. But if you examine such first principles closely, you can see that they may always be ‘deconstructed’: they can be shown to be products of a particular system of meaning, rather than what props it up from the outside.

We might start by considering the all-too-black-and-white words themselves: “success” or “failure.” You are either a success, a comprehensive, singular, over-all good thing, or its opposite, a failure, a comprehensive, singular, irredeemably bad thing. The words imply no alternative and no middle ground. However, in a world as complex as ours, such generalizations (really, such failure to differentiate) are a sign of naive, unsophisticated or even malevolent analysis. There are vital degrees and gradations of value obliterated by this binary system, and the consequences are not good.

بخشی از نقد کتاب یوز پلنگانی که با من دویده اند.برگرفته از سایت: www.atiban.com در ده داستان کوتاهی که در این مجموعه هست ، ساختار چیره بر داستان ها و ذهنیت " بیژن نجدی " ساختار " تقابل‌های دوگانه " ( Binary Oppositions ) است‌. نویسنده خود یک بار در تنها گفت‌و‌گویش با " فرنگیس حبیبی " از بخش فارسی رادیو فرانسه " یوزپلنگ " را استعاره‌ای از نسل ، نهاد ، آرمان و کسانی می‌داند که همانند " نوع " یوزپلنگ ، در آستانه‌‌ی انقراض و " مورد هجوم " هستند ؛ باورها ، هستی‌ها و کسانی که به گذشته‌های نزدیک یا دورتر ما تعلق دارند و شاید دیگربار در تاریخ تکرار نشوند . همین ذهنیت خاص و شرح تأسفبار تباهی ارزش‌ها و به تعبیر نویسنده "‌جاه‌طلبی‌های زیبا "‌ی یوزپلنگان است که همه‌ی داستان‌های کوتاه این مجموعه را به هم پیوند می‌دهد و میان دیروز و امروز ، طبیعت و انسان ، جهان برین و فرودین ، روستا و شهر ، آرمانخواهی و آرمان گریزی فاصله می‌افکند‌. "‌ یوزپلنگانی که با من دویده‌اند " به این تعبیر ، ادعانامه‌ای برضد عصری است که در روند هیاهوی پیشرفت صنعتی و اجتماعی کاذب ما ، اصالت هایش را از کف می‌دهد و از درون تهی و خوارمایه می‌شود‌. هشت بار چاپ یوزپلنگانی که با من دویده‌‌اند ( از سال 1373 تا 1386 ) از اقبال عمومی این مجموعه داستان خبر می‌دهد‌. تعلق جایزه‌ی ادبی مجله‌ی گردون عباس معروفی در 1374 به این اثر ، مایه‌ی توجه به آن و کسب آوازه‌ی نویسنده شد. داوری‌ها در مورد این داستان‌ها یا داستان گونه‌ها متفاوت بوده است . گویا " رضا قاسمی‌" دارنده‌ی سایت " دوات " گفته است :« همان یک داستان کوتاه سپرده به زمین نجدی به تمام داستان‌های کوتاه صادق هدایت می‌ارزد‌.» (2) داوری در کار ادبیات داستانی ، مانند همه‌ی دیگر عرصه‌ها ، در این مُلک همیشه افراطی یا تفریطی است و به جای آن که منتقدان ادبی نظر دهند ، نویسندگان در کارِ هم داوری می‌کنند ؛ چنان که خانم دکتر سیمین دانشور هم به گفته‌ی " زراعتی " پس از ارزیابی شتاب زده‌ی رضا قاسمی در مورد داستان‌های کوتاه هدایت ، برای تعیین تکلیف بهترین اثر هدایت ، یکی از آثار رضا قاسمی ( چاه بابل یا همنوایی شبانه‌ی ارکستر چوبها ؟ ) را از بوف کور هدایت " برتر " دانسته‌اند‌. با این همه به پندار ما آنچه بیش‌تر باعث اقبال خوانندگان به مجموعه‌ی مورد نقد گردیده ، شاعرانگی و برجستگی زبان داستان‌هاست ؛ وگرنه بعضی داستان‌ها به اعتبار ساختار نوع ادبی داستان کوتاه و برخی به اعتبار ذهنیت اجتماعی واپسگرایانه ارزشی ندارند‌. در جمع بندی نهایی می‌توان گفت در همه‌ی داستان‌های این مجموعه ، وجه شاعرانگی بر نوع ادبی داستان

