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On the Verge of Nothing: Pessimism’s Impossible Beyond
Gary Shipley’s On the Verge of Nothing moves according to a patient logic, asking us to consider what follows when we begin from pessimism, rather than arriving at it. Through Shipley’s ciphers – Nietzsche, Pessoa, Lispector, contemporary performance art – pessimism is illuminated as at once unliveable and unconsolable, and yet unavoidable. Reading On the Verge of Nothing , the primordial philosophical question of “how to live” now takes on contours that are colder, more detached, and yet, somehow, deeply engaged.
~ Eugene Thacker, author of Infinite Resignation
Beginning insistently with the end of thought, this panegyric of the pointless offers a withering post-pessimistic ethics and aesthetics of diversionary tactics for life in the void. Territories traversed include dreams and delusions, the limits and purpose of self-consciousness, human animality, and the paradox of feeling-thinking. Gary J Shipley’s lucid, often pitiless diagnoses; rigorous, informed, and tight arguments; bons mots and essential apercus – larded with a rich compost of quotation (Pessoa, Lispector, Cioran, Kafka, etc.) – pursue a relentless thrashing of thought, sketching both a Bartlett’s and a Baedeker of our inevitable doom. These essays, aphorisms, fragments, and quotations have been shored not against but amidst ruin. Experimental, exploratory soundings and performances, a fantasia for the end of the this word horde is an essential drug for addicts of the impossible.
~ Stuart Kendall, author of Georges Bataille
Pessimism is the tenor of our times, even if it is rarely fully embraced. Gary J. Shipley’s important book not only embraces pessimism, it offers a way to make life liveable not in the modality of morose resignation, but with enthusiasm. This is an achievement, even for pessimists who regard all achievement as ultimately futile.
~ Scott Wilson, author of The Order of Joy (from the Foreword)
~ Eugene Thacker, author of Infinite Resignation
Beginning insistently with the end of thought, this panegyric of the pointless offers a withering post-pessimistic ethics and aesthetics of diversionary tactics for life in the void. Territories traversed include dreams and delusions, the limits and purpose of self-consciousness, human animality, and the paradox of feeling-thinking. Gary J Shipley’s lucid, often pitiless diagnoses; rigorous, informed, and tight arguments; bons mots and essential apercus – larded with a rich compost of quotation (Pessoa, Lispector, Cioran, Kafka, etc.) – pursue a relentless thrashing of thought, sketching both a Bartlett’s and a Baedeker of our inevitable doom. These essays, aphorisms, fragments, and quotations have been shored not against but amidst ruin. Experimental, exploratory soundings and performances, a fantasia for the end of the this word horde is an essential drug for addicts of the impossible.
~ Stuart Kendall, author of Georges Bataille
Pessimism is the tenor of our times, even if it is rarely fully embraced. Gary J. Shipley’s important book not only embraces pessimism, it offers a way to make life liveable not in the modality of morose resignation, but with enthusiasm. This is an achievement, even for pessimists who regard all achievement as ultimately futile.
~ Scott Wilson, author of The Order of Joy (from the Foreword)
- GenresPhilosophyNonfiction
202 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2021
8 people are currently reading
204 people want to read
About the author
Gary J. Shipley
47 books177 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Gary J. Shipley is a writer and philosopher based in the UK. He has published work in various philosophy journals and literary journals.
Gary J. Shipley is a writer and philosopher based in the UK. He has published work in various philosophy journals and literary journals.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
January 28, 2022
"Pessimism does not seek to replace the philosophical and religious theories that have so far sheltered us with their illusory structures, but only to undermine them to the point of collapse. There are no subsequent plans to rebuild anything new or improved from the rubble; for the rubble is already something improved, in that it is no longer the architectural lie that had arranged it to look like truth."
