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

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While it often reads more like an academic thesis than an accessible work of pop-philosophy, it is still a worthwhile read, especially for fans of the genre. Also, by horror I do not mean the human emotion of fear, be it manifest in a fiction film, a news report, or a personal 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. Herein is a philosophical description of ‘our demons’ what plaques our lives and permeates our universe.

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.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. In the Dust of This Planet is an encyclopedic grimoire instructing us in the varieties of esoteric thought and infernal diversions that exist for the reader's further investigation, treating us to a delightful stroll down a midway of accursed attractions that alone are worth the ticket of this volume. Thacker argues that supernatural horror expresses these limits of our humanity in our secularized world today in a similar way that religious mysticism did in the medieval and early modern era. Like all great works of philosophy, this book will force readers to question their long-held beliefs in the way the world works and the way the world ought to work. In my mind, there is a subjective process of distortion of the numbers – but this subjective process is one that also objectively exists, doesn’t it?

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. The Planet is a planet, it is one planet among other planets, moving the scale of things out from the terrestrial into the cosmological framework. I think that honest exploration in to any question is conducive to good philosophy and that truth springs from argument among friends. Thacker’s unique idea is that horror is not a manifestation of our fear of death, but rather our dreading of life.

I do not know what is the nature of noumenon, all I can say is that noumenon need not be like our perceptions of noumenon. Eugene Thacker has written on science fiction, horror, continental philosophy, politics, culture, science and technology. So, if you are standing with a friend and looking and you see a lake and the friend also sees the lake. 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.

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.The writing of Thacker and Thomas Ligotti is cited as an influence on the 2021 album The Nightmare of Being by the Gothenburg melodic death metal band At The Gates; Thacker also provided lyrics for the song "Cosmic Pessimism". Eugene Thacker is the author of several books, including In the Dust of This Planet (Zero Books, 2011) and Infinite Resignation (Repeater/PenguinRandomHouse, 2018). Hence, a central focus of this book is on the problem of thinking this world-without-us; and its argument is that this problem is at once a philosophical, a political, and a cultural problem. In a sense, the real challenge today is not finding a new or improved version of the world-for-us, and it is not relentlessly pursuing the phantom objectivity of the world-in-itself.