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

by Eugene Thacker

The infamous question “What is Life?” appears to always be eclipsed by the question of “What is Being?” And yet the very idea of Life-without-Being would seem to be an absurdity for philosophy…though, as we’ve seen, not for horror.

The divine is dark because we have no concept of it.

Knowledge only arises, however, by virtue of the conversion of the impossible back into the possible, of the unforeseeable into the foreseeable. “Hazardous flight” is converted into “wise calculation.”

Darkness mysticism is “mystical” not because it says yes to the therapeutic, anthropocentric embrace of God, but because it says no to the recuperative habits of human beings to always see the world as a world-for-us.

“unless the history of the mystics can touch and light up some part of this normal experience, take its place in the general history of the non-human, contribute something towards our understanding of non-human nature and destiny, its interest for us can never be more than remote, academic, and unreal.”

have their being within it.”145

Being within nothingness

There is no being-on-the-side-of the world, much less nature or the weather. If anything, the apparent prevalence of natural disasters and global pandemics indicates that we are not on the side of the world, but that the world is against us. But even this is too anthropocentric a view, as if the world harbored some misanthropic vendetta against humanity. It would be more accurate – and more horrific, in a sense – to say that the world is indifferent to us as human beings.

the core problematic in the climate change discourse is the extent to which human beings are at issue at all. On the one hand we as human beings are the problem; on the other hand at the planetary level of the Earth’s deep time, nothing could be more insignificant than the human.