Been reading Thacker's "Infinite Resignation"--and while I wasn't very impressed at first it has grown on me. Hopelessly "academic" (as that needless academic qualifier in the title gives away, even fucking resignation has to be xtreme now!), since it's as much about reading the great pessimists and thinking about pessimism as a form of thinking as it is an instance of the thing itself. Sometimes quotes from Cioran or whoever come up and they are bracing in their directness, which Thacker by contrast often places at a kind of theoretical remove--as if he's asking what it means to see the world this way rather than directly feeling it, maybe he's only tempted. Not always, of course,...though T's pessimism is very different from his (our?) heroes because it's so damn secular and prosaic...no "tears of the saints" here...Raises the question if there could be a "Book of Disquiet" for the hyper-connected 21st century...I think the disgust is there but not often those quiet solitary lost hours which seem to be the necessary environment for, say, Cioran envying the freedom of the stillborn...
― ryan, Sunday, 19 August 2018 17:55 (five years ago) link