I’ve noticed quite a few people are reading Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of This Planet at the moment. I gave it a quick download on the Kindle, and read it, more or less, straight through. It’s a wonderful piece of work and quite different from his previous book After Life which I found more difficult to get through if only because the book deals with a lot of material I am unfamiliar with.
His latest is a different beast; it talks about demons, black metal, speculation, a little philosophy, a little theology, and is outright fascinating in general. The book certainly has elements of the pessimistic style of recent continental realisms and the arguments are broadly in line with the less merry strands of 'speculative realism'. But mostly it’s a book about the un-human.
What I really like about the book is how it refuses to defang the weird in order to make appease these very same forms. Thacker’s book also has that cosmological edge that I personally find interesting (and that I see more and more through Land’s vision). This doesn’t mean that Thacker spends his time discussing cosmology, but rather that there is a cosmic pessimism that seems to run throughout his work.
Life, a key word for Thacker of course, comes across in this text as a shared zone of immanent pain, but it’s not a miserable text. What drives his interest in the un-human, as hinted it in his choice of quotations, is more a devotion to nothing, or nothingness in a similar fashion to the ‘un-thinged’ of Schelling (raised from the dead by Grant), the impersonal wills of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and Land’s obsession with entropic imagery (that crops up toward the end of Brassier’s Nihil Unbound too).
In all these thinkers, Thacker included, there is an attempt to break the endless variations on philosophy as concerned with the peculiar ‘destiny’ of symbolic thinking. We know that the post-Kantian philosopher-subject has traditionally taken this to necessitate a way of thinking about thinking.
Leaving Thacker aside his book got me thinking a little about the meaning of the various continental realisms, and their almost oedipal relation to Kant. Except to do that one has to ignore all the counter-revolutions to Kant that have already taken place.
On the edges of the tradition one can already find interesting thinkers pondering the nature of thinking-subjects as they exist in their not-quite-at-home situation amidst an indifferent and alien cosmos (the ‘cold world’ as Dominic Fox puts it).
The thinkers attuned to cosmologically-inspired pessimism tend to think about human consciousness as an ‘error,’ or ‘aberration,’ and, to borrow from Žižek, one begins from this perspective with the assumption that when it comes to the human ‘something went terribly wrong.’
In thinkers like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Land, what went wrong was the emergence of an entity that quite simply knows too much.
These despondent cosmological visions have a strange lineage, and it’s not just the non-anthropocentric metaphysics revived by thinkers such as Deleuze, but there’s even a bit of the whole grand-error narrative holding over from Heidegger. This is why I tend to characterize continental realists as inverted Hegelians.
They try to think ‘Hegel without hope’ which means to bleed his vision of any theological or onto-theological comfort (the latter being nothing more than comfort within reason). So you still have the problem of the wound of subjectivity, but it’s a cosmic, perhaps even comic, burden in that it ultimately leads nowhere; there’s no answers – just the horrible realization, so wonderfully brought to bear by Land, that philosophy is just plumbing the depths of unknowing.
Whereas thinkers like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer found a little solace in art, great figures, or poetry the contemporary cosmological pessimist is hermeneutically doomed to know that everything tends toward dissipation; everything desires to become a zero-sum. It’s a pitiless Universe all the way down, and there’s not even the memory of a receding gift to cling to (not even the Greeks can save us now…)
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