When ideologies that defend racism and heterosexism become taken-for-granted and appear to be natural and inevitable, they become hegemonic. Few question them and the social hierarchies they defend. Racism and heterosexism both share a common cognitive framework that uses binary thinking to produce hegemonic ideologies. Such thinking relies on oppositional categories. It views race through two oppositional categories of Whites and Blacks, gender through two categories of men and women, and sexuality through two oppositional categories of heterosexuals and homosexuals. A master binary of normal and deviant overlays and bundles together these and other lesser binaries. In this context, ideas about "normal" race (whiteness, which ironically, masquerades as racelessness), "normal" gender (using male experiences as the norm), and "normal" sexuality (heterosexuality, which operates in a similar hegemonic fashion) are tightly bundled together. In essence, to be completely "normal," one must be White, masculine, and heterosexual, the core hegemonic White masculinity. This mythical norm is hard to see because it is so taken-for-granted. Its antithesis, its Other, would be Black, female, and lesbian, a fact that Black lesbian feminist Audre Lorde pointed out some time ago.

a complication enters. This transcendental genesis of plurality as the filling-in of the lack of the binary signifier is supplemented by the opposite genesis in which the starting point is the plurality (series) of signifiers and the Master-Signifier appears as the reflexive signifier that fills in the gaps in the series of signifiers. Spinoza’s own supreme example of “god” is here crucial: when conceived as a mighty person, god merely embodies our ignorance of true causality.

Woman is the opposite, the ‘other’ of man: she is non-man, defective man, assigned a chiefly negative value in relation to the male first principle. But equally man is what he is only by virtue of ceaselessly shutting out this other or opposite, defining himself in antithesis to it, and his whole identity is therefore caught up and put at risk in the very gesture by which he seeks to assert his unique, autonomous existence. Woman is not just an other in the sense of something beyond his ken, but an other intimately related to him as the image of what he is not, and therefore as an essential reminder of what he is. Man therefore needs this other even as he spurns it, is constrained to give a positive identity to what he regards as no-thing. Not only is his own being parasitically dependent upon the woman, and upon the act of excluding and subordinating her, but one reason why such exclusion is necessary is because she may not be quite so other after all. Perhaps she stands as a sign of something in man himself which he needs to repress, expel beyond his own being, relegate to a securely alien region beyond his own definitive limits. Perhaps what is outside is also somehow inside, what is alien also intimate — so that man needs to police the absolute frontier between the two realms as vigilantly as he does just because it may always be transgressed, has always been transgressed already, and is much less absolute than it appears.

God loves my people and me. God also loves those whom I consider my enemies. Now what do I do? The spirit of truth does not see the world in either-or or binary form. Technologies are not always against nature. Human action and nature’s process are not always at odds with each other. Globalism and localism are not mutually exclusive. Immigrants and citizens do not have to be fearful of the other. Gay and straight are not enemies. Pro-life and pro-choice people are not necessarily adversaries. Men and women are not opposites. Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, “Differences are not intended to separate, to alienate. We are different precisely in order to realize our need of one another.”1 In

When I was a teen, I think I was a touch too enamored of the idea that life’s most important questions are binary, meaning that one answer is always Right, and all the rest of the answers are Wrong. I think I was enchanted by the model of computer programming, whose questions can only be answered in one of two ways: 1 or 0, the machine-code version of Yes or No, True or False. Even the multiple-choice questions of my quizzes and tests could be approached through the oppositional logic of the binary. If I didn’t immediately recognize one of the possible answers as correct, I could always try to reduce my choices by a process of elimination, looking for terms such as “always” or “never” and seeking out invalidating exceptions.

An antiracist movement that emphasizes the *actions* of individual 'white people' with a docus on things like 'calling out' everyday racism, or holding a company 'to account' for not catering to darker skin tones, perhaps isn't up to the task of defeating a concept that our societies have been deeply invested in for centuries, and that has assumed the 'truth' status that whiteness has. The focus on microaggressions and interpersonal slights often occurs at the expense of considering 'whiteness' or as a pervasive, insidious modus operandi, a particular way of engaging with the world. It is a system that is extractive, oppositional, and binary - a dominant system, one that asserts not just that white people should be dominant over other 'races' but that, more fundamentally, sees human life as dominant over all other life forms.

The classical American pragmatists believed that once the quest for certainty was exposed, once the craving for absolutes was challenged, once we learned that there is no permanent metaphysical comfort and that we must cope intelligently and imaginatively with unexpected contingencies and dangers, then there would be no going back – no return to a world of simplistic binary oppositions of Good and Evil. But the pragmatists underestimated the appeal of the mentality that they opposed – especially in times of perceived crisis, anxiety, and fear. There is always the threat of regression. This is why I believe that it requires passionate commitment and constant endeavor to make pragmatic fallibilism a living reality in people’s everyday lives.

