{∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅}}} : Rage Against the Meat Grinder

Collapse also included the philosopher Graham Harman’s early attempt to propose H. P. Lovecraft as a thinker equal if not more important than his contemporary, Edmund Husserl, the German founder of phenomenology. To counter Husserl, whose work had dominated twentieth century thought and placed it within the horizon of the problem of the subjective apprehension of the world, Harman suggested Lovecraft’s use of horror was a pioneering attempt to dethrone anthropocentric conceptions of time and space. Instead, horror provides glimpses of the world of things beyond the subject/object divide. Lovecraft’s fiction specifically provided a sense of the cosmic indifference of the universe.  The real lay beyond the subject/object horizon: a place that no longer ‘correlated’ with Kantian categorical imperatives: The Thing-in-Itself. This ‘weird realism’, as Harman coined it, was not focused on the human subject at all but on that which could not be correlated to human frameworks (the critique of ‘correlationism’ is associated with another French non-philosopher, Quentin Meillassoux, who has also used science fiction as a way of philosophizing without philosophy). ‘No other writer’, Harman said at the beginning of his book-length study of Lovecraft, ‘is so perplexed by the gap between objects and the power of language to describe them … Despite his apparently limited interest in philosophy, Lovecraft as a tacit philosopher is violently anti-idealist and anti-Human.’ This is how a once-derided pulp novelist became a linchpin for what has become known since 2010 as ‘object-oriented ontology.’

The allied project of American para-philosopher Eugene Thacker has included a three-volume study, not of the ‘philosophy of horror’ but, reversing the genitive, of what he calls the horror of philosophy. He defines the philo-fiction of horror as confronting the very limits of the capacity of conventional philosophical thought, the objectal world-without-us that lies beyond philosophical capture. ‘Horror’, as Thacker puts it, ‘is a non-philosophical attempt to think about the world-without-us philosophically.’ Just to express how weirdly this weird had been mainstreamed, after Nic Pizzolatto name-checked Thacker as another of his sources for True Detective, the cover of Thacker’s In the Dust of This Planet was used as a design by the fashion house BLK DNM and was soon seen stencilled on the back of a leather jacket in a video of rapper Jay-Z and as a T-shirt on the Instagram feed of Lily Collins. The weird was the new rock and roll.