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In the Dust of This Planet
by Eugene Thacker

Supernatural horror defined as the thought of the unthinkable. In this bestselling book, Eugene Thacker suggests that we look to the genre of horror as offering a way of thinking about the unthinkable world.

#1 Amazon Bestseller in Philosophy Criticism

The world is increasingly unthinkable, a world of planetary disasters, emerging pandemics, and the looming threat of extinction. In this book Eugene Thacker suggests that we look to the genre of horror as offering a way of thinking about the unthinkable world. To confront this idea is to confront the limit of our ability to understand the world in which we live – a central motif of the horror genre.

In the Dust of This Planet explores these relationships between philosophy and horror. In Thacker’s hands, philosophy is not academic logic-chopping; instead, it is the thought of the limit of all thought, especially as it dovetails into occultism, demonology, and mysticism. Likewise, Thacker takes horror to mean something beyond the focus on gore and scare tactics, but as the under-appreciated genre of supernatural horror in fiction, film, comics, and music. This relationship between philosophy and horror does not mean the philosophy of horror, if anything, it means the reverse, the horror of philosophy: those moments when philosophical thinking enigmatically confronts the horizon of its own existence. For Thacker, the genre of supernatural horror is the key site in which this paradoxical thought of the unthinkable takes place.

The cover of In the Dust of this Planet can be seen in a New York gallery, on a banner at the 2014 Climate Change march in New York and on Jay-Z’s back promoting Run. The book influenced the writers of the US TV series True Detective and has been lambasted by ex-Fox News broadcaster, Glenn Beck in his podcast.

Other writing by Eugene Thacker

Two more in the series Horror of Philosophy - April 2015:

• [ Zero Books ] Starry Speculative Corpse Horror of Philosophy vol. 2

Eugene Thacker

Paperback: 978-1-78279-891-0 eBook: 978-1-78279-890-3

• [ Zero Books ] Tentacles Longer Than Night Horror of Philosophy vol. 3

Eugene Thacker

Paperback: 978-1-78279-889-7 eBook: 978-1-78279-888-0

Reviews:
Thacker’s discourse on the intersection of horror and philosophy is utterly original and utterly captivating...In the Dust of This Planet is an encyclopedic grimoire instructing us in the varieties of esoteric thought and infernal diversions that exist for the reader’s further investigation, treating us to a delightful stroll down a midway of accursed attractions that alone are worth the ticket of this volume. ~ Thomas Ligotti, author of The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
In The Realm of the Senses: A Materialist Theory of Seeing and Feeling
by Stuart Walton

A thorough-going re-elaboration of modern experience via the senses.

The five physical senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching have been held to underpin the complexity of human experience ever since Aristotle first theorised about how they worked. Classical and scholastic philosophy up to the time of the European Enlightenment relegated their operations to its margins, viewing them as at best a distraction from higher thinking, and at worst a positive deception. Paradoxically, what one could not objectively know, the products of the mind, were accorded precedence over the concrete.

From the Romantic era onwards, the senses moved to the centre of speculative thought, and the various dialectical currents of philosophy after Hegel made them interdependent with the intellectual function, which was held to derive most or all of its authority from them. This tendency has continued down to the sensualist, hedonist and anti-intellectual currents of our own day.

In this theoretical consideration of what has been done to the senses in modern experience, Stuart Walton subjects the life of the senses to a further materialist turn, one that refuses a spiritualisation of the material realm, to which contemporary discourses of the body have often fallen prey, while at the same time preserving sensuality from being delivered once again to a sterile idealism.

Reviews:
Instagram Archipelago, The
by Elliot C. Mason

Through a raucous tour of Instagram’s fisherwomen, The Instagram Archipelago proposes a radical new ethics of gender and race.

Set on Idan Hayosh’s peculiar Instagram page of women holding dead fish, The Instagram Archipelago is a conversation with contemporary culture’s logics of gender and race. Working through recent thinking in Black studies and Hayosh’s satirical images, Elliot C. Mason presents the aesthetics of capitalism as a sea that makes everything the same, turning the world into a single form.

The Instagram Archipelago brings radical antiracist and feminist scholarship to a general audience, applying a model of thinking beyond gender and race to the strange world of online fishing photos. This funny and fascinating book moves past the liberal celebration of gender and race, towards a tiny island of resistance in a growing archipelago.

