#1 Amazon Best Seller in Philosophy Criticism 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. In the Dust of This Planet 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 In the Dust of this Planet 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 this podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IW8OK4_1gQ Other writing by Eugene Thacker Two more in the series Horror of Philosophy will be published in 2015: [ Zero Books ] Starry Speculative Corpse Horror of Philosophy vol. 2 Eugene Thacker Philosophy meets horror against the backdrop of an indifferent, unhuman cosmos. Paperback: TBC 978-1-78279-891-0 eBook: 978-1-78279-890-3 [ Zero Books ] Tentacles Longer Than Night Horror of Philosophy vol. 3 Eugene Thacker Philosophy meets more horror against the backdrop of an indifferent, unhuman cosmos.
Paperback: TBC 978-1-78279-889-7 eBook: 978-1-78279-888-0 Thacker has also contributed an essay The Sound of the Abyss on nihilism & Schopenhauer in the Zero Books title by Scott Wilson published in September 2014 Melancology: Black Metal Theory and Ecology.
