Thacker's discourse on the intersection of horror and philosophy is utterly original and utterly captivating...Thomas Ligotti, author of The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

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.

Essays, articles, artworks, and documents taken from and inspired by the symposium on Reza Negarestani's Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, which took place in March 2011 at The New School. Hailed by novelists, philosophers, artists, cinematographers, and designers, Cyclonopedia is a key work in the emerging domains of speculative realism and theory-fiction. The text has attracted a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary audience, provoking vital debate around the relationship between philosophy, geopolitics, geophysics, and art. At once a work of speculative theology, a political samizdat, and a philosophic grimoire, Cyclonopedia is a Deleuzo-Lovecraftian middle-eastern Odyssey populated by archeologists, jihadis, oil smugglers, Delta Force officers, heresiarchs, and the corpses of ancient gods. Playing out the book's own theory of creativity - a confusion in which no straight line can be traced or drawn between creator and created - original inauthenticity - this multidimensional collection both faithfully interprets the text and realizes it as a loving, perforated host of fresh heresies. The volume includes an incisive contribution from the author explicating a key figure of the novel: the cyclone.

CONTENTS: Robin Mackay, A Brief History of Geotrauma - McKenzie Wark, An Inhuman Fiction of Forces - Benjamin H. Bratton, Root the Earth: On Peak Oil Apophenia - Alisa Andrasek, Dustism - Zach Blas, Queerness, Openness - Melanie Doherty, Non-Oedipal Networks and the Inorganic Unconscious - Anthony Sciscione, Symptomatic Horror: Lovecraft's 'The Colour Out of Space' - Kate Marshall, Cyclonopedia as Novel (a meditation on complicity as inauthenticity) - Alexander R. Galloway, What is a Hermeneutic Light? - Eugene Thacker, Black Infinity; or, Oil Discovers Humans - Nicola Masciandaro, Gourmandized in the Abattoir of Openness - Dan Mellamphy & Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, Phileas Fogg, or the Cyclonic Passepartout: On the Alchemical Elements of War - Ben Woodard, The Untimely (and Unshapely) Decomposition of Onto-Epistemological Solidity: Negarestani's Cyclonopedia as Metaphysics - Ed Keller, . . .Or, Speaking with the Alien, a Refrain. . . - Lionel Maunz, Receipt of Malice - yk Tekten, Symposium Photographs - Reza Negarestani, Notes on the Figure of the Cyclone

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.

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.

Schism Press brings you the 20th Anniversary Edition of Eugene Thacker's anti-novel An Ideal for Living.

In an unnamed city in the not-so-distant future, individuals spend their time in isolation, enclosed in high-tech pods, arrayed in symbiotic megastructures, connected to vast networks of neurological and biochemical data. An Ideal for Living is a glimpse into this world, presented not as a story but as a documentary-style dossier of data streams, research articles, and automated activity logs. Originally published in 2000, An Ideal for Living evokes a dark poetics of bodies and technologies; at once a look back to cyberpunk science fiction and a look forward to the new weird.

As today's strategies of conceptual writing have become legitimized and clich d, Thacker's text reminds us of how radical and potent these gestures once were, treading a fine line between the mechanical and the authorial. This is an important book...these pages take cues from Burroughs and Gibson, while at the same time presciently pointing to the web-based path writing would take over the next decade. It's a joy to see this back in print.-- Kenneth Goldsmith, author of Soliloquy, Day, and Uncreative Writing, founder of Ubuweb

We're doomed. So begins the work of the philosopher whose unabashed and aphoristic indictments of the human condition have been cropping up recently in popular culture. Today we find ourselves in an increasingly inhospitable world that is, at the same time, starkly indifferent to our species-specific hopes, desires, and disappointments. In the Anthropocene, pessimism is felt everywhere but rarely given its proper place. Though pessimism may be, as Eugene Thacker says, the lowest form of philosophy, it may also contain an enigma central to understanding the horizon of the human. Written in a series of fragments, aphorisms, and prose poems, Thacker's Cosmic Pessimism explores the varieties of pessimism and its often-conflicted relation to philosophy. Crying, laughing, sleeping--what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent?

Scholarly advice for dark times. --The New Yorker
Provides a metric ton of misery and a lot of company. --New York Times
Probably philosophy's only beach read. --Vice

A 'nihilist's devotional, ' this collection of aphorisms, fragments, and observations on philosophy and pessimism offer a raw look at the human condition

Dark times lie around us and ahead of us, and what better way to survive the coming Apocolypse than by immersing yourself in some of the greatest thinkers on pessimism, brought together with his own thoughts on the subject by Eugene Thacker, author of the contemporary classic, In the Dust of This Planet.

Comprised of aphorisms, fragments, and observations both philosophical and personal, Infinite Resignation traces the contours of pessimism, caught as it often is between a philosophical position and a bad attitude. Reflecting on the universe's looming abyss of indifference, Thacker explores the pessimism of a range of philosophers, from the well-known (Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Camus), to the lesser-known (E.M. Cioran, Lev Shestov, Miguel de Unamuno). Readers will find food for thought in Thacker's handling of a range of themes in Christianity and Buddhism, as well as his engagement with literary figures (from Dostoevsky to Thomas Bernhard, Osamu Dazai, and Fernando Pessoa), whose pessimism about the world both inspires and depresses Thacker.

By turns melancholic, misanthropic, and darkly funny, Infinite Resignation is a welcome antidote to the exuberant imbecility of our times.

The merging of computer science and molecular biology, genetic codes and computer codes

As biotechnology defines the new millennium, genetic codes and computer codes increasingly merge--life understood as data, flesh rendered programmable. Where this trend will take us, and what it might mean, is what concerns Eugene Thacker in this timely book, a penetrating look into the intersection of molecular biology and computer science in our day and its likely ramifications for the future.

