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Eugene Thacker | |
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Era | Contemporary philosophy |
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Website | eugenethacker |
Eugene Thacker is an American author. He is a professor of media studies at The New School in New York City. [1] His writing is associated with the philosophy of nihilism and pessimism. Thacker's books include In the Dust of This Planet (part of his "Horror of Philosophy" trilogy) and Infinite Resignation.
Thacker was born and grew up in the Pacific Northwest. [2] He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from University of Washington, and a Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy in comparative literature from Rutgers University. [3] Prior to teaching at The New School, he was a professor at Georgia Institute of Technology in the school of literature, media, and communication. [4]
Thacker's work has been associated with philosophical nihilism and pessimism, as well as to contemporary philosophies of speculative realism and collapsology. [5] His short book Cosmic Pessimism defines pessimism as "the philosophical form of disenchantment." As Thacker states: "Pessimism is the night-side of thought, a melodrama of the futility of the brain, a poetry written in the graveyard of philosophy." [6]
In 2018, Thacker's new book, Infinite Resignation was published by Repeater Books. Infinite Resignation consists of fragments and aphorisms on the nature of pessimism, mixing the personal and philosophical. Thacker engages with writers like Thomas Bernhard, E.M. Cioran, Osamu Dazai, Søren Kierkegaard, Clarice Lispector, Giacomo Leopardi, Fernando Pessoa, and Schopenhauer. The New York Times noted "Thacker has thrown a party for all of these eloquent cranks in Infinite Resignation, and he is an excellent host...This book provides a metric ton of misery and a lot of company." [7] One reviewer writes of the book: "Infinite Resignation belongs on the shelf next to the likes of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer...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...Thacker's voice is quiet, a desperate whisper into the void that is both haunting and heartbreaking." [8]
Thacker's major philosophical work is After Life, published by the University of Chicago Press. In it, Thacker argues that the ontology of life operates by way of a split between "Life" and "the living," making possible a "metaphysical displacement" in which life is thought via another metaphysical term, such as time, form, or spirit: "Every ontology of life thinks of life in terms of something-other-than-life...that something-other-than-life is most often a metaphysical concept, such as time and temporality, form and causality, or spirit and immanence" [9] Thacker traces this theme in Aristotle, Dionysius the Areopagite, John Scottus Eriugena, negative theology, Immanuel Kant, and Georges Bataille, showing how this three-fold displacement is also alive in philosophy today. [10] After Life also includes comparisons with Arabic, Japanese, and Chinese philosophy.
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." [11] Specifically, Thacker argues that Schopenhauer's philosophy posits a "dark life" in opposition to the "ontology of generosity" of German Idealist thinkers such as Hegel and Schelling. Thacker has also written in a similar vein on the role of negation and "nothingness" in the work of mystical philosopher Meister Eckhart. [12] Ultimately Thacker argues for a skepticism regarding "life": "Life is not only a problem of philosophy, but a problem for philosophy. [13]
Thacker's most widely read book is In the Dust of This Planet, part of his Horror of Philosophy trilogy. [14] In it, Thacker explores the idea of the "unthinkable world" as represented in the horror fiction genre, in philosophies of pessimism and nihilism, and in the philosophies of apophatic ("darkness") mysticism. [15] In the first volume, In the Dust of This Planet, Thacker calls the horror of philosophy "the isolation of those moments in which philosophy reveals its own limitations and constraints, moments in which thinking enigmatically confronts the horizon of its own possibility." [16] Thacker distinguishes the "world-for-us" (the human-centric view of the world), and the "world-in-itself" (the world as it exists objectively), from what he calls the "world-without-us": "the world-without-us lies somewhere in between, in a nebulous zone that is at once impersonal and horrific." [17] In this and the other volumes of the trilogy Thacker writes about a wide range of work: H.P. Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, Edgar Allan Poe, Dante's Inferno , Les Chants de Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont, the Faust myth, manga artist Junji Ito, contemporary horror authors Thomas Ligotti and Caitlín Kiernan, K-horror film, and the philosophy of Schopenhauer, Rudolph Otto, Medieval mysticism (Meister Eckhart, Angela of Foligno, John of the Cross), occult philosophy, and the philosophy of the Kyoto School.
