After Life

by Eugene Thacker

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?”

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, Nonfiction, Ebooks, Politics

295 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Eugene Thacker is an American philosopher, poet and author. He is Professor of Media Studies at The New School in New York City. His writing is often associated with the philosophy of nihilism and pessimism. Thacker's books include In the Dust of This Planet and Infinite Resignation.

Reviews

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

After Life is, as the table of contents and page 241 show, an examination of three competing interpretations of life. There is, first of all, superlative life as outlined by Pseudo-Dionysius and Eriugena; secondly, there is univocal life as found in Scotus and Spinoza; and, finally, there is Eiugena's and Cusa's pantheistic life. In each case, Thacker argues, life is defined by something other than itself: "[e]very ontology of "life" thinks of life in terms of something-other-than-life" (x).

In the first case, life is thought of in terms of time or in terms of the distinction between living creatures and the Life that makes them possible (the 'that' of life); in the second case, life is examined in terms of its 'what': what is Life? what is the Life that makes it possible for creatures to live? and what is the relation between Life and living creatures? For Aquinas and Henry of Ghent, Life is analogically related to living creatures: there is a dis-junction between the two such that they are neither entirely different (as in Aristotle) nor entirely on the same level (as Deleuze argues). Rather, they are causally related: Life is the cause of living creatures. The third understanding of life - that of Nicholas of Cusa and Gilles Deleuze - focuses on the immanence of life (answering the question, perhaps, of the 'where' of Life). For each of these thinkers, Life and living creatures are related in a somewhat pantheistic way: Life is in the living creatures (though not identical with any one of them). Hence, we have - at least in Deleuze - a sense that Life is immanent; Life is not absolutely other than living creatures (as in Aristotle), nor analogously/causally related (as in Aquinas and Henry of Ghent), nor even emanatively/causally related (as in Plotinus and Pseudo-Dionysius); rather, Life is thoroughly immanent to itself where "[a] cause is immanent . . . when its effect is 'immanante' in the cause, rather than emanating from it" (Deleuze, as quoted on 217).

So, does Thacker do a good job?

I'd say he does.

But I'd also say that his interpretations of these largely medieval philosophers is somewhat tainted by a Deleuzean lens. Thacker's readings of Pseudo-Dionysius, Aquinas, and Henry of Ghent are fairly good (though he fails to point out the obvious continuities between Dionysius and Aquinas) but his understanding of Scotus could be improved: like many advocates of Radical Orthodoxy and followers of Deleuze, he could gain a lot by reading of Richard Cross's paper "'Where angels fear to tread': Duns Scotus and radical orthodoxy" (a paper Cross gladly e-mailed me upon request). Thacker seems to think, along with Deleuze, that Scotus's univocity of Being is both epistemological and ontological when, in fact, it is bare: it is merely a logical concept that has no content in itself. This point needs to be more emphasized since Scotus is far too often taken to advocate an early kind of panentheistic or monistic framework.

Aside from content, the book also has a lot of grammatical errors. At times I noticed errors on consecutive pages (one important mistake that affects Thacker's argument in on page 132: the final sentence in the second-last paragraph should read "while in the second statement "exists" would mean "having an extra-mental reality in the world"" instead of "while in the second statement "exists" would mean "not having an extra-mental reality in the world"".) This is really unacceptable, especially for a book published by The University of Chicago Press.

In the end, though, Thacker has done an admirable job of bringing to light and interpreting often neglected medieval sources and I'm looking forward to the release of Thacker's promised second volume, Dark Life.

[Gnome Books · Rating 4 out of 5]

A clear and insensibly tormenting conceptual observation of the majestic intolerability of life as philosophical idea. Suggested background listening: Lustmord.

[Mahmoud Amr · Rating 4 out of 5]

In other words: what is life?

[Alexander Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

It seems like it's not really fair to start reviewing this book from any particular direction, but I suppose it makes sense to start with my intentions when I picked up this book in the first place-"understanding life and vitalism philosophy":

This book begins by positing that "life" is full of paradoxes, but not simply in the casual way this is said, but literally as in "the concept of 'life' generates paradoxes." It proceeds from explaining the relationships that 'life' has conceptually been entangled with in other concepts, theologies, ontological arguments, epistemology, and so on. It also entangles and untangles the relations of all of these more formalized compartments of academic literature on the subject. How this was done so aesthetically in the format of the linearity of a book was inconceivable to me before I read it.

I truly want a lesson in how to write as Thacker does. Thacker answered almost every concern I had coming into this book, and managed to still provide me with more questions than I started. While perhaps he sides more with the nihil of life as others are clearly pointing towards, I perhaps see the absurdism in it. It's perhaps the reason I claim to be "pantheist" (and read many of these philosophers as pantheist) rather than "atheist." Thacker concludes that "nothing" provides immanence for life, and any fair account of life must begin from a strange ontology.

However, where he concludes (as many of Thacker's speculative realists/materialists do) this is horrifying in the science fictive sense provided by 20th century horror of the "weird", I find it "weird" more in a child-like fascination. The horror of the immanent "nothing" occurs because of the fear of not knowing that which one cannot know. The absurdism is in the joy of playing with that which one cannot know and teasing it into expression when we can taunt it into doing so. While perhaps a life-long theorist with ontological commitments to things conservatively translates the unknown "nothing" into absolute horrors, this need not be so conservatively interpreted. It would seem to me that it induces an anxiety or a shame of misunderstanding or unknowing of the "weird," one still eventually is connected to it, and experiences it as a child. Instead of H.P. Lovecraft, as Thacker points to initially, I read this work more in connection to the "weird" of Douglas Adams' Hitchhicker's Guide or perhaps Dennis E. Taylor's Bobiverse series.

While certainly I am not sure of where I stand on the horrors of the nihil, I can say this is the most thought provoking book I have read in several years and I will have to return to it if I am to trust my intuition.

[Lette Hass · Rating 4 out of 5]

"If philosophy begins in a certain perplexity towards the world, then perhaps perplexity is resolved in life. However, in philosophy, "life" is never a simple affair. More often than not, life is understood to be something that, though it is not "lived" exclusively by human beings, is however, "thought" exclusively by human beings."

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Could have been better edited for flow and clarity but offers an excellent orientation to the conceptual issues around transcendence and immanence as they were expressed through the Western medieval period into the present.