Eugene Thacker

The world is increasingly unthinkable, a world of planetary disasters, emerging pandemics, and the looming threat of extinction. In this book Eugene Thacker suggests that we look to the genre of horror as offering a way of thinking about the unthinkable world. 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. In the Dust of This Planet explores these relationships between philosophy and horror. 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. Likewise, Thacker takes horror to mean something beyond the focus on gore and scare tactics, but as the under-appreciated genre of supernatural horror in fiction, film, comics, and music.

In the Dust of This Planet

Philosophy meets horror against the backdrop of an indifferent, unhuman cosmos.

Horror of Philosophy

Starry Speculative Corpse

"We're doomed." So begins the work of the philosopher whose unabashed and aphoristic indictments of the human condition have been cropping up recently in popular culture. Today we find ourselves in an increasingly inhospitable world that is, at the same time, starkly indifferent to our species-specific hopes, desires, and disappointments. In the Anthropocene, pessimism is felt everywhere but rarely given its proper place. Though pessimism may be, as Thacker says, the lowest form of philosophy, it may also contain an enigma central to understanding the horizon of the human. Written in a series of fragments, aphorisms, and prose poems, Eugene Thacker's Cosmic Pessimism explores the varieties of pessimism and its often-conflicted relation to philosophy. "Crying, laughing, sleeping--what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent?"

Cosmic Pessimism

A collection of aphorisms, fragments, and observations on philosophy and pessimism. Composed of aphorisms, fragments, and observations both philosophical and personal, Eugene Thacker’s Infinite Resignation traces the contours of pessimism, caught as it is between a philosophical position and a bad attitude. By turns melancholic, misanthropic, and tinged with gallows humor, Thacker’s writing tenuously hovers over that point at which the thought of futility becomes the futility of thought.

On Pessimism

Infinite Resignation

Tentacles Longer Than Night

Arthur Schopenhauer

On the Suffering of the World

Alexander R. Galloway

Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker challenge the widespread assumption that networks are inherently egalitarian. Instead, they contend that there exist new modes of control entirely native to networks, modes that are at once highly centralized and dispersed, corporate and subversive. In this provocative book, they argue that a whole new topology must be invented to resist and reshape the network form.

A Theory of Networks

The Exploit

Establecer una filosofía del pesimismo parece un proyecto condenado a fracasar de antemano, pero esta colección de aforismos y reflexiones se propone fracasar mejor.

Un libro sobre la melancolía, la futilidad de la existencia, la condena de estar vivo; un artefacto literario y filosófico inspirado por la oscuridad de Nietzsche, Kafka, Schopenhauer y Cioran.

Pesimismo cósmico

Life is one of our most basic concepts, and yet when examined directly it proves remarkably contradictory and elusive, encompassing both the broadest and the most specific phenomena. We can see this uncertainty about life in our habit of approaching it as something at once scientific and mystical, in the return of vitalisms of all types, and in the pervasive politicization of life. In short, life seems everywhere at stake and yet is nowhere the same. In After Life, Eugene Thacker clears the ground for a new philosophy of life by recovering the twists and turns in its philosophical history. Beginning with Aristotle’s originary formulation of a philosophy of life, Thacker examines the influence of Aristotle’s ideas in medieval and early modern thought, leading him to the work of Immanuel Kant, who notes the inherently contradictory nature of “life in itself.” Along the way, Thacker shows how early modern philosophy’s engagement with the problem of life affects thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Georges Bataille, and Alain Badiou, as well as contemporary developments in the “speculative turn” in philosophy. At a time when life is categorized, measured, and exploited in a variety of ways, After Life invites us to delve deeper into the contours and contradictions of the age-old question, “what is life?”

After Life

Tra le ceneri di questo pianeta

Biomedia (Electronic Mediations, V. 11)

The network has become the core organizational structure for postmodern politics, culture, and life, replacing the modern era’s hierarchical systems. From peer-to-peer file sharing and massive multiplayer online games to contagion vectors of digital or biological viruses and global affiliations of terrorist organizations, the network form has become so invasive that nearly every aspect of contemporary society can be located within it. Borrowing their title from the hacker term for a program that takes advantage of a flaw in a network system, Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker challenge the widespread assumption that networks are inherently egalitarian. Instead, they contend that there exist new modes of control entirely native to networks, modes that are at once highly centralized and dispersed, corporate and subversive. In this provocative book-length essay, Galloway and Thacker argue that a whole new topology must be invented to resist and reshape the network form, one that is as asymmetrical in relationship to networks as the network is in relation to hierarchy.

