Quotes from Eugene Thacker

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Our own era is one haunted by the shadow of futurity, precisely because there is no future.

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?

Two kinds of pessimism: "The end is near" and "Will this never end?

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.

Pessimism is the night-side of thought, a melodrama of the futility of the brain, a lyricism written in the graveyard of philosophy.

Whether we can "save" the planet is one question – whether the planet needs saving is another.

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?

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.

The more we learn about the planet, the stranger it becomes to us.

The indifference of the everyday gets the better of us all.

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.

A crying baby is the purest expression of the inanity of being human.

What Kant refers to as depression is simply this stark realization: that thought is only incidentally human. It would take a later generation of philosophers to derive the conclusion of this: that thought thinks us, not the reverse. Legend

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.

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.

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.

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).

When solutions produce problems, when thought flounders in the absence of order, unity, and purpose, when healthy skepticism turns into pathological sarcasm – this is usually when pessimism enters the fray.

For every un-universe, then, an un-philosophy that must also negate itself.