What if, one day, there are no more humans? Doesn’t this scenario become more likely with every day that passes? But how would we think something like the irrevocable end of thinking? What access do we have to our own non-being? How do we know that our distinction between death and life is relevant to the things of this world? Perhaps the people and things we’re dealing with every day are much more dead or much more alive than we suspect?
Thought experiments about worlds without human beings or time travel into a future that turns out to be the past are but two speculative figures in which horror and contemporary metaphysics intersect. The study of horror is particularly apt at showing how contemporary philosophy and poetics share a speculative conception of time. Unlike, for example, Dietmar Dath’s aesthetic “drastic second,” the emphasis on the present tense in contemporary high literature, and the obsession of science fiction with the future, cosmic horror is concerned with the poesis of impossible time. Speculative horror shows us that–in Meillassoux’s terms–the past, too, is unforeseeable. Speculative horror opens up weird perspectives on our real absence and the unforeseen contingency of the world.
(from Abyssus Intellectualis. Spekulativer Horror, ed. together with Björn Quiring and out next week)