Infinite Resignation

Infinite Resignation PDF Author: Eugene Thacker
Publisher: Watkins Media Limited
ISBN: 1912248204
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
“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.” —Vice A ‘nihilist’s devotional,’ this collection aphorisms, fragments, and observations on philosophy and pessimism offer a raw look at the human condition Dark times lie around us and ahead of us, and what better way to survive the coming Apocolypse than by immersing yourself in some of the greatest thinkers on pessimism, brought together with his own thoughts on the subject by Eugene Thacker, author of the contemporary classic, In the Dust of This Planet. Comprised of aphorisms, fragments, and observations both philosophical and personal, Infinite Resignation traces the contours of pessimism, caught as it often is between a philosophical position and a bad attitude. Reflecting on the universe’s “looming abyss of indifference,” Thacker explores the pessimism of a range of philosophers, from the well-known (Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Camus), to the lesser-known (E.M. Cioran, Lev Shestov, Miguel de Unamuno). Readers will find food for thought in Thacker’s handling of a range of themes in Christianity and Buddhism, as well as his engagement with literary figures (from Dostoevsky to Thomas Bernhard, Osamu Dazai, and Fernando Pessoa), whose pessimism about the world both inspires and depresses Thacker. By turns melancholic, misanthropic, and darkly funny, Infinite Resignation is a welcome antidote to the exuberant imbecility of our times.

Infinite Resignation

Infinite Resignation PDF Author: Eugene Thacker
Publisher: Watkins Media Limited
ISBN: 1912248204
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 349

Get Book Here

Book Description
“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.” —Vice A ‘nihilist’s devotional,’ this collection aphorisms, fragments, and observations on philosophy and pessimism offer a raw look at the human condition Dark times lie around us and ahead of us, and what better way to survive the coming Apocolypse than by immersing yourself in some of the greatest thinkers on pessimism, brought together with his own thoughts on the subject by Eugene Thacker, author of the contemporary classic, In the Dust of This Planet. Comprised of aphorisms, fragments, and observations both philosophical and personal, Infinite Resignation traces the contours of pessimism, caught as it often is between a philosophical position and a bad attitude. Reflecting on the universe’s “looming abyss of indifference,” Thacker explores the pessimism of a range of philosophers, from the well-known (Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Camus), to the lesser-known (E.M. Cioran, Lev Shestov, Miguel de Unamuno). Readers will find food for thought in Thacker’s handling of a range of themes in Christianity and Buddhism, as well as his engagement with literary figures (from Dostoevsky to Thomas Bernhard, Osamu Dazai, and Fernando Pessoa), whose pessimism about the world both inspires and depresses Thacker. By turns melancholic, misanthropic, and darkly funny, Infinite Resignation is a welcome antidote to the exuberant imbecility of our times.

Fear and Trembling

Fear and Trembling PDF Author: Soren Kierkegaard
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1625584024
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 142

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Book Description
In our time nobody is content to stop with faith but wants to go further. It would perhaps be rash to ask where these people are going, but it is surely a sign of breeding and culture for me to assume that everybody has faith, for otherwise it would be queer for them to be . . . going further. In those old days it was different, then faith was a task for a whole lifetime, because it was assumed that dexterity in faith is not acquired in a few days or weeks. When the tried oldster drew near to his last hour, having fought the good fight and kept the faith, his heart was still young enough not to have forgotten that fear and trembling which chastened the youth, which the man indeed held in check, but which no man quite outgrows. . . except as he might succeed at the earliest opportunity in going further. Where these revered figures arrived, that is the point where everybody in our day begins to go further.

In the Dust of This Planet

In the Dust of This Planet PDF Author: Eugene Thacker
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 1780990103
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
#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. In the Dust of This Planet explores these relationships between philosophy and horror. In Thacker's hands, philosophy is not academic logic-chopping; instead, it is the thought of the limit of all thought, especially as it dovetails into occultism, demonology, and mysticism. Likewise, Thacker takes horror to mean something beyond the focus on gore and scare tactics, but as the under-appreciated genre of supernatural horror in fiction, film, comics, and music. This relationship between philosophy and horror does not mean the philosophy of horror, if anything, it means the reverse, the horror of philosophy: those moments when philosophical thinking enigmatically confronts the horizon of its own existence. For Thacker, the genre of supernatural horror is the key site in which this paradoxical thought of the unthinkable takes place. The cover of In the Dust of this Planet can be seen in a New York gallery, on a banner at the 2014 Climate Change march in New York and on Jay-Z's back promoting Run. The book influenced the writers of the US TV series True Detective and has been lambasted by ex-Fox News broadcaster, Glenn Beck in this podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IW8OK4_1gQ

Cosmic Pessimism

Cosmic Pessimism PDF Author: Eugene Thacker
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1937561879
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 47

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Book Description
“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 philosophy, it may also contain an enigma central to understanding the horizon of the human. Written in a series of fragments, aphorisms, and prose poems, Thacker’s Cosmic Pessimism explores the varieties of pessimism and its often-conflicted relation to philosophy. “Crying, laughing, sleeping—what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent?”

Kierkegaard and Nietzsche

Kierkegaard and Nietzsche PDF Author: J. Kellenberger
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 023037963X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
This book examines the thinking of two nineteenth-century existentialist thinkers, Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. Its focus is on the radically different ways they envisioned a joyful acceptance of life - a concern they shared. For Kierkegaard, in Fear and Trembling, joyful acceptance flows from the certitude of faith. For Nietzsche, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, joyful acceptance is an acceptance of the eternal recurrence of life, and is ultimately a matter of will. This book explores the relationship between these opposed visions.

