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Self-Stalking Prey: A Study for a Portrait of Little Red Riding Hood

Carl Olsson
26.08.2025.GLOB

publications Subjectivity Self-effacement Consciousness

Eliminativism Philosophy of Mind De-Subjectivation

My title is adapted from the poet Gherasim Luca whose contradictory image animates a bewildering conceptual drama.¹ One of the most intriguing prospects of philosophy is its supposed ability to have us revise our conceptual understanding of ourselves. Some of the more radical varieties suggest that we are nothing like we seem. This kind of notion occurs, for instance, in the work of radical irrealists who suggest that our discursive framework about mental activity is a false theory that can be eliminated.² We can recognize a similar dynamic in claims that present one or several aspects of our consciousness as inescapable illusion, as Thomas Metzinger does in his now classic proposal that we are nobodies.³ The difficulty lies in convincing ourselves that we are. Can the theories we used to describe ourselves be changed and replaced like any other?

One standard objection to the argument that our everyday conceptual apparatus can be overcome is that it would be self-refuting because the intelligibility of the argument relies on the very categories it denounces as irreal.⁴ This dynamic of apparent self-refutation can be recast as a species of self-effacement, transforming it from a theoretical error into a matter of psychological horror: Elimination of semantic content is a real possibility but it comes with similarly real consequences. Although this position is consistent with our everyday belief that theories can be superseded, its coherence depends on overcoming our equally vernacular presumption that theoretical replacement cannot become a direct agent of our destruction. It does not seem farfetched to entertain that some type of repression is preventing us from having this realization.

Here I will be particularly interested in the dynamics of the effacement of the concept of a ‘subject’ and the particular point of vulnerability it comprises. I want to briefly develop three different themes in relation to it:

The elimination of subjectivity is thinkable as catastrophic self-effacement;
We can look to objectify and historicize the catastrophe in order to facilitate its prospective status as a natural kind; that is, the catastrophe that is the conceptual effacement of subjectivity has its own place in general history;
Finally, the structure of the catastrophe of eliminated subjectivity can be drawn out from fairy tales and literary folk traditions through what might be termed ‘psychoanalysis without psyche’ – pure structure enacted in narrative space through violent force. Perhaps the history of philosophy has inherited a pre-philosophical way of thinking the dialectics of theoretical change from folk tradition and beyond – but in what ways is this generic thought constituted?

With these themes in mind, it is time for a bedtime story. The Hungarian analyst Géza Róheim proposed an exotic interpretation of fairy tales.⁵ They are retold from the events of actual dreams. And as is common in the psychoanalytic tradition, the different characters that feature in dreams can be interpreted as aspects of a single person, i.e. the dreamer. This is the case in Róheim’s reading of Little Red Riding Hood. Less than a wild beast residing in the forest, the wolf-that-speaks represents the little girl’s hunger.

The version of Little Red Riding Hood that was first recorded by Charles Perrault, a former secretary of the First Minister to Louis XIV, casts a young girl named after the red hood she always wears on her way to her sick grandmother with some food and wine.⁶ In the forest, she meets a speaking wolf who learns about her visit to the grandmother, and cunning as the wolf is he sees a way to enjoy not just one, but two humans for dinner. The wolf sends Little Red Riding Hood astray to pick flowers while he, the wolf, quickly runs to the grandmother’s house, knocks on the door and when the grandmother asks who it is he changes his voice to imitate her granddaughter. The door opens and the wolf swallows the grandmother whole, and then dresses up in her clothes as he waits for his second victim.

When Little Red Riding Hood arrives, the wolf has gotten into bed wearing the grandmother’s clothes. Sensing that something is off, Little Red Riding Hood questions her ‘grandmother’s’ strange appearance, and time and again she is told that it is to better be able to interact with her granddaughter. The big ears are to better be able to hear her, the big legs are to better be able to run with, and so on, until finally, the big mouth is to better eat her all up – and, saying those words, the wolf does just that.

