eugene thacker, tentacles longer than night, vol. 3 — review
thacker accidentally writes a better book about the gothic right in the middle of his study of the unknown
thacker is most scattered in the first chapter, which has to decide between three different introductory narratives, scattered across four subchapters that all behave like a continuation of the previous but dont meet the margin of a continuation, and also an extension of the previous, also not meeting this criterium due to the fact that they get extinguished before they start to hold any weight. the only thing holding weight in thacker's writing process is the weight behind what he's asking – "what if we read poe or lovecraft as philosophers rather than as writers of short stories? what if we read poe or lovecraft as non-fiction? [...] what is the best way to order human beings and the culture which they have created? at what point does a political philosophy become a political theology?" – rather than what he ever actually manages to say, and the joy of reading it is only carried over by his simplicity and dedication to elucidating his points rather than what he manages to uncover about his questions, since the questions become both instantly answered and also categorically pass over into other concerns way too quickly, which disallows him to enter a genuienly speculative mode.
the text passes topically from literary uncertainty in the first page (poe and lovecraft), to philosophical causality and genre theory only three pages later (todorov, twilight zone), and then to an autobiography where thacker attempts to awkwardly stitch together his own childhood experience with horror in an attempt to give it the stakes he previously argues are really required to encounter it, except that in the academic essay medium this has less than zero value since it has no genuine impact as a small closed-off sequence that disrespects its own origin story (not that most autotheory doesnt fail even without this) which then turns into an analysis of allegory, religion and cosmic pessimism into the last few pages. whats even weirder is that the childhood reminiscal story actually gets weaponized to confirm his thesis rather than offer a genuine moment of original clarity, the subchapter basically starts with a history of his encounter with horror and nearly ends with "it suddenly revealed something about the horror genre I had not expected: that the horror genre is as much driven by ideas as it is driven by emotions ... the horror came not from what you saw, but from what you couldn’t see, and even beyond that, what you couldn’t fathom, what you couldn’t think"
chapter one is audacious in multiple ways. the way it makes use of literary works and films such as "nightmare at two thousand feet", "the shadow out of time", "the black cat", "the devil in love", "the inferno" and "cabin in the woods" - examples which thacker brings up for one exact reason, to elucidate a discussion about horror rather than to experience it as a condition - where the example itself is usually one not even tied to a plot-line but tied to a seperate peripheral discussion on the intentions behind why it was written. this practice makes it interesting to read, since the "vision of the origin and problem of perception" of something is often more instantly entertaining and biographically memorable than anything related to the plotline. but unlike fisher, who in "the weird and the eerie" really does follow close attention to the exact pacing, thacker is more interested in philosophical questions that arise out of the short-hand comments that already sit peripherally, where the questions themselves end up targetting the concept he is hosting.
take for example the inferno, where dante is depicted by thacker as ruminating about how the allegorical function of visiting hell is greater than the non-allegorical one, an irony that thacker seems to either not explicate or fail to even imply, given, what could be more fantastical to us today than the very idea that souls were regularly considered as subject to vanquishment or judgement back then?
or take cabin in the woods, a horror narrative that plays with viewer expectations as supposedly the only way to produce a horror that ripples through the categorically protective labelling mechanisms - zombie as biological entity, vampire as organic bloodlust, of the viewer. even though thacker is right that the breaking of these expectations rather than their falliciation is the cause of existential terror, this very breaking is short-lived if the break itself becomes a point rather than a declaration. one could very well finish "the cabin in the woods" and go home thinking "what could be more horrifying than reality, which is able to produce the concept of horror itself?"
this thought would follow linearly from cabin in the woods, but it would fail to make it a simulacrum if that same vision is compounded by the idea that everything the cabin could possibly assert is already non-terrifying, outside of visions of existence that can quantify our meaning making reportoire. thacker reveals to us in a way that directors today are literally faced with the problem of having to figure out what made a vampire scary that now no longer makes it as such. this very problem is not a problem of horror, but a problem that lacks horror. this very same horror, despite thackers instinct, cant be quantified in the same way, given that it doesnt produce the organic meeting with the horrifying that would allow it to appear granted rather than synthesized.
for example, if he's speaking about how the fantastic has to either be an internal illusion or a real vision, this problem itself is literalized into being about horror as an event, which in and of itself doesnt broaden the idea past the concept that was already excavated by it. or when he mentions how he worries about whether psychology or science are demythologizing our ability to encounter the real through gothic enviornments or the horror of experience, this same idea isnt just left open ended but is also categorically treated as horror, which loosens any delianted distinction between the categories. thacker poses in the conclusion to the chapter:
"our contemporary horror stories are written in a world in which religious fanaticism routinely exterminates religious experience, a world in which scientific fanaticism explains and controls everything, a climatological world, after nietzsche’s “death of god,” where there seems little faith, lost hope, and no salvation." yet ends it by tying this idea to the idea that the universe's inhumanity is tied to the association that religious horror is about how the real terror isnt humans doing bad things to other humans but a greater indifference that shrouds us. he chooses to protect this vision of a multi-scalar horror so as to not make a sentiment outside of his own discipline, or so as not to politicize the same substance that horror needs to weaponize against us in order to cultivate a sense of dread.
yet, what is the reason thacker mentions the numinous if not to point to the idea that horrifying encounters themselves have lessened in possibility? this contrasts quite oddly with the tensive and powerful way the book starts, by examining edgar allan poe's genuine fear of his own account.
by the time we get to chapter two, its clear hes not even writing the same book anymore. this on its own isnt just bad because its digressive, but because the digression ends up eating itself up. in "dead tropes, resurrected bodies", thacker spends the chapter arguing that a body politic was brought to us by plato's polis - and that he used metaphors for health and part-dependent class categorizations to make it happen, resurrected by paul's christologicalism - who argued that every single organ involved tabular matching in his influence on cusa and aquinas, and then brought back to life by hobbes, who "gives us the best account" as its noted in full.
that, along with the claim that as the body politic is composed it also collapses, is the only thing present in a subchapter that's supposed to revive a dead trope. this chapter in itself is a sort of dead trope of a supposed political theology that did far more than just metaphorize the body into politics. in the next two subchapters, thacker does successfully argue why it came about (as a challenge to thinking about political order, as a creative interprise connected to a natural body that can justify it, as a balanced stratification, as governance centralizing sovereign circulations, as a problem of exceptionalism in sovereignty corresponding to order, etc...) after which he spends another two whole chapters detailing the exact specificities of a medical ontology.
all of this historicizing falls flat into his exposition into dantes, where in "necrologies" he elucidates how the city of dis is an inverted polis where the living dead exist as subjects who have passed through the logic and judgement of a particular sovereignity, sects of people living in shadows and tombs, damned due to their own social participation, one that he predictably uses foucault to analyze as an geneological archeology of a particular time.
all of this additional historicizing also falls flat by the time he finishes the chapter, where he simply states "today, however, we no longer speak of the body politic ... they are dead metaphors. ... this is not because the concept as such has ceased to exist. ... it never been so relevant as it is in contemporary philosophical discussions over the “state of exception,” “biopolitics,” and the “multitude” – in addition to the zombie-like proliferation of films, tv shows, and the like, all of which feature some variant of dante’s living dead in the city of dis"
all of this makes you wonder what thacker's role in all of this is? he has spent ten subchapters, an entire chapter of a book that connects neither to the previous nor successive chapter, detaling an entire cross-history between dantes and political theologians, only to end on a sour note that the concept is more relevant than ever but in all the forms he doesnt expect to see, in all the cultural forms he won't thoroughly analyze aside from note fragments or brief mentions, in all the ways that philosophical analysis cant pronounce, in all the ways that thacker himself chooses not to instrumentalize, in all the studies of "frommsoftware" games and zombie movies that he doesnt do, in all the actual particularities of a body politics he doesnt analyze, in all the alternative history he mentions in bodin, grotius, and althusius that he argues this chapter isnt meant for, in all the speculative questions he already uses schmitt to answer, in the reader's contract that this chapter doesnt just offer a scholarly account that horror can be perfectly ordered and still meaningful?
the only moment that breaks is a short original fictive writing where he uses his interest in argento's suspiria to construct an argentian version of the inferno, a woman in an apartment building who falls down a cellar full of water, only to discover the past history of the building within it, the "body horror" of residentialism. the point of this chapter is that the living inhabit structures designed by the dead, ruled by old occult arrangements they do not understand, and the horror behind what thacker is stitching here is essentially that the inferno did become realized, it became literalized in our life, except instead of a mythical portrayal or a conquest, its this passive entity thats hugged us really tight and corrupted our living experience, or otherwise brought hell to us without us realizing. our very lives are governed by dead people” thacker writes.
