/lit/ - Literature

>>18941361
Just read this guy's short stories instead, they're way more entertaining

>>18941361
Ligotti is one of the best horror writers of all time. He only loses to Lovecraft and Poe because they are more historically important. The Conspiracy Against the Human Race is a good introduction to philosophical pessimism and horror theory, but that's all, there's nothing exceptional about it.

>>18941535
Thing about Poe and Lovecraft is the factor of time. In future people will remember Ligotti on same merit as these authors.

>>18941361
>It seemed edgy for the sake of being edgy
I don't believe Ligotti was trying to be edgy. I think the truth is that Ligotti is just that close-minded. CAHR is what happen when your brain implodes autistically in itself and you get trapped in an echo-chamber of your own mind. If you don't believe me, analyze the thesis on the book from intuition to understanding and then to reason, and you will see how all of them are mind-illusions.

The book only makes sense if you believe the world is berkeleyian.

>>18941596
>The book only makes sense if you believe the world is berkeleyian.
Yes Ligotti is a Schopenhauerian.

>>18941615
Schopenhauerian idealism isn't as naive as what Ligotti describes. In fact, the world as will, the ground for any possible pressimism, makes a joke of CAHR (which is based entirely on the world as representation).

>>18941596
>>18941615
Ligotti is profoundly mentally ill and literally cannot feel happiness, that's where his bleak view of the world as well as his ability to write horror come from. It's been a while since I read this but I think he mentioned that and admitted most people don't feel the way he and his pessimist philosophy heroes do

>>18941640
>which is based entirely on the world as representation
Bullshite and thanks for confirming that you haven't read the book.

>>18941652
>Ligotti is profoundly mentally ill and literally cannot feel happiness
It was not in a pejorative sense that I said he was "that close-minded", but in a pathological one to reffer exactly the same think you say.

>his ability to write horror come from
You should read his other books and look by yourself that he is not that ill, since most of his fiction outcomes and endings are moralistic and hopeful garbage no different from those of King et al US-like McHorror.

>>18941652
>Bullshite and thanks for confirming that you haven't read the book.
I bought a copy after an interview in which Ray Brassier talked about it. I've also read most of his books. And, about the "world of representation" stuff, I'm talking in a strict philosophical sense.

If you somewhat irrationally stan Ligotti, good for you, it will not change reality.

>>18941361
Are there other books like that?

>>18941710
>most of his fiction outcomes and endings are moralistic and hopeful garbage no different from those of King et al US-like McHorror.
Lol are you serious? Pretty much every single one of his endings has the main characters die horribly or end up insane or broken empty shells. Not to mention the world his fiction is set in is basically the nightmare world from silent hill already to begin with. There's no moralizing here, just absurdity and despair

>>18941652
Enlighten me

>>18941723
Eugene Thacker. But all I liked the book for was it gave me more reason to rewatch true detective (a great show for cool gritty mystery while throwing in pop philosophy)

>>18941734
Yeah, now I'm sure you have no clue what horror is and that you are just a bugmen or a youtube-raised child.
If you are happy with your lecture of Ligotti's ouvre, good for you.

>>18941643
im pretty happy most of the time but i acknowledge that its because im lucky, so philosophically i agree with the pessimists

>>18941745
>Eugene Thacker
His poetry is cute in a tumblr kind of way. But he isn't a serious philosopher, he's basically a cultural critic on Mark Fisher's level

>>18941710
>And, about the "world of representation" stuff, I'm talking in a strict philosophical sense.
Ligotti often talk about the "shadow", "the stage show of the universe", "puppets" "actors" and similar things. He acknowledges the puppet master or the mysterious force which underlies the nightmare of hour played in front of us. I don't know how the fuck you can claim that you have read the book when this was one of the its main points.

>>18941781
>He acknowledges the puppet master or the mysterious force which underlies the nightmare of hour played in front of us.
Yes, the demiurge, just like his inspirations Cioran and Schulz, except he calls it the Anima Mundi the few times he directly refers to it.

