Thomas Ligotti, author of The Conspiracy Against the Human Race The world is increasingly unthinkable, a world of planetary disasters, emerging pandemics, and the looming threat of extinction. Also, check out WNYC Studio's On the Media episode Staring into the Abyss, in it Brooke Gladstone and Jad Abumrad continue their discussion of nihilism and its place in history. The contemporary cynic – which on many days describes myself – might respond that we still live by all of these interpretive frameworks, and that only their outer shell has changed – the mythological has become the stuff of the culture industries, spinning out big-budget, computer-generated films and merchandise; the theological has diffused into political ideology and the fanaticism of religious conflict; and the existential has been re-purposed into self-help and the therapeutics of consumerism. Here, Thacker argues for a philosophical consideration of the demonic, which serves as a negation of the human (through Thacker’s construction of Demontology and Cosmic Pessimism).

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. Thacker’s central idea is that horror literature brings us to the edge of thought, as it brings us to the very limit of human thought and forces us to consider the world apart from the human.It is a series of philosophical essays, presented in a variety of philosophical techniques that are explained by Thacker before they are exercised, and they deal with three major themes: The first one is the contrast between the way we see ourselves as part of, even as shapers of, the world we see around ourselves, and the reality of the world existing without us — while we are part of it, and after we are all extinct; the second, a philosophical discourse of the origins of the main themes of horror literature, cinema and television — demons, monsters, ghosts, sinister beings — and how they actually reflect on our perception of the world around ourselves; the third (and this was the theme most explored in the podcast episode), revolves around the analysis of a poem, which is a dry description, in prose, of the chemical elements that are making up the planet, none of which are in our control, none of which we affect much. 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. On the other hand, all these effects are linked, directly and indirectly, to our living in and living as a part of this non-human world. This is the world that we, as human beings, interpret and give meaning to, the world that we relate to or feel alienated from, the world that we are at once a part of and that is also separate from the human. If, however, one is completely uninterested in the connections between philosophy, horror, and mystical theology, then this book will probably not engage your interest at all.

Given the random nature of how books are picked from my list, the next one, “ Starry Speculative Corpse”, will probably be read only in four years as well.

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. First, he examines the significance of “black” within the Black Metal music genre, using Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to argue for a kind of “Cosmic Pessimism” that avoids the anthropocentric foundations of both Satanism and paganism. The decision to approach some of the material in scholastic form starts the investigation off on an intriguing note – and I was more than eager to play along – but dropping this approach later on left me feeling like I was reading two separate books. 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.

The premise of having a book that the creators of True Detective, Jay-Z and the creators of Radiolab all find interesting was intriguing, and therefore the book made it into my list, and finally, several years later, I was actually able to read it. As a catalogue of interesting tidbits it's quite nice, but on the whole it lacks philosophical substance. v=2IW8OK4_1gQ Other writing by Eugene ThackerTwo more in the series Horror of Philosophy – April 2015:•[ Zero Books ] Starry Speculative Corpse Horror of Philosophy vol.

The book does have a very interesting premise, and on that front at least is leagues above some of the dusty pedantic fare which often deposits itself in academic journals. I especially enjoyed the “Excursus on Mists and Ooze,” which notes the role played by these slippery, slimy and amorphous entities in a number of horror stories and films. Grounding Thacker’s book is the idea of “the horror of philosophy,” which is an attempt to articulate the “unthinkable.