A Feeling of Wrongness: Pessimistic Rhetoric on the Fringes of Popular Culture 9780271083179

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A Feeling of Wrongness

A Feeling of Wrongness Pessimistic Rhetoric on the Fringes of Popular Culture

Joseph Packer and Ethan Stoneman

The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania

Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data Names: Packer, Joseph, 1983– author. | Stoneman, Ethan, author. Title: A feeling of wrongness : pessimistic rhetoric on the fringes of popular culture / Joseph Packer and Ethan Stoneman. Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “Examines case studies of popular culture as pessimistic rhetorical artifacts, and how non-traditional modes of argumentation can work rhetorically to overcome biases against pessimistic messaging”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2018031497 | ISBN 9780271082356 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Pessimism—Case studies. | Popular culture. | Rhetoric. Classification: LCC B829.P23 2018 | DDC 809/.93353—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc .gov/2018031497

Copyright © 2018 Joseph Packer and Ethan Stoneman All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802–1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992.

Contents

Acknowledgments  vii “Few Defenders”: An Introduction 1 1 “No, Everything Is Not All Right”: Supernatural Horror as Pessimistic Argument 23 2 “I’m Bad at Parties”: The Philosophical Pessimism of True Detective 49 3 “Wubba Lubba Dub-Dub!”: The Tragicomic Pessimism of Rick and Morty 79

4 “Finish Her”: The Interactive Pessimism of Final Fantasy VII 107 5 “All Hope Abandon”: Transhumanism’s Hidden Hellscape 137 Conclusion: Pessimism Never Won Any Battles? 165 Notes  175 Bibliography  196 Index  211

Acknowledgments

It is probably a dubious honor to be acknowledged in a book that explores life’s intrinsic badness, but thanks are in order. I would like to start by thanking my coauthor. I was never a fan of group work in school, but writing this book has been a happy experience. One can see the enormous amount of work Ethan contributed simply by looking at the sharp increase in quality between this manuscript and my other published writing. I also would like to thank my academic mentors: Tim O’Donnell for saving me from a life in law and Ron and Mary Zboray for shaping me into someone capable of writing a book. I would like to thank everyone at Penn State University Press, but specifically Kendra Boileau and Alex Vose for shepherding this project through its various stages. Patricia MacCormack and Barry Brummett offered enormously valuable suggestions, all of which we incorporated. The manuscript would have been much weaker without their thoughtful analyses. Finally, I would like to thank my family: my parents for always supporting and encouraging me, my sister for just being awesome, my partner Rebecca for being a brilliant academic mind to share ideas with. —Joseph Packer Much I owe many. First, my coauthor: Joe lit the fuse to this project years ago when he asked if I knew of Thomas Ligotti. I did but had never thought to write about him or his work. Joe’s initiative, enthusiasm, and diligence were the engines that made this thing possible—and overpowered any inertia on my end.

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I also want to thank Dr. Steven Knepper at Virginia Military Institute. His morale-boosting, friendship, and intellectual curiosity should but don’t come at a price.  I have benefited from many conversations with members of the Hillsdale College community, both in and outside the classroom. Special thanks are owed to Zoe Harness and Peyton Bowen, whose interpretations of various media texts were frequently illuminative and invigorating to my own work. Dr. Stephen Smith’s encouraging words about the value of media courses at a traditional liberal arts college were what I needed to here when I needed to hear them. Informal cultural criticism with Dr. Lee Cole is one of the chief hidden influences on my approach to the various dispiriting and nihilistic texts Joe and I examined; a sincere “thank you” goes to him as well (and perhaps a sincere apology). I can never adequately express to my wife, friend, and fellow academic Dr. Brita Stoneman my appreciation for all the support and invaluable writing time she has given me over the past eight years. I owe a similar debt to our three children, who have so understandingly put up with their academic parents. With great fondness and gratitude, I acknowledge the tireless love and support of my parents, Bill and Kathy Stoneman, my sister, Maureen Stoneman, and my grandparents, William and Lillian Allmon and Edith and Jay Stoneman. You make pessimism difficult. —Ethan Stoneman

Acknowledgments

“Few Defenders” An Introduction Rustin Cohle: Look, I’d consider myself a realist, all right? But in philosophical terms I’m what’s called a pessimist. Martin Hart: Uh, okay, what’s ’at mean? Rustin Cohle: Means I’m bad at parties. —True Detective (2014)1

The rhetoric of pessimism is, to say the least, off-putting. The Romanian aphorist E. M. Cioran, for instance, informs readers that, contrary to their best (even modest) wishes, the world is a place where “pleasures vanish . . . while the memory of pain is poignant.”2 An unpleasant idea, to be sure, though perhaps even more disconcerting is cult horror writer Thomas Ligotti’s bald pronouncement that life is “malignantly useless,” a pure negation.3 Life may very well be mournfully wretched, but it would be foolish, Ligotti reasons, to attribute any value to that suffering. After all, argues the arch-pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer, life is no more than a “constant dying,” a perpetual misery machine, entirely lacking in any meaning or purpose—that is, apart from its own blind, stupid self-consumption.4 And yet for all that doom and gloom, stylistically, such typical histrionics border on the laughably repellent, providing those who find pessimism otherwise irksome a convenient excuse to write it off as the self-indulgent ramblings of middle-aged, bourgeois cranks. Pessimists would be so lucky, however, if popular objections to pessimism were primarily driven by aesthetic preferences. But one suspects that resistance to pessimistic sentiment runs deeper than concerns for style and expression, that it stems principally from a disagreement over fundamental beliefs, values, and attitudes. For as a philosophical orientation, pessimism runs counter to majority dispositions that regard life and living as, in some way, meaningful and purposive, as justifying—even if against all odds—hope in a brighter future, in a better, or at the very least livable,

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tomorrow. Hence, for the pessimist seeking to win converts, merely “toning down the language” and pursuing a rhetorical strategy of careful argumentation and sober analysis would most likely meet with very little persuasive success. It would thus appear that pessimism faces, at the outset, a rhetorical challenge that is prima facie insuperable: in proselytizing to the unconverted, pessimism rejects the data—things assumed as facts—that form the basis of common-sense reasoning and valuation. All the same, even if pessimists found an audience willing to entertain their ideas, they would still face another significant hurdle, namely, that the denial of existential significance is at some odds with the affirmative function of rhetoric to preserve a world of meaning, one in which material reality is not blindly cruel and indifferent but welcoming, reassuring, and kind. Indeed, as Michael Hyde argues, this activity points up to what could be described as rhetoric’s urfunction, that is, to “transform space and time into ‘dwelling places’” and in such a way that “we might feel more at home with others and our surroundings.”5 This transformation of life’s basic, a priori conditions— from stark reality to hospitable, humanizing habitat—is thus not only at odds with the pessimistic depiction of the world but also anathema to the pessimists’ goal of a lucidity in the face of social, cultural, even metaphysical illusions of optimism. Honed over thousands of years, the very structure of information transfer and persuasion simply does not lend itself to pessimistic messages. Indeed, beginning with the Older Sophists of the fifth century, rhetoric has tended to embrace an optimistic perspective, especially with regard to questions concerning the meaning-making capacity of language and the prospect of human agency via symbolic action. That tendency, however, is only incidental to the systematic study and intentional practice of effective symbolic expression. (Such an inclination says more about how the tool is applied—and the appliers—than about the tool itself.) Less incidental is the notion that rhetoric, conceived of as “a kind of subtly articulated machine,” is itself unavoidably oriented toward the accomplishment of some end, that it is inescapably goal-oriented and therefore optimistic.6 Common rhetorical strategies, for instance—what Aristotle termed topoi—presuppose the possibility, if not likelihood, of discursively mediated resolution.7 What’s more, such structural features also presuppose an underlying subjective dimension. According to the early twentieth-century pessimist Carlo Michelstaedter, rhetoric also designates an innate capacity of mind, one that, by imposing certain limitations on human consciousness, reflects, intensifies, and anticipates any number of anti-pessimistic and pro-optimistic biases.8 Either way, the bias for optimism is as evident as it is unshakable: A Feeling of Wrongness

rhetoric is a practicable, sense-making machine with which to impose order on a fundamentally disordered nature, to forge relationships between consciousness and a world of experience calling for meaning. Quite apart from these structural tendencies, the rhetorical injunction to draw on audiences’ cognitive and affective prejudices would still pose a rather obvious problem for pessimism. Over and above rhetoric’s built-in propensity for meaning making, audiences still carry with them a variety of ingrained, nonideological defense mechanisms, many of which make traditional rhetorical appeals exceedingly inadequate for the rhetor-pessimist. Not to put too fine a point on it, most modern people are simply, and profoundly, hostile to pessimistic sentiment. Rhetoric therefore runs aground when the reality it discloses is not the reality that most people recognize as “really real,” that is, when the unconcealed reality is undiluted by beliefs in things such as linear progress, stability of meaning, and the intelligibility of the material world. Contributing to this line of critique, the late Norwegian deep ecologist Peter Wessel Zapffe argues that such structures of thought function as reflexive anti-pessimistic strategies, which, when appropriately stimulated, serve to obstruct the rhetorical efficacy of pessimistic argumentation.9 Specifically, he identifies four distinct, albeit related, constraints that hinder the rhetorical efficacy of pessimistic argumentation: distraction, isolation, anchoring, and sublimation. In confronting pessimistic arguments, audiences tend to deploy any or all of these four overlapping strategies as a nonconscious means of inoculating themselves against pessimism’s basic anti-message of pure negation. Although Zapffe does not make use of rhetorical terminology, per se, the strategies name a group of rhetorical liabilities that negatively constrain people’s receptivity to pessimistic ideas and arguments: most people actively avoid pessimistic ideas (isolation), spending their time engaging in frivolities such as watching reality TV or sitcoms (distractions); others rationalize life’s suffering, relying on deeply ingrained structures of meaning and purposiveness (anchoring); still others welcome pain as an important part of life (sublimation). Essentially, each of these resistant strategies goes a long way in explaining why traditional models of rhetoric and argumentation tend not to win many new converts to pessimism: propositional arguments are easy prey for conflicting nonconscious practices and patterns of perceptual experience, especially when the former threaten to expose the latter to uncertainty and contingency. As a result, advocacy for pessimism, if it is to meet with rhetorical success, must address itself to negotiating these strategies, and this entails avoiding argument structures that are inherently anti-pessimistic. Introduction

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With that observation in mind, this book turns to a variety of less straightforwardly argumentative modes of pessimistic expression—and relatively neglected types of texts—so as to examine some of pessimism’s uncharted rhetorical possibilities and thereby make visible for the cultural critic the rhetorical efficacy of certain alternate ways and means of persuasion. The broader goal, then, is to provide an interpretive heuristic or critical-rhetorical hermeneutic for the identification and critique of nontraditional persuasive strategies, especially, but not exclusively, as they appertain to philosophical pessimism. To that end, the present work engages a wide range of popular culture texts on the premise that nonphilosophically discursive modes of expression are better suited to the production of pessimistic affect—of belief without cognition—than carefully argued treatises and polemics. Unlike the latter, the nondiscursive text carries with it the potentiality of circumventing the counterforces of pessimistic persuasion identified by Zapffe. So too, the specification of “popular” means that the relevant field of cultural production is not only inclusive but also (and more importantly) distinguished by different layers of meaning and sociocultural content, a quality that more easily allows for the exploitation of strategic ambiguity, experiments in expressive form, and the bringing forth of an array of feelings, emotions, and desires. Ranging from genre fiction to fifth-generation video games, our case studies of pop culture artifacts advance pessimistic ideas—and are therefore pessimistic—but they do so while twisting genres, upending common tropes, and disturbing conventional narrative structures. That is to say, they offer “readers” enjoyment, while throwing them off guard and frustrating conventional meaning-mapping, counterpessimistic strategies. In a sense, then, they perform a purer practice of pessimism and construct an ethos more in line with pessimistic thought than the “professionals.” For while the philosophers and the polemicists argue for pessimism in accord with optimistic structures of expressive thought, the texts we highlight communicate their pessimism in ways that are more properly pessimistic and rhetorically effective. Thus freed from the restrictive tools of optimism, pessimism is enabled to address itself, more adequately, to the task of dismantling the façade of the master’s house and to reveal a dwelling place that no one would desire to inhabit. Pessimism in Nuce

Although the title of “pessimist” has many definitions, most of which encompass broad swaths of individuals, Ligotti claims that to be a pessimist is to subscribe to a specific and inflexible belief about life. A pessimist, he argues, A Feeling of Wrongness

is someone who believes that “life is something that should not be, which means that what they believe should be is the absence of life, nothing, nonbeing, the emptiness of the uncreated.” Similarly, he describes an optimist as “[anyone] who speaks up for life as something that irrefutably should be—that we would not be better off unborn, extinct, or forever lazing in nonexistence—is an optimist.”10 For Ligotti, people are “either pessimists or optimists.” This disjunction, however, is at odds with the philosopher Joshua Foa Dienstag, who rejects any litmus test for pessimism and instead classifies in terms of “Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘family resemblance.’” Dienstag’s list of pessimists includes many who question the possibility of progress or take a negative view toward humanity but ultimately stop short of arguing that life should not exist or that nonexistence is preferable to existence. This includes such intellectual luminaries as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, Miguel de Unamuno, José Ortega y Gasset, Sigmund Freud, Albert Camus, Theodor W. Adorno, and Michel Foucault, to name but a few. Ligotti, however, is reluctant to sign off on the pessimistic bona fides of this assortment as a whole, referring to many of its members as “‘heroic’ pessimists, or rather heroic ‘pessimists,’” shifting his scare quotes to challenge both their heroism and pessimism.11 For Ligotti, a good pessimist is hard to find—not least of all because genuine pessimism demands a level of self-effacement that runs counter to the egoism that often accompanies intellectual creativity and the need to prove one’s scholastic worth. While pessimism has always been a view held only by a minority, one finds pessimists who meet Ligotti’s strict definition of the term scattered throughout the Western intellectual tradition. Writing in Athens in the fifth century, for instance, Sophocles has the chorus of Oedipus at Colonus sing in the third stasimon of the misery that comes to a long life: The best is never To have been born Or, once alive, die young And return to oblivion.12 Much later, in mid-nineteenth-century Germany, pessimism even gained a small foothold in the academy—and, then, only briefly—through the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer, whose reputation is that of a misanthropic old crank, not only passes the “Ligotti test” but also represents the gold standard of pessimism. On Schopenhauer’s view, individuated human life is nothing but an epiphenomenal series of oscillations between pain and Introduction

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boredom: “Man [sic] is a compound of needs which are hard to satisfy; that their satisfaction achieves nothing but a painless condition in which he is only given over to boredom; and that boredom is a direct proof that existence is in itself valueless, for boredom is nothing other than the sensation of the emptiness of existence.”13 Although this grim idealism was later eclipsed by Nietzsche’s Dionysiac pessimism of strength, which used Schopenhauer’s philosophy as a point of departure, Schopenhauerian pessimism continues to haunt the tradition of philosophical inquiry, at least in the West. Even in the wake of Nietzsche’s rebuke of his old master, the spirit of philosophical pessimism has been preserved up to the present by the occasional, disruptive appearance of full-throated, unreconstructed pessimists.14 In particular, Hungarian aphorist E. M. Cioran (1911–1995) served as unheroic pessimism’s twentieth-century answer to Nietzsche, an avenging spirit who combines Schopenhauer’s philosophical vision with Nietzsche’s combative, aphoristic style. Producing hundreds of fragments that spoke to life’s futility and undesirability, Cioran is unmatched in capturing that vision in the titles of his many works, to wit, On the Heights of Despair, The Trouble with Being Born, and A Short History of Decay. In a similar vein, Peter Wessel Zapffe (1889–1990) has proposed thinking about consciousness both as the source of humanity’s uniquely undesirable state and as that which singularly exacerbates that state by preventing the vast majority of us from attaining the pessimistic truths about life and living. Situated historically between Cioran and Zapffe, and putting his money where his pessimistic mouth was, former doctoral student at the University of Florence Carlo Michelstaedter (1887– 1910) finished a dissertation on the impossibility of authentic existence and, totally demoralized, promptly committed suicide. Among the living, perhaps the most well-known pessimist is the South African philosopher David Benatar. Unlike the other members of the pessimistic pantheon, Benatar approaches the question of life’s meaning from the perspective of analytic rather than continental philosophy, asserting that nonexistence is good when it avoids pain, but that when nonexistence prevents pleasure, it is neither good nor bad. On account of this asymmetry, he argues, one should only assess the pain of existence when evaluating the creation of new life and thus conclude that “coming into existence is always a serious harm.”15 Benatar’s book, Better Never to Have Been, is perhaps most remarkable for the amount and type of attention it has received, enjoying coverage in mainstream media outlets such as the Sydney Morning Herald and National Public Radio, garnering over three hundred academic citations, and eliciting a public response from Peter Singer, one of the world’s best-known A Feeling of Wrongness

philosophers.16 More recently, Brazilian philosopher Julio Cabrera has posited an ontological foundation for pessimism, which is partly grounded in the thought of Martin Heidegger: All that can be achieved, even the most glamorous from the ontical point of view, will carry the stigma of impoverishment, limitation and disappointment. The pure possibility was always greater and broader, more developed and more fulfilled than any realization of possibilities, however amazing. The nonbeing of pure possibility cannot do less than to limit itself in order to occupy a space into some form of being. The unlimited expressivity of nonbeing is necessarily restricted to limits and constrained in order “to be.” The being, any being, is born from suffocation and strangling, from an inescapable basic narrowing.17 In effect, Cabrera argues, existence always fails to measure up to existence. Although Cabrera disagrees with Benatar’s specific formulation, they both reach and hammer home the same antinatal conclusion, namely, no one should be born—not ever—because to live is to suffer. For whatever reason, our present century has also witnessed the emergence of pessimistic tracts from beyond the discipline of academic philosophy. The blogger Jim Crawford wrote his first book, Confessions of an Antinatalist, despite limiting his self-designated qualifications to those of “short order cook and part-time poet.”18 Likewise, a self-described “adorable housewife” who makes a “killer chanterelle risotto,” Sarah Perry, published Every Cradle Is a Grave.19 A simple Google search reveals the existence (and relative popularity) of pessimist blogs with names such as “Say No to Life” and “Don’t Have Kids.”20 Also online, Reddit, one of the world’s largest online message boards, hosts an active pessimist community.21 And of course, one of the most important works of pessimism in recent memory, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, was authored by Ligotti, a writer whose public persona is that of a scribbler of weird tales. Although this list of post-Schopenhauerian pessimists is hardly exhaustive, a complete listing would in all likelihood not overwhelm the uninitiated. If one is interested in discovering additional pessimists, one could do worse than consult the works of any of the twenty-first-century pessimists mentioned above. Like other marginalized voices, pessimists have a tendency to collect assiduous lists of their fellow travelers, as if there were a certain safety (or legitimacy) in numbers, even, or especially, when those numbers Introduction

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barely reach the dozens over the span of centuries. What’s more, these inventories typically contain such largely forgotten figures as the rabbinic school House of Shammai and the American novelist Edgar Saltus.22 That is to say that the admitted incompleteness of our catalogue does not suggest some hidden wellspring of pessimistic thought. The truth is much closer to the opinion of the philosopher Peter Singer, namely, that “Schopenhauer’s pessimism has had few defenders over the past two centuries”—a statement that we think can be fairly extended to the whole of human history.23 Rhetorical Problems

Pessimists, in their defense, face no shortage of difficulties in their attempt to persuade others of their philosophy. One of the most intriguing problems, however, is that the overall scarcity of pessimists itself serves as a compelling argument against their philosophical outlook. For if the world is so terrible that human extinction is desirable, so the thinking goes, then why do so many people seem fine with being alive—some of which are themselves, presumably, pessimists? Pessimists provide a variety of answers to this question. Schopenhauer posits an almost metaphysical “will-to-live,” which he thinks overcomes human judgment and bends us to the purpose of extending life.24 Cioran explains humanity’s generally pro-life (or at least nonextinctionist) views in a variety of ways, from general naiveté to the prominence of Hegelian ideas about progress.25 Some even lay the blame on evolution, arguing that as a means of facilitating propagation, natural selection has resulted in certain adaptive psychological mutations that prevent an accurate evaluation of the world’s terror.26 Still another recurrent explanation pessimists give for their small number is that society, culture, and even language itself work to obscure the grim reality of the world. Crawford, for instance, argues that society enacts “self-delusion” through cult-like brainwashing; Benatar describes these forces as an incorrect “paradigm,” one that biases individuals toward life, applies “peer” and “social pressure” to reproduce, and “pathologiz[es]” pessimism.27 Anticipating Crawford and Benatar, Zapffe similarly argues that “most people manage to save themselves by artificially paring down their consciousness.”28 Perry simply claims that people tend to agree with those around them and since most people are not pessimists, pessimism as a specific cultural meme has a difficult time gaining a foothold.29 Whereas Ligotti describes such counterpessimistic forces as a “conspiracy,” Michelstaedter refers to them as “rhetoric,” arguing that rhetoric as a structure of thought displays any number of anti-pessimistic, or optimistic, A Feeling of Wrongness

biases. Highly idiosyncratic, Michelstaedter’s interpretation of rhetoric is admittedly based on a selective study of certain ancient texts (e.g., those of pre-Socratic philosopher-poets and Athenian tragedians, as well as of Plato and Aristotle). Nevertheless, the notion that the structures of human thought and communication constrain the communicability of expressive ideas is as cogent as it is simple. According to Eugene Thacker, such simplicity is befitting since, “pessimism abjures all pretenses towards system—towards the purity of analysis and the dignity of critique.”30 If this is indeed the case, then rhetoric in the primordial sense of a meaning-making structure intrinsic to the human mind must by its very nature come into conflict with pessimism as a variety of anti-thought. Rhetoric, however, as it has been developed over the centuries as the study and practice of effective symbolic expression, contains far more optimism than rhetoric in Michelstaedter’s sense of a “deep” structure.31 Beginning with the axiom attributed to Protagoras that “‘[of] all things the measure is man,’” the rhetorical enterprise has sought to describe and refine the symbolic means by which humans make ongoing sense of appearances.32 The significance of such an undertaking cannot be overestimated. As Thomas Farrell points out, the tricky thing about appearances is that they “admit to a tension between their stability and ‘the shifting way in which they appear,’” whence the practical need to develop systematic ways of engaging “modalities of appearance,” especially insofar as they admit open-ended themes involving emotion, conviction, and judgment.”33 At first glance, the work of contemporary rhetoricians appears to mirror the effort of recent pessimists to subvert the storehouse of relatively stable meanings that have accrued to the myriad of changing appearances. Raymie McKerrow’s critical rhetoric, for instance, privileges the critic’s role in revealing the ways in which the contingent, contextual interpretation of appearances helps to foster and maintain social and political oppression.34 Similarly, Lloyd Bitzer’s concept of the rhetorical situation forwards the idea that problematic aspects of the world (“an actual or potential exigence”) can be resolved if effective discourse, “introduced into the situation, can so constrain human decision or action as to bring about the significant modification of the exigence.”35 Such intervention, however, either presupposes agreement about the nature and existence of a particular problem or requires convincing people that there is an exigence and that its reality constitutes a pressing problem. Thus, appearances notwithstanding, rhetoricians—and, by extension, the cultural project of rhetoric as a whole—take aim at actual meaning not in order to disclose the emptiness of meaning as such (i.e., the truth of non-meaning) but to usher in “better” significations, Introduction

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to articulate what is apparent with new and improved frameworks. Even at the level of form, common rhetorical strategies (what Aristotle designated as topoi) presuppose the possibility, if not likelihood, of discursively mediated resolution.36 Nevertheless, even if none of these anti-pessimistic tendencies absolutely precludes pessimism’s persuasive viability, still, audiences carry with them a variety of ingrained defense mechanisms, many of which make traditional rhetorical appeals problematic for the rhetor-pessimist. As T. S. Eliot famously writes in his Four Quartets, “Human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.”37 Rooted in common belief and opinion, rhetoric therefore runs aground when the reality it discloses is not the reality that most people recognize as “really real” or want to believe in—that is, when the unconcealed reality is undiluted by beliefs in things such as linear progress, stability of meaning, and the intelligibility of the material world. Argumentation theory, which tries to create a mechanism of persuasion beyond appeals to common belief and opinion, is even more optimistic than rhetoric, because it imposes on discourse a set of rules governing what is appropriate, rules that no one is under an obligation to follow. That is to say, few individuals refute the detailed case Benatar provides for antinatalist pessimism before dismissing his arguments out of hand. Some detractors express satisfaction after having presented counterpoints that reflect a clear misunderstanding of Benatar’s work, while others choose simply not to engage it at all.38 We find evidence of this attitude even among philosophy professors such as Sami Pihlström: We are, moreover, accustomed to thinking that the best argument wins. Philosophy is an argumentative game; this, indeed, is what we philosophy professors teach to our students (and are expected to do so). However, sometimes—especially when people put forward, and argue for, views that are ethically intolerable, whether or not they lead to school shootings or other mass murders—it might be argued, at a metalevel, that argumentation is not the only game in town. Perhaps there are ideas that are dangerous enough not to deserve serious argumentative attention. Perhaps there are philosophical ideas and arguments that ought to be left aside precisely because they violate some human values and ideals that are cherished more deeply than the ideal of sound argument itself.39 Apart from the world of competitive debate, there exists no external referee who could ensure adherence to argumentation’s rules and best practices A Feeling of Wrongness

such that one’s opponents would find themselves obligated (somehow) to play fair—or play at all. For that reason, argumentation, with its formal standards as to what counts as appropriately persuasive, offers the pessimist no better alternative model with which to refute optimism, despite its added pretensions. What’s more, the project of argumentation, beyond being practically useless for pessimists, has typically been articulated in optimistic terms. Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s seminal work of argumentation theory describes argument as an intrinsically human-valuing endeavor.40 David Zarefsky, in contention with Perelman for the title of leading argumentation scholar of our time, likewise describes the various views within the field of argumentation in humanistic (and humanizing) terms: “An underlying premise of the discipline is that arguing is a natural and inherent human activity, whether (as some believe) a substitute for force which makes civilized society possible, or (as others believe) an expression of creativity that liberates the individual, or (as still others believe) the glue which holds society together by linking the separate interests and concerns of otherwise atomized individuals.”41 Civilizing, liberating, de-atomizing, all these strains, while perhaps in some tension with each other, nevertheless stand in stark contrast to the pessimistic project, which sees no civilization, liberation, or escape from atomization (much less our existence as mere atoms). Even without these optimistic framings, how could a discipline so singularly focused on informal logic help advance pessimism—especially when, as Thacker rightly points out, pessimism is “the failure of sound and sense, the disarticulation of phone and logos”?42 The existence of an optimistic grammar at the heart of almost all rhetoric and argumentation is a fascinating prospect. Disparate groups across the political, ideological, and academic spectrum are united by some shared cultural-linguistic topoi. The phenomenon, however, goes largely unreported (and unnoticed) because form and content are typically intertwined. Communists, fascists, liberals, libertarians, almost all creeds, causes, and covenants share an underlying optimistic foundation. It should thus come as no surprise that rhetoric and argumentation’s optimism becomes visible only on the rare occasions that we hear from a true-blue pessimist, and even then few have spent much time analyzing what most dismiss as the ravings of the mad or misanthropic. Zapffe’s taxonomy of counterpessimistic defense mechanisms is thus unique in that it offers the most developed examination of the rhetorical obstacles facing philosophical pessimism. Zapffe argues that optimism Introduction

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triumphs because anchoring allows audiences to reframe pessimistic “facts” so that they take on life-affirming meaning. Zapffe imagines a future “messiah” spreading the good word of pessimism, only to have his audience “pour themselves over him, led by the pacifier makers and the midwives, and bury him in their fingernails.”43 Even those persons whom society typically identifies as pessimistic tend toward these commonplaces. Not infrequently one finds such types deploying an optimistic discourse even as they talk about unpleasant things. What’s more, pessimists in the vein of Ligotti and Schopenhauer literally cannot communicate in a standard way without performatively contradicting their core beliefs. The very performance of humanity runs counter to pessimism. This paradox is not lost on pessimists. As Ray Brassier explains, “Ligotti knows well, if living is lying, then even telling the truth about life’s lie will be a sublimated lie.”44 Pessimistic Persuasion

Nevertheless—and despite all these serious constraints to rhetorical effectivity—we maintain that pessimists can take advantage of suasive operations and tactics that lessen this tension, strategems that are much less reliant on traditional models of rhetoric and argumentation and much more indebted to aesthetic, narrative, and esoteric means of persuasion. Such resources are crucial if pessimism ever hopes to have a good showing in the struggle over common belief and opinion. For as we have seen, the typical avenues of persuasion seem off-limits to pessimistic appropriation, so much so that Thacker can write that “if pessimism has any pedagogical value, it is that the failure of pessimism as a philosophy is inextricably tied to the failure of pessimism as voice.”45 Pessimism delivered in an optimistic veneer, in other words, is self-defeating or at least nonstarting. Or as Adorno argues of philosophy more generally, “The presentation of philosophy is not an external matter of indifference to it but immanent to its idea.”46 Fortunately for the rhetorically aspiring pessimist, there are a number of aesthetic forms and possibilities that lend themselves to pessimistic persuasion. Although in the present book we make mention of a few of these, other scholars have already insightfully forayed into this area. Dienstag, for instance, suggests that “aphorisms and pessimism are fitted to one another” and points out that many of the great pessimists have written aphoristically. On his view, the unstructured and fragmented nature of aphorisms reflects a disordered universe, even if the content might betray a positive worldview.47 Their pithy, unstructured natures also tend to focus attention on the present A Feeling of Wrongness

rather than the future—a future, moreover, which Dienstag maintains is hopelessly enmeshed with optimism.48 Writing aphoristically, Cioran hints at another pessimistic aspect of aphorisms, writing, “Works die: fragments, not having lived, can no longer die.”49 That is to say that works, however pessimistic, having died, can be buried, isolated, sublimated, or anchored away. The fragment, in contrast, can slip past one’s optimistic defenses, like a fly that when swatted away returns moments later to land on one’s skin. The philosophical-literary fragment, however, is only one kind of stylistic device and one that is rather limited in terms of audience reach. What’s more, we might question the extent to which any aphorism “can no longer die.” Well beyond the artistic ambitions of professional pessimists, the realm of the popular hosts a multiplicity of expressive modes and modalities. Although these forms overwhelmingly tend to be occupied by an optimistic content, there are a few instances in which pessimistic messages creep past the vigilant gatekeepers of commercial propriety and exploit the rhetorical potentiality of this multimodal environment. Dienstag also discerns a distinctly Schopenhauerean ideology in the behavior of Justine in Lars von Trier’s recent film, Melancholia, in which a massive rogue planet is on course to collide with Earth.50 Justine, on her wedding day, welcomes the impending destruction. Dienstag argues that this passive desire reflects the film’s broader ontological statement about the Earth, namely, that it is evil and better off shattered into a billion pieces of space debris. The pessimistic narrative, which Dienstag argues is quite intentional on the part of Von Trier, is bolstered by a variety of pessimistically suitable aesthetic choices, choices that diverge sharply from typical Hollywood fare. As Dienstag explains, “Pessimistic popular film is hard to make because it is not pleasant to look at. It even requires us to look at nothing, like the black screen that persists for a long time in Melancholia after the destruction of the Earth and before the final credits.”51 In similar fashion, communication scholar Brian Zager claims that the post-apocalyptic thriller Vanishing on 7th Street also embodies a pessimistic ethos. In this film a creeping darkness causes most of the world’s human population to disappear, leaving only a few survivors who try their best to remain in the light at all times. According to Zager’s interpretation, the movie’s depiction of the loss of self represents a “destabilization of humanity’s (presumed) privileged status in a world that harbours [sic] truths strange to rational understanding.” For that reason, he continues, “Vanishing provides viewers an occasion to ponder the peculiar relationships between being and nothingness, speech and silence, and the light of reason and the obscurity of Introduction

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un-nameable horror.”52 This focus on a world without humans, he contends, serves as a “rhetorical pessimism then [that] becomes an integral part in evoking the traces of horror-as-absence.”53 Not all pessimistic art, however, is contemporary. Dienstag also identifies postimpressionist painting with a pessimistic aesthetic (though noting that most postimpressionist works do not contain pessimistic content). The postimpressionist style, he argues, reflects a rather acute consciousness of the socially constructed—and therefore void-filled—nature of perceived reality: “Impressionism exposed the ‘fiction’ of straight lines, pure black, and large fields of constant color. . . . Now, postimpressionism accepted this impressionist lesson but desired nonetheless to paint objects with solidity, line, and the appearance of definition. Only now these elements were understood to be fictions, creations, impositions. . . . Postimpressionists painted nature, but always emphasized how it was a function of man [sic].”54 This self-awareness stands in sharp contrast to the unironic aesthetic of order found in the art of the Renaissance and Reformation, which as with most representational art is optimistic through and through—depictions of the occasional devil and demon notwithstanding. Taking our cue from such thoughtful analyses, the present study looks to the messy terrain of popular culture as an occasion to analyze and interpret some of the unconventional means of pessimistic persuasion. For just as the unorthodox can at times provide the best means by which to defend orthodoxy, so, too, can the popular serve as a persuasive expedient for philosophical pessimism, smuggling grim truths inside shiny packaging. After all, who would ever suspect? The “White Male Wail”

Despite the homogeneity of thinkers in the Western tradition of pessimism, the pessimistic canon does include the occasional overture to nondominant or peripheral groups and individuals—marginal, that is, vis-à-vis the political and cultural influence of Europe and the Anglo-sphere. Schopenhauer, for example, writes, “If I wished to take the results of my philosophy as the standard of truth, I should have to concede to Buddhism pre-eminence over the others.”55 For the most part, however, such overtures are little more than brief, infrequent dalliances, exceptions that prove the rule: namely, that philosophical pessimism constitutes (historically, at least) a closed circuit comprising a rather compact collection of writings, a “restricted” field of cultural production in which certain works are recognized as belonging to the canon.56 From Arthur Schopenhauer to Eugene Thacker, the major works A Feeling of Wrongness

of philosophical pessimism are almost exclusively written by men from developed countries for the affections of an educated, upper-middle class audience, itself mostly made up of straight, cisgendered white men. Little wonder, then, that issues of gender, race, class, and sexuality receive limited, if any, attention. Less understandable, however, is the tendency of certain pessimistic treatises to wander into deeply uncomfortable territory. Nicole Seymour, for instance, details the ways in which Jim Crawford’s Confessions of an Antinatalist conceals a problematic approach to questions pertaining to race.57 Nevertheless, Crawford is not a professional researcher and scholar, and his potentially disconcerting views about race do not appear endemic to the pessimistic canon on the whole. A much more significant problem to the tradition of formal pessimistic inquiry is the almost total absence of any meaningful engagement with particular categories of meaningful identity and the bodies of experience that such categories signify. As Seymour writes, “[In] literally absenting sociocultural concerns from view, antinatalist texts prove no different in effect, from say, the kind of white supremacy and conservative heteronormativity we find in pronatalist discourse.”58 A pessimist, of course, could respond to the above objections by claiming that philosophical pessimism must, by definition, speak in the language of universals and that particularizing the discourse—whether in terms, say, of race, class, gender, or sexuality—would give the false impression that pessimistic conclusions about meaning and life could, in some instances, be successfully navigated or avoided altogether. We can get a sense of how this argument might unfold by briefly considering what is perhaps pessimism’s most philosophically robust form, that of Schopenhauer. In Schopenhauer’s view, although the individual phenomenological will constitutes the ground of all suffering, the cause of that suffering is the objectification and individuation of the thing-in-itself (pure willing or Will) in the world of experience. And this pure willing, he maintains, is excluded from the principle of individuation, that is, independent of how we as individuals perceive and totally outside of the mind’s conceptual categories. We may all suffer differently and as individuals, but the “will to life”—to will to live—is to suffer, for all people and at all times, irrespective of sociocultural, historical, national, or economic differences. While quantitatively speaking, suffering may be differentiated across categories such as race and class, the fundamental condition of life and living remains an unchanging, inevitable, constant—showing no discernible signs of preference or prejudice. More recently, and less metaphysically indebted than Schopenhauer, David Benatar has argued that nonexistence is preferable to life even if the sum total of pain experienced in Introduction

