Nihilism: Four Ways of Wanting Nothing
Nihilism has meant a politics, a diagnosis, a cosmology and a longing for dissolution. Telling them apart, and why none of them is the last word.
The Scandal Machine: Shock Art After 1945
Post-war art can be told as a series of outrages. A taxonomy of the art scandal, and a test for telling the scandals that revealed something from those that only sold.
The Pleasures of Dread: Why We Go Looking for Horror
Nobody wants to meet a monster, yet millions pay to watch one. On the old puzzle of why horror pleases, and what each era's monsters say about it.
The Curse of the Sun: A Reader's Guide to Expenditure
The theory of expenditure holds that a society is best understood by what it wastes. A guide to the solar economy, sacrifice and the ruinous gift, and to what the idea became.
The Slow Apocalypse: Decay Without an Ending
We were promised a final scene. What arrived instead was a process: a world that does not end so much as thin out.
What Transgression Was For
Transgressive philosophy held that a limit is only visible to those who cross it. An assessment of what the wager won, and what it cost.
The Desert of the Copy: A Reader's Guide to Simulation
The theory of simulation says that images no longer hide reality; they have replaced it. A guide to the idea and the strongest objections to it.
Rust Belt Metaphysics: Notes on Post-Industrial Angst
Industrial angst was the fear of being used by the machine. Post-industrial angst is the fear that the machine has finished with you.
After Irony: Sincerity, Oscillation and the Meme
Irony was the house style of the postmodern decades, and it worked until it didn't. On the swing back toward meaning it.
The Postmodern Sublime: Awe for Things Too Big to Picture
The mountain and the storm once taught people what it felt like to be overwhelmed. The systems that overwhelm us now have no outline at all.
Pessimism: A User's Manual
Philosophical pessimism is not a bad mood. It is a set of arguments about the worth of existence, and it comes with a surprising number of consolations.
Modern, Postmodern, Metamodern: A Short Primer
Three words that are used constantly and defined rarely. A compact orientation to what each one means, and the misreadings worth avoiding.
Nothing of that kind is shelved in this room yet.