Eugene Thacker > Quotes

“We have to entertain the possibility that there is no reason for something existing; or that the split between subject and object is only our name for something equally accidental we call knowledge; or, an even more difficult thought, that while there may be some order to the self and the cosmos, to the microcosm and macrocosm, it is an order that is absolutely indifferent to our existence, and of which we can have only a negative awareness.”
― Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy

“A new ignorance is on the horizon, an ignorance borne not of a lack of knowledge but of too much knowledge, too much data, too many theories, too little time.”
― Eugene Thacker, Tentacles Longer Than Night: Horror of Philosophy Vol. 3

“In a culture that prizes the can-do, self-starter attitude, to be a pessimist is simply to be a complainer – if you’re not part of the solution, then you’re part of the problem. To live in such a culture is to constantly live in the shadow of an obligatory optimism, a novel type of coercion that is pathologized early on in child education in the assessment: “Does not like to play with others.”
― Eugene Thacker, Tentacles Longer Than Night: Horror of Philosophy Vol. 3

“What if depression – reason’s failure to achieve self-mastery – is not the failure of reason but instead the result of reason? What if human reason works “too well,” and brings us to conclusions that are anathema to the existence of human beings? What we would have is a “cold rationalism,” shoring up the anthropocentric conceits of the philosophical endeavor, showing us an anonymous, faceless world impervious to our hopes and desires.”
― Eugene Thacker

“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.”
― Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy

“The logic of pessimism moves through three refusals: a no-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-for-us, or Schopenhauer’s tears); a yes-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-in-itself, or Nietzsche’s laughter); and a no-saying to the for-us and the in-itself (a double refusal, or Cioran’s sleep).

Crying, laughing, sleeping—what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent?”
― Eugene Thacker, Cosmic Pessimism

“Our own era is one haunted by the shadow of futurity, precisely because there is no future.”
― Eugene Thacker, Tentacles Longer Than Night: Horror of Philosophy Vol. 3

“In addition to the interpretive frameworks of the mythological (classical-Greek), the theological (Medieval-Christian), and the existential (modern-European), would it be possible to shift our framework to something we can only call cosmological? Could such a cosmological view be understood not simply as the view from inter-stellar space, but as the view of the world-without-us, the Planetary view?”
― Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy

“Two kinds of pessimism: “The end is near” and “Will this never end?”
― Eugene Thacker, Infinite Resignation

“To the culture of the early Renaissance, the demon presents a limit to the empiricism of the unknown, something that can only be verified through contradictions – an absent manifestation, an unnatural creature, a demonic malady.”
― Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy

“The world is increasingly unthinkable – a world of planetary disasters, emerging pandemics, tectonic shifts, strange weather, oil-drenched seascapes, and the furtive, always-looming threat of extinction. In spite of our daily concerns, wants, and desires, it is increasingly difficult to comprehend the world in which we live and of which we are 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.”
― Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy

“The last word of philosophy is loneliness.”
― Eugene Thacker, Infinite Resignation

“Pessimism is the night-side of thought, a melodrama of the futility of the brain, a lyricism written in the graveyard of philosophy.”
― Eugene Thacker, Infinite Resignation

“The indifference of the everyday gets the better of us all.”
― Eugene Thacker, Infinite Resignation

“In raising problems without solutions, in posing questions without answers, in retreating to the hermetic, cavernous abode of complaint, pessimism is guilty of that most inexcusable of Occidental crimes—the crime of not pretending it’s for real. Pessimism fails to live up to the most basic tenet of philosophy—the “as if.” Think as if it will be helpful, act as if it will make a difference, speak as if there is something to say, live as if you are not, in fact, being lived by some murmuring non-entity both shadowy and muddied.”
― Eugene Thacker, Cosmic Pessimism

“The question is, what happens when we as human beings confront a world that is radically unhuman, impersonal, and even indifferent to the human? What happens to the concept of politics once one confronts the possibility that the world only reveals its hiddenness, in spite of the attempts to render it as a world-for-us, either via theology (sovereign God, sovereign king) or via science (the organismic analogy of the state)? In the face of politics, this unresponsiveness of the world is a condition for which, arguably, we do not yet have a language.”
― Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy

“If the supernatural in a conventional sense is no longer possible, what remains after the “death of God” is an occulted, hidden world. Philosophically speaking, the enigma we face is how to confront this world, without immediately presuming that it is identical to the world-for-us (the world of science and religion), and without simply disparaging it as an irretrievable and inaccessible world-in-itself.”
― Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy

“A bit of philosophizing leads to a wonderment of life. A lot of philosophizing leads to a contempt of it.”
― Eugene Thacker, Infinite Resignation

“(life science) definitions. The question that runs through these disputatio is the following: What if “horror” has less to do with a fear of death, and more to do with the dread of life?”
― Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy

“Whether we can “save” the planet is one question – whether the planet needs saving is another.”
― Eugene Thacker, Starry Speculative Corpse

“A crying baby is the purest expression of the inanity of being human.”
― Eugene Thacker, Infinite Resignation

“For Nishitani, then, the only way beyond nihilism is through nihilism. And here Nishitani borrows from the Buddhist concept of śūnyatā, conventionally translated as “nothingness” or “emptiness.” In contrast to the relative nothingness of modern nihilism, which is privative, and predicated on the absence of being (that is, an ontology), Nishitani proposes an absolute nothingness, which is purely negative and predicated on a paradoxical foundation of non-being (that is, a meontology). “Emptiness”
― Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy

“What is repulsive about children - all children - is not that they are not yet adults, but that they are already adults - whining, self-absorbed, demanding attention, unable to care for themselves, throwing tantrums when things don't go their way. Far from what we tell ourselves, children are the most concise expressions of humanity. At least children are unaware of this.”
― Eugene Thacker, Infinite Resignation

“The more we learn about the planet, the stranger it becomes to us.”
― Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet

“But already there is some ambiguity, for does black designate a “color” that does not reflect light (and if so, why label it a color?), or does black designate the “color” that results in the total absence of light? Without light, no color, and without color, there is only black – and yet black is not a color.”
― Eugene Thacker, Starry Speculative Corpse

“In books such as Isis Unveiled (1877) or The Secret Doctrine (1888), Blavatsky covers everything from archaic mystery cults to modern paranormal research, giving one the sort of global perspective found in anthropology classics such as James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890).”
― Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy

“There will always be someone who will see the futility of your actions. There will always be someone who is irritated by what you do, whatever you do. In this way we participate in a kind of shared, communal pessimism.”
― Eugene Thacker

“Traditionally, the Socratic tradition in philosophy has a therapeutic function, which is to dispel the horrors of the unknown through reasoned argument. What cannot be tolerated in this tradition is the possibility of a world that cannot be known, or a world that is indifferent to our elaborate knowledge-producing schemes.”
― Eugene Thacker, Starry Speculative Corpse: Horror of Philosophy

“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.”
― Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy

“The ethereal nature of mists means that while they may appear solid and to have distinct forms, they are also immaterial, and can readily become formless.”
― Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy