Tentacles Longer Than Night: Horror of Philosophy vol. 3

Our contemporary horror stories are written in a world where there seems little faith, lost hope, and no salvation. All that remains is the fragmentary and occasionally lyrical testimony of the human being struggling to confront its lack of reason for being in the vast cosmos. This is the terrain of the horror genre. Eugene Thacker explores this situation in Tentacles Longer Than Night. Extending the ideas presented in his book In The Dust of This Planet, Thacker considers the relationship between philosophy and the horror genre. But instead of taking fiction as the mere illustration of ideas, Thacker reads horror stories as if they themselves were works of philosophy, driven by a speculative urge to question human knowledge and the human-centric view of the world, ultimately leading to the limit of the human - thought undermining itself, in thought. Tentacles Longer Than Night is the third volume of the "horror of philosophy" trilogy, together with the first volume, In The Dust of This Planet, and the second volume, Starry Speculative Corpse. 1. Tentacles longer than night The vast and seething cosmos (Poe, Lovecraft) Horror of philosophy On supernatural horror (A personal history) I can't believe what I see, I can't see what I believe 2. Meditations on the demonic On Hell (Dante's Inferno) Digression on Hell Dead tropes, resurrected bodies As above, so below Corruptible bodies Only that which falls can rise again Necrologies Variations on Hell Argento's inferno Disastrous life 3. Meditations on the Gothic Book of beasts (Lautréamont's Maldoror) Tooth and claw, flesh and blood The bliss of metamorphosis I carry around a cadaver Against literature, against life Eaten alive or buried alive Dreams of the cephalophore Long hair of death Floating abattoir Molten media 4. Meditations on the weird Frozen thought (Blackwood, Lovecraft) The logic of the supernatural Neither fear nor thought Neither life nor death Black illumination In praise of shadows Black matheme Naturhorror An exegesis on tentacles We are not from here (Ligotti) Monastery horror 5. As if... As if The wandering philosopher Dethroned Phantasms (III) Horror religiosus A once-living shadow Phantasms (IV) The world becomes a phantom Spectral suicide An argument for the categorical imperative Hymn to horror Unholy matter Qualitas occulta Phantasms (V).