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any given life would amount to nothing more than a solitary pinprick. Pain, in other words, is pain—self-equivalential—and admits of no salient difference between the pain involved in having to deal with societal homophobia, institutional racism, or misogyny in the home, for instance, and the pain of Monday morning traffic, insomnia, or interminable boredom. Over against such apologias, which are at once rational and unsatisfactory, Herman Tennessen offers an explanation as to why philosophical pessimism tends to take hold in the most economically privileged parts of the world. According to Tennessen, while the relationship between comfort and security, on the one hand, and a propensity for pessimistic reflection, on the other, is not a necessary one, it is nevertheless quite understandable: Philosophy and suicide have always been typical upper-middle class phenomena. . . . The more advanced countries today have caught up with many Utopian ideals concerning economic poverty and unquestionably psychopath-creating authoritarian family structures, while at the same time beliefs in gods and devils, heaven and hell, angels and immortality have almost vanished. In these countries people suffer less from nightmarish misery than from the more subtle disorders previously buried by the harsh and bitter struggle for existence. The clinical psychologists are unexpectedly confronted with patients who by all social criteria are tremendously successful and well adjusted. They have just—prematurely, as it were—anticipated the dying groan, Ivan Ilyitch’s [sic] three-dayslong shriek: what is it all about? Thus what once was an obviously commendatory endeavour to abolish poverty and ignorance, is slowly raising before us a problem, the severity of which will increase in correlation with increase in leisure time and socioeconomic and educational “progress,” viz., the most humanly relevant question of all: What does it mean to be Man [sic], what is the Lot of Mankind [sic] in cosmos?59 Tennessen writes in the context of class, but a pessimist (even a nonpessimist) could argue along the same lines for any nonprivileged group: outsiders and marginalized groups confront material and social hardships from which other, more privileged individuals might be exempt or whose effects on those individuals might be significantly attenuated, even offset, by other of life’s advantages. Thus on Tennessen’s view, certain patterns of privation function to distance life’s “wrongness” from life itself, with the result that things A Feeling of Wrongness

such as heteronormativity, capitalism, patriarchy, racial supremacy, and so on come to particularize the universal truth of suffering and are taken to signify the root cause of life’s misfortunes. By the same token, relative freedom from privation, whether of a symbolic or material nature, creates the optimal conditions for revealing the essence and basic structure of being-inthe-world: namely, blind, unmotivated urging within a never-ending cycle of self-conflict and suffering. In a world of haves and have-nots, having is directly proportional to pessimistic rumination, while not having involves being able to put a face on the source of one’s misery (and being able to believe in the veracity of that identification). In fact, serving to buttress Tennessen’s observations, certain marginalized pessimists have recently emerged whose trenchant criticisms of life focus on structural oppressions, rather than the intrinsic badness of life as such. Exemplified by Lee Edelman’s No Future, queer pessimism, for instance, adopts an intensely antagonistic stance toward human reproduction, sociality, and the futurity (all of which are mainstays of optimism). Edelman writes, “Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck laws both with capital ls and with small; fuck the whole network of symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop.”60 Nevertheless, while such rhetorical discourse is not likely to be mislabeled as optimistic, queer pessimism does not deny the value or meaning of life as such nor is it likely to include references to the canon of philosophical pessimism. Indeed, even some in the nascent field of queer theory recognize queer pessimism’s difference from most of what has passed for philosophical pessimism. As Michael Snediker writes, “It’s worth noting that queer pessimism has as little truck with conventional pessimism as queer optimism trucks with optimism, per se.”61 The same largely holds true for Afro-pessimism, which positions the nearly insurmountable problem of antiblack racism (rather than that of heteronormativity) as the central locus of life’s petty but nonetheless severe cruelties.62 Although the Afro-pessimist Jared Sexton does put his work in conversation with Joshua Dienstag’s Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit, Sexton does so at the level of pessimism writ large; that is, he articulates his version of Afro-pessimism with a generic, “inclusive” brand of pessimism rather than the uncompromising “hard” pessimism of thinkers such as Schopenhauer or Benatar.63 For someone who remains committed to radical social improvement and open to the possibility of transforming a problematic aspect of the social universe, Sexton’s selective appropriation of pessimism is sensible. Introduction

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Philosopher Patricia MacCormack, who proudly dons the mantles of antinatalism and human extinctionism, finds herself “ambivalent about pessimism,” which she correctly regards as an overly masculine discourse. As with Afro and queer pessimism, her work—which does not fit neatly under a single category or subgenre of scholarship—also touches on pessimistic topoi, especially as these relate to desiring bodies.64 Yet as a useful corrective, she infuses that pessimistic inclination with the radicalism of thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, among others. In so doing, MacCormack’s work stands in contrast to the hopeless aphorisms of a Cioran or a Leopardi—using pessimism’s deterritorializing potentiality as a means of charting an emancipatory reterritorialization, rather than achieving the absolute deterritorialization of Schopenhauerian pessimism.65 With these observations in mind, the present work makes critical use of a canon that, while allowing for a few notable exceptions, speaks from a position of privilege and with a privileged voice—what MacCormack has dubbed the white male wail.66 Whether a pessimism grounded more firmly in divergent identities would be preferable is beyond the scope of this project, a project that is largely interpretive and evaluative, rather than prescriptive. Nevertheless, due to the social (and academic) marginalization of philosophical pessimism itself, a rhetorical inquiry into various pessimistic discourses promises to make more highly visible a range of persuasive tactics and maneuvers that could hopefully be to the advantage of other micro-pessimisms and marginalized ideas more generally. Zapffe’s four obstacles to pessimism (isolation, distraction, anchoring, and sublimation) function as internal rhetorical constraints, standing as a “counter-force” to any idea, value, or attitude—pessimistic or other—that runs afoul of a society’s Overton window.67 Classical Marxists, for example, view global poverty as justifiable grounds for the radical transformation of the political economy. When confronted by that idea, or similarly revolutionary ones, most English-speaking audiences will most likely and unthinkingly make use of at least one of Zapffe’s defense mechanisms. They may, in effect, change the proverbial channel to something more lighthearted, popular, and acceptable (isolation and distraction) or claim that poverty, however unfortunate, is nevertheless a necessary byproduct of our otherwise superior economic system (anchoring). They could even go one step further and “fetishize” poverty as a spiritual test or an ascetic and overall uplifting experience (sublimation). Although the particular instantiation of these mechanisms will likely change on a case-by-case basis, still, they comprise a set of ever-present “counter-forces,” at least one of which will stand between A Feeling of Wrongness

any given radical idea (e.g., animal abolitionism, anti-statism, deep ecology, etc.) and its persuasive effectuation in the minds of the audience. Hence, given that philosophical pessimism is so distant from the Overton window that one requires a high-powered telescope to glimpse it, if, in the case of philosophical pessimism, there turn out to be rhetorical strategies capable of overcoming any or all of Zapffe’s counter-forces, then we can reasonably assume the effectiveness of such strategies in the context of other, less outré ideas (a notion to which we will return in conclusion). Chapter Preview

Although the word rhetoric may call to mind great orators such as Pericles or Frederick Douglass, rhetoric at its core is simply about persuasion. Whether achieved in a high style or a low one, through oral means or visual, the fact of persuasive effect—of whether it occurred and, if so, to what degree—is, in the final analysis, the only relevant consideration. With that in mind, it becomes quite clear that persuasion (or rather the rhetorical act) is a pervasive quality of modern life, especially in a post-industrial society where the consumption of media is embedded in the rhythms of everyday life. Indeed, the treatment of media as rhetorical is a well-established convention within the interdisciplinary field of communication studies:68 The tendency to view popular media products like the film Anchorman, or the television show So You Think You Can Dance, or the Kid Rock song “All Summer Long,” or the video game Guitar Hero as mere (which implies only) entertainment obscures the fact that media messages inevitably persuade as well as entertain us. Media messages cannot help but convey meanings, and meanings are never neutral or objective. Consequently, films, television shows, songs, video games, etc. are constantly inviting us to adopt certain attitudes, values, and beliefs, while simultaneously encouraging us to overlook and discount others. This is because all media products are rhetorical. Nevertheless, the ubiquity of this rhetorical dimension notwithstanding, finding instances of distinctively and thoroughly pessimistic media artifacts is surprisingly challenging. Part of the difficulty owes to the fact that genuinely pessimistic media artifacts rely on persuasive strategies that are radically at odds with most traditional and structurally optimistic forms of Introduction

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rhetoric. In the absence of any critical consensus regarding a set of canonical pessimistic media products, we embarked on a time-consuming inductive process. This involved searching through any number of media artifacts in order to find instances of pessimistic persuasion that could be used as case studies in the construction of a critical apparatus for the analysis and interpretation of effective pessimistic rhetoric within the context of popular culture. As the apparatus began to take shape, the identification of potential cases and subsequent determination of their rhetorical effectiveness became easier. What we eventually settled on represents a diverse sample of pessimistic media texts found at the cult fringes of popular culture (though given the cult origins of culture, the fringes may well as be the heart).69 The texts are rhetorically savvy and highly innovative vis-à-vis their pessimistic modes of argumentation, and they range across a variety of media—from literature and television to video games and cultural memes. What, then, connects such apparently disparate case studies? For starters, we do believe that we arrive at a pessimistic model of rhetorical effectivity, one that is evinced and thoroughly examined in each of the case studies. But the construction of this model, however, is unquestionably experimental, built as it was in the process of criticism. For this reason, the selection criterion employed was rather unscientific. All the case studies are media products with which one or both of the authors was intimately familiar and that produced in both a sense of uncanny dread—the hallmark of pessimistic unease. This is not to say that we settled immediately on the following five case studies (many other possibilities were examined and discarded for one reason or another), only that the case studies are connected more by the authors’ sensibility than by something like genre or medium or even method. Genre, in particular, would have been an exceptionally poor determining factor, for as the latter analyses demonstrate, dark storytelling or subject matter is neither a sufficient nor even necessary condition of pessimism or pessimistic rhetoric. What is more, given our finding that pessimistic rhetoric functions at its best when lurking just below the surface and in between the cracks, one cannot help but to lean heavily on sensibility and intuition and to proceed, at least initially, on the basis of trial and error. In the final analysis, what connects our apparently diverse selection of popular culture artifacts is a shadowy, inky quality: namely, the ambulatory, promiscuous nature of pessimistic argument carried out to great effect, that is, its canny ability to flirt with any genre or medium, to rebel against expectation and form, and to emerge unexpectedly—during laughter, after catharsis, beneath an optimistic veneer, or in an adult animated science-fiction sitcom with a minor character named Mr. Poopybutthole. A Feeling of Wrongness

The first chapter, “‘No, Everything Is Not All Right’: Supernatural Horror as Pessimistic Argument,” begins the exploration of popular culture as pessimistic argument by focusing on weird fiction, a relatively neglected subgenre of supernatural horror first popularized by writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft. While promising a simple, scary tale, weird fiction obliquely works to invoke in the reader what Sigmund Freud refers to as a sense of uncanny fear and in ways that call into question the very nature of reality, including the normative structures that uphold an optimistic worldview. By looking at certain key stories through the lens of the uncanny, we show how weird fiction transforms the merely strange into an effective hostility against the world, life, and meaning, arguing that such a transformation serves to unanchor human beings’ feelings of existential security, both in the world and in their own skin. The second chapter, “‘I’m Bad at Parties’: The Esoteric Pessimism of True Detective,” examines the first season of HBO’s award-winning miniseries, True Detective. Adopting the literary hermeneutics of Leo Strauss, we analyze the series by juxtaposing its exoteric structure with its multiple levels of hidden, esoteric meaning. By highlighting the use of a variety of rhetorical stratagems and compositional techniques, such as obscure references, irony or paradox, hyperbole, even deliberate self-contradiction, we demonstrate how True Detective obliquely yet effectively conveys a powerfully pessimistic message, but one that it reserves for its esoterically or more philosophically driven viewers. For that reason, this chapter combines a Straussian approach with an analysis of True Detective’s online fan communities, in order to show how initial fan dissatisfaction with the series’ finale further complicates what is exoterically a happy ending. This chapter may be the first in-depth Straussian reading of a popular culture text. The third chapter, “‘Wubba Lubba Dub-Dub’: Tragicomic Pessimism in Rick and Morty,” takes a look at how the adult animated science fiction sitcom, by uniquely blending elements from the poetic categories of the tragic and the comic, provides a scaffolding that is prima facie sufficiently invitational or nonthreatening to disarm audiences’ resistance to pessimistic content. Drawing widely from the history of the tragic and comic, we explore the ways in which the series utilizes the comic as a means of purifying or accomplishing the pessimistic trappings of the tragic, while also demonstrating how the use of an undiluted tragic frame ultimately belies an optimistic effect of affirmation or reassurance. To that end, the chapter pays particular attention to how the series frames cutting-edge scientific speculation, such as the multiverse theory and the simulation hypothesis, in covertly pessimistic terms. Introduction

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The fourth chapter, “‘Finish Her’: The Interactive Pessimism of Unwinnable Games,” examines how a certain class of video games, by sabotaging players’ agency, can act as a conduit for pessimistic disillusionment. We draw on recent game studies literature on procedural rhetoric and narratology, as well as the work of pessimistic psychologist Herman Tennessen, to analyze “unwinnable” moments in video games, such as the iconic death of Aerith/Aeris in Final Fantasy VII. We argue that the death of Aeris has such an emotional impact because the game leads the player to believe that she or he could direct the narrative of the game. After exhaustive efforts on the part of many heartbroken players, however, Final Fantasy VII forces the players to confront the fixed nature of the game’s narrative, as well as players’ own inevitable mortality. The fifth and final chapter, “‘All Hope Abandon’: Transhumanism’s Hidden Hellscape,” explores how pessimism can respond to the challenge of transhumanism. Transhumanists agree that the world as it presently exists is not good but argue that new technology will usher in a utopia, where all the problems of the current world are fixed. We argue that transhumanism’s challenge to pessimism is a secular version of the Christian belief in heaven. We examine the short story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” as a pessimistic response, as it explores how a technological future could become more like hell than heaven.

A Feeling of Wrongness

1 “No, Everything Is Not All Right” Supernatural Horror as Pessimistic Argument Despite the pitfalls facing pessimistic persuasion, there exist a variety of nonrationally discursive modes of creative expression that provide philosophical pessimism with viable rhetorical alternatives. Among such possibilities, one of the more effective, albeit lesser known, is the subgenre of speculative fiction known as weird fiction. Although early weird fiction writers such as H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe often conveyed pessimistic sentiments, the contemporary cult writer Thomas Ligotti is perhaps the first to make an explicit contribution to the philosophy of pessimism, which he did in 2010 with The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. In it, he describes his weird fiction and weird fiction in general as constituting a more or less thought-out strategy to spread pessimistic ideas. Building on Ligotti’s insight, this chapter maintains that weird fiction serves as something of a pessimistic Trojan horse: while promising a simple scary tale, it works to invoke in the reader a sense of uncanny fear and in ways that call into question the very nature of reality. But rather than presenting well-reasoned arguments in support of explicit pessimistic claims, weird fiction manifests or enacts pessimism, aesthetically, through the clever deployment of a range of stylistic devices and rhetorical maneuvers. What is more, by invoking the sense of the uncanny, such rhetorical tactics work to undermine the common psychological defenses of anchoring, thereby disrupting our ability to comprehend the world in terms of a coherent narrative. In so doing, they transform what would otherwise remain merely strange into an effective hostility against the world, against life, and against meaning. In this chapter, we turn to weird fiction as an unconventional but potentially effective site of rhetorical invention vis-à-vis the ends of pessimism,

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arguing that weird fiction’s production of uncanny effects functions as a workable substitute for pessimistic argumentation, one that convinces primarily by way of affect or aesthetics. Specifically, our analysis demonstrates the following: (1) that weird fiction, by masquerading as a source of pleasant distraction, attracts an audience that might not be inclined to pick up a work by a Schopenhauer or a Zapffe; (2) that, by subtly blurring the line between the natural and the supernatural, weird fiction weakens readers’ inclination to isolate and, hence, neutralize the pessimistic undertones of any given weird tale; (3) that weird fiction’s monstrous aberrations destabilize the conceptual-ontological categories of space and time, knowing, and performing, all of which serve to anchor human beings’ feelings of existential security, both in the world and in their own skin; and (4) that the very structure of weird fiction inhibits audiences from sublimating the uncannily horrific into a life-affirming experience. Weird-ing Pessimistic Rhetoric

Coined by H. P. Lovecraft in his nonfiction writings, the term “weird fiction” describes a predominantly twentieth and twenty-first century literary art form that reached its zenith in the 1920s, with American and British pulp writers such as Robert E. Howard, Lord Dunsany, and Clark Ashton Smith. Weird fiction’s presence, however, extends back to the first half of the nineteenth century, with the fantastic and the macabre writings of figures such as Edgar Allan Poe and E. T. A. Hoffman. As a classificatory term, weird fiction refers to stories that produce in the reader a distinctive, albeit peculiar, sensation: namely, “a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost rim.”1 According to Lovecraft, rather than serving instrumentally to further the ends of realism, characterization, or the dovetailing of a plot, this affective quality—this dark recognition of the unsettling and the unknown—is “the final criterion of authenticity.”2 In the realm of the weird, in other words, such an effect is not ornamental but absolutely essential. Like the traditional ghost story and the Gothic tale of the 1800s, weird fiction characteristically avails itself of a supernatural element, leading some scholars, such as the prolific and independent critic S. T. Joshi, to treat the weird tale as belonging to a specific genre or generic hybrid.3 Recently, however, contemporary editors and practitioners of the modern weird tale have A Feeling of Wrongness

recommended thinking of “the weird” in terms that frustrate its identification with formulaic scenarios and the conventionalized tropes of other traditions. As Ann and Jeff VanderMeer argue in their introduction to the pioneering and, at over a thousand pages, monumental anthology, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, there are compelling reasons to treat weird fiction—what they term “The Weird”—in nongeneric terms: “In its purest form, The Weird has eschewed fixed tropes of the supernatural such as zombies, vampires, and werewolves, and the instant archetypal associations these tropes bring with them.”4 On their view, the weird tale often, if not always, exists “in the interstices,” simultaneously occupying different imaginative territories, from the cosmically horrific to the weirdly ritualistic to the science fictional.5 Indeed, Lovecraft himself chose not to define weird fiction in terms of genre, focusing instead on weird fiction’s singular ability to invoke powerful and complex sensation. “The true weird tale,” Lovecraft writes, “has something more than a secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.”6 This profound sense of dread, which Lovecraft labels “weird,” is remarkably similar to Sigmund Freud’s theory of the uncanny, which is unsurprising because Freud theorized the uncanny in relation to Hoffman’s weird tale “The Sandman.”7 Freud writes, “[An] uncanny effect often arises when the boundary between fantasy and reality is blurred, when we are faced with the reality of something that we have until now considered imaginary.”8 As with Lovecraft’s understanding of the weird, the uncanny names “a specific affective nucleus,” which, Freud argues, “allows us to distinguish the ‘uncanny’ within the [more general] field of the frightening” and justifies the use of a special conceptual term.9 Regardless of whether one prefers one term to the other—and in the following analysis we use them interchangeably—both the weird and the uncanny designate as much a sensation (an affect, feeling, or mood) as a mode of writing. In a word, they point to what Ligotti refers to, in a felicitous turn of phrase, as a feeling of wrongness: “A violation has transpired that alarms our internal authority regarding how something is supposed to happen or exist or behave. An offense against our world-conception or self-conception has been committed.”10 A sense of uncanny fear stems from Supernatural Horror as Pessimistic Argument

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a type of reality-disturbance from the creation of uncertainty vis-à-vis the markers of agreed-upon, common-sense reality and from the intuition that such signposts are not as stable and reliable as we believe them to be. Nevertheless, despite the intensity of uncanny fear, common belief and opinion—what classical Greek rhetoricians termed endoxa—function more or less automatically, and for the most part successfully, in policing the patterns of meaning and certainty upon which our conceptions of world and self depend.11 As Ligotti states, “[Even] though we are not as we usually perceive ourselves to be, we can still continue in our accustomed ways if only we can quash the sense of being uncanny mechanisms in a world of things that may be transformed anytime and anywhere. Such quashing is not often a problem in the so-called real world. But,” he continues, “it must be a problem in the world of supernatural horror.”12 Why? Because in transporting the reader from the mundane world of everyday life to a fictive universe marked by unexplainable dread and disturbing unfamiliarity, the weird tale of supernatural horror circumvents the habitual, intellectual, and social barriers that otherwise preserve one’s sense of reality and make the world a familiar home of reassurance and belonging—in other words, of meaning, intelligibility, identity, and rational expectation. For these reasons, weird fiction would appear to be not only compatible with but also rhetorically advantageous to philosophical pessimism. First, the sense of uncanny fear shares a strong family resemblance to pessimism: weird fiction does not merely scare its readers but fundamentally disturbs their worldview, moving beyond shock in the pursuit of an indefinable, unnerving understanding of the world. Indeed as Joshi writes, “During the early part of the twentieth century, weird fiction was not so much a genre as a consequence of a world view.”13 Conversely, the feeling of the weird is not so much a single emotion as the affective analogue of pessimistic premises and conclusions, that is to say, the affective result that would presumably attend one’s—at least initial—acceptance of pessimistic arguments. Second, as noted above, resistance to philosophical pessimism is engendered and maintained, primarily, by the pervasive and seemingly ineradicable adherence to established patterns of perceptual experience, as explicated by Zapffe’s avoidance strategies. Weird fiction, by psychically transporting and effectively disarming the reader, seems to accomplish what pessimism cannot achieve for itself via rational (inductive or deductive) argument. In the following analysis, we demonstrate the ways in which weird fiction operates rhetorically as an alternative mode of pessimistic argument. That is, we show how the weird tale, in creating a sense of uncanny fear—a A Feeling of Wrongness

feeling of ontological wrongness—affords pessimism a suitable model of rhetorical effectivity. Specifically, we examine how the structure, form, and tropes of weird fiction act to subvert the four defense mechanisms that Zapffe argues inure individuals to the horrors of the world: isolation, distraction, anchoring, and sublimation. Through an examination of several representative weird tales, we demonstrate how weird fiction provides an affective, nonrationalistic means of weakening readers’ adherence to optimism, of demonstrating, by way of atmosphere and affect, the plausibility—if not probability—of philosophical pessimism. However, in bypassing ratiocination, the rhetoric of weird fiction does not promise to secure for pessimism a sure-fire means of achieving assent; rather, it offers something even stronger: a means of incontestable revelation, a feeling and creeping sense, not easily done away, that all might not be right with the world. Feigning Distraction

Apart from the occasional philosophy course reading assignment, it is safe to say that most individuals do not read much Schopenhauer, much less works by more contemporary pessimists such as Cioran, Benatar, and Michelstaedter. These thinkers simply cannot lay claim to the kind of popularity enjoyed by the writers of weird tales—the evidence of which can be seen in the subgenre’s dedicated readership, as well as in the multiple magazines, e-zines, independent films, industry conferences, and fan conventions devoted to exploring all things “weird.” The comparison is neither trivial nor arbitrary, for while one could view philosophical treatises and essays as pessimism’s most appropriate conduit for disseminating its dark truths, the limited reach and appeal of philosophical discourse drastically hinders its rhetorical efficacy. For that reason, the disparity between weird fiction’s large readership and what amounts to a small cult following of Conspiracy’s readers is unsurprising. Indeed, as Zapffe astutely observes, people seek distraction for the purpose of escaping from life’s many terrors—whether great or small, existential or banal. But they tend not to read so as to indulge in masochistic fantasies of negative-seeking pleasure or to be told that life is, in Ligotti’s turn of phrase, malignantly useless. Since emerging in the nineteenth-century writings of such eldritch luminaries as Ambrose Bierce and M. R. James, weird fiction has distinguished itself in presenting a pessimistic worldview in the guise of harmless literary entertainment, typically in the form of the supernatural horror tale.14 Hiding behind and within the conventions of the supernatural horror story, weird Supernatural Horror as Pessimistic Argument

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fiction’s pessimism masquerades as distraction. Yet, as in the case of Edgar Allan Poe’s fictitious masquerades (e.g., “The Cask of Amontillado” or “The Masque of the Red Death”), the pleasant suspension of reality and temporary escape from everyday life ultimately give way to a much more unsettling, even threatening proposition.15 Of course, when one reads a horror story, one expects to be scared, but the garden-variety horror entertainment that weird fiction resembles does not typically raise the prospect of existential dread. Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Blake Crouch, and the like—the perennial bestsellers of mass-market paperback horror fiction—find their way into the beach baskets of vacationers eager to pass the hours in the sun and for good reason. According to France’s most recent existential novelist, Michel Houellebecq, most of what passes for horror today can be summarized as follows: “At first nothing at all happens. The characters are bathed in banal and beatific happiness, adequately symbolized by the family life of an insurance agent in an American suburb. The kids play baseball, the woman plays piano a little, etc. . . . Then, gradually, almost insignificant incidents accumulate, dangerously reinforcing one another. Cracks appear in the glossy varnish of the ordinary, leaving the field wide open for troublesome hypotheses. Inexorably, the forces of evil enter the setting.”16 So whereas the popular horror yarn in its classical form distracts with tales of monsters (both human and nonhuman alike) encroaching on ordinary life, weird fiction subverts our sense of ordinary life by calling into question the viability, desirability, or even intelligibility of life itself. Although weird fiction contains its fair share of monsters (H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu and other Great Old Ones being emblematic), these do not serve—as they do for the bulk of mainstream horror writers—as foils for commonly held beliefs and opinions regarding the innate value of human life and coexistence, much less life’s inevitable vanquishing of death. Rather than distracting readers from life’s varied cruelties or providing what Stephen King calls “a cave where both readers and writers hide from life,” the well-crafted weird tale conveys the pessimistic idea that life is disappointing and painful—at best a bore—and that human aspirations are, in the final analysis, utterly futile.17 Nevertheless, the mistaken view of weird fiction as a typical form of literary distraction has enabled the genre to carve out its own niche within genre fiction, albeit a much larger and popular niche than that enjoyed by philosophical pessimism. In effect, the easy confusion of weird fiction for mainstream horror ensures a slow, but steady stream of new weird readers. Not surprisingly, then, the pessimistic thread running through weird fiction reveals itself much more subtly than the unconcealed pessimism A Feeling of Wrongness

of Schopenhauer, Cioran, or Benatar. Consequently, one can mistakenly read the stories of an Arthur Machen or Algernon Blackwood—or even a Ligotti—as escapist distraction, consciously unaware that such authors held or hold a pessimistic worldview or that their works connect in any meaningful way with the tenets of philosophical pessimism (“Whatever the heck that is”). “Come for the scares, stay for the lingering sense of life’s wrongness” would appear to be the implicitly agreed upon slogan of weird fiction, its undisclosed promise to the unknowing and uninitiated. Through an act that Lovecraft describes as “consummate craftsmanship,” masters of the weird tale perform a rhetorical sleight of hand whereby the trappings of fictive entertainment give way to a fear-inducing atmosphere whose hallmark, according to Lovecraft, is “the maintenance of a single mood and achievement of a single impression in a tale,” namely, the weird or uncanny.18 As a form of pseudo-distraction, weird fiction thus enacts an odd variant of the philosophical tradition of rhetoric initiated by Plato in his dialogue the Phaedrus. According to Plato’s Socrates, the true art of rhetoric leads souls to truth, which it does more or less effectively through adaptation, in other words, by coordinating “each kind of soul with the kind of speech appropriate to it.”19 In the case of the weird tale, the skillful writer guides souls to what is probably, for most readers, an uncomfortable, unpleasant truth about existence; and he or she does that by adapting pessimistic axioms to modern sensibilities via aesthetically wrought (and narratively disguised) arguments. Broadly conceived, this strategy is aesthetic rather than discursive, proceeding by way of perception or intuiting rather than argument or reasoning. It thus operates as a mode of psychagogia or “soul-leading” but one employed in the service of a negative (i.e., unpleasant) truth having to do with the fundamental wrongness of life and by symbolic means other than rational argumentation. Collectively, these strategic means function epideictically in the pre-generic or etymological sense of epideixis or epideiktikos. According to the late Lawrence W. Rosenfield, the originary function of the epideictic was “to shine or show forth,” to exhibit or make apparent “(in the sense of showing or highlighting) what might otherwise remain unnoticed or invisible.”20 Much like unconcealing activity of aletheia, epideixis worked toward the revelation or disclosure of undiscovered or long-buried truths, bringing to light rather than reinforcing cultural norms and community endoxa. As Richard McKeon confirms, the “demonstrations” peculiar to epideictic rhetoric may take the form not only of “inferences, inductions, and proofs” but also of “exhibitions, presentations, manifestations,” demonstrating in the sense of showing forth, “‘on’ or ‘for,’” uncovering “data,” and pushing beyond Supernatural Horror as Pessimistic Argument

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the bounds of what is already known or believed to be true.21 Because weird fiction’s persuasive power derives from its function as exhibition, rather than induction, it can mimic the form of the distractions that would typically keep one from attending to the arguments of pessimists, absorbing the reader while simultaneously distracting her attention from the story’s pessimistic sting. Like a literary embodiment of The Jungle Book’s hypnotic serpent, Kaa, weird fiction hypnotizes the reader the better to devour him. Spoiling Isolation

Of course, there is a reason why distraction is such a common and effective counterpessimistic force. Even the most Panglossian optimists would—if pressed—be forced to admit that the world contains great pain and suffering. As Schopenhauer famously avers, “[Nine]-tenths of mankind live in constant conflict with want, always balancing themselves with difficulty and effort on the brink of destruction.”22 Most people, however, go about their lives without much concern for all the world’s death and destruction or even their own impending end. What is more, even if we take Schopenhauer at his word, then at least one-tenth of humanity does not exist on the brink of destruction—some percentage may even enjoy the conveniences of Wi-Fi. In any case, modern Western society tends to view the many and frequent reminders of life’s grim state of affairs as rather gauche, regarding those who dwell too much on the issue as mad or at least maladjusted. In the allegory of the cave, Plato depicts philosophers as enlightened, selfless beings who, by freeing certain of the hoi polloi from a world of shadow and parlor tricks, initiate the unenlightened into the realm of the good, the true, and the beautiful—the world as it truly is, beyond the changing complex of appearance.23 Similarly, pessimists attempt to force individuals into bearing witness to the horrors occurring just out of view, though most people, quite understandably, are content to stare at the shadows projected on the wall, enraptured by the flickering images and averse to that which might lurk beyond the shadows. Rhetoric for its part is made to invest in maintaining belief in the verity of such projections and to provide the apparent world with stable frameworks of meaning and interpretation. Hence, whereas rhetoric tends both to presuppose and reinforce common opinion and belief (endoxa), pessimistic argument often appears to exist in a world unrecognizable to the average person of common-sense opinion. Of course, simply being ignored by the middle-of-the-road optimist is often the best-case scenario for pessimists. For what Plato’s Socrates says A Feeling of Wrongness

about the enlightened vis-à-vis the cave dwellers holds true for the pessimist with respect to the unadventurous optimist: “And, as for anyone who tried to free them and lead them upward, if they could somehow get their hands on him, wouldn’t they kill him?”24 Whether the response to pessimism is dismissal or hostility or somewhere in between, pessimistic conversion is dead on arrival. In contrast, rhetoric that gratifies a group of people collectively flattering its sense of meaning and purposiveness by validating existence, cannot but succeed—for the most part and in the majority of cases—in preserving a willful unseeing.25 In this way, life-affirming rhetoric subserves the end of isolation, maintaining a bulwark against rational pessimistic argument and critique. Moreover, although weird fiction’s ability to masquerade as distraction can act as a first step in bypassing the defenses of isolation, packaging pessimistic works—such as Cioran’s The Trouble with Being Born or Benatar’s Better Never to Have Been—in what figuratively amounts to a Stephen King dust jacket hardly solves the pessimists’ larger problem of modifying its readers’ basic beliefs regarding the meaning and value of existence. Human beings’ tolerance of overtly pessimistic views and themes is quite low, regardless of whether they are presented in polemical or narrative form. For if form is, as Kenneth Burke writes, “the creation of an appetite in the mind of the auditor, and the adequate satisfying of that appetite,” then the rhetorical effectivity of weird fiction qua pessimistic argument will require formal strategies radically other than those appropriate either to argumentation—understood by David Zarefsky as “a structure of reasons”—or plot—interpreted by Aristotle to mean “the representation of a complete i.e. whole action which has some magnitude.26 Traditional types of argument invite counterstatements, and in the case of pessimism the opposing counterarguments always already enjoy the assumption of being right, while plot tends in the direction of clarification and resolution—neither of which is conducive to the Weltanschauung of pessimism or the tactical aim of creating a sense of the uncanny. Hence, in the attempt to overcome isolation, weird fiction often eschews the more rationalistic types of appetite creation and fulfillment, seizing instead on the nonrational structures of dreams and hallucinations, exploiting the episodic rather than the logically continuous. Weird fiction overcomes isolation because its pessimism is hazy, inducing the reader into a dreamlike state where reality and narrative blur and pessimism slowly intrudes into the edges of consciousness. As Ligotti says, “Everything that happens in every story ever written is merely an event in someone’s imagination—exactly as are dreams, which take place on their own little plane of Supernatural Horror as Pessimistic Argument

