Georgie Newson

Philosophers have often held that the antidote to despair is hope, and that hope is temporally oriented towards the future. How do such accounts fare, however, when faced with the prospect of human extinction? If we have no future, is our only option to despair? In this paper, I approach this question via an analysis of the ’discovery’ of human extinction, which followed the nineteenth-century theorisation of the laws of thermodynamics. I examine the ‘existential mood’ induced by the concept of entropy through the interwar work of three thinkers: Bertrand Russell, H.G. Wells, and Erwin Schrödinger. I argue that the apparent tension in these figures’ thought between existential despair and political hope was neither contradictory nor accidental. This was because all three arrived at a position that I call ‘pessimistic humanism’. This position regards the opposition between natural processes and human value as the source of humanity’s autonomy, but rejects the transhumanist conclusion that this autonomy is limitless. I suggest that in our present moment, which is abundant with both transhumanist and anti-humanist responses to existential threat, we should take inspiration from pessimistic humanism, adopting a politics of mourning to counter the paralysis of despair.

For a short while she is here, and then, for some time, she is nowhere. In the years following her death she is a curiosity, an oddity and an enigma; or perhaps a neurotic, a narcissist and a fraud. She is a frigid anorexic, a fanatical communist and a self-hating Jew. She is dismissed by de Gaulle, scorned by Bataille and snubbed by Trotsky. But she acquires a starry coterie of defenders: Camus, T.S. Eliot and Iris Murdoch. She is published. She is translated. She is quoted. She is biographised. She is the Red Virgin and the Categorical Imperative in Skirts. She is anthologised. She is paraphrased. She is praised by the pope. She is written about by poets. She is a mystic. She is a heretic. She is a Great Jewish Thinker. She is a revolutionary. She is a theory of S&M. She is in memes. She is in Instagram handles. She is a tradcath. She is a sad girl. She is based. She is cringe. She is everywhere.

This article argues that the New Weird Fiction of Jeff VanderMeer is highly attuned to the difficulty of processing and representing extreme alterity. Its particular focus is his Southern Reach trilogy and the forms of weird encounter it describes. The article proposes a ‘mysticism of the unhuman’, and explains why it pertains to the encounters depicted in VanderMeer’s texts. It explores the instances of mystical annihilation that feature in the trilogy, an analysis that evolves into a discussion of the relationship between mysticism and horror. This leads into a discussion of linguistic representation, suggesting that approaches by philosophers of language and natural theologians to certain paradoxes surrounding ineffability can illuminate aspects of VanderMeer’s mythos. Although aspects of VanderMeer’s ‘Area X’ may escape human language and cognition, it is nevertheless able to convey information about itself. In exploring how this transmission occurs, the article turns to the notion of recognition, circling back to earlier discussions by asking whether an annihilation of alterity is required for linguistically incompatible beings to recognise one another. The article concludes that VanderMeer answers this question affirmatively, but that his stance is not necessarily pessimistic with regard to the possibility of establishing recognition between human and unhuman inhabitants of Earth.

Bishop John Wilkins’s “universal philosophical language", set out in his Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668), has often been described - and indeed dismissed - as a “utopian” project. However, despite the charge of utopianism being applied to Wilkins’s work by theorists as eminent as Foucault, Lacan, and Umberto Eco, no effort has yet been made to read the Essay as a legitimately utopian text: a text that may be positioned alongside the rich utopian literary-critical tradition to mutually illuminating effect. This article argues that the Essay displays a tendency that the author terms “info-utopianism,” and that this tendency can be located in a number of other Early Modern utopian works. The article then discusses the contextual influences behind the emergence of Early Modern info-utopianism, as well as its implications for contemporary utopian theory.

In this study, I reconstruct and compare Alain Badiou’s Being and Event (2005) and Graham Priest’s One (2014), arguing that the ontologies pursued within the two texts are intriguingly analogous in a number of ways. Both Badiou and Priest are committed to thinking through classically ontological problems without denying the validity of the paradoxes they raise; both regard Plato’s Parmenides as an early and formative account of these paradoxes; both establish conclusions to the effect that unity – or “oneness” – is indeed a contradictory phenomenon; and both, as a corollary of this conclusion, develop frameworks which confer ontological prominence upon "the void" and "emptiness" respectively, thereby arriving at what appears to be a shared ontological nihilism. In this comparative study, I not only enquire whether the frameworks adopted by Badiou and Priest really do lead to nihilist conclusions, but also attempt to clearly outline their trajectories of thought for the benefit of those who might be tempted to dismiss their seemingly outlandish theses out of hand.