Thacker's writing on philosophy and horror extends to what he calls dark media, or technologies that mediate between the natural and supernatural, and point to the limit of human perception and knowledge. [18] Similarly, Thacker has written a series of essays on "necrology", defined as the decay or disintegration of the body politic. [19] Thacker discusses plague, demonic possession, and the living dead, drawing upon the history of medicine, biopolitics, political theology, and the horror genre. [20]
Thacker's earlier works adopt approaches from the philosophies of science and technology, and examine the relation between science and science fiction. [21] Many of his media contributions are developments of Science and Technology Studies. He has produced theory around how media informs and augments biological processes across several publications. Examples are his book Biomedia, [22] and his writings on bioinformatics, nanotechnology, biocomputing, complex adaptive systems, swarm intelligence, and network theory. [23] Thacker's concept of biomedia is defined as follows: "Biomedia entail the informatic recontextualization of biological components and processes, for ends that may be medical or nonmedical...and with effects that are as much cultural, social, and political as they are scientific." Thacker clarifies: "biomedia continuously make the dual demand that information materialize itself...biomedia depend upon an understanding of biological as informational but not immaterial." [24] In his book The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture, Thacker looks to developments in tissue engineering where techno-mechanical apparatuses disappear altogether so that it appears as though technology is the natural body. In Thacker's words, "biotechnology is thus invisible yet immanent." [25]
In 2013 Thacker, along with Alexander Galloway and McKenzie Wark, published the co-authored book Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation. In the opening of the book the authors ask "Does everything that exists, exist to be presented and represented, to be mediated and remediated, to be communicated and translated? There are mediative situations in which heresy, exile, or banishment carry the day, not repetition, communion, or integration. There are certain kinds of messages that state 'there will be no more messages'. Hence for every communication there is a correlative excommunication." [26] This approach has been referred to as the "New York School of Media Theory." [27]
Thacker's poetry and prose has appeared in various literary anthologies and magazines. Thacker has produced book arts projects, [28] and an anti-novel titled An Ideal for Living, of which American poet and conceptual writer Kenneth Goldsmith has said: "this an important book...these pages take cues from Burroughs and Gibson, while at the same time presciently pointing to the web-based path writing would take over the next decade." [29] In the 1990s, Thacker, along with Ronald Sukenick and Mark Amerika, established Alt-X Press, for which he edited the anthology of experimental writing Hard_Code. Thacker is part of the editorial board of underground publisher Schism Press. [30]
Thacker is a contributor to The Japan Times Books section, where he has written about the work of Junji Ito, Osamu Dazai, Haruo Sato, Keiji Nishitani, Izumi Kyōka, Edogawa Rampo, and Zen death poetry. He wrote a column for London-based Mute Magazine called "Occultural Studies," writing about such topics as the Surrealist poet Robert Desnos, Schopenhauer's philosophy, the horror writing of Thomas Ligotti, and the music of And Also The Trees. He has also written Forewords to the English editions of the works of E. M. Cioran, published by Arcade Press. He has contributed to limited editions books produced by Fiddleblack Press, Infinity Land Press, Locus+, [NAME], Schism, and Zagava Press.
