Eugene Thacker is an author and Professor at The New School in New York City. His writing is often associated with the philosophy of nihilism and pessimism. Thacker's most recent books are the Horror of Philosophy series (including the book In The Dust Of This Planet) and Cosmic Pessimism. He received his Bachelor's degree from the University of Washington, and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Rutgers University.
Video Eugene Thacker
Works
Thacker's most widely read book is In The Dust Of This Planet, part of his Horror of Philosophy trilogy. 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 apophatic ("darkness") mysticism traditions. 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." Thacker distinguishes the "world-for-us" (the human-centric view of the world), and the "world-in-itself" (the world as it exists in essence), 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."
Thacker's major philosophical work is After Life. 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" Thacker traces this theme from Aristotle, to Scholasticism and mysticism/negative theology, to Spinoza and Kant, showing how this three-fold displacement is also alive in philosophy today (life as time in process philosophy and Deleuzianism, life as form in biopolitical thought, life as spirit in post-secular philosophies of religion). Ultimately Thacker argues for a skepticism regarding "life": "Life is not only a problem of philosophy, but a problem for philosophy.
Thacker's work has often been associated with contemporary philosophies of nihilism and pessimism, as well as to speculative realism. His text "Cosmic Pessimism" defines pessimism as "the philosophical form of disenchantment." The text begins with the following line: "Pessimism is the night-side of thought, a melodrama of the futility of the brain, a poetry written in the graveyard of philosophy."
In 2013 Thacker, along with Alexander Galloway and McKenzie Wark, published the book Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation. There Thacker writes about dark media or technologies that mediate between the natural and supernatural. In the opening of the book the authors ask "Does everything that exists, exist to me 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." This approach has been referred to as the "New York School of Media Theory."
Thacker's poetry and fiction has appeared in anthologies such as Degenerative Prose (published by Black Ice/FC2), Diagram: Selections from the Magazine (edited by Ander Monson), Debug: Primary Techno Noir (edited by Kenji Siratori) and Black Ice Magazine. Thacker has produced book arts projects, 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." With Ronald Sukenick and Mark Amerika, Thacker helped establish Alt-X Press, for which he edited the anthology Hard_Code. Thacker has also collaborated with art, media, and music collectives.
Thacker's earlier works adopt approaches from the philosophy of science & technology. Examples are his book Biomedia and writings on bioinformatics, nanotechnology, biocomputing, complexity, CAS (complex adaptive systems), swarms and networks. This work is also interested in the boundary between science and science fiction.
Thacker is a regular contributor to The Japan Times Books section. He has written a column for Mute Magazine called "Occultural Studies." Thacker has also written the Forewords to the English editions of the works of E.M. Cioran, published by Arcade Press, as well as the Preface and Annotations to Clive Barker's novella Cabal, published by Fiddleblack Press. He has written about religion, art, and music (on topics of black metal, Japanese noise, spectral music, and Requiem Mass).
Maps Eugene Thacker
Influence in media
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Nic Pizzolatto, creator and writer ofTrue 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).
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. Both Thacker's book and the Radiolab podcast were covered by Glenn Beck on TheBlazeTV. Thacker has commented on 'nihilism memes' in an interview for The Awl.
Eugene Thacker and his work In the Dust of This World: The Horror of Philosophy is referenced by Youtube channel Wisecrack.
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.
Bibliography
- Into the Influx Incision (Mercury Arts Press, 1994)
- Editor, Hard Code: Narrating the Network Society (Alt-X Press, 2001)
- Biomedia (University of Minnesota Press, 2004)
- Creative Biotechnology: A User's Manual, with Natalie Jeremijenko and Heath Bunting (Locus+, 2004)
- The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture (MIT Press, 2005)
- The Exploit: A Theory of Networks, co-authored with Alexander R. Galloway (University of Minnesota Press, 2007)
- After Life (University of Chicago Press, 2010)
- In The Dust Of This Planet - Horror of Philosophy, vol. 1 (Zero Books, 2011)
- Editor with Ed Keller & Nicola Masciandaro, Leper Creativity: The Cyclonopedia Symposium (Punctum Books, 2012)
- Dark Nights of the Universe (with Daniel Colucciello Barber, Nicola Masciandaro, Alexander R. Galloway and François Laruelle) ([NAME] Publications, 2013)
- Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation, with Alexander R. Galloway and McKenzie Wark (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
- And They Were Two In One And One In Two, co-edited with Nicola Masciandaro (Schism Press, 2014)
- An Ideal for Living: Anti-Novel (Gobbet Press, 2014 [2006])
- Starry Speculative Corpse (Horror of Philosophy Vol. 2) (Zero Books, 2015)
- Tentacles Longer Than Night (Horror of Philosophy Vol. 3) (Zero Books, 2015)
- Cosmic Pessimism (Univocal Books, 2015)
See also
- Georges Bataille
- Gilles Deleuze
- Michel Foucault
- Arthur Schopenhauer
- horror fiction
- experimental literature
- biopunk
- antihumanism
- Emil Cioran
- nihilism
- pessimism
- Japanese horror
References
External links
- The New School: Eugene Thacker
- Lecture at The New School, November 8, 2010
- Biophilosophy for the 21st Century, Ctheory (6 September 2005)
- Nine Disputations on Theology and Horror, published in Collapse vol. IV (2008)
- Nekros or the Poetics of Biopolitics, "Incognetum Hactenus - A Journal on Art, Philosophy, and Horror".
- 12 Fragments on Nihilism, Four By Three Magazine
- Thacker, "Cosmic Pessimism", continent 2.2 (2012)
- Black Bile, Plinth issue 2 [2014]
- Interview on philosophy and horror, To The Best Of Our Knowledge, 10/30/2011
- 'Horror of philosophy' interview on Expanding Mind Radio, 9 July 2012
- "The Sight of a Mangled Corpse - Interview with Eugene Thacker" in the journal Scapegoat, issue 05 (2013)
- Radiolab - In The Dust Of This Planet, Radiolab interview with Eugene Thacker, Simon Critchley, and others, WNYC, September 8, 2014
- Horror of Philosophy: Three Volumes, Interviewed by Carla Nappi on New Books Network (2015)
- Full Stop interview October 26, 2016
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