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This paper aims to present firstly - an overview of modern metaphysical philosophy as demanding an inseparability between that which is and that which thinks what is; secondly - a discussion on recent philosophy that intends to undermine this inseparability as the foundation of continental philosophy, and subsequently attend to a conceptualisation of absolute contingency and of a world-in-itself; thirdly – contemplate models of extinction that are simultaneously immanent and exterior to the human mortality model vis-à-vis absolute contingency, and identify the affective structure of presentiment produced by such models for the subject; fourthly – present a concept of a subject as a witness-who-cannot-witness, that is affected and productive in a realm of what we will be calling ‘concept-horror’. It is worth noting I have taken the term concept-horror from the fourth edition of a British philosophical journal Collapse, published ten years ago. Editor of the journal, Robin Mackay, engenders concept-horror as a set of experiments attending to a “discursive intersection between the attempt to rethink reality through contemporary science and philosophy, and the tropes of the horror ‘genre’… to discover ourselves vindicated by the impossibility of determining where the concept ends and the horror begins”.[1]

I.

To begin, we will be focusing on a discourse that at first glance, seems quite internal to philosophy per se. However, as it is developed, the discourse will delineate a conceptual concern adequate for describing the affectual relationship between presentiment and concepts of horror vis-à-vis a natural materialism. As such, we begin retrospectively, with Kant. The critical philosophy, albeit fibrous and vast, can be understood cursorily as an articulation of boundaries; a delimitation of the area in which to perform theoretical work. As such, an architectonic, to use Kant’s term, of the knowable produces a zone of the unknowable. The boundary is conjured via a system of legitimation, quid juris, that establishes well-formed deductions.[2] Items of thought on each side of this boundary are designated a title by Kant – anything that is legitimate, knowable or otherwise theoretically conceivable are phenomena, whereas the illegitimate, unknowable items are noumena, also commonly referred to as the ‘in-itself’. The latter is not adequate to the legitimate function of understanding, or the ‘faculty of knowledge’, and as such, the noumenon cannot be a positive item for knowledge.[3] Thus, the line Kant draws is between a legitimate and illegitimate employment of thought. Phenomena is that which is subject to the faculty of knowledge, and is formalised through the synthesis of imagination, understanding and conception. Despite understanding this legitimate employment, the faculty of knowledge retains an ambition to make noumena known as phenomena is. Gilles Deleuze, in his book on Kant, observes that this ambition sees Kant returning to a “theme that there are internal illusions and illegitimate uses of faculties… The imagination sometimes dreams rather than schematizes”.[4] This is a transcendental employment of reason – transcendental in that it attempts to exceed the boundaries of understanding – forming contradictions produced as a consequence of applying reason to the noumenal.[5] The process of illegitimate transcendental reason is inherently speculative and attempts to assure a general knowledge of that in-itself. However, as we have established, the noumenon is not a positive object – it does not have an appearance correlative or even possible for our faculties. To quote Kant – “transcendental employment… has no determinate object, not even one that is determinable in its mere form”.[6]

The critical philosophy, through the trial of contradiction and the speculative tendency of reason to attempt to exceed its own architecture, constitutes a field of legitimacy for thought and theoretical work similar to that of, as Deleuze comments, a civil state – “The Critique is precisely the establishment of [a] civil state: like the jurist’s contract, it implies a renunciation of reason from the speculative point of view”.[7] A particularly telling moment of Kant’s self-restriction is written in the Critique of Pure Reason as follows:

On this an imaginary science is built up, both by those who assert and by those who deny; for each of them either pretends to know something about objects of which no human being has any concept, or turns his own representations into objects and thus spins around in a constant circle of ambiguities and contradictions. Nothing but a sober, strict and just criticism can free us of this dogmatic illusion.[8]

However, we are not met with total sobriety – to continue Deleuze’s observation, “when reason is renounced in this way the speculative interest does not stop being its own interest, and reason fully realises the law of its own nature”.[9] The insistence of reason to speculate, to err from its own jurisprudent architecture will form the core of the notion of ‘concept-horror’ that we will be elaborating throughout the discussion. To recapitulate, noumena, as conceptualised in the critical philosophy, is “not indeed in any way positive, and is not a determinate knowledge of anything, but signifies only the thought of something in general”.[10] The concept of noumenon or the thing-in-itself would meet revision and a tentative positivisation in Kant’s third critique,[11] however, the original schism between phenomena and noumena remains a central actor in contemporary philosophy.

II.

