{"title":"Books by Eugene Thacker","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780226793726","title":"After Life","description":"Life is one of our most basic concepts, 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?'","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56227984671093,"sku":"9780226793726","price":35.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780226793726_2fec11cf-6fc7-43fa-9365-34eee456904a.jpg?v=1786012802"},{"product_id":"9781509562367","title":"Sad Planets","description":"“Everything is sad,” wrote the Ancient poets. But is this sadness merely a human experience, projected onto the world, or is there a gloom attributable to the world itself? Could the universe be forever weeping the “tears of things”? In this series of meditations, Dominic Pettman and Eugene Thacker explore some of the key “negative affects” – both eternal and emergent – associated with climate change, environmental destruction, and cosmic solitude. In so doing they unearth something so obvious that it has gone largely unnoticed: the question of how we should feel about climate change. Between the information gathered by planetary sensors and the simple act of breathing the air, new unsettling moods are produced for which we currently lack an adequate language. Should we feel grief over the loss of our planet? Or is the strange feeling of witnessing mass extinction an indicator that the planet was never “ours” to begin with? Sad Planets explores this relationship between our all-too-human melancholia and a more impersonal sorrow, nestled in the heart of the cosmic elements.   Spanning a wide range of topics – from the history of cosmology to the “existential threat” of climate change – this book is a reckoning with the limits of human existence and comprehension. As Pettman and Thacker observe, never before have we known so much about the planet and the cosmos, and yet never before have we felt so estranged from that same planet, to say nothing of the stars beyond.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56302223851893,"sku":"9781509562367","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781509562367_abe0442f-cd91-4d5f-ab59-b0579171ff15.jpg?v=1786022234"},{"product_id":"9781782798910","title":"Starry Speculative Corpse – Horror of Philosophy vol. 2","description":"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.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56303709913461,"sku":"9781782798910","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781782798910_995a394c-127a-4e26-b286-8e493c9b12ca.jpg?v=1786026001"},{"product_id":"9781782798897","title":"Tentacles Longer Than Night – Horror of Philosophy vol. 3","description":"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.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56304689578357,"sku":"9781782798897","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781782798897_7c02cdd0-c1f1-407a-b476-c0eda0267ef5.jpg?v=1786026000"},{"product_id":"9781846946769","title":"In the Dust of This Planet – Horror of Philosophy vol. 1","description":"\"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.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56308419854709,"sku":"9781846946769","price":11.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781846946769_6e071ec3-0049-43ba-afc1-dcc5f062dfff.jpg?v=1786029444"},{"product_id":"9781912248193","title":"Infinite Resignation","description":"\u003cb\u003e“Scholarly advice for dark times.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Provides a metric ton of misery and a lot of company.” —\u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Probably philosophy’s only beach read.” —\u003ci\u003eVice \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eA ‘nihilist’s devotional,’ this collection of aphorisms, fragments, and observations on philosophy and pessimism offer a raw look at the human condition\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDark 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, \u003ci\u003eIn the Dust of This Planet\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eComprised of aphorisms, fragments, and observations both philosophical and personal, \u003ci\u003eInfinite Resignation\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBy turns melancholic, misanthropic, and darkly funny, \u003ci\u003eInfinite Resignation \u003c\/i\u003eis a welcome antidote to the exuberant imbecility of our times.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56308652638581,"sku":"9781912248193","price":18.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781912248193_d53a1d58-ee8b-4c6a-b6fc-0ae71c093c8b.jpg?v=1786030709"},{"product_id":"9781937561475","title":"Cosmic Pessimism","description":"\u003cp\u003e“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 \u003ci\u003eCosmic Pessimism\u003c\/i\u003e 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?”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56309079409013,"sku":"9781937561475","price":17.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781937561475_dd136be6-9856-4cf3-b209-b97c2a85addc.jpg?v=1786030562"},{"product_id":"9781803415901","title":"Horror of Philosophy – Vols.1–3","description":"Zer0 Books presents a new, omnibus edition of a cult classic: all three volumes of Eugene Thacker s Horror of Philosophy trilogy, revised and expanded by the author. Across the three volumes of the series Thacker adopts a unique approach, reading works of horror as if they were philosophy, and works of philosophy as if they were horror, leading to far-reaching questions: 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? At the center of Thacker s project is the idea of the 'world without us,' an increasingly unthinkable world of planetary disasters, emerging pandemics, and the looming threat of extinction. To confront this idea is to confront the limit of our ability to understand the world in which we live - not a philosophy of horror, but a horror of philosophy.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56312960352629,"sku":"9781803415901","price":33.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781803415901_93543f29-9f56-47f3-a1d1-5bc9351a49b0.jpg?v=1786027082"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-eugene-thacker.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}