In the Dust of This Planet (Horror of Philosophy): 1

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There's always death to look forward to: Nihilist Arby's and the cheerful nihilism of the Internet", The Awl, August 2, 2017. It is a dilemma expressed in contemporary discourse on climate change, between a debate over the world-for-us (e.g. how do we as human beings impact - negatively or positively - the geological state of the planet?), and a largely unspoken, whispered query over the world-in-itself (e.g. to what degree is the planet indifferent to us as human beings, and to what degree are we indifferent to the planet?). This taxonomic discussion was to me the centre of the book, although it was woven in with a great deal about mysticism, theology, and ooze that I saw more as intellectual curiosities. When it comes to environmental philosophy, I find myself preferring the more focused approach of, for example, Timothy Morton’s The Ecological Thought. In ogni caso mi ci è voluta la lettura di parecchie pagine per rassegnarmi al fatto che non avrei letto un'illuminata analisi di motivi presi da cinema/libri horror e musica metal, analisi che mi avrebbe fornito nuove chiavi di lettura, nuove suggestioni (queste sì) filosofiche, le quali avrebbero provveduto a spalancare la mia povera mente mortale a significati altri, più profondi e terrificanti, sulla condizione umana rispetto a quell'Universo cieco e idiota che gorgoglia indifferente al centro del tutto e del niente.

Thy mind o man! . .must search into and contemplate the darkest abyss, and the broad expanse of eternity- thou must commune with God."Dark Nights of the Universe, co-authored with Daniel Colucciello Barber, Nicola Masciandaro, Alexander R. Galloway and François Laruelle. [NAME] Publications, 2013. ISBN 978-0984056675. Although, not as deep or meaningful as some of the above quotes, I thought the allegorical associations of zombies to rising underclasses, of vampire to romantic, but decaying aristocracy and demons to a middle class burgeois was quite interesting. Premessa: "Tra le ceneri di questo pianeta" non è un saggio divulgativo, bensì una trattazione filosofica, e non è nemmeno conclusiva o risolutiva nelle premesse che si pone poichè si tratta del primo volume di una trilogia. E quel che segue non è una recensione ma un commento, personalissimo e parziale.

This turned out to be more about mysticism (what ET intriguingly describes as a "dark mysticism") than I first thought it would. A turn that has now happened with more than a few books I've read in the past year, and in the end a pleasant alternative to some of the directions Dust might have gone from the starting provocations.We can even abbreviate these three concepts further: the world-for-us is simply the World, the world-in-itself is simply the Earth, and the world-without-us is simply the Planet. The Exploit: A Theory of Networks, co-authored with Alexander R. Galloway. University of Minnesota Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0816650446. We can also think of mysticism as actually enabled by overly optimistic, "gee-whiz" scientific instrumentality, in which the Earth is the divinely-sanctioned domain of the human, even and especially in the eleventh hour of climate change."

darkness mysticism retains the language of shadows and nothingness, as if the positive union with the divine is of less importance than the realization of the absolute limits of the human." Leper Creativity: The Cyclonopedia Symposium, co-edited with Ed Keller and Nicola Masciandaro. Punctum Books, 2012. ISBN 978-0615600468. See the essays "Data Made Flesh: Biotechnology and the Discourse of the Posthuman," Cultural Critique no. 53 (2003), "Biohorror/Biotech," Paradoxa no. 17 (2002). It’s not a particularly easy read, and I wasn’t a great fan of the jargon-laden style, but the subject is nevertheless fascinating. I marked a great many passages. The author is widely-read, his subjects diverse, his thought digressive; and yet he seems to expend a great deal of ink in tracing the contours of an idea which is expressed with greater elegance and simplicity in the fictions he so admires. Why not then express them succinctly in fiction? Most of the chapters conclude with more questions than can possibly be answered in one book, and I was constantly waiting for the author to take his thesis a step or two beyond. And so what, I kept wondering. What does it do to us, this world-without-us? Where does it come from? What is it for?In the final section he dissects a poem about the formation of life, and primarily discussing the mystics and what they have to tell us that strict religion and hard-line science cannot. This book made my skin crawl and my mind expand. It's a dense, sometimes impenetrable work of philosophy that discusses the Unthinkable, so obviously it's not going to work very well as beach reading. But if you give it your attention and an open mind, there are some seriously creepy-cool concepts about the Universe to be gleaned here.