The rationale of the critical philosophy was to dampen any pre-critical claim to things-in-themselves – under Kant’s legislation, there is no unmitigated access to noumena; the faculties, a priori conditions of the human mind, frame all subsequent experience, and as such, any form of world, thing, entity and/or event independent to these conditions is entirely unknowable. A philosopher who is contemporary to the present day, Quentin Meillassoux, has made a diagnosis of ‘modern philosophy since Kant’ under the title correlationism – the propensity to demand an inseparability between subjectivity and objectivity when thinking them: “Not only does it become necessary to insist that we never grasp an object in-itself, in isolation from its relation… it also becomes necessary to maintain that we can never grasp a subject who would not always-already be related to an object”.[12] As such, the post-critical correlationist reasoning is a vicious circle, a constant demand for relationality or difference. To return to the in-itself, Kant does not entirely prohibit thinking the unknowable per se, but still dictates the legitimacy of such thought – Meillassoux, following Heidegger, understandings this legitimation as a regime of ‘facticity’, wherein the categorical faculty of knowledge is primary, and subsequently, the phenomenal and noumenal are only distinguishable by facticity tout court, along with a priori forms of knowledge such as space and time.[13] The critical philosophy, which situates facticity in a fortiori relationality, is thus a subjectivist/transcendental idealism, which Meillassoux posits as the ‘weak model of correlationism – a civil prohibition of “any knowledge of the thing-in-itself, but maintains the thinkability of the thing-in-itself”.[14]

Without having the space to continue Meillassoux’s development of facticity, we can note that, through Hegel’s speculative system that similarly reconfigures the insistence of positing the in-itself vis-à-vis absolute idealism, Meillassoux arrives at a speculative notion of time and of a world-in-itself. In the midst of a rigorous debasing of correlationism, Meillassoux forms an absolute ‘principle of unreason’, demonstrating that, “there is no reason for anything to be or to remain the way it is; everything must, without reason, be able not to be and/or be able to be other than it is”.[15] This applies indifferently to the now putative names phenomena and noumena – the principle produces “a positive knowledge of everything’s capacity-to-be-other”.[16] Subsequently, “the term contingency – designates pure possibility”.[17] This absolutisation of contingency is a principle that maintains that there is nothing beneath or beyond the manifest gratuitousness of the given - nothing but the limitless and lawless power of its destruction, emergence, or persistence”.[18] Meillassoux, at this junction, expresses that this devaluing of correlationism is a ‘Pyrrhic victory’.

The extremity of Meillassoux’s proposal is calmed in an elaboration of a diachronic event immanent to a world-in-itself. Diachronicity is a term for the general character of “statements about events that are anterior or ulterior to every terrestrial-relation-to-the-world” i.e. to the edifice of relationality itself, and instead installs a “temporal discrepancy between thinking and being”.[19] This term is posed in opposition to synchronicity or the tendency to associate humanity and the empirical conditions of the world unequivocally. For the correlationist, “the idea of a world-in-itself, a realm of phenomena subsisting independently to our relation to it, can only be intelligible as something ‘in-itself’ or an independent ‘for-us’”.[20] For Meillassoux, a statement generated by empirical science that details a diachronic event is that which at once legitimates and performs the de-centering of thought from an event – “the question of the witness has become irrelevant to the knowledge of the event”.[21] The stake of what is stated by empirical science – “events occurring prior to the emergence of humans, but also statements about possible events that are ulterior to the extinction of the human species”[22] – is, on the one hand, a challenge to correlationism (and its accompanying dogmatic/metaphysical hang-ups), and on the other, forms natural principles concerning absolute contingency without contradicting the absoluteness of contingency as such. Less of a Pyrrhic victory, but radical nonetheless.

After establishing this foundation, the question remains of returning to the individual-witness of science producing observations on diachronic events – is the realist finitude inscribed by the re-routing of the correlationist circle – that of theoretical events anterior/ulterior to thought/consciousness, and that of pure possibility in diachronic variability, that is to say absolute contingency, an assured movement towards existential dread situated in the activity of anticipation; a sobering relocation of subjectivity faced towards pure possibility? Concept-horror, as an affective-practical model, has sought to encapsulate this question for the alienated witness to a reversal of the noumenal legislation – an unthinkable (or rather unbound by thought), yet known, anonymous that which there is, the face of pure possibility.

III.