now the issue with all of this is is that thacker never decides to critically evaluate philosophy. it seems that all he can do is either stitch his inspirations together (like in the aformentioned subchapter) or prove his scholarly capacity (like in the surrounding nine subchapters). you can think to yourself, "yes its cool, wow, what a great image!" after being surprised by a fictional account surrounding historicla commentary. yet, at least chapters one and four try to be speculative, try to think. a proper scholarly account reveals new lines, a soft commentatorial account scaffolds around an argument. this chapter does neither, it just drags you through scholaricity, which is great for discovery and a re-integration of well known concepts but not for much else.
there is really no shame or harm in doing this, and its an exercise that proves the ability to really sit inside of history as somebody that can understand it. but, what is the point in sitting inside a history that thacker at the end dismisses as subsumed by greater forces today? what's the point of always looking at a concept from a past that you already claim has been reintegrated by more powerful forces? or the point in an account of commentary that would be done way better by way more boring people, precisely wasted when the idea of a necropolis is evaluated by thacker through the concept of a philosophically useful revelation, one that, conclusively, he could have spent time developing instead of deliniating.
chapter three features another break, a surprising and sudden detour into latremount's book of beasts, a much more obscure historical relic compared to his other interests, which also makes it a far more scholarly important chapter than the surrounding material. the other thing that makes it far more scholarly important is that its by far the most depthly researched piece in the work, moving from bachelards analysis, a careful reading of the work itself, a constant attachment to aristotle's philosophies, and into a four-piece detour that manages to give a systematically argued definition of the gothic, even if by the end, this logic scatters through so many mediums anthologically that the central thesis starts to float around.
however, the first two chapters set up the author behind the work and his internal logic, which helps in situating his intentions and perspectives, since this work as has been displayed is more anthological, questioning the limits of thinking itself rather than the ability to write a piece of literature or the contents behind it. however, a lot of the biography could've been thinned down to show more of the speculation and less of the description. thacker spends the whole first chapter explaining how it motivated surrealists, what other people wrote about it, how the first critic treated it as this amazing but distant object, and so on. the chapter also ends on this conclusion: "all of the “facts” surrounding maldoror seem to point to a text that, at all levels, attempts to unhumanize itself, divesting itself of authorship, authentic voice, and even significance. the text of maldoror is predatory in its extensive borrowings, and, true to praz’s words, ultimately becomes an autophage, devouring itself in the process."
this very same conclusion then ends up carrying into the other four subchapters about the work, which, by the end of the first half of the chapter, not only does the lautremont section abruptly end, but thacker actually ends the book with the exact same conclusion yet again: "it works through various textual assertions, but these assertions are really negations, the negation of the bodies in the text and the auto-negation of the body of the text itself ... maldoror is, in a way, the most “gothic” of texts because it takes the gothic logic of decay and decomposition to its extreme point, where the text itself begins to crumble beneath its anti-human negations, its negations of all form – including literary form. as a book, maldoror renders itself as a ruin."
it is however true that the chapters talk about something a little different, even if they end in the idea that the work swallows itself, or drowns in its own ruin, or is written as an ultimate negation. the first is a negation of principles, style and sufficient reason, which thacker analyzes through the motif of laruelle's non-philosophy, or the principle that philosophy must be sufficient towards itself instead of towards other subjects, an idea that could just as easily pass as one particular doctrine of meta-philosophy, if it wasnt for the fact that non-philosophy itself serves more as a tendency to promote the resignations and distances towards styles of thinking in much the same way the book of beasts does, than to simply posit a perspective of evaluation. thacker writes: "bachelard’s evocation of a non-lautréamontism looks forward to the “non-philosophy” of françois laruelle, who also makes the comparison to non-euclidian geometry. for laruelle, non-philosophy is neither anti-philosophy nor meta-philosophy. it takes philosophy as its raw material, illuminating the “philosophical decision” that structures the separation of philosophy from [subjects], and that also internally distinguishes [metaphysics] from regional philosophy"
the idea for thacker naturally is that since something can complicate the form or self representation of its own subject, it can naturally resist the notion that its representation must match the style under which it seems to accompany itself by. this same idea is the problem of calling something a "non" thing, even bachelard's proposal to call on a non-lautréamontism is really a proposal to extend his own style of inquiry, not in a way that genre-fies it but in a way that "promotes it" as a project or proper way of thinking. the reason this promotion is being highlighted is because thacker believes that the animality and mistanthropy of the book of beasts is not even its own subject, but rather a proposal to "think in the way the book believes itself to carry along with itself", or in other words, the rape of a young girl, ferocious sex with a shark, god turning into something arbitrary, being able to see the world through an oak tree, mathematics becoming cursed and weaponizing itself against the human, a bunch of birds acting passioned and enlightened retrospected to the dirty world of humans, all of this for thacker is an ability to think past the form of something and into the essence of a "new way to behave about it".