>>18941735
>Like Segal’s vastness, Schopenhauer’s Will has the same purpose in mind for human beings—to use our “circuitries” to acquire some kind of knowledge of its mindless self. For Schopenhauer, though, the self-seeking Will does not feel good to human beings except during moments when we temporarily satisfy its universal ravening as it emerges within us. Why the vastness or the Will should want to use us in this way is a mystery. Both of these non-dualistic meta-realities do serve the purpose of making sense of human life in their own way. But whether they make us feel good does not seem to matter to either of them. We are just vehicles; they are the drivers. And wherever we are going, as Segal and Schopenhauer have assured us, along with every other individual whose consciousness has been opened to the vastness by whatever name or nature, we must keep in mind that we are not what we think we are. Taking things a step further, Professor Nobody would teach us that neither is our world what we think it is, lecturing us with a flamboyant dispassion on the omnipresence of the infernal in “The Eyes That Never Blink.”

>Mist on a lake, fog in thick woods, a golden light shining on wet stones—such sights make it all very easy. Something lives in the lake, rustles through the woods, inhabits the stones or the earth beneath them. Whatever it may be, this something lies just out of sight, but not out of vision for the eyes that never blink. In the right surroundings our entire being is made of eyes that dilate to witness the haunting of the universe. But really, do the right surroundings have to be so obvious in their spectral atmosphere?
Take a cramped waiting room, for instance. Everything there seems so well-anchored in normalcy. Others around you talk ever so quietly; the old clock on the wall is sweeping aside the seconds with its thin red finger; the window blinds deliver slices of light from the outside world and shuffle them with shadows. Yet at any time and in any place, our bunkers of banality may begin to rumble. You see, even in a stronghold of our fellow beings we may be subject to abnormal fears that would land us in an asylum if we voiced them to another. Did we just feel some presence that does not belong among us? Do our eyes see something in a corner of that room in which we wait for we know not what?
Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror. Then: no belief or body of laws will guard you; no friend, no counselor, no appointed personage will save you; no locked door will protect you; no private office will hide you. Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness.

>>18941361
Absolute dogshit. I dropped it 1/3 of the way through.

>>18941781
Because he always talk about that on a dialectical level, something that is alien to pessimism. The world as will, for any constitued pessimism, can only be analytically understood. You cannot apply categories to non-objectual phenomena, something that Schoppy aknowledged to Kant, if you don't want to look like an imbecile or a charlatan. CAHR must be an entertaining book, but makes no sense on a philosophical level being that illconstructed ---at best, you can say it is a fun mental gymnastics to impress ignorant people.

>>18941830
[...]
The difference of Schoppy and Ligotti is that S was a dualist that derived "the world as representation" from "the world as will", so, strictly, Schop was a realist. Meanwhile, L, being so enclosed on incel-weinningeria mental delusion, built a completely fictional world about "what reality is / should be" ---but all from his mind and constitued rationality. L don't make it out of Maya's Veil (remains a navie idealist).

>>18941830
For larping as fanboy of Schopenhauer you have dogshit understanding of metaphors.

>>18941361
it has a kick ass title

>>18941800
Sounds like a schizo. Schopenhauer’s metaphysics make more sense. It basically puts us on the level of plants and the will is objectified in our biological drives and instruments (teeth, stomach, perception)which is better than your fairytale friend.

>>18941643
He borrows Zapffe's explanation for why most people aren't pessimists, namely that they employ a series of repressional (isolation, anchoring, distraction) and transformative (sublimation) mechanisms.

>>18941943
He is literally saying yes to Schopenhauer while coating it in literary aesthetics.

>>18941957
He doesn't reject Schopenhauer's metaphysics, but basically calls it intellectual masturbation and that cosmic pessimism can be arrived at without it

>>18941976
How?

>>18941976
Yeah that was one of the few retarded things Ligotti said in his book. He completely ignored the time period in which Schopenhauer lived. If it wasn't for his metaphysics the Philosophy Pessimism would have been a forgotten school. And it is funny because in this sense Ligotti cucked the Philosophical pessimists and sided with Nietzsche.

>>18942001