The Book of Pessimists by the Prince of Pessimism

There is a niche within philosophy of pessimists and misanthropes. Its celebrities all seem to be depressed white western males. Most of them lived solitary lives, tainted by religion, and surrounded by, when not participating in, suicide. Their books are filled with aphorisms and fragments rather than measured thought. So is this one. Every thought is precious, it seems.

The first 250 pages of Eugene Thacker’s Infinite Resignation are the stereotypical pessimist’s publication. It is clearly inspired by Schopenhauer, the patron saint of pessimism. It gets less and less reader-friendly as it goes on. And it is entirely horizontal. It does not build into anything. You find yourself trying to figure out why Thacker has put them in this particular order, not why he prints them at all. Because there is no answer to that. The flatness means you can open the book to any page without having missed anything. It is a collection, not an investigation or analysis. It reads like an Oscar Wilde notebook – experimenting with clever, hopefully immortal epigrams. Unfortunately, it seems to be lot of single words put in juxtaposition counterintuitively, without explanation, or verbs. They are instantly forgettable and forgotten, and you move on.

There are some minor gems worth mentioning:
-The pessimist is a well-informed optimist
-Two kinds of pessimism: The end is near and Will this never end?
-There are no solvable problems except in mathematics
-Good luck is bad luck because nothing lasts. Bad luck is bad luck because it’s worse than what came before.
-For pessimists, sleep is a form of training.
-Pessimist slogans: Drop all causes! or Not To Be!
-In writing I feel a strange euphoria… there are so many ways to say nothing.

The second (and last) chapter is a 150 page collection of Thacker’s pessimist heroes, in profiles of a few pages. They do not readily link to the previous chapter, and the point of the whole exercise is elusive. The unstated irony is that while Thacker mentions the ugly hubris of Man in the universe, this whole book is an act of hubris putting forth pessimism as if it were God’s Design. Pessimists revile life, are annoyed at all evidence of it, and spend their lives wondering if they should end it (or beating themselves up over why they don’t). It doesn’t lend itself to happy times or fortuitous outcomes for its proponents. Or as Thacker himself put it at the outset: “The problem is that when pessimism enters philosophical discussion, it is almost never helpful. In fact, it makes things worse.“

David Wineberg ( )