Eugene Thacker Popular Books

Eugene Thacker Biography & Facts

Eugene Thacker is an American author. He is Professor of Media Studies at The New School in New York City. Previously he was a professor at Georgia Institute of Technology in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication. His writing is associated with the philosophy of nihilism and pessimism. Thacker's books include In the Dust of This Planet (part of his Horror of Philosophy trilogy) and Infinite Resignation. Many of his media contributions are developments of Science and Technology Studies. He has produced theory around how media informs and augments biological processes across several publications. Early life and education Thacker was born and grew up in the Pacific Northwest. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Washington, and a Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature from Rutgers University. Works Nihilism, pessimism, and speculative realism Thacker's work has been associated with philosophical nihilism and pessimism, as well as to contemporary philosophies of speculative realism and collapsology. His short book Cosmic Pessimism defines pessimism as "the philosophical form of disenchantment." As Thacker states: "Pessimism is the night-side of thought, a melodrama of the futility of the brain, a poetry written in the graveyard of philosophy." In 2018, Thacker's new book, Infinite Resignation was published by Repeater Books. Infinite Resignation consists of fragments and aphorisms on the nature of pessimism, mixing the personal and philosophical. Thacker engages with writers like Thomas Bernhard, E.M. Cioran, Osamu Dazai, Søren Kierkegaard, Clarice Lispector, Giacomo Leopardi, Fernando Pessoa, and Schopenhauer. The New York Times noted "Thacker has thrown a party for all of these eloquent cranks in Infinite Resignation, and he is an excellent host...This book provides a metric ton of misery and a lot of company." One reviewer writes of the book: "Infinite Resignation belongs on the shelf next to the likes of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer...Like all great works of philosophy, this book will force readers to question their long-held beliefs in the way the world works and the way the world ought to work...Thacker's voice is quiet, a desperate whisper into the void that is both haunting and heartbreaking." Thacker's major philosophical work is After Life, published by the University of Chicago Press. In it, Thacker argues that the ontology of life operates by way of a split between "Life" and "the living," making possible a "metaphysical displacement" in which life is thought via another metaphysical term, such as time, form, or spirit: "Every ontology of life thinks of life in terms of something-other-than-life...that something-other-than-life is most often a metaphysical concept, such as time and temporality, form and causality, or spirit and immanence" Thacker traces this theme in Aristotle, Dionysius the Areopagite, John Scottus Eriugena, negative theology, Immanuel Kant, and Georges Bataille, showing how this three-fold displacement is also alive in philosophy today. After Life also includes comparisons with Arabic, Japanese, and Chinese philosophy. Thacker's follow-up essay "Darklife: Negation, Nothingness, and the Will-to-Life in Schopenhauer" discusses the ontology of life in terms of negation, eliminativism, and "the inverse relationship between logic and life." Specifically, Thacker argues that Schopenhauer's philosophy posits a "dark life" in opposition to the "ontology of generosity" of German Idealist thinkers such as Hegel and Schelling. Thacker has also written in a similar vein on the role of negation and "nothingness" in the work of mystical philosopher Meister Eckhart. Ultimately Thacker argues for a skepticism regarding "life": "Life is not only a problem of philosophy, but a problem for philosophy. Horror and philosophy Thacker's most widely read book is In the Dust of This Planet, part of his Horror of Philosophy trilogy. In it, Thacker explores the idea of the "unthinkable world" as represented in the horror fiction genre, in philosophies of pessimism and nihilism, and in the philosophies of apophatic ("darkness") mysticism. In the first volume, In the Dust of This Planet, Thacker calls the horror of philosophy "the isolation of those moments in which philosophy reveals its own limitations and constraints, moments in which thinking enigmatically confronts the horizon of its own possibility." Thacker distinguishes the "world-for-us" (the human-centric view of the world), and the "world-in-itself" (the world as it exists objectively), from what he calls the "world-without-us": "the world-without-us lies somewhere in between, in a nebulous zone that is at once impersonal and horrific." In this and the other volumes of the trilogy Thacker writes about a wide range of work: H.P. Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, Edgar Allan Poe, Dante's Inferno, Les Chants de Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont, the Faust myth, manga artist Junji Ito, contemporary horror authors Thomas Ligotti and Caitlín Kiernan, K-horror film, and the philosophy of Schopenhauer, Rudolph Otto, Medieval mysticism (Meister Eckhart, Angela of Foligno, John of the Cross), occult philosophy, and the philosophy of the Kyoto School. Thacker's writing on philosophy and horror extends to what he calls dark media, or technologies that mediate between the natural and supernatural, and point to the limit of human perception and knowledge. Similarly, Thacker has written a series of essays on "necrology", defined as the decay or disintegration of the body politic. Thacker discusses plague, demonic possession, and the living dead, drawing upon the history of medicine, biopolitics, political theology, and the horror genre. Philosophy, science, and technology Thacker's earlier works adopt approaches from the philosophies of science and technology, and examine the relation between science and science fiction. Examples are his book Biomedia, and his writings on bioinformatics, nanotechnology, biocomputing, complex adaptive systems, swarm intelligence, and network theory. Thacker's concept of biomedia is defined as follows: "Biomedia entail the informatic recontextualization of biological components and processes, for ends that may be medical or nonmedical...and with effects that are as much cultural, social, and political as they are scientific." Thacker clarifies: "biomedia continuously make the dual demand that information materialize itself...biomedia depend upon an understanding of biological as informational but not immaterial." In his book The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture, Thacker looks to developments in tissue engineering where techno-mechanical apparatuses disappear altogether so that it appears as though technology is the natural body. In Thacker's words, "biotechnology is thus invisible yet immanent." In 2013 Thacker, along with Alexander Galloway and McKenzie Wark, published the co-authored book Excommunication: Thr.... Discover the Eugene Thacker popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Eugene Thacker books.