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unreality, a realm of nowhere in which outside and inside are of equivalent ontological status.”27 These dreams become nightmares, but nightmares not where we run endlessly from pursuing beasts but where intelligibility itself breaks down—a process that is aided by the way in which weird fiction undercuts our biological instinct to run. For isolation typically takes the form of what Nietzsche calls “a useful blindness,” one that has connections to humanity’s primordial instinct of flight.28 While traditional horror certainly attracts a particular thrill-seeking crowd, we also see evidence of isolation in the terrified movie patron who peeks between raised hands and yelling at the young teenagers onscreen not to open the door because Freddy Krueger / Jason Voorhees / Chucky / Leather Face is lurking just around the corner. Weird fiction, although equally capable of chilling the blood, does not elicit raised pulses and adrenaline rushes in the same way: for its occurrent horror is typically obscene, in the ancient Greek sense of occurring out of view or off-scene—if, of course, anything horrific occurs at all. Not infrequently, the reader is left in the dark on that score, as weird fiction as a whole tends to create and leave unresolved ambiguities pertaining to major events and minor episodes, for example, did the protagonist really see a man chained to the floor of the hotel he stumbled upon while lost, or was it a figment of his imagination like the screams that only he heard in the night?29 As the protagonist of Fritz Leiber’s the “Black Gondolier” explains of a friend who met his fate at the hands of unseen forces: “I used to carp at horror stories in which the protagonist could at any time have departed from the focus of horror. . . . I’ve changed my mind. Daloway did try to leave. He made that one big effort with the car and it was foiled. He lacked the energy to make another. He became fatalistic. And perhaps the urge to stay and see what would happen—always strong, I imagine, curiosity being a fundamental human trait—at that point became somewhat stronger than the opposing urge to flee.”30 Weird fiction nurtures this curiosity and does so in such a way that the narrative slowly draws the reader into an uncommon place, abandoning him or her to the uncanny stirrings of the imagination. Weird fiction begins the slow process of drawing in the reader by setting its stories in worlds that mirror our own. Writing in the late 1800s, Ambrose Bierce told stories set in and around the American Civil War; Lovecraft writing in the 1930s often focused on knowledge and artifacts brought back from European exploratory expeditions; Fritz Leiber, Ramsey Campbell, T. E. D. Klein, and Ligotti all write or wrote about modern urban environments.31 While often impossible to connect to any precise real-world location, A Feeling of Wrongness

these are not cursed mansions, long abandoned lake cabins, or tribal burial grounds, but rather meant to stand in for the world in which the readers live their everyday lives. As Joyce Carol Oates writes, “Most of Lovecraft’s tales . . . develop by way of incremental detail, beginning with quite plausible situations . . . One is drawn into Lovecraft by the very air of plausibility and characteristic understatement of the prose, the question being When will the weirdness strike?”32 The familiar settings give the impression that one could easily stumble into one of weird fiction’s nightmare vignettes without much warning. Most horror stories possess a narrative arc where, by the story’s end, there is no longer any doubt that a monster or some other evil force exists. In keeping with the ambiguity of a dream state, weird fiction rarely contains a moment when anything is known for certain. The stories are often told from the first-person perspective, by a narrator that is unreliable, like Tara the biologist, in Caitlín R. Kiernan’s “A Redress for Andromeda,” who has had two Xanax prior to recounting her story, or the narrator in Julio Cortázar’s “Axolotl,” whose obsessive attention to detail points to madness.33 In these and other, similar narratives, monsters do not suddenly or inexplicably intrude into our world but rather reveal our world to be, in a sense, monstrous or wrong. At times this wrongness is suggested at the level of signification, as Isabella van Elferen argues in connection with Lovecraft’s use of sound, which “invert[s] the seemingly obvious signifying chain linked to voices and communication.”34 At other times, the monstrousness that is disclosed occurs at the level of human desire and intimacy. As Clive Barker writes of Ramsey Campbell’s foray into erotic horror, when done well, such horrifying disclosures can render something as familiar and fundamental to human life as sex “fretful,” “strange,” even “chilling.”35 This of course fits nicely with pessimistic themes that broader forces play an oversized role in limiting the scope of human behavior and freedom. But unlike discursive argumentation, the weird tale exhibits rather than tells—makes the reader feel instead of analyze. And what comes to the fore in weird fiction is nothing short of the cataloguing of our most primordial fears—death, insignificance, loss—the very things that humans employ to achieve isolation. Of course, death in the form of violence exists ubiquitously in popular culture, but death as configured and conveyed in weird fiction is your death; the loss is your loss. What is missing from big-budget, cinematic depictions of carnage and chaos is internalization, identification with the horror as one’s own, for, as Ligotti says, “All apocalyptic phenomenon takes place on a personal level.”36 When Supernatural Horror as Pessimistic Argument

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the raven flutters into the chamber and squawks something that could be “Nevermore,” the narrator must confront the finality of his lost Lenore’s departure. And Poe’s rhetorical effectiveness consists, in no small part, in the invitation not only to reflect on one’s own loss but also to experience or reexperience the emotional state of losing one’s own beloved.37 In “Novel of the White Powder,” Arthur Machen dramatizes the limitations of humans’ scientific mastery of the material world by way of Miss Leicester’s loss of her brother Francis, first to crippling anxiety, then, after a medical intervention, to some unseen demonic power, and, finally, to putrefaction and death.38 In Algernon Blackwood’s classic tale, “The Willows,” one character gives the other contradicting advice for how to deal with the unexplainable horrors they witness, first saying to accept the situation, “The best thing you can do is to keep quiet and try to hold your mind as firm as possible. This feeble attempt at self-deception only makes the truth harder when you’re forced to meet it.” But later he follows up with the suggestion, “We’re wiser not to talk about it, or even to think about it.”39 This juxtaposition, which is not uncommon to the weird tale, captures the tension that pessimists find at the heart of our existence: there is value in seeing the world in its terrible reality, but it is no easy or pleasant task. Unlike philosophical discourse, the unique structures of weird fiction allow for the slow, often undetected introduction of a pessimistic worldview, drawing on readers’ curiosity to pull them into an existential confrontation from which they would likely flee in another form. Unanchoring

Whether it is a thousand years of Christian apologetics on the question of evil or the exercise motto “no pain, no gain,” there is no shortage of reasons to suffer. God, country, family, truth, love, progress, all of these noble ideas drive us to sacrifice and be sacrificed. They anchor our suffering, giving it purpose and thus making it more bearable and comprehensible. Pessimists hope to lift these anchors, leaving the audience adrift in the sea of life’s torments. This is no easy task, however; much like nautical anchors, these psychic moorings are highly valued, and individuals are loath to surrender themselves to life’s currents. Whereas pessimism’s attempts at unanchoring run up against the inherent limits of conceptual and rational argumentation, weird fiction circumvents rational critique and counterarguments by using a form of signification that relies on imagery and association. Rhetorically speaking, weird fiction employs tropes that, rather than buttressing stable frameworks of A Feeling of Wrongness

meaning and interpretation, work toward the unanchoring of basic cultural ideas and institutions. As figural devices, such tropes have an impact on the relationship between consciousness and a world of experience; at the same time, however, they embody a self-devouring or self-destructing tendency of unanchoring a community’s traditional, taken-for-granted methods for making sense of a changing complex of appearances. If, as Kenneth Burke argues, an orientation consists of “a bundle of judgments as to how things were, how they are, and how they may be,” then the tropological maneuvers encountered in weird fiction can be regarded as attempts at undermining the basis of such sense-making bundles.40 Unlike the style of philosophical pessimism, which forwards rational arguments for viewing the world as fundamentally wrong and life as essentially futile, weird fiction adopts a style of laying bare and of creating the sense of the uncanny through the use of unanchoring tropes, conceived both as figurative expressions or, more broadly, as recurrent themes or motifs. This usage, we argue, consists of pointing up the unreliability of the various conceptual categories necessarily involved in interpreting the empirical-phenomenal world—of drawing attention to the inadequacy of what Jacques Rancière refers to as “partitions of the sensible world” or distributions of patterns of perceptual experience.41 In opposition to the rounded systems of basic cultural ideas and institutions (e.g., morality, religion, the State, etc.)—all of which enable, to some degree, the formation and maintenance of common-sense understandings of shared reality—weird fiction’s strategy of figural, uncanny disturbance aims at revealing the world, even life itself, as essentially unknowable, chaotic, and terrifying. For someone acquainted with the conventional fare of the horror genre, in particular its recurring stock of malefic entities (werewolves, vampires, mummies, zombies, evil clowns, masked psychopaths, demons, and the like), perhaps the most striking aspect of the weird tale is the virtual absence of such recognizable figures. In their place, weird fiction substitutes unimagined horrors and unnamable creatures—some of which, as in the case of Fritz Leiber’s “Smoke Ghost,” constitute radically modified versions of horror’s traditional nonhuman antagonists.42 Writing in the context of horror film, contemporary philosophic pessimist and philosopher of horror Eugene Thacker describes such unnamable creatures as aberrations of thought, distinguishing them from the more familiar abominations of nature: “Whereas the creature-feature films define the monster as an aberration (and abomination) of nature, the unnamable creature is an aberration of thought. The classical creature-features still retain an element of familiarity, despite the impure mixture of categories (plant, animal, human) or differences in scale Supernatural Horror as Pessimistic Argument

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(giant reptiles, ants, leeches, etc.). Films featuring unnamable creatures . . . contextualize the monster in terms of ontology (form-without-matter, matter-without-form) or in terms of onto-theology (the spiritual abject, the oozing abstraction). They point towards a form of life-after-life that highlights conceptual aberrations.”43 What is more, in both fiction and on film, abominations of nature primarily serve as a means of testing the strength and resilience of human agency and of reinforcing predominant cultural ideas, many of them structured around dichotomies, which make up our sense of reality. Through the conventional monster one can acknowledge the pain of the world but lay the blame for the pain on an external actor that humanity can overcome. The act of overcoming the monster gives purpose to life and the existence of the monster offers a convenient explanation for life’s suffering that can be partitioned off from life itself. To that end, “natural” monsters tend to invoke a sense of physical fear, in other words, that sort of fear connected to one’s finitude and sensuous being, which Aristotle describes as “a sort of pain and agitation derived from the imagination of a future destructive or painful evil.”44 In contrast, the monsters populating weird fiction call into question the adequacy of rational thought to organize and structure the sensible world of appearance. Hence their capacity to horrify proceeds from insinuating not that the natural world is unnatural—much less that existence contains any number of Aristotle’s destructive evils—but that the world is essentially unintelligible, our frameworks of interpretation fundamentally wanting. Such aberrations of thought are thus not simply frightening but also truly monstrous—or at least monstrous in the quasi-Kantian sense of nullifying and dumbfounding conceptualization as such.45 Hence, it is with a view to the monstrous that weird fiction invents and deploys its unanchoring tropes, and it is the monstrous to which it owes its most powerful uncanny effects. While there is no shortage of anchoring tropes, our analysis focuses on four broad but noncomprehensive categories: space, time, knowledge, and performance. Cyclopean Space

For Plato, the universe encoded the idea of goodness within its very structure, with the celestial objects projecting a reflection of perfection for humanity to emulate. The heavens moved in sync with the Euclidean geometrical forms, reflecting those eternal, intelligible truths that exist beyond the realm of human creation.46 This vision of the kosmos (world order), however, was not confined to Plato’s dialogues or the world of classical antiquity. Indeed, aspects of Plato’s cosmicism extend well beyond the Copernican Revolution, A Feeling of Wrongness

with famous astrophysicists, like Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson, frequently commenting on the inherent beauty of our cosmic home.47 Pessimists, by contrast, find no comfort in space, intra- or extraplanetary, real or theoretical. While they may agree with rhetoricians in assigning to rhetoric the capacity of making humans feel at home in the phenomenal-empirical world, they would nevertheless take issue with the suggestion that space itself is capable of being other than it is—that by means of rhetoric space can be rendered conformable to human perception and brought under the influence of human control. Dienstag compares critics that tell pessimists to simply look on the bright side to those that deny the science of global warming. His response in each case would be: the facts speak for themselves.48 Like the Platonists, pessimists view space as possessing a true nature or inherent qualities, which they distinguish from its representations, whether sensorial, linguistic, graphical, and so on.49 At the same time, they consider space to be a thing-in-itself (noumena) and therefore, ultimately, unknowable. So whereas representations of space are alterable and can be cognized (through thought, experience, and the senses), space itself remains immutable and unknown. The rhetorical process of making sense of appearances via the domestication of space can thus only ever occur at the level of representation. This is certainly not controversial—indeed, since the older sophists rhetoricians have consistently conceived of rhetoric as trafficking in appearances. However, the pessimists would add, rhetoric’s involvement in transforming our apparent understanding of space simultaneously serves to dissimulate the nature of space as fundamentally unknowable and unchanging—even if, as according to certain of the pre-Socratics, that unchanging nature were to consist in a constant state of flux. For that reason, pessimism would characterize such transformation as constituting a type of anchoring, specifically, one that attempts to make hospitable that which is, or would otherwise appear to be, inherently hostile. In that way, rhetoric’s approach to space helps to ensure that humanity will continue to lurch forward, indefinitely, generation after generation, into a world that cannot be anything but estranged. Echoing this pessimistic point of view, weird fiction assaults the idea of optimistic space on all levels, from the cosmic to microcosmic. Indeed, in H. P. Lovecraft’s weird classic “The Call of Cthulhu” not even geometry is safe. In this story, which employs a method of piecing together dissociated source material to reveal the survival an ancient, horrific being, a Norwegian sailor recounts to the narrator his crew’s discovery of an uncharted island whose geometry “was all wrong”: “the dream-place he saw was abnormal, Supernatural Horror as Pessimistic Argument

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non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours.”50 Here, in the city of “the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh,” the tried-and-true distributions of our patterns of perceptual experience does not result in mastery of that experience or of the sensible world; rather it reveals the precariously contingent nature of our partitions of the sensible world—the fragile, localized, particularity of any given experience or sense datum.51 In so doing, it elicits the sense of the uncanny, unmooring the spatial relationships that make up the places we inhabit in everyday life and which go far in creating and sustaining subjective belief in that very everydayness.52 The subsequent emergence of the Great Old One, Cthulhu—“a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline . . . with an octopus-like head . . . prodigious claws . . . [and] narrow wings”—works to redouble this uncanny effect, securing for the story its singular reputation among weird aficionados.53 Although Lovecraft’s assault on the geometry of ordinary experience is not a defining feature of the weird tale, as Eugene Thacker points out, the subversion of space points up a subtle yet crucial difference between weird fiction proper and the conventional horror story. According to Eugene Thacker, standard or “mainstream” horror tends to adhere to a separation of spatial realities: either monsters intrude into the realm of human space or humans enter into or find themselves transported to the spatial realm of monsters; in either case, the two domains remain ontologically distinct and separate. This formula works rhetorically by preserving the naturalness of ordinary spatial experience over against the monstrous or supernatural, thereby maintaining the canniness or homelike nature of humans’ perceptual relation to space. Banish the evil, save the dwelling place—such would appear to be the inherent rhetorical message. Weird fiction, by contrast, works to create a blurring effect with respect to spatial delineations and in such a way that, on Thacker’s view, “natural and supernatural blend into a kind of ambient, atmospheric no-place.”54 And this tendency to blur, of which Lovecraft’s geometric subversion is a peculiar instantiation, is a recurring theme that lends itself not only to the cosmic but also the quotidian, as exemplified in the “strange stories” of Robert Aickman. In one of his better-known stories, “The Hospice,” a traveling businessman called Maybury stumbles upon an affluent nineteenth-century housing estate, which promises “good food, some accommodation.”55 Inside, Maybury and the other guests are treated and patronizingly encouraged to consume generous amounts of heavy, overcooked food, which seems to produce a sedative effect on the other guests, who appear to suffer from unquenchable appetites. As he stands to leave the dining hall, Maybury A Feeling of Wrongness

notices “something curious,” though immediately afterward he doubts his perception: “A central rail ran the length of the long table a few inches above the floor. To this rail, one of the male guests was attached by a fetter round his left ankle.”56 Is Maybury witnessing something horrifying, banal, or both? Is the hospice real or unreal, natural or supernatural—and, more important, are these categories even pertinent, defensible? To what extent are we bound in our day-to-day lives by an atmospheric no-place, wherein we inexplicably (programmatically?) work to fulfill the basic needs of living, often in excess? To what extent is the world in which we find ourselves natural? Aickman does not provide definitive answers but instead leaves the reader with a feeling of obscure dread regarding our place in the world. In “From Beyond,” Lovecraft pushes this questioning of spatial familiarity in the direction of hostile indifference, albeit with his characteristic penchant for the fantastic. In this story, a scientist makes the unfathomable discovery that the human race does not enjoy a special claim to its surroundings but rather shares its space with sentient, jellyfish-like monstrosities, invisible to the naked eye. “You see the things that float and flop about you and through you every moment of your life? You see the creatures that form what men call the pure air and the blue sky?”57 Here, as in “The Call of Cthulhu,” Lovecraft uses the monster trope as means of undermining the last remaining vestiges of what amounts to the anthropocentric worldview, which has manifested in so many ways, for example, as geocentrism, the great chain of being, the unity of the world, the quantum observer, and so on. In so doing, he makes it clear—affectively, figurally—that there is no such thing as humanity’s space, no such thing as a natural world, if by “natural” we understand rationally knowable or conformable to human expectation and desire. Rather, there is only an indifferent, unknowable world, rife with any number of uncaring, hostile surprises. Primordial Time

As with space, so too with time, since linear notions of the temporal provide optimists with a tried-and-true means of anchoring a world of changing, complex appearances. One can endure the sufferings of today, so the thinking goes, by placing faith in the promise of a brighter, better tomorrow. This sense of inevitable improvement in time is, however counterfactual, a common belief (or desire turned belief ), one shared by professionals and experts across fields, as well as by ordinary persons. With apologies to Leibniz, the sentiment is perhaps best captured by the eternal optimist Annie, in the song “Tomorrow”: “The sun’ll come out tomorrow / Bet your Supernatural Horror as Pessimistic Argument

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bottom dollar that tomorrow / There’ll be sun / Just thinking about tomorrow / Clears away the cobwebs and the sorrow / Till there’s none.”58 Like Annie’s sanguine projections about the future, optimists since at least the Age of Reason have depicted the developments of science, technology, and socialization as embodying a continual march toward the achievement of a social order, one distinguished by near perfect qualities. Similarly, certain forms of religious asceticism justify the pain and suffering of this world with a view to the eternal bliss to be enjoyed in the afterlife. As Nietzsche famously argued, this religious belief is often mirrored in modern political thought, particularly, but not only, in modern democracy, which views history as a material process necessarily leading to a “free society,” a political community that recognizes neither God nor master.59 In each case, the believed reality is the same: time will yield an abundant, much sought-after harvest, (almost) guaranteed. While Ligotti and other writers of weird fiction do not embrace Nietzsche’s so-called “Dionysian pessimism” or “pessimism of strength,” they are nevertheless indebted to his critique of the rational-progressivist model of linear time. For Nietzsche, this optimistic temporal orientation is shot through with teleology, animated by a religious impulse to interpret the material world in terms of design and purpose. Harking back to the ancient and classical world of antiquity, Nietzsche instead champions a cyclical view of the temporal order, which, borrowing from the hermetic tradition, he encapsulates in the imagistic phrase “eternal recurrence,” in other words, the eternal return of the same.60 More or less at odds with notions of linear progress, cyclical views are ipso facto amenable to a pessimistic worldview. However, it is one thing to forward rational, discursive arguments in favor of a cyclical understanding of time—whether in philosophical treatises or television series—and quite another to disturb, affectively, people’s common-sense belief in time’s linear progression. Despite the brilliance of many pessimistic philosophers’ arguments regarding the cyclical nature of time—for example, Nietzsche’s, of course, but also those of Miguel de Unamuno, Giacomo Leopardi, Mircea Eliade, and E. M. Cioran—the Western imaginary presents a rather consistent and apparently unassailable bias toward linearly progressivist conceptions of time.61 Rhetorically speaking, weird fiction goes one better in arguing against or calling into question the notion of linear progress, frequently depicting the reliance of the present and future on the past or, albeit less frequently, the devolutionary movement of recurring cycles.62 Lovecraft’s Sherwood Anderson–inspired “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His A Feeling of Wrongness

Family” is representative of the former.63 In this story, Sir Arthur Jermyn, a British nobleman, is driven to insanity and suicide by the revelation that his recent lineage is the result of his human forebears having crossbred with white apes. Unable to cope with an intolerable reality, Arthur’s mind quickly and violently deteriorates, with the result that he ends his life in an act of self-immolation. Although the horror of the story resides in Arthur’s revelation (and demise), combined with the reader’s own newly awakened ancestral uncertainty, the pessimistic implications are more far-reaching: life in general—identity and enhancement in particular—is conditioned by a temporal sequence that does not necessarily coincide with modern notions of progress but is ever-susceptible to time’s indifferent yet monstrous cruelties, its reversals, perversions, and degeneracies. At a more basic level, the argument would appear to be that the human animal—despite having convinced itself, as did Marx, of the uniqueness of its species-being—remains, at its core, an animal all the same, forever tied to a nonhuman past, from which it is only superficially differentiated by its own representations of an evolutionary process, which nevertheless escapes the guiding influence of the conscious mind. Harmful Knowledge

As an extension of this assault on ancestry and phylogenesis, weird fiction often takes aim at the viability if not the very possibility of civilizational progress. In Fritz Leiber’s inimitable “The Black Gondolier,” for instance, evidence slowly mounts that humanity exists merely as a tool for oil. According to Thacker, “The oil is not so much a product of human design or intervention . . . but the reverse—it is human ‘modern technological civilization’ that is the effect, the product of this sentient, creeping oil.”64 That is, the narrative midwifes the pessimistic idea that what humans tend to regard as societal progress, upon closer inspection, only serves to dissimulate the enslavement of humanity to forces beyond its control. Whether such forces are organic or inorganic, artificial or natural, is beside the point; what is more, such distinctions are, on Leiber’s view, entirely false, because “consciousness goes down to the level of the electrons—yes, and below that to the strata of the yet-undiscovered sub-particles.”65 Expanding on Lovecraft’s anti-evolutionism, “The Black Gondolier” suggests that what we call civilizational achievements conceal ancient, secret forces of domination and control. Appearances change—from jungles to modern cityscapes—but the changes are superficial: the human animal is forever made to serve the whims of a consuming, indifferent will, while simultaneously believing itself to be Supernatural Horror as Pessimistic Argument

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master of its domain. Like Lovecraft’s tale about the Jermyn family, “The Black Gondolier” opposes the idea that the future justifies the pain we experience in the present, arguing via narrative for the pessimistic idea that the future promises only more of the same—with, of course, one notable exception, namely, that each person alive today will one day die. While humanity has always valued knowing, post-enlightenment society has elevated it to new heights as a path to control our surroundings and as an intrinsic good. Problems of suffering become defined in terms of a lack of knowledge and resources (a lack of resources itself becoming an issue of lack of knowledge). From games to ameliorate boredom, to drugs to improve temperament, knowledge promises solutions to all the ills that plague us, a view that gives credence to the linear progressive view of time espoused by optimists. However, knowledge need not cure ills in order to anchor; it can become an end in itself, a possibility captured by one of philosophy’s great trailblazers, Francis Bacon, when he claimed, “For all knowledge and wonder (which is the seed of knowledge) is an impression of pleasure in itself.”66 Suffering, then, can be cast in terms of ignorance, rather than an intrinsic element of the human experience. Over against this reverence for knowledge, pessimists do not see wisdom and learning as a panacea for humanity’s problems and tend to contest the claim that erudition normally does more good than harm. As British philosopher (and sometimes pessimist) Roger Scruton writes, “Every scientific advance is welcomed by those who see a use for it, and usually deplored by those who don’t. History does not record the protests that surrounded the invention of the wheel,” before detailing the great backlash spurred by inventions like the railway and the car.67 Put another way by Cioran, “Who in good faith could choose between the stone age and the age of modern weapons?”68 Technology creates as many problems as it solves and knowledge of the world only obliterates the possibility to enjoy it: “How can one still have ideals when there are so many blind, deaf, and mad people in the world? How can I remorselessly enjoy the light another cannot see or the sound another cannot hear?”69 For pessimists, knowledge of human suffering makes enjoying life’s pleasures impossible—or, at the very least, unethical. In weird fiction the optimistic idea of knowledge as beneficial gets turned on its head. In these stories ignorance is often bliss, as heightened perception threatens to undermine one’s sanity. Hence, one common strategy is the appearance of agencies that promise to enrich the protagonist’s knowledge of the world: Lovecraft’s fictional grimoire, the Necronomicon, the play the Yellow King in Robert W. Chambers’s work, a pair of eyeglasses that A Feeling of Wrongness

peer into new dimensions in Ligotti’s “Masquerade of a Dead Sword,” as well as the various scientific experiments and occult rituals found in stories such as Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Devotee of Evil,” Lovecraft’s “From Beyond,” and Ligotti’s “Dream of a Mannikin.”70 But rather than the knowledge to create a better toaster or a feature-rich cloud storage platform, this knowledge raises questions concerning the very nature of reality, undercutting the illusions that modern, rational-scientific humanity has constructed a means of buttressing its sanity. In Machen’s the “The Great God Pan,” a character encountering forbidden knowledge warns another, “I could tell you certain things which would convince you, but you would never know a happy day again. You would pass the rest of your life, as I pass mine, a haunted man, a man who has seen hell.”71 To understand reality as it really is, shorn of its sociohistorical and cultural niceties, means to see the world as hell, a point Ligotti makes explicit throughout Conspiracy and demonstrates throughout his short works of fiction. Even language itself, the tool by which humanity constructs and comprehends the world, falls apart in weird fiction. As Graham Harman writes of Lovecraft, “No other writer is so perplexed by the gap between objects and the power of language to describe them, or between objects and the qualities they possess.”72 There is no shortage of characters in weird fiction finding that language fails them when confronted with terror, as Harman and others have detailed.73 Make-Work Performances

Weird fiction not only assaults the world but also makes our own selves a conduit for terror. Ordinarily, the liberal subject at the heart of the rhetorical project coexists comfortably with optimism. If people can make reasoned arguments and deliberate, it suggests the possibility of progress. This creates a troubling paradox for pessimists like Ligotti, because the very forms of argumentation used in works like Conspiracy presuppose an optimistic perspective. Ligotti frequently refers to humans as “meat puppets,” but what is the point of trying to persuade a “meat puppet”? The very act of rational argumentation anchors one’s humanness. Paradoxically, this polemic indirectly serves to affirm the reader as an agent capable of making sense of the world, since the reader’s ability to parse Ligotti’s arguments depends on the very rational linguistic systems Ligotti seeks to overturn. In contrast, the puppets of weird fiction leave the readers questioning their ontology with no clear comprehension of the path that led them to their questioning. Weird fiction does not make the case that the audience is a meat puppet, but rather causes the audience to identify with the puppet, the insect, the automaton. Supernatural Horror as Pessimistic Argument

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Figure 1 One of Ligotti’s disturbing puppets from the comic adaptation of “The Clown Puppet,” written by Joe Harris and illustrated by Bill Sienkiewiez, in The Nightmare Factory: Volume 2.

Certainly there is no shortage of seemingly human characters transforming into or being revealed as something less than human. Puppets and insects are creatures that can do the things that we do, speak, build, procreate, but they lack the inner life, the soul, the consciousness that humans believe separate them from the rest of life’s creations. Weird fiction does not argue with the reader. Instead it raises the prospect that humanity is a convenient and conventional identification, an ontic designation rather than a true ontological state. Tennessen argues that “Man’s [sic] ability to ‘stand out’ (ek-sistere) and, while still breathing, examine himself and his ‘total situation,’ is, from a biosophic viewpoint, an insanely haphazard ‘short-circuit’ in nature,” one that allows us to escape our performance and see ourselves as we are.74 Once rendered visible, the performativity of human existence—of humans’ standing out—becomes as grotesque as insects donning human exteriors and as A Feeling of Wrongness

disconcerting as manikins pretending to be sentient. What once provided comfort becomes just an added indignity—and a disconcerting one at that. Humans do not perform alone, however, which is what gives such strength to the conspiracy against the human race. Individuals may doubt society will drag along all but the strongest, because each person is bound up in a cosmic drama that drags him or her forward, despite every reason to surrender to abject terror. Why does a soldier go to fight? To defend the nation. Why does a flood strike a village? Because God decreed it. Why does a woman spend all night working on equations? So that humanity may some day reach the stars, and so on. In these and innumerable other instances of meaning making, humans articulate life’s data within a broad narrative framework, one that maintains and is maintained by the collective fantasies of billions of other people. When contextualized as part of a performance that is always already endowed with special significance, suffering becomes comprehensible, bearable. Suffering in the ritualized service of nation, science, freedom, and so on makes suffering meaningful, a fact that underscores the anxiety-inducing dissatisfaction of failing to come up with a plausible explanatory context for a life unexpectedly cut short, as in the often-heard non-explanation of “she died for no reason.” For the pessimist, however, everyone dies for no reason whatsoever, no exceptions. Weird fiction frequently takes the idea of customs, rituals, religion, and so forth and portrays them as covering up the world’s monsters, just as pessimists accuse people of using customs to falsely justify the horror of the world. Ligotti’s masterfully unsettling “The Last Feast of Harlequin” is one of the many weird fiction tales to depict rituals as enabling the conspiracy against the human race, a conspiracy consisting both of the monsters of weird fiction and the continued propagation of humanity in reality. In “The Last Feast” a professor travels to a small town to observe an annual ritual celebration of clowns. Deeper investigation reveals the tradition as a simultaneous cover for ritual sacrifice to ancient creatures when the protagonist witnesses a grisly murder and the horrors of existence when the professor witnesses the crowd, “singing to the ‘unborn in paradise,’ to the pure unlived lives.” They sang a dirge for existence, for all its vital forms and seasons. Their ideals are those of darkness, chaos, and a melancholy half-existence.”75 The ritual keeps these terrible forces, literal monsters and the truth of the monstrous world in which we live, out of sight for another year, but of course both continue to exist. Religion, perhaps the greatest source of anchoring, also gets extensive treatment in weird fiction. Rather than deny religion on face, weird fiction often offers a horrifying model of religion where God is Supernatural Horror as Pessimistic Argument

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malevolent, indifferent, or idiotic and certainly no comfort when facing the daily suffering of our existence. Lovecraft’s universe is governed by a pantheon of cruel deities led by Azathoth the blind idiot god, “whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time and space amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes.”76 Such deities serve to unconceal the true nature of reality, as it exists beyond the curtains of humanity’s pathetic performance, a reality that is incomprehensible, cruel, and indifferent to even the highest of human aspirations and achievements. Denying Sublimation

Anchoring justifies the existence of suffering, but sublimation embraces it and turns it from an evil to a good. So while Ligotti points out that it is the rarest of Zapffe’s techniques, sublimation is perhaps the most problematic for pessimists. After all, Ligotti admits that even Conspiracy, one of the most strongly argued defenses of pessimism of all time, only serves as a means of sublimating his own unhappiness with the world.77 Readers risk leaving the works of pessimistic philosophy with a cathartic purging of their fears or a Nietzschean embrace of suffering, both of which impede the influence of pessimism. Hence, this strange Stockholm syndrome–like relationship between humans and suffering binds us to the very evils we should seek to eliminate. What makes humanity’s relationship to sublimation so powerful is that sublimation operates primarily through how we structure ideas. It is no mistake that Aristotle and Nietzsche spoke of the tragic in the context of drama. Writing in the Poetics Aristotle argues, “A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle and a conclusion.”78 Gustav Freytag later expanded on this axiom to argue that drama has exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and dénouement.79 Such a tried-and-true formula, which has existed from at least the ancient Greeks and continues through the present day, ensures that stories conclude mythically, that is, with the central conflict resolved. Even when things end badly, as in the case of Oedipus Tyrannus, the conflict is nevertheless settled, and the audience can come to enjoy that sense of completeness that lends itself to catharsis or parable. As Zapffe writes, the theater, “at worst,” leads the audience “from despair to uncertainty” but more often than not “stretches a bridge of purpose over the abyss, pushing with dynamic élan whenever it creaks. By cultivating the joys of experience it becomes a greenhouse for life-affirming values.”80 Tragic drama, by means of its predictable structures, turns the shit of the world into A Feeling of Wrongness

a fertile environment for the affirmation, or catharsis, of life.81 Operating by means of the common structures of communication, sublimation stands as a final bastion against those freak pessimistic thoughts that make it past the fortresses of distraction, isolation, and anchoring. Weird fiction, however, does not make use of traditional optimistic structures of narrative but instead breaks convention in ways that leave readers disoriented and open to experiences with the uncanny. Rather than end a story in conformity to the narrative arc, many weird fiction tales end in medias res. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” for instance, slowly builds to the revelation of a mysterious and alien realm below the sea, only to end before the protagonist ventures there.82 Machen’s “The White People” presents the journal of a young girl who has made contact with supernatural beings, but the journal ends mid-sentence, offering no resolution to the events.83 Sometimes the subversions of form are more drastic, such as in “An Occurrence at Owl Creek,” which begins like an action adventure extravaganza. In the story Peyton Farquhar, a saboteur, is about to be hanged when his rope snaps, allowing him to flee into a nearby river, all the while dodging bullets fired from a company of enemy soldiers. Farquhar dodges, dives, and weaves and finally arrives safely at the shore. He returns to his home and runs to hug his wife when, abruptly, “he feels a stunning blow upon the back of the neck; a blinding white light blazes all about him with a sound like the shock of a cannon—then all is darkness and silence! Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek Bridge.”84 He was dead the whole time, a sudden and surprising realization that negates the story’s previous adherence to narrative form. Such abrupt endings make it difficult to find any deeper meaning in weird fiction. The audience is conditioned to expect dénouement, but none arrives, hurtling them into a confrontation with the uncanny but with no mechanism by which to convert it into something life affirming. Another manner in which weird fiction overcomes the optimism of traditional narrative structure is through deemphasizing plot and foregrounding atmosphere. As Joyce Carol Oates argues, “There is a melancholy, operatic grandeur in Lovecraft’s most passionate work, like ‘The Outsider’ and ‘At the Mountains of Madness’; a curious elegiac poetry of unspeakable loss, of adolescent despair and an existential loneliness so pervasive that it lingers in the reader’s memory, like a dream, long after the rudiments of Lovecraftian plot have faded.”85 A strong narrative arc is one that frames a story’s events and ultimately provides the grounds for sublimation. Ligotti and Lovecraft and others write in a manner that leaves the reader hazy on a story’s particular Supernatural Horror as Pessimistic Argument

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plot points, and in a way that makes sublimation difficult. It is simple to interpret a bad event in a way that affirms life by means of catharsis; it is much more difficult to transform a feeling of unease and malaise. Omnia Exeunt in Mysterium: Toward an Obfuscatory Model of Rhetorical 48

Effectiveness

Together, the strategies of isolation, distraction, anchoring, and sublimation act as a rather comprehensive shield against pessimistic thinking. What recourse does a pessimist have when optimism runs through something so basic as our understanding of time? Subversion of the hegemonic structures of language and thought is a perquisite of pessimism, just as Nietzsche argued, “I am afraid that we have not got rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.”86 At a minimum, then, effective pessimistic persuasion must abandon the traditional ratiocinative structures of literature and rhetoric, which is precisely what weird fiction does, opting instead for of a range of stylistic devices and rhetorical maneuvers that subvert traditional cognitive and social barriers to pessimistic thought. In this way, weird fiction surpasses its status as genre fiction and becomes metaphysically subversive. Rhetorical efficacy notwithstanding, pessimists have not found a silver bullet for converting the masses to the true and vile nature of the world. Pessimists, one would imagine, do not put much faith in silver bullets. What they have stumbled upon is a strategy of persuasion that manages to combat both the inherently optimistic structures of rhetoric and argumentation and some of the most prominent strategies that audiences deploy to avoid reconciling themselves to pessimistic ideas. In contrast to polemics like the Conspiracy, weird fiction adopts a Fabian approach, gradually wearing down the reader’s defenses. Its stories raise the prospect that our existence is deeply wrong but in a way too vague and ephemeral to merit full counterattack. Weird fiction thus acts as a coded communiqué, just obscure enough to bypass some of the mental walls and guards that evolution and culture have worked millennia to erect, just furtive enough, inscrutable enough, to reach that tiny corner, tucked away in the deep recesses of our primordial mind, that pocket of potential insurgency that murmurs, “No, everything is not all right.”

