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

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Networks, Swarms, Multitudes" Part 1, Part 2, Ctheory (2004), "Biophilosophy for the 21st Century", Ctheory (2005).

The linguistic contrivance that resulted in the following phrase, "extinction is the non-being of life that is not death.", was for me, the logical nadir. In The Dust Of This Planet has been translated into several languages, including Spanish (Materia Oscura, 2015), Italian (Nero Editions 2018), Russian (Hyle Press, 2017), and German (Mathes & Seitz, 2019). 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. 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.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. 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). Pessimism, Futility, and Extinction" Theory, Culture & Society interview with Thomas Dekeyser (17 March 2020). 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." And They Were Two in One and One in Two, co-edited with Nicola Masciandaro. Schism Press, 2014. ISBN 978-1494701239.

An interesting look at some philosophical themes -- essence, reality, negation, alterity, myth -- with horror and occult themes used as a framework. The work deserves a star, simply for its ambition, given its experimental structures and unconventional ways of organizing its ideas. There are compelling conceptual turns and clever treatments, so it's certainly worth a shot, especially for fans of horror and theory, speculative realism, etc. 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. 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. Some of the early sections are rough around the edges, as I believe some reviewers mentioned. They read like preparatory notes toward some more extensive work, which I look forward to reading. Here ET draws more on cultural sources: the Inferno, pulp horror, music, B movies, TV shows, and the like, rather than mystical or philosophical texts. I was vaguely interested in what he had to say about the cultural material, but none of these are really my thing, and I suppose were there for those who have different inclinations than I do. It is increasingly difficult to comprehend the world in which we live and of which we are not a part. To confront this idea is to confront an absolute limit to our ability to adequately understand the world at all - an idea that has been a central motif of the horror genre for some time.

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. Leper Creativity: The Cyclonopedia Symposium, co-edited with Ed Keller and Nicola Masciandaro. Punctum Books, 2012. ISBN 978-0615600468. 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.

Darklife: Negation, Nothingness, and the Will-to-Life in Schopenhauer," Parrhesia no. 12 (2011), p. 3. Creative Biotechnology: A User's Manual, co-authored with Natalie Jeremijenko and Heath Bunting. Locus+, 2004. ISBN 978-1899377220. 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. Radiolab - In The Dust Of This Planet", original broadcast Monday September 8, 2014. The story was also covered by NPR's On The Media.

Briefly, the argument of the book is that through certain works of the horror genre we can encounter something which the author calls the ‘world-without-us’: a vision of the universe in which humanity is not only extinct but has never existed in any sense, a place which is utterly indifferent even to the idea of us. It is a thing which words fail to describe adequately, perhaps exemplified in Lovecraft’s many tales of inconceivable depths; one could call it ‘dark’ or ‘disturbing’, but our conceptions of what those words entail are limited as notions inherited from religious tradition. 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.

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."The Repeater Book of the Occult, co-edited with Tariq Goddard. Repeater Books, 2021. ISBN 978-1913462079. 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. 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 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. The Exploit: A Theory of Networks, co-authored with Alexander R. Galloway. University of Minnesota Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0816650446.