Contrary to some other versions of Little Red Riding Hood, like those recorded by the Grimm brothers, Perrault’s version does not feature a hunter coming to the rescue or any other sign of hope. There is no happy ending offered by Perrault. Rather, the story comes to an abrupt end with the wolf eating Little Red Riding Hood. If the wolf and Little Red Riding Hood are aspects of the same person, it means the hungry subject has turned on itself, and satiety is achieved when the condition of hunger is rescinded by its treatment as any other object of hunger. Perrault’s version of Little Red Riding Hood is a story about a subject that ultimately annihilates itself. Since Róheim’s interpretation prefers a version of the story that casts the missing hunter as a father figure, he finds Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood ‘complicated’ to interpret, settling on the wolf as a symbol of male aggression. Although that is likely to be consistent with the intended ‘moral’ of the story about Little Red Riding Hood, Róheim had to tell a complex (read implausible) story about bisexual displacement of male and female traits to find support for the aspects interpretation of characters in his ‘dream theory’⁷ of fairy tales.

Ronald Fairbairn had a simpler interpretation, describing the story as a tale about Little Red Riding Hood’s ‘own incorporative need in the form of a devouring wolf’⁸: a showcase of an early oral dynamic rooted in unsatisfied hunger rather than sexual competition. The recurrent vore fantasies (the wolf swallowing its victims whole) are cast as pre-Oedipal, more to do with hunger and infantile disappointment in the nourishing mother than the family triad; and it is in terms of hunger that we will think about theory replacement and the exhaustion of ‘our’ conceptual dependency on the inherited concept of subjectivity.

Departing from the psychodynamic interpretations, I want to consider Little Red Riding Hood as a conceptual rather than psychological drama that may, however, attain psychological import in due course. It is a developmental allegory for the self-effacement of the language that makes us ‘us’, such as in moving from an image of ourselves as rational agents to biological objects that can be explained. The little girl is a werewolf preying on herself. It is a story about self-overcoming in the double sense that it is a about the effacement of the subject as a theoretical entity and about an effacement that unfolds as the result of a dialectic initiated by the subject itself. The deep forest is a stage for a conceptual clash.

A first glance at the true identity of the characters:

Little Red Riding Hood – The subject as it is represented in the conventional theory

The Grandmother – The conventional theory that contains a concept of subjectivity

The Hungry Wolf – The application of the replacement theory that contains no concept of subjectivity

Less than a wild beast residing in the forest, then, the speaking wolf is a representation of the little girl’s hunger that has been split off and become autonomous. What makes Perrault’s version so interesting in this context is how it ends the moment the subject turns back on itself, satiating its desire by devouring the condition of its dependency on food. The wolf, dressed as the benevolent grandmother, annihilates the subject that made the story possible. An objective representation of the subject is just like this. It is a form of regression, or a deletion of the basis of subjectivity like a word that is swallowed even as it is spoken. Little Red Riding Hood exists only insofar as she claims to exist as Little Red Riding Hood.

If the wolf is the ascendant theory, the grandmother is the stand-in for the old theory in which the character of Little Red Riding Hood is meant to be formed. Little Red Riding Hood herself is the subject that exists in virtue of her formation in the theoretical language that she uses to represent herself as Little Red Riding Hood; the name she is given by her mother and grandmother.

The allegory of hunger is not coincidental. The relationship between Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother doubles that of the original absolute reliance of the infant on its mother such that only if there is an established folk theory can the child mature and realize its potential as a subject. It is, in a sense, only in becoming the grandmother that the child is a self. The grandmother is thus the object of hunger, the necessary capacity to support the existential need of the child; first by providing nourishment and, then, symbolically, as the stand-in for the theory that the child must adopt to become a subject of her own. Concepts are patterns of the mind.

In some French versions of the story, Little Red Riding Hood even drinks the blood of the grandmother or eats her breasts. Her goal is to feed and ingest the grandmother, though it is not to kill her immediately but to keep her alive for the time being as a cow in the milking stanchion. Little Red Riding Hood becomes a subject to the extent that she can enter into the reciprocal relationship of feeding and being fed; of speaking and being spoken to in a comprehensible language that casts her as her. The theoretical articulation of subjectivity is to the subject as food is to the body.

But when the wolf devours the grandmother he does it to replace her with immediate effect. He substitutes one object for another (himself). That is why the grandmother is swallowed whole – clothes and hairdo nice and tidy. The new theory mimics the old, promising to be a greater successor (just look at my big ears!), even as it sets the conditions for undermining itself in the meantime. Then, it ultimately turns to erase the subject that depended on the old theory that was required as the ground of the new. When the grandmother is substituted by a ‘mere’ animal it means that Little Red Riding Hood is also set on the path to replacement. In fact, she already has been replaced, but the story defers the consequences by laying them out in narrative time.

