The Conspiracy Against the Human Race ———————— a Contrivance of Horror Thomas Ligotti
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The Conspiracy against the Human Race ———————— A Contrivance of Horror Thomas Ligotti Hippocampus Press ————— New York 3 Copyright © 2010 Thomas Ligotti. Foreword © 2010 by Ray Brassier. Thomas Ligotti photograph © 2010 by Jennifer Gariepy. Parts of this work were published, in different form, in the following publications: “Literature Is Entertainment or It Is Nothing: An Interview with Thomas Ligotti” by Neddal Ayad, Fantastic Metropolis (website), October 31, 2004; “Thomas Ligotti on Sweeney Todd,” Horror: Another 100 Best Books, Stephen Jones and Kim Newman, eds., 2005; Introduction by Thomas Ligotti, The Tenant by Roland Topor, 2006; “‘It’s All a Matter of Personal Pathology’: An Interview with Thomas Ligotti” by Matt Cardin, The Teeming Brain (weblog), 2006. All excerpts from the works of Peter Wessel Zapffe © Gisle R. Tangenes; used with permission. All excerpts from the writings of H. P. Lovecraft © Robert C. Harrall; used with permission of Lovecraft Properties LLC. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ligotti, Thomas. The conspiracy against the human race: a contrivance of horror / Thomas Ligotti. – 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-9824296-9-3 (hardcover) – ISBN 978-0-9844802-7-2 (pbk.) 1. Horror in literature. 2. Literature–Philosophy. 3. Pessimism in literature. I. Title. PN56.H6L55 2010 809’.9164–dc22 2010008781 Published by Hippocampus Press P.O. Box 641, New York, NY 10156. http://www.hippocampuspress.com All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher. Cover design by Jennifer Gariepy. Cover production by Barbara Briggs Silbert. Hippocampus Press logo designed by Anastasia Damianakos. First Digital Edition(s) May 2012 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 ISBN 978-1-61498-030-8 Digital book(s) (epub and mobi) produced by Booknook.biz. 4 To the memory of Peter Wessel Zapffe 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my appreciation to Tim Jeski and Scott Wetherby for supplying me with materials essential to the writing of this work; to the members of Thomas Ligotti Online and its administrator, Brian Edward Poe, for participating in a forum of commentary on an early version of The Conspiracy against the Human Race; to Robert Ligotti for being a ready test subject whenever I needed an alert response from a mind akin to my own; and to Jennifer Gariepy for the encouragement and insight she has afforded me over many years. In addition, I would be more than remiss not to acknowledge the counsel and labors of S. T. Joshi, David E. Schultz, and Jonathan Padgett, with special recognition reserved for Nicole Ariana Seary, who granted me the benefit of her talents and experience during the most crucial stages of this book’s composition. Finally, I am indebted, as are all devotees of philosophical pessimism who are not knowledgeable of the Dano-Norwegian language, to Gisle R. Tangenes for his translations of and writings on the works of Peter Wessel Zapffe. The responsibility for the use made of these valued contributions lies entirely with the author. 6 CONTENTS Foreword by Ray Brassier………………………………….9 Introduction: Of Pessimism and Paradox………………….13 The Nightmare of Being…………………………...............19 Who Goes There?.................................................................85 Freaks of Salvation………………………………………..119 Sick to Death……………………………………...............147 The Cult of Grinning Martyrs………………….................169 Autopsy on a Puppet: An Anatomy of the Supernatural….183 Notes………………………………………………………229 7 FOREWORD Ray Brassier We know what verdict is reserved for those foolhardy enough to dissent from the common conviction according to which “being alive is all right,” to borrow an insistent phrase from the volume at hand. Disputants of the normative buoyancy of our race can expect to be chastised for their ingratitude, upbraided for their cowardice, patronized for their shallowness. Where self-love provides the indubitable index of psychic health, its default can only ever be seen as a symptom of psychic debility. Philosophy, which once disdained opinion, becomes craven when the opinion in question is whether or not being alive is all right. Suitably ennobled by the epithet “tragic,” the approbation of life is immunized against the charge of complacency and those who denigrate it condemned as ingrates. “Optimism”; “pessimism”: Thomas Ligotti takes the measure of these discredited words, stripping them of the patina of familiarity that has robbed them of their pertinence, and restoring to them some of their original substance. The optimist fixes the exchange rate between joy and woe, thereby determining the value of life. The pessimist, who refuses the principle of exchange and the injunction to keep investing in the future no matter how worthless life’s currency in the present, is stigmatized as an unreliable investor. The Conspiracy against the Human Race sets