James Harris

Simon Critchley

Brad Baumgartner

Drew Daniel

Edia Connole

Charlie Blake

Assistant Professor of English Drew Daniel

Dominik Irtenkauf

Brooker Buckingham

Heather Masciandaro

Katherine Foyle

Dylan Trigg

Caoimhe Doyle

Nicola Masciandaro

Daniel Barber

Jeremy Dyer

Teresa Gillespie

Niall Scott

Hunter Hunt-Hendrix

Gary Shipley

Oyku Tekten

Essays and artworks related to Mors Mystica, a black metal theory symposium on the theme of mystical death. "Only that person who says: 'My soul chooses hanging, and my bones death' can truly embrace this fire . . . for it is absolutely true that 'no one can see me and live.'" -- Bonaventure, Itinerarium Mentis in Deum CONTENTS Introduction: On "Heroes/Helden" Edia Connole & Nicola Masciandaro Following the Stench: Watain and Putrefaction Mysticism Drew Daniel Ablaze in the Bath of Fire Brad Baumgartner Mycelegium James Harris dying to find I was never there Teresa Gillespie On the Ecstasy of Annihilation: Notes towards a Demonic Supplement Charlie Blake Autonomy of Death, Nothing Like This Daniel Colucciello Barber "It's a suit! It's ME!": Hyper-Star and Hyper-Hero through Black Sabbath's Iron Man Caoimhe Doyle & Katherine Foyle The Tongue-Tied Mystic: Aaaarrrgghhh! Fuck Them! Fuck You! Gary J. Shipley These Flames Will Lick the Feet of God Heather Masciandaro Mystical Anarchism Simon Critchley Die Maske des Black Metals Dominik Irtenkauf Xenharmonic Black Metal: Radical Intervallics as Apophatic Ontotheology Brooker Buckingham The Perichoresis of Music, Art, and Philosophy Hunter Hunt-Hendrix On Darkness Itself Niall Scott Haemal Jeremy Dyer From Black Bile Eugene Thacker "This Place is a Tomb": Infinite Terror in Darkspace Dylan Trigg Seven Propositions On The Secret Kissing Of Black Metal: OSKVLVM Edia Connole Wings Flock to My Crypt, I Fly to My Throne: On Inquisition's Esoteric Floating Tomb Nicola Masciandaro Symposium Photographs Oyku Tekten APPENDIX Bound to Metal (Interview with Edia Connole for Legacy) Dominik Irtenkauf Theoria e praxis del Black Metal (Interview by Fabio Selvafiorita for L'Intellettuale Dissidente) Nicola Masciandaro"

Black Metal Theory Symposium

Mors Mystica

Daniel Colucciello Barber

François Laruelle

Alexander Galloway

Aaron Metté

Dark Nights of the Universe

Ed Keller

Alexi Kukuljevic

Schism press brings you its first anthology, edited by Nicola Masciandaro and Eugene Thacker. A collection of essays on beheading and cinema, with full color interior. Contents: Dominic Pettman, "What Came First, the Chicken or the Head?" - Eugene Thacker, "Thing and No-Thing" - Alexi Kukuljevic, "Suicide by Decapitation" - Alexander Galloway, "The Painted Peacock" - Evan Calder Williams, "Recapitation" - Nicola Masciandaro, "Decapitating Cinema" - Ed Keller, "Corpus Atomicus" - Gary J Shipley, "Remote Viewing." Photography by Leighton Pierce.

And They Were Two in One and One in Two

How global biotechnology is redefining "life itself." In the age of global biotechnology, DNA can exist as biological material in a test tube, as a sequence in a computer database, and as economically valuable information in a patent. In The Global Genome, Eugene Thacker asks us to consider the relationship of these three entities and argues that—by their existence and their interrelationships—they are fundamentally redefining the notion of biological life itself. Biological science and the biotech industry are increasingly organized at a global level, in large part because of the use of the Internet in exchanging biological data. International genome sequencing efforts, genomic databases, the development of World Intellectual Property policies, and the "borderless" business of biotech are all evidence of the global intersections of biology and informatics—of genetic codes and computer codes. Thacker points out the internal tension in the very concept of biotechnology: the products are more "tech" than "bio," but the technology itself is fully biological, composed of the biomaterial labor of genes, proteins, cells, and tissues. Is biotechnology a technology at all, he asks, or is it a notion of "life itself" that is inseparable from its use in the biotech industry? The three sections of the book cover the three primary activities of biotechnology today: the encoding of biological materials into digital form—as in bioinformatics and genomics; its recoding in various ways—including the "biocolonialism" of mapping genetically isolated ethnic populations and the newly pervasive concern over "biological security"; and its decoding back into biological materiality—as in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. Thacker moves easily from science to philosophy to political economics, enlivening his account with ideas from such thinkers as Georges Bataille, Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault, Antonio Negri, and Paul Virilio. The "global genome," says Thacker, makes it impossible to consider biotechnology without the context of globalism.

Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture

The Global Genome

Die Welt ist zunehmend undenkbar geworden: Umweltkatastrophen, Pandemien, und am Horizont grinst die Fratze des Aussterbens der Menschheit. Angesichts dieser Szenarien sind neue Weltbetrachtungen vonnöten. Der Philosoph Eugene Thacker taucht dafür ein in die Horrorwelten in Literatur, Film, Comics und Musik und lotet die Grenzen der Verstehbarkeit unserer Welt aus. Für ihn ist Philosophie keine akademische Logikübung, stattdessen integriert er Okkultismus, Dämonologie und Mystik und zeigt nebenbei, dass Horror viel mehr ist als prickelndes Gruseln und Kunstblut.

Im Staub dieses Planeten

Steven Shakespeare

Aspasia Stephanou

Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary Volume 6 (2012) -Black Metal Editors: Nicola Masciandaro & Reza Negarestani Of Plications: A Short Summa on the Nature of Cascadian Black Metal - Steven Shakespeare Black Metal and the Mouth: Always Serving You as a Meal, or, Infected Orality, Pestilential Wounds and Scars - Aspasia Stephanou The Blackish Green of the Greenish Black, or, The Earth's Coruscating Darkness - Ben Woodard Day of Wrath - Eugene Thacker Appendix: Abstracts - Manabrata Guha, Reza Negarestani, Benjamin Noys, Zachary Price, James Trafford

Black Metal

Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary

Tariq Goddard

A selection of Repeater authors choose their favourite horror stories for this new anthology, with each writing a critical introduction for the story of their choice. Edited by novelist and Repeater publisher Tariq Goddard and Òhorror philosopherÓ Eugene Thacker, The Repeater Book of the Occult is a new anthology of horror stories that explores the ever-shifting boundaries between the natural and supernatural, between the real and the unreal. As the editors note, ÒIn the grey zone between what appears and what is, lies horror. But horror writing is also a certain disposition, a way of thinking based on a suspicion regarding the world as it is given to us, and a doubt regarding the accepted ways of explaining that world to us Ð and for us.Ó The Repeater Book of the Occult includes introductions by Repeater authors such as Leila Taylor, Carl Neville, Rhian E Jones, and Elvia Wiik, and features horror classics by Algernon Blackwood, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Edgar Allan Poe, as well as forgotten gems by authors such as W.W. Jacobs, Mark Twain, and Sheridan Le Fanu.

Tales from the Darkside

The Repeater Book of the Occult

McKenzie Wark

Always connect—that is the imperative of today’s media. But what about those moments when media cease to function properly, when messages go beyond the sender and receiver to become excluded from the world of communication itself—those messages that state: “There will be no more messages”? In this book, Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark turn our usual understanding of media and mediation on its head by arguing that these moments reveal the ways the impossibility of communication is integral to communication itself—instances they call excommunication. In three linked essays, Excommunication pursues this elusive topic by looking at mediation in the face of banishment, exclusion, and heresy, and by contemplating the possibilities of communication with the great beyond. First, Galloway proposes an original theory of mediation based on classical literature and philosophy, using Hermes, Iris, and the Furies to map out three of the most prevalent modes of mediation today—mediation as exchange, as illumination, and as network. Then, Thacker goes boldly beyond Galloway’s classification scheme by examining the concept of excommunication through the secret link between the modern horror genre and medieval mysticism. Charting a trajectory of examples from H. P. Lovecraft to Meister Eckhart, Thacker explores those instances when one communicates or connects with the inaccessible, dubbing such modes of mediation “haunted” or “weird” to underscore their inaccessibility. Finally, Wark evokes the poetics of the infuriated swarm as a queer politics of heresy that deviates from both media theory and the traditional left. He posits a critical theory that celebrates heresy and that is distinct from those that now venerate Saint Paul. Reexamining commonplace definitions of media, mediation, and communication, Excommunication offers a glimpse into the realm of the nonhuman to find a theory of mediation adequate to our present condition.

Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation

Excommunication

Eugene Thacker

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