A Feeling of Wrongness

2 “I’m Bad at Parties” The Philosophical Pessimism of True Detective True Detective is in broad strokes indistinguishable from the recent spate of dark televised police dramas such as The Fall, The Killing, Top of the Lake, and Luther, to name only a few: there is a serial killer on the loose in the bayous of Louisiana; known only as the mysterious Yellow King, he is ritualistically killing women and leaving their bodies on full, grotesque display; two detectives with mismatched personalities—the moody intellectual, Rustin (“Rust”) Cohle, played by Matthew McConaughey, and the everyday family man, Martin (“Marty”) Hart, portrayed by Woody Harrelson—take up the case; together, they overcome scant clues, bureaucratic red tape, and their own personal differences and demons to find out whodunit. But True Detective’s true genius lies not in the broad strokes but in the carefully choreographed weeds. The uniquely dark atmosphere, the realistic, yet at times bizarre, dialogue, the intricate, cross-generational plot, and compelling character development—all these elements work together to capture the attention of audiences who have been saturated with premier television shows. Sarah Hughes writes in the Guardian that the show quickly achieved iconic status, earning the “same hushed tones normally reserved for the likes of Breaking Bad and The Wire.”1 Other reviewers agreed—indeed, a supermajority of critics: the show earned an enviable score of 87 on the review-aggregating website Metacritic, a rating that the website labels “universal acclaim.”2 Fans of the show were equally impressed; in some cases even more so. As is the case with many cult films and television programs—and True Detective is certainly a highly regarded cult show—a segment of True Detective’s fan base became truly obsessive, pouring over episodes for hidden clues and messages

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and sharing their thoughts with other sleuths on various internet forums. As the idiosyncratic philosopher Nick Land writes, “The most intelligent series in TV history has opened strange crypts for explorers.”3 With that observation in mind, we argue that the narrative crypts opened up by True Detective signal something other than the kind of edgy macabre that has come into fashion over the last few decades of television programming (as in, for example, the anthology series American Horror Story and the hybrid drama The Walking Dead)—and of greater artistic significance than a device for suturing a deeply conflicted plot (as with Lost).4 Rather, it is our contention that True Detective’s crypts serve as an invitation—or challenge—to undertake the work of reading the series esoterically. According to the German-American classical philosopher Leo Strauss, such an interpretive approach consists of decoding a text’s obscure meaning, of discovering, as Robert Howse describes, “an obscure or brief presentation of the truth that is, in principle, accessible to all thoughtful readers in all times and places.”5 In the context of True Detective, what those who endeavor to dig past the show’s iridium hues discover is not a convoluted narrative about the light overcoming the dark—or even a grisly murder mystery—but a complete and utter blackness of the kind associated with the weird, cosmic pessimism of Thomas Ligotti and H. P. Lovecraft. What’s more, such a discovery is no mere coincidence. As we argue, the very structure of True Detective encourages such an esoteric reading, galvanizing the careful viewer to seek out and crack the show’s gloomy secrets, to uncover knowledge about the world that, in the true spirit of the Lovecraftian weird, they might be better off not knowing. “Nothing’s Ever Fulfilled, Not Until the Very End”: Rust Cohle on Fatality, Consciousness, and Procreation

The fact that True Detective’s Rust Cohle is a pessimist should be obvious even to the casual viewer. His bleak worldview utterly permeates his character— what he says, what he does, the movement and attitude of his body—and for much of the show he has little positive to say about anything or anyone. Less obvious, however (at least to the uninitiated), is that Cohle’s ideas are not simply a quirk of temperament but instead reflect his commitment to the ancient, quasi-esoteric school of philosophical pessimism. Cohle admits as much when early in the series he says, “I consider myself a realist, all right, but in philosophical terms, I’m what’s called a pessimist.”6 This identification with pessimism is likewise reflected in the show’s DVD marketing slogan— “Touch darkness and darkness touches you back”—which, for those “in the A Feeling of Wrongness

know,” is an obvious restatement of Nietzsche’s famous aphorism, “And when you stare for a long time into an abyss, the abyss stares back into you.”7 Similarly, True Detective’s lead writer and creator, Nic Pizzolatto, reports using lines of dialogue “that were specifically phrased in such a way as to signal [to] Ligotti admirers.”8 Indeed, the influence of Ligotti’s pessimist manifesto, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, is so great that it became the basis for accusations of plagiarism.9 While we refrain from weighing in on the allegation of plagiarism, it is the case that rarely does philosophy get much of a hearing in popular culture and that this is especially the case for a philosophical perspective as unpalatable to the general public as pessimism.10 In any case, more interesting than whether or to what extent Pizzolatto “borrowed without asking” is that, in the character of Rust Cohle, he marshals many of the most salient and provocative pessimistic arguments for the idea that life is an unfortunate accident and that humanity would do better if it simply ceased to exist. The existence of a pessimistic character in a major television show represents something of a coup for pessimism in and of itself. Most people probably live blissfully unaware of the philosophical school of pessimism, despite harboring pessimistic thoughts from time to time. The pessimistic tome (Ligotti’s Conspiracy) that inspired Rust’s character never reached the shelves of major bookstores, failed to catch the eyes of mainstream reviewers, and was prepared and issued by the relatively obscure independent publisher Hippocampus Press. A correspondence with a representative from Hippocampus revealed that the book sold roughly 8,500 copies in the four years after its release, a far cry from 3.5 million, which is the number of viewers who tuned in to watch the finale of HBO’s police-procedural, True Detective.11 As Zapffe and others so effectively point out, however, information about pessimism is not necessarily pessimistic. What is more, the mere presence of a pessimistic character is not rhetorically efficacious for the cause of pessimism, especially in light of such important factors as the optimistic nature of narrative structures and the self-defense mechanisms of the audience. Rust’s pessimism, however, provides only one component of an effective pessimistic message, albeit an important one. Like the written letter, this outlook is essential to a particular communicative exchange, yet it is all but undeliverable in the absence of an appropriately marked envelope. Nevertheless, explicating Cohle’s philosophy and his idiosyncratic interpretations of the world he inhabits constitutes a necessary first step toward answering the question of whether and how the series as a whole invites an The Philosophical Pessimism of True Detective

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esoteric reading. For if, as we argue, True Detective invites an esoteric reading—one that safely ushers Cohle’s overt pessimism past optimism’s system of roadblocks and checkpoints—then the guiding thread for such a reading would likely begin somewhere in the realm of conspicuous appearances—the realm of the exoteric. 52

Well-Versed in the Pessimistic Canon

Throughout much of the first season, Cohle can be counted on to offer some lyrical, although deeply tragic, interpretations of whatever situation is at hand. His brooding monologues even prompted a reviewer for The New Yorker to write, “Rust might have been presented as comically absurd, but instead he is the show’s guiding philosopher.”12 The “absurdity” of Rust’s speech owes much to the fact that no one speaks like him, or at least no one whom the average viewer is likely to have met. And this is because Rust Cohle is in deep conversation with a variety of philosophical pessimists who are united in their basic judgment about the world and humanity’s place in it. This is evident from the very beginning, when, in one of the character-establishing scenes of the first episode, Cohle proclaims himself to be a pessimist.13 Although Cohle does not explicitly mention Schopenhauer in the series, over the course of the eight episodes he channels Schopenhauer and Schopenhauerian thought. In particular, Cohle invokes the idea—central to Schopenhauer’s philosophy—that human beings lack the capacity to achieve meaningful, long-term fulfillment in life. Although Schopenhauer articulates this view at various points in his writing, he most clearly expresses it in his essay “On the Vanity of Existence,” writing “that man [sic] is a compound of needs which are hard to satisfy; that their satisfaction achieves nothing but a painless condition in which he is only given over to boredom; and that boredom is a direct proof that existence is in itself valueless, for boredom is nothing other than the sensation of the emptiness of existence.”14 Even, or especially, when their hard work pays off, humans do not attain satisfaction or happiness. They simply give themselves over to boredom and in so doing demonstrate the utter disvalue of any human striving and the purposeless of life and living. Cohle does not mention, much less discourse on, boredom per se—a life spent chasing violent criminals, one imagines, is many things but not boring; nevertheless, he does echo Schopenhauer’s sentiment that no human action—no project, no design—can ever bring about an enduring sense of accomplishment or an abiding state of contentment that was not at once its own undoing. For Cohle, “Nothing’s ever fulfilled, not until the very end,” and peace only comes in death, which is why Cohle sees “unmistakable A Feeling of Wrongness

relief” in the eyes of dead bodies, for death is the only true cessation of disturbance, of dashed hopes and expectations.15 We find a similar affinity between Cohle’s ideas and those of pessimism in the treatment of time. In one of the show’s more memorable dialogues, two police officers, Thomas Papania and Maynard Gilbough, interrogate an unkempt and inebriated Cohle regarding a string of murders that he and Hart had failed to solve seventeen years earlier. Cohle grimly remarks, “This is a world where nothing is solved. Someone once told me, ‘Time is a flat circle.’ Everything we’ve ever done or will do, we’re gonna do over and over and over again.”16 The reference here is to the premodern, transcultural myth— popularized in the late nineteenth century by Nietzsche and revived in the twentieth by Mircea Eliade—of the eternal recurrence, the eternal return of the same.17 Over against the optimistic view of history, which understands the unfolding of time in terms of linear progression, the image of an eternal return implies a cyclical view of time, whereby the universe is regarded as endlessly recurring, in a self-same form, across infinite time and space, with nothing added and nothing taken away. By describing time as a flat circle, Cohle is goading the interrogators (and, by extension, the audience) to reexamine the conventional, linear understanding of time. Moreover, the impetus for such reconsideration is redoubled by the actual form of the interview itself, which occurs over the span of several episodes and is interrupted with numerous flashes to events happening at other times and in other places. None of these reminiscences are particularly encouraging—either with respect to the unsolved murder case or to what the killings say about life—but each one tells the same basic story. The thing about stories, however, is that they are complete, finalized, waiting to be retold. Thus, to the apparent bewilderment of Cohle’s interrogators, Cohle approaches the unsolved murders as a story, one whose ending is predictable, if not already known, and whose details are, for that reason, uninterestingly dull. When earlier in the interview, Cohle remarks on studying the pictures of murder victims, he does not dwell on forensics, the setting, witnesses, or lines of inquiry, either those not pursued or inadequately explored; rather, he conveys the import of the investigation, the meaning of the story, namely, that no matter how hard he or anyone else works, people still die. Maybe, from time to time, the police apprehend a criminal or two, but new ones always emerge to take their place—just as has been the case throughout human history. “Nothing is solved” in the macro sense, and the same holds true for the individual lives that occupy history’s cyclical retelling. Cohle, like everyone else, wakes up each day to live the same story. The Philosophical Pessimism of True Detective

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Cohle, however, does not only repeat and apply, in cookie-cutter fashion, the pessimistic insights of others but also stakes out his philosophical positions within pessimism. That is, he philosophizes, albeit at times crudely. When Cohle first hears the phrase “time is a flat circle” from a shirtless drug cook, he yells, “What is that, Nietzsche? Shut the fuck up!”18 Although one would be justified in thinking that Cohle is either being ironic or simply expressing disapproval at what he perceives as inappropriate glibness, given his pessimistic pedigree it is perhaps more likely that the strong language is meant for Nietzsche, as well as the drug cook. For Nietzsche, the true significance of the eternal return does not consist in its propositional content but in its capacity to provoke an ethical response, to test one’s fortitude in the face of everything that life and living have to offer. Nowhere does he state this more clearly than in his Gay Science: “What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again.’ . . . Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine.’”19 For Nietzsche, the eternal return is intended only for those persons capable of an uncompromising acceptance of reality as it is—a resolute “Yes”-saying to life. His term for this is the Latin amor fati, love of (one’s) fate: “Let that be my love from now on!”20 Cohle obviously rejects this valuation, even while accepting Nietzsche’s fatalism—hence the caustic “Shut the fuck up!” Yet despite this abrasiveness, Cohle is not issuing an outright rejection of Nietzsche; rather, he is giving a Schopenhauerian answer to the demon’s hypothetical question. What is more, Cohle accepts the idea behind Nietzsche’s amor fati, namely, that for good or bad, life itself is its own meaning, rigidly indifferent to any human design or purpose. To those who would endeavor to imbue life with direction, Cohle responds with a rather Nietzschean answer: “The ontological fallacy of expecting a light at the end of the tunnel, well, that’s what the preacher sells, same as a shrink. See, the preacher, he encourages your capacity for illusion. Then he tells you it’s a fucking virtue.”21 Cohle’s pessimism, however, extends beyond a “No”-saying fatalism to include the nature of human beings as such, the very meaning of humanness. In Cohle’s view, if the purposiveness of time is an illusion, then human consciousness is a mistake, and a calamitous one at that. In the same car ride in which Cohle discloses his pessimism, he says to Hart, “Human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. A Feeling of Wrongness

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Figure 2 The drug cook quoting Nietzsche to Cohle. True Detective, episode 5, “The Secret Fate of All Life,” directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, and written by Nic Pizzolatto.

Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law.” Such a pronouncement is likely to strike many as being counterintuitive, if not outright ridiculous. The reason for this is at once simple and profound: since at least Plato’s Socrates, self-awareness has typically been regarded as a virtue. Cohle’s notion that human self-awareness is a flaw has deep roots in the pessimistic tradition— Schopenhauer famously describing consciousness, egocentrically, as “the life-dream of the man [sic] who wills.”22 Among the who’s who of pessimist philosophers, this idea perhaps bears strongest resemblance to the “deep ecology” pessimism of Peter Wessel Zapffe, according to which humanity developed a “hazardous surplus of consciousness.”23 Zapffe sells this idea by way of analogy, comparing the level of human consciousness with the antlers of a long-extinct species of great elk. At a certain stage of evolution the elk’s antlers were conducive to survival, a happy accident that led to the generation of offspring with ever-larger antlers. This developmental pattern worked fine until one day the elk were no longer blessed with large antlers but burdened by antlers that were simply much too large for them to function properly. Similarly, Zapffe argues, human consciousness, which had once been a tool for survival, has since become detrimental to humanity. He writes, “[The] human mind is like such antlers, which in all their The Philosophical Pessimism of True Detective

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magnificent glory, crush their bearer slowly to the ground” (43). As Cohle puts it, humans have become too self-aware, to the point that consciousness is now dysfunctional, debilitating.24 It is no longer natural, he says—if by natural we understand the state of being in accord with the character or makeup of, or circumstances surrounding, something. Consciousness is now a liability, on this view, because it exists apart or outside nature and thus can coolly contemplate, as Zapffe states, the “suffering of humanity’s billions” and “the mechanics behind everything” (43). If one accepts this line of reasoning—that consciousness is or has become problematic—then one is immediately confronted with the practical necessity of discovering a solution. Cohle’s proposal, which he reveals to Hart after making his remarks about human self-awareness, is highly logical—and exceptionally hard to take. We humans, Cohle argues, ought to “deny our programming, stop reproducing, and march, hand-in-hand, into extinction.”25 This, finally, is Cohle’s solution not to the problem of consciousness but to life itself. As a solution it offers nothing to those hapless beings already in existence, but it offers a promising nonfuture for the countless number of unborn. Despite how one might feel about this resolution, Cohle’s proposal renders the stale pro-choice/pro-life debate unnecessary, if not nonsensical. Conceptually, antinatalism annuls the disagreement over the sanctity of life versus individual rights. But Cohle is not only anti-life but also anti-choice. As he later remarks to his interrogators, “Think of the hubris it must take to yank a soul out of nonexistence into this . . . meat, to force a life into this . . . thresher.”26 Each child born is a child destined for the “thresher,” a choice no parent (or would-be parent) should be allowed to make. Cohle’s opposition to children runs so deep that he smiles and appears genuinely relieved when he discusses the death of his daughter—a death that “spared” her and “spared” him “the sin of being a father.”27 Undoubtedly, this is the bleakest of Cohle’s pessimistic remarks. Yet they too are firmly grounded in philosophical pessimism, specifically in the antinatalist strain of David Benatar, which holds that no human should reproduce, because coming into existence harms everyone. The most obvious (and most overlooked) type of harm is that everyone born will one day die and experience some degree of suffering for many days along the way. Cohle uses the metaphor of a thresher, but Benatar has his own colorful metaphor, writing, “[Parents] play Russian roulette with a fully loaded gun—aimed, of course, not at their own heads, but at those of their future offspring.”28

A Feeling of Wrongness

The Prophecies of Rust Cohle

Clearly Cohle spends much of the series espousing pessimistic ideas, but that fact alone does not mean that True Detective is itself a pessimistic show—in other words, that it forwards an unqualifiedly pessimistic perspective or that it overcomes optimistic structures. After all, Cohle is still only one character. And although he is an important focal point for much of the show’s dramatic action, he is also a character whose pessimistic quips and assertions are routinely countermanded by his man on the street partner, Marty Hart. Hart, however, is something more than the perfect foil for Cohle’s pessimistic views. Hart speaks for the optimistic majority; he is the character with whom most viewers identify, even if they find Cohle more interesting. His is the simple and direct voice of our common-sense reasoning. When he says things like, “I just want you to stop saying odd shit, like you smell a psycho’s fear or you’re in someone’s faded memory of a town. Just stop,” he puts into words what most viewers are, at a gut level, probably feeling.29 And at the outset, the show seems to confirm this intuition, reassuring the viewers that, while Hart may not be as smart or eloquent or well read as Cohle, he gives off the appearance of a well-adjusted and relatively happy individual. And isn’t that more important than being right? Might some illusions—if optimism is indeed an illusion—be at once necessary and, on balance, beneficial? Certainly, the beginning of the series lends credence to this line of reasoning. When we first see Marty, he is living in a nice, spacious suburban home, which he shares with a beautiful wife and loving daughter. This image stands in stark contrast to the isolated Cohle, who lives alone in a barren apartment without even a seat to offer a guest. One could even suspect that Cohle’s pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy, that his worldview created and maintains his life circumstances, not the other way around. Painting a picture of a man destroyed by his job, Hart at one point describes Cohle as someone inclined to “sit alone in an empty room beating off to murder manuals.”30 But Cohle himself explicitly denies the idea that the job inspired his pessimism. During his interview with the detectives, he says to Gilbough, “I can’t say the job made me this way. More like me being this way made me right for the job.”31 At the very least, it does seem that Cohle’s pessimism coincides with an uncanny ability to predict terrible future events, while Hart’s disposition—for a time, anyway—correlates with a relative inability to grasp the nature of those events. Nevertheless, despite possessing the trappings of happiness, Hart, the audience soon comes to learn, is unfulfilled. As a result of this dissatisfaction,

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he cheats on his wife—first with a court transcriber, Lisa Tragnetti, and later with a former underage prostitute, Beth. Predictably, these transgressions set into motion a series of events that leave Hart as abandoned and alone as Cohle. More important, and perhaps less predictable, this reversal serves to justify a range of Cohle’s pessimistic pronouncements—pronouncements that, previously, Hart had been only too eager to write off—from general statements regarding the “inadequacies of reality” to the more tailored observation that Hart’s act of kindness in giving Beth money to escape from child prostitution was merely a “down payment” for sex.32 When Cohle made these comments, they appeared like typical grousing, but by the middle of the series they take on a more prophetic aspect, as Hart’s family life—his former bulwark against pessimism—falls to pieces. In addition to the changing circumstances of Hart’s private life, the dialectical tension between Cohle’s pessimism and Hart’s (increasingly muted) optimism plays out on the institutional level, where certain key events ultimately tip the scales in Cohle’s favor. In keeping with his common-sense optimism, Hart holds up certain key social institutions as arguments against pessimism, particularly those of the church and the police. Whereas for Hart, the church is predominantly a defender of “common good” and a preserver of “community,” for Cohle, religion consists of so many “fairy tales,” which are not good for anybody—a view that echoes pessimists like Freud and, with some qualification, Nietzsche.33 Ultimately, the show would seem to vindicate Cohle’s views. After cheating on his wife, Hart joins the religious organization the Promise Keepers and promptly breaks that promise by cheating again, while Billy Lee Tuttle’s religious schools proved to be a hunting ground for cultists preying upon vulnerable children. Similarly, Hart and Cohle clash over the meaning and value of the police. In Cohle’s first scene with his superiors, Cohle identifies what he sees as the cynical motive behind his appointment: political leverage in an election season owing to Cohle’s information regarding certain federal cases. Cohle offers a rather unromantic view of the police when purchasing Quaaludes from Lucy, saying to her, “Of course I’m dangerous. I’m police. I can do terrible things to people with impunity.”34 Hart, by contrast, views the police as a force for good, and cannot understand what possible interest a pessimist could have in being a police officer. Yet here, too, Cohle’s vision of the police more closely resembles the show’s reality. In the end, the police department shuts down Hart and Cohle’s murder investigation—and on suspicious grounds. Even the example of Hart works to support Cohle’s take on the police—Hart, the officer who, with impunity, will commit acts of private violence when it suits A Feeling of Wrongness

his needs, as he does when savagely beating two men for having sex with his daughter. Hence, despite providing a fertile climate for affirming meaning and value—for saying “Yes” to life—these major social institutions are exposed as little more than what Zapffe calls “human theatrics,” an elaborate theater production, which, by stretching “a bridge of purpose over the abyss,” gives the illusion of meaning in what remains, at bottom, a cold, meaningless world.35 Even so, True Detective’s shades of black are not the only colors in the series’ palette, however much they may dominate the first season. Nowhere is this clearer than in the finale, in which the retreat of the seemingly omnipresent force of social decay calls into question any straightforwardly pessimistic reading of the show. Instead, the finale introduces the prospect of tempered optimism that, while by no means Panglossian, is a far cry from the idea that life is irredeemably bad. Take, for example, the death of Dora Lange, the criminal case driving the show’s narrative. Cohle and Hart manage to track down Errol Childress, the efficient cause of Lange’s death, and kill him. The death of a murderer can be read as a point in favor of optimism. Cohle and Hart had come to the realization that Childress did not act alone but as part of a secret cabal of backwoods fanatics, however, and someone could read the failure to achieve complete justice as a mark for pessimism. We see the potential for this dispute when Cohle says, “We didn’t get ’em all,” to which Hart responds, “Yeah, and we ain’t gonna get ’em all. That ain’t what kind of world it is, but we got ours.” But while in the past Marty’s answer would likely have elicited a pessimistic monologue or witticism, Cohle here seems to acquiesce to Hart’s logic. What is more, Cohle confirms this change of heart when, in the final minutes of the show, he describes the universe as a battle between light and dark and remarks, “If you ask me, the light’s winning.”36 It is hard not to want to agree with Cohle—if only for catharsis—and it is also difficult not to read this observation both as a statement about reality and as evidence of a change in perspective, namely, from misanthropic pessimism to tempered optimism—a recognition of the world’s darkness combined with a belief that humans can act to reduce that darkness. As the show’s spokesman for philosophical pessimism, Cohle is effectively giving the audience permission to return to their belief in a world that while far from perfect is still not as bad as it could be, a world that is in fact getting better, not worse, in which good will ultimately win out over evil. This restoration of confidence in the future is not limited to the season’s final moments but is at work throughout the finale. Hart’s shattered support structure rallies in his time of need. While lying on a hospital bed recovering from his grievous The Philosophical Pessimism of True Detective

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wounds, Hart’s ex-wife and daughters visit him. Although his ex-wife has since remarried, her show of kindness still brings tears to his eyes. Steve Geraci, the officer whom Cohle fought with back in 1995 turns out not to have been part of the conspiracy. In the end, he is guilty of nothing more than failing to follow up on a report. Certainly, incompetence in policing does not fit with an overly optimistic picture of the world, but it is certainly a far cry from the alternative—namely, that a vast criminal conspiracy had successfully infiltrated an entire police force. Even religion, whose sole purpose in the show had been in its use in covering up child murder, is given a second chance. This reappraisal appears in the form of Cohle’s mystical, near-death experience, in which he becomes, in his words, “a part of everything that [he] ever loved.”37 Ontological fallacy notwithstanding, Cohle genuinely believes that he has found light at the end of the tunnel, though paradoxically his light is formed in darkness. Taken together, these incidents suggest that while the world of True Detective is far from perfect it remains a world that is not entirely beyond redemption. An Invitation to Delve

Ultimately, however, the question of whether or to what extent True Detective is pessimistic or optimistic is one that cannot be adequately addressed in the absence of considering the show’s underlying, or “deep,” structure. For an optimistic structure can easily undermine the import of pessimistic themes and characters, regardless of how pronounced they might be, just as the apparent pessimism of a polemic like The Conspiracy Against the Human Race must contend with the optimistic structure of rational argumentation. From this perspective one could reasonably assume that any of True Detective’s pessimistic indicators would be subsumed and transformed by Zapffe’s principals of sublimation and anchoring discussed in chapter 1. After all, if a story with an explicitly tragic ending, such as Oedipus Tyrannus or Antigone, allows audiences to sublimate their pessimistic experience, thereby gaining a cathartic release from hearing tell of others suffering, then a story that ends on an explicitly positive note should be much easier to reconcile with an optimistic or at least nonpessimistic worldview. On the surface, then, one could find no more fitting instance of Zapffe’s idea of anchoring than the arc of True Detective. Although the show may have treated viewers to a number of horrors, both physical and moral, it allowed the character of Cohle to overcome them via a peculiar combination of Nietzschean will and mystic, quasi-divine revelation. All of the mysterious twists and turns, all of the dark conspiracies are left unsettled, but that is A Feeling of Wrongness

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Figure 3 Sign spelling out “Notice King.” True Detective, episode 3, “The Locked Room,” directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga and written by Nic Pizzolatto.

OK—the audience is led to believe—because, as Cohle declares, “The light is winning.” Erik Adams, a reviewer for The Onion’s A.V. Club, defends the show’s denouement, writing, “[What] I really love about ‘Form And Void’ is that it doesn’t matter who The Yellow King was or how he was discovered.” What matters, from this perspective, is simply that Cohle and Hart survive their ordeal, mostly intact, and come out on top, with respect both to the villainess Childress and the dark malaise that had surrounded Cohle ever since the death of his daughter. Not all viewers, however, shared this assessment—that a finale boasting an emotional but not logical closure made for good TV. Adams himself admits that the show inspired a “mani[c] . . . Easter-egg hunt” among the show’s core fan base, for whom each episode presented an opportunity to decode the true nature and depth of the conspiracy lying at the heart of the show.38 This subset of viewership approached the series as though it were interpreting cryptic notes in a cipher, meticulously dissecting entire episodes in hundreds of posts on online forums—Reddit’s /r/TrueDetective, in particular. Posts to these forums not infrequently caught tiny details that would foreshadow later important developments. Perhaps the most significant of such discoveries occurred in the context of episode 3, when, during Cohle’s first interaction with Childress, the camera slow panned to a partially obscured sign that spelled out “notice king”—an oblique reference to Childress’s hidden identity as the Yellow King, which would not be explicitly revealed until episode 7.39 This reveal itself was subject to intense speculative scrutiny, with fans constructing elaborate theories as to the true identity of the Yellow King. As one critic wrote, “Reddit boards are full of readings that would impress The Philosophical Pessimism of True Detective

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Talmudic scholars, or perhaps CIA cryptographers, with their ontological complexity: what this represents, what that means, and how it’s all leading up to some sort of otherworldly finale.”40 Entertainment journalists trawled these message boards and, in articles published in Wired, the Atlantic, and the Daily Beast, presented the better or more interesting theories to an audience eager for anything related to True Detective.41 But in the end, the finale did not reward these complicated readings of the text. For those viewers participating in the various online discussion boards, the show’s finale was thus something of a disappointment. Rather than confirming a multifaceted, backwoods conspiracy, the show proffered a conventional ending in which the identity of the Yellow King hardly mattered. What is more, it seemed to abandon a host of enigmatic questions, as though Pizzolatto had intended them as nothing more than red herrings: Who are the five mysterious masked horsemen—first seen in the photograph from Dora Lange’s mother’s house, over which the camera lingered in episode 2? Why did Hart’s young daughter draw pictures depicting sexual intercourse or arrange her dolls in a way suggestive of rape? Why did the tent-revival preacher make the sign of the cross in the wrong direction?42 Who did Cohle see on Tuttle’s videotape? How did Childress commit the other murders and for what, if any, larger purpose?43 These and other questions remained entirely unresolved and, moreover, of no apparent concern to any of the detectives, including Cohle and Hart. Even the critics were alive both to the fact and the grounds of fans’ irritation, a situation prompting the Guardian’s Alan Yuhas to write, “Conspiracy theorists, Reddit users, fans of thorough writing; you’re not wrong to be disappointed.”44 Indeed, dissatisfaction was so pronounced that fans’ reaction to the finale itself became a popular news story, appearing not only in the Guardian but also in Slate, Esquire, Grantland, the Wall Street Journal, and the Atlantic.45 Nevertheless, it bears keeping in mind that only a small fraction of the 3.5 million viewers of True Detective devoted a significant amount of time and energy to reconciling the season finale with the details of the previous episodes. But whereas for the casual viewer, the finale simply marked the end of the mini-series, for the careful viewer, True Detective’s redemptive arc did not fit with the series’ accumulation of cryptic details, producing what New York Times critic Emily Nussbaum called a lack of “payoff” or, perhaps in some cases, the view that the show’s true message was obscure.46 The disjunction between promise and payoff, clues and closure, ambition and ambivalence created no small amount of displeasure on the part of fans that took the show seriously. Significantly, this displeasure was quite A Feeling of Wrongness

at odds with the cathartic release one might have imagined to result from one of the more straightforwardly pessimistic endings discussed online—for example, in which one of the leads dies or was the Yellow King all along. This subversion of cathartic release opens up space for a pessimistic message that exists both in form and content. Of course, the very nature of the subversion requires the audience put in the necessary interpretive labor, even as it invites them to do so. While few if any fans are likely to have employed a formal critical lens in their efforts to deconstruct True Detective, the work of Leo Strauss, the best-known modern proponent of esoteric hermeneutics (outside of the occult, that is), provides a useful heuristic for carrying out a pessimistic reading of the show. This formal reading provides more clarity than the multiplicity of ad hoc internet posts—many of which go to great lengths merely to point out a myriad of apparent contradictions in the plot—while at the same time keeping with the general spirit of the internet’s amateur literary sleuthing. For something, surely, does not add up. The Straussian Structure of True Detective

Leo Strauss argued that some philosophical books contain “two teachings: a popular teaching of an edifying character, which is in the foreground; and a philosophic teaching concerning the most important subject, which is only indicated between the lines.”47 Could it be that True Detective has two meanings, one for the common viewer and another for those that take the time to decipher its hidden, esoteric meaning? According to Strauss’s “hermeneutic” argument, prior to the nineteenth century, Western scholars generally understood that philosophy was not compatible with political society and therefore required a “shield” that would provide protection both to its author and its author’s views—especially “in an era of persecution, that is, at a time when some political or other orthodoxy was enforced by law or custom.”48 For that reason, many premodern philosophers felt compelled to write (and teach) esoterically—to disguise multiple levels of meaning within an exoteric structure of philosophical communication. Such an art of writing would thus enable authors to avoid displeasing the many defenders of the status quo—the king, the censors, and various others who benefit from the fashion of the times. As Strauss writes, “The exoteric teaching was needed for protecting philosophy. It was the armor in which philosophy had to appear. It was needed for political reasons. It was the form in which philosophy became visible to the political community. It was the political aspect of philosophy. It was The Philosophical Pessimism of True Detective

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‘political’ philosophy.”49 Using a variety of rhetorical stratagems and compositional techniques—for example, obscure references, irony or paradox, hyperbole, even deliberate self-contradictions—premodern scholars would communicate esoterically by conveying their messages in an oblique manner. Understandably, this “art of writing” would cue in those readers who were “in the know”—in other words, those who were both sympathetic to the radical nature and questions of philosophy and willing to decipher the code in which the message had been encrypted—while simultaneously delivering a safely banal, or exoteric, message to the hoi polloi. Philosophical writing, in other words, entices the inquisitive mind and puts off the rest, ensuring a coterie of attentive, erudite readers. The thoughtful ferret out and appreciate the true philosophical message of a text, whereas the thoughtless would content themselves with the superficial meaning of explicit (exoteric) statements. In that way, philosophy is always already adapted to a select readership. As Strauss states, “Thoughtless men [sic] are careless readers and only thoughtful men are careful readers.”50 We can see in the case of True Detective that there exists a set of incredibly thoughtful watchers, dissecting the show for hidden meanings. These are the individuals dissatisfied by the way the show’s finale treated the themes that had developed over the course of the season, but were these thoughtful readers detecting a hidden meaning? And even if no hidden meaning was intended, does the show’s structure, nevertheless, invite an esoteric reading? Strauss outlines three major criteria or guidelines for determining whether a text possesses an esoteric meaning. The first guideline is to consider the sociopolitical climate of the times in which the writer was working and whether he or she would face persecution for expressing heterodox views. At first glance, it would seem that True Detective emphatically fails to meet this condition. Ligotti, for instance, published Conspiracy Against the Human Race without meeting Socrates’ fate and without having to worry whether the manuscript would safely make its way past government censors—as in the case of, say, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. And the series itself, in addition to garnering millions of weekly viewers, was broadcast on a premium cable and satellite television network. The parameters for persecution, however, are different within the context of a capitalist society, where money and attention compose the main levers of sociocultural power. Writing a straightforwardly pessimistic text may not carry the risk of imprisonment—much less ostracism or a sentence of hard labor—but in the case of True Detective such unambiguous pessimism could very well have prevented HBO from continuing the show or audiences A Feeling of Wrongness

from watching it. Optimism sells and pessimism—that is, the truly bleak pessimism of Zapffe, Schopenhauer, and Ligotti—does not. Nevertheless, despite the fact that every epoch imposes some set of restrictions on creative expression, Strauss admonished against approaching each and every text under the assumption that esoteric meaning is embedded within an exoteric structure. Hence, Strauss’s second hermeneutic principle specifies a negative condition, namely, that “reading between the lines is strictly prohibited in all cases where it would be less exact than not doing so.”51 In other words, the reader should only look for esoteric meaning if and when the explicit message of the text suggests “contradictions and blunders” on the part of its author. Assuming at the outset that any given text boasts an exoteric structure that simultaneously conceals and discloses multiple levels of meaning is hermeneutically misguided, just as a heterodox writer’s failure to write esoterically would be rhetorically ill-conceived. In Strauss’s view, points of apparent tension within a text ought to be treated as hints or allusions intended to guide the reader, not as inartistic missteps that sympathetic readers should rationalize or excuse in an attempt to redeem an otherwise compelling or entertaining text—that is, unless one is a thoughtless and careless reader.52 Here, too, True Detective would seem to satisfy this guideline or at least skirt the prohibition on reading between the lines. Indeed, as we have seen, the various fan theories that proliferated on discussion forums would seem to adhere much more coherently to the facts of the story than Pizzolatto’s finale. As Willa Paskin writes in Slate, “The Internet’s theories about the case were so much more ingenious and captivating than what happened in tonight’s episode. They so much more neatly and plausibly tied up loose ends that the finale had no interest in.”53 In Straussian terms, then, fan-based theories would appear to justify, ex post facto, an esoteric reading of the text—though it cannot be said that the fans themselves had undertaken an esoteric approach in their speculations. Finally, Strauss recommends that readers should adopt an esoteric way of reading a text only insofar as the author invites it—that is, only to the extent that an author provides the careful reader with hints and guidelines suggestive of a text’s true, deeper meaning. As Strauss writes, “The first question to be addressed to a book would be of this kind: what is its subject matter, in other words, how is its subject matter designated, or understood, by the author? what is his [or her] intention in dealing with his [or her] subject? what questions does he [or she] raise in regard to it, or with what aspect of the subject is he [or she] exclusively, or chiefly, concerned?”54 As meticulously documented by the show’s fan base, True Detective is anything The Philosophical Pessimism of True Detective