thacker writes "maldoror is non-literature because in every phrase it questions the “literary decision” that literature be at once apart from and yet engaged in that which it depicts.", but later rescinds his statement through deleuze to argue that literature itself passes into a literature that resists life as an imperative and proposes it as a movement that considers itself, with the bold statement "it would seem that any non-lautréamontism or non-literature immediately raises the possibility of a non-life, a life that cannot be lived, or, better yet, the “lived-without-life." yet, take as an example the classic kierkegaardian critique implicitly present in "prefaces", or otherwise, a situation where there is an existing branch of people invested almost exclusively into copying the style of lautreamont and laruelle without the necessary intimate fervor to justify that feeling. or think about it from the perspective of that same group of people not having a single justifiable reason to do it past genrefying the tendency. or on the other hand, a group that is so wholly devoted to the aesthetic of that way of thinking that they reduce the works messages entirely to the vibe they give off, that they accidentally reproduce its logic through examples that increasingly stray far from the implied ideology behind it.
yet this same way of behaving about something is in fact still nonetheless the genre of the thing, yet it could be a revolutionary genre, something about the idea could be presented in such a way that even prevents the domestification of the ideology by others, or the ability to even turn it into something reproducible just by its sheer force. thacker writes "all of this proceeds from the premise that the animality of maldoror is not reducible to animals. this in turn means a focus on the form-giving and form-generating process in life forms, taken to its extreme in the many cases of monstrous metamorphoses. here animality is that form-generating principle of life ... that conditions the very possibility of form and forming"
thacker infuzes this idea with this other narrative "maldoror is non-literature because in every phrase it questions the “literary decision” that literature be at once apart from and yet engaged in that which it depicts." which is not enough to justify a non-literature but nonetheless a meta-literature about non-literature. a true non-literature would be one where surrealists refuse to use words, such as in experimental fascist writings that depict machine guns through an aesthetics of fonted and abbreviated letterings meant to depict emotion. a form-of-literature is one that understands itself as having transcended its own domain in so far as its subject of consideration is far grander and has higher stakes than those around it, yet these same stakes are internal to the vision rather than a total collapse of the entire domain, unlike the popular surrealist sentiment "andré breton noted that maldoror was “the expression of a revelation so complete it seems to exceed human potential.”"
thacker writes in another instance "an animality not reducible to animals, an assertion made in the text’s frequent transgression of both naturalistic and narrative form". clearly, lautremont is writing about animals as above humans in order to point to the human condition. thacker himself points out that there is something spiritual in the work, that it transcends the human condition, both the body politic and naked life of something regarding the human in order to push it past its epistemic limit and into a reconsideration that can transcend those limits in its postulation. the tension is clear. two subchapters prior to the one about literature, thacker tells us that bachelard reads maldoror as “bliss of metamorphosis”: animality as aggressive forming, tearing, sucking, claw, tooth, flesh, blood. thacker writes "bachelard stresses this active, dynamic, “aggressive” animality in maldoror, in which animality is equivalent to function." thacker likes this, but also thinks it risks becoming too vitalist and reliant on “creative imagination.” in the next subchapter, he ties the text with the gothic, which for him is the dissolution of all form, the discomboluation and liquidification and to some extent partial nullification and dissipitation of life forces around things, forces that lay their subjects bear and empty.
