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

Thacker, Eugene

ISBN 10: 184694676X / ISBN 13: 9781846946769

Published by Zero Books, Winchester, 2011

About this Item

179pp paperback, ownership signature.

Seller Inventory # 063350

Bibliographic Details

• Title: In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy (Volume 1)
• Publisher: Zero Books, Winchester
• Publication Date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 184694676X
• ISBN 13: 9781846946769
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

<I>'Thacker's discourse on the intersection of horror and philosophy is utterly original and utterly captivating...'</I> Thomas Ligotti, author of The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

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. <I>In the Dust of This Planet</I> 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. This relationship between philosophy and horror does not mean the philosophy of horror, if anything, it means the reverse, the horror of philosophy: those moments when philosophical thinking enigmatically confronts the horizon of its own existence. For Thacker, the genre of supernatural horror is the key site in which this paradoxical thought of the unthinkable takes place.

The cover of <I>In the Dust of this Planet</I> can be seen in a New York gallery, on a banner at the 2014 Climate Change march in New York and on Jay-Z s back promoting Run. The book influenced the writers of the US TV series True Detective and has been lambasted by ex-Fox News broadcaster, Glenn Beck in his podcast.

About the Author

Eugene Thacker has written on science fiction, horror, continental philosophy, politics, culture, science and technology. He is associate professor of media studies at the New School in New York, and is scholar-in-residence at the Miskatonic University's Institute for Shoggothic Atheology in Israel.