Emergence-extinction is a scalable coupling of diachronic event-themes that we have conceived, plotted by a non-synchronised time scale. Concept-horror is capable of entering either theme analogously, but for the sake of today’s discussion, we will be focusing on the anonymity of death as horror-producing, particularly in the nested scales of individual organism, biological structure, planetary whole and cosmic. Anonymity, as we will be developing, is the theme of unthinkability qua what is known or in the capacity of being known. Thematising death diachronically and anonymously is a way of eliding a myopic focus on individual human finitude and considering the affective presentiment of extinction-events in themselves, anterior and/or ulterior to the thought contained in the thing that dies. To begin, we will produce a tracing of Reza Negarestani’s diagrammed conception of Freud’s notion of the death-drive, the latter being most substantially developed in Freud’s 1920 essay “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”. The death-drive thesis, abridged, is as follows: “Life of the organism is determined by the way it must return to the inorganic state”.[23] Negarestani compartmentalises this thesis into three aspects:

i) The objectifying truth of extinction: The reality of death as an extinction-event or ‘decontraction’ cannot be indexed as either a retrogressive ‘past state’ nor a future point that is dependent on the reality of the organism – it is vehemently exterior. The actuality of extinction thus precedes and supersedes “existential temporality” – hence the witness, as an interiorised-index of death, is never actually witness to the reality of death.

ii) Dissipation: An organism has a dissipative, self-conservative nature, and this nature, despite the strict exteriority of decontraction to the organism, is what affords the course toward the exorbitant extinction-event – “Life, in this sense, is an inflection of death”.

iii) The dictatorial tendency of affordance: The self-conservative nature of the organism places an economic restriction on the way in which death is driven – “The organism can only follow its own affordable and thus economically conservative path to death in order to decontract”.[24]

These three aspects are woven by two tensile strands – the interiority of witness-organism that contains no index for the exteriority of extinction-events and the self-conserving nature of the organism that economically, not existentially, plots the course toward death, thus authorising the natural principle of an extinction-event without being temporally conscious of it per se. Extinction is absolutely contingent, and diachronically situated as ulterior to thought, but naturally immanent to the conservative economics of the organism itself. Note that ‘organism’ here is not to privilege the organic-monad – the thesis is readily scalable to microcosmic, entropic, planetary or cosmic scale of events. Ray Brassier, in a similar tenor, situates this triadic thesis of the death-drive in a cancellation of “sense, purpose and possibility [marking] the point at which the ‘horror’ concomitant with the impossibility of either being or not-being becomes intelligible”.[25]

The contingency of extinction – the slippage from being into not-being (note: this is reversed in the ancestral moment of accretion) – is spontaneous, and ultimately exterior. Yet concept-horror strives to attend to the natural interior economy of a given scale, despite its anonymity, and build conceptual images of what we can know about, and how we might feel about the spontaneity of extinction-events. Returning to Meillassoux, albeit a different essay, we can see the construction of two dynamic models of death delimited by the empirical/natural principles afforded by any given witness. Firstly, reactive death, marked by a diminishing body; shrinking, decaying until it is annihilated, exhausted – it is a slippage toward the sign of narcosis. Secondly, creative death, wherein a body is dissipated, widened, until the body is gaped and far too nondescript to house anything that resembles the organic.[26] It is “to become a pure point of passage, a centre of communication of all things with all things”.[27] The latter model is non-regulative, unconcerned with legitimation and is instead driven by a continual process of contingency; the external field of extinction-events proper. It is a betrayal of the philosopher-legislator; it is, in Meillassoux’s words, “anti-Kantian… for a very simple reason: in this model, there could be nothing worse than to achieve that towards which we tend”.[28] The two models here appeal to the two strands coursing through the realist foundation of death; the reactive model economically plots finitude qua exhaustion; the creative model exorbitantly plots events of finitude qua dissipation and externalisation. The former appeals to body immanent to the organic, the planet, the ecological system whereas the latter appeals to the contingencies of destruction, stasis, further births and deaths; accretions and extinctions. However, both are similarly anti-regulative and unindexed vis-à-vis the thought of a human subject – it is this conviction that produces a death-realism, and subsequently, a productive concept of horror.

IV.