in the subchapters following this one, he analyzes this through different motifs like a slaughterhouse, hair remaining on the head even after the body has died - almost in the form of an alien, the withering away of the corpse and flesh, the wearing of the mask on the head that slowly takes over the human, or one could even be reminded of the other gothic references in the work such as when poe's portrait drawing inadvertently features the real human behind it as already dead or having been dissapitated or their life force withdrawn in the process of the painting, or otherwise having already long rotted in place. thacker writes "however, [bachelard] tends to downplay the central importance of the gothic in maldoror, both in its style and in its literary context. in this gothic mode, life exists only to the extent that it constantly ceases to exist; the prodigality of forms only exists in so far as they are decaying, decomposing, or disintegrating"
thacker also gives us examples on how the work presents subjects as both actively viral and intense but also frozen in place and stuck in their own position, such as when a flock of starlings behaves both in collective and principled and organized ways, yet can also be seen as a totality that is directionless and moving about in chaotic and unbounded ways. there is however a tendency that thacker seems to have where, the animality-mistanthropy line, the bliss-negativity line, and the genre-antigenre lines all seem to collapse around the idea of the gothic as something that dissolves yet transcends, negates form yet postulates substance into form, negates representation yet represents in a curious and sometimes intense manner. all this to say, thacker has an implicit gnostic reading of maldoror that transcends it above horror but below postulation.
this makes him faithfully resistant to harsh or generalizing or overly inspired readings of the book of beasts, but it also forces him to accept that the work is meta-allegorical towards its own object of interest, or essentially, that there cant be a comedy of misanthropy that actually privilidges the human reader inadvertently, only to latently repress him but in a way that awkwardly gives him credence, or even worse, to accept that an inhuman reader base of the work already exists, that there is an apophatic resting ground where animality is not inhuman violence metaphyiscally inflicted apriority, and that neither is a text thats negative towards the world both above the state of the world but below its entire possible state of being.
a work can be gnostic and intense in implication but agnostic in final treatment or subsumption, or it can allow tiself to reach far and opress at times, but also to still wish to experience the human world in another, to stumble as low as rape in order to point to the intricacies of a random dog, rather than to negate the entire human condition and carry with itself a text that attempts to ignite the entire world aflame so it can preserve its own logic. thacker writes "Into this world maldoror depicts the invasion of animality, the invasion of the human by the unhuman" tying this to the idea that the work collapses the very subject-object distinction by turning humans swiftly into other animals. this can be read as advanced misanthropy in as much as it can be read as gnostic apophaticism or revalatory spiritual neoplatonism, but what is essential here is that a human reader not be a politically human reader to understand the inhuman within him or the world.
thacker writes "the result of such disruptions in the conventions of poetic language is that the reader “finds that lautréamont is revealing to him a new mode of perception, a vision which is not restricted by the artificial limits imposed through culture, since the boundaries between the objective and subjective have vanished.” this idea points more towards the limits of a possible cultural imagination than a total justification of post-cultural heresy, which would appear far more athiestic than a text that denies the implicit joint boundary between "man and god". no work so rich could ever be so gnostic, in a certain sense, what thacker really points out to us is that the genre of misanthropy is a genre that considers the human rather than voids it, that considers it in a flagellatory, auto-self-erotic manner.
in a sense this then leads to the conclusion that a real anti-human text would be required to fundamentally isolate what is essential about human and animal away from both human and animal, and postulate only the type of monster that doesnt offend human or animal but offends the ground upon which they can be thought, and then confirms that ground as superior. lautremont partially denies the human due to proximity for it in every breath, due to consideration. he regularly features human skin as felt, human conversations and bonds as implicitly possible, and other such devices, and references his own poetics towards an otherwise very human reader.
thacker does get closer to this idea later on in his slaughterhouse chapter, which is partially a celebration against carnism and industrial agriculture, where he uses pascals writing: "imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, some of whom are each day butchered in the sight of the others; those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows, and looking at each other with grief and despair await their turn. this is the image of the human condition." this abjectification and misconsideration of the fundamental nature of man is far closer than his subsumption into a gothic dissolution through dehumanization. yet, in a sense, the very metaphor of dante's inferno and the thombs and shadows and slicings and anti-bondings of seeing others butchered in your stead gives an image of consideration. how evil can a service really be, even a funeral service of torment, if it is oriented around the human? maybe the camera in the movie "leviathan" that thacker points to is closer, a camera that doesnt care about human vision, but only its consequences.