Reviews:
By way of a personal response to Idan Hayosh’s deeply weird images, Elliot C. Mason has conjured a bracingly witty, original and lyrical meditation on architecture, fishing, bikinis and the possibility of escape from the ‘eclipsing wetness’ of our homogenizing neoliberal culture. ~ Josh Cohen
Elliot C. Mason is a force of nature. Dissolving the boundaries of genre, he provides a roadmap to the writing of the future. The Instagram Archipelago is witty, trenchant, and very very relevant. ~ Frances Wilson
Timely, insightful, moving, funny, and rigorous in its self-scrutiny. [Mason has written] a persuasive, and admirable, study of the white male gaze and the world it’s helped bring about. ~ Matt Greene, author of Jew(ish) and Ostrich.
Is the East Still Red?
by Gary Blank

Leftist observers of China's political economy, whether they are adulatory or dismissive, have fundamentally misunderstood the role of the market

Does China represent a non-capitalist alternative to neoliberal development models? Commentators on the left have offered sharply divergent assessments over the last two decades. A few still cling the old dream of market socialism, twinning efficiency with social justice. For most, however, China is proof that market reforms invariably yield dispossession, inequality, and capitalist restoration.

Is the East Still Red? argues that both interpretations are wrong and exhibit a common failure to distinguish between market mechanisms and capitalist imperatives. Gary Blank situates the Chinese experience within broader Marxist debates on socio-historical transitions and primitive accumulation, highlighting the need to conceptualize capitalism as a unique system in which producers and appropriators depend on the market for their reproduction. Despite years of marketization, the mandarins in Beijing have not yet imposed full market dependence in industry and agriculture. He shows how the resistance of workers and peasants, the imperatives of party-state legitimacy, and the reproductive strategies of individual Communist officials and managers all act to perpetuate central aspects of a bureaucratic-collectivist system, in which direct producers and bureaucrats are effectively merged with the means of production. The People’s Republic may be a non-capitalist market alternative, albeit one that is hardly edifying for socialists.

Reviews:
It’s Not Over
by Pete Dolack

A comprehensive historical study to understand today's world and find a better world tomorrow.

The path to a better world can’t be found without knowledge of history. "It’s Not Over" analyzes attempts to supplant capitalism in the past in order to draw lessons for emerging and future movements that seek to overcome the political and economic crises of today. This history is presented through the words and actions of the men and women who made these revolutions, and the everyday experiences of the millions of people who put new revolutionary ideas into practice under the pressures of enormous internal and external forces. This is history that can be applied to today’s struggles to shape our world, in which new ideas are emerging to bring about the economic democracy that is indispensable to a rational and sustainable future.

Reviews:
As Cold War taboos on honest discussions of capitalism and socialism lose their force, important books like this are emerging. They ask why capitalism keeps provoking movements to go beyond it, why they have not yet achieved that goal, and what we must learn from them so the next efforts prove more effective. Dolack here contributes to the vital emerging answers. ~ Rick Wolff, author of Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism and host of the Economic Update radio program
There is a great amount of knowledge to be gained from this ambitious work that takes us from the Paris Commune to the Sandinista revolution. It’s Not Over sifts through more than a century of revolutionary history persistently seeking the lessons to be drawn from it for the construction of a non-capitalist world. The result is original and useful book that should not be missed. ~ Silvia Federici, author of Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation and co-founder of the International Feminist Collective
Over two decades following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, this book provides a timely and comprehensive appraisal of its internal and geopolitical contradictions and a grounded general schematic for workers’ movements which will form and build new socialist states in the near future. Dolack cogently recognizes the incredible advances of socialism in improving the quality of life among workers and peasants. The lessons of It’s Not Over point to the fundamental significance of worker control in organizing a sustainable and equitable system of social exchange. ~ Immanuel Ness, City University of New York and author of Southern Insurgency: The Coming of the Global Working Class
Land of Hunger
by Wayne Holloway

A collection of short stories; or one long one.

Land of Hunger is a collection of short stories, that interconnect, loop and return upon each other despite their seemingly disparate subject matter. Fragments that resonate across time and place, from the Ukraine during the Russian Civil War, to the miners' strike, to the world of animal rights protestors.

The stories are all about the collection of fictions that make up a writer. A fantasy of who the author is, where he comes from; the story of a fragile, shifting identity built on facts, yet obscuring them. In doing this, Wayne Holloway embodies our deep hunger for the stories of who and why we are.

"At long last: A short-story collection packed with meaning. LAND OF HUNGER is a socio-political odyssey that is both laugh-out-loud funny and deeply moving. Wayne Holloway is a much-needed breath of fresh air."

