“Scholarly advice for dark times.” —The New Yorker“Provides a metric ton of misery and a lot of company.” —New York Times“Probably philosophy’s only beach read.”—ViceA ‘nihilist’s devotional,’ this collection aphorisms, fragments, and observations on philosophy and pessimism offer a raw look at the human conditionDark times lie around us and ahead of us, and what better way to survive the coming Apoc...

#1 Amazon Best Seller in Philosophy Criticism.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....

Eugene Thacker’s three cult-classic volumes of supernatural horror come together in this new Zer0 Books omnibus, revised with updated material, offering an essential resource for thinking about the unthinkable world.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 ...

“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...

Always connect—that is the imperative of today's media. But what about those moments when media cease to function properly, when messages go beyond the sender and receiver to become excluded from the world of communication itself—those messages that state: "There will be no more messages"? In this book, Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark turn our usual understanding of media and mediation on its head by arguing that these moments reveal the ways the impossibility of c...

A collection of the later writings of Arthur Schopenhauer whose “reputation as the bard of pessimism makes him the perfect philosopher for the Covid era” (New York Times).Schopenhauer’s writings tap into the anxieties of our modern, uncertain world—from climate change and mental health crises to the threat of mass extinction.Produced during the last decades of Schopenhauer’s long life, these texts reveal a unique kind of philosophy...

“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 ...

TechGnosis is a cult classic of media studies that straddles the line between academic discourse and popular culture; it appeals to both those secular and spiritual, to fans of cyberpunk and hacker literature and culture as much as new-thought adherents and spiritual seekersHow does our fascination with technology intersect with the religious imagination? In TechGnosis—a cult classic now updated and reissued with a new afterword—E...

A selection of Repeater authors choose their favourite forgotten horror stories for this new anthology, with each also writing a critical introduction for the story of their choice.A selection of Repeater authors choose their favourite horror stories for this new anthology, with each writing a critical introduction for the story of their choice.Edited by novelist and Repeater publisher Tariq Goddard and "horror philosopher" Eugene Thacker, The Repeater Book...

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 bein...

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 relat...

In this collection of essays and epigrams, E.M. Cioran gives us portraits and evaluations—which he calls "admirations"—of Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the poet Paul Valery, and Mircea Eliade, among others. In alternating sections of aphorisms—his "anathemas"—he delivers insights on such topics as solitude, flattery, vanity, friendship, insomnia, music, mortality, God, and the lure of disillusion.