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but lacking in its invitations for esoteric dissection. Indeed, given the subject matter and how it is handled throughout the series, it is reasonable to assume that even a moderately attentive viewer would be tempted to read between the lines—to connect the explicit mystery of the show to the problem of despair, to pick up on the presence of obscure references, if not their meaning, to speculate as to multiple levels of meaning and read the show esoterically. Yet even beyond the embedded hints and allusions, in numerous interviews during the series’ airing, Pizzolatto repeatedly gestured toward his having adopted an esoteric approach to writing the show. As reported by the Guardian, Pizzolatto stated that, with True Detective, “the point wasn’t to write another serial-killer show.”55 In an interview with the Arkham Digest, Pizzolatto talks about how noir is intrinsically grounded in the precepts of pessimistic philosophy, saying, “[There] was a clear line to me from Chambers to Lovecraft to Ligotti, and their fictional visions of cosmic despair were articulating the same things as certain nihilist and pessimist philosophers, but with more poetry and art and vision. And then I found that this level of bleakness went arm-in-arm with the genre of noir, and that aspects of the weird fiction I loved could be used to puncture and punctuate aspects of the noir genre that I loved.”56 Regarding the ostensibly optimistic finale, this last quotation is particularly suggestive, since it explicitly aligns noir with pessimistic thought. Although in the week leading up to the finale, Pizzolatto rejected many of the wilder fan theories, he nevertheless acknowledged that “there’s enough fragmentary history in Episode 7 that, like Hemingway’s iceberg, what is obscured can be discerned by what is visible”—an invitation to a Straussian way of reading if ever there was one.57 As Amy Sullivan of the Atlantic puts it, “[The] show practically begged us to get into the weeds.”58 All the same, tacit permission to read a text for esoteric layering is no guarantee that the search will yield “prosecutable” evidence in support of one’s beliefs. The fact that True Detective appears to meet all of Strauss’s hermeneutic criteria—thereby inviting an esoteric reading—does not mean that Pizzolatto planted an esoteric message within an exoteric structure. Nor does it ensure that what a careful reader might discern as esoteric will coincide with the actual hidden meaning, toward which the author is attempting to guide the reader (i.e., the unearthed meaning might still prove to be a figment of the reader’s imagination). Of course, there is no way around the doubtfulness of any esoteric reading. Barring some technological or evolutionary leap, we will never have direct, unmediated access to Pizzolatto’s true motives in writing True Detective. But, ipso facto, we will also never possess A Feeling of Wrongness

such access vis-à-vis “great thinkers” like Maimonides and Spinoza. And yet this crisis of interpretation has not prevented Strauss and his followers from offering esoteric readings of these and other philosophers’ texts.59 It may very well be that the philosophical writings of a Maimonides or Spinoza contain no hidden messages; certainly this is the majority opinion of historians and contemporary teachers of philosophy.60 Given the sheer number of Straussian readings—on Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, and Machiavelli, to name only a few examples—it is considerably likely that some of them are a creation of their author’s fantasies, rather than an accurate glimpse into the “true” nature and intention of texts like Plato’s Republic. Nevertheless, works of creative expression can and often do deploy a variety of structures and tropes that invite esoteric readings, regardless of authorial intent. Contrary to Strauss, for whom esoteric messages were a thing of conscious activity, texts emerge—they happen—within an interactive framework in which meaning is variably constructed via the activity of many different actors, in which the meaning of any complex of appearances is only partly determined by the conscious efforts and influential techniques of the author. In terms of esoteric appearances, one would be hard-pressed to find a more outwardly inviting post-millennial text than True Detective. The following section will provide an exoteric reading of True Detective; a reading that, contra the opinion of Strauss, is meaningful regardless of Pizzolatto’s intention. Reading Between the Lines

Like any mode of interpretation, however, a Straussian approach runs the risk of reading too deeply, of reading too much into a text and essentially projecting onto it one’s own desires or emotions. Or as Hart warns Cohle, “Once you attach an assumption to a piece of evidence, you start to bend the narrative to support it.”61 Strauss, however, was well aware of this tendency; rather than denying or downplaying the possibility of misinterpreting an exoteric message as an exoteric cover story, he recommends as a safeguard the search for a map, by means of which a reader could more or less accurately detect and interpret esoteric clues—separating genuine hints and allusions from potential and unintended red herrings and arranging them into a coherent argument or story. Such a map would thus serve as something of a cipher, a tool for cracking open the multiple levels of meaning and discerning the proper meaning at the tacit heart of a text, a message irreducible to the play of superficial or super-structural statements. As in the case of Plato’s Republic, in which Thrasymachus’s discourse on justice provides the reader The Philosophical Pessimism of True Detective

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with a cipher for decoding the real, unpopular truth of the esoteric text— Socrates’ dialectic serving as a smokescreen—Strauss allows that such maps can be internal to, or generated autonomously by, the texts themselves.62 In the case of True Detective, the key to mapping out the “true,” esoteric portion of the text comes in the form of the character Rust Cohle. In addition to helping to advance the plot and differentiating the series from other police procedurals with a noir bent, Cohle functions cryptographically to unconceal the show’s actual mystery. Much like Thrasymachus’s speech in Plato’s dialogue, Cohle’s discourse amounts to something more than dialogue, something that, for want of a better term, we might call a species of esoteric cartography, a crypto-rhetoric that speaks in the algorithm of dark poetry. Regardless of terminology, Cohle-as-map suggests that if we want to understand the heart of the show, we need to take his words seriously—more seriously than others. At first glance, however, the choice of Cohle as a guide to the show might seem questionable. To begin with, a strong majority of viewers are probably predisposed against his pessimistic worldview, a bias likely compounded by the fact that throughout the series Cohle’s pessimism is frequently the butt of Hart’s clever quips. Cohle is also unquestionably asocial, living alone in an unfurnished apartment, save for a single mattress on the floor. What is more, by the series’ end, Cohle has apparently abandoned his “problematic” worldview for one more in line with common-sense wisdom. And in this he comes to resemble not so much a full-fledged dramatic character as an interlocutor from one of Plato’s early Socratic dialogues—as a character who exists merely to be proven wrong. Yet for these very reasons, Strauss would advise taking Cohle and Cohle’s words all the more seriously. For in Strauss’s view, philosophers writing in the esoteric mode will often select “some disreputable character” as their true “mouthpiece,” thereby communicating dangerous ideas without appearing to condone them. Hence, it is little wonder, argues Strauss, that we find in “the greatest literature of the past so many interesting devils, madmen, beggars, sophists, drunkards, epicureans and buffoons.”63 For devils and madmen provide the heterodox author with an economic means of conveying dangerous ideas while simultaneously furnishing the pretense of plausible deniability. Such a tactic is also, for that reason, as rhetorically artistic as it is effective: it conceals the fact of its own rhetoricity, and in so doing bypasses those deep-seated prejudices that serve as a bulwark against considering what is unorthodox, radical, and unsettling.64 With these observations in mind, Rust Cohle’s flaws do not prima facie disqualify him from serving as a hermeneutic A Feeling of Wrongness

guide but—quite the opposite—provisionally recommend him as a sibyl for decrypting True Detective’s pessimistic nucleus. In apparent confirmation of this status, the show uses a variety of methods to suggest to the careful viewer how one might come to see the world through a Cohle-like lens and what such a world looks like. First, the portrayal of Cohle is that of a highly intelligent, attentive investigator. The series’ very first line of dialogue introduces him as the “taxman,” a nicknamed he earned for carrying a large ledger of notes with him, both at crime scenes and the police station. Twice in the first episode, Hart specifically calls Cohle “smart,” while in an interrogation scene from the next episode he claims, referring to past events, that “Rust had as sharp an eye for weakness as I’ve ever seen,” which made him an excellent “box man.”65 Cohle’s prowess is evidently so legendary that his reputation survives over a decade. Papania, for instance, one of the young detectives interviewing Hart, refers to Cohle as an “ace case man.”66 The series makes clear that such praise is neither effusive nor calculated but reflects a genuine (and accurate) appraisal of Cohle’s intellectual abilities. When assessing Cohle’s investigative acumen, Hart says to Papania and his partner, detective Gilbough, “As arrogant as he could be, he was right.” He expresses a similar grudging respect for Rust’s detective skills when he says to Cohle, “You’re bonkers, just not on this.”67 As these last two remarks emphasize, Cohle’s uncongenial personality means that such accolades are hard-won and serve, rhetorically, as reluctant testimony. In a word, Cohle is a frustrating man and an exasperating colleague, someone whom Hart describes as “the Michael Jordan of being a son of a bitch.”68 Other of Cohle’s colleagues find him no less infuriating, as evidenced by frequent verbal and, occasionally, physical altercations between Cohle and his fellow police officers. Since the string of compliments Cohle receives cannot be explained by virtue of camaraderie or a feeling of police fidelity, viewers would be hard-pressed to conclude other than that Cohle is as smart as everyone claims he is, and that he justly earned his reputation, despite his unpleasant personality.69 While the depiction of Cohle as an exceedingly capable “true detective” confirms his suitability as esoteric guide, the series goes a step further by inviting, or provoking, viewers to adopt Cohle’s subject position, to try to see the world of True Detective through a Cohle-like lens. Cohle himself appears to issue just such an invitation when explaining why he is such an effective box man: “You just look at somebody and think like they think.”70 Cohle’s standoffish personality notwithstanding, this statement is neither glib nor pretentious—or if it is, it also signifies more than insincerity or cynicism. The Philosophical Pessimism of True Detective

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Earlier in the series, detective Papania discloses to Hart that Papania and Gilbough’s reason for interviewing Hart and Cohle is “to understand [Cohle’s] process.”71 As viewers, then, we are encouraged not only to focus on Cohle as a character but also make the attempt to understand his thought process, a challenge that is underscored in the first episode’s very last lines of dialogue. During the interview with Papania and Gilbough, Cohle inquires about the detectives’ newfound interest in interviewing him about an unsolved murder case dating back seventeen years. Gilbough simply replies that Cohle “would be the one to know” how to solve a new murder, which Gilbough and Papania believe to be related to the earlier case. Cohle’s advice is characteristically terse, vulgar, and to the point: “Start asking the right fucking questions.”72 The audience is then treated to an extended demonstration of Cohle’s modus operandi—of asking “the right” questions and of integrating them into a sense-making process that seeks clarity by penetrating into the deeper, hidden meaning of things—an MO that, prior to the finale, is essential to comprehending the real message behind True Detective’s mystery. The Box Man

If Cohle therefore represents a type of esoteric heuristic, then the first stage in a Cohle-like approach to detection is to ask the right question, namely, “What information is relevant to the case at hand?” And this, of course, requires, the collection and thorough analysis of data, as well as an openness to the possibility that the smallest detail might prove to be of extreme significance. In Cohle’s language, the first thing to do, then, is to become a “taxman,” to painstakingly pour over the minutia surrounding a police investigation, letting nothing slip by unnoticed. “You never know what the thing is going to be, do you?” asks Cohle. “A little detail way down the line that makes you say ‘huh,’ breaks the case.”73 And Cohle, as we know, exemplifies this trait. After fastidiously combing through old case files (for at least fourteen hours, probably more), Cohle convincingly connects Reanne Olivier’s “accidental” death to the Dora Lange case. In response, Hart accuses him of being “obsessive,” a label that Cohle himself does not deny.74 And why would he? His constant preoccupation and attentiveness to detail eventually pay off. This vindication, however, cuts both ways, simultaneously justifying Cohle’s “obsessiveness” while undermining his assertion that “the light is winning.” Establishing a link between Reanne Olivier and Dora Lange does not solve anything; rather, it un-solves what had previously been considered a drug-related accidental drowning and further complicates an already thorny homicide investigation. It adds to the horror of their case while revealing A Feeling of Wrongness

that the horror is potentially boundless, that it commands an unpredictable and malignant power to transform not only life but also death. What is more, the connection between the two women’s deaths is only one of many of Cohle’s noteworthy details—and one of the few that actually yields probable knowledge. With so many other bits of information left unexplored, it is difficult to agree with Hart and Cohle that the light is winning or, for that matter, that it ever could win, since gains in knowledge would seem only to expand the darkness, not diminish it.75 Yet for that very reason, Cohle’s prescription for an all-consuming attentiveness remains valid. Moreover, the dilemma to which it gives rise lends force to those viewers who poured endlessly over many of the show’s puzzling details and apparent dead-end clues, justifying their interpretive effort, ex post facto, though without vindicating any particular interpretation. Cohle’s manic diligence allows him to see what others miss, to make causal connections where others observe only epiphenomena or discrete facts. That his insights into the case (and beyond) are unpleasant is beside the point: Cohle sees more and he sees more deeply into the nature of things. Ipso facto, this approach simultaneously vindicates those fans’ dissatisfaction with the finale’s lack of revelation. Not only were they correct in their interpretive approach; in the end, they were more faithful adepts than the master. More important, the interpretive dilemma vindicates the process itself as unavoidably pessimistic: Cohle is damned if he does, and damned if he doesn’t. The same holds true for the viewer and, by extension, everyone else: one either sees too little or sees too much. True Detective’s path toward disappointment thus serves as a synecdoche for that which characterizes a life of consciousness and reflection. In the show, as in life, the search for meaning is necessarily an unfinished project and a dangerous one at that. One either accepts one’s cognitive deficiency— consciously or not—or punishes oneself in the vain attempt to overcome that deficiency or compensate for it through expended effort. In the search for ultimate meaning, positive conclusions like “the light is winning” will not fail to disappoint, and although the same might be said for negative conclusions, such as “the dark is winning” or “the light is losing,” the latter will at least enjoy the benefit of also being right. Contrary to Cohle’s final verdict, if the light appears to be winning, that can only be because we have stopped looking into the darkness, not because the darkness is losing. Intertextuality

Cohle’s obsessional attitude toward information collection and data analysis, however, does not occur without a context but always in relation to other The Philosophical Pessimism of True Detective

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“texts” or “discourses,” broadly construed. Hence, the second stage of a Cohle-like method of interpretation is to create meaningful connections between data points, to learn how to construct a unifying order or plausible narrative from a chaotic bricolage of material; it is to think mytho-poetically, by reusing and recombining available materials to solve new problems, to produce schizophrenically by borrowing from all that one knows to construct new assemblages of meaning.76 When Cohle correctly identifies the killer of Dora Lange as a “meta-psychotic,” Hart asks, “You got that from one of your books?” to which Cohle simply but honestly replies, “I did.”77 Although the audience does not know for certain which book Cohle is referencing, the attentive viewer can probably surmise that the work in question is in some way concerned with Sigmund Freud’s work on psychoanalytic metapsychology and that it touches on Freud’s addition of unconscious processes to the conscious ones of traditional psychology.78 As we have seen, such an obscure reference is not out of the ordinary for Cohle, who, throughout the series, directs the viewer to texts, experts, and bodies of knowledge that go beyond the scope of a typical case file and whose pertinence to the investigation is not always clear: in addition to the coroner’s report, he recommends that the investigation should consult with an anthropologist about the markings on Dora Lange’s body; in monologues he alludes to Ligotti’s pessimistic nonfiction, at one point even borrowing the latter’s imagery that procreation is a “thresher” that forcibly separates a soul from the comfort of nonexistence; he identifies Ledoux’s cryptic remarks about time with the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche; and in the original script he specifically recommends that Hart read Schopenhauer.79 By selecting from and deploying a broad range of material, Cohle is able to connect events in the case to texts that exist both within and outside the universe of the typical police procedure, thereby fashioning an interpretive framework capable of producing meaning and ascribing motive. Where others see only the disorder of seemingly random acts of pathological violence, Cohle discerns the outline of a cultic, multigenerational, homicidal, backwoods conspiracy. Essentially, this intertextual approach to mystery solving performs two basic functions: first, to promote itself as a viable method of interpretation, by encouraging viewers to regard disorder as an opportunity for making meaningful connections among a complex of changing appearances; second, to undermine further the optimistic tone or catharsis of the finale’s final moments. Schopenhauer, Freud, Ligotti, even Nietzsche would object to the not-so-guarded triumphalism of the light’s predicted victory over the dark. According to Schopenhauer, even if human beings are able to satiate their A Feeling of Wrongness

desires, their satisfaction cannot but eventually turn to boredom, which— barring the immediate adoption of an ascetic lifestyle—inevitably leads to the arousal of greater, more demanding, and less easily gratified desires. Although this baldly pessimistic position contradicts Cohle’s explicit, albeit reserved, exultation about good versus evil, more significantly it also reveals the finale’s myopic sleight of hand—that is, the shift in frame from a multifaceted, multigenerational conspiracy to the immediate aftermath of a successfully solved murder case. Killing Ledoux brought Hart and Cohle no lasting happiness, why, then, should the viewer expect that ten, five, or even one year after having killed Childress that either detective, in the absence of a newly reinstantiated cognitive dissonance, would hold to the view that the light is—or ever was—winning? A Freudian reading might rationalize Cohle’s newfound optimism in terms of “the program of becoming happy, which the pleasure principle imposes on us” that, in Freud’s view, plays an almost omnipotent role in one’s mental life.80 Similarly, Ligotti would likely chalk up Cohle’s apparent conversion to weakness in the face of the conspiracy against the human race, a conspiracy that, much like Schopenhauer’s “will to life,” virtually ensures the perpetuation of suffering. Regardless of which specific brand of pessimism may best explain Cohle’s metamorphosis, his intertextual hermeneutics, which draws from the who’s who of philosophical pessimism, utterly subverts its credibility, favoring instead a thoroughly non-optimistic, anti-triumphalist reading of the series. True Detective’s Weirdness

Alongside Cohle’s creative appropriation of pessimistic philosophy, the show offers up another implicit argument for intertextuality in the form of references to a “Yellow King” and his legendary city of “Carcosa.” Although not discussed by any characters in the show, Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow is an early classic in the field of weird fiction and supernatural horror. Published in 1895, it is a collection ten short stories, the first four of which make up a set of loosely connected stories in which sensitive individuals discover The King in Yellow, an obscure, forbidden play that, through the revelation of unutterable, horrible truths about the universe, induces in its readers hopelessness, depravity, and eventually total mental collapse. As we briefly mentioned in the first chapter, the idea that there exist certain ultimate truths the perception of which brings about madness and despair is a common trope of weird fiction. In this case, however, The King in Yellow has become a trope unto itself: Chambers borrowed the name “Carcosa,” as well as others, from Ambrose Bierce’s “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” and “Haïta The Philosophical Pessimism of True Detective

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the Shepherd”; and H. P. Lovecraft, after reading The King in Yellow in early 1927, would go on to include repeated, passing references to things and places from the fictional play (e.g., the Lake of Hali and the Yellow Sign) in “The Whisperer in the Darkness,” effectively incorporating it as another piece of occult literature in his Cthulhu Mythos.81 True Detective viewers first encounter references to the Yellow King and Carcosa in the second episode with the discovery of Dora Lange’s diary. Reading aloud from the journal, Cohle intones, “I closed my eyes and saw the King in Yellow moving through the forest. The King’s Children are marked. They became his angels.”82 Following this recitation the audience is treated to a quick glimpse of several pages from the journal, which contain lines copied verbatim from Chambers’s metafictional play (act 3, scene 2, to be precise): “Along the shore the cloud waves break / The twin suns sink behind the lake / The Shadows lengthen / In Carcosa / Strange is the night where the black stars rise / And strange moons circle through the skies / But stranger still is / Lost Carcosa” (cf. Chambers). As the plot progresses, allusions to Chambers’s work continue to accumulate—for example, tattoos of black stars, spirals, the regular use of yellow, “Carcosa”—yet despite this recursive layering of clues, Cohle, the autodidactic polymath, never makes a connection.83 Why is that? Is the audience to assume that the man who has read a wide range of difficult, relatively obscure authors has never heard of Robert Chambers—that a detective who spent countless hours poring over old murder files could not be bothered to run a simple Google search on the phrase “The King in Yellow”? Perhaps, but this assumption would effectively unmake Cohle as a character and thus spoil the plot’s integrity. No, a much more plausible and satisfying explanation would be that Chambers’s short story collection, The King in Yellow, simply does not exist in the fictional universe of True Detective, even though the Yellow King—whoever or whatever it is—may indeed lurk somewhere in the backwoods of its imaginary. This negative explanation, however, carries with it a positive corollary, namely, that True Detective inhabits the fictional reality of Robert W. Chambers and H. P. Lovecraft, that it appends to the intertextual lore of the Yellow King a story about two Louisiana State Police homicide detectives who, over a seventeen-year period, investigate the murder of prostitute Dora Lange and the histories of several other unsolved crimes. This revelation—which is as esoteric as it is plausible—further, and decisively, undercuts any remaining argument in favor of an optimistic interpretation of the series as a whole. For in the Chambers-Lovecraftian mythos, happy endings are only ever preludes to future trials of unimaginable horror and suffering—insanity being among one of the most likely forms. For that A Feeling of Wrongness

reason, Cohle’s newfound optimism is best interpreted as an instance of what Aristotle refers to as a nonnecessary but probable sign (sēmeion), either of the beginning, the middle, or the end of madness.84 In Cohle’s world—the world of the Yellow Sign, black stars, and backwoods ritual sacrifice—the presence of secret harmful forces combine with the machinations of various malefic entities to mortify the human pretension to understanding, while exposing the utter futility of all of what passes for purposeful, agential action. In this world, neither is the light winning nor is there a reality in which a victory for the light would be intelligible, much less plausible. Religious Foreshadowing

Far from undermining a hermeneutics of pessimistic esotericism, this impossibility of positive understanding gestures toward the last stage in Cohle’s heuristic approach to textual interpretation, to wit, an anti-therapeutic mode of catharsis, the seeds of which are contained in Cohle’s critique of religion. For Cohle, religion is a sham, nothing more than a fairy tale designed to induce people to persevere in the face of life’s endless horrors, a simulation that fulfills the anti-pessimistic strategy of anchoring. Because Cohle does not view religion as actual—as really real—he treats it as pure narrative, as qualifying at best as a fictional reality: “You gotta get together,” he says, “tell yourself stories that violate every law of the universe just to get through the god damn day” (“The Locked Room”). In this view, religion provides “catharsis” (katharsis), absorbing people’s anxiety and dread and thereby dulling devotees’ critical thinking. It thus parallels Nietzsche critique of Aristotle’s theory of tragic catharsis, according to which the “catharsis” of certain powerful emotions amounts to a pathological-moral process, one that while promising moral elevation in actuality only ever results in a pathological discharge or “purgation.”85 In attempting by means of pathological purgation and moral purification to cast life as “indestructibly mighty and pleasurable,” religion heralds a “metaphysical solace.”86 According to Cohle’s Nietzschean perspective, however, this therapeutic effect presupposes a certain reflection of reality—a certain representation of pure willing or Will—one that in directing attention to one kind of observation rather than others deflects it from other sorts of observations that would produce incongruity and contradiction—possibly even disappointment.87 In terms of tragic catharsis, religion’s therapeutic effect, emotional catharsis, depends almost entirely on its strength relative to that of philosophical introspection, on a willingness to value affective illusions rather than the insights provided by cathartic intellection, what scholars read as clarification. The Philosophical Pessimism of True Detective

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This view on religion thus implies a rather devastating critique of the show’s finale. For while the final episode provided a species of emotional and moral comfort, it simultaneously offered up a killer who did not fit with the accumulated body of evidence unearthed by the seventeen years of intermittent investigation. That is, the provision of solace depended, in the last instance, on deflecting attention away from the violation of the operative laws of True Detective’s fictional universe to a hopeful, reassuring message about the eventual ascendency of good over evil, of the triumph of the light over the dark. Seen in this light, Cohle’s near-death experience and his subsequent Christ-like resurrection comes across less as a red herring than as a pessimistic provocation, a moral-esoteric challenge. Remarking on this apparently transfigurative process, which culminates in a shot of Cohle recuperating in a hospital bed, GQ Magazine’s Gwynne Watkins writes, “[Cohle] looks like a Jesus figure now: long hair falling to his shoulders, white robe, that wound in his side—all he needs is stigmata.”88 Exoterically, this new Christ-like Cohle appears to offer a silent repentance for his pessimistic waywardness, promising to absorb the audience’s fear and dread and, thereby, to afford it the kind of emotional, therapeutic catharsis about which Cohle had earlier told viewers to be wary. However, instead of simply accepting the finale at face value, of being directed toward the attitudes and sentiments compatible with religious optimism, the esoteric reader is invited to hold on to all that came before, to think like Cohle before his improbable conversion, to remain faithful to him and even when he falters and betrays himself. The finale challenges the audiences to maintain their capacity for critical thinking and philosophical reflection, to push themselves toward that moment of searing clarification when the individual realizes that the only path to salvation from suffering consists not in the vanquishing of darkness but in the possibility of transcending the will of life for the sake of knowledge, insight, and understanding—in a hermeneutics of pessimistic suspicion rather than a belief in fairy tales. As Cohle admonishes us, “The ontological fallacy of expecting a light at the end of the tunnel, well, that’s what the preacher sells, same as a shrink. See, the preacher, he encourages your capacity for illusion. Then he tells you it’s a fucking virtue. Always a buck to be had doing that, and it’s such a desperate sense of entitlement, isn’t it?”89 Conspiracy for the Human Race

An esoteric reading of True Detective demonstrates that the show’s undercurrents are far more pessimistic than the finale would indicate. Hence, the A Feeling of Wrongness

instrumental value of esotericism consists not primarily in hiding the series’ pessimistic core but rather in revealing that identity through strategems of concealment. Rhetorically speaking, we might say that the esotericism of True Detective amplifies philosophical pessimism by way of a form of diminution, exaggerating it via a path of circuitous dissimulation. As we have had opportunity to see, in order to be rhetorically successful a pessimistic text must not only “contain” pessimistic ideas but must also transmit them in a way that circumvents the optimistic defense mechanisms identified by Zapffe. If the show had embraced a straightforwardly pessimistic conclusion—or limited its pessimism to Cohle’s exoteric philosophizing—then it would fall prey to the strategy of sublimation, plain and simple. But that is not the case. The series’ alternative strategy of esoteric messaging is thus an effective negotiation of humans’ cognitive and affective prejudices—even if the form of the whole is somewhat compromised as a result. Strauss, in his esoteric reading of Maimonides, argues that “the explanations of secrets is, as [Maimonides] asserts, not only forbidden by law, but impossible by nature: the very nature of the secrets prevents their being divulged.”90 Maimonides, in this context, was referencing the idea that spiritual knowledge is first and foremost experiential, rather than narrowly cerebral, and the same holds true, we argue, for pessimism. The conspiracy against the human race continues despite the many leaks of Schopenhauer, Ligotti, Zapffe, Cioran, and so on, in part, because these whistle blowers lack a set of pessimistic rhetorical practices to communicate the conspiracy’s secrets. Maimonides’s solution to the paradox of the incommunicable secret is that “ordinary language is utterly insufficient for their description [that] the only possible way of describing them is parabolic and enigmatic speech.”91 The esoteric reading of True Detective engages in precisely that kind of ambiguity, such that Zapffe’s defense mechanisms are never triggered. After all, who needs a defense mechanism for such a saccharine sweet conclusion? True Detective’s finale did not reward viewers’ obsessive attention to detail, even as it actively cultivated a fanatic cult following. This gap between expectation and narrative, however, is not merely “accidental”—not merely “a-formal”—but rather facilitates the creation of a displeasure that allows for the effective transmission-reception of pessimism’s dark secrets. Almost certainly no one else has constructed a reading of True Detective identical to the one offered here, but that hardly matters. Informed by the shows many intertextual references and minute, “blink and they’re gone” details, meticulous fans crafted their own careful readings of the show, The Philosophical Pessimism of True Detective

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readings that are more likely, for instance, to point to the Yellow King as the source of deep societal rot than the singular figure of Childress, who in the end is revealed to be all too human. For these fans, the plot’s holes and contradictions are likely to leave them with a much more pessimistic message than the empty platitude that “the light is winning.” And this disappointment, widely felt by the show’s most devoted fans, is in fact a testament to True Detective’s true rhetorical effectivity. Yes, the show was great, but that finale did not fit. Of course, remove the finale and you are left with the bleak worldview of the pre-resurrected Rust.

A Feeling of Wrongness

3 “Wubba Lubba Dub-Dub!” The Tragicomic Pessimism of Rick and Morty In stark contrast to the bleak prose of weird fiction or the desolate color schemes of True Detective, the brightly colored adult animated science-fiction sitcom Rick and Morty is a rather unlikely pessimistic text. Premiering on December 2, 2013, as part of Cartoon Network’s late-night programming block for adults, Adult Swim, Rick and Morty joined the ranks of such cult series as Aqua Teen Hunger Force, a surreal animated series centering on the adventures of three anthropomorphic fast-food items: a narcissistic, pathologically lying milkshake, a dimwitted ball of ground meat, and an intelligent, well-intentioned box of french fries. Like Aqua Teen, Rick and Morty partakes of a distinctively absurdist humor, one that merges the quotidian with the truly bizarre and violent. What distinguishes Rick and Morty, however, is that it borrows its most basic narrative structure not from the surreal adventures of adult animated television series like Aqua Teen but from the classic family sitcom. A mother and father, Beth and Jerry Smith, have two high school age children, Summer and the titular Morty; all four of them live in a house in the suburbs with Beth’s eccentric father, Rick. Yet unlike traditional family sitcoms, such as Family Matters and Everybody Loves Raymond—or even their wilder animated counterparts like The Simpsons and Family Guy—Rick is not a stand-in for or even a parody of the intrusive extended family member or wacky next-door neighbor. Rick, it turns out, is a bona fide super genius, and that intelligence grants him access to the vast expanse of the universe, including its many strange byways, bizarre alien technologies, and myriad forms of extraterrestrial life. At the same time, Rick’s genius allows him to cross over into other universes, where he often encounters alternate versions of himself and his family, a situation that opens up a number of strangely comedic storylines.

