“We're All Mad Here!”: Becoming God in Bloodborne

Abstract

This paper engages with Slavoj Žižek's notion of the ‘vanishing mediator,’ by taking a closer look at his study of the Hegelian ‘night of the world.’ It specifically probes into the notion of the divine madness that becomes the ‘Ground’ for the sane, subjective God of The Bible to Word the universe into being. Following this, it proceeds to bring the aforementioned into discourse with Bloodborne, which, in one of its endings, presents the curious case of the next stage of human evolution, i.e., a transcendence into Godhood, which occurs during a similar night. The paper, in essence, presents a dramatic stage for this madness to play out in its reading of Bloodborne, while tracing its vestiges using a postsecular-psychoanalytical lens.