At this point we return to a term that has been employed occasionally throughout the discussion – the witness. After elaborating a death-realism qua three-aspect, dual-threaded death-drive, we scale back to the individual, the witness capable of practically initialising an instance of concept-horror. Such an individual is not transcendentally secured in the circular hold of correlation. It is rather an inessential witness, capable of affection but incapable of having purchase on the reality of death that is not afforded by its organistic nature, itself untranslatable as thought. The work of concept-horror is to build transposable witnesses who spontaneously form an artifice virtually appealing to a given diachronic event, despite their absolute remove from the event as such. Following a discussion of Kant that is analogous to how we have approached him, Amy Ireland has written about such a witness who, in the abstraction of chronological experience, and despite their “narcissistic compulsion to draw the contours of differences from an illusory model of identity”, realises the interior over which a witness has zero-control – “an alien insider – ironically installed by the very program that attempts to most vociferously to excise it… you are not what you think you are”.[29] Interior economy and its collusion with exterior contingency is that which the witness cannot witness, and it is the dual-threaded death, that the witness is always bundled within, that produces the conditions of affective structure – the horror principal to any work of concept-horror.

The witness-who-cannot-witness is flanked by anonymity. To turn now to the writing of Emmanuel Levinas, the interior/exterior coupling that is implacably concealed from the witness is a productive event; it is that which is “impersonal, anonymous, yet inextinguishable… [that which] murmurs in the depths of nothingness itself we shall designate by the term ‘there is’”.[30] Levinas locates horror upon the surface or subjectivity of the witness, identifying their conditions as not regulated by human-individual conceptions of death:

Horror is nowise an anxiety about death… in horror a subject is stripped of his subjectivity… it is a participation in the there is that has ‘no exits’. It is, if we may say so, the impossibility of death, the universality of existence even in its annihilation.[31]

Here, an opposition between subjective anxiety and horror is formed – the former being closer to Heidegger’s existential being-toward-death, wherein the fear of nothing is predicated upon the moment of exit from life, co-extensive with Dasein in a structural model of death, distilling time as virtual potentiality.[32] Conversely, Levinas’ moment of horror is a “horror of the night… with no exits, which does not answer”.[33] It is not the moment of exit marked by our biological finitude, but the horrifying nocturnal paucity of that which there is… It is an existential production of the impossibility of possibility in the witness who faces the besmirched window of the contingent – Brassier observes in Levinas “two senses of impossibility – the impossibility of ceasing to be and the impossibility of beginning to be… a horror of sense and a horror of non-sense”[34] with the latter referring to the impossibility of exit or escape from that which there is, and the former marking an interruption of being – to repeat Amy Ireland; an alien insider, one that one has zero control over. Concept-horror is itself the participation in the there is… and works to instrumentalise a speculative materialist philosophy of absolute contingency, in which the exterior/interior complex of the death-drive, scalable at many levels, in being entirely anterior to thought, manifests notions of extinction-events that are not predicated on our mortal-exit but a realist conception of death precluding exit, finally secreting witnesses incapable of witnessing, horrified subjects proximal only to that anonymous, nocturnal contingent of that which there is…

V.

To quote the late Mark Fisher – “[W]hy all these Horror stories? Because as Nietzsche warns, to ‘unlearn to pray and curse, unlearn man and God’ is to subtract all certainty, to become a stranger to yourself”.[35] The edifice of horror – concept-horror as we have named it here – not only indexes the shifts internal to philosophy - from Kantian transcendental idealism i.e. correlationism to a principle of unreason attendant to diachronic statements – but also situates a realist and materialist conception of death that produces a witness-subject who cannot witness the anonymity of that there is… To close the discussion, we will be tying the points made to the literature and thought of contemporary American horror author Thomas Ligotti. James Trafford has precisely summarised Ligotti’s realist pessimism as “suffocating, hallucinogenic… a claustrophobic discrepancy between realism and oneirism… Ligotti inverts the very possibility of redemption; the close-ness of the world is disclosed in grotesque fabulution to be utterly autonomous”.[36] Ligotti’s is an existential horror, taking thought to be a meaningless surface upon which consciousness is projected, and beneath which dark, anonymous, alienating reality looms. The following is an extract from his short story “Professor Nobody’s Little Lectures of Supernatural Horror”:

Mist on a lake, fog in thick woods, a golden light shining on wet stones - such sights make it all very easy. Something lives on 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 the 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. 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 is we voiced them to another. Did we just feel some presence that does not belong to 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... not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness.[37]

Ligotti’s image of thought is an absolute speculation on a simultaneous material of horror and a reality of alienation that conjures vast scales of momentary doubt to grandiose universal schemes that are nonetheless autonomous and anonymous. Thus, the concept-horror active in Ligotti’s writing is a theme of a pervasive witness being dispossessed in participation of the absolute contingency of events anterior and utterly separate from the witness themselves. In the foreword to Ligotti’s collection of non-fiction writing, Brassier notes that for Ligotti “there is no nature worth revering or re-joining; there is no self to be re-enthroned as captain of its own fate; there is no future worth working towards or hoping for”.[38]