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None of these traits, however, indicate a predisposition toward the pessimistic. The fact that the show airs on basic cable’s Cartoon Network and is in fact often very bizarrely funny further stretches its pessimistic credentials. Nevertheless, despite these cheerful and comedic trappings, Rick and Morty operates within the interstices of comedy and tragedy, employing grotesque and surrealistic humor as an effective rhetorical mode by which to elicit pessimistic thought and feeling. Concealed within the comedic, lurking below the “no stakes” frills of escapist ebullience, are disarming narrative arguments about the utter absence of meaning and the illusoriness of human agency when faced with the cold indifference of the void. Situating the Smith family within the broader cosmos, for instance, not only provides for comedic fodder but also renders the happenings of the Smith family as profoundly insignificant and life itself as extremely precarious. What’s more, despite the lack of traditional discursive arguments in favor of pessimism, the series extends its rhetorically pessimistic sleight of hand by subjecting the viewer to a thoroughgoing disfigurement of its several hardwired anti-pessimistic responses; and it simultaneously attacks the shibboleths of optimism—for example, meaning, purpose, identity, or the value of perseverance, and so on—while anticipating likely counterarguments and responding to them in kind. One by one, and repeatedly, Rick and Morty take on each of Zapffe’s anti- or counterpessimistic defense strategies, arguing circles around them without ever formulating an explicit argument at all. And it accomplishes this feat by means of a hybrid rhetorical strategy that combines the advantage of a sensorial “shock and awe” onslaught with the hit-and-run tactics of guerrilla warfare and the dissimulating effects of laughter. Lack of Meaning in Rick and Morty

Rick and Morty inhabit a multiverse in which God is dead—that is, both the literal monotheistic God of the Judeo-Christian tradition and the widespread, taken-for-granted belief in that God, including its attendant morality. Echoing the cry of Nietzsche’s madman in the marketplace, the characters’ multiverse would seem to confirm the declaration that “God is dead! God remains dead!”1 Indeed, several of the characters make similar explicit pronouncements.2 Rick, who is unquestionably the series’ smartest character, frequently defends atheism, and often in a candid, unsentimental manner— as he does when he tells his granddaughter, “There is no God, Summer, gotta rip that Band-Aid off now. You’ll thank me later,” or when he quips to one of his creations, “My God’s the biggest dick that never existed!”3 In addition to A Feeling of Wrongness

Rick’s brazenly atheistic—or, better yet, anti-theistic—remarks, the series routinely lampoons humans’ religious belief in divine beings. When, for instance, massive alien heads appear over the Earth, in the episode “Get Schwifty,” certain of the Earth’s denizens institute a new fanatical religion.4 These religious hopes are soon dashed, however, when it becomes obvious that the sole purpose of the heads’ arrival is to host an intergalactic singing competition. This rejection of divinity as such extends even to the generically supernatural, including the demonic. When the devil opens an antique gift shop specializing in lucrative items that are monetarily free but ironically cursed, Rick sets up a competitive counter-business across the street. Named “Curse Purge Plus!” the store promises to use modern science and technology to remove curses, to “de-curse,” effectively running the devil out of business in what is clearly intended to signify a victory of rationalism over the irrationalism that allegedly characterizes belief in superhuman beings and supernatural powers. Driving home that message, the episode closes with a steroid-enhanced Rick, and a similarly strengthened Summer, literally beating up the devil.5 Nevertheless, despite the importance of spirituality—both as an object of mocking criticism and as an occasional plot device—Rick and Morty’s attack on religious belief and practice is subordinate to a broader critique concerning systems of beliefs, values, and attitudes, especially those laying claim to universality. Or more precisely, as a frequent target, religion functions as a representative anecdote for the myriad ways in which humans invest their world with a meaning whose constructedness is either culturally forgotten or cynically dissimulated. When Morty’s father, Jerry, says, “Traditionally science fairs are a father-son thing,” Rick retorts with, “Well, scientifically, traditions are an idiot thing.”6 On its face, this comes across as a blunt rejection of traditions and the intellectual pretensions of those who adhere to them. However, when interpreted in the light of the series as a whole, Rick’s point would seem to be not that traditions qua traditions are terribly stupid but that traditions are undeserving of uncritical subjective adherence simply by virtue of their privileged sociohistorical status as such—that traditions are likely to become problematic when their veracity and value are presupposed rather than made the subject of free and open inquiry. Rick, in other words, does not feel especially compelled to uphold a tradition, or to respect the devotee of a tradition, simply because they appeal to habit and custom. But he is more than willing—at times even giddy—to play the role of participant-observer vis-à-vis the customs and practices of alien races. The Tragicomic Pessimism of Rick and Morty

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He apparently has few misgivings about first spectating and then actively engaging in a planet’s annual “Purge,” a tradition of sanctioning lawless, unrestricted killing for one night of the year.7 To do so, however, requires that Rick not take his own or any other society’s traditions too seriously—or at all—that he instead adopt an attitude whereby mores are desacralized and rendered inessential to one’s identity. To that end, Rick is more or less successful, combining a cultural nihilism with an adventurous hedonism that treats ethical systems and the larger traditions of which they are a part as means for pursuing and satisfying one’s desires. Consequently, Rick avoids issuing moral judgments on cultural beliefs and practices that, from a human perspective, are strange and unfamiliar and exhorts Morty to do the same, whether the thing in question is a planet’s violent purgation or an interspecies orgy occurring in a man’s subconscious. In this way, Morty serves as a perfect foil for Rick’s moral agnosticism, as well as something of an argument in support of that nonsystem of values and principles of conduct, albeit a negatively demonstrative one. Time and again, Morty indiscriminately applies a particular system of Earth values (Western or Judeo-Christian) to peoples and cultures that are literally not of this planet, let alone of the Occident. And time and again, Morty’s well-intentioned application of familiar moral precepts serves to underscore their particularity, exposing—oftentimes via the grotesque and the hyperbolic—their incapacity to achieve, even approximately, their pretensions to universality. In “Look Who’s Purging Now,” Morty blackmails Rick into helping him rescue a young alien woman, Arthricia, from her planet’s annual “Purge.” After convincing Morty and a skeptical Rick to travel to a ramshackle house to save Arthricia’s grandmother, Arthricia double-crosses the pair: she overpowers Rick— stealing his gun and shooting him with it—coerces Morty to surrender Rick’s spaceship, and flies away into the night, leaving the two for dead. Similarly, in “Mortynight Run,” Morty learns of Rick’s plan to sell an antimatter firearm to Krombopulos Michael, an alien assassin. Morty, disgusted by what he considers to be an immoral decision on Rick’s part, sets out to prevent Krombopulos Michael from killing his target, eventually (accidentally) killing the assassin and then chancing on the assassin’s target, an incarcerated gaseous alien life-form that assumes the name “Fart.” After freeing Fart and guiding him back to the wormhole that will return him to his home planet—a decision that will lead to a violent shootout with government agents that results in many civilian casualties—Fart thanks Morty and reveals his plan to return with his race and annihilate all carbon-based life-forms from the universe. In both cases, Morty’s decision to save another’s life A Feeling of Wrongness

directly results in betrayal—ill intentioned, as in the Arthricia example, or no—and in the latter case it even results in the deaths of innocent bystanders. Regardless of which ethical system Morty might invoke to justify his actions—consequentialism, deontology, or virtue theory—no one or combination would be adequate (though in the “Fart” example the utilitarian form of consequentialism would perhaps be the most inadequate).8 This does not mean, however, that Morty’s values or ethical system are wrong per se, only that the complexity of the universe, particularly the moral universe, exists, as Nietzsche famously put it, beyond good and evil, which is to say, beyond any universal framework of right and wrong, good and bad (or evil).9 Although the series frames this argument in a cosmic or intergalactic perspective, there is no reason why it would not also equally apply to possible or actual interactions of different groups, ethnicities, or races of human beings. Here, as throughout the series, Rick and Morty delivers an uncomfortable truth claim in a comic frame. And from this poetic perspective, Morty’s implicit universalism is shown to be out of touch and Morty himself a little touched in the head. This vision of moral anarchy is concordant with—indeed, could be read as a function of—the absurdism that pervades Rick and Morty as a whole and whose effect is to unanchor audiences from their inherited, collective firmaments, that is, from their system of basic (i.e., fundamental) cultural ideas, values, and assumptions. Nowhere does the series showcase this absurdism with more exaggerated clarity than in the pair of episodes featuring Rick’s homemade, crystal-powered cable box.10 Capable of receiving television-broadcasting signals from across the universe, the cable box allows its viewers to experience wildly variable alternate realities—both in television programming and in “real life,” as several of the characters are treated to alternate versions of their own selves.11 The episodes themselves, which center on the characters channel surfing through a seemingly infinite number of televisual possibilities, go to great lengths to highlight the utter randomness of any given reality and the absurdity of presuming that any one reality enjoys—or ought to enjoy—the privileged status of being “correct” or ontologically superior. In a series of juxtaposed vignettes, the audience is treated to a number of preposterous scenarios, including a police procedural drama starring an adult actor with baby legs, an infomercial for household appliances featuring a salesman with ants in his eyes who continues his sales pitch even as he bursts into flames, a never-ending commercial for fake doors, a Showtime crime drama based in a reality in which people have evolved from corn, a commercial for “Eyeholes,” a cereal protected by a The Tragicomic Pessimism of Rick and Morty

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spandex-clad alien with a megaphone, and so on. Some of the clips are barely comprehensible, like the advertisement for the “plumbus”:

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Everyone has a plumbus in their home. First they take the dingle bop and they smooth it out with a bunch of schleem. The schleem is then . . . repurposed for later batches. They take the dingle bop and they push it through the grumbo, where the fleeb is rubbed against it. It’s important that the fleeb is rubbed, because the fleeb has all the fleeb juice. Then, a schlami shows up, and he rubs it . . . and spits on it. They cut the fleeb. There’s several hizzards in the way. The blamfs rub against the chumbles, and the . . . plubis, and grumbo are shaved away. That leaves you with . . . a regular old plumbus.12 To enhance the sense of weirdness generated by these clips, the show’s creators used mostly improvised voice acting, which resulted in frequent awkward, misplaced pauses and points where the actors audibly struggle to suppress laughter. As A.V. Club critic Zack Handlen writes, “[One of the show’s creators] Justin Roiland’s sound booth improvisations strike me as a more accurate representation of the chaos of interdimensional cable (if that actually existed) than something more scripted would be.”13 By taking advantage of and coordinating the aural and visual potentialities of the cartoon medium, these segments work rhetorically to amplify the feeling of the absurd as something at once cerebral and sensuous. In all of these ways, the series attempts to reflect (and refract) the absurdity of human life through the prism of interdimensionally absurd. Much like a multimodal version of weird fiction, albeit one that gives apparent pride of place to the humorous, Rick and Morty confronts its audience with the question of what, exactly, separate the human race and human cultures from the absurd meaninglessness of a cold, indifferent cosmos. And much like weird fiction, the series seems to offer the same one-word answer, “Nothing.” Indeed, from the series’ cosmic perspective, what distinguishes human society as a bio-cultural formation is only a question of degree. As a group of important intergalactic delegates remarks to a hospitalized Jerry, Earth is noteworthy only by virtue of its being “tiny and undeveloped”—its inhabitants completely ignorant, for instance, of the genocides of Clorgon or the tragic events of 65.3432.23/14 and, what’s more, incapable of comprehending such events, anyway. Supplementing this observation, the famed intergalactic civil rights leader Shrimply Pibbles— voiced by iconic German filmmaker Werner Herzog, in an unexpectedly bizarre cameo appearance—says, “I’ve dwelt among the humans. Their entire culture A Feeling of Wrongness

is built around their penises. It’s funny to say they are small. It’s funny to say they are big. I’ve been at parties where humans held bottles, pencils, thermoses in front of themselves and called out, “Hey, look at me. I’m Mr. So-and-So Dick. I’ve got such-as-such for a penis. I never saw it fail to get a laugh.”14 While not entirely clear whether this comment is intended to condemn or exonerate the relative failures of human culture and civilization, the effect is the same: from the point of view of intelligent alien life, the human race stands out—if it does at all—for its “dick jokes.” Isolation, Distraction, and Anchoring

Nevertheless, staging a confrontation with the inherent absurd meaninglessness of the universe does not necessarily mean that the series is itself representative of pessimism in the Schopenhauerian tradition, no matter how clever, indirect, or surreptitious the coordination of rhetorical form with pessimistic content. Indeed, so-called heroic pessimists like Freud and Leopardi, those who demonstrate what Nietzsche calls a “pessimism of strength,” begin with the premise that values are not inherently meaningful—that no value is self-evidently what it alleges to be but is instead the product of various, ongoing processes of meaning making and instauration.15 The existentialist Camus is representative of this kind of response. His reasoning, he argues, starts “from a philosophy of the world’s lack of meaning” and “ends up by finding a meaning and depth in it.”16 Camus explicitly uses the notion of absurd as a foundation for his heroic, life-affirming pessimism. The next section explains how Rick and Morty employs measures to resist the sublimating Camusian reading, but before advancing, it is important to show that despite its capacity for optimism, the absurd provides a fragile foundation for positive thinking. While leaving intact Zapffe’s avoidance strategy of sublimation, such a clear-headed, “realistic” position weakens the strategies of isolation, distraction, and anchoring: for its point of departure has already denuded the world of its apparent immanence and thus undermined the taken-for-granted strength of the foundational firmaments in which the human anchors its life and to which it returns in moments of existential crisis for reassurance and encouragement. Beyond this structural antagonism between absurdism and three of Zapffe’s defenses, the show makes full use of the audience’s position in relation to the narrative to further undermine isolation and distraction. One of the primary ways that Rick and Morty’s characters attempt to cope with and manage the meaninglessness of the universe is through the avoidance strategies of isolation and distraction, that is, either by cordoning The Tragicomic Pessimism of Rick and Morty

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oneself off or diverting attention away from the void. The audience’s first experience of isolation occurs in the pilot episode: Morty breathes in and coughs out an alien organism that goes through its entire life cycle—from infancy to death—in fewer than four seconds—a vivid, powerful demonstration of the fleetingness of ontogenetic human life. To Morty’s existential horror, Rick responds with the isolationist message of “Don’t think about it.”17 Unlike Rick—whose tendency is to isolate, ignore, or explain away the otherwise unsettling—Morty gravitates toward tactics of distraction. Hence, when discussing with his sister, Summer, the futility of life, he ends the conversation by inviting her to watch television. In so doing, he interrupts what could have been an uncomfortable moment of reflection and introspection, offering in its place a distracting form of entertainment.18 And yet while these and other, similar coping mechanisms may work for characters in the show by providing them with effective avoidance strategies, the way they are invoked, their MO, virtually ensures that any such effectiveness will be denied to the viewer. As an isolation strategy the injunction “Don’t think about it” functions ironically as an invitation to do the exact opposite. The series itself makes this point in the episode “Meeseeks and Destroys.” Mr. Meeseeks, a helpful blue creature spawned by Rick’s Meeseeks Box, addresses himself to the task of helping Jerry to knock off two strokes of his golf game. When he tells Jerry that to improve his golf game he should focus on relaxing, Jerry shouts back, quite rationally, “You try to relax! Have you ever tried to relax? It is a paradox!”19 An absurd scenario, yet one that points up a basic truth, namely, that one cannot demand from others an action that is antithetical in nature to that of the command and expect from them the successful performance of that action, whether the demand is to ignore something that commands one’s attention or to relax while in the midst of a stressful situation. And in the case of philosophical pessimism, such a tactic would prove not only unsuccessful but also counterproductive. For avoidance strategies occur as part of the “natural” (sociohistorical, evolutionary) process of filtering out pessimistic thinking and ideas. Rhetorically speaking, then, the show hits upon a uniquely effective strategy for subverting these avoidance strategies. In turning these strategies into explicit injunctions or invitations, it stages their failure for the audience: Morty tries to distract Summer from the absurd nature of the world by asking her to watch television with him. Perhaps this works for Summer, perhaps not (the audience is left in the dark). What is more important is that for the audience watching this interaction—who is watching it on television—the invitation serves as a reminder of the horrors of unmediated reality, and of the utility of A Feeling of Wrongness

television (and of entertainment more generally) in its role as a mechanism of distraction. It thus serves to reveal to the viewer a possible motive for his or her viewing practices, forcing the viewer to reflect on his or her use of television as a medium of distraction. Anti-absurdism and Anti-sublimation

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Despite its resistance to isolation, distraction, and anchoring, a universe in which meaning does not precede existence can (and for many does) provide the material necessary to ground a type of cautious or attenuated optimism, typically via the back-door method of sublimation.20 Because Zapffe’s strategies are coordinate yet distinct forms of anti-pessimistic technique, a message that cannot destabilize them all leaves open the possibility for circumvention and the reestablishment of a worldview in which life enjoys meaning and value. Hence, regardless of how effective Rick and Morty’s assault on immanence may be—and despite its vivid, entertaining depiction of a meaningless universe—the series cannot ensure a singularly pessimistic effect so long as sublimation remains for the viewer a viable counterpessimistic strategy. In that event, the show itself would not qualify as an authentically pessimistic work since, in the manner of Camus, it could very well be an attempt to salvage from meaninglessness a wellspring of significance and complexity. Or—what amounts to the same thing and is rhetorically even more important—it could be perceived or felt to be making such an attempt. In any event, the show does take a variety of steps to showcase and dismantle the kind of sublimating strategies that are endorsed by the more heroic brand of pessimism. One of the ways it does this is by putting on full display individual characters’ lamentations regarding their originary coercion, the urhorror of their simply having been brought into existence. In the episode “The Ricks Must Be Crazy,” Rick and Morty visit a microverse inhabited by intelligent life-forms that Rick had created for the sole purpose of generating power for his car battery. Upon learning of this origin story, and of Rick’s creational motives, one of the inhabitants screams, “I didn’t ask to be born!” while another promptly takes its own life. Confronted with expert testimony as to life’s utter lack of meaning and purpose—or, what is possibly even worse, with evidence of life’s inanity and purposelessness—these characters scream out in anguish or kill themselves or, presumably, both. While each of these choices represents a possible response to Camus’s challenge that we take philosophical charge of our lives, neither fully acknowledges the absurd according to Camus’s absurdist reasoning, The Tragicomic Pessimism of Rick and Morty

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which demands “the repudiation of suicide and the acceptance of the desperate encounter between human inquiry and the silence of the universe.”21 To be sure, Camus admonishes constant confrontation with the absurd and constant revolt against it, but suicide puts an end to both while anguish and despair amount to capitulation. In each case, the contradiction between the desire of human reason (“my appetite for the absolute and for unity”) and the unreasonableness of the world (“the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle”) fails to result in sublimation via absurdist reasoning.22 This failure reappears throughout the series, most notably in connection with two other accusations of wrongful birth. Morty’s alien hybrid son, Morty Jr., and Abradolf Lincler, a genetic hybrid of Abraham Lincoln and Adolf Hitler, both suffer from a feeling that their very personhood is fundamentally out of step with the universe—Morty Jr. on account of his unintelligible desire for wanton destruction and Lincler because of his inability to reconcile the opposing drives of his personality into a satisfying whole.23 By highlighting likely responses to unlikely encounters with futility, Rick and Morty enacts a nonrepressive form of desublimation, one in which characters do not transform their awareness and confrontation with the absurd into valuable experiences but kick, scream, cry, and kill themselves. At the same time, however, the series juxtaposes this anguish over the purposelessness of existence—including the attendant rage that is oftentimes directed toward one’s creator/progenitor—with the monomania that can accompany the goal-oriented and meaning-striving life. Unquestionably, the most singularly driven character is Mr. Meeseeks, hominoid creatures (plural) who are spawned for the purpose of completing one objective and whose life span ends upon completing the task. For a Mr. Meeseeks, neither meaning nor its apparent lack is a problem: it is spawned, fully formed, assigned a task, works toward that task’s accomplishment, and promptly disappears out of existence. It does not worry about whether the task is meaningful; it does not fret that its entire reason for being is tied to a purpose that is externally imposed; and it does not seem to experience nervous dread, or any emotional state other than cheerfulness, over the prospect that its greatest and only fulfillment essentially coincides with its death. As one Mr. Meeseeks says, “Meeseeks are not born into this world fumbling for meaning.”24 Obviously, this kind of life stands in stark contrast to the purposelessness and confusion that besets the likes of Morty Jr., Abradolf Lincler, and the creatures inhabiting Rick’s car battery microverse. Yet what the life of a Mr. Meeseeks demonstrates is not the possibility of avoiding the absurd confrontation between a mind that desires meaning and a coldly A Feeling of Wrongness

indifferent universe but rather the possibility of encountering absurd even in circumstances where meaning is at once clearly established—as an ontic thing—and unambiguous. In so doing, the Mr. Meeseeks character draws attention to something that Camus’s absurdist reasoning does not adequately account for, namely, the nature and value of purpose as such, along with the possibility that the purpose-driven life, rather than bestowing existence with meaning—or salvaging “meaning and depth” from the world’s lack of meaning—may merely delay the genuine philosophical moment of grappling with the absurd. For the life of a Mr. Meeseeks suggests that purpose functions somewhat like a spiritual “quick fix” or sweetener, providing either a temporary solution, which nevertheless fails to address the underlying issue—a salve for the absurd—or an additive that while improving a thing’s appearance fails to alter its identity. While in connection with the first possibility, establishing and working toward a purpose serves to delay one’s confrontation with the absurd, and with respect to the second, it merely denies the inexorability of the absurd encounter; in neither case does purposiveness or the comportment expected of goal-oriented behavior resolve the basic existential problem of meaninglessness. The show makes this dramatically clear when Mr. Meeseeks’ ability to fulfill a singular objective is frustrated over the long range, which, for a Meeseeks, is any duration of time longer than is appropriate for the completion of a fairly simple, short-term goal. In the case of helping to remove two strokes from Jerry’s golf game, the Meeseeks’ inability to fulfill this purpose in a timely fashion leads them to experience misery and despair to such a degree that they undergo a process of total mental collapse, one ending in insanity and murderous violence. After two days of life, a panic-stricken Mr. Meeseeks screams, “Existence is agony to a Meeseeks.”25 And rightly so, for existence entails more than the technical know-how of discovering and then coordinating the means that are appropriate vis-à-vis their respective ends. At a minimum—and irrespective of whether one is a “spontaneous” or “resigned” pessimist or even, for that matter, an optimist— existence requires confronting and dealing with or accepting the problem of meaning, which is also simultaneously the question of being. Meeseeks, however, flee from life, recoil at the prospect of a prolonged existence, and utterly implode if circumstances force them to endure one. The Meeseeks are thus a profoundly provocative character, for their way of being and doing carries with it the suggestion that the purpose-driven life—the ultimate anchoring—is not a way of living but a way of dying—and dying, as Camus would put it, irresponsibly, insofar as it enacts a continual The Tragicomic Pessimism of Rick and Morty

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deferment of the absurd. Through their example, we see how rather than justifying existence, purposes supplant all other possible life values. The Meeseeks “exist” only for a specific, limited purpose, but this purpose does not permeate life; rather, it signals the completion of life and the coincidence of life and nothingness, which is nothing other than the subsumption of the former under the latter. In terms of avoidance strategies, the Meeseeks serve to parody not only purposiveness as a particular anchoring strategy but anchoring as a set of counterpessimistic techniques. As representative of anchoring, purpose does not wrest meaning and depth from the void but instead transports signification outside of life or at the threshold of nonlife; it is at once a simulation of and substitution for meaning and value. This is purposiveness as non-meaning or para-meaning—either a simulacrum or substitute—but not “the real deal.” In an exaggerated, hyperbolic form, then, the Meeseeks represent the idea that, in the final analysis, the desire to fulfill objectives, to satisfy one’s concrete ambitions, corresponds to the antinatalist desire to abandon life. In this regard, the Meeseeks are the mirror image of the unsublimated inhabitants of Rick’s car battery. Whereas an unfortunately clear purpose brings no joy to the denizens of the microverse—indeed, it induces in them a feeling of shock and horror—for a Mr. Meeseeks it is an “existence” without the buffer of purpose that causes pain. For the viewer, both possibilities are presented as equally unpleasant. What is perhaps more important is that the series does not seem to offer an unambiguous third way but contents itself with portraying to audiences a “You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t” scenario. One may suspect, however, that Rick proves the exception to this logic of despair. To all appearances, he leads an exciting, adventurous life—one that is relatively free from the many existential anxieties that bedevil and, in some cases, devastate his scientifically engineered creatures. In place of Zapffe’s cultivated anchoring strategies, Rick has apparently adopted the more straightforwardly hedonistic practice of constant alcohol consumption, occasionally supplemented with other, illicit drug use. The result is a disposition closer to mania than mental and emotional stability. Still, the overall quality that can sum up the arc of his persona—what John Dewey calls a “sense of qualitative unity”—is much closer to exhilaration than despondency or despair.26 And this seems about right. Rick is, after all, the product of organic evolution, a disinterested process of gradual natural selection, and not the creation of a singular, very flawed personality. Yet despite this qualitative unity, or rather in the interstices of this persona, darkly shimmering through the cracks, Rick’s suffering shines through. In “Something Ricked A Feeling of Wrongness

This Way Comes,” Rick creates a tiny sentient robot, whose sole purpose is to carry butter across the dining table and has the following exchange: Robot: What is my purpose? Rick: You pass butter. Robot: [looks around in horror] Oh my god. Rick: Yeah, welcome to the club, pal.27 Like the Meeseeks, Rick does not need to come face-to-face with his flawed creator or be presented with empirical proof of its existence to experience a sense of purposelessness. Yet, like the creatures inhabiting the microverse inside his car battery, he evidently believes that working toward a goal can be just as meaningless as, perhaps even more futile than, having no aim at all or carrying out no plan (the horrifying recognition of the Meeseeks). In fact, in a later episode, Rick, while being forced to listen to Elliott Smith’s “Between the Bars,” repeats verbatim the lamentation of one of his car battery creatures, “Oh God, I didn’t ask to be born” (6“Big Trouble in Little Sanchez”). Similarly, in the first season’s finale, “Ricksy Business,” it is revealed that Rick’s seemingly meaningless and innocuous catchphrase, “Wubba Lubba Dub-Dub!” which he peppers throughout the series, translates into English as “I am in great pain, please help me.” And in an incredibly dark ending to an episode, Rick attempts to commit suicide and fails only because he passes out drunk.28 Later, he even implores Morty to shoot him in the face, screaming, “Do it! Do it, motherfucker! Pull the fucking trigger!”29 Hence, while neither outwardly despondent nor traumatized, Rick’s apparent fearlessness and daring is intermittently contradicted by moments of expressive spiritual anguish and pain, moments that render him at once more human and more vulnerable—even if that vulnerability is highly idiosyncratic. Nevertheless, despite these sporadic bouts of existential turmoil, Rick is not suicidal in an uncomplicated sense but preserves within himself a healthy, natural fear of death. However, we would be incorrect if we automatically assumed that this biologically conditioned fear is somehow necessarily—or even generally—at odds with philosophical pessimism. In fact, fear of death is completely compatible with a belief in the inadequacy of being, as well as the anxiety, sorrow, and grief that so often accompany it. What is more, from a philosophical perspective, suicide solves nothing. The pain of life and living having already been established, the act of self-annihilation, according to Thomas Ligotti, serves not to void but legitimize that suffering, causing “bitterness, or depression beforehand, then the troublesomeness of the The Tragicomic Pessimism of Rick and Morty

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method, and nothingness afterward.”30 One could, of course, counter that talk of rationalization and legitimization is beside the point, that phenomenologically speaking, the only thing that matters is that the consciousness in pain (and the consciousness of that pain) has come to an end. And yet, while such a view would benefit from the storehouse of common belief and opinion, it conveniently overlooks an even more fundamental point—one that Cioran captures in his typical acerbic style—namely, that “[You] always kill yourself too late.”31 Rick may or may not adhere to this line of reasoning, yet he would seem to occupy a hermeneutics somewhere between salvation through suicide and the heroic-absurdist brand of pessimism championed by the likes of Camus and other existentialists. When facing certain death in the cold vacuum of space, Rick stoically says, “I’m OK with this.” To be sure, this attitude might suggest a heroic, philosophically responsible acceptance of fate; however, when Rick realizes there is a possibility to fix his collar and, thus, to transport himself back to safety, his stoicism quickly fades, to be replaced by the exclamation of “Oh fuck, the other collar! I’m not OK with this! I’m not OK with this! Oh sweet Jesus please let me live.”32 Hence, while such “clinging-to-life” sentiments may not meet the standards of a Schopenhauerian pessimism of resignation and despair, they are a much further cry from anything resembling Sisyphean heroism. Rick does not appear committed to persuading himself of life’s inherent meaning, but neither does he seem willing to go gently into that good night. Yet this unwillingness is not a poetic rage against the dying of the light but a coping mechanism, one that is biologically programmed and shared by all forms of organic life. What it is not is a genuine, philosophical reaction to the inevitability of death. Sublimated Un/reality

In addition to showcasing this range of nonheroic pessimistic narratives and the nonconscious pessimistic strategies of many of its characters, Rick and Morty draws upon cutting-edge scientific theories to undercut the possibility of sublimation. And given the centrality of heavy science fiction to the show’s identity—as well as the rhetorical purposing of this trope toward pessimistic ends—it would appear that, if read as a pessimistic text, the series takes the “threat” of sublimation as the most serious hurdle to subjective adherence to philosophical pessimism. In honing in on the tendency to sublimate existential panic, the series introduces its main characters to a series of simulations, or hyper-real models, that allegedly re-present reality. However, as a substitution of “signs of the real for the real itself,” simulations, according to the A Feeling of Wrongness

French social theorist Jean Baudrillard, grievously compromise the ability to distinguish the real from the fake.33 Moreover, this blurring effect is not limited to human perception and judgment but extends to the ontological difference separating the real from merely phenomenal existence. On Baudrillard’s view, “[Simulation] threatens the difference between ‘true’ and ‘false,’ between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary.’”34 In ascribing this power to simulations, Baudrillard is, in a sense, liberating the concept from authorial intent and the structure of motivation. At the same time, however, this liberation does not do away with the rhetorical potentiality of simulations as such or the possibility of their conscious malleability vis-à-vis rhetorical ends. And, indeed, Rick and Morty exploits these rhetorical prospects at two, interconnected levels—and to great effect. One of the principal ways in which the series harnesses the rhetorical effectivity of simulations is by introducing its characters to a series of simulated hyper-realities, wherein neither the characters nor the audience can determine whether what they are experiencing is real or a realistically complex arrangement of hyper-real signs, whether the characters’ interactive reality is symbolically real or pure simulacrum. In the episode “M. Night Shaym-Aliens!” Rick, Morty, and Jerry are kidnapped and immersed in a simulated reality by a race of what Rick refers to as “intergalactic scammers,” the Zigerions.35 After escaping from the simulation and returning home, Rick enters the passcode to a hidden safe, which refuses to open. The garage then melts away, revealing that the characters are in a simulation of a simulation. From the viewer’s perspective the import of this event is not limited to the simple enjoyment of having shared in Rick and Morty’s hoodwinking but also reveals something uncomfortable about the nature of the contemporary era—namely, that the increasing separation of signs from their objective, symbolic referents has ushered in a world in which simulations have taken over the original objects, nothing is real, and the perpetual recreation of simulated models substitutes signs of the real for the real itself. As Baudrillard points out, the institution of such hyperreal models simultaneously signals the death knell of the human capacity to distinguish the real from the model, causes from effects—a fact not lost on the Zigerions’ Prince Nebulon, who unfeelingly taunts Rick for thinking he had escaped the virtual reality simulator.36 While audiences are, of course, spared Rick’s humiliation, the esoteric viewer would undoubtedly pick up on the pessimistic implications of this episode. At stake is more than the inability to discern better, to be able to find the “tell” or locate the glitch that would reveal the simulation for the artifice that it is. Or rather what is at risk is the possibility of ever The Tragicomic Pessimism of Rick and Morty

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securing—for oneself, one’s family or country, or human life in general—an existence in which meaning is possible, that is, a world in which signs are clear, referential, stable, and reflect basic reality, in which all agree on what something means and are clear about its relation to reality, a world in which the sign and the real are equivalent and signs correlate directly to reality. In using simulations to blur the ontological difference between the real and the merely apparent, between being and becoming, Rick and Morty likewise introduces a sense of profound indeterminacy with respect to individual identity. For while the tendency of simulations may not be that of pure negation (even the proliferation and arrangement of signs is something), they most certainly tend to engender a sense of radical, that is to say, disorienting, indeterminacy. As Gorgias was reputed to have written, “Even if [something] exists it is inapprehensible to man [sic]” and “even if it is apprehensible, still it is without a doubt incapable of being expressed or explained to the next man [sic].”37 Simulations, then, work to realize, through the construction of hyperreality, this nihilistic chain of reasoning; Rick and Morty, in addition to applying this ratiocination to the objective world, turn this uncertainty inward, subjecting their characters (and audiences) to a subjective experience of decentering, one in which the assurances of individuation and identity are intensely compromised. This introspective potentiality is best exploited in the episode “Mortynight Run” via the fictitious arcade game Roy. After plugging into the arcade game, Roy, Marty enters into a simulated world that is phenomenologically indistinct from his lived reality, save for the fact that he is no longer Morty but someone named (or to be named) Roy.38 The game begins with Morty “waking up” as Roy—in Roy’s childhood bed, in Roy’s body, and with a completely different set of family, friends, and acquaintances. He relates to his former identity as Morty only as a half-remembered bad dream and proceeds to live an entirely separate life as Roy—winning the big high school football game, falling in love and getting married, choosing a job, beating cancer, and finally falling to his death in a workplace accident at the shoe store. Upon his death, Morty’s identity as Roy is abruptly ended, and he immediately reacquires his former identity as Morty, “reawakening”—or unawakening—at the arcade console, in his old, familiar body, just as confused and just as unsettled as when he had first entered the game. But which version of Morty/Roy is real—or more real? And how would the character be able to make this determination or feel secure in his judgment? In this instance, the viewers enjoy a more privileged epistemological position but only with respect to the show’s characters, not their own lives. A Feeling of Wrongness

Presumably, Morty’s life as Roy was not real—or less real than his life as Morty. But even if this were the case, or could be satisfactorily proven to be the case (but according to what metrics?), it nevertheless raises a new set of problematic questions, the first of which is whether Morty’s time as Roy is meaningful or merely time spent playing what Morty disparagingly calls “video games”? Clearly, Morty desires that his experience as Morty is more meaningful than his time as Roy. Yet desire alone merely designates a preference; it certainly does not offer up evidentiary support. Indeed, Jerry’s experience in the Zigerion simulator was, from his perspective, arguably more enjoyable than his life sans simulation: in his simulated world he is a successful, and because successful, increasingly confident ad man, someone who impresses board members with a pitch for a marketing slogan (“Hungry for Apples?”), makes love to his wife, wins a sales award, and delivers an acceptance speech. After the simulation crashes and Jerry, Rick, and Morty escape from the Zigerions, Rick sarcastically remarks, “Jerry, don’t worry about it. So what if the most meaningful day of your life was a simulation operating at minimum capacity?”39 But Rick’s disdain and, presumably, the audience’s pity likewise prove nothing other than the state or quality of their holders’ subjective, socially conditioned preferences. They do not—and cannot—supply objective reasons as to whether a simulated experience or virtual identity is less meaningful than an unsimulated, nonvirtual one. Was Morty’s time as Roy somehow more purposeless than his time outside the simulation in “the real world”? The philosopher Robert Nozick maintains that most people, if given the option of living a simulated life (even if a highly pleasurable one), would opt to live an unmediated life, for the simple reason that the unreality of those experiences would deny them meaning or significance.40 But that judgment presupposes an ability to distinguish unmediated from virtual experiences, as well as a confidence in that ability. What is more, the judgment is an emotional and preferential one and provides no criterion beyond the body of experience from which it was born. That is to say that despite Nozick’s philosophical expertise, his is a judgment rendered by one who believes his experiences—as well as the identity they inform to be real, as opposed to virtual. But one could imagine a machine who/that thinks he/ she/it is a human making an identical determination.41 Apart from this radical indeterminacy regarding the nature of one’s own experiences, the prospect of a simulated existence further complicates the idea that humans could ever really take philosophical charge of their lives. As we have seen, Camus posited suicide as the most fundamental philosophical question, arguing that actively saying “No” to suicide—in the light of an The Tragicomic Pessimism of Rick and Morty

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awareness of the world’s meaninglessness—is what gives life its value. But the possibility of a simulated existence threatens our ability to make that choice a meaningful one. To draw once again from Baudrillard: a simulation is the “sequencing of things as though they had a meaning, when [in fact] they are governed only by artificial montage and non-meaning” (our emphasis).42 That being the case, a simulated existence would be “like suicide,” as freelance journalist Shane Ryan has argued, but a suicide that simply is rather than one that takes place, since “[my] agency would be stolen from me, and the value I perceive in myself would be gone.”43 Like feature films such as The Truman Show, The Matrix, and, more recently, Her, all of which feature some variant of the concept of simulation, Rick and Morty raises the question not only of whether the audience exists in a simulation but of whether human existence is meaningful—could ever be meaningful—in light of the very possibility of simulated hyperreality. Is a world in which everything could be the product of an “experience machine,” as Nozick calls it, ever be capable of anything resembling a Sisyphean revolt on the order Camus’s philosophical absurdism? While a basic avoidance strategy would be to write off this question as hypothetical or academic, today the notion of simulated reality enjoys scientific support in fields like quantum mechanics and is openly defended by scientific popularizers Neil deGrasse Tyson and Elon Musk. What is more, the show blurs the lines between reality and simulation in such a way that it raises the follow-up question of what it is about life, exactly, that makes it so meaningful. The context of the show, in other words, delivers an irresolvable pessimistic dilemma, suggesting, on the one hand, that simulations are as meaningful as everyday (nonsimulated life) but, on the other hand, that everyday life—and the identities it involves—is not particularly meaningful in the first place. Playing the simulation video game Roy, Morty lives out an entire life in the span of minutes—without purpose. His death in the game was meaningless but, arguably, no more meaningless than his inevitable death in life will be. The simulation exists as a metaphorical (and purpose literal) assault on the individual. The individual is foundational to heroic pessimism’s effort to sublimate suffering into an optimistic worldview. Multiversal Decentering

This attack on the individual as individual, which draws on the cutting-edge science of simulation as a means of depriving the individual of its experiential markers of certainty, is at the same time carried out on the macro- or A Feeling of Wrongness

species level, through stratagems that take as their target not the individual as such but rather humankind or human beings in general. With intellectual roots in the Older Sophists of classical antiquity, decentering is in effect an enterprise aimed at de-anthropomorphizing the universe. Specifically, it names a class of strategies for demonstrating that humanity, as a whole, is of no particular existential importance. Taking its name from the Copernican revolution—which of course overthrew the Ptolemaic system by proving that the Earth’s sun rather than the Earth itself was the center of the solar system—decentering consists in reassessing humanity’s metaphysical, rather than physical, place in the universe. As scientists Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee discuss in their bestselling book, post-Copernicus, several scientific discoveries have brought about similar, epochal decenterings: “[It] was not only astronomers who changed the worldview. Einstein showed that there is no preferred observer in the Universe, and quantum mechanics told us that chance is king. Charles Darwin and his powerful theory of evolution demoted humans from the crown of creation to a rather new species on an already animal-rich planet, the chance offspring of larger-scale evolutionary and ecological forces. Nothing special.”44 In other words, with each successive advance in scientific knowledge—from evolution to quantum mechanics and Einsteinian physics—the human race is stripped of just one more of its claims to metaphysical or supra-ordinary importance. However, rather than remaining the preserve of the “hard” sciences, decentering provides further support for the increasingly less marginal philosophical doctrine of cosmic pessimism, which its chief contemporary exponent, Eugene Thacker, describes as “a drastic scaling-up or scaling-down of the human point of view.”45 For whether peering into the infinitesimal world of quanta and quarks or into the vast expanse of deep space, one risks coming face-to-face with one’s “primordial insignificance, the impossibility of ever adequately accounting for one’s relationship to thought.”46 Despite these philosophical implications, the decentering effects—of evolution, heliocentrism, and Einsteinian physics—are not optimally suited for escaping the “gravitational” pull of Zapffe’s counterpessimistic strategies. After all, each set of effects occurs at the abstract level affecting the species and is thus relatively unconnected from the concerns of everyday life and living. So while scientific discoveries may indeed, as Thacker argues, demonstrate a certain inadequacy vis-à-vis the relationship between consciousness and abstract, conceptual thought—or, as Lovecraft writes, an “inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents”—the very nature of this demonstration functions as a kind of buffer, one that either prevents a powerful The Tragicomic Pessimism of Rick and Morty

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subjective response from arising or mutes the intensity of that response.47 For physicists, biologists, and astronomers, this buffer is part and parcel of their work, because it sublimates or redirects the implications of their discoveries back into the love and labor that makes modern scientific inquiry possible. It is thus a highly ironic form of sublimation, since it perpetuates the very impulse responsible for disclosing humanity’s metaphysical insignificance. For everyone else—from the child whose bedroom wall displays photographs taken from the Hubble space telescope to the mother who lulls her child to sleep with “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”—the safeguard manifests in so many different forms of isolation, all of which effectively isolate the beauty and serenity of space from the corresponding reality of its cold, monstrous indifference to all organic life. Clearly, our species does not exist in a position of privilege, either literally or metaphorically. And yet, here too, the truth of this proposition is not necessarily—and certainly not by virtue of its veracity—rhetorically effective, for the effects of isolation and sublimation are as strong as the strategies themselves are nonconscious, automatic. In this connection, Rick and Morty’s rhetorical effectivity consists in using the scientific cosmology of the multiverse to transpose scientific decentering from the abstract species level to that of the individual character. In so doing, the series bypasses the counterpessimistic strategies of sublimation and isolation, effectively desublimating and un-isolating the recent disclosures of modern science.48 The message conveyed is thus not only that the human species itself is utterly unimportant but also that you, yourself—the individual human personality and those of your friends and family—your choices, beliefs, actions, desires, and relations, all the things that make you uniquely who you are, are of no consequence whatsoever. This is effected in two ways or occurs for two reasons. First, in the multiverse, infinite “yous” exist, a fact that robs each and every character of his or her identity qua individual. The Rick we typically see as the show’s protagonist is from dimension C-137, but there is no shortage of other Ricks, from other dimensions; indeed, there is an infinite supply of them, not to mention an infinite number of Mortys, Jerrys, and so on. The implications, here, are of a different order than those implied by the belief that the future is undetermined, that “your” life is indeterminable and each and every one of us can, through opportunity and struggle, can become who “we” are. For the idea of the multiverse suggests not that anything is possible but that all things are actual and, hence, that every decision, every action, is on existential par with every other decision or action, even their opposites. Making friends is as important as not making friends—or making friends with these specific A Feeling of Wrongness

persons rather than others—addiction is as significant as sobriety, and so forth. Hence, the second way in which the series puts decentering into operation is by revealing the meaninglessness or sheer illusoriness of choice itself. For instance, “you” may decide to help an elderly woman to cross a busy intersection, but other versions of you, potentially an infinite number, may not make that choice. (One version, an evil one presumably, may even push her in front of oncoming traffic.) But irrespective of the particular details of any hypothetical example, the point that the multiverse drives home is that nothing anyone does is of any real consequence, that nothing “you” do can ever make the universe a better place, for the simple reason that all good work is constantly—ceaselessly—being undermined by different “yous” in different dimensions of space and time. However, rather than rendering this point explicit through discursive argumentation, Rick and Morty creates a scenario in which the character whom audiences identify as Rick literally battles against alternate versions of himself—for allegedly having murdered twenty-seven Ricks in alternate dimensions. During a celebratory breakfast, “Rick” (Rick C-137) is arrested by a group of armed and uniformed alternate Ricks and transported via portal to the Trans-Dimensional Council of Ricks, where he is formally charged with having committed crimes against alternate Ricks.”49 Effectively, this narrative argument externalizes weird fiction’s attack on the notion of a self-identical, coherent subject: instead of showing the individual subject to be a groundless fiction, a fabrication masking a multiplicity of varying drives with no unifying will or consciousness, this maneuver refracts the individual outward into millions of different pieces, transcendentalizing rather than immanentizing the split subject. Such decentering of the individual is not isolated to this one instance but occurs throughout the series. In “Rixty Minutes,” Morty faces an existential crisis when he assumes the identity of a dead Morty in another dimension. Long story short, C-137 Rick and Morty destroy their own universe, leave for a different dimension, find the mangled bodies of that dimension’s recently deceased Rick and Morty, bury them in the backyard, and assume their lives. Morty is obviously traumatized by the events and after he explains to his sister that “every morning . . . I eat breakfast twenty yards away from my own rotting corpse,” Morty offers the simple takeaway, “Nobody belongs anywhere, nobody exists on purpose, everybody’s going to die.” Similarly, in “Rick Potion #9,” where Rick and Morty destroy their universe, a cut to a new scene briefly (around forty seconds) fools the audience into thinking the problem has been solved. Then, without warning, the Rick and The Tragicomic Pessimism of Rick and Morty

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Figure 4 Rick and Morty burying a Rick and Morty from another dimension. Rick and Morty, episode 8, “Rixty Minutes,” directed by Bryan Newton and Pete Michels and written by Tom Kauffman and Justin Roiland.

