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

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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. In modernity, in the intersection of scientific hegemony, industrial capitalism, and what Nietzsche famously prophesied as the death of God, the non-human world gains a different value.

Thacker’s little book is a unique and interesting exploration of an alternative way of thinking about the relationship between horror, philosophy, and theology. I thought going into this my bachelor's in physics would help, but sadly I feel like only philosophy majors will truly enjoy this piece. Ultimately, this leads Thacker to ponder the implications of the hiddenness of the world upon political theology, in which the human is confronted with a cold, indifferent, and unresponsive world stripped of its anthropocentrism via theology (a sovereign God or king) or political science (a totalizing state). 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.He has also collaborated with Biotech Hobbyist, and co-authored an art book Creative Biotechnology: A User's Manual. By contrast, we understand the Earth as encompassing all the knowledge of the world as an object, via geology, archaeology, paleontology, the life sciences, the atmospheric sciences (meteorology, climatology), and so on. 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. Here, Thacker takes a decidedly philosophical turn, as he attempts to define what exactly constitutes “life. Thacker utilizes St John of the Cross, Jakob Bohme, Georges Bataille, and Kyoto School philosopher Kenji Nishitani to articulate a kind of dark mysticism based on a radical groundlessness (Śūnyatā) that is centered in the recognition of the unhuman.

The book starts a bit shaky and is a bit of a slow-burn toward the beginning, yet it also seems to crystallize and focus as it progresses. 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.Thacker’s discourse on the intersection of horror and philosophy is utterly original and utterly captivating. Toward the end, I didn’t come away with a better understanding of how such a dark mysticism could be useful in reconfiguring our notions regarding our climate, and the political implications of his thesis are left rather vague and fuzzy. Yes, I personally do believe there is something (independent of me) that corresponds to the chair I am sitting in. So, if all humans died today, then *something* would remain, but what it is that remained would be unknown.

Thacker's voice is quiet, a desperate whisper into the void that is both haunting and heartbreaking. The life of every individual, viewed as a whole and in general, and when only its most significant features are emphasized, is really a tragedy; but gone through in detail it has the character of a comedy. But if phenomenal reality is the actual *experience* of noumenal reality, then it (phenomenal reality) can only be known from within experience. Things are only in the perceiver’s mind and each perceiver has his own things which are not identical with things in any other mind. Tackling an array of topics from black metal, demonology, mysticism, witchcraft, existentialism, Buddhist philosophy, and horror literature, Thacker aims to explore the limits of our thought, and what horror reveals about the unthinkable world.Perhaps it would help to advance the argument if you articulated what you take to be the differences between these terms? The real challenge lies in confronting this enigmatic concept of the world-without-us, and understanding why this world-without-us continues to persist in the shadows of the world-for-us and the world-in-itself.

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. 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. The New York Times noted "Thacker has thrown a party for all of these eloquent cranks in Infinite Resignation, and he is an excellent host. Thacker's follow-up essay "Darklife: Negation, Nothingness, and the Will-to-Life in Schopenhauer" discusses the ontology of life in terms of negation, eliminativism, and "the inverse relationship between logic and life. On the other hand, “the horror of philosophy” suggests the converse: an examination of philosophy itself, with an emphasis on identifying philosophy’s own “horrific” aspects.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. Thacker discusses plague, demonic possession, and the living dead, drawing upon the history of medicine, biopolitics, political theology, and the horror genre. P. Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, Edgar Allan Poe, Dante's Inferno, Les Chants de Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont, the Faust myth, manga artist Junji Ito, contemporary horror authors Thomas Ligotti and Caitlín Kiernan, K-horror film, and the philosophy of Schopenhauer, Rudolph Otto, Medieval mysticism ( Meister Eckhart, Angela of Foligno, John of the Cross), occult philosophy, and the philosophy of the Kyoto School. A work like Gaston Bachelard's "The Poetics of Space" carries out its mission, exploring the abodes of the imagination, without appeal to logic (and remains a singular example of true philosophical genius).