Eugene Thacker's Horror of Philosophy
The world-for-us is the world as we know it, filled with social and political constructions that hold the human as center of the world. According to Thacker, the world-in-itself is the inaccessible world in an “already-given state” that humans mold into the world-for-us. The-world-without-us is then a “speculative world” that “allows us to think about the-world-in-itself” (Thacker 5). Thacker explains that the world-in-itself “co-exists” with the world-for-us, however, the world-without-us “cannot co-exist” with the world-for-us; “the world without-us is the subtraction of the human from the world” (5). The world-without-us is thus a hybrid of the world-for-us and the world-in-itself that SF and supernatural horror attempt to evoke viewers/readers to face (6). SF novels such as Atwood’s MaddAdam trilogy address the issue of the world-without-us as a pandemic disease kills human near extinction. Besides the extinction of humans, the books also address animal extinction and global warming in the Anthropocene. The same parallel can be drawn in Parable by Octavia E. Butler. Lauren Olamina and the survivors in her group see society crumbling before them as big numbers of human death are rising in their posthuman condition. Thacker thus offers a horror of philosophy to challenge the limits of the-world-for-us in relation to the-world-in-itself by analyzing works of SF and horror genre.
With his philosophy, Thacker challenges human-centric thoughts and force readers to think about the position of the non-human in relation to the human; the world-without-us and its relation to the world-for-us. Even human thought belongs to the-world-in-itself, according to Thacker (Thacker plays with the idea that human thought is non-human) (7). Thacker’s main argument is that ‘” horror” is a non-philosophical attempt to think about the world-without-us philosophically” (9). Thacker reinterprets the demon, occultism and mysticism in order to create a philosophy of the world-without-us.
By Demons be Driven
In the first section of the book,Thacker discusses three quaestio on demonology (the study of demons and the demonic). The quaestio developed in medieval law schools that aim to “synthesize” or solve discrepancies (10). The first quaestio is on the meaning of the color black and music genre black metal and their association with demon or demonic. He states:
“Another meaning of the word ‘black’- not Satanism with its opposition/inversion and dark technics, not paganism with its exclusion/alterity and dark magic, but Cosmic Pessimism, with its dark metaphysics of negation, nothingness and the non-human.” (20)
The color black is thus Cosmic Pessimism: “the difficult thought of the world as absolutely unhuman, and indifferent to the hopes, desires and struggles of human individuals and groups” (17). The color black (which the demon represents) goes beyond the traditional demonic associations with evil and is the anonymous impersonal world in-itself on which we speculate the world-without-us.
Demons are associated with the supernatural, religion and evil. However, they have an anthropological function as well, where they function as a metaphor for the human to think about its relationship with other humans, basically explore the “nature of humans” (23). However, Thacker considers the demon a mythological concept of which the ontological function must be utilized in order to think about the relation of the human with the non-human and to prompt the human to understand the world (26-27). The mythological demon works through allegory.
Thacker has a third type of demon, the “meontological” demon that deals with non-being rather than being (31). This demon deals with the perspective of the non-human. For the third demon, “affirmation is negation, and thinking about is being is the same as thinking about its non-being” (31). Thacker illustrates this by close-reading passages of Dante’s Inferno. He shows that in the inferno all boundaries between human and non-human collapse: there are “human bodies melting into dead trees” for example (36). Demonic possession is thus not just the possession of living beings, but also of the non-living such as the weather and landscape; “Demonic possession is not just teratological, but also geological and even climatological” (36). The ontological demon thus goes one step further than the mythological one as this demon represents the perspective of the non-living planetary world-in-itself.
The third quaestio questions if demonology can be a respectable field of study. Thacker argues that a philosophical demonology: “demontology” is useful to “undertake the thought of nothingness” (46). It is important to realize that by nothingness, Thacker means a neutral definition he refers to as Schopenhauer’s nihil negativum. In constrast, nihil privativum is about negativity versus positivity. Nihil negativum is thus the horizon whereby the human attempts to understand the world-in-itself (47).
The section I summarized in this chapter are the relevant parts for the analysis. Thacker’s In the Dust of this Planet further discusses the relationship between Occultism and philosophy, the end of the world and philosophy and horror of theology. The horror of theology is relevant for the second part of the analysis in which I will discuss posthuman practice. In the following section an analogy will be made between God and the third demon in Parable of the Sower and The Year of the Flood.