now, imagine a lautremontian "book of cameras" where those very same human disposal rituals just happen to be the ambient enviorment, but you can only see so much. the narrator, the speculative "camera" of such a work would but only barely mention such events, not focusing particularly on their behalf. it is not enough just to not focus or ambientalize, to truly see from the inhuman lense, or to encounter a dissolution of epistemology, one must view the world as already in that way, and this is one thing lautremont does not do. just take a look at a single line in an entire paragraph that thacker quotes: "my anus has been blocked by a crab. encouraged by my inertia, it guards the entrance with its pincers and causes me considerable pain!" the service of a crab blocking an entrance, an augmentation of the anus. or yet another unquoted paragraph from the work "human laws still pursued me with their vengeance, although i did not attack the race that i had abandoned so calmly. but my conscience made me no reproaches. during the day i fought with my new fellow creatures, and the earth was saturated with countless layers of clotted blood. i was the strongest and i bore away all the victories."
once we get to chapter four, the regression and compression that existed in chapter one return but in an even more cliche manner - its fallback on kant and lovecraft fails to distinguish its own charater underneath. thacker seems to be in the mode of a philosophical tourist, splicing little motives together as if taking film notes. how come philosophers today still obsess over canonical names hundreds of years old, even with titles that allow an authorial voice to peak through? there is a sense of natural aversion that should arise whenever kant and lovecraft appear in any writing of this thematically free type, due to what you can predict the thesis declares. the thesis falls back on itself the whole time, once you see a single pargaraph, it's like you've read the whole book. worse than that, once you've actually read the whole book, thacker's recursive writing style makes you feel like you've lost more knowledge on the topic than you've actually gained, given how his writing essentially has the role of killing your assumptions on the topic more than it implants new ideas.
there have been thousands of horror esque variations in this world, whole fandoms and tropes and styles and genres of film have been made after them. the choice to borrow the existing schema of only these two thinkers is tasteless, when theres so many things to engage in as one of the few prominent or visible philosophers of horror, its like the moral weight is so high in this position but the outcome clearly so low. and the thesis revolves around such simple ideas, mainstream horror is fear of the unknown vs lovecraftian fear is a fear about the unknown being unknown, dread is anguish that understands, terror is anguish that seeks to flee this understanding. i mean it really misses the mark of relevance entirely
one thing that is salvaged in this writing - even if not the content - is the author's position and ambition. thacker is clearly writing from the position of horror's existential importance to thought, and proximity to lived experience. he is directly symmetrical to the questions that don't appear heavy as in appear profound, but that make horror into an object of the sublime in a way thats supposed to validate its presence. horror as an object of sublime is exhausted, it is in a categorically edgy position attempting to confront questions it can no longer hold the weight of, like a poor and broken down scaffolding trying to hold the weight of newly realized existential queries. these new queries are the new cultural positions of the world, which have literally dominated reinessance era thought by drawing it as irrelevant and over enunciated, audacious in its strenght but empty in its theological underpinnings.
but the new wave of cultural horror is a pastiche, a bourgeoise form of entertainment, a simulacrum past-time. thacker is right to deny it, to deny the impulse to view horror as aristotle would classify plants, or as disneyland goers would enjoy themeparks, by fuzing it with the object of sublimity capable of removing the thrill behind it and re inserting it as a bubble of intruige, as something that can allow you to re experience the weight in things. second hand horror (from the outside looking back in) never fully escapes a simulacrum, because the object of the real weight of the world always rests in what is not considered a category of horror but an existential experience, in whatever at the time is the most cruical issue.
so simultaneously, the task thacker should have is to shift both the philosophical perspective onto the cultural advancement of what horror is, but to reimburse it with the proper weight, to de-simulacrify it just enough to see the clear exit line, but not enough to fully cast or banish it back into meta-realism, to hold the nicest, thinnest line between worlds where the object of horror can rest. clearly thacker is facing too much on the side of a fake sublimity surpassed, but his pseudo heideggerian positioning preserves him as a philosophical voice way more than it would if he started to do a minor analysis of new horror culture, unless he genuinely believed in those categories and could prove them
thacker confirms this very narrative when he argues in chapter 5: “a new ignorance is on the horizon, an ignorance borne not of a lack of knowledge but of too much knowledge, too much data, too many theories, too little time”. other than the recursivity in this chapter, one line does stick out “the truly disturbing thing is not just that other people might not act accordingly, but that the whole non-human world may not act accordingly”. this actually posits the universal as a potential cosmic actor, an idea that appears quite fresh next to thacker's usually more passive pacing recursivity. the tragedy of the whole project ultimately is that he repeatedly glimpses the contemporary horror condition, but his conclusions essentially soften it and kill any genuine value it can produce, after which he usually retreats back into kant/lovecraft/the numinous before any of his insights end up being able to hold any weight