In the final section he dissects a poem about the formation of life, and primarily discussing the mystics and what they have to tell us that strict religion and hard-line science cannot.

This is an incredibly ambitious book of philosophy, in that it is quite literally trying to "think the unthinkable," or to establish a kind of mysticism / belief system that is without any human (anthropocentric) basis whatsoever. In other words, to create a framework for interpreting reality from an increasingly remote point of view... that of the planet, of the cosmos, of nothingness itself-- which is nothing, therefore it cannot even be an 'itself,' and should not be described as the absence of things but rather more extremely as the absence of absence. It’s not a particularly easy read, and I wasn’t a great fan of the jargon-laden style, but the subject is nevertheless fascinating. I marked a great many passages. The author is widely-read, his subjects diverse, his thought digressive; and yet he seems to expend a great deal of ink in tracing the contours of an idea which is expressed with greater elegance and simplicity in the fictions he so admires. Why not then express them succinctly in fiction? Most of the chapters conclude with more questions than can possibly be answered in one book, and I was constantly waiting for the author to take his thesis a step or two beyond. And so what, I kept wondering. What does it do to us, this world-without-us? Where does it come from? What is it for?This turned out to be more about mysticism (what ET intriguingly describes as a "dark mysticism") than I first thought it would. A turn that has now happened with more than a few books I've read in the past year, and in the end a pleasant alternative to some of the directions Dust might have gone from the starting provocations. In short, when the non-human world manifests itself to us in these ambivalent ways, more often than not our response is to recuperate that non-human world into whatever the dominant, human-centric worldview is at the time.

An Ideal for Living: An Anti-Novel (20th Anniversary Edition). Schism Press, 2020. ISBN 979-8682903832. An interesting look at some philosophical themes -- essence, reality, negation, alterity, myth -- with horror and occult themes used as a framework. The work deserves a star, simply for its ambition, given its experimental structures and unconventional ways of organizing its ideas. There are compelling conceptual turns and clever treatments, so it's certainly worth a shot, especially for fans of horror and theory, speculative realism, etc. We can even abbreviate these three concepts further: the world-for-us is simply the World, the world-in-itself is simply the Earth, and the world-without-us is simply the Planet.This book made my skin crawl and my mind expand. It's a dense, sometimes impenetrable work of philosophy that discusses the Unthinkable, so obviously it's not going to work very well as beach reading. But if you give it your attention and an open mind, there are some seriously creepy-cool concepts about the Universe to be gleaned here. Networks, Swarms, Multitudes" Part 1, Part 2, Ctheory (2004), "Biophilosophy for the 21st Century", Ctheory (2005).

Leper Creativity: The Cyclonopedia Symposium, co-edited with Ed Keller and Nicola Masciandaro. Punctum Books, 2012. ISBN 978-0615600468. There's always death to look forward to: Nihilist Arby's and the cheerful nihilism of the Internet", The Awl, August 2, 2017.

The Patron Saints of Pessimism - A Writer's Pantheon, excerpt from Infinite Resignation @ LitHub (2018) This taxonomic discussion was to me the centre of the book, although it was woven in with a great deal about mysticism, theology, and ooze that I saw more as intellectual curiosities. When it comes to environmental philosophy, I find myself preferring the more focused approach of, for example, Timothy Morton’s The Ecological Thought. Although, not as deep or meaningful as some of the above quotes, I thought the allegorical associations of zombies to rising underclasses, of vampire to romantic, but decaying aristocracy and demons to a middle class burgeois was quite interesting. Ciò che mi sarei aspettata di trovare: un saggio, alla maniera di "The Weird and the Eerie" di Mark Fisher, dove opere musicali, letterarie e cinematografiche sono chiamate in causa e analizzate per mostrare come il linguaggio dell'arte sappia descrivere e definire, ma soprattutto trasmettere, concetti e suggestioni altrimenti impossibili da rendere.