July 20, 2023
Shipley’s On the Verge of Nothing tries to reconcile, on the one hand, the pragmatism he concedes of optimism-as-a-way-of-life and, on the other, the hard-nosed, uncompromising skepticism of the pessimist. In looking for a middle way between the dull, banal certainty of the optimist and the weary, cynical certainty of the pessimist, he advocates incompleteness (the elusiveness of absolute meaning) as a form of diversion and counterposes Pessoa’s proliferation of heteronyms to Buddhist self-abnegation as a more tenable alternative to ego death. Through such self-consciously fictitious personas, Shipley argues, we can exhaust our ‘dreams’ without taking their object so seriously as to be overwhelmed by the disillusionment typical of professional life. So, the inexhaustibility of incompleteness and the fabricated nature of identity become themselves means, not of escape, but of diverting and exhausting desire and thereby living out, not merely knowing, the futility of all its many forms in fantasy. The disappointed pessimist who actively dissects the ‘self’ into fragmentary figments prevents the cancer of depression from metastasizing in the process. Thus, in ‘post-pessimism’, which takes pessimism as a point of departure rather than a terminus, the contingency of meaning itself becomes invested with meaning. The post-pessimist views existential crises as illnesses, not to be treated through a therapeutic approach, but to be endured until the dream of health is forgotten for the illusion it always was.
June 19, 2024
'On the Verge of Nothing' is a thorough and very referential study of pessimism as a philosophy. Two works of literature frequently referenced are, Thomas Ligotti's 'The Conspiracy Against the Human Race', and Fernando Pessoa's 'The Book of Disquiet'. When I find the courage to read these two books, I have the numerous citations bookmarked to guide and comfort me along the way.
My favorite chapter was 'Pessimism and Performance Art: A Speculative Contract'. This chapter reviews examples of strange and extreme performances, such as Marina Abramovic's 'Rhythm 0' (1974), in which the artist stood in front of a table of dangerous objects, including razor blades and a loaded gun, and waited to endure attacks from the audience.
I'm unaccustomed to philosophy literature and struggled to fully comprehend some of the analytical discourse. I spent too much time reading and re-reading pages with a speed of around twenty minutes per page. I appreciate the strenuous mental exercise this book provided me and feel like this will be an easier experience the next time I read it.
My favorite chapter was 'Pessimism and Performance Art: A Speculative Contract'. This chapter reviews examples of strange and extreme performances, such as Marina Abramovic's 'Rhythm 0' (1974), in which the artist stood in front of a table of dangerous objects, including razor blades and a loaded gun, and waited to endure attacks from the audience.
I'm unaccustomed to philosophy literature and struggled to fully comprehend some of the analytical discourse. I spent too much time reading and re-reading pages with a speed of around twenty minutes per page. I appreciate the strenuous mental exercise this book provided me and feel like this will be an easier experience the next time I read it.
March 30, 2025
Shipley’s book sits within a wave of contemporary responses to “pessimism” that I classify as “non-academic” in nature, e.g., as encountered in Ligotti (setting aside Ligotti’s literary bona fides, Shipley has produced what is in my estimation a superior work of “philosophy”). I note that it is “non-academic” and “philosophical” in the sense of (unconsciously) paying homage to both Albert Camus and Colin Wilson.
Scott Wilson’s forward, while concise and inviting, paints a somewhat disingenuous portrait of the book’s content, e.g., the three strands of pessimism (pleasure-pessimism, surplus-pessimism, and post-pessimism) are revealed by Shipley in a variety of ways, and he also bring to light sub-divisions within these classifications to complicate matters.
In essence, what we learn is that Shipley's "Third Way" approach is critical of (1) conscious ignorance of the pessimistic situation, (2) wallowing in a Romantic type of suffering (of which Nietzsche was also critical!), (3) believing that the pessimistic situation can be wholly transcended, overturned, or transvalued – we are stuck here in the quicksand, slowly and inevitably going down, and (3) despite the term “exalted pessimism” (post-pessimism), Shipley is not a “Yes-sayer” like Nietzsche’s Dionysian man – Shipley is more a “junkie of futility” than “tragic hero”.
The book is not written in the form of a treatise; it is a “patch-worded” post-modern experiment (pastiche) in philosophy, literature, poetry, and aesthetics – perhaps, as the author demonstrates, there is a need for a “multi-linguistic” approach to the persistent problem of pessimism – our creative response to the rumbling silence at the core of human subject-hood is varied and nuanced. For example, the author, perhaps drawing on the scholarship of Dienstag, incorporates aphorisms in sections to inspire and enlarge the reader’s thought. So, I stress to prospective readers that there is not a clear and coherent line of argumentation driving the text – but remember, we are confronting issues that defy traditional approaches, for they are, in an important sense, ineffable - requiring creative (poetic) gestures and intimations...
