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

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I appreciated most when he wrapped-up the Occult and began the project of situating current versions of (Horror-rooted/genre)"mysticism" in the world of ecology: our "beyond science and faith" approach to it. It's not nature worship; it's not the white stag and the Wild Hunt necessarily, though I think one could do some nifty readings of Barron using aspects of his theories, but a sort of ecology stripped-down to its processes and illuminated, somehow beyond both science and spirituality(still not entirely clear on this--I'll tinker with it a bit more and see what I might have missed). It reminded me of a discussion I had a while ago about what exists "beyond" post-modernism, post-modern-post-modernism, and other silliness. 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. I understood what he was doing most of the time, however, and appreciated it even if it didn't hold my interest completely in spots and even when he appears to fall short with the supporting logic. It's a pretty ambitious undertaking, and I like that quality of it. He was working with some fairly complicated ideas, on whole.

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. In that same vein, he does a nice, albeit short, reading of "From Beyond" that I enjoyed and found interesting. The connection with the "magic circle" is one that I never would have made. It wasn't until the final sections that I really began to appreciate his ideas, but that's mostly because he was moving into my areas of interest. I'm sure there are plenty of Horror fans whose passion is mysticism and occultism and who would prefer this volume to the others that I (frustratingly--I'm spoiled now) must wait on for delivery.Radiolab - In The Dust Of This Planet", original broadcast Monday September 8, 2014. The story was also covered by NPR's On The Media.

I would have rated this work higher, but the ideas didn't gel, or build in any intelligible way. When no continuous thread is discernible, it makes the whole work feel like a stream of consciousness of provocations and obscurity. It clearly takes itself seriously, despite its occasional sense of irony, but it doesn't move beyond the standard philosophical motif that governs all horror-oriented theoretical projects: The universe is defined by an absolutely unknowable Other, which engages us in paradoxes of alterity when we try to approach it. This is the third book I've read that was in some way connected to True Detective, but it was actually hearing it endorsed by Warren Ellis and listening to an episode of Radiolab ( http://www.radiolab.org/story/dust-pl...) about the strange story around the book's cover ending up in a Jay-Z/Beyonce video that pushed me over the edge. Ciò che mi sarei aspettata di trovare: un saggio, alla maniera di "The Weird and the Eerie" di Mark Fisher, dove opere musicali, letterarie e cinematografiche sono chiamate in causa e analizzate per mostrare come il linguaggio dell'arte sappia descrivere e definire, ma soprattutto trasmettere, concetti e suggestioni altrimenti impossibili da rendere. an era almost schizophrenically poised between religious fanaticisms and a mania for scientific hegemony..." 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.

Darklife: Negation, Nothingness, and the Will-to-Life in Schopenhauer," Parrhesia no. 12 (2011), p. 3. This is an incredibly ambitious book of philosophy, in that it is quite literally trying to "think the unthinkable," or to establish a kind of mysticism / belief system that is without any human (anthropocentric) basis whatsoever. In other words, to create a framework for interpreting reality from an increasingly remote point of view... that of the planet, of the cosmos, of nothingness itself-- which is nothing, therefore it cannot even be an 'itself,' and should not be described as the absence of things but rather more extremely as the absence of absence.

Pessimism, Futility, and Extinction" Theory, Culture & Society interview with Thomas Dekeyser (17 March 2020).See also “Nekros; or, the Poetics of Biopolitics” in Zombie Theory: A Reader (University of Minnesota Press, 2017); “Necrologies: The Death of the Body Politic” in Beyond Biopolitics (Duke University Press, 2011). 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 Age of Catastrophe, Books.fr/Cairn.info (October 2020) and the journal Collapse (Urbanomic Publications).