Thacker has also collaborated with artists and musicians. These include the art collective Fakeshop, which presented art & installation at Ars Electronica, [31] ACM SIGGRAPH, [32] and the Whitney Biennial. [33] He has also collaborated with Biotech Hobbyist, and co-authored an art book Creative Biotechnology: A User's Manual. [34] In 1998 Thacker produced a CD of noise music released by Extreme Records and a split CD with Merzbow/Masami Akita, part of the Extreme Records Merzbow Box Set released in 2000. [35] In 2022 Thacker collaborated with Iranian composer Siavash Amini on the album 'Songs for Sad Poets', released on the label Hallow Ground.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Nic Pizzolatto, creator and writer of True Detective , cites Thacker's In the Dust of This Planet as an influence on the TV series, particularly the worldview of lead character Rust Cohle, along with several other books: Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound, Thomas Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race , Jim Crawford's Confessions of an Antinatalist, and David Benatar's Better Never to Have Been . [36]
In September 2014 the WNYC's Radiolab ran a show entitled "In the Dust of This Planet." The program traced the appropriation of Thacker's book of the same name in contemporary art, fashion, music video, and popular culture. [37] Both Thacker's book and the Radiolab podcast were covered by Glenn Beck on TheBlazeTV. [38] Thacker has commented on 'nihilism memes' in an interview: "Is it any accident that at a time when we have become acutely aware of the challenges concerning global climate change, we have also created this bubble of social media? I find social media and media culture generally to be a vapid, desperate, self-aggrandizing circus of species-specific solipsism — ironically, the stupidity of our species might be its only legacy." [39]
Thacker and his book In the Dust of This Planet are referenced by YouTube channel Wisecrack. [40]
Comic book author Warren Ellis cites as an influence the nihilist philosophies of Thacker and Peter Sjöstedt-H for his 2017 series Karnak: The Flaw in All Things, a re-imagining of the original Marvel Inhumans character Karnak. [41]
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". [42]
Thacker's writing is cited as an influence on 'Polia & Blastema', an experimental film and opera written and directed by E. Elias Merhige. [43]
Eugene Thacker one of a main character of the animation film Tetragrammaton, [44] the last chapter is devoted to his philosophy.
Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher. He is known for his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation, which characterizes the phenomenal world as the manifestation of a blind and irrational noumenal will. Building on the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Schopenhauer developed an atheistic metaphysical and ethical system that rejected the contemporaneous ideas of German idealism.
Pessimism is a mental attitude in which an undesirable outcome is anticipated from a given situation. Pessimists tend to focus on the negatives of life in general. A common question asked to test for pessimism is "Is the glass half empty or half full?"; in this situation, a pessimist is said to see the glass as half empty, or in extreme cases completely empty, while an optimist is said to see the glass as half full. Throughout history, the pessimistic disposition has had effects on all major areas of thinking.
"The Last Messiah" is a 1933 essay by the Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe. One of his most significant works, this approximately 10 pages long essay would later be expanded upon in Zapffe’s book, On the Tragic, and, as a theory describes a reinterpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche's Übermensch. Zapffe believed that existential crisis or angst in humanity was the result of an overly evolved intellect, and that people overcome this by "artificially limiting the content of consciousness."
Thomas Ligotti is an American horror writer. His writings are rooted in several literary genres – most prominently weird fiction – and have been described by critics as works of philosophical horror, often formed into short stories and novellas in the tradition of gothic fiction. The worldview espoused by Ligotti in his fiction and non-fiction has been described as pessimistic and nihilistic. The Washington Post called him "the best kept secret in contemporary horror fiction."
Alexander R. Galloway is an author and professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. He has a bachelor's degree in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University and earned a Ph.D. in literature from Duke University in 2001. Galloway is known for his writings on philosophy, media theory, contemporary art, film, and video games.
The philosophy of technology is a sub-field of philosophy that studies the nature of technology and its social effects.
Cosmicism is American author H. P. Lovecraft's name for the literary philosophy he developed and used for his fiction. Lovecraft was a writer of horror stories that involve occult phenomena like astral possession and alien miscegenation, and the themes of his fiction over time contributed to the development of this philosophy.
McKenzie Wark is an Australian-born writer and scholar. Wark is known for her writings on media theory, critical theory, new media, and the Situationist International. Her best known works are A Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory. She is a professor of Media and Cultural Studies at The New School.