The novel view espoused is that pessimism is a mood and is expressed and instantiated (carried out in praxis) through an ethical engagement with the world. The author makes the key distinction between “value” (ethics/normativity) and “uselessness” (utility), and he wholeheartedly endorses the former. I must stress that “post-pessimism” is term that on first blush seems to indicate a “way out” of the bleak and frightful cycle of suffering, but this book eschews so-called teleological salvific, utopian ends. Instead, the notion of post-pessimism requires a paradoxical sort of understanding - grounded in the ontological truism that it is only from out of the pessimistic muck and mire of existence can we “hope” to better ourselves – a condition to which we must continually return - a “down-going” - in order to continually draw inspiration.
On my reading, and of course, we all bring our own “understanding” to the text, through creative activities, we strive for moments of what might be termed STE (Subjective Transcendent Experiences), as we encounter in the philosophies of William James, Karl Jaspers, and Colin Wilson. This means that a transformation to consciousness, through creatively inspired modes of re-attunement, is possible. This secular form of finite human transcendence occurs through what Shipley identifies as “feeling-thinking,” which is a form of immersed bodily attunement and activity, which includes the incorporation of the arts and creative ways of being-in-the-world.
Simon Critchley, describing the type of “pessimism” we encounter in John Gray’s philosophy (borrowing from Nietzsche) “passive nihilism,” this is a moniker that also might be attached (in error, I contend) to Emil Cioran. However, I argue against such a classification, and move to include to this observation Shipley’s philosophy. At the conclusion of the book Black Mass, Gray intimates a position similar to that of Shipley’s. Cioran, in a way that relates specifically to Shipley’s view, instantiates an “ethical-practical-creative” response to pessimism, consistent throughout his corpus, expressive of a creative and aesthetically inspired view to “post-pessimism”.
The only critique I have is with Shipley’s reading and subsequent dismissal of Nietzsche’s brand of “active Nihilism,” expressed through the Dionysian “pessimism of strength,” for Shipley focuses only on early Nietzsche in the Birth of Tragedy, eliminating all talk about “the spirit of (Wagnerian) music.” For a renewed view of Nietzsche’s ongoing and developing pessimism, it is necessary to consult the later texts, specifically, but not limited to, Twilight of the Idols, Ecce Homo – and the collected, translated and published lectures (use caution!), Will to Power.
I recommend this book to readers interested in the issue/problem/truism of pessimism. To reiterate, although we cannot transcend the pessimistic condition - outside of the single fatality of death (and for Shipley, I note, suicide is not, a viable (ethical) option - see Philipp Mainländer) - we can navigate it and momentarily transform it artistically.
Dr. J. M. Magrini
Former: Philosophy/College of DuPage
Scott Wilson’s forward, while concise and inviting, paints a somewhat disingenuous portrait of the book’s content, e.g., the three strands of pessimism (pleasure-pessimism, surplus-pessimism, and post-pessimism) are revealed by Shipley in a variety of ways, and he also bring to light sub-divisions within these classifications to complicate matters.
In essence, what we learn is that Shipley's "Third Way" approach is critical of (1) conscious ignorance of the pessimistic situation, (2) wallowing in a Romantic type of suffering (of which Nietzsche was also critical!), (3) believing that the pessimistic situation can be wholly transcended, overturned, or transvalued – we are stuck here in the quicksand, slowly and inevitably going down, and (3) despite the term “exalted pessimism” (post-pessimism), Shipley is not a “Yes-sayer” like Nietzsche’s Dionysian man – Shipley is more a “junkie of futility” than “tragic hero”.
The book is not written in the form of a treatise; it is a “patch-worded” post-modern experiment (pastiche) in philosophy, literature, poetry, and aesthetics – perhaps, as the author demonstrates, there is a need for a “multi-linguistic” approach to the persistent problem of pessimism – our creative response to the rumbling silence at the core of human subject-hood is varied and nuanced. For example, the author, perhaps drawing on the scholarship of Dienstag, incorporates aphorisms in sections to inspire and enlarge the reader’s thought. So, I stress to prospective readers that there is not a clear and coherent line of argumentation driving the text – but remember, we are confronting issues that defy traditional approaches, for they are, in an important sense, ineffable - requiring creative (poetic) gestures and intimations...
The novel view espoused is that pessimism is a mood and is expressed and instantiated (carried out in praxis) through an ethical engagement with the world. The author makes the key distinction between “value” (ethics/normativity) and “uselessness” (utility), and he wholeheartedly endorses the former. I must stress that “post-pessimism” is term that on first blush seems to indicate a “way out” of the bleak and frightful cycle of suffering, but this book eschews so-called teleological salvific, utopian ends. Instead, the notion of post-pessimism requires a paradoxical sort of understanding - grounded in the ontological truism that it is only from out of the pessimistic muck and mire of existence can we “hope” to better ourselves – a condition to which we must continually return - a “down-going” - in order to continually draw inspiration.
On my reading, and of course, we all bring our own “understanding” to the text, through creative activities, we strive for moments of what might be termed STE (Subjective Transcendent Experiences), as we encounter in the philosophies of William James, Karl Jaspers, and Colin Wilson. This means that a transformation to consciousness, through creatively inspired modes of re-attunement, is possible. This secular form of finite human transcendence occurs through what Shipley identifies as “feeling-thinking,” which is a form of immersed bodily attunement and activity, which includes the incorporation of the arts and creative ways of being-in-the-world.
Simon Critchley, describing the type of “pessimism” we encounter in John Gray’s philosophy (borrowing from Nietzsche) “passive nihilism,” this is a moniker that also might be attached (in error, I contend) to Emil Cioran. However, I argue against such a classification, and move to include to this observation Shipley’s philosophy. At the conclusion of the book Black Mass, Gray intimates a position similar to that of Shipley’s. Cioran, in a way that relates specifically to Shipley’s view, instantiates an “ethical-practical-creative” response to pessimism, consistent throughout his corpus, expressive of a creative and aesthetically inspired view to “post-pessimism”.
The only critique I have is with Shipley’s reading and subsequent dismissal of Nietzsche’s brand of “active Nihilism,” expressed through the Dionysian “pessimism of strength,” for Shipley focuses only on early Nietzsche in the Birth of Tragedy, eliminating all talk about “the spirit of (Wagnerian) music.” For a renewed view of Nietzsche’s ongoing and developing pessimism, it is necessary to consult the later texts, specifically, but not limited to, Twilight of the Idols, Ecce Homo – and the collected, translated and published lectures (use caution!), Will to Power.
I recommend this book to readers interested in the issue/problem/truism of pessimism. To reiterate, although we cannot transcend the pessimistic condition - outside of the single fatality of death (and for Shipley, I note, suicide is not, a viable (ethical) option - see Philipp Mainländer) - we can navigate it and momentarily transform it artistically.
Dr. J. M. Magrini
Former: Philosophy/College of DuPage
October 22, 2024
Gary shipley reads like the puzzle box thing from Hellraiser.
Eat my brain with a spoon, man.
A lot of Pessoa citations and ???? but I'm into it. Been on an all cockroach diet since I finished it.
Eat my brain with a spoon, man.
A lot of Pessoa citations and ???? but I'm into it. Been on an all cockroach diet since I finished it.
August 6, 2025
“As Zapffe and other prominent pessimists have iterated many times, it is consciousness itself that is the problem, and our survival relies on our facility for restricting (or at least manipulating) its contents.”
This was my summer read.
Humanism to existentialism to absurdism to philosophical pessimism. There’s no clear answer because, as Shipley points out, we can’t even articulate the question. I’m not looking for an answer, really. Certainty would be scarier than uncertainty because where do you go from there?
Shipley quoting Baudrillard: “we have to accept is that there are no questions at all, in which case our responsibility becomes total, since we are the answer—and the enigma of the world also remains total, then, since the answer is there, and there is no question to that answer.”
Anyway, it took me months to read this, often while Blippi was giggling and hooting in my ear. Sometimes it was Thomas the Tank Engine, which is better, or Grover from Sesame Street, but most often it was Blippi.
I’d read Shipley’s “Bright Stupid Confetti” collection of poems prior to reading this, and he’s a hell of a talented painter of images. Sometimes to his detriment, as the prose becomes incredibly dense, but maybe that perception was Blippi’s fault.
I’m not really here to defend philosophical pessimism, which is defined in the book briefly as the view that: “as long as humans exist you will have the problem of human suffering; and given this, nonexistence is always preferable to existence, in that the former precludes the possibility of harm while the latter necessitates it.” Though it’s hardly a worldview, really.
