Third lecture for my students in English 192, "Science Fiction," summer 2013 at UC Santa Barbara. Course website: http://patrickbrianmooney.nfshost.com/~patrick/ta/m13/

1. Lecture 3: The Cosmological View
English 192
Summer 2013
7 August 2013
“‘No!’ interrupted the doctor. ‘There is no peace and rest in the
development of material interests. They have their law and their
justice. But it is founded on expedience, and is inhuman; it is
without rectitude, without the continuity and the force that can be
found only in a moral principle.’"
— Joseph Conrad, Nostromo, ch. 11

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3. Comprehending the World
“[…] it is increasingly difficult to comprehend the
world in which we live and of which we are a part.
To confront this idea is to confront an absolute limit
to our ability to adequately understand the world at
all – an idea that has been a central motif of the
horror genre for some time.” (Thacker 1)
“But the world can mean many things, from a
subjective experience of living in the world, to the
objective scientific study of geological conditions.
The world is human and non-human,
anthropocentric and non-anthropomorphic,
sometimes even misanthropic.” (2)

4. Limits of Comprehension
“the horror of philosophy: the isolation of those
moments in which philosophy reveals its own
limitations and constraints, moments in which thinking
enigmatically confronts the horizon of its own
possibility – the thought of the unthinkable that
philosophy cannot pronounce but via a non-
philosophical language.” (2)
“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. After all, being human, how else would we
make sense of the world?” (4)

5. “the world can mean many things” (2)
● “the world-for-us” (or “the World”) is the world as we
experience it, the world as a phenomenological construct
with which we interact. (4)
● “the world-in-itself” (or “the Earth”) is the world that
“‘bites back,’ resists, or ignores our attempts to mold it
into the world-for-us.” This is the world as an object of
scientific study; it is also an imaginary construct that
“constitutes a horizon for thought, always receding just
beyond the bounds of intelligibility.” (4-5)
● “the world-without-us” (or “the Planet”) is an
unknowable (“spectral and speculative”) construct in
which we attempt to subtract human meaning and activity
from “the Earth.” (5-6)

6. Thinking the Unthinkable
“To say that the world-without-us is antagonistic to the
human is to attempt to put things in human terms, in
the terms of the world-for-us. To say that the world-
without-us is neutral with respect to the human, is to
attempt to put things in terms of the world-in-itself.
The word-without us lies somewhere in between, in a
nebulous zone that is at once impersonal and horrific.
The world-without us is as much a cultural concept as
a scientific one, and, as this book attempts to show, it
is in the genres of supernatural horror and science
fiction that we most frequently find attempts to think
about, and to confront the difficult thought of, the
world-without-us.” (5-6)

7. Main take-away points
● Our primary engagements with “the world” are
infused with human values and human
constructions based on human activities.
● “[T]he world-without-us is not to be found in a
‘great beyond’ that is exterior to the World […] or
the Earth […]; rather, it is in the very fissures,
lapses, or lacunae in the World and the Earth.” (7-
8)
● “I would propose […] that horror be understood
about the the limits of the human as it confronts a
world that is not just a World, and not just the
Earth, but also a Planet (the world-without-us).” (8)