Eugene Thacker's "In the Dust of this Planet" and others

S

Speaking Mute

Chymist
I'm curious if anyone here has read "In the Dust of this Planet: The Horror of Philosphy Vol. 1" by Thacker. He forwards an interesting premise in the opening section; the Horror genre - particularly in the vein of Lovecraft and Ligotti's fiction - grants us a window on the Kantian "thing-in-itself" through stripping away human values and interests. Thacker contrasts the "world-without-us" perspective found in Horror to both traditional mythological/religious views of the world and modern scientific/humanist views that take the world's being as "being-for-us". Unfortunately, Thacker doesn't pursue this line of thought very far - but this book is only one of three projected volumes. I'm keen on where he might take the idea, and what others think.

Thacker is part of a small band of philosophers publishing through Zer0 books who take up similar themes. I'm currently half way through Graham Harman's "Weird Realism; Lovecraft and Philosophy". This book merits a thread of its own, but it compliments Thacker's book quite well so far.
 
Speaking Mute said:
Thacker is part of a small band of philosophers publishing through Zer0 books who take up similar themes. I'm currently half way through Graham Harman's "Weird Realism; Lovecraft and Philosophy". This book merits a thread of its own, but it compliments Thacker's book quite well so far.
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I wrote a little bit about Weird Realism here. There is also an old thread called Weird Realism, which I won't bother linking to. It was just a long flamewar that wasn't really about the book or Harman's philosophy (ah, the internet!).
 
I read Eugene's In the Dust of this Planet: The Horror of Philosophy Vol. 1 a couple of years ago and found it to be pretty damned brilliant, although he briefly lost me in an early portion with his musical excursion into some black metal theorizing. (Not that there's anything wrong with black metal theorizing, but I just wasn't familiar with the particular items he was examining, and so the personal thread of identification that guided me through the rest of the book wasn't there.) I consider the book to be a real contribution to its subject, which you articulate nicely, Speaking Mute, and which is obviously of high interest to the TLO crowd.

N.B., Erik Davis interviewed Eugene about this book and his work in general on the Expanding Mind radio show last year. The conversation makes for an excellent and fascinating introduction, as indicated by the program's description: "Lovecraft, medieval mysticism, and thinking the world-without-us. A talk with Professor Eugene Thacker, author of In the Dust of the Earth: the Horror of Philosophy and After Life."
 
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gveranon said:
I wrote a little bit about Weird Realism here. There is also an old thread called Weird Realism, which I won't bother linking to. It was just a long flamewar that wasn't really about the book or Harman's philosophy (ah, the internet!).
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...I'm about halfway through Weird Realism - and so far I think it's a brilliant analysis of Lovecraft's prose. I agree that Graham elevates Lovecraft a bit too high, but I can forgive him given the shoddy assessment Lovecraft has received from literary critics. I've always loved Lovecraft's prose, but never bothered to sort out what exactly it was in his choice of words that I found so captivating. Graham's actually given me a deeper appreciation for Lovecraft's approach to writing, and seen things that I hadn't seen before (Lovecraft's humor, for instance).

I do, however, part ways with Graham so far as the uniqueness of Lovecraft's style. One of my first impressions from Graham's analysis is the similarity between H.P. Lovecraft's and Joseph Conrad's use of allusive description. I've enjoyed both authors for quite some time, but never thought them akin to one another so far as prose.

So far as the third section, I cannot say much as I've yet to read it. I do, however, recommend Graham's The Quadruple Object if you're inclined towards metaphysics. Grahams quite a philosophical mutant; his views on objects remind me of Leibniz's monads, but he reaches this point through using Heidegger's tool analysis and an some epistemic considerations more common to the Analytic Philosophy of Science.

I think Graham's view of objects might lend more formal arguments to Thacker's - they're parallel thematically, but Thacker's writing in In the Dust of this Planet verges on stream of consciousness...but I'll say more about this in my replay to Matt Cardin...
 
matt cardin said:
I read Eugene's In the Dust of this Planet: The Horror of Philosophy Vol. 1 a couple of years ago and found it to be pretty damned brilliant, although he briefly lost me in an early portion with his musical excursion into some black metal theorizing. (Not that there's anything wrong with black metal theorizing, but I just wasn't familiar with the particular items he was examining, and so the personal thread of identification that guided me through the rest of the book wasn't there.) I consider the book to be a real contribution to its subject, which you articulate nicely, Speaking Mute, and which is obviously of high interest to the TLO crowd.
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I felt let down by the later half of In the Dust of this Planet - he raised such fascinating ideas about death and extinction, and then wandered off into more mundane topics. I've nothing against Black Metal, and understand how it could have related to the open section - but he never really tied this up. I enjoyed his review of the occult detective trope in Horror films and literature - but this was an even greater digression. I'm hoping the next volume is more focused on the "world wtihout us" - I fear he might not have pursued the topic further is because he doesn't know how to take it beyond suggetion.

