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

Product Information

Briefly, the argument of the book is that through certain works of the horror genre we can encounter something which the author calls the ‘world-without-us’: a vision of the universe in which humanity is not only extinct but has never existed in any sense, a place which is utterly indifferent even to the idea of us. It is a thing which words fail to describe adequately, perhaps exemplified in Lovecraft’s many tales of inconceivable depths; one could call it ‘dark’ or ‘disturbing’, but our conceptions of what those words entail are limited as notions inherited from religious tradition. It is increasingly difficult to comprehend the world in which we live and of which we are not a part. To confront this idea is to confront an absolute limit to our ability to adequately understand the world at all - an idea that has been a central motif of the horror genre for some time. In the final section he dissects a poem about the formation of life, and primarily discussing the mystics and what they have to tell us that strict religion and hard-line science cannot.

The third section dragged a bit for me, but has some interesting things in it. Here he engages in a fascinating and often very rambling discourse on "Life," not the life of individual organisms, but of all life. This is a concept that is always just outside of reach, most studies that begin with this as their central idea devolve into systems of natural history (studies of individual organisms) or theology. This driving force behind living things remains elusive to us. There's also discussion of the afterlife, the living dead and biblical plagues. See the essays "Data Made Flesh: Biotechnology and the Discourse of the Posthuman," Cultural Critique no. 53 (2003), "Biohorror/Biotech," Paradoxa no. 17 (2002). In ogni caso mi ci è voluta la lettura di parecchie pagine per rassegnarmi al fatto che non avrei letto un'illuminata analisi di motivi presi da cinema/libri horror e musica metal, analisi che mi avrebbe fornito nuove chiavi di lettura, nuove suggestioni (queste sì) filosofiche, le quali avrebbero provveduto a spalancare la mia povera mente mortale a significati altri, più profondi e terrificanti, sulla condizione umana rispetto a quell'Universo cieco e idiota che gorgoglia indifferente al centro del tutto e del niente. Leper Creativity: The Cyclonopedia Symposium, co-edited with Ed Keller and Nicola Masciandaro. Punctum Books, 2012. ISBN 978-0615600468. Radiolab - In The Dust Of This Planet", original broadcast Monday September 8, 2014. The story was also covered by NPR's On The Media.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.

Although, not as deep or meaningful as some of the above quotes, I thought the allegorical associations of zombies to rising underclasses, of vampire to romantic, but decaying aristocracy and demons to a middle class burgeois was quite interesting. Ciò che mi sarei aspettata di trovare: un saggio, alla maniera di "The Weird and the Eerie" di Mark Fisher, dove opere musicali, letterarie e cinematografiche sono chiamate in causa e analizzate per mostrare come il linguaggio dell'arte sappia descrivere e definire, ma soprattutto trasmettere, concetti e suggestioni altrimenti impossibili da rendere. An Ideal for Living: An Anti-Novel (20th Anniversary Edition). Schism Press, 2020. ISBN 979-8682903832.The Repeater Book of the Occult, co-edited with Tariq Goddard. Repeater Books, 2021. ISBN 978-1913462079. Networks, Swarms, Multitudes" Part 1, Part 2, Ctheory (2004), "Biophilosophy for the 21st Century", Ctheory (2005).

This is an incredibly ambitious book of philosophy, in that it is quite literally trying to "think the unthinkable," or to establish a kind of mysticism / belief system that is without any human (anthropocentric) basis whatsoever. In other words, to create a framework for interpreting reality from an increasingly remote point of view... that of the planet, of the cosmos, of nothingness itself-- which is nothing, therefore it cannot even be an 'itself,' and should not be described as the absence of things but rather more extremely as the absence of absence. Pessimism, Futility, and Extinction" Theory, Culture & Society interview with Thomas Dekeyser (17 March 2020). I would have rated this work higher, but the ideas didn't gel, or build in any intelligible way. When no continuous thread is discernible, it makes the whole work feel like a stream of consciousness of provocations and obscurity. It clearly takes itself seriously, despite its occasional sense of irony, but it doesn't move beyond the standard philosophical motif that governs all horror-oriented theoretical projects: The universe is defined by an absolutely unknowable Other, which engages us in paradoxes of alterity when we try to approach it. The linguistic contrivance that resulted in the following phrase, "extinction is the non-being of life that is not death.", was for me, the logical nadir. An interesting look at some philosophical themes -- essence, reality, negation, alterity, myth -- with horror and occult themes used as a framework. The work deserves a star, simply for its ambition, given its experimental structures and unconventional ways of organizing its ideas. There are compelling conceptual turns and clever treatments, so it's certainly worth a shot, especially for fans of horror and theory, speculative realism, etc.

See the entry "Biomedia" in Critical Terms for Media Studies, eds. W.J.T. Mitchell & Mark Hansen (University of Chicago Press, 2010). See also “Nekros; or, the Poetics of Biopolitics” in Zombie Theory: A Reader (University of Minnesota Press, 2017); “Necrologies: The Death of the Body Politic” in Beyond Biopolitics (Duke University Press, 2011). darkness mysticism retains the language of shadows and nothingness, as if the positive union with the divine is of less importance than the realization of the absolute limits of the human." In The Dust Of This Planet has been translated into several languages, including Spanish (Materia Oscura, 2015), Italian (Nero Editions 2018), Russian (Hyle Press, 2017), and German (Mathes & Seitz, 2019). Dark Nights of the Universe, co-authored with Daniel Colucciello Barber, Nicola Masciandaro, Alexander R. Galloway and François Laruelle. [NAME] Publications, 2013. ISBN 978-0984056675.

I appreciated most when he wrapped-up the Occult and began the project of situating current versions of (Horror-rooted/genre)"mysticism" in the world of ecology: our "beyond science and faith" approach to it. It's not nature worship; it's not the white stag and the Wild Hunt necessarily, though I think one could do some nifty readings of Barron using aspects of his theories, but a sort of ecology stripped-down to its processes and illuminated, somehow beyond both science and spirituality(still not entirely clear on this--I'll tinker with it a bit more and see what I might have missed). It reminded me of a discussion I had a while ago about what exists "beyond" post-modernism, post-modern-post-modernism, and other silliness. This book made my skin crawl and my mind expand. It's a dense, sometimes impenetrable work of philosophy that discusses the Unthinkable, so obviously it's not going to work very well as beach reading. But if you give it your attention and an open mind, there are some seriously creepy-cool concepts about the Universe to be gleaned here.

It is a dilemma expressed in contemporary discourse on climate change, between a debate over the world-for-us (e.g. how do we as human beings impact - negatively or positively - the geological state of the planet?), and a largely unspoken, whispered query over the world-in-itself (e.g. to what degree is the planet indifferent to us as human beings, and to what degree are we indifferent to the planet?). Creative Biotechnology: A User's Manual, co-authored with Natalie Jeremijenko and Heath Bunting. Locus+, 2004. ISBN 978-1899377220. This taxonomic discussion was to me the centre of the book, although it was woven in with a great deal about mysticism, theology, and ooze that I saw more as intellectual curiosities. When it comes to environmental philosophy, I find myself preferring the more focused approach of, for example, Timothy Morton’s The Ecological Thought. an era almost schizophrenically poised between religious fanaticisms and a mania for scientific hegemony..."