Thacker's discourse on the intersection of horror and philosophy is utterly original and utterly captivating.

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. 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.In short, when the non-human world manifests itself to us in these ambivalent ways, more often than not our response is to recuperate that non-human world into whatever the dominant, human-centric worldview is at the time. There are mediative situations in which heresy, exile, or banishment carry the day, not repetition, communion, or integration. Horror, fashion, and the end of the world … In this episode, first aired in 2014, but maybe even more relevant today, things get weird as we explore the undercurrents of thought that link nihilists, beard-stroking philosophers, Jay-Z, and True Detective. However, this relationship between philosophy and horror should not be taken to mean the philosophy of horror, in which horror as a literary or film genre is presented as a rigorous formal system.

ThackerPaperback: 978-1-78279-891-0 eBook: 978-1-78279-890-3 •[ Zero Books ] Tentacles Longer Than Night Horror of Philosophy vol. In a sense, the world-without-us is not to be found in a great beyond that is exterior to the World (the world-for-us) or the Earth (the world-in-itself); rather, it is in the very fissures, lapses, or lacunae in the World and the Earth.If the reader is interested in the Buddhist notion of emptiness, time might be better spent reading about it directly, say through the works of Nishida or Nishitani.

He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Washington, and a Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature from Rutgers University. Examples are his book Biomedia, [20] and his writings on bioinformatics, nanotechnology, biocomputing, complex adaptive systems, swarm intelligence, and network theory. He talks about Bataille, and I am afraid I can make no sense of that, except that Bataille was interested in Buddhism and Hinduism, thus foreshadowing the final pages of this book. Here, Thacker takes a decidedly philosophical turn, as he attempts to define what exactly constitutes “life. Seems to me that certainly there is reality independent of all human thought (something like noumenon).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. v=2IW8OK4_1gQ Other writing by Eugene Thacker Two more in the series Horror of Philosophy will be published in 2015: [ Zero Books ] Starry Speculative Corpse Horror of Philosophy vol. 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.