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

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While there are many interesting ideas worth considering in this volume, they are often buried under a pile of obscure and unnecessarily convoluted philosophical references and throw-away lines. ThackerPaperback: 978-1-78279-891-0 eBook: 978-1-78279-890-3 •[ Zero Books ] Tentacles Longer Than Night Horror of Philosophy vol. In modernity, the response is primarily existential – a questioning of the role of human individuals and human groups in light of modern science, high technology, industrial and post-industrial capitalism, and world wars.

After the promising prologue, Chapter One jumps into a discussion of black metal music and demonology without much preparation. And the modern existential framework, with its ethical imperative of choice, freedom, and will, in the face of both scientific and religious determinisms, ultimately constricts the entire world into a solipsistic, angst-ridden vortex of the individual human subject. I’m particularly interested in Demonology as supernaturalism or even historical or political but there is so much information here as first of a trilogy.And then aren’t we back to the old dualism of that which can be known and that which exists beyond our knowing? You will have to read both of them to understand why — I am not going to explain it, so as not to spoil the enjoyment of reading either from you, but I don’t rule out the possibility that one book’s ideas illuminated the other. On could argue that it is middlebrow at best which probably is accurate, but it opened my horizon never the less. It was about a curious chain of events, in which a non-philosophy book (as described by its author) that came out with very little fanfare outside of its immediate academic realm, in an obscure publishing house (a publishing house with a manifesto, printed at the end of the book, explaining what the qualifications are for books that they will publish.

In this bestselling book, Eugene Thacker suggests that we look to the genre of horror as offering a way of thinking about the unthinkable world. In his appraisal of these ideas, Thacker concludes that philosophical thinking about life owes much to mystical, apophatic theology since this radical negativity is at the root between Being and Life.

I think what Thacker is making reference to is very much like – if not identical to – what Kant has referred to as the “noumenal” world: the “thing-in-itself. Horror, fashion, and the end of the world … things get weird as we explore the undercurrents of thought that link nihilists, beard-stroking philosophers, Jay-Z, and True Detective. 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.

The world-without-us is as much a cultural concept as it is a scientific one, and, as this book attempts to show, it is in the genres of supernatural horror and science fiction that we most frequently find attempts to think about, and to confront the difficult thought of, the world-without-us. The aim of this book is to explore the relationship between philosophy and horror, through this motif of the unthinkable world. Among the interviewees in the episode, the amused author of the book, Eugene Thacker (who also happens to be Abumrad’s brother-in-law), tries to explain the recent popularity of a book that he expected very few people, none of them famous rappers, to read. The issue here is twofold, as both the content and structure don’t offer Thacker any favors in helping him clarify his thoughts. This is Thacker’s clever perspectival shift from the “philosophy of horror” to the “horror of philosophy.The world-in-itself is a paradoxical concept; the moment we think it and attempt to act on it, it ceases to be the world-in-itself and becomes the world-for-us. In his second chapter (titled “Six Lectio on Occult Philosophy”), Thacker gives us his unique reading of occult philosophy and its usefulness in demarcating the boundary between natural and supernatural.