I love Eugene Thacker, he changed how I see the world. This book took me a while to read because it got dense in some parts, but it didn't stop me from loving it.

An easy-reading, pop-friendly account of pessimism in philosophical history. If there is such a thing as pessimistic, light reading, this is it. Great for microdosing with existential dread, right before bed.

Just like the first book in the series, this is thought-provoking and compelling despite its occasional impenetrability.

Loved it! This series is one of the best commentaries on Philsophy that I have read.

This book was a little denser to me since I'm not exactly a philosophy major. I enjoyed it's content but I think some of the rigor may have been lost on me personally. There were a few really interesting nuggets that are something I want to look more into but overall I found the book insightful despite being bombarded with terms. Definitely worthwhile if you're interested in the subject material.

This second installment in the Horror of Philosophy series is definitely more philosophically charged than the first one. Thacker takes us through the tradition of Darkness Mysticism and various typologies of darkness/blackness, the Kyoto's School's fascination with absolute nothingness (sunyata) and the Schopenhauer's reworking of the Kantian split as opposed to German Idealist double folding of the noumena in the phenomena and vice versa (Will or Will-to-Life as the inhuman drive within us). W...

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“The proposition that governs this book, Starry Speculative Corpse, is that something interesting happens when one takes philosophy not as a heroic feat of explaining everything, but as the confrontation with this thought that undermines thought, this philosophy of futility.”Again, I have to preface this with confessions of bias, I absolutely love the subject matter of this series so I was easily sucked into this book after reading In The Dust of This Planet.This book sent more chills down my sp...

Of the three volumes of Eugene Thacker's brilliant Horror of Philosophy series, Starry Speculative Corpse is perhaps the only one that faulters slightly in the face of his ambition. Based on the premise of "mis-reading" philosophy texts as horror stories, I feel sympathetic as someone who has written numerous essays with clearly set goals that, somehow, end up being un-met in favour of a more conservative, albeit successful pursuit of academic rigour, that what SSC ends up as looks suspiciously

Less punchy and incisive than "In the Dust of This Planet" (though the title is equally strong), here we dance through Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer, and the history of philosophy. Interesting, but it didn't jump out at me as much. Only pick it up if you enjoy reading philosophy. I did quite enjoy the section on darkness.

Slower reading than the first, but understandableA really interesting look at philosophers such as Nietzsche, Kant, and Schopenhauer. This book focuses much more on philosophy itself than the first volume of the trilogy, "In the Dust of Planet". As a result it's a bit slower reading, but even if you don't have much background in philosophy at all it is still approachable.

More cohesive and cogent than its predecessor “In the Dust of This Planet,” Thacker mines Western (and a little Eastern) philosophy for insights we typically associate with the horror genre.If you’re a fan of grimdark armchair philosophizing from writers like Thomas Ligotti, E.M. Cioran, and Schopenhauer this is essential reading. Suitably, the volume ends in the nowhere and nothing one might expect. It arrives there changed (or the same or both or neither).

There was more meat on this volume compared to the first one, but it was also still plagued by most of the shortcomings that haunted its prequel. Crossing my fingers for the third volume.

Thacker's "heretic" reading of Meister Eckhart's treatment of a single passage from Bible (Acts 9.8: "Paul rose from the ground and with open eyes saw nothing") is quite possibly the most horrifying thing I have ever read.Dehşet."He saw nothing, that is God"

Trilogy’s best one.“And so the human being discovers, at last, that its existence has always been subtended by its non-existence, that it dies the moment it lives, and that, perhaps, we do nothing but carry around a corpse that itself carries around the sullen grey matter that occasionally wonders if the same sullen stars that occupy every firmament at every scale also occupy this starry speculative corpse”

This book was much denser than volume one of Thacker's Horror of Philosophy series. It retains the humour and wit of "In the dust of this planet," but the pop culture references are much fewer and far between. As someone who has not read primary sources by Plato, Decartes or Kant, I struggled to grapple with some of the theoretical concepts and approaches discussed by Thacker. This book asks a lot more of its readers than volume one did, and assumes a solid base knowledge of philosophy and it's

So much good Schopenhauer

This book is part two of the Philosophy of Horror. Despite this link to the horror genre and an introduction that promises a reading of philosophical works as horror, the link is only occasionally established. This book is more of a history and extended argument of cosmic pessimism. I enjoyed reading it and found the text scholarly, stimulating, and very deep. However, it is, at times, very dense. I cannot claim to have fully understood all of the arguments in my first reading. There were plenty...

Those, like me, who are attracted to Thacker for his meta-analyses of horror fiction will find this second edition to his Horror of Philosophy a bit tricky, as it wades deep in theory with little fiction to grasp on to. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Kant are some of the names most discussed. The book functions as a sort of poetic ouroboros, constantly acknowledging its ironic existence as a discussion of the philosophy of negating philosophy. The chief focus of this book, much like its predecesso...

"Every star in the universe will have burnt out, plunging the cosmos into a state of absolute darkness and leaving behind nothing but spent husks of collapsed matter. All free matter, whether on planetary surfaces or in interstellar space, will have decayed, eradicating any remnants of life based in protons and chemistry, and erasing every vestige of sentience--irrespective of its physical basis. Finally, in a state cosmologists call 'asymtopia,' the stellar corpses littering the empty universe