Because that’s what eats away at me most of the time: suffering. The fact of it. I’ve always felt this but the pandemic, and the way the United States responded to it, ripped all of that completely open. Combine this with a sort of rediscovery of my emotions, raw and unaccustomed, and I was primed to lose it and, for a while, lose it I did (have). Shipley at one point calls this the “unclad spectacle” whereas Burroughs calls it “naked lunch.”
It’s not seeing things in some secret light of truth, and I don’t agree with all of Shipley’s conclusions, but I do realize that systems of thought or belief or action don’t help cover up the horror anymore. I wish they did.
Shipley’s main focus is not what philosophical pessimism is but what to do after the revelation. I’ll leave that for the reader.
Bottom line: nothing gets better. Humanity, much as I love it (I can’t help it, I want people to be ok), doesn’t seem capable of true change. We’ve had quite enough time to try. Because look: fascism makes the rounds once again, not even a century later, albeit in a bizarre reality TV carnival fashion (at least in the US). The arc of history doesn’t bend at all, or if it does, it seems we’re reluctant to bend it toward justice for very long.
There’s a film, “God on Trial,” in which Jewish men held at Auschwitz, in light of their predicament, put God on trial in absentia for breaking his covenant. Apparently this is not unprecedented in Jewish history but it’s especially striking given the context.
I can’t remember if they find God guilty or not, to be honest. But as the men are being led to their deaths, one non-believer asks another: “What do we do now?”
“We pray.”
What do I do now?
I continue.
And I’m not saying I’m suffering as though in the Holocaust but, somewhere in the world, someone is.
That’s fucking unacceptable.
This was my summer read.
Humanism to existentialism to absurdism to philosophical pessimism. There’s no clear answer because, as Shipley points out, we can’t even articulate the question. I’m not looking for an answer, really. Certainty would be scarier than uncertainty because where do you go from there?
Shipley quoting Baudrillard: “we have to accept is that there are no questions at all, in which case our responsibility becomes total, since we are the answer—and the enigma of the world also remains total, then, since the answer is there, and there is no question to that answer.”
Anyway, it took me months to read this, often while Blippi was giggling and hooting in my ear. Sometimes it was Thomas the Tank Engine, which is better, or Grover from Sesame Street, but most often it was Blippi.
I’d read Shipley’s “Bright Stupid Confetti” collection of poems prior to reading this, and he’s a hell of a talented painter of images. Sometimes to his detriment, as the prose becomes incredibly dense, but maybe that perception was Blippi’s fault.
I’m not really here to defend philosophical pessimism, which is defined in the book briefly as the view that: “as long as humans exist you will have the problem of human suffering; and given this, nonexistence is always preferable to existence, in that the former precludes the possibility of harm while the latter necessitates it.” Though it’s hardly a worldview, really.
Because that’s what eats away at me most of the time: suffering. The fact of it. I’ve always felt this but the pandemic, and the way the United States responded to it, ripped all of that completely open. Combine this with a sort of rediscovery of my emotions, raw and unaccustomed, and I was primed to lose it and, for a while, lose it I did (have). Shipley at one point calls this the “unclad spectacle” whereas Burroughs calls it “naked lunch.”
It’s not seeing things in some secret light of truth, and I don’t agree with all of Shipley’s conclusions, but I do realize that systems of thought or belief or action don’t help cover up the horror anymore. I wish they did.
Shipley’s main focus is not what philosophical pessimism is but what to do after the revelation. I’ll leave that for the reader.
Bottom line: nothing gets better. Humanity, much as I love it (I can’t help it, I want people to be ok), doesn’t seem capable of true change. We’ve had quite enough time to try. Because look: fascism makes the rounds once again, not even a century later, albeit in a bizarre reality TV carnival fashion (at least in the US). The arc of history doesn’t bend at all, or if it does, it seems we’re reluctant to bend it toward justice for very long.
There’s a film, “God on Trial,” in which Jewish men held at Auschwitz, in light of their predicament, put God on trial in absentia for breaking his covenant. Apparently this is not unprecedented in Jewish history but it’s especially striking given the context.
I can’t remember if they find God guilty or not, to be honest. But as the men are being led to their deaths, one non-believer asks another: “What do we do now?”
“We pray.”
What do I do now?
I continue.
And I’m not saying I’m suffering as though in the Holocaust but, somewhere in the world, someone is.
That’s fucking unacceptable.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews