![]() ![]() Corresponding to this, he also proffers the human, the non-human, and the unhuman. He puts it another way early on, distinguishing among world (the world-for-us), Earth (the world-in-itself), and Planet (the world-without-us). If Kant posited a phenomenal world, the thing-for-us, which may or may not be a result of or reflection of the thing-in-itself, that never-knowable yet necessary postulate of a noumenal world, Eugene Thacker asks us to add thing-without-us. It is only in post-modernity, particularly with regard to our reflections upon global climate change, where we come face to face with something that cannot be named except through negation. Yet philosophy in the west, particularly in its middle, onto-theological phase from late antiquity through the Renaissance, has demanded that this not be so. ![]() Even at a semantic, grammatical level, such a sentence is meaningless after all, the pronoun “that” needs a positive referent, and the “not” is the nullity of all content, even the nullity of the null. Where does human thought fail? What is the Event Horizon of philosophy, the boundary point that, should one venture past, results in ultimate destruction with no possibility of escape? For the West, at least (less so in the east, particularly in various strains of Buddhism, but we’ll come to that later), that boundary line is quite simply “that which is not”. ![]()
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