An in-depth study of the key lines of post-postmodernism and a convenient entry into the colorful landscape of today’s philosophy.
…and then one by one they vanished: Barth, Foucault, and then Deleuze. In the dim emptiness left after these intellectual titans, it became clear: philosophical postmodernism had reached an impasse—like a snake that has coiled itself into a circle around its own tail, the self-digestion of modernity, its living dead matter. What was left to do next? Take a step into an unknown, unlit region of thought. That is how the theories dimmed. Animals and microbes, fungi and bacteria, the impenetrable cosmos and the depths of the ocean, cold algorithms of cyberculture, the inhuman, posthuman, and even antihuman—these are their new territories. There, beyond the last strip of light that the fading Enlightenment still held, anxious shadows of Hegel’s “night of the world” stir: here Lovecraft seems to be watching Cronenberg, and radical nihilists—watching von Trier; here speculative realists read Philip K. Dick and try on living outfits by Martin Margiela; environmental activists look into “Black Mirror” and “Alien”; cyberpunks listen to the deafening silence of John Cage; and “dark” Deleuzians listen to the noise layers of Einstürzende Neubauten and the misanthropic shriek of black metal. Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway, Quentin Meillassoux and Graham Harman, Nick Land and Reza Negarestani—among many others—set out on a journey through the catacombs of contemporary posthuman thought. We’ll follow them to find out: is there anything at all in the dark—and if so, what exactly?