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

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Thy mind o man! . .must search into and contemplate the darkest abyss, and the broad expanse of eternity- thou must commune with God." Networks, Swarms, Multitudes" Part 1, Part 2, Ctheory (2004), "Biophilosophy for the 21st Century", Ctheory (2005).

Premessa: "Tra le ceneri di questo pianeta" non è un saggio divulgativo, bensì una trattazione filosofica, e non è nemmeno conclusiva o risolutiva nelle premesse che si pone poichè si tratta del primo volume di una trilogia. E quel che segue non è una recensione ma un commento, personalissimo e parziale. This turned out to be more about mysticism (what ET intriguingly describes as a "dark mysticism") than I first thought it would. A turn that has now happened with more than a few books I've read in the past year, and in the end a pleasant alternative to some of the directions Dust might have gone from the starting provocations. In short, when the non-human world manifests itself to us in these ambivalent ways, more often than not our response is to recuperate that non-human world into whatever the dominant, human-centric worldview is at the time. In that same vein, he does a nice, albeit short, reading of "From Beyond" that I enjoyed and found interesting. The connection with the "magic circle" is one that I never would have made. It wasn't until the final sections that I really began to appreciate his ideas, but that's mostly because he was moving into my areas of interest. I'm sure there are plenty of Horror fans whose passion is mysticism and occultism and who would prefer this volume to the others that I (frustratingly--I'm spoiled now) must wait on for delivery. It is increasingly difficult to comprehend the world in which we live and of which we are not a part. To confront this idea is to confront an absolute limit to our ability to adequately understand the world at all - an idea that has been a central motif of the horror genre for some time.

Darklife: Negation, Nothingness, and the Will-to-Life in Schopenhauer," Parrhesia no. 12 (2011), p. 3. The Patron Saints of Pessimism - A Writer's Pantheon, excerpt from Infinite Resignation @ LitHub (2018) We can also think of mysticism as actually enabled by overly optimistic, "gee-whiz" scientific instrumentality, in which the Earth is the divinely-sanctioned domain of the human, even and especially in the eleventh hour of climate change." Pessimism, Futility, and Extinction" Theory, Culture & Society interview with Thomas Dekeyser (17 March 2020). We can even abbreviate these three concepts further: the world-for-us is simply the World, the world-in-itself is simply the Earth, and the world-without-us is simply the Planet.

The third section dragged a bit for me, but has some interesting things in it. Here he engages in a fascinating and often very rambling discourse on "Life," not the life of individual organisms, but of all life. This is a concept that is always just outside of reach, most studies that begin with this as their central idea devolve into systems of natural history (studies of individual organisms) or theology. This driving force behind living things remains elusive to us. There's also discussion of the afterlife, the living dead and biblical plagues. See the entry "Biomedia" in Critical Terms for Media Studies, eds. W.J.T. Mitchell & Mark Hansen (University of Chicago Press, 2010). An interesting look at some philosophical themes -- essence, reality, negation, alterity, myth -- with horror and occult themes used as a framework. The work deserves a star, simply for its ambition, given its experimental structures and unconventional ways of organizing its ideas. There are compelling conceptual turns and clever treatments, so it's certainly worth a shot, especially for fans of horror and theory, speculative realism, etc. In ogni caso mi ci è voluta la lettura di parecchie pagine per rassegnarmi al fatto che non avrei letto un'illuminata analisi di motivi presi da cinema/libri horror e musica metal, analisi che mi avrebbe fornito nuove chiavi di lettura, nuove suggestioni (queste sì) filosofiche, le quali avrebbero provveduto a spalancare la mia povera mente mortale a significati altri, più profondi e terrificanti, sulla condizione umana rispetto a quell'Universo cieco e idiota che gorgoglia indifferente al centro del tutto e del niente. I appreciated most when he wrapped-up the Occult and began the project of situating current versions of (Horror-rooted/genre)"mysticism" in the world of ecology: our "beyond science and faith" approach to it. It's not nature worship; it's not the white stag and the Wild Hunt necessarily, though I think one could do some nifty readings of Barron using aspects of his theories, but a sort of ecology stripped-down to its processes and illuminated, somehow beyond both science and spirituality(still not entirely clear on this--I'll tinker with it a bit more and see what I might have missed). It reminded me of a discussion I had a while ago about what exists "beyond" post-modernism, post-modern-post-modernism, and other silliness.This is the third book I've read that was in some way connected to True Detective, but it was actually hearing it endorsed by Warren Ellis and listening to an episode of Radiolab ( http://www.radiolab.org/story/dust-pl...) about the strange story around the book's cover ending up in a Jay-Z/Beyonce video that pushed me over the edge. Dark Nights of the Universe, co-authored with Daniel Colucciello Barber, Nicola Masciandaro, Alexander R. Galloway and François Laruelle. [NAME] Publications, 2013. ISBN 978-0984056675. This is an incredibly ambitious book of philosophy, in that it is quite literally trying to "think the unthinkable," or to establish a kind of mysticism / belief system that is without any human (anthropocentric) basis whatsoever. In other words, to create a framework for interpreting reality from an increasingly remote point of view... that of the planet, of the cosmos, of nothingness itself-- which is nothing, therefore it cannot even be an 'itself,' and should not be described as the absence of things but rather more extremely as the absence of absence. Some of the early sections are rough around the edges, as I believe some reviewers mentioned. They read like preparatory notes toward some more extensive work, which I look forward to reading. Here ET draws more on cultural sources: the Inferno, pulp horror, music, B movies, TV shows, and the like, rather than mystical or philosophical texts. I was vaguely interested in what he had to say about the cultural material, but none of these are really my thing, and I suppose were there for those who have different inclinations than I do.

Although, not as deep or meaningful as some of the above quotes, I thought the allegorical associations of zombies to rising underclasses, of vampire to romantic, but decaying aristocracy and demons to a middle class burgeois was quite interesting. darkness mysticism retains the language of shadows and nothingness, as if the positive union with the divine is of less importance than the realization of the absolute limits of the human." This taxonomic discussion was to me the centre of the book, although it was woven in with a great deal about mysticism, theology, and ooze that I saw more as intellectual curiosities. When it comes to environmental philosophy, I find myself preferring the more focused approach of, for example, Timothy Morton’s The Ecological Thought. Ciò che mi sarei aspettata di trovare: un saggio, alla maniera di "The Weird and the Eerie" di Mark Fisher, dove opere musicali, letterarie e cinematografiche sono chiamate in causa e analizzate per mostrare come il linguaggio dell'arte sappia descrivere e definire, ma soprattutto trasmettere, concetti e suggestioni altrimenti impossibili da rendere.

The linguistic contrivance that resulted in the following phrase, "extinction is the non-being of life that is not death.", was for me, the logical nadir. See the essays "Data Made Flesh: Biotechnology and the Discourse of the Posthuman," Cultural Critique no. 53 (2003), "Biohorror/Biotech," Paradoxa no. 17 (2002).