Author: Eugene Thacker Publisher: John Hunt Publishing ISBN: 1782798900 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 186
Book Description
Could it be that the more we know about the world, the less we understand it? Could it be that, while everything has been explained, nothing has meaning? Extending the ideas presented in his book In The Dust of This Planet, Eugene Thacker explores these and other issues in Starry Speculative Corpse. But instead of using philosophy to define or to explain the horror genre, Thacker reads works of philosophy as if they were horror stories themselves, revealing a rift between human beings and the unhuman world of which they are part. Along the way we see philosophers grappling with demons, struggling with doubt, and wrestling with an indifferent cosmos. At the center of it all is the philosophical drama of the human being confronting its own limits. Not a philosophy of horror, but a horror of philosophy. Thought that stumbles over itself, as if at the edge of an abyss. Starry Speculative Corpse is the second volume of the "Horror of Philosophy" trilogy, together with the first volume, In The Dust of This Planet, and the third volume, Tentacles Longer Than Night.
Author: Eugene Thacker Publisher: John Hunt Publishing ISBN: 1780990103 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 180
Book Description
#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
Author: Eugene Thacker Publisher: John Hunt Publishing ISBN: 1782798889 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 200
Book Description
Our contemporary horror stories are written in a world where there seems little faith, lost hope, and no salvation. All that remains is the fragmentary and occasionally lyrical testimony of the human being struggling to confront its lack of reason for being in the vast cosmos. This is the terrain of the horror genre. Eugene Thacker explores this situation in Tentacles Longer Than Night. Extending the ideas presented in his book In The Dust of This Planet, Thacker considers the relationship between philosophy and the horror genre. But instead of taking fiction as the mere illustration of ideas, Thacker reads horror stories as if they themselves were works of philosophy, driven by a speculative urge to question human knowledge and the human-centric view of the world, ultimately leading to the limit of the human - thought undermining itself, in thought. Tentacles Longer Than Night is the third volume of the "horror of philosophy" trilogy, together with the first volume, In The Dust of This Planet, and the second volume, Starry Speculative Corpse.
Author: Jonathan Newell Publisher: University of Wales Press ISBN: 1786835460 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 258
Book Description
Offers a new critical perspective on the weird that combines two ways of looking at weird and cosmic horror. Mingling of nausea and knowledge, this book connects pulp horror with metaphysical insight, offering an innovative approach aesthetics and metaphysics. Combines recent speculative philosophy and affect theory.
Author: Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller Publisher: Duke University Press ISBN: 1478027452 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 210
Book Description
In Law by Night Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller asks what we can learn about modern law and its authority by understanding how it operates in the dark of night. He outlines how the social experience and cultural meanings of night promote racialized and gender violence, but also make possible freedom of movement for marginalized groups that might be otherwise unavailable during the day. Examining nighttime racial violence, curfews, gun ownership, the right to sleep, and “take back the night” rallies, Goldberg-Hiller demonstrates that liberal legal doctrine lacks a theory of the night that accounts for a nocturnal politics that has historically allowed violence to persist. By locating the law’s nocturnal limits, Goldberg-Hiller enriches understandings of how the law reinforces hierarchies of race and gender and foregrounds the night’s potential to enliven a more egalitarian social life.
Author: Francois Debrix Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1317533836 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 159
Book Description
Global Powers of Horror examines contemporary regimes of horror, into horror’s intricacies, and into their deployment on and through human bodies and body parts. To track horror’s work, what horror decomposes and, perhaps, recomposes, Debrix goes beyond the idea of the integrality and integrity of the human body and it brings the focus on parts, pieces, or fragments of bodies and lives. Looking at horror’s production of bodily fragments, both against and beyond humanity, the book is also about horror’s own attempt at re-forming or re-creating matter, from the perspective of post-human, non-human, and inhuman fragmentation. Through several contemporary instances of dismantling of human bodies and pulverization of body parts, this book makes several interrelated theoretical contributions. It works with contemporary post-(geo)political figures of horror—faces of concentration camp dwellers, body parts of victims of terror attacks, the outcome of suicide bombings, graphic reports of beheadings, re-compositions of melted and mingled remnants of non-human and human matter after 9/11—to challenge regimes of terror and security that seek to forcefully and ideologically reaffirm a biopolitics and thanatopolitics of human life in order to anchor today’s often devastating deployments of the metaphysics of substance. Critically enabling one to see how security and terror form a (geo)political continuum of violent mobilization, utilization, and often destruction of human and non-human bodies and lives, this book will be of interest to graduates and scholars of bio politics, international relations and security studies.
