Kev Nickells's Reviews > In the Dust of This Planet

This ticks a few boxes for me (especially with regards pre-enlightenment philosophy and Theology). We are of course boycotting Zero at the moment so do buy it second-hand if you can.

So this is dealing with a few ideas from pre-enlightenment or 'scientistic' epistemology - demonology, occultism - and how those principles are refracted through horror. The key insight of Thacker's that struck me was that he was keen to circumscribe that (eg) demonology isn't rendered as something to be considered in broader sociological terms (where many thinkers would say something like 'the demon is a manifestation of social anxieties'). Rather Thacker uses the manifest-unknown to think through ideas like nihilism (we might say the nihilate - thought tending towards nihil), which is to say, taking the sources not as antiquated curios so much as key sources in the unknown.

This in my head is similar to a thread that runs through a lot of 20th-century theology - that of taking the predicate of (nominally) antiquated text as serious in its own terms rather than justifying it exclusively in contemporary terms. A kind of non-condescending use of older texts - which is worth saying that in contemporary theology can quickly lead to some volatile conclusions (say the Exclusivism of Daniel Strange). This approach to demonology also problematises a kind of fixed Heideggerian dasein - not least because demonology is so diffuse in its horror. As Thacker points out, it is not merely the anthropic which is saturated with demons (or horror), the landscape (trees, mountains etc) can be writ with demons. The principle of a this and not-this, a thing-in-itself is made complex when horror is invested in the object-in-itself.

A counterpoint to the above would be 'that's a silly way of seeing things' and that's reasonable. Worth noting that Thacker is often drily witty here - there's a sense that Thacker's sincerity isn't per se to reify occultism (which is likely true of his medieval sources) but rather to use the unhewn impulse of horror to think-towards the nihilate. His use of contemporary and earlier horror (say, Dante's inferno through to early 20th-century literature) ends up articulating a contemporary-to-us horror of climatology. Which is an interesting subject for 'reification' in the definitive sense of 'making the abstract concrete' - climate apocalypse leaves us with philosophical quandaries of our own annihilation (how to think the absence of humans-to-think) and is hugely abstract - we're left with a litany of effects but the holistic view of climate-in-general is unknowably diffuse.

That is to say, in conclusion, that this work does a great job of bringing us closer to the horror of the unknown. Not really a happy conclusion but the world is on fire so this feels like a necessary work for the coming horror.