Raymond Brassier is a British philosopher. He is a member of the philosophy faculty at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, known for his work in philosophical realism. He was formerly Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University, London, England.
Speculative realism is a movement in contemporary Continental-inspired philosophy that defines itself loosely in its stance of metaphysical realism against its interpretation of the dominant forms of post-Kantian philosophy.
Parerga and Paralipomena is a collection of philosophical reflections by Arthur Schopenhauer published in 1851. The selection was compiled not as a summation of or introduction to Schopenhauer's philosophy, but as augmentary readings for those who had already embraced it, although the author maintained it would be comprehensible and of interest to the uninitiated nevertheless. The collection is divided into two volumes, covering first the parerga and thereafter the paralipomena to that philosophy. The parerga are six extended essays intended as supplementary to the author's thought. The paralipomena, shorter elaborations divided by topic into thirty-one subheadings, cover material hitherto unaddressed by the philosopher but deemed by him to be complementary to the parerga.
Tariq Goddard is a British novelist and publisher. He has written seven novels, the first of which Homage to a Firing Squad, was short-listed for the Whitbread Book Award for First Novel. He founded, and was the publisher of the independent publishing companies Zero Books and Repeater Books.
Dark media are a type of media outlined by American philosopher Eugene Thacker to describe technologies that mediate between the natural and supernatural, most commonly found in the horror genre.
Collective Ink is a publishing company founded in the United Kingdom in 2001 under the name O Books. The publisher has 15 active imprints, the largest of which are Moon Books, O-Books and Zero Books. After changing ownership in 2021, in June 2023, John Hunt Publishing was renamed to Collective Ink.
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror is a 2010 non-fiction book by American author Thomas Ligotti. Better known as a horror fiction author, with Conspiracy Ligotti offers a series of essays exploring his philosophical pessimism, nihilist and antinatalist views. Among other sources, Ligotti cites Peter Wessel Zapffe's essay "The Last Messiah" and the writings of Emil Cioran (1911–1995) and Philipp Mainländer (1841–1876) as inspirations for his philosophical outlook. The book is noted for its repeated usage of the phrase "malignantly useless," as well as for the manner "in which philosophical thought and literary analysis converge" in his writings. In 2018, the book was re-released, with a new preface.
Olga Marie Pauline Plümacher, who wrote under the name O. Plümacher, was a Russian-born Swiss-American philosopher and scholar. She engaged with the philosophies of the German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann, and published three books which contributed to the pessimism controversy in Germany. Her book on the history of philosophical pessimism, Der Pessimismus in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart was influential on Friedrich Nietzsche and Samuel Beckett.
The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life's Biggest Questions is a philosophy book by David Benatar, which makes a case for philosophical pessimism, published by Oxford University Press in 2017. The book presents Benatar's views on a range of philosophical issues, arguing, among other topics, that having children is immoral, that death is bad despite much of human life being spent in suffering, and that suicide may be a morally justified action more often than is commonly assumed. The Human Predicament has been favorably compared to The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti, the worldview presented in Ecclesiastes, and the works of philosopher Thomas Metzinger.
Philosophical pessimism is a family of philosophical views that assign a negative value to life or existence. Philosophical pessimists commonly argue that the world contains an empirical prevalence of pains over pleasures, that existence is ontologically or metaphysically adverse to living beings, and that life is fundamentally meaningless or without purpose. Philosophical pessimism is not a single coherent movement, but rather a loosely associated group of thinkers with similar ideas and a resemblance to each other. Their responses to the condition of life are widely varied. Philosophical pessimists usually do not advocate for suicide as a solution to the human predicament; though many favour the adoption of antinatalism, that is, non-procreation.
Philosophical pessimism is a philosophical school that is critical of existence, emphasizing the inherent suffering and futility of life. This perspective can be traced back to various religious traditions and philosophical writings throughout history.