Since the late 1990s historians of the Habsburg Monarchy have often been in the forefront of European historians in developing cultural, transnational, or comparative approaches that question some of the most tenacious binary concepts that have traditionally structured most accounts of Western versus Eastern Europe: “civic nationhood” versus “ethnic nationhood,” “developed” versus “backward,” “democratic” versus “authoritarian,” “ethnic homogeneity” versus “ethnic mosaic.” Their work shows that these supposed oppositions largely fail when tested against evidence drawn from local society.22 Today the field of Habsburg history flourishes as a site of remarkable creativity and innovation.

Here we may fruitfully turn to the work of those feminists who have attempted to (re)theorize sexual difference, to escape – however temporarily and partially – from the terms of a binary hierarchy in which one term is deprived of positive being. For woman to be a set of specificities rather than the opposite, or complement, to Man, man must become a set of specificities as well. If Man is singular, if he is a self-identical and definite figure, then non-man becomes his negative, or functions as an indefinite and homogeneous ground against which Man’s definite outlines may be seen. But if man himself is different from himself, then woman cannot be singularly defined as non-man. If there is no singular figure, there can be no singular other. The other becomes potentially specific, variously definite, an array of positivities rather than a negation or an amorphous ground. Thus the plural specificity of “men” is a condition of the positive existences and specificities of “women.”28 By analogy here, the specificity of capitalism – its plural identity, if you like – becomes a condition of the existence of a discourse of noncapitalism as a set of positive and differentiated economic forms.

Dualism, as we have noted, comes in many forms: between mind and body, in-group and out-group, and between the higher and lower instincts between which we must constantly choose. It may be that binary opposition is one of the fundamental ways in which we understand the world. But divide humanity into absolute categories of good and evil, in which all the good is on one side and all the evil on the other, and you will see your own side as good, the other as evil. Evil seeks to destroy the good. Therefore your enemies are trying to destroy you. If there is no obvious evidence that they are, this is a sign that they are working in secret. If they deny it, this is proof that the accusation is true, else why would they bother to deny it? And since they are evil and we are good, they are the cause of our present misfortunes and we must eliminate them so that the good to which we are entitled, the honour we once had and the superiority that is our right can be ours again. That is the pathological dualism that leads to altruistic evil with murderous consequences.

Some people believe that God exists, and consider the opposite statement, God doesn't exist, to be false. But honestly, it's only because of the restrictions imposed by binary logic. And now let’s imagine that you reject this defective logic! Then you can accept that the notion - God exists - is true, and at the same time the opposite notion - God doesn't exist - is also true, and sincerely believe in both.

the abandoning of ideological conviction – the modern surrogate for religious belief – or us-versus-them thinking won’t be easy. The experts on Islam who opened for business on 9/11 peddle their wares more feverishly after every terrorist attack, helped by clash-of-civilization theorists and other intellectual robots of the Cold War who were programmed to think in binary oppositions (free versus unfree world, the West versus Islam) and to limit their lexicon to words such as ‘ideology’, ‘threat’ and ‘generational struggle’.

the LGBT trend is right in “deconstructing” the standard normative sexual opposition, in de-ontologizing it, in recognizing in it a contingent historical construct full of tensions and inconsistencies; however, it reduces this tension to the fact that the plurality of sexual positions is forcefully reduced to the normative straitjacket of the binary opposition of masculine and feminine, with the idea that, if we get away with this straitjacket, we will get a full blossoming multiplicity of sexual positions (LGBT etc.), each of them with a full ontological consistency: once we get rid of the binary straitjacket, I can fully recognize myself as gay, bisexual, or whatever. From the Lacanian standpoint, however, the antagonistic tension is irreducible, it is constitutive of the sexual as such, and no amount of classificatory diversification and multiplication can save us from it.

New sciences developed, based on observation of the real world, rather than speculation. Rational thought was valued over inspiration, and logic over magic. All the natural world was closely observed and recorded by self-styled "scientists" who thought that the rich diversity in nature would be understood by being defined and categorized. The diversity of human beings, the one human body, that could have both male and female qualities, and change from female to male, did not fit this new hunger for precise and limited labeling. The new philosophers decided that there were only two sexes, fixed and unchanging, completely opposite, male and female, normal and other. They saw this simple binary model because they favored it. They found it because they looked for it, because it fitted their ideas of male and female status. When they saw behaviors or nature that did not support a rigid binary model, they explained them away. The changing sex of the developing fetus, the presence of all the sex organs in early development was ignored. Two sexes, completely opposite, were never a genuine observation, supported by all the other evidence, but an intellectual fashion, in all modernizing Europe thought, invented to explain and justify sexual inequality.