Integrating approaches from science and media studies, Biomedia is a critical analysis of research fields that explore relationships between biologies and technologies, between genetic and computer codes. In doing so, the book looks beyond the familiar examples of cloning, genetic engineering, and gene therapy--fields based on the centrality of DNA or genes--to emerging fields in which life is often understood as information. Focusing especially on interactions between genetic and computer codes, or between life and information, Thacker shows how each kind of body produced--from biochip to DNA computer--demonstrates how molecular biology and computer science are interwoven to provide unique means of understanding and controlling living matter.

Throughout, Thacker provides in-depth accounts of theoretical issues implicit in biotechnical artifacts--issues that arise in the fields of bioinformatics, proteomics, systems biology, and biocomputing. Research in biotechnology, Biomedia suggests, flouts our assumptions about the division between biological and technological systems. New ways of thinking about this division are needed if we are to understand the cultural, social, and philosophical dimensions of such research, and this book marks a significant advance in the coming intellectual revolution.

Life is one of our most basic concepts, and yet when examined directly it proves remarkably contradictory and elusive, encompassing both the broadest and the most specific phenomena. We can see this uncertainty about life in our habit of approaching it as something at once scientific and mystical, in the return of vitalisms of all types, and in the pervasive politicization of life. In short, life seems everywhere at stake and yet is nowhere the same.

In After Life, Eugene Thacker clears the ground for a new philosophy of life by recovering the twists and turns in its philosophical history. Beginning with Aristotle's originary formulation of a philosophy of life, Thacker examines the influence of Aristotle's ideas in medieval and early modern thought, leading him to the work of Immanuel Kant, who notes the inherently contradictory nature of life in itself. Along the way, Thacker shows how early modern philosophy's engagement with the problem of life affects thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Georges Bataille, and Alain Badiou, as well as contemporary developments in the speculative turn in philosophy.

At a time when life is categorized, measured, and exploited in a variety of ways, After Life invites us to delve deeper into the contours and contradictions of the age-old question, what is life?

Glossator: Practice and Theory of the CommentaryVolume 6 (2012) -Black MetalEditors: Nicola Masciandaro & Reza NegarestaniOf Plications: A Short Summa on the Nature of Cascadian Black Metal - Steven ShakespeareBlack Metal and the Mouth: Always Serving You as a Meal, or, Infected Orality, Pestilential Wounds and Scars - Aspasia StephanouThe Blackish Green of the Greenish Black, or, The Earth's Coruscating Darkness - Ben WoodardDay of Wrath - Eugene ThackerAppendix: Abstracts - Manabrata Guha, Reza Negarestani, Benjamin Noys, Zachary Price, James Trafford

Schism press brings you its first anthology, edited by Nicola Masciandaro and Eugene Thacker.

A collection of essays on beheading and cinema, with full color interior. Contents: Dominic Pettman, What Came First, the Chicken or the Head? - Eugene Thacker, Thing and No-Thing - Alexi Kukuljevic, Suicide by Decapitation - Alexander Galloway, The Painted Peacock - Evan Calder Williams, Recapitation - Nicola Masciandaro, Decapitating Cinema - Ed Keller, Corpus Atomicus - Gary J Shipley, Remote Viewing. Photography by Leighton Pierce.

As biotechnology defines the new millennium, genetic codes and computer codes increasingly merge-life understood as data, flesh rendered programmable. Where this trend will take us, and what it might mean, is what concerns Eugene Thacker in this timely book, a penetrating look into the intersection of molecular biology and computer science in our day and its likely ramifications for the future.

Integrating approaches from science and media studies, Biomedia is a critical analysis of research fields that explore relationships between biologies and technologies, between genetic and computer codes. In doing so, the book looks beyond the familiar examples of cloning, genetic engineering, and gene therapy-fields based on the centrality of DNA or genes-to emerging fields in which life is often understood as information. Focusing especially on interactions between genetic and computer codes, or between life and information, Thacker shows how each kind of body produced-from biochip to DNA computer-demonstrates how molecular biology and computer science are interwoven to provide unique means of understanding and controlling living matter.

Throughout, Thacker provides in-depth accounts of theoretical issues implicit in biotechnical artifacts-issues that arise in the fields of bioinformatics, proteomics, systems biology, and biocomputing. Research in biotechnology, Biomedia suggests, flouts our assumptions about the division between biological and technological systems. New ways of thinking about this division are needed if we are to understand the cultural, social, and philosophical dimensions of such research, and this book marks a significant advance in the coming intellectualrevolution.

Eugene Thacker is assistant professor of new media in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His writings on the social and cultural aspects of biotechnology and biomedicine have been published and anthologized widely and translated into a dozen languages.

Life is one of our most basic concepts, and yet when examined directly it proves remarkably contradictory and elusive, encompassing both the broadest and the most specific phenomena. We can see this uncertainty about life in our habit of approaching it as something at once scientific and mystical, in the return of vitalisms of all types, and in the pervasive politicization of life. In short, life seems everywhere at stake and yet is nowhere the same.

In After Life, Eugene Thacker clears the ground for a new philosophy of life by recovering the twists and turns in its philosophical history. Beginning with Aristotle's originary formulation of a philosophy of life, Thacker examines the influence of Aristotle's ideas in medieval and early modern thought, leading him to the work of Immanuel Kant, who notes the inherently contradictory nature of life in itself. Along the way, Thacker shows how early modern philosophy's engagement with the problem of life affects thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Georges Bataille, and Alain Badiou, as well as contemporary developments in the speculative turn in philosophy.

At a time when life is categorized, measured, and exploited in a variety of ways, After Life invites us to delve deeper into the contours and contradictions of the age-old question, what is life?