Lee Rourke, author of Vulgar Things and winner of the Guardian's Not the Booker Prize 2010

Reviews:
Wayne Holloway delivers a clenched fist rammed hard into the flabby belly of what post-modern writing has become! ~ Stewart Home, author of 69 Things to do with a dead princess, Slow Death and Tainted Love
At long last: A short-story collection packed with meaning. LAND OF HUNGER is a socio-political odyssey that is both laugh-out-loud funny and deeply moving. Wayne Holloway is a much-needed breath of fresh air. ~ Lee Rourke, author of Vulgar Things and winner of the Guardian's Not the Booker Prize 2010
Last Night, The
by Federico Campagna

By replacing hope and faith with adventure, The Last Night of our lives might finally become the first morning of an autonomous future.

Our secular society seems to have finally found its new God: Work. As technological progress makes human labour superfluous, and over-production destroys both the economy and the planet, Work remains stronger than ever as a mantra of universal submission. This book develops a fully-fledged theory of radical atheism, advocating a disrespectful, opportunist squandering of obedience. By replacing hope and faith with adventure, The Last Night of our lives might finally become the first morning of an autonomous future.

Reviews:
By turns lyrical, acerbic and fabular, Federico Campagna updates existentialism for the 21st century. If death is certain, surely we can't afford to sacrifice our lives to the pointless labour which capital demands of us. Why do we continue to waste our lives doing it? What are the invisible bonds that keep us in servitude? The Last Night exposes the fondly held delusions that stop us from confronting these challenges - but, beware leftists and anarchists, it is our assumptions that the book dismisses most ruthlessly. ~ Mark Fisher, author of Capitalist Realism: is there no alternative?
Effortlessly moving between politics, philosophy and autobiography, Campagna has created an ethical code that can function as an everyday compass for the lost generation of adventurers. And we are in desperate need of new maps. ~ Simon Critchley
If God is dead then why do we worship work? Federico Campagna’s provocative and poetic manifesto suggests we will not be atheists until we stop believing in capitalism. Contesting the abstractions that rule our lives The Last Night is an ethical manual for our warfare without welfare present.

~ Benjamin Noys
"A precarious culture is emerging from the horizon of our time, and this book is a presage of the tide to come." ~ Franco 'Bifo' Berardi, from the introduction
"Like Stirner before him, Campagna has written something novel, singular and dangerous. Not a prayer book for ideologues, but something between an ethical meditation and Molotov cocktail that can be thrown against the abstractions that imprison us." ~ Saul Newman, from the afterword
Last Tape, The
by Alex Niven

In this haunting debut collection, Alex Niven explores a poetic hinterland that is also a psychological and cultural wilderness.

In this haunting debut collection, Alex Niven explores a poetic hinterland that is also a psychological and cultural wilderness. Adopting a style grounded in the radical minimalism of northern English modernism and romanticism, Niven writes poems constructed out of traditional forms cut up and reassembled to produce an abrupt lyric realism ideally suited to the political subject matter of his verse. These are poems of anger, mourning, and finally, extraordinary optimism, announcing the arrival of a historically lucid new bearing in twenty-first-century British poetry.

HIDDEN TRACK

I couldn’t work out whether

you were part of the future

or a beautiful aftershock.

Blind spots where the sun snuck.

Your skin was syncopated, weightless.

We crossed every finish line,

woke immaculately new.

Reviews:
Alex Niven always has something to say that I’m better for having heard said. And he says it with passion and eloquence. One of his loci is a North of mind and place, and these poems remind us there is a north in every southern town, a south in every north.

~ Tom Pickard
'One of these days there will be movement …' The backdrop to Alex Niven's The Last Tape is the official story of the last three decades: the defeat of socialism in the eighties, the capitalist realist desert of the noughties, the nameless confusion of our current moment. With a compassion devoid of sentimentality, Niven reminds us of the casualties of capitalist triumphalism: lost lives, suppressed yearnings, prematurely terminated projects. Yet everywhere in The Last Tape we can feel the trace and pressure of other possibilities. Niven's vignettes quietly but insistently wager on the thought that progress is about to be resumed: 'After 1979/ Our reeling hopes were all erased/ But the last tape can be wiped again/ And the dreaming past can be rephrased.' ~ Mark Fisher, author of Ghosts Of My Life and Capitalist Realism
Lazarus in the Multiple
by Camaren Peter

Surviving the anthropocene; the era of complexity!

Lazarus in the Multiple presents a new philosophy on how to navigate the complex challenges that society faces in the 21st Century. It deploys the biblical “Lazarus” as the everyman of modernity, who is caught between past and present, life and death, and sleep and awakening amidst the humdrum and complexity of the “multiple”. The multiple is the great sea of noise that lies both within and without Lazarus, from which social reality is born. In this casting, Lazarus is unable to distinguish the signal from the noise and hence remains trapped within enduring ritual and an unfulfilled existence. He is unable to find expression and take actions to bring about meaningful change within himself or in the world around him.

