Also, similarly to “ The Three Body Problem”, this is the first in a trilogy of books, and the names of the rest of them look promising as well. In the final section, the strategy is abandoned altogether, and the author simply comments on the stanzas of a poem.

On the other hand, “the horror of philosophy” suggests the converse: an examination of philosophy itself, with an emphasis on identifying philosophy’s own “horrific” aspects. Thus, this chapter is broken into two main explorations of this kind of anti-humanism, as Thacker explores the use of the magic circle in literature as a boundary between the natural and supernatural ( Lectio 1-3) and the utilization of motifs such as blobs, slime, ooze, mists, and clouds as manifestations of the hidden world without the use of mediation ( Lectio 4-6). Hint: They are not planning to reach the New York Times best sellers list anytime soon), finds itself quoted in the television show True Detective, has its title printed on T-shirts and other pieces of clothing in a fashion show, and then adorned on a jacket worn by Jay-Z in one of his music videos. By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. According to this tradition, the realization that humans are cut off from objective reality (because of the operations of the mind) degrades the notion of Truth by subjectifying it.

Overall, In the Dust of this Planet is a unique and fascinating introduction to the idea of the “horror of philosophy” and the limits of the human.

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. Do you yourself (not Kant) think that the chair you think you are sitting on right now, actually exists independently of you out “there” or is it only in you and nowhere else? The lake which is in you is very similar to the lake which is in the friend but these two lakes are distinct, they are not the same. P. Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, Edgar Allan Poe, Dante's Inferno, Les Chants de Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont, the Faust myth, manga artist Junji Ito, contemporary horror authors Thomas Ligotti and Caitlín Kiernan, K-horror film, and the philosophy of Schopenhauer, Rudolph Otto, Medieval mysticism ( Meister Eckhart, Angela of Foligno, John of the Cross), occult philosophy, and the philosophy of the Kyoto School. Written in 2011 by Eugene Thacker, this work of philosophy made a surprising splash within the mainstream culture a few years ago.

The chapters can be a bit fragmentary and often read more like three mini-essays rather than a cohesive whole. So all what we are perceiving or experiencing is a distorted, false and misleading representation of noumenon presented to us by our limited faculties of cognition. Thacker begins his exploration of these ideas in his first chapter, titled “Three Quaestio on Demonology. By necessity there are other characteristics that are not accounted for, that are not measured, and that remain hidden and occulted. If you are looking for an pop-cultural intro into modern nihilism (or are stuck in a self-harming downwards spiral of "entry level" nihilism) you are likely to enjoy it too.

Even though there is something out there that is not the world-for-us, and even though we can name it the world-in-itself, this latter constitutes a horizon for thought, always receding just beyond the bounds of intelligibility. In a sense, the world-without-us is not to be found in a great beyond that is exterior to the World (the world-for-us) or the Earth (the world-in-itself); rather, it is in the very fissures, lapses, or lacunae in the World and the Earth. Chapter One is structured around an initial quaestio (question) followed by an articulus (articulation of themes), sed contra (counterarguments) and finally a responsio (response to the counterarguments). Thacker’s attempt, therefore, is to construct a new way of thinking about the world and the nature of thought that considers the world apart from us. The world-in-itself is a paradoxical concept; the moment we think it and attempt to act on it, it ceases to be the world-in-itself and becomes the world-for-us.Horror, fashion, and the end of the world … things get weird as we explore the undercurrents of thought that link nihilists, beard-stroking philosophers, Jay-Z, and True Detective.