The pivotal moment of the story occurs as the reader is introduced to the wolf, for it is precisely this wolflike aspect that Little Red Riding Hood cannot acknowledge as a part of herself (it is the foreign agent that seeks to dominate the language within which Little Red Riding Hood exists as a subject). At this point, Little Red Riding Hood does not yet know the wolf as a part of her, and the story develops as she grows ever closer to this annihilating recognition. It is as if she has glanced into a pond and seen, for the first time, mirrored in the water, her own bestial nature. Only that she does not yet recognize it.

But she starts having doubts. She is lost on her way to the grandmother, and even after it should be clear to all that the grandmother has become obsolete, she refuses to acknowledge the truth. ‘Here is just grandmother and no one else’, and in the very moment the untenability of this desperate bluff is called; transforming the double image from grandmother-wolf to wolf-grandmother, the game ceases as Little Red Riding Hood falls for her own trick and forcibly re-enters the world as one object among the rest. ‘So it was ‘I’ who was the beast...’. She trails off. There is silence, not even a howl.

In Perrault’s rendition of Little Red Riding Hood we find a weird allegory for the drama of the regressive naturalization of the self. As the hungry wolf, Little Red Riding Hood devours the object that brings her into being but in doing so her wolf’s autonomy is turned back on her, and therefore, it also turns on the wolf which has been split off from her. The aspects interpretation makes the story of Little Red Riding Hood the story of a mouth that eats itself. Just like ‘Our hands of flesh and bone are only the auxiliary machines of the “absolute hand” of our cerebral cortex’⁹, thought is an immaterial means of grasping. This virtual hand – our means of abstract action – can also turn around and tear itself apart in the same way as we can mutilate our own extended limbs. The wolf is an agent of self-effacement, only it must wear a mask that makes its participation invisible to its own eyes. We would like to think there is no wolf, only grandmother; that the new theory poses no threat, that it is simply a better version of the old. The closer we come to recognizing ourselves as beasts of the world, the closer we come to disappearing like a chameleon looking in a mirror, a short-circuited grammatical system or, indeed, a werewolf that eats itself all up. Apprehending the structural resemblance between these events is to understand theory replacement as a destructive event, particularly when it pertains to concepts propping up the intelligibility of theory as such. It is a type of event that goes deep into the structures of thought and perhaps much deeper, stretching all the way to the spatial relationship of a self apprehending itself in space.

Fairy tales and fables have the peculiar power or staging conceptual dynamics in space and time. The aspects interpretation of fairy tale characters suggests that a subterranean awareness of the dialectic of self-effacement is already present in the depths of folk imaginaries, latent as a highly particular understanding of the things theory can do to us. It is structure converted to psychology through the medium of the concept. We know from our nightmares that we can turn on ourselves in thought; that the very notions that make us into who we are are vulnerable to complete annihilation.

Luca, G. (2012) Self-Shadowing Prey. Trans. M. A. Caws. New York: Contra Mundum Press.
Traditional examples include Churchland, P. M. (1981) 'Eliminative materialism and propositional attitudes', The Journal of Philosophy, 78(2), pp. 67-90 and Churchland, P. S. (1989) Neurophilosophy: toward a unified
science of the mind-brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Metzinger, T. (2004) Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
Wilfrid Sellars’ example is that the naturalistic or ‘scientific image’ lacks the normative resources needed for science to even make sense as a project, hence it cannot straightforwardly replace its manifest counterpart. Sellars, W. (2007) In the Space of Reasons: Selected Essays of Wilfrid Sellars. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. See also Boghossian, P. A. (1990a) 'The Status of Content', The Philosophical Review, 99(2), pp. 157-184.
Róheim, G. (1953) 'Fairy tale and dream', The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 8(1), pp. 394-403.
Perrault, C. (2021) Little Red Riding Hood. Copenhagen, Denmark: Lindhardt og Ringhof.
Róheim, G. (1953) 'Fairy Tale and Dream', The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 8(1), p. 396.
Fairbairn, W. R. D. (2001) Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality. New York, NY: Routledge, p. 24.
Ruyer, R. (2020) The Genesis of Living Forms. Trans. J. Roffe and N. B. de Weydenthal. London/New York:
Rowman & Littlefield, p. 161. Italics removed.

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