Pessimism - Detailseite

“No one ever needs pessimism”, writes Eugene Thacker; it is the “night-side of thought, a melodrama of the futility of the brain, a lyricism written in the graveyard of philosophy” (2018: 3). So why teach and attend a seminar about something no one needs and why read texts that aren’t going to unnecessarily raise your mood? Even if it might be the “lowest form of philosophy” (Thacker 2015: 3), pessimist thought has nevertheless been an irrepressible force in the history of modern Western philosophy. The thoughts of writers like Arthur Schopenhauer and E.M. Cioran continue to haunt contemporary thinking, and pessimism continues to outstay its welcome. Sometimes, it is even taken up as a virtue, such as in the political thinking of Antonio Gramsci, who armed himself with “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” (1977: 188) – an idea that was later adopted by Stuart Hall in his Gramscian analysis of Thatcherite British culture and politics (1988).

In this seminar, we will particularly look at the way pessimism informs attitudes towards the future in contemporary culture and how it has pervaded current cultural theory and philosophy in writers such as Eugene Thacker, Thomas Ligotti, Sara Ahmed and Patricia MacCormack. We will also discuss how literature, film and popular culture express and represent pessimism in their aesthetics.

In the Lektürekurs, we will focus on reading theoretical and philosophical texts that shed light on a wide variety of contexts through which to understand the primary texts.

Reading:

Most material will be available on Moodle. Novels and films will have to be purchased individually. The list of texts and films will be provided during the first session.

Introductory Reading:

Joshua Foa Dienstag: Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit. Princeton UP, 2006.

Joseph Packer & Ethan Stoneman: A Feeling of Wrongness: Pessimistic Rhetoric on the Fringes of Popular Culture. Penn State UP, 2018.