Reviews:
Levinas Unhinged
by Tom Sparrow

Levinas Unhinged presents philosopher Emmanuel Levinas as a metaphysician racked by the sensuous, and often terrifying, materiality of existence.

Through six heterodox essays this book extracts a materialist account of subjectivity and aesthetics from the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. More than a work of academic commentary that would leave many of Levinas’s pious commentators aghast, Sparrow exhibits an aspect of Levinas which is darker, yet no less fundamental, than his ethical and theological guises. This darkened Levinas provides answers to problems in aesthetics, speculative philosophy, ecology, ethics, and philosophy of race, problems which not only trouble scholars, but which haunt anyone who insists that the material of existence is the beginning and end of existence itself.

Reviews:
Admitting from the off that his aim is not to ‘get Levinas right’, [Sparrow] seeks to defamiliarize Levinas through a series of powerful readings, each foregrounding the strange, unsettling and liminal aspects of his philosophy: the centrality of the body, materiality, the night. The result is impressive. Sparrow presents a Levinas who is both haunted and haunting — and, a Levinas primed for an engagement with the turn towards the weird and visceral that we see in recent speculative philosophy. ~ Will Rees, 3:AM Magazine
Most 'defenders' of Levinas have undercut his genius by presenting him either as a pious old finger-wagging grandpa or as Jacques Derrida's halfhearted apprentice. In this book Tom Sparrow gives us the true Levinas: a formidable metaphysician who did more than anyone else to sensualize and concretize the work of Heidegger. Levinas is not in our rearview mirror, but remains in our motorcade today. He will still have much to teach us. Sparrow lucidly reminds us why. ~ Graham Harman, Associate Provost for Research Administration and Professor of Philosophy, American University in Cairo
Levinas Unhinged shows us another side of Levinas that is often ignored or overlooked. Sparrow's Levinas is foremost a philosopher of the night, attuned to the shadowy underbelly of appearances. Removed from his role as the high priest of ethics, Levinas appears in a new way. Now, the terms horror, indifference, and facelessness all come to the foreground as central to an understanding of Levinasian philosophy. This provocative reading is thus not only a challenge to Levinas scholarship, it is also a challenge to materialist ontology more broadly. The result is a worthy contribution to current debates in speculative realism and phenomenology. ~ Dylan Trigg, Research Fellow at École Normale Supérieure and University College Dublin
Levitate the Primate
by Michael Thomsen

A lovestory in fragments, told in the margins of a new philosophy of 21st Century sexuality.

A collection of essays and confessions about sex, taken, in large part, from a period of time, when author, Michael Thomsen was writing a sex and dating blog for Nerve.com

Reviews:
Michael Thomsen writes about sex like someone who's actually had it. That is, the sex in this book isn't like the sex in movies, or porno movies, or 99% of books about sex--it's real: funny, confusing, gross, thrilling, and occasionally beautiful. You could say the same about the book. Thomsen writes with wit, intelligence, and impressive candor about things most people are too embarrassed to discuss. The end product is a book that everyone--virgins and experts alike--will find engrossing, illuminating, and absolutely hilarious. ~ Adam Wilson, Author, Flatscreen
A crushingly honest collection of confessions about love in the shape of sex, from which any American man could learn a thing or ten. ~ Malcolm Harris, The New Inquiry
Literary Freedom: a Cultural Right to Literature
by Heather Katharine McRobie

How do we protect literary freedom while preventing the harm done by literary hate speech? This book presents an innovative new approach to literary freedom as a cultural right.

Literary Freedom: a Cultural Right to Literature is a non-fiction study of literary freedom from a political-philosophical perspective. It adds an original perspective on the issue of literary freedom as it synthesises debates from human rights as well as providing a new way of addressing the question 'How do we mitigate against the harm caused by hate speech?' by applying Amartya Sen's capability approach to this question.

Reviews:
Featured with 6 other Zero titles on "Publishers in Focus" webpage by Blackwell Oxford

"Many publishers struggle to get the exposure that we feel their books deserve. On this page we will bring you a selection of the independent, interesting and essential that are worthy of greater attention" ~ Blackwell Oxford
Lives; Running
by David Renton

A story of learning to run, of a son's love for his father, and of becoming a father in turn.

David Renton was in his mid-teens a country standard middle-distance runner. He tells the story of how he began to run, and of the influence over him of his father s own career as an international-standard rower.

He portrays running as a step towards a world of freedom, and describes the attempts of his father to find ideas that would guide his life.

Reviews: