What, if anything, can the things that go bump in the night teach us? As with every myth or legend that has been passed down from generation to generation, horror stories often have some sort of lessen or kernel of truth buried under all of the blood and viscera, no matter how outlandish the ghouls and beasties at their heart seem to be. There has been a resurgence, a renaissance of sorts, of the horror genre over the last decade or so, not just in film and literature, but in all creative media. The fear we feel from hearing a ghost story around a camp fire, or watching some demonically enhanced killer stalk his human prey from room to room on the screen, or opening digital doors and shining pixelated flashlights into the darkness of a video game, is so much more than simply the natural fight-or-fight response found in all living things. According to Eugene Thacker, author of the phenomenal Horror of Philosophy series, this fear is the only way humanity can truly appreciate its own capacity for thought.

Thacker lays his argument out in very succinct fashion. In volume one, In the Dust of this Planet, he outlines his main thesis: there is a limit to human understanding, a horizon to all of human thought. As we approach this horizon, we find that every idea we have ever come up with is insufficient in dealing with the fact that there will be an end to what we can possibly know. Thacker claims that only through the genre of horror can we ever fully approach this limit to understanding, and that dread is the only emotion left to us as we realize that our thoughts are not necessarily our own, and there is a limit to how much we can know.

To illustrate this point, Thacker gives us three different worlds. First is the world-for-us, the subjective reality in which humanity finds itself, a world that has its center humans. Second is the world-in-itself, the objective reality that is ultimately neutral as far as humans are concerned, a world that is neither for nor against humans. You can taste Kierkegaard’s ideas of making parts of objective reality subjectively true in these first two worlds; that is to say, when thinking about the world-in-itself, it becomes the world-for-us. Thacker himself says that it is a paradoxical concept, but not one that strays too far from conventional logic. The third world, however, is the one Thacker really wants his readers to try and grasp. He calls this the world-without-us, and it exists somewhere between antagonism (the world-for-us) and ambivalence (the world-in-itself) “in a nebulous zone that is both impersonal and horrific.” It is in the world-without-us that we find this horizon to human thought, where things we have no concept of that can only be measured or observed by noticing their absence exist. It is in the world-without-us that we find true fear. To further explain these points, Thacker gives us volumes two and three. Volume two, Starry Speculative Corpse, has readers delve into philosophical texts as if they were pieces of genre horror. Volume three, Tentacles Longer than Night, has readers tear into genre horror as if it were philosophical.

The Horror of Philosophy series is a masterful piece of philosophic inquiry into an ever-enduring genre without relying on pop philosophy tropes. Thacker pulls no punches, demanding that his audience be well-versed in many different philosophical disciplines from page one, refusing to hold the hands of any reader who is not up to his very rigorous standards. Yet he manages to write these complex ideas in an approachable way, something that cannot be said of all philosophers, contemporary or ancient. His balance of academic discourse and plain English should come as no shock since he is a professor in the Media Studies department of The New School. Thacker knows what he is talking about, is unafraid to talk about it, and has the credentials to back it up.

While the lessons to be learned from stories about whatever is out there stalking the darkness are many and varied, Thacker claims that the true messages of all of horror are found not in the monsters and the blood, but in the shadows and penumbras of the stories themselves that speak to another reality beyond human comprehension. As we approach the horizon to human thought and realize that no matter how much knowledge we accumulate there will always be terrifying things staring back at us from the darkness we have yet to uncover, we can only recoil in terror. Eugene Thacker is a thinker that needs to be studied by a wider audience, one that will have to learn to be receptive to his brand of cosmic pessimism and is prepared to grapple with the abyss the way he clearly does. Any serious student of philosophy should be excited—and more than a little terrified—for whatever this philosopher writes next.

Buy The Horror of Philosophy Series (Zero Books, 2011-2015) here.







Author Details Jay C. Mims Contributor Jay C. Mims is a writer living and working in North Texas. He holds an MFA in Fiction from Columbia College Chicago and a BS in Politics from Texas Woman’s University. His first novel, ‘Skin Eater,’ is available on Amazon and other online retailers, and his short fiction can be found at emptyshelves.wordpress.com. When not working on fiction, you can find him on the back of his motorcycle or lifting heavy things.

