#eugene thacker

[funeral]

Eugene Thacker, Infinite Resignation

[thepeelingrenoir]

"All that is hidden will remain hidden."

[nousrose]

We have to entertain the possibility that there is no reason for something existing; or that the split between subject and object is only our name for something equally accidental we call knowledge; or, an even more difficult thought, that while there may be some order to the self and the cosmos, to the microcosm and macrocosm, it is an order that is absolutely indifferent to our existence, and of which we can have only a negative awareness.

In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy vol. 1

Eugene Thacker

[reterritorialisation]

From After Life, by Eugene Thacker

[loneberry]

Song of Sorrow. Nietzsche once castigated Schopenhauer for not being pessimist enough. He writes: "Schopenhauer, though a pessimist, really – played the flute. Every day, after dinner: one should read his biography on that. And incidentally: a pessimist, one who denies God and the world but comes to a stop before morality – who affirms morality and plays the flute … Is that really – a pessimist?" (1966, 99) We know that Schopenhauer did possess a collection of instruments, and we also know that Nietzsche himself composed music. But for the pessimist who says no to everything and yet finds comfort in music, the no-saying of pessimism can only be a weak way of saying yes – the weightiest statement undercut by the flightiest of replies. The least that Schopenhauer could’ve done is to play the bass. I’m not a big fan of the flute, or, for that matter, wind instruments generally. But what Nietzsche forgets is the role that the flute has historically played in Greek tragedy. In tragedy, the flute (aulos) is not an instrument of levity and joy, but of solitude and sorrow. The Greek aulos not only expresses the grief of tragic loss, but it does so in a way that renders weeping and singing inseparable from each other. This is the mourning voice. Set apart from the official civic rituals of funerary mourning, the mourning voice constantly threatens to dissolve song into wailing, music into moaning, and the voice into a disarticulate anti-music.

--Eugene Thacker, “Cosmic Pessimism”

[sex-ray-spex]

Scientists estimate that approximate ninety percent of the cells in the human body belong to non-human organisms (bacteria, fungi, and a whole bestiary of other organisms). Why shouldn’t this also be the case for human thought as well? In a sense, this book is an exploration of this idea – that thought is not human.

Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy 

[summonee]

Not to get too much of a sociologist on main, but grading papers that involves Durkheim's theory of social facts reminds me of when Eugene Thacker read works of philosophy as horror, and you could probably do the same with social facts.

We teach that "Social facts are things", Durkheim says they exist beyond people and control society and are things like language, religion, basically things sociology studies. And that they are external to us, and we cannot directly change them while they continue to act on us. Is this not a cosmic horror idea, of a high concept being that governs humans social life that we can't escape from?

[salvatriceaverse]

“From a blurred horizon, quiet black-basalt pools bore into the rocks and our own patiently-withering bones. Slumbering swells of a salt-borne amnesia course through our fibrous limbs. Scorched, wandering brine secretes from every pore.

[…]

In tall lichen forests dreams silently hang — anomie of every living cadaver. Towering assemblies of bird, bark, and branching obsidian sway in a tenebrous delirium, asking nothing, accepting everything.”

— Eugene Thacker, Cosmic Pessimism

[juliansummerhayes]

“Traditionally, the Socratic tradition in philosophy has a therapeutic function, which is to dispel the horrors of the unknown through reasoned argument. What cannot be tolerated in this tradition is the possibility of a world that cannot be known, or a world that is indifferent to our elaborate knowledge-producing schemes.” ― Eugene Thacker, Starry Speculative Corpse: Horror of Philosophy

[streamxsoniksubway]

[funeral]

Eugene Thacker, "Misanthropos" in Wound of Wounds: An Ovation to Emil Cioran

[thepursuitofunderstanding]

The demon is not really a supernatural creature, but an anthropological motif through which we human beings project, externalize, and represent the darker side of the human to ourselves.

Eugene Thacker

[alephskoteinos]

Reading Eugene Thacker on Satanism in In The Dust Of This Planet had me thinking about Satan as being intrinsically tied to opposition in abstract. Let me quote him here, where he talks about the formula of black metal as Satanism:

For one, if we take the Medieval and Renaissance notion of Satan as a starting point, the equation black = Satanism is governed by a structure of opposition and inversion. Opposition defines the demonic as much as the divine; it is the "War in Heaven" described so vividly in Revelations, and dramatized in Milton's Paradise Lost. Opposition is also the structure that comes to define the Medieval Church against its foes, the role that the Church councils accord various activities, from witchcraft to necromancy, as threats to both religious law and religious political authority. This opposition, then, is as much political as it is theological, resulting in the infamous witch-hunts, persecutions, and inquisitions of the early Renaissance. In its oppositional mode, the equation black = Satanism means "against God", "against the Sovereign", or even "against the divine".

When reading it I felt the sense that one could extend satanic opposition to a principle of opposition in itself that is then extended further onto Heraclitus' fragment, "war is the father of all things". There are people who prefer to think of Satan as "Father Satan". If it is "Father Satan", then "Father Satan" is Heraclitus' War.

And it's not that hard for me to connect both themes back to the cosmos that appears in many pre-Christian traditions, which are often defined by struggle and rebellion. In the Hesiodic tradition, rebellion is so central to cosmic life that Zeus himself earns his stature as king of the gods by overthrowing Kronos, after Kronos overthrew Ouranos.

So, maybe, if one takes Satan as opposition, as Heraclitus' war-principle or strife-principle, then the supreme principle of a life constantly rebelling becomes evident.

[onenakedfarmer]

EUGENE THACKER In the Dust of This Planet - The Horror of Philosophy Vol. 1

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.

[bocadosdefilosofia]

«El concepto de un pesimismo americano es un oxímoron. En una cultura que prospera a partir del emprendeurismo, la farmacología y la autoayuda, “pesimismo” no es más que una forma elegante de referirse al mal humor. Es una cultura que premia la actitud proactiva y el espíritu emprendedor, ser pesimista no es más que resultar quejoso; si no eres parte de la solución, eres parte del problema. Vivir en una cultura así es estar perpetuamente a la sombra de un optimismo obligatorio, un nuevo tipo de coerción que es patologizada a temprana edad por la educación infantil mediante la apreciación “No le gusta jugar con otros”».

Eugene Thacker: Tentáculos más largos que la noche. El horror de la filosofía vol.3. Materia Oscura Editorial, pág. 151.  Segovia, 2019

TGO

@bocadosdefilosofia

@dies-irae-1