...in any case, the first section made me consider just how anthroprocentric Naturalism tends to be even at its extremities. Eliminativism, for instance, has often been forwarded as a mental salve that will allow us to be "at home in the universe" if we only embrace it - and parallels to Zen Buddhism have been repeatedly marked. The "world without us" strikes me as much more extreme, and much more truthful due to it's brutality...

"I have seen the dark universe yawning
Where the black planets roll without aim-
Where they roll in their horror unheeded,
Without knowledge or luster or name."

...but can the concept due to metaphysical work, as it were? The trouble with Cosmic Horror is that it tends to make the "world-without-us" into an undifferentiated void. We might not be able to allude to "unobserved entity" without using negation - but surely the "world-without-us" is richer than we can imagine?
 
In Speculations vol. 4 Dylan Trigg writes interestingly about the horror of darkness, here is the link:
http://www.speculations-journal.org/storage/Trigg_The%20Horror%20of%20Darkness_Speculations_IV.pdf

I would also like to second Speaking Mute's recommendation of The Quadruple Object. The book contains many interesting reflections on the world without us and the subterranean strangeness of things:

"The cosmos seems to be gigantic in both space and time. It is more ancient than all our ape-like ancestors and all other life forms. It might also seem safe to assume that the trillions of entities in the cosmos engage in relations and duels even when no humans observe them. However interesting we humans may be to ourselves, we are apparently in no way central to the cosmic drama, marooned as we are on an average-sized planet near a mediocre sun, and confined to a tiny portion of the history of the universe."

Funny btw that Graham's concept "Ontography" is explicitly referred to M.R. James' story Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You My Lad :-)
 
Alarm Agent said:
Here's Thacker on Schopenhauer , Blackness or on And Also The Trees. I quite like his texts and there are not many Philosophers who explore the dark side. At least he is less obscure than Meillassoux and doesn't expect you to know the whole history of Neuroscience and phenomenology like Ray Brassier does in Nihil Unbound.
Edit : on Mr. Ligotti
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Black on Black was a great article. From what I've read by Thacker so far, I think I enjoy his cultural criticism and history better than his philosophical work. He knows how to make an interesting potpourri if nothing else. I did, however, just order After Life...
 
Nolon said:
In Speculations vol. 4 Dylan Trigg writes interestingly about the horror of darkness, here is the link:
http://www.speculations-journal.org/storage/Trigg_The%20Horror%20of%20Darkness_Speculations_IV.pdf
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Great article - this is more of what I hoping to find in In the Dust of this Planet. Trigg has written a full volume on the subject which I'm ordering along with Thacker's After Life...

http://www.amazon.com/The-Memory-Place-Phenomenology-Continental/dp/0821420399/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1382301426&sr=8-1&keywords=Dylan+Trigg

I'm glad to see some academic respect extended to these views. I graduated with a BA in philosophy in 2011 and decided not to go on to a graduate program due to feeling alienated from the field. Any mention of Schopenhauer would get steered into a debate on his misogyny and racism, Anti-anthropocentric environmentalism and Anti-natalism was dismissed as excesses from the 1970's New Left, and I never would have mentioned Lovecraft in a philosophical context for fear of immediate dismissal. Hopefully this movement continues to grow.
 
Speaking Mute said:
Nolon said:
In Speculations vol. 4 Dylan Trigg writes interestingly about the horror of darkness, here is the link:
http://www.speculations-journal.org/storage/Trigg_The Horror of Darkness_Speculations_IV.pdf
Click to expand...

Great article - this is more of what I hoping to find in In the Dust of this Planet. Trigg has written a full volume on the subject which I'm ordering along with Thacker's After Life...

http://www.amazon.com/The-Memory-Place-Phenomenology-Continental/dp/0821420399/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1382301426&sr=8-1&keywords=Dylan+Trigg

I'm glad to see some academic respect extended to these views. I graduated with a BA in philosophy in 2011 and decided not to go on to a graduate program due to feeling alienated from the field. Any mention of Schopenhauer would get steered into a debate on his misogyny and racism, Anti-anthropocentric environmentalism and Anti-natalism was dismissed as excesses from the 1970's New Left, and I never would have mentioned Lovecraft in a philosophical context for fear of immediate dismissal. Hopefully this movement continues to grow.
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We're out there, but you'll find that most of us aren't in philosophy departments (at least in the U.S.).
 
