34 Quotes by Eugene Thacker

What is repulsive about children - all children - is not that they are not yet adults, but that they are already adults - whining, self-absorbed, demanding attention, unable to care for themselves, throwing tantrums when things don't go their way. Far from what we tell ourselves, children are the most concise expressions of humanity. At least children are unaware of this.

A crying baby is the purest expression of the inanity of being human.

The logic of pessimism moves through three refusals: a no-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-for-us, or Schopenhauer’s tears); a yes-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-in-itself, or Nietzsche’s laughter); and a no-saying to the for-us and the in-itself (a double refusal, or Cioran’s sleep).Crying, laughing, sleeping—what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent?

There will always be someone who will see the futility of your actions. There will always be someone who is irritated by what you do, whatever you do. In this way we participate in a kind of shared, communal pessimism.

The pull of the organic towards the inorganic, of the animate towards the inanimate, of the living towards the unliving - the pull towards something "old." In these moments, the human being is turned inside-out, revealing the entirety of human civilization as a bg-brain neurosis, beneath which a deeper, multi-layered geo-trauma manifests itself in a myriad of ways, from frenetic protozoa to the torpid, stumbling forth of human self-awareness.

Pessimism is the night-side of thought, a melodrama of the futility of the brain, a lyricism written in the graveyard of philosophy.

The more we learn about the planet, the stranger it becomes to us.

(I long for someone to invent a punctuation mark for despondency…)

Our own era is one haunted by the shadow of futurity, precisely because there is no future.