Kierkegaard's Concept of Faith

Kierkegaard's Concept of Faith PDF Author: Merold Westphal
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 1467442291
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
In this book renowned philosopher Merold Westphal unpacks the writings of nineteenth-century thinker Søren Kierkegaard on biblical, Christian faith and its relation to reason. Across five books — Fear and Trembling, Philosophical Fragments, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Sickness Unto Death, and Practice in Christianity — and three pseudonyms, Kierkegaard sought to articulate a biblical concept of faith by approaching it from a variety of perspectives in relation to one another. Westphal offers a careful textual reading of these major discussions to present an overarching analysis of Kierkegaard’s conception of the true meaning of biblical faith. Though Kierkegaard presents a complex picture of faith through his pseudonyms, Westphal argues that his perspective is a faithful and illuminating one, making claims that are important for philosophy of religion, for theology, and most of all for Christian life as it might be lived by faithful people.

After Life

After Life PDF Author: Eugene Thacker
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226793737
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Life is one of our most basic concepts, and yet when examined directly it proves remarkably contradictory and elusive, encompassing both the broadest and the most specific phenomena. We can see this uncertainty about life in our habit of approaching it as something at once scientific and mystical, in the return of vitalisms of all types, and in the pervasive politicization of life. In short, life seems everywhere at stake and yet is nowhere the same. In After Life, Eugene Thacker clears the ground for a new philosophy of life by recovering the twists and turns in its philosophical history. Beginning with Aristotle’s originary formulation of a philosophy of life, Thacker examines the influence of Aristotle’s ideas in medieval and early modern thought, leading him to the work of Immanuel Kant, who notes the inherently contradictory nature of “life in itself.” Along the way, Thacker shows how early modern philosophy’s engagement with the problem of life affects thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Georges Bataille, and Alain Badiou, as well as contemporary developments in the “speculative turn” in philosophy. At a time when life is categorized, measured, and exploited in a variety of ways, After Life invites us to delve deeper into the contours and contradictions of the age-old question, “what is life?”

Omnicide

Omnicide PDF Author: Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0997567465
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 489

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Book Description
A fragmentary catalogue of poetic derangements that reveals the ways in which mania communicates with an extreme will to annihilation What kind of circumstances provoke an obsessive focus on the most minute object or activity? And what causes such mania to blossom into the lethal conviction that everything must be annihilated? There is no turning away from the imperative to study this riddle in all its mystifying complexity and its disturbing contemporary resonance—to trace the obscure passage between a lone state of delirium and the will to world-erasure.. A fragmentary catalogue of the thousand-and-one varieties of manic disposition (augomania, dromomania, catoptromania, colossomania…), Omnicide enters the chaotic imaginations of the most significant poetic talents of the Middle East in order to instigate a new discourse on obsession, entrancement, excess, and delirium. Placing these voices into direct conversation, Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh excavates an elaborate network of subterranean ideas and interpretive chambers, byways, and burrows by which mania communicates with fatality. Like secret passages leading from one of the multitudinous details of a bustling Persian miniature to the blank burning immanence of the desert, each is a contorted yet effective channel connecting some attractive universe (of adoration, worship, or astonishment) to the instinct for all-engulfing oblivion (through hatred, envy, indifference, rage, or forgetting). A captivating fractal of conceptual prisms in half-storytelling, half-theoretical prose, a rhythmic, poetic, insidious work that commands submission, Omnicide absorbs the reader into unfamiliar and estranging landscapes whose every subtle euphoric aspect threatens to become an irresistible invitation to the end of all things.

The Routledge Guidebook to Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling

The Routledge Guidebook to Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling PDF Author: John Lippitt
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317376927
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Søren Kierkegaard is one of the key figures of nineteenth century thought, whose influence on subsequent philosophy, theology and literature is both extensive and profound. Fear and Trembling, which investigates the nature of faith through an exploration of the story of Abraham and Isaac, is one of Kierkegaard’s most compelling and widely read works. It combines an arresting narrative, an unorthodox literary structure and a fascinating account of faith and its relation to ‘the ethical’. The Routledge Guidebook to Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling introduces and assesses: Kierkegaard’s life and the background to Fear and Trembling, including aspects of its philosophical and theological context The text and key ideas of Fear and Trembling, including the details of its account of faith and its connection to trust and hope The book’s reception history, the diversity of interpretations it has been given and its continuing interest and importance This Guidebook assumes no previous knowledge of Kierkegaard's work and will be essential reading for anyone studying the most famous text of this important thinker.

Reading Kierkegaard I

Reading Kierkegaard I PDF Author: Paul Martens
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1532613571
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 84

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Book Description
In his posthumously published Journals and Papers, Kierkegaard boldly claimed, "Oh, once I am dead, Fear and Trembling alone will be enough for an imperishable name as an author. Then it will be read, translated into foreign languages as well. The reader will almost shrink from the frightful pathos in the book." Certainly, Fear and Trembling has been translated into foreign languages, and its fame has ensured Kierkegaard's place in the pantheon of Western philosophy. Today, however, most shrink from the book not because of its frightful pathos but because of its fearsome impenetrability. In this first volume of a Reading Kierkegaard miniseries, Martens carefully unfolds the form and content of Kierkegaard's celebrated pseudonymous text, guiding and inviting the reader to embrace the challenge of wrestling with it to the end. Throughout, Martens demonstrates that Fear and Trembling is not merely a book that contains frightful pathos; it is also an entree into Kierkegaard's vibrant and polyphonic corpus that is nearly as restless as the faith it commends.