out what is perhaps the most sustained challenge yet to the intellectual blackmail that would oblige us to be eternally grateful for a “gift” we never invited. Being alive is not all right: this simple not encapsulates the temerity of thinking better than any platitude about the tragic nobility of a life characterized by a surfeit of suffering, frustration, and self-deceit. There is no nature worth revering or rejoining; there is no self to be re-enthroned as captain of its own fate; there is no future worth working towards or hoping for. Life, in Ligotti’s outsized stamp of disapproval, is MALIGNANTLY USELESS. No doubt, critics will try to indict Ligotti of bad faith by claiming that the writing of this book is itself driven by the imperatives of the life that he seeks to excoriate. But the charge is trumped-up, since Ligotti explicitly avows the impossibility for the living to successfully evade life’s grip. This admission leaves the cogency of his diagnosis intact, for as Ligotti knows full well, if living is lying, then even telling the truth about life’s lie will be a sublimated lie. 8 Such sublimation is as close to truth-telling as Ligotti’s exacting nihilism will allow. Unencumbered by the cringing deference towards social utility that straightjackets most professional philosophers, Ligotti’s unsparing dissection of the sophisms spun by life’s apologists proves him to be a more acute pathologist of the human condition than any sanctimonious philanthrope. 9 Look at your body— A painted puppet, a poor toy Of jointed parts ready to collapse, A diseased and suffering thing With a head full of false imaginings. —The Dhammapada 10 INTRODUCTION: OF PESSIMISM AND PARADOX In his study The Nature of Evil (1931), Radoslav A. Tsanoff cites a terse reflection set down by the German philosopher Julius Bahnsen in 1847, when he was seventeen years old. “Man is a self-conscious Nothing,” wrote Bahnsen. Whether one considers these words to be juvenile or precocious, they belong to an ancient tradition of scorn for our species and its aspirations. All the same, the reigning sentiments on the human venture normally fall between qualified approval and loud-mouthed braggadocio. As a rule, anyone desirous of an audience, or even a place in society, might profit from the following motto: “If you can’t say something positive about humanity, then say something equivocal.” Returning to Bahnsen, he grew up to become a philosopher who not only had nothing either positive or equivocal to say about humanity, but who also arrived at a dour assessment of all existence. Like many who have tried their hand at metaphysics, Bahnsen declared that, appearances to the contrary, all reality is the expression of a unified, unchanging force—a cosmic movement that various philosophers have characterized in various ways. To Bahnsen, this force and its movement were monstrous in nature, resulting in a universe of indiscriminate butchery and mutual slaughter among its individuated parts. Additionally, the “universe according to Bahnsen” has never had a hint of design or direction. From the beginning, it was a play with no plot and no players that were anything more than portions of a master drive of purposeless self-mutilation. In Bahnsen’s philosophy, everything is engaged in a disordered fantasia of carnage. Everything tears away at everything else … forever. Yet all this commotion in nothingness goes unnoticed by nearly everything involved in it. In the world of nature, as an instance, nothing knows of its embroilment in a festival of massacres. Only Bahnsen’s self-conscious Nothing can know what is going on and be shaken by the tremors of chaos at feast. As with all pessimistic philosophies, Bahnsen’s rendering of existence as something strange and awful was unwelcome by the self-conscious nothings whose validation he sought. For better or worse, pessimism without compromise lacks public appeal. In all, the few who have gone to the pains of arguing for a sullen appraisal of life might as well never have been born. As history confirms, people will change their minds about almost anything, from which god they worship to how they style their 11 hair. But when it comes to existential judgments, human beings in general have an unfalteringly good opinion of themselves and their condition in this world and are steadfastly confident they are not a collection of self- conscious nothings. Must all reproof of our species’ self-contentment then be renounced? That would be the brilliant decision, rule number one for deviants from the norm. Rule number two: If you must open your mouth, steer away from debate. Money and love may make the world go round, but disputation with that world cannot get it to budge if it is not of a mind to do so. Thus British author and Christian apologist G. K. Chesterton: “You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.” What Chesterton means to say here is that logic is irrelevant to truth, because if you can find truth without logic then logic is superfluous to any truth- finding effort.