Author: Roger Luckhurst Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1107153174 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 241
Book Description
This celebrated Gothic novel is explored through essays providing critical, historical, anthropological, philosophical and intellectual contexts that serve to further the understanding and appreciation of Dracula in all its many guises. Together the essays offer exciting new critical approaches to the most famous vampire in literature and film.
Author: Gavin F. Hurley Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 1611463637 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 203
Book Description
Identifying an important subgenre of horror literature, this book argues that Catholic horror fiction works distinctively to inspire the philosophical, theological, and spiritual imaginations of readers from all backgrounds and faith traditions. Hurley analyzes four novels that are foundational to the genre of Catholic horror: J.K. Huysmans’s Là-Bas (1891), Robert Hugh Benson’s The Light Invisible (1903) and A Mirror of Shalott (1907), and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971). Putting these texts in conversation with the classical liberal arts, the book shows how Catholic horror fiction coheres in a commitment to dialectical thinking that aims both to resolve—and to accommodate—contrasting world views. Given its use of this methodology, Catholic horror literature is uniquely positioned to draw readers into a contemplative mindset. In presenting ghost stories, tales of possession, and narratives about evil, Catholic horror invites audiences to confront and reflect on profound existential questions—questions about the line between life and death, the nature of being, and the meaning of reality.
Author: Graham Harman Publisher: John Hunt Publishing ISBN: 1803412410 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 841
Book Description
'Overcoming the war of religion between analytics and continentals with a brand-new metaphysical insight, Graham Harman has restored to philosophy its greatness and value.' Maurizio Ferraris, Italian continental philosopher and author of the Manifesto of New Realism The Graham Harman Reader is the essential compendium of shorter works by one of the most influential philosophers of the twenty-first century. The writings in this volume are split into seven chapters. The first concerns Harman’s resistance to both downward and upward reductionism. The second chapter contains works that develop the specific fourfold structure of Object-Oriented Ontology. In the third, we find Harman’s novel arguments for why causal relations between two entities can only be indirect. The fourth chapter discusses why aesthetics deserves to be called first philosophy. The fifth chapter contains Harman’s underrated contributions to ethics and politics, and the sixth deals with epistemology, mind, and science. A concluding seventh chapter contains several previously unpublished writings not available anywhere else. Written in Harman’s typical clear and witty style, the /Reader/ is an essential resource for veteran readers of Harman and newcomers alike.
Author: Roy Christopher Publisher: punctum books ISBN: 168571062X Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 165
Book Description
The physical body has often been seen as a prison, as something to be escaped by any means necessary: technology, mechanization, drugs and sensory deprivation, alien abduction, Rapture, or even death and extinction. Taking in horror movies from David Cronenberg and UFO encounters, metal bands such as Godflesh, ketamine experiments, AI, and cybernetics, Escape Philosophy is an exploration of the ways that human beings have sought to make this escape, to transcend the limits of the human body, to find a way out. As the physical world continues to crumble at an ever-accelerating rate, and we are faced with a particularly 21st-century kind of dread and dehumanization in the face of climate collapse and a global pandemic, Escape Philosophy asks what this escape from our bodies might look like, and if it is even possible.
Author: Eugene Thacker
Author: Eugene Thacker
Author: Eugene Thacker
Author: Jonathan Newell
Author: Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller
Author: Francois Debrix
Author: Roger Luckhurst
Author: Gavin F. Hurley
Author: Graham Harman
Author: Roy Christopher