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. 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.

We can even abbreviate these three concepts further: the world-for-us is simply the World, the world-in-itself is simply the Earth, and the world-without-us is simply the Planet. 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. The Patron Saints of Pessimism - A Writer's Pantheon, excerpt from Infinite Resignation @ LitHub (2018) 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.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.

See the essays "Data Made Flesh: Biotechnology and the Discourse of the Posthuman," Cultural Critique no. 53 (2003), "Biohorror/Biotech," Paradoxa no. 17 (2002).an era almost schizophrenically poised between religious fanaticisms and a mania for scientific hegemony..." The Age of Catastrophe, Books.fr/Cairn.info (October 2020) and the journal Collapse (Urbanomic Publications). 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. 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."

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.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. 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. Creative Biotechnology: A User's Manual, co-authored with Natalie Jeremijenko and Heath Bunting. Locus+, 2004. ISBN 978-1899377220. 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.

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. 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. The third section dragged a bit for me, but has some interesting things in it. Here he engages in a fascinating and often very rambling discourse on "Life," not the life of individual organisms, but of all life. This is a concept that is always just outside of reach, most studies that begin with this as their central idea devolve into systems of natural history (studies of individual organisms) or theology. This driving force behind living things remains elusive to us. There's also discussion of the afterlife, the living dead and biblical plagues. An Ideal for Living: An Anti-Novel (20th Anniversary Edition). Schism Press, 2020. ISBN 979-8682903832.

Thy mind o man! . .must search into and contemplate the darkest abyss, and the broad expanse of eternity- thou must commune with God."