Morty the audience are watching explode, painting the walls in blood.50 An identical-looking Rick and Morty then step out of a portal, we learn that this is the C-137 Rick and Morty whose adventures we have been following. Has this kind of switch occurred elsewhere? If Camus would have us believe that a once-great king could, through the feat of sublimation, joyfully embrace his divine punishment by making “[his] rock his thing,” then Rick and Morty poses the challenge of a multiverse in which there is an infinite number of Sisyphuses, some of whom are less than joyful about their eternal maltreatment and instead pray for a sweet release that never comes.51 To this deconstruction of choice, however, a counterpessimist might propose the following rationalization: that what stabilizes the uniqueness of the individual self is not the accumulation of successive meaningful decisions within a changing complex of appearances—not the distinctive, nonrepeatable trajectory of an individuated entity—but the relationships that it forges with other unique individuals. Existence, so the thinking goes, is relational, moral; hence, the uncertainty that Rick and Morty introduces in connection with the unique self is not devastating but quite manageable. Such a rationalization would thus leave behind the sublimation both of Camus’s absurd heroism and Nietzsche’s Dionysian pessimism, opting instead for a kind of moral anchoring, according to which the uniqueness A Feeling of Wrongness

of one’s identity derives from and is thus grounded in his or her experience of encounters with other people and the various relationships that emerge from those encounters. Rick and Morty, however, short-circuits this counterpessimistic maneuver by transposing the notion of an externally split or fragmented self to the level of interpersonal relationships. It does this, rather simply, by interrogating the coherence of the self not only in isolation but also in its relations to other “selves,” other sensible beings with and through which a self fashions for itself an identity. For instance, in the episode “Mortynight Run,” Rick and Morty drop Jerry off at a day-care center before setting off on one of their intergalactic adventures. As we come to discover, the day-care center was established by an enterprising Rick for the sole purposing of providing for the needs of various Jerrys while their respective Rick and Mortys go about gallivanting. When Rick and Morty return and collect their Jerry, they soon realize that there has been a Jerry mix-up and that the Jerry they have picked up is not “their” Jerry but an alternate. As with the instances of simulated reality, the audience is not “in” on the joke but is instead led to believe that the Jerry it sees being returned to Rick and Morty is the correct one. It is only after “our” Rick and Morty, the C-137 versions, lodge their complaint about the mix-up that the audience is made aware of the error.52 The implications of this confusion are twofold. First, Rick’s indifferent response to the goof—a nonchalant “whatever”—drives home the chief philosophical import of the multiverse without inviting a response: namely, that everyone is fungible; no one is irreplaceable. Second, and more important with regard to the undermining of the self’s claim to a relational existence, Rick’s response combined with Jerry’s expression of existential angst affectively demonstrates the instability of external identities and, by extension, the fragility of those interpersonal ties that we believe make a coherent self possible. Through the rhetorical device of the multiverse, anchoring via some type of other-oriented phenomenology is no guarantor of identity; rather, it is just another casualty of multiversal decentering. Rick and Morty as Comitragedy

Despite Rick and Morty’s tragic reflections on the nature of identity, reality, and meaning, it is unlikely that anyone would interpret the show as a straightforward tragedy or tragic tale. The series’ animated characters and sitcom format, in fact, share a strong resemblance to the family tree of postmodern adult animated television series. Such series include major The Tragicomic Pessimism of Rick and Morty

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network offerings like The Simpsons, Family Guy, and American Dad, as well as Comedy Central’s award-winning show South Park.53 More immediately, Rick and Morty owes much of its content, tone, and style to the influence of its network’s late-night programming block, Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, which is best known for its shock comedies combining unorthodox and at times transgressive content with bizarre presentation. Nevertheless, regardless of its specific web of influence and resemblance, Rick and Morty has much more in common with adult animated television comedies in general than, say, a tragic masterpiece like Antigone. At the same time, however, there is an undeniable tragic dimension to Rick and Morty, which makes it unique among its adult animated compatriots. The Simpsons, for example, lacks the persistently recurring bleakness of Rick and Morty, as do The Simpsons’ darker progeny, like South Park and Family Guy. And while Adult Swim series such as Aqua Teen and Squidbillies do not shy away from explicit depictions of violence, substance abuse, and deviancy, their anthropomorphism, surrealism, and general illogic almost militate against the identification necessary for critical reflection and self-analysis. Rick and Morty, in contrast, exists as a true hybrid of comedy and tragedy, representing precisely that mix of genres that modern-day chronicler of pessimism Eugene Thacker suggests may be the best medium for pessimistic ideas.54 While, as Thacker argues, the combination of tragedy and comedy has the potential to subvert the optimistic structures inherent in both genres, Rick and Morty does something extra to secure that effect: rather than using comedy as a way of attenuating a tragic message or response, as in tragicomedy, the series uses comedy as a way of surreptitiously importing the tragic, of facilitating tragic introjection via comedic camouflage. While this book has previously touched on tragedy’s relationship to optimism, Rick and Morty’s use of comi-tragic hybridity calls for a closer examination. Beginning with Aristotle’s theory of tragic katharsis, tragedy as an art form functioned ethically to cultivate in audiences an intellectual-therapeutic acceptance that life and living involve, as a matter of course, experiences of pain and suffering. Within the field of literary theory and criticism, this theory was to hold dominance until well into the sixteenth century and even today is still one of the primary academic views of tragedy, alongside that of Hegel.55 Even when Aristotle is not the go-to theorist for thinking through tragedy—as in the case of Nietzsche, whose idiosyncratic response to Schopenhauerian pessimism in The Birth of Tragedy reaches back to pre-Aristotelian Greek sources—tragedy is still formulated as an affirmative enterprise.56 A Feeling of Wrongness

Commenting on this tendency to conceive of tragedy optimistically, French postmodern critic Roland Barthes writes, “Tragedy is only a way of assembling human misfortune, of subsuming it, and thus of justifying it by putting it into the form of a necessity, of a kind of wisdom, of a purification.”57 Barthes is not alone among recent continental thinkers in the view that such purification inculcates in the spectators of tragedy receptiveness to the view that the world’s problems are at once inevitable and desirable; both Bertolt Brecht and Theodor W. Adorno, for instance, articulated their own versions of this assessment.58 If Barthes et al. are correct, then the danger for the would-be pessimistic tragedian—or, for that matter, any pessimistic rhetor—owes first and foremost to the structure of the message itself, which functions to produce life-affirming effects or judgments of acceptance. Kenneth Burke shares an anecdote about this structural tendency: “William James, for instance, complained that Schopenhauer was content with his pessimism. He wanted a world that he could bark at. And unquestionably, once a man has perfected a technique of complaint, he is more at home with sorrow than he would be without it. He has developed an equipment, and the integrity of his character is best upheld by situations that enable him to use it . . . one may paradoxically be said to have found a way of ‘accepting’ life even while symbolizing its ‘rejection.’”59 In much the same way, tragedy has developed into the perfected technique of complaint. Hence, while it seems the obvious platform for hosting pessimistic ideas and sensibilities, it is in fact counterpoised to the true spirit of pessimism—its appearance belied by its essential function. Counterintuitively, this essential role of providing an avenue for the acceptance of life renders tragedy and comedy “consubstantial.” As Burke reminds us, comedy reassures “us by dwarfing the magnitude of obstacles or threats, it provides us relief in laughter.”60 Just as in tragedy, this relief is experienced as a form of emotional catharsis—albeit in a different emotional register—and it is thus little surprise that Burke views both tragedy and comedy as complementary frames of acceptance.61 Not infrequently, rhetorical public discourse demonstrates very much the same point. For instance, fifteen days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the US satirical paper The Onion released an entire issue dedicated to the tragedy. The editors were apparently “deluged with fan mail from readers who seemed to find catharsis” in the paper’s use of humor and irony.62 Daniela S. Hugelshofer, a psychologist with a PhD from Washington State University, helps to explain this phenomenon by showing how humor, rather than insulting the bereaved, can act as a shield against depression and hopelessness.63 Comedy’s potential The Tragicomic Pessimism of Rick and Morty

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for cathartic reassurance, however, should not be misinterpreted as a cure for tragedy; indeed, the two are probably even more closely related, more consubstantial, than Burke allows. As Mark Twain insightfully quips, “The secret source of humor itself is not joy, but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.”64 In other words, comedy and suffering share a deep, profound interdependence, with the implication that using comedy as a means to promote pessimism is a perilous rhetorical strategy. For that reason, neither comedy nor tragedy alone is capable of overcoming its genre’s life-affirming tendencies. Nonetheless, as Thacker suggests, a volatile synthesis of the two can produce an effect that exists outside one another’s respective frames of acceptance, escaping or circumventing the therapeutic pull of poetic catharsis. Tragedy’s catharsis is in part made possible from the patterns of expectations surrounding the genre as a whole. Certainly, most of us can recall that childhood movie which traumatized us as children but if seen today through the lens of accumulative experience would have a very different, probably much milder, impact. While this seems natural, normal, and right, a similar experience occurs each time we encounter a new tragedy or “drama”: with each successive tragic work we become that much more accustomed—acclimated—to the tragic form, and as a result our tragic sensibility grows at once more refined and less responsive, more cerebral and less affectively responsive. So too, when experiencing tragic events in the “real world” (either directly or at some remove), our individual and collective memories of encounters with tragedy inure us to future sufferings. While learning to laugh through the pain or adding a comic’s touch to the artistic presentation of a tragic plot can facilitate acceptance, a different type of synthesis—one operating in a different affective mode—is possible. Such a fusion, we argue, is epitomized in Rick and Morty and is what best helps to explain why the series is so adroit at conveying its pessimistic messaging. On the one hand, its idiosyncratic blending of the comic and the tragic is virtually antithetical to the kind of mixture represented by the humorous eulogy and the tragic-comedy. On the other hand, unlike philosophically discursive argumentation, Rick and Morty’s aesthetic form matches its pessimistic content, and it does so in a way similar to but different from those of weird fiction and True Detective. Unlike the uncanny short story or the brooding, esoteric police procedural, Rick and Morty avoids the slow-burn approach of gradually creating an atmosphere of uncertainty and dread, boasting instead a staccato—almost manic—tempo in which the comedic quickly and repeatedly gives way to the tragic. This rapid back-and-forth quality, however, which itself can be a source of disorientation, functions like the uncanny to defamiliarize A Feeling of Wrongness

the audience with respect to generic decorum, leaving it un-inured to and unprepared for sudden, unpredictable encounters with the tragic. We prepare to laugh and are immediately made to feel deeply unsettled—our safe, familiar surroundings suddenly changing dramatically. The qualitative form that emerges from this experience should not, however, be confused with that of mere “dark comedy,” understood as making jokes about subjects thought to be serious (though Rick and Morty does possess plenty of darkly comedic moments). What the form allows for instead are deeply disturbing and explicitly uncomic moments interspersed throughout the series’ zany and at times lowbrow humor. Perhaps the best example of this is the sexual assault perpetrated against Morty in the pub of a restroom during his and Rick’s fairy tale adventure. Justin Roiland confirms that this scene was not intended for laughs: “I went out of my way to make sure this scene was not animated in a way that would play for laughs. Dan, Ridley, and I also wrote it to be a serious scene. It had to feel real and be horrific, weighty, and not cartoony. You’re supposed to be shocked.”65 Undoubtedly, there is no shortage of mass media texts that, either by design or accident, would be worthy of trigger warnings. But invoking the darkly comedic does not go far in explaining what a serious depiction of sexual violence is doing in an animated science-fiction sitcom—wedged, as it is, between shots of another character (Rick) karaokeing “Sweet Home Alabama” and playing cards with an alien shaped like a set of stairs—especially when that sitcom is marketed as a zany, hijinks comedy. Overcoming the optimistic biases of tragedy is of course only half the battle for tragic comedy. Comedy’s ability to produce catharsis out of others’ suffering should act as a barrier to comedy with pessimistic affect, because by its very nature most fictional suffer belongs to the characters and not us. Put more eloquently by Angela Carter, “Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.”66 In fact, the existential nature of pessimism by its very nature subverts this barrier. Morty confronts the inherent meaningless of existence, but this is not a tragedy that happens to “other people.” Morty’s anagnorisis (moment of tragic insight) is shared with the audience, shared in the sense that we too are called upon to have the tragic insight. This is not like Oedipus’ anagnorisis that he has killed his father and married his mother (an event unrelatable to most audience members) or even Willy Loman’s presuicidal realization that he failed to achieve the American dream (much more relatable). Morty’s pessimistic revelation is not about his unique circumstances, but about the human condition in general. This denies the audience the ability to laugh at Morty’s plight from a respectable distance, because his plight is our own. The Tragicomic Pessimism of Rick and Morty

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“I Want My Szechuan McNugget Dipping Sauce, Morty!”

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On April 1, 2017 (April Fool’s Day), Adult Swim aired a surprise release of the first episode of Rick and Morty, Season Three. In it, Rick launches into a completely unhinged, fourth-wall-breaking rant about his insatiable desire to consume McDonald’s discontinued Szechuan McNugget dipping sauce: “Because that’s, that’s what this is all about Morty! Th-that’s my one arm man. I’m not driven by avenging my dead family, Morty, that was FAKE! I-I’m driven by finding that McNugget Sauce. I want that Mulan McNugget Sauce, Morty. That’s my series arc, Morty! If it takes 9 seasons, i want my mcnugget dipping sauce! szechuan sauce, morty!”67 While the humor of the scene requires no specialized knowledge—only an appreciation for the bizarre—the April Fool’s Day joke takes as its target the heroic pessimism of thinkers like Nietzsche, Camus, and Cervantes, all of whom counsel the creation or imposition of meaning within a meaningless world. For Rick’s “heroism” obviously comes across, as it is almost certainly intended to, as a form of madness. In the struggle to wrest meaning from a coldly indifferent universe, Rick comes away with something as pitifully insignificant as a mass-produced, “Asian influenced” dipping sauce. And yet, the provocation would seem to be, “Why not a dipping sauce?” Why would such a thing be less deserving of one’s commitment and care than, say, family and friends, carpentry, musical excellence, and so forth? Why would the latter things be valued more highly, even intrinsically? Their value is, after all, either arbitrary in the first instance or, in the case that value derives from a capacity to subserve something more fundamental, by extension. Such is the argument advanced by Rick’s seemingly insane quest for McDonald’s discontinued Szechuan nugget sauce—an argument that works, primarily, because it conceals itself in the trappings of animated absurdism, ensuring that audiences consume the pessimistic pill before the optimistic defense mechanisms kick in. Through using that basic rhetorical strategy, Rick and Morty are able to mount an effective challenge to humanity’s claims to meaning, purpose, and identity, to sneak past the censors, and plant the seeds of nihilistic unfurling. The ultimate non-Aristotelian tragedy of Rick and Morty is thus that of existence itself, a painful conclusion from which audiences cannot distance themselves precisely because of the shows many laughs. In the end the viewer is left with Morty’s maxim, “Nobody exists on purpose. Nobody belongs anywhere. Everybody dies. Now, come watch TV.”

A Feeling of Wrongness

4 “Finish Her” The Interactive Pessimism of Final Fantasy VII Much like Rick and Morty, Final Fantasy VII does not wear its pessimistic bona fides on its sleeves. In fact, much of the game is openly optimistic and presents players with a rather conventional action adventure in which good triumphs over evil. There is one moment, however, one death, so singular and profoundly personal that it casts a pall of existential despair over the entire game—in some cases even haunting players for decades after they had finished the game. Indeed, the death of Aerith Gainsborough, the humble flower seller, constitutes such an irruptive eclipsing event that her death becomes death incarnate, at once personified and individualized as one’s own. In this regard, the effect of Aerith’s passing differs markedly from that of other popular forms of personified death. For unlike, say, a scythe-wielding, cloaked skeleton, Aerith is not so much an external agent or harbinger of doom as she is someone with whom players intensely identify, so much so that Aerith’s death becomes not the death of a loved one but that of the player. Such an internalized experience is, in no small part, made possible by the unique technological capabilities inhering in the video game medium, which offers “readers” a level of interactivity, virtuality, immersion, and intensiveness not easily reproducible by literature, film, radio, or television. In Final Fantasy VII, if the medium is the message, then the message is one’s own death. Such a rhetorically distinctive experience is made all the more singular because it assaults the optimistic barrier to pessimistic incursion on a new, more fundamental front. For underneath each of Zapffe’s counterpessimistic strategies, forming something of an existential substratum, is the cold, hard fear of death and dying. To be sure, insofar as this fear is essential or basic,

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all of Zapffe’s unthought strategies would amount to varying symptomatic conversions. Nevertheless, there is an additional strategy that goes right to the root and meets this fear head on, and that is the denial of death. At times outright, at others surreptitious, this mode of inoculation consists of all the refusals to orient oneself to the inevitability of one’s own fate, all avoidances, the fleeing froms, even the morbid anticipations that, though focused on counting the days, nevertheless serve to keep one’s death at bay as something “not yet” and therefore unreal and unowned. Final Fantasy VII, with its death of Aerith, promises to make available a means of undermining the capacity for that denial, to deprive the subject of the distance and the dissonance that allows for considering death as a tragic abstraction, as something that, while occasionally hitting close to home via the death of a friend or loved one, is not really “mine.” Pessimism’s Death Problem and the Problem of Death

When David Benatar’s antinatalist book Better Never to Have Been hit the shelves in 2006, one common reaction from anonymous internet posters to university professors was some version of “OK, if you truly believe that the value of birth is negative and nonexistence is preferable to existence, then why don’t you kill yourself?” Of course, Princeton professor Elizabeth Harman made the claim more eloquently, than, for example, Spiked commenter “Bearrorist,” but the overall argument remains roughly the same: If life is unquestionably awful, why not opt for a more or less graceful exit from this “thresher,” as Rust Cohle puts it?1 Indeed, this retort is one of if not the most common criticisms leveled at pessimists, whom critics not unreasonably treat as insufficiently committed to their principles. Nevertheless, this charge of hypocrisy tactically omits from mention those pessimists who actually did take their own lives. As Ligotti points out: “But as for shooting ourselves—ask Gloria Beatty, ask Michelstaedter, ask Weininger, ask Hemingway. But do not ask Mainlander or Bjorneboe, who hanged themselves. And do not ask Jean Amery, author of Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death (1976), who made his exit with a drug overdose. Amery survived Auschwitz, but he did not survive his survival.”2 Collectively, then, the pessimists’ compelling response would seem to be some version of “While we have no love for life, many of us also have no love for death”—or even, more bluntly, “Some of us actually do kill ourselves, thank you very much.” More important, however—and irrespective of the back-and-forth of this imaginary debate between pessimists and their moral critics—the claim A Feeling of Wrongness

that adherence to philosophical pessimism demands suicide ignores the fact that the horror of death undergirds, rather than conflicts with, much of pessimistic philosophy. This can clearly be seen in Schopenhauer’s more pessimistic passages, such as when he writes that if death were “a sudden stoppage of existence,” then it is likely that “no man alive . . . would not have already put an end to his life”; for Schopenhauer, however, death is a horror unto itself, so horrifying in fact that the “terrors of death offer considerable resistance [to suicide].”3 In a similar vein, E. M. Cioran writes that “the immanence of death in life is a sign of the final triumph of nothingness over life.”4 Even David Benatar wryly repeats the old joke that “Life is a sexually transmitted terminal disease,” meaning to say that parents either murder their children or subject them to a prolonged, painful death, simply by bringing them into existence.5 For many pessimists then, death is properly seen as an ineradicable component of life’s horror rather than a solution to the problem of existence. Hence, over against the rather obvious opposition between pessimists and optimists, one could imagine the terror of death serving as a point of connection between the two camps, a secret substratum that, operating beneath the many surface-level disagreements, could allow for harmonious relations. Such a rapprochement, however, has not often been the case: the ever-present prospect of death is so exceptionally powerful it has engendered its own particular defense mechanism, one that is related yet distinct from Zapffe’s anti-pessimistic strategies of isolation, distraction, anchoring, and sublimation. Let us call this defense mechanism a denial, or refusal, of what Martin Heidegger famously calls “being-towards-death.” For Heidegger, the concept of “being-towards-death” is not an orientation that would bring one closer to his or her end or clinical death.6 Rather, it is a way of being, one that is determined by four conditions or criteria: namely, that death is nonrelational, certain, indefinite, and not to be outstripped (by which he means that death is the ultimate limit, exceeding all the possibilities that our power of freedom— i.e., our capacity of free projection—possesses).7 According to Heidegger, to understand what it means to be an authentic human being requires the cultivation of being-towards-death, and this involves constantly projecting our lives onto the horizon of our death, confronting the finitude of our being, and trying to wrest meaning from the fact of our death. With respect to the conflict between pessimism and optimism, Heidegger introduces a distinction between anticipation (Vorlaufen) and expectation or waiting (Erwarten).8 When one anticipates one’s death, one essentially (and morbidly) counts the days until the possibility of one’s death is actualized. When one awaits death, The Interactive Pessimism of Final Fantasy VII

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however, one does not passively await death but rather comes to embrace one’s mortality—one’s individual death—as always already a part of one’s selfhood.9 Authentic being-towards-death is thus the acceptance of one’s own death as the basis for an affirmation of one’s life—hence Heidegger’s appropriation of the ancient maxim that “to philosophize is to learn how to die.”10 Hence, although Heidegger is not commonly associated with philosophical pessimism—and it is doubtful that he should be, existentialist credentials notwithstanding—the notion that authentic potentiality-for-being necessarily involves awaiting one’s own death is at some remove from most of what today passes for optimism—to put it mildly.11 What is more, in our everyday lives—in the everyday-ness of being—most of us do not make the attempt to project our lives onto the horizon of our death; instead, argues Heidegger, we seek to evade it “or cover up this possibility by . . . fleeing from it,” or we “give new explanation for it to accord with the common-sense” (italics in the original) understanding of death as a neutral or mundane aspect of existence—death as mere fact.12 For Heidegger, all of these efforts are ultimately failures because they involve the anticipation of death’s facticity rather than the awaiting of death as one’s own, as always already a part of one. They are failures, in other words, because they endeavor to keep death at a distance, so to speak, to deindividuate it such that it is regarded as belonging to no one in particular and thus meriting no authentic consideration. Nevertheless, Heidegger argues, these evasive tactics—many if not most of which are unthought—typify everydayness and our commonplace attitudes toward death. And more than any other criterion, it is this fundamental difference in attitude that differentiates the optimist’s orientation on death from the pessimist’s and thus ultimately thwarts their reconciliation. Whereas the pessimist awaits death, the optimist merely anticipates it (and here, it would perhaps be more accurate to include among optimists all species of nonpessimists). The pessimist, in other words, benefits from a way of being that understands death as one’s “ownmost,” that is, as something that is nonrelational, certain yet indefinite, and not to be eclipsed. For the optimist, however, death inhabits everydayness and is trapped within normal, everyday discussions of death. In this inauthentic mode of being, death is talked about in a “fugitive” manner in which it is continually passed off as something that occurs at some futural “not yet” and to some generic “they self.” That one dies may very well be interpreted as a fact, as an actualizable possibility, but, Heidegger stipulates, existentially “this ‘one’ is the ‘nobody’ . . . because everyone else and oneself can talk himself [or herself] into saying that ‘in no case is it I myself’” (italics in the original).13 A Feeling of Wrongness

The optimist, then, unlike the pessimist, is engaged in a mode of evasion, in what Heidegger describes as “a constant fleeing in the face of death” (italics in the original).14 However, when this evasion fails, as it inevitably must, and the facticity of death becomes an anticipation of one’s own, anxiety in the face of death is transformed—or, for Heidegger, “perverted”—into cowardly fear.15 Hence, in inauthentically understanding death the optimist flees from it—remains indifferent toward it—until that moment when it can no longer be evaded, when death is unconcealed and fear takes hold. While the shock of such clarifying—or cathartic—transformations is difficult to convey via the abstract prose style of philosophical discourse, it can be approached by way of narrative. Relating a story about a captured Russian spy, the philosophical pessimist Herman Tennessen helps to “bring before the eyes” something of the felt, subjective quality of such an experience: During the Finnish-Russian War of 1939, the Finns caught a Russian spy behind their own lines. It was an obvious case. The spy confessed and was to be immediately executed. He knew that he would be shot at dawn, knew it as well as anything can be known. Therefore, he appeared stoically in court. He knew the outcome. There was not the shadow of a doubt. The court scene was a theatre, a bureaucratic performance, demanded in every community founded on the rule of law, but ridiculously superfluous in his case. And still the stage does not leave him entirely untouched. Against his own will he gradually gets involved in the proceedings. When finally the death sentence is pronounced, he collapses completely. What on earth had happened? He knew the outcome with absolute certainty. We should want to say the spy knows about his imminent death now, in a new and terrifying way.16 According to Heidegger, the Russian spy has now entered into a new relationship with death, having move from a being-towards-the-end—from the anticipation of a clinical, deindividuated “they” death—to an intense realization of his own death, that is, death as something that is at once uniquely his own and imminently actualizable. His anticipation of death had been only that: a kind of morbid and calculated fascination with the mere facticity of death, one that allowed him to evade death as his ownmost and utmost possibility, to avoid—or rather to delay—his coming face-to-face with his own mortality. This was the form assumed by the Russian’s mode of “fleeing,” which then manifested in, and made possible, the outward appearance The Interactive Pessimism of Final Fantasy VII

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of stoic resolve. With the pronouncement of the death sentence, however, that resolve was unconcealed for what it really was, and what, according to Heidegger, it can only ever be: an ultimately impotent fleeing from an authentic being-towards-death, an ersatz confrontation with finitude; in a word, it amounts to a denial or refusal to consider death as always already a part of one’s own self. For that reason, the subsequent terror that characterizes the Russian’s revelation of having inauthentically projected his life toward death is not atypical but rather something to be expected. His shock, his disbelief, his frantic questioning—all of these qualities serve to distinguish the state of mind of the one whose fleeing death has run its course. They therefore justify our treating of the Russian spy as a “representative anecdote” for what affectively transpires when such death denial is unconcealed qua denial.17 If something were to set apart the spy’s experience as something of a special case, this would only owe to the condition of imminence and the concomitant intensiveness of the “perverted” transformation. The difference, in other words, would be merely quantitative, but qualitatively his story represents an experiential (and existential) type. Regardless, the denial itself—the fleeing, the refusal, and so on—constitutes a unique anti-pessimistic defense mechanism, in addition to the other four defense mechanisms identified by Zapffe and explored in our preceding analyses. Clearly, the Russian spy has unconsciously denied himself authentic consideration of his own finitude; at the very least, he has dismissed death as something profoundly individualized—as his—keeping it, instead, at a “safe” distance. Nevertheless, at no point does this distancing isolate, anchor, distract from, or sublimate death. First, the spy does not isolate death because he does not silence death. From the very outset of his capture and imprisonment, he seems to accept the high probability of his imminent death: that he will die—that death will occur—that his life story will end in a show trial resulting in his execution. Such acknowledgement, however, does not amount to his embracing death as a part of himself; he merely anticipates the end. Second, he does not distract himself from seeing the facticity of death. If anything, the trial magnifies death, denying him any of the possible short-term pleasures that distraction could afford. Essentially, the trial turns his death into a horror show or car crash from which he cannot look away. But here, too, death is merely anticipated—and, crucially—anticipated as something clinical. Third, and very closely related to the unlikelihood of distraction, the spy’s story does not admit of anchoring. At no point in the anecdote does the Russian search for—much less find—meaning in death. He does not appeal to God, A Feeling of Wrongness

Church, or State; nor does he seek comfort in the law of life, the future, the people; he certainly does not seek the consolations of divine justice or karma or fate. In the story, he comes face-to-face with an understanding of death that is denuded of “foundational firmaments” or basic cultural ideas that seek to find meaning, even affirmation, in the end of life. Fourth, we have no evidence of whether or how the spy may have sublimated death prior to his capture—unless, that is, we count anticipation in the Heideggerian sense as a form of sublimation. We do, however, possess evidence of a profound subjective transformation. Tennessen tells us, for instance, that upon hearing the sentence the spy completely collapses. Nevertheless, the apparent transformation is of an entirely different species than that offered by sublimation. To be sure, there is no evident repression at play. Still, the transformation that he undergoes would appear to involve neither artistry nor conversion. It is simply something that happens to him, and what happens is the failed accomplishment of denial. The time of creativity past—but also that of authentic reflection—the Russian is left only with a painful realization, a searing moment of terrifying clarity. Previously, he had “known” of his fate, had accepted the facticity of death’s actualization. And in knowing it, he regarded death—as well as death’s inevitability—as undesirable. Yet despite the absence of sublimation, his knowledge seemingly had little to do with him until the final sentence, when that knowledge became acutely real and effected a genuine transformation of being (albeit a genuinely inauthentic one, in Heidegger’s view). Thus over against the tried-and-tested strategies of isolation, anchoring, distraction, and sublimation, the anecdote of the Russian spy illustrates a “new” and different kind of anti-pessimistic defense mechanism: namely, a fleeing from authentic being-towards-death, a denial or refusal of death as one’s ownmost possibility. Or rather, what Tennessen provides is a narrative demonstration of what it might feel like to live through the inevitable failure of one’s death-denial, of having refused to confront death as a possibility, to think of death as already a part of oneself. If Heidegger provides a useful vocabulary for thinking through this existential crisis, narratives like the one offered by Tennessen help to communicate something of its experiential quality, to round out our understanding by creating a virtual experience that appeals to cognition by way of visceral, emotive impact. In terms of effect, Tennessen’s juxtaposition with Heidegger functions as a reminder of the superior power of narrative and drama to bring about a qualitative sense of pessimistic purpose and unity vis-à-vis more rational modes of discursive argument and explication. That is to say, Tennessen reminds us that The Interactive Pessimism of Final Fantasy VII

