Practically from its inception, the Enlightenment ideal of rationality was equally criticized and fostered in European intellectual tradition. The belief in reason as an exclusive property of human mind capable of reproducing an authentic image of reality quickly revealed itself as highly disputable from the standpoint of philosophy and art, as well as from the angle of particular scientific disciplines (above all, psychology and anthropology). Within the sphere of contemporary literature, one of the greatest adversaries of the Enlightenment idea of the rationally apprehensible nature of reality is the horror fiction writer Thomas Ligotti. For this author, "the world as it is" has little or nothing to do with rational consciousness, and correlates more strongly with our deepest irrational fears which reveal themselves in feverish visions and nightmarish images. While establishing his personal and artistic worldview on the inversion of the usual ideas about reality, Ligotti creates a specific type of subversive prose: one that depraves the world of any higher meaning and denies all possibilities of consolation to humankind. In this paper I pose the question whether such disillusionment may leave any possibility for an individual to act independently, be it in a subversive or non-subversive sense of the word.
