Here is my abstract for the upcoming P.E.S.T. event in Dublin. Excited to attend such an event in my hometown. I'll also be posting a relatively long post on Heidegger in the coming days as I try to reboot the blog.
On the Internal Pest: Jack the Ripper as a not-so-alien Maniac
Paul J. Ennis
In his 1937 oddity ‘Jack the Ripper; or, When London Walked in Terror’ Edwin T. Woodhall claimed to have read a postcard dated September 9th, 1888 from the Ripper (the date, more or less, when people realized that something was up). The postcard likely never existed, but as a fiction (about a real crime consistently fictionalized) it at least resists the temptation to cast Jack as an outsider. The ditty in the postcard runs as follows;
‘I’m not an alien maniac, nor yet a foreign tripper, I’m just your lively, jolly friend, Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper.’
At the time of the crimes the list of Ripper suspects tended to be comprised of those on the margins: Polish Jews, foreign sailors, American psychopaths, menacing Irish rogues, and a whole host of outsiders. These were the ‘external’ pests of the day, but these suspects were likely designed to shield Londoners from a more startling possibility – the ‘internal pest.’ Jack was, I suspect, one such pest, but so too is the Unabomber, or the Zodiac, or even the early black metal scene and its attack on traditionalist Norwegian Christianity. In this paper I want to demonstrate a simple thesis; that the Ripper was the first contemporary internal pest, the first blip on the modern way of life, and a singular kind of blackening of the consciousness it has given rise to.
Man, this looks interesting. I wish I could be there in person to witness it!
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