In the Dust of This Planet (Horror of Philosophy): 1

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As a catalogue of interesting tidbits it's quite nice, but on the whole it lacks philosophical substance. While classical Greece does, of course, acknowledge that the world is not totally within human control, it nevertheless tends to personify the non-human world in its pantheon of humanoid creatures and its all-too-human gods, themselves ruled by jealously, greed, and lust. For an interview with the author Eugene Thacker where he discusses horror and philosophy go to http://www.

The second “lightning bolt” comes in the second chapter, where, while addressing the issue of occult philosophy, Thacker articulates the thought-provoking idea that while the world in-itself may be something inaccessible to human understanding and experience, its very inaccessibility reveals a quality that is indeed graspable by humans. Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation, co-authored with Alexander Galloway and McKenzie Wark (University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp. The cover of In the Dust of this Planet can be seen in a New York gallery, on a banner at the 2014 Climate Change march in New York and on Jay-Z s back promoting Run.Thacker condenses a large amount of literature and philosophy into such a small volume, and he’s fairly clear and concise in his summations. In it, Thacker explores the idea of the "unthinkable world" as represented in the horror fiction genre, in philosophies of pessimism and nihilism, and in the philosophies of apophatic ("darkness") mysticism. The cover of In the Dust of this Planet can be seen in a New York gallery, on a banner at the 2014 Climate Change march in New York and on Jay-Z’s back promoting Run. Here the author has finally landed on a tradition that does take into consideration the unhuman (if we grant that emptiness is in some sense unhuman).

Thacker does premise this work by letting us know not to expect the logical rigour of Aristotle or Kant.The term horror does not exclusively mean cultural productions of horror (or art horror), be it in fiction, film, comics, or video games. Having read the introductory chapter, I was really keen to get on with this work and to see what secrets lay within. To confront this idea is to confront the limit of our ability to understand the world in which we live – a central motif of the horror genre. Thacker argues that supernatural horror expresses these limits of our humanity in our secularized world today in a similar way that religious mysticism did in the medieval and early modern era. Paperback: TBC 978-1-78279-891-0 eBook: 978-1-78279-890-3 [ Zero Books ] Tentacles Longer Than Night Horror of Philosophy vol.

Thacker is a contributor to The Japan Times Books section, where he has written about the work of Junji Ito, Osamu Dazai, Haruo Sato, Keiji Nishitani, Izumi Kyōka, Edogawa Rampo, and Zen death poetry.Many of the ideas are often disconnected between sections, and his use of the Quaestio in the first chapter can be a bit unnecessarily confusing and unhelpful. But even the Earth is simply a designation that we’ve given to something that has revealed itself or made itself available to the gathering of samples, the generating of data, the production of models, and the disputes over policy. In the final section, the strategy is abandoned altogether, and the author simply comments on the stanzas of a poem. So, it sounds like your way of putting things reduces the phenomenal/noumenal dualism to a kind of monism. In the Dust of This Planet is an encyclopedic grimoire instructing us in the varieties of esoteric thought and infernal diversions that exist for the reader’s further investigation, treating us to a delightful stroll down a midway of accursed attractions that alone are worth the ticket of this volume.

Thacker's voice is quiet, a desperate whisper into the void that is both haunting and heartbreaking. Thacker's books include In the Dust of This Planet (part of his Horror of Philosophy trilogy) and Infinite Resignation. We can even abbreviate these three concepts further: the world-for-us is simply the World, the world-in-itself is simply the Earth, and the world-without-us is simply the Planet. In regards to structure, while I find the organization of the book (3 Quaestio, 6 Lectio, and 9 Disputato) to be novel and an interesting framing device, at times it can seem a bit forced and gimmicky. Much of modern philosophy, according to Thacker, has been enmeshed in anthropocentric thinking, which ultimately centers the human subject as the center of thought and experience.To confront this idea is to confront an absolute limit to our ability to adequately understand the world at all – an idea that has been a central motif of the horror genre for some time. In Thacker’s hands, philosophy is not academic logic-chopping; instead, it is the thought of the limit of all thought, especially as it dovetails into occultism, demonology, and mysticism. The writing of Thacker and Thomas Ligotti is cited as an influence on the 2021 album The Nightmare of Being by the Gothenburg melodic death metal band At The Gates; Thacker also provided lyrics for the song "Cosmic Pessimism". By contrast, the response of Medieval and early modern Christianity is primarily theological – the long tradition of apocalyptic literature, as well as the Scholastic commentaries on the nature of evil, cast the non-human world within a moral framework of salvation.