The gender binary is culturally specific and—like the sexuality binary—related to the settler-colonial, imperialist project of categorizing different groups of people and bodies as superior or inferior to each other. It’s also rooted in a capitalist system which required femininity to be “opposite” to masculinity in various ways in order to justify women’s unpaid labour within the home: caring for the current workforce and raising the next one, or—particularly in the case of women of color—serving other people’s families in these ways.

A universe of a 100% love is not a loving universe at all. It’s one where love has ceased to exist because it has no binary opposition against which it can be emotionally contrasted. Heaven only makes sense when paired with hell. A heaven without a hell is pleasure without pain, and pleasure without pain is the absence of feeling because feeling is all about the pleasure-pain axis. Imagine you loved everything. There would be no special thing in your life because everything would be equally special to you. How would you move from one thing to the next? Each thing would demand your love, and you would want to give it your love. You would be unable to discern between any two things. You couldn’t judge things, prioritize, or derive any special pleasure from any special thing. In fact, when all things are special, nothing is special. When all things are loved, nothing is loved. You have killed love by failing to hate. And you are no longer human. Do not speak of love without also speaking of hate. If you want to be the great “lover”, go ahead, but know that you are thereby the great “hater” too.

Throughout this book, I frequently compare Black women’s experiences with those of White women. These groups’ struggles are connected by gender and yet are divided by different racial histories and privileges. I do not intend to imply that White women are primarily to blame for the oppression of Black women, or that I have forgotten the existence of Latina, Native American, Asian, and Pacific Islander women. It is simply that, in Western society, Black and White women have been placed in binary positions. White women have been idealized (through the lens of sexism), and Black women have commonly been denigrated as their opposite. Non-Black women of color tend to be racialized relative to the Black-White binary, placed in a hierarchy between the poles.22

We don't become white even if we wash ourselves with a kilo of soap. We are not angels who do not know the word sin, but we are also not devils whose work is nothing but misleading. In humans there are always paradoxes, contradictions and inconsistencies, but that doesn't mean our existence has no meaning. Black and white humans cannot be seen solely from their skin color, degree level, gender differences or other dichotomous things based on social stratification in society. In fact, life is not always what it seems. Life is not a story in fiction or superhero stories. We don't pull everything into the corner where we want to stand. Seeing things from a perspective with binary opposition; honesty versus hypocrisy, egoism versus altruism, good versus evil, batman versus joker...

Two Opposite Too Binary Eclectic THOHPAISZHELIXORBIT

A core part of...'orthodox masculinity' has its bedrock in not doing, saying or being anything that might be seen as feminine... The first rule of being a man is 'no sissy stuff'. Instead, these sexist and misogynistic constructs at the heart of orthodox masculine gender performance are understood as helping shore up the theory of men's 'natural' dominance over effeminate men and women. Men who fail to live up to the standards set...are excluded or marginalised to the extent of their transgression. The fear of the loss of power and male privilege lies in the rejection of masculinity's apparent binary and complementary opposite, femininity.

From Two to Many The world is very fond of binaries: black and white, male and female, mind and body, good and bad. These pairs, we all learn, are opposed: there’s the right way and the wrong way, and our task is to do battle to defend the right and destroy the wrong. This kind of thinking dominates our courts, our politics, and our talk shows, with some crazy results: for instance, some people believe that anyone who enjoys sex outside of marriage, or a kind of marriage that’s different from theirs, must be attacking their marriage. Anything that is different must be opposed, must be the enemy. When right and wrong are your only options, you may believe that you can’t love more than one person or that you can’t love in different ways or that you have a finite capacity for love—that “many” must somehow be opposed to “one,” or that your only options are in love and out of love, with no allowance for different degrees or kinds of love. We would like to propose something different. Instead of fretting about what’s right or what’s wrong, try valuing whatever is in front of you without viewing anything as in opposition to any other thing. We think that if you can do this, you will discover that there are as many ways to be sexual as there are to be human, and all of them are valid, an abundance of ways to relate, to love, to express gender, to share sex, to form families, to be in the world, to be human…and none of them in any way reduces or invalidates any of the others.