Speaking Mute said:
I'm glad to see some academic respect extended to these views. I graduated with a BA in philosophy in 2011 and decided not to go on to a graduate program due to feeling alienated from the field. Any mention of Schopenhauer would get steered into a debate on his misogyny and racism, Anti-anthropocentric environmentalism and Anti-natalism was dismissed as excesses from the 1970's New Left, and I never would have mentioned Lovecraft in a philosophical context for fear of immediate dismissal. Hopefully this movement continues to grow.
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Such things happen when flat-brained ideologies like 'Political Correctness' contaminate Philosophy. But that's nothing new. Schopenhauer himself condemned his contemporary scholars for being mostly interested in advancing various political agendas for their own benefit. That's why one has at least to respect the efforts of Harman or Brassier to destroy Anthropocentricism (still so ridiculously prevalent in Philosophy as opposed to in Cosmology). Another extreme example might be Nick Land http://www.amazon.com/The-Thirst-Annihilation-Bataille-Virulent/dp/041505608X
But since turning over to the 'Dark Side' of Dark Enlightenment or Neo-Reactionism he has become a Pariah or Heretic of first order.
 
After finishing Harman's Weird Realism and starting a second reading of The Quadruple Object, I've concluded that both books should be read together. If I'd read Weird Realism without prior exposure to Harman's ideas, I'd have found the third section lacking and undeveloped - much the same as Thacker. Weird Realism also serves to illustrate the novelty of Harman's theory of objects, as to my first reading of The Quadruple Object lead me to draw too close a parallel between Harman and Leibniz.

Harman has a new book on Speculative Realism coming out in a few weeks:

http://www.amazon.com/Bells-Whistles-More-Speculative-Realism/dp/1782790381/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1382898859&sr=8-1&keywords=Harman+bells


I wonder if Zero Books has a strict page constraint, as to every book I've ordered so far has been rather slender. In any case, I find it amusing that the Speculative Realists are not only taking inspiration from horror fiction, but being published like horror fiction as well - small specialty presses.

Alarm Agent said:
Such things happen when flat-brained ideologies like 'Political Correctness' contaminate Philosophy. But that's nothing new. Schopenhauer himself condemned his contemporary scholars for being mostly interested in advancing various political agendas for their own benefit. That's why one has at least to respect the efforts of Harman or Brassier to destroy Anthropocentricism (still so ridiculously prevalent in Philosophy as opposed to in Cosmology). Another extreme example might be Nick Land The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism: Nick Land: 9780415056083: Amazon.com: Books
But since turning over to the 'Dark Side' of Dark Enlightenment or Neo-Reactionism he has become a Pariah or Heretic of first order.
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I think there's two reasons for the stodginess. The first is that Anglo-American philosophy now has a century long tradition of telling itself that philosophy is useless and irrelevant. The second is that Philosophy Departments are facing existential threats as Liberal Arts programs are winnowed away by funding cuts. None of these are a good foundation for saying anything radical or different. But it's a self-perpetuating downward spiral, as to redoubles cliquish behavior and narrow mindsets that make Philosophy departments irrelevant little ivory towers. So on it goes down hill.
 
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Speaking Mute said:
After finishing Harman's Weird Realism and starting a second reading of The Quadruple Object, I've concluded that both books should be read together. If I'd read Weird Realism without prior exposure to Harman's ideas, I'd have found the third section lacking and undeveloped - much the same as Thacker. Weird Realism also serves to illustrate the novelty of Harman's theory of objects, as to my first reading of The Quadruple Object lead me to draw too close a parallel between Harman and Leibniz.
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Circus Philosophicus is also a good, short introduction to Harman's philosophy. It's full of colorful examples, and lighter on purely theoretical discussion than The Quadruple Object. I agree that it helps to read more Harman in order to better understand what he means by "weird realism" -- and that Weird Realism will help one to better understand his object-oriented metaphysics, too.
 
Has anyone read Eugene Thacker's An Ideal for Living yet? It looks pretty interesting and far out...

http://www.amazon.com/Ideal-For-Living-Eugene-Thacker/dp/1497358256/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1398673171&sr=8-3&keywords=eugene+thacker
 
My favorite works in this vein would be Ben Woodard's books Slime Dynamics and On an Ungrounded Earth. They are a very dark look at philosophy through the lens of weird horror and pessimistic thought. Sections on virus's, worms, black suns, and the heat death of the universe. Must reads.
 
Actually i'm still waiting for the follow-ups of "In the Dust of this Planet" : 'Starry Speculative Corpse' and 'Tentacles longer than Night' pursuing the relationship between Thought, Horror and Philosophy. I especially liked the idea of a world not just indifferent to us, but actually A World against us which exposes the World for us as nothing but a delusional lie made up to ward off the horrors of existance. Of course, this line of thinking is nothing but a negative theology, but it still seems more plausible than to live in a world of carnage and still hold up the believe of a benevolent god.
@luciferfell :The most amazing thing i read was in 'The Five Ages of the Universe' [Adams&Laughlin] : the possiblity of spontanous annihilation of the whole Universe through a process called 'Vacuum decay' : a phase transition which travels at nearly lightspeed and destroys every atom in it's wake. Theoretically, it could have started already somewhere beyond the observable universe.
 
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