“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...

“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...

The network has become the core organizational structure for postmodern politics, culture, and life, replacing the modern era’s hierarchical systems. From peer-to-peer file sharing and massive multiplayer online games to contagion vectors of digital or biological viruses and global affiliations of terrorist organizations, the network form has become so invasive that nearly every aspect of contemporary society can be located within it.Borrowing their title from the hacker term for a...

Bezna 5 makes an ouroboric move of plunging into itself ('Bezna' in Romanian means consistent darkness + diffuse fear). Bezna 5 is darkly glowing dead thinking, cosmic pessimism, hairy autonomy, limbo sighs, horrendous pink volumes, underground nematodes, happy dismemberment, haunting prehumanism, glowing horror, sinister moods, eternal stillness, future plague, idiot nonknowing and news from Cioran:The Book of Delusions (fragments) Emil CioranFollowing the Sigh Nicola Masc...

"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 so ...

How they changed the world, and how they can change it again.This is the best book on philosophy I have ever read, and I have four master's degrees. —Philip van Heusen for Readers' FavoriteFor better or worse, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle engineered the Western mind.Above all, they formed part of a movement that stood at the crossroads of mythological and scientific-rational thought, at the crossroads of mythos and logos....

Noam Chomsky and linguist Andrea Moro explore language, the history of science, Big Data and AI, and the mysteries of the human brain.Influential linguist Noam Chomsky and his longtime colleague Andrea Moro have a wide-ranging conversation, touching on such topics as language and linguistics, the history of science, and the relation between language and the brain. Chomsky discusses today’s misplaced euphoria about artificial intelligence (Chomsky sees “lots of hype...