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.

Thacker is writing about the limits of human thought, and while he offers interesting avenues to explore these ideas, it can be a bit of a dense and overly academic read.But even the Earth is simply a designation that we’ve given to something that has revealed itself or made itself available to the gathering of samples, the generating of data, the production of models, and the disputes over policy. 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.

Thacker begins his exploration of these ideas in his first chapter, titled “Three Quaestio on Demonology.Do you yourself (not Kant) think that the chair you think you are sitting on right now, actually exists independently of you out “there” or is it only in you and nowhere else? Yes, I personally do believe there is something (independent of me) that corresponds to the chair I am sitting in. Let me piggyback on your example: Let’s say that there is a reality in which I encounter the numbers 7423. The philosophy of horror” suggests an attempt to philosophize about horror, perhaps by looking for its essential characteristics in various experiential, literary and cinematic forms.

I think what Thacker is making reference to is very much like – if not identical to – what Kant has referred to as the “noumenal” world: the “thing-in-itself. Also, check out WNYC Studio's On the Media episode Staring into the Abyss, in it Brooke Gladstone and Jad Abumrad continue their discussion of nihilism and its place in history. Seems to me that certainly there is reality independent of all human thought (something like noumenon). 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.p. 9) Horror, in this sense, derives from the thought that there is a non-human world, cut off and unconcerned with human existence. The world-without-us is as much a cultural concept as it is a scientific one, and, as this book attempts to show, it is in the genres of supernatural horror and science fiction that we most frequently find attempts to think about, and to confront the difficult thought of, the world-without-us. There's two stars here because it does, in places, set out some fairly interesting ideas (if you can manage to wade through the more vacuous portions). Thacker's most widely read book is In the Dust of This Planet, part of his Horror of Philosophy trilogy. Far from a simplistic or one-dimensional work on the virtues of nihilism, In the Dust of this Planet is a fascinating and wide-ranging exploration into the relationship between horror and philosophy.

Eugene Thacker is the author of several books, including In The Dust Of This Planet (Zero Books, 2011), and Cosmic Pessimism (Univocal, 2015). Among the interviewees in the episode, the amused author of the book, Eugene Thacker (who also happens to be Abumrad’s brother-in-law), tries to explain the recent popularity of a book that he expected very few people, none of them famous rappers, to read. Having read the introductory chapter, I was really keen to get on with this work and to see what secrets lay within. The world-in-itself is a paradoxical concept; the moment we think it and attempt to act on it, it ceases to be the world-in-itself and becomes the world-for-us. Thacker’s discourse on the intersection of horror and philosophy is utterly original and utterly captivating…In the Dust of This Planet is an encyclopedic grimoire instructing us in the varieties of esoteric thought and infernal diversions that exist for the reader’s further investigation, treating us to a delightful stroll down a midway of accursed attractions that alone are worth the ticket of this volume.

P. Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, Edgar Allan Poe, Dante's Inferno, Les Chants de Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont, the Faust myth, manga artist Junji Ito, contemporary horror authors Thomas Ligotti and Caitlín Kiernan, K-horror film, and the philosophy of Schopenhauer, Rudolph Otto, Medieval mysticism ( Meister Eckhart, Angela of Foligno, John of the Cross), occult philosophy, and the philosophy of the Kyoto School. Noumena here might be thought of as consisting of my objective existence, including all of the distortions occurring in my mind, along with the objective existence of the numbers. The book does have a very interesting premise, and on that front at least is leagues above some of the dusty pedantic fare which often deposits itself in academic journals.