The binary tribalism of our politics chokes off deeper discussion and prevents the discovery of common ground… Binary tribalism also gives way to purposeful mischaracterization, a favorite ploy of the far left to shoot down their ideological opposition without the hard work of substantiating their accusations or provide supporting evidence for their arguments. It’s insidious and heavily relied upon by those who wish to impugn their opponents as hateful or bigoted… The enemy of binary tribalism is common ground, and rediscovering the nuance of national discourse is the first step in establishing it. If you agree with one aspect of an ideology but not the rest, you risk coming to a better understanding of the political opposition. You might even see them as human.” -pp. 40, 51

Once male and female poles have bonded together, the undifferentiated energies of life can then circulate through us. Looking at the state of the earth, it's no surprise that we worship the patriarchal state of stillness and silence while disregarding the feminine artistic and biological forces. We exist in a patriarchal society where the feminine influence of production has been distorted and ignored. The profound feminine intelligence within us is our souls, the spirit world, the natural world, and our emotions. These were all stolen, killed, or demonized. The patriarchal axis forces us into stereotypical awareness. In somatic studies, the brain, the "working" force, and our rational minds are portrayed. We need that force to shed light on our ideas, to act upon our feminine intuition. There will always be two polarities of masculine forms of consciousness at odds with one another. The masculine vs. the feminine, me vs. someone else— what we see as opposite and inward and outwardly warring forces. There is a triple form of consciousness rooted in the feminine pole: the power to see two things but also what lies between them, to access liminal space, to continually create and re-create. In the end, this is the power from which we all emerge to separate into binary consciousness. Only by revering intensely the feminine force of existence, by linking the head with the body, the masculine with the feminine, may we push beyond the constraints of patriarchal truth and into awareness of the divine concept that gave birth to all of us. It is an incorrect assumption to state that awakening kundalini is purely feminine energy or energy of the goddess. The power of creation and evolution, which are profoundly feminine powers, certainly never stops being. Yet illumination arrives as the masculine and feminine powers within us intertwine and embrace each other rather than hinder each other. By merging these feminine and masculine principles, we move into wholeness beyond a state of separation and thus become fully realized. We become masculine and feminine, empty, and full. We can even go beyond those states and witness them, observe consciousness or energy waves that flow through our body. In kundalini awakenings, the completion state is not one of a single energy chain streaming from the genitals through the top of the head or into the brain, but of all energies merging and becoming one, and both flowing downwards, entangled, into the space of the heart. This is a state of being constantly at odds with each other within and without, between two forces— male and female, void and non-void, extension and contraction, fullness, and absence. This is a state of being both forces at the same time, as well as falling between them.

The question I want to begin with is impossibly overdetermined – it is the question of why we are so afraid. The particular answer I will trace out derives from my increasing belief that Gothic literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is more than a phenomenon of Anglo-American life. It is a project. To explain and explore this notion, I want to offer a contribution to one of the longest on-going enterprises in fiction studies – the attempt to define the nature of the Gothic in literature. Nearly two hundred years ago, vexed reviewers struggled to explain the amazing, perverse, inescapable, loathsome, irresistible phenomenon of The Monk, by contrasting the narrative strategies of Matthew Gregory Lewis and Ann Radcliffe. From the controversy over the Monk came the first tools for defining Gothic fiction: the distinction between terror and horror. The inadequacy of these useful terms has driven students of the Gothic for the past two centuries to offer other terms, to devise other distinctions. A distinction common in recent Gothic studies is my starting point. Critics frequently create a binary opposition between inside and outside, between Gothic as an exploration of the unconscious and Gothic as a concern for and even an intervention in social reality. In refusing this bogus binary of Freud versus Marx, I want to define a Gothic praxis that involves – necessarily – the interplay of psychological and social forces. This interplay has determined both the title and the subtitle of my essay. My title, the nurture of the Gothic, plays obviously on the phrase already old by John Ruskin’s time – the nature of the Gothic – because I believe the nature of the Gothic is to nurture. This belief derives from what I take to be a basic fact of communal life: that societies inflict terrible wounds upon themselves and at the same time develop mechanisms that can help heal these wounds. Gothic fiction from the later eighteenth century to the present is one such mechanism. Not consciously and yet purposively, Anglo-American culture develops Gothic in order to help heal the damage caused by our embrace of modernity. Thus my title: Gothic’s nature is the psycho-social function of nurture; its project is to heal and transform. To define this healing process, I will begin with the work of a physician, the British paediatrician and psychoanalyst, D.W. Winnicott. His notions of potential space, transitional objects and play will help me produce a general definition of Gothic that I can then historicise and contextualise, drawing upon such thinkers as Michel Foucault, Michael Taussig, Ross Chambers, and Peter Stallybrass and Allon White. This will bring me to the question posed in my subtitle – how can a text be both popular and subversive? Why do we hug closest that which threatens us most? This is another way of asking, how does Gothic nurture? Which is another way of asking, why are we so afraid?