Concept-horror, however, does not find conclusion or limit in an expression of pessimistic realism – notwithstanding a collapse into unbridled optimism, the pervasive exteriority posed by the diachronicity of events such as extinction can incite in the witness, despite its untether from that which there is, a compulsion to represent – Claire Colebrook has written about an “art object that would seem to signal the human organism’s potentiality to free itself from mere biological life, to create that which endures beyond its own being, itself shows all the signs of material fragility, exposure and annihilation”.[39] In the present day of an awareness of a distinctly anthropocentric material contribution to an ever widening set of possible extinctions, the shore of the so-called ‘Anthropocene’, is it the task of representations, and the art-object capable of culturally housing such work, to produce not only concepts of horror and presentiment, but to represent the philosophical principle of absolute contingency in a spontaneous, performative grasp at the nested material of the many-scaled event of extinction?

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[1] Collapse IV, 6.

[2] “We make use of a number of empirical concepts without opposition from anybody, and consider ourselves justified… because we can always appeal to experience to prove their objective reality. But there exist also concepts that we have usurped, such as fortune, fate, which, though allowed to circulate through an almost universal indulgence, are yet from time to time challenged by the question: quid juris.” Critique of Pure Reason, herein CPR A84/B116.

[3] “If we wish to call this object noumenon, because the representation of it is not sensible, then we are at liberty to do so. But we cannot apply it to any of the concepts of our understanding, such a representation remains empty for us, serving no purpose other than that of indicating the limits of our sensible knowledge and of leaving at the same time an open space which we can fill neither through possible experience nor through pure understanding”. CPR A289/B345.

[4] Deleuze, Gilles. Kant’s Critical Philosophy, translated by High Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. The Athlone Press, 1984. 24.

[5] In the “Antinomy of Pure Reason” the ‘scenes of discord and confusion produced by the conflict of laws (antinomy) of pure reason’ are exemplified for Kant in the “transcendental principles of a pretended pure (rational) cosmology” a ‘world concept’ that Kant conjures “not in order to show this cosmology is valid and can be accepted, but… in order to expose it as an idea surrounded by bedazzling but false illusion, and utterly irreconcilable with appearances” (CPR A408/B434, 435). This is anticipated earlier in CPR, see “Of Transcendental Illusion” (A293-294/B350).

[6] CPR A247-248/B304.

[7] Deleuze, 1984. 26.

[8] CPR A395

[9] Deleuze, 1984, 26.

[10] CPR A252 (endnote 82 in B)

[11] see Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement: §57 “Solution to the Antinomy of Taste”, 213/341, in the context of aesthetic judgement, “A judgement of taste is indeed based on a concept, but on an indeterminate one (namely, that of the supersensible substrate of appearances); and then there would be no conflict”.

[12] Meillassoux, Quentin, After Finitude, herein AF, 2007/2011. 5.

[13] AF 38.

[14] AF 35.

[15] AF 60.

[16] AF 62.

[17] Ibid.

[18] AF 63.

[19] AF 112.

[20] Brassier, Ray. Nihil Unbound. 50.

[21] AF 116.

[22] AF 112.

[23] Negarestani, Reza. “Drafting the Inhuman: Conjectures on Capitalism and Organic Necrocracy” in The Speculative Turn, Melbourne: re. press, 2011. 192.

[24] Ibid. 191.

[25] Brassier, 238.

[26] Meillassoux, Quentin. “Subtraction and Contraction” in Collapse III. 103-104

[27] Ibid. 104.

[28] Ibid. 106.

[29] Ireland, Amy. “The Alien Inside”, 46.

[30] Levinas, Emmanuel, “Existence without Existents” in The Levinas Reader. 30.

[31] Ibid. 33.

[32] See Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time: p307-308/263: “Death is Dasein’s ownmost potentiality. Being toward this possibility discloses to Dasein its ownmost potentiality-for-Being, in which its very Being is the issue… The ownmost possibility is non-relational”.

[33] Levinas, 34.

[34] Brassier, 233.

[35] Fisher, Mark, “Gothic Materialism”, 231.

[36] Trafford, James, “Shadow of a Puppet Dance” in Collapse IV, 2008. 189, fn.12.

[37] Ligotti, Thomas. Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe. 1986. 301.

[38] Brassier, Ray, “Foreword” in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, Thomas Ligotti.

[39] Colebrook, Claire, Death of the Posthuman – Essays in Extinction. 2014, 157.