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coherent dramatic structures—irrespective of particular form or type—command an immediacy and perceived necessity that is either diluted from or entirely lost on the abstracting mind and thought of traditional philosophical discourses, philosophical pessimism being one of them. But beyond merely reiterating that central idea, however, our Russian spy drives home a key insight regarding the existential nature of the problem of death as well as the proclivity of nonpessimists to flee from an authentic consideration of that nature, to evade it and keep it apart from oneself. For nonpessimists, especially, the problem of death is not an existential challenge but first and foremost a problem with death, one that takes the form of a disagreement or an objection—without, however, admitting of any interlocutor, judge, or possibility of arbitration. Not to be discouraged, nonpessimists nevertheless stick to their guns, at least on the whole, refusing to compromise or change their relationship to death—despite close brushes with death, the loss of loved ones, and undergraduate encounters with thinkers like Heidegger. Indeed, it would appear that individuals the world over, from all walks of life, find occasion to flee being-towards-death. Oftentimes, this evasion manifests in the anticipation of death or the reduction of death to the mere facticity of life. For instance, if you ask someone whether one day he or she will die that person will most likely answer in the affirmative—provided, of course, that the person takes you seriously (and is also not a transhumanist). In fact, the answer to your question is so blindingly obvious, the person might well reason, that it calls into question your motives or, worse, your soundness of mind. For all of us move through this life surrounded by constant reminders of our inevitable death: when driving our motor vehicles we take any number of precautions to avoid fatality and on occasion rubberneck as we pass the wreckage and remains of those who either failed to employ those precautions or, in employing them, were thwarted by other human or nonhuman agencies; we attend the funerals and calling hours of friends and family and gaze in awe at a body that is ineffably no longer a person; we plan our estates; we visit our physicians; we teach our children to “look both ways” before crossing the street. We even expose ourselves—sometimes perversely, sometimes unconsciously—to any number of simulated deaths via literatures, film and television, music, theater, sports, the news, jokes, and so forth. Death is everywhere and so is our knowledge and experience of death. Yet insofar as death is only anticipated, it remains an impersonal and abstract proposition, one with which we politely, or not so politely, disagree. For that reason, death remains abstract and deindividualized, at least for many of us. We know it, A Feeling of Wrongness

and in that knowledge we know it to be apart from us but not a part of us. And this knowledge serves us well, more or less. It frees us from angst, unburdening us from the kind of existential dread experienced by Cioran, while simultaneously postponing until the end the soul-crushing catharsis exemplified by the Russian spy. The knowledge of anticipation, in other words, inoculates the nonpessimist from attempts to stage an authentic (or more authentic) confrontation with death. It thus also ensures a fundamental misunderstanding, with respect to death, between pessimists and optimists; rather than signaling a path of resolution, death presents the probability of miscommunication. Video Games and the Death-Denying Illusion of Agency Agency as Structured Belief

Perhaps the most powerful, certainly the most common, way of denying or deindividuating death resides in the optimistic notion of agency. In terms of the incongruity between pessimists and optimists, agency is undoubtedly the most immediate source of misunderstanding and miscommunication. For although the gulf separating an authentic being-towards-death from various inauthentic modes, the latter would all seem to involve, perhaps even stem from, the perceived existence of human agency; not incidentally, this perception is virtually presupposed by optimistic orientations on life, just as it is called into serious question or disposed of by more pessimistic frames of reference. As we move through life we are confronted with an immeasurable number of choices, and common-sense reasoning—or common optimism— instills in us the belief that these choices will leave a lasting impact, that they will in no small part determine our future chances of happiness and success. While this conviction can itself be productive of anxiety, it nevertheless speaks the language of possibility, fulfillment, and actualization: “Attending a four-year college will allow me to secure a high-paying job and provide either for myself or myself and my family. . . . Diet and exercise will make me stronger, healthier, more attractive. . . . Commitment, dedication, and practice will lead to improvement and allow me to impress others. . . .” To be sure, these and many other similar beliefs require something of the doer, and though they offer pathways of success they cannot guarantee against failure. Nevertheless, while some of our long-range plans will likely go unfulfilled or fall apart due to some outside contingency or lack in ability, at the most basic level, belief in human agency remains intact and for some very understandable, practical reasons: I drive to McDonald’s, order a value meal at the The Interactive Pessimism of Final Fantasy VII

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drive-through and voilà, I am feasting on a mass-produced hamburger and French fries; I sneak out of work early; I hit the snooze button on the alarm clock; I order a movie using my On Demand service; and so on. On the basis of such mundane episodes, most of us arrive at the justifiable, dramatized belief that our lives have a story to tell and, significantly, that these stories are plotted first and foremost by means of our freely chosen courses of action, as well as the effects of those actions on future outcomes. Through this dramatized belief we envision how we will relate to something in the future or how something happened in the past, while imagining our present consciousness as occupying the seat of central command. Agency is therefore always dramatic and objective, for it involves the active relationship with things both in the phenomenal, empirical real world and in our imaginations. It organizes our experiences of the sensible world into a coherent dramatic structure, establishing relationships and helping us to interpret and regulate our world. Most important, subjective adherence to the notion of agency confers on the individual a sense of indeterminability and control, of authorship, unity, and power. Thus, while the notion of agency would certainly resonate among philosophical optimists, common belief in the above dramatized structure is supported first and foremost by the common perception that actions produce knowable—at times even predictable—effects and that these can in turn be manipulated by the subsequent decisions of free agents. Moreover, while in some instances the connection between cause and effect is somewhat uncertain, the sheer volume of cases in which the connection is more readily apparent plays a compensatory function, such that we are likely to believe in it even in the absence of compelling evidence, thus securing an agential confirmation bias. In comparison, Ligotti’s depiction of humans as mere “puppets” or “meat machines” who behave programmatically simply does not ring true to most people. Even when faced with disaster, we typically trace the event back to some choice we made or failed to make—for example, “If only I’d left the house one minute earlier,” “If only I had not convinced my parents to fly Jet Blue,” and so on.18 Strictly speaking, these hypothetical scenarios are causally probable, but even if they were entirely irrational they would not for that reason be incomprehensible. For we have been told from the very beginning that our actions matter, that when we act we do so by freely choosing from a range of possibilities, and that by acting in “good faith,” as Jean-Paul Sartre would say, we can take control of the situation at hand and become the authors of our own life stories.19 This basic message, which is reinforced, continually, and through virtually all our communicative environments, renders virtually unthinkable the notion that A Feeling of Wrongness

there exist some difficulties that could not be overcome by means of an optimal set or sequence of free choices. The philosophical pessimists, however, have a rather different story to tell. In their view (but also, on this point, Heidegger’s), the end result of this coherent belief structure is not an acknowledgment of genuine freedom—much less its attainment—but rather the evasion or denial of death.20 Thus, even if pessimists were to concede the point that human beings are something more, something higher, than mere meat puppets, they would also conclude that such rhetorical flourishes are inessential to their overall argument about the meaning of life—and the meaningfulness of agency— in the light of certain death. Essentially this argument states that life is meaningless—or at best illusory—in the absence of death, for death is an ontological prerequisite for life; without death, life is never truly one’s own. The appeal to agency thus merely muddies the waters, substituting for life (or a life lived) a subjective core, or substratum, which is allegedly in control of producing the actions in which life consists. The results of this substitution, however, are as unsatisfyingly circular as they are myopically futile, at least as far as pessimistic reasoning goes. For agency, pessimists aver, does not amount to an adequate denial or evasion of death nor could it, for all human action—planned and unplanned alike—is powerless in the face of the facticity and inevitability of death. And ultimately, they would argue, such powerlessness belies the delusory nature of all the comforting “what if ” scenarios in which most of us routinely indulge—scenarios that, if realized, would merely delay (or displace) the inevitable without, however, ever facilitating the formation of an authentic being-towards-death. To these consoling feats of imaginative play, pessimists, we have seen, oppose the harsh light of undiluted, disagreeable-to-most realism. “We all die, and death is a part of every individual life—indeed is that which individuates human life,” the pessimist dourly proclaims. “The greatest minds throughout history could not outsmart death. The strongest bodies finally could not overcome it. In our final moments, death overtakes us all, and no belief in agency, no matter how strong the level of subjective adherence, can alter this cold, hard, brute fact. Death is the limit of any capacity for human agency (if such a capacity can even be said to exist).” The pessimists, indeed, have a compelling case. Certainly, we know that no series of decisions can culminate in the permanent avoidance of death; there is no secret code to decrypt, no esoteric “cheat.” At some level, every adult knows this, but most of us know this only in the abstract, while still fewer morbidly anticipate his or her end. In either case, we do not truly The Interactive Pessimism of Final Fantasy VII

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know death, for we do not orient ourselves in such a way that we could be said to have projected our lives onto the horizon of our death. For the vast majority of us it is not until death finally reveals itself to us as an event—as our event—not until it “comes for us” that we ever truly come to know it. Yet from a rhetorical perspective, such existential veracity does not automatically translate into persuasive effect. Even if most of us are deluded by an inauthentic sense of agency and freedom, even if we try to avoid death by way of so many misapprehensions of what life is and what is a part of us, the incontrovertible fact is: we do. And we cling onto this belief for all the above stated reasons but also—and just as importantly—despite the fact that we do, in fact, anticipate our demise, that we acquaint ourselves with death through numerous close encounters and the powerful emotions that attend the loss of an acquaintance or loved one—even a beloved character. Hence even here, at the virtual ground zero of pessimism, the optimists would appear to occupy the rhetorical high ground. Indeed, the very notion of agency enjoys the status of presumption while at the same time serving as a bulwark against—or, depending on one’s philosophical commitments, obstacle to—the confrontation with death. Mario Runs, Walks, Swims, and Jumps

While the other mass media artifacts we have analyzed are no strangers to the topos of death, none of them stages a confrontation with death on its own terms or engages with the kind of death denial that is performed by agency as a distinct anti-pessimistic strategy. (Indeed, weird fiction treats agency as a branch of the strategy of anchoring.) For that, rhetoricians would do well to turn their attention to the video game community, where its scholars, players, and critics have for some time been embroiled in a debate mirroring the disagreement between optimists and pessimists regarding human agency. Whether participants in the debate broadly favor or oppose video games as a recreational or multimodal artistic phenomenon, the majority of those weighing in support the idea, tacitly or explicitly, that video games amount to a means of exercising human agency. However, a notable minority of voices—no less vocal than philosophical pessimists but also greater in number—challenges this assumption. Beginning in the 1980s, critics—primarily parents and media pundits— treated the rising popularity of video games as a newly formed tributary of mindless mass media entertainment. Some of their criticisms, however, captured certain distinctive aspects that would distinguish video games from other similar forms of popular entertainment. In particular, the possibility of A Feeling of Wrongness

interactivity and nonlinearity would appear to afford video games a degree of agency not easily accessed by other media. Parents and various voices in the media focused on the act of playing video games as inculcation in a life of violence or gambling.21 Proponents of games also recognize this element of agency that distinguishes video games from other popular media, but as a point in favor of playing video games. Offering up a hypothetical world in which the much-derided video game precedes the universally appreciated book, popular science writer Steven Johnson provides what is perhaps the most rhetorically savvy defense of the former’s uniquely agential properties (or propensities): But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can’t control their narratives in any fashion—you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you. For those of us raised on interactive narratives, this property may seem astonishing. Why would anyone want to embark on an adventure utterly choreographed by another person? But today’s generation embarks on such adventures millions of times a day. This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they’re powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it’s a submissive one.22 For Johnson, as for most video game apologists, video games are not only a fundamentally different medium than books but also, arguably, a better one.23 Unlike books—and here we could metonymically include all communicative media in which “the one” communicates to or with “the many”—video games actively include “the user” (or “reader” or “consumer” or “viewer”) in the unfolding of a narrative that is by that very act interactive and, almost assuredly, nonlinear.24 The most vocal critics, to their credit, have largely abandoned the charge that video games destroy agency by providing just one more type of mindless entertainment—so much so that Johnson’s countercritique comes across as almost anachronistic, even as recently as 2005. This abandonment, however, did not result in an about-face among video game critics, and in the 1990s the chief criticism leveled against video games shifted from a focus on the potential cognitive side effects of video gameplay to the possible moral consequences. Specifically, critics adopted what is essentially one of Plato’s reasons for banishing mimetic poetry from the ideal city, claiming that video games helped to subvert the rule of intellect and reason in players, and in some special cases even inspiring real-world The Interactive Pessimism of Final Fantasy VII

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acts of violence, including murder (see Republic Book 10).25 Despite the allure of such causal explanations—especially in the immediate aftermath of tragic events—this line of argument suffers, rhetorically, due to its diminishing returns, having been previously used to call into question the moral influence of virtually all new media technologies. That is not to say that this line of argument met with no rhetorical success; however, beyond parental scrutiny, such effectiveness would appear to be limited to the establishment, in 1994, and subsequent expansion of the Entertainment Software Rating Board’s (ESRB) content rating system for video games. Although video game apologists have weighed in on whether and to what degree the content of video games changes the attitudes and behavior of a player, more recently they have focused their forensic efforts on championing the medium for its capacity to foster player agency. Video game scholar James Paul Gee is representative of this trend—and quite explicit regarding the potential of video games to encourage meaningful human activity. He writes, “The soul feeds on agency and meaningfulness. . . . I will argue that good video games are, in this sense, food for the soul.”26 Similarly, in a TED Talk that, at present, has been watched 4,287,753 times, game designer and digital technology advocate Jane McGonigal makes the case that such agential possibility can be harnessed to provide solutions to real-world problems.27 McGonigal is not alone in having this sentiment. Developers in general have come to embrace gamer choice as a conscious design strategy, a development that is perhaps best embodied in the much-repeated quotation of legendary game developer Sid Meier, which states, “A game is a series of interesting choices.” Game reviews, as well (both professional and user-supplied), tend to praise those games that provide the player with a range of alternate choices, while criticizing those that do not.28 Gamespot, the world’s largest specialty video game retailer, captures this feeling—as well as that feeling’s salience to the video game community—with its only half-ironic slogan, “power to the player.”29 Still, several notable scholars have treated the notion of player agency with a degree of skepticism. For example, professor of communication and culture Janet Murray argues that while players clearly do make choices in a game they are nevertheless beholden to the designers’ authorial power to shape the narrative.30 Recently, media studies scholar Alec Charles has expanded on Murray’s argument, suggesting that the choices themselves, apart from the question of their delimitation, do not amount to genuine instances or opportunities for agency; somewhat pessimistically, he claims that the availability of choice presents players with—at most—the illusion A Feeling of Wrongness

of agency, one that “re-envisages the immutable, impersonal edifice of the game as an extension of the gamer’s own subjectivity—as if the player could somehow reconfigure the programmatic structure of the game, could escape its preprogrammed linearity (which is a multi-linearity, but is still a linearity, and a finite one at that).”31 Thus, even though players may feel as though they are capitalizing on an opportunity to demonstrate agency, the confines of the video game’s code deny the possibility for any meaningful player choices, as all possible choices are but a function of programmers’ game-constitutive design plans. Such arguments, however, while rhetorically sound are nevertheless limited, with respect both to their persuasive and practical effects. Like hard-lined pessimists who deny the reality of human agency, critics of video game agency reach very few nonacademic players (due to the well-known and numerous constraints of specialized knowledge fields); what is more, even among those familiar with their arguments, they enjoy few adherents, either within or beyond academe. All things being equal, most players—like most people—simply believe (and with good reason) that they possess and exert agency and that their choices are free and are of consequence, either in the real or virtual world. Whereas professional, credentialed critics see signs of limitation, video game enthusiasts tend to see possibility and indeterminability. This tendency, however, is not unique to seventh- and eighth-generation video games but emerges at least as early as the introduction of the third generation of video game consoles in 1983. A review of the original Super Mario Brothers for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)—perhaps the single most well-known and all-time popular video game title—discusses how “Mario walks, runs, swims, and jumps his way through various worlds of the Mushroom Kingdom, avoiding the Koopa Troopa and other nasty creatures. There are countless ways that he can discover mushrooms. . . . The graphics are cute and comical, the music lively, but it’s the great depth of play action that keeps you playing again and again.”32 Absent from this comment about the depth of play and Mario’s many abilities is any mention of the characters’ limitations. “Why can’t you pick up a turtle shell or move in three dimensions?” These and other similar questions are not the questions of players’ themselves but are only asked by people who do not understand or play video games. Accepting limited inputs is a necessary precondition to deriving pleasure from video gameplay. On that score, little if anything as changed since 1983. A review of Mass Effect, a title available only on seventh-generation consoles (2005–2012), gushes about how “your choices dictate the way all the key events play out.”33 Significantly, these The Interactive Pessimism of Final Fantasy VII

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choices are limited to dialogue options, all of which are preprogrammed by the game’s creators. Players make choices, freely, but the type and range of those choices is relatively minimal, or so it would appear. Games, however, deploy a variety of techniques at various levels of sophistication, from locked doors to invisible walls that shuffle players about, which encourage players to believe they are in control. While video game critics like Murray and Charles might argue that such variety merely pulls the wool over players’ eyes, a more full-blooded pessimist would argue that players’ relationships to games mirrors our relationship to life and that rather than serving as a foil for “genuine” agency in the real world, video games actually belie the artifice of agency as such. In life as in our virtual worlds, the pessimist might gleefully point out, authorship regarding the range of actualizable possibilities is limited by contexts over which we have little if any control. Although the player’s individual existence is not “thrown” into any given virtual world in the same way, or to the same degree, that it is thrown into the real, nonvirtual world—experiencing little in the way of a connection between the virtual past and present, for instance—there is a sense in which the matrix within which the player chooses is similar to the idea of the past as a matrix not chosen.34 From that perspective it would thus appear that critics of agency who limit their critiques to the realm of video games simultaneously go too far and not far enough. Choice is either meaningful or it is not. And if it is not meaningful in the context of video games, in which the range of choice is already programmed, then it is equally meaningless in the context of ones’ own nonvirtual existence. Video games, on this more pessimistic view, are important because they conceal or disclose the illusory nature of agency altogether, not merely as it exists (if it does) in a pixelated universe; academics are therefore simply misguidedly and naively wrong if they think that video games either present an inferior model of agency or make a farce of so-called authentic choice. For choice, according to pessimists, is always already unreal, no matter the context and despite nobility of purpose. More important than these pessimistic rejoinders, however, is the fact video games typically do not inspire in their players a skepticism regarding the veracity of agency. Nevertheless, sometimes video games are designed in such a way as to make clear the players’ lack of agency, whether by intent or accident. For the poorly constructed game, the frustration or lack of player agency can result from such deficiencies as unresponsive controls, technical glitches, or uneven, jerky gameplay. Player irritation notwithstanding, such attacks on agency are unlikely to provoke much soul-searching on the part of frustrated player. If one purchased, say, 1995’s Daryl F. Gates Police A Feeling of Wrongness

Quest: SWAT for the personal computer (PC), and was disappointed with the “repetitive, tedious game play,” then that person could simply move on to more rewarding gaming experiences, such as those offered by Chrono Trigger, Warcraft II, or Full Throttle.35 For the failure of SWAT was a failure of a particular game, not the medium itself, and for that reason its shortfalls did not call into question the agential viability of games in general. A notable exception, however, is Atari’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), a game remembered primarily for players’ avatars falling endlessly into poorly marked pits. So critical was this flaw that, today, the game is best remembered for having almost single-handedly destroyed the home video game industry.36 Yet even in this extreme case, E.T. was only an indictment of video games, but there is no reason to think it caused players to call into question the nature of human agency writ large. If anything, it only emboldened parents to admonish their children with the directive of, “If games are so boring, then go outside and play.” Much to the horror of Atari’s investors, for a period of time players actually did abandon their consoles, until Nintendo Entertainment System brought video games roaring back with a vengeance in 1983. The impact of this surge in video game enthusiasm, however, was not limited to the growth and revitalization of a particular entertainment industry but also extended to the quality and diversity of gameplay. Nintendo’s success, in other words, allowed for the maturation of video games as a medium. Specifically, it made possible the differentiation of “good” games—in other words, games that players find enjoyable and mechanically competent but are largely indistinct within the broader video game canon—and games whose appeal is more cerebral or “readerly.” Unlike the more conventional video game fare, the latter type is designed to prompt critical reflection in the player, to entice them through “mere” play into thinking carefully about not only the genre of games but also a range of philosophical questions. Bioshock (2007), a game that enjoys a 96 percent rating on Metacritic, is exemplary in this regard.37 At first glance, it appears to be a standard first-person shooter, albeit one that takes place within the fantastical locale of an underwater city. Players engage in standard video game fare: killing bad guys, dodging bullets, and acquiring increasingly more powerful weapons, all while being guided from objective to objective by the disembodied voice of the friendly nonplayer character (NPC) Atlas. However, this conventionalism comes to a spectacular collapse about two-thirds of the way through the game, when players learn that rather than being helped by Atlas they have been laboring under his superior psychic control. With this realization, all of the gaming conventions that players had previously taken for granted as normal design constraints—from The Interactive Pessimism of Final Fantasy VII

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linear narrative structure to the inability to explore the map freely and to undertake actions beyond those prescribed by the game—become evidence of mind control. Structurally, nothing has changed for the players or the gameplay. And yet, the meaning of that play, as well as of player identity, is radically destabilized, for it calls into question the meaning and extent of the entire range of players’ choices, thereby threatening their agential status. Commenting on this “tragic” moment of reversal and recognition, digital media and video game theorist Rowan Tulloch argues that Bioshock deconstructs player agency, demonstrating—indeed “maliciously” celebrating—“the lack of authorial control players have over their ludic experience and the particularly finite bounds within which their agency is contained.”38 Bioshock, in effect, rips away the curtain of free choice and reveals the various strings that animate our so-called player agency. Even more important, Bioshock’s clever critique of gameplay implies a broader insight into human agency as such. As Tulloch argues, “Bioshock carefully deconstructs its own operation and in doing so forces us to deconstruct ourselves.”39 For Tulloch this critical analysis assumes the form of a Foucauldian appreciation of the ways in which power relations prefigure and produce distinct notions of the subject, which include assumptions about human agency. At the same time, this deconstructive maneuver suggests another interpretive possibility: namely, that given the right narrative framework, a virtual, interactive text could promote a reexamination of agency in a way that comports not with post-Marxian modes of analysis but with the lens of philosophical pessimism. Bioshock is therefore valuable, as are Tulloch’s post-structural insights, because it points up the possibility that a video game could potentially upend agency and in a way that forces a confrontation with death and thereby makes more difficult the kind of unreflective death-denial that pervades the everyday—at least for gamers. Live, Die, Repeat

Unsurprisingly, death is ubiquitous in video games. The average game of Donkey Kong (1983) does not last a minute before the player dies.40 The average playthrough of the popular, role-playing game (RPG) Dark Souls (2011) results in 2,541 deaths by a player.41 As perhaps the single most common trope in video games, death owes its ever-presence to the business model of arcades. Video arcade games were coin operated and, therefore, developers had an incentive to limit a player’s game time per quarter. Since a player’s virtual death resulted in the restart of the game, its frequency ensured that the player (or player’s parents) paid more money or left the machine open A Feeling of Wrongness

to a new, paying customer.42 As the economic model for the game industry shifted from arcades to home consoles, the importance of death as a quarter-generator disappeared, but death remained an omnipresent feature. While widespread player deaths continued, game designers began to reduce the penalties for death. Games began to give players continues (more chances per life) or save points to which their avatars could return if they died (rather than rebegin at the start of the game). With the introduction of sixth-generation video game consoles, games now typically allow players to save whenever and wherever they like, ensuring that death means little more than repeating the last few minutes of action. Given that a confrontation with death in real life can force a confrontation with one’s lack of agency—as illustrated by Tennessen’s example of the Russian spy—one may expect the same in the virtual world, but this is far from the case. Rather than experiencing virtual death as one’s own, players tend to sever their identification with their onscreen avatars in the moment of death.43 The character dies, but the player moves right along, unfazed, either within or outside the game. Life, in some form, continues relatively unperturbed. Consequently, video games do not serve to acquaint players with death as their “ownmost” but instead encourage players to fixate— morbidly, detachedly—on the possibility or likelihood of their avatar’s impermanent demise. The result is a perpetual dance with, or race against, death, but one that is experienced as anything but one’s own. In quality, though not intensity, the relationship that the player enacts with death is akin to that which is performed by the reading of newspaper obituaries: both flirt with death though in a way that functions to keep the specter at bay, something in the manner of a pre-exorcism. Moreover, as digital media scholar Karin Wenz explains, each death offers players the heuristic opportunity to learn from their mistakes and, thereby, to optimize their performances: “The omnipresence of death and dying in video games can be seen as based in the computer’s ontology. If we understand the computer as a simulation machine, then we can challenge the concept of mortality. While symbolic representations of death in novels and movies allow for an imaginary examination of death and dying and philosophical questions of mortality, video games differ in their death simulations. They hinder this reflection and examination because of their replay function, as this highlights repeatability without consequences.”44 Yet even when such reflection and examination are present—as in games that include deliberate steps to heighten the consequences of death, say, by having players design unique characters and making the loss of one’s avatar permanent—death fails to The Interactive Pessimism of Final Fantasy VII

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achieve authenticity and is instead experienced as pertaining to a generic “they self.” Instead of projecting their lives onto the horizons of their deaths, players typically view the loss of their custom-made avatars—into which players, presumably, invested thought, planning, care, and the like—not with existential dread or even the mourning due to a loved one but rather, as Wenz writes, “as a loss of a toy [they] paid a lot for and invested a lot of time in developing.”45 In some cases, this feature of emotional, creative investment goes beyond merely failing to cultivate an authentic being-towards-death and fosters a propensity for sadomasochism. Indeed, the risk of such loss is what attracts players to so-called hardcore modes for games such as Diablo II (2000) and Diablo III (2012), in which any death permanently kills the player’s character. Quite apart from whether and how such a feature complicates player belief in agency, the risk of such loss, as well as the fear associated with it, contributes to players’ excitement while simultaneously sublimating this fear of death into a form of engaged amusement.46 However, not all video game deaths are those of the players, far from it. A successful play of the arcade game Galaga (1981), for instance, sees the player destroying thousands of alien ships, while Dynasty Warriors (1997) for the PlayStation has players wade through hordes of combatants, leaving a trail of bodies in their wake. Presumably, these types of video game deaths are not meant to inspire a reaction beyond that of taking a certain (perverse) satisfaction in the carnage. Occasionally, however, games attempt to leverage characters’ deaths in order to produce a nonsublimated emotional impact.47 Such emotive deaths can serve as major plot points and are typically meant to motivate the player to action. For example, the death of Michelle Payne in the Max Payne series provides motivation for Max’s violent revenge plot against the game’s villain. In the God of War series, the Kratos is haunted by the deaths of his wife and daughter. The player, of course, is intended to take on, vicariously, such characters’ emotional states, just as readers of fiction and moviegoers are meant to identify with the trials and tribulations of the protagonist. Although the player may be powerless to prevent certain characters’ deaths, these deaths do not diminish the player’s agency, quite the opposite in fact. By highlighting the lack of agency in those characters killed outside of or beyond gameplay, these deaths serve to highlight the agency enjoyed by the player in his or her quest for vengeance. While each new play of Max Payne ensures that Michelle Payne dies, it also promises each player the opportunity to exact retribution. Hence, while the deaths of various characters may be inherent to a video game’s story line, death is almost never inevitable for the player. If a player A Feeling of Wrongness

makes a poor choice or sequence of choices that results in the character’s death, typically the player has the option of replaying the game in a new way, of making alternate choices that, hopefully, will evade death. The “tragic” nature of non-player-controlled deaths simply throws into relief the special, agential nature of the players’ characters while simultaneously reinforcing an inauthentic being-towards-death, a contradictory hermeneutics of being that states, “We know that we will die, but we also know that death is only for other people.” Tennessen selects Tolstoy’s short story, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” as representative of such cognitive dissonance: Ivan was thoroughly convinced of the logic of the syllogism: ‘Caius is a man, all men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal.’ That Caius-man in the abstract-was mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from all others. He had been little Vanya, with a mamma and a papa, with Mitya and Volodya, with the toys, a coachman and a nurse, afterwards with Katenka and with all the joys, griefs, and delights of childhood, boyhood, and youth. What did Caius know of the smell of that striped leather ball Vanya had been so fond of? Had Caius kissed his mother’s hand like that, and did the silk of her dress rustle so for Caius? Had he rioted like that at school when the pastry was bad? Had Caius been in love like that? Could Caius preside at a session as he did? Caius really was mortal, and it was right for him to die; but for me, little Vanya, Ivan Ilych, with all my thoughts and emotions, it’s altogether a different matter. It cannot be that I ought to die. That would be too terrible.48 Consequently, while these deaths can be tragic, they are tragic in a rather quotidian—and, in our terminology—death-denying way, for they stand in for the all-too human attempt—conscious or no, structural or decisive—to flee from the death that is always already one’s own. The fact that such an avoidance strategy relies on an antilogy is not an effective argument against it but only a testament to its deep-rootedness and virtual ineradicability—at least via rational means but also, or so it would appear, by means of virtual interactivity. The Death of Aerith

Final Fantasy VII was released in 1997 by the Japanese company Square. It takes place in the heavily industrialized fictional world of Gaia. The game’s The Interactive Pessimism of Final Fantasy VII

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antagonists, the Shinra Electric Power Company, are using machines to suck the mystical life force from the planet, an action that threatens the entire planet’s ecology. The player takes on the role of Cloud Strife, a former mercenary, to defeat Shinra and restore balance to the world. Later the player has the option to control other characters, like Cait Sith, a robotic cat, Barret Wallace, a leader of an armed resistance movement, and Aerith Gainsborough, a flower seller. The game fits rather comfortably in the genre of “turn-based role-playing game.” The player moves his or her avatar around, talking with computer-controlled players to find out new information and advance the plot. When a conflict occurs, the player is moved to an alternate screen, where they issue combat directives to members of their party like Cloud, Barret, and Aerith. The player and their computer-controlled antagonists take turns issuing orders, like attack, heal, or use item. Succeeding in combat gives the player experience points, which can be used to make their characters more powerful. At present, these types of games and the Final Fantasy series in particular, are enormously popular, but this was not the case in 1997. In fact, Japanese role-playing games had a niche audience outside of Japan, and Final Fantasy II, III, and V were never even released in the United States, one of the biggest gaming markets.49 Square made an active effort to use Final Fantasy VII as a gateway into Western markets. It deployed a massive and unprecedented (for a video game) advertisement campaign, including TV commercials that aired during primetime shows such as Saturday Night Live, The Simpsons, and major sporting events.50 As a result, Final Fantasy VII became Square’s best-selling game, moving more than 10 million units.51 What’s more, the game’s success did much to popularize the genre outside of Japan and helped ensure that later Final Fantasy games would also be enormously popular.52 At the same time, this success provided the conditions for one of the most iconic deaths in video game history. IGN, one of the oldest and most famous video game review websites, lists the death of Aerith as number one on its list of “Top 100 Video Game Moments.” Death, as we know, happens all the time in video games. “In Call of Duty,” writes the anonymous lister, “it’s a slap on the wrist, in Dark Souls it’s education, in Pac-Man it’s another coin for the machine. In Final Fantasy VII, though, one death is a genre-defining moment.”53 Indeed, Aerith’s death is so memorable that, according to A.V. Club, “Legions of Final Fantasy fans still share their experience of Aerith’s death online, to the point that ‘Did you cry when Aerith died?’ has become a standard icebreaker.”54 So lasting has the A Feeling of Wrongness

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Figure 5 Cloud lays Aerith to rest. Final Fantasy VII, directed by Hironobu Sakaguchi.

effect of this one death been on players that it seems to have cast a shadow over fans’ anticipation of the game’s scheduled remake. Previewing the Final Fantasy VII remake for Forever Geek, Remy Carreiro writes, “[Aerith’s death is] a moment I sort of prayed I would never have to live again.”55 There are two overarching reasons that help to explain why Aerith’s death produced such a singularly intense reaction among gamers, why it stands out against innumerable other video game deaths. The first reason is that Final Fantasy VII itself creates a sense of agency vis-à-vis death and then utterly shatters it—in much the same way that Bioshock treats players as capable of meaningful choices only to pull the agential rug out from under them. Throughout Final Fantasy VII players have the ability to direct the progression of the narrative: the dialogue choices may result in, for example, a date taking place with one of four characters; not stealing money from a young boy’s dresser early in the game means a potion will be there at a later stage; and so on.56 While many of these decisions are relatively minor (both intrinsically and instrumentally), the game also affords players a high degree of agency with respect to combat and, related, death. One of the more significant of such affordances is the variety of ways in which the player may reverse his or her death: if the player’s party dies, the player has the option of simply restarting the game from a save point and making a different set of decisions that, hopefully, will allow the player to proceed safely. What The Interactive Pessimism of Final Fantasy VII

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is more, if a party member loses all of his or her life (“hit points” in the game), then in battle that character will crumble to the ground, leaving the fight to the other members of the player’s party; however, winning the fight ensures not only that the character will recover but also that no amount of punishment in a battle will be fatal. Even if all of a player’s characters lose their hit points, death is no real obstacle—not even for an inexperienced player—since, as the character Cloud’s dialogue makes clear in the game’s informal tutorial, “When you are wiped out, you start back from the last save point. Even a weakling like you, can make it out of the roughest places as long as you hang in there and fight. You should be glad!” On top of that, players need not even wait until the battle is finished to revive their characters. In the event a player is “killed” in battle, he or she can use a “Phoenix Down” item for complete player revival. Phoenix Downs are not even particularly rare, and the player can acquire one in a chest during the first ten minutes of gameplay. In all likelihood Aerith would have “died” many times prior to her final death at the hands of Sephiroth and simply been revived by a Phoenix Down or by successfully completing the fight. Together, the save points and the presence of a life-reviving item create the expectation on the part of the player that death is more of a transitory state of inconvenience, rather than an irreversible fate. And yet for that very reason Aerith’s death defies the game’s rules and narrative—a narrative that provides for individuals’ revival through the use of magic, combined with a set of procedures that permit the use of such magic via various items and checkpoints. None of these mechanisms, however, are adequate to save Aerith from the jaws of death, and the game does not trouble itself with explaining why, and yet such blatant incongruity of player expectations and the permanence of Aerith’s death suggests the intentional (rather than accidental) violation of form. Indeed, according to one of the games designers, Yoshinori Kitase, the perceived conflict between player expectancy and actuality is an intended rhetorical effect: “Death comes suddenly and there is no notion of good or bad attached to it. It leaves, not a dramatic feeling but a great emptiness. When you lose someone you loved very much you feel this big empty space and think, ‘If I had known this was coming, I would have done things differently.’ These are the feelings I wanted to arouse in the players with Aerith’s death relatively early in the game.”57 The goal, in other words, was to create in players a feeling of hopelessness and despair, “an empty space”—to arouse a desire to do things differently, even though no way of doing things, no sequence of choices, could result in the Aerith’s salvation. Like life, the game encourages players to indulge A Feeling of Wrongness

in “what if” fantasies, or hypothetical scenarios of paths untaken; yet even more cruelly than in actual life, Aerith’s death allows players to experience the futility of each alternative course of action. Upon repeat plays, players learn, painfully, that Aerith’s death is simply unavoidable, that nothing they can do will alter this facticity. Similar to the function of Bioshock’s reversal, the discordance between expectation and outcome creates the conditions for a reexamination of agency. Yet whereas in the former players were prepared for such reexamination through the effective use of foreshadowing, Aerith’s death provides little if anything in the way of audience satisfaction. Indeed quite the opposite seems to be the case: as Kitase’s statement reveals, Aerith’s death is designed to bring about, even reproduce, intense dissatisfaction. Moreover, as surprising as Bioshock’s reversal it nevertheless remains consonant with the game’s narrative arc; the same cannot be said for Final Fantasy VII, in which Aerith’s death actively dissimulates the influence of authorial control and intent—the designed-ness of despair. The shattering of belief in agency is therefore redoubled in the presence of a kind of accidental fatalism: Aerith’s death, though only a possibility, cannot be otherwise—and nothing the player does can alter that accidental eventuality. But Aerith’s death also stands out among previous games in the Final Fantasy franchise. In the first place, although Final Fantasy I–VI included the deaths of a number of NPCs, these deaths were portrayed as in some way meaningful. Characters would sacrifice themselves as a way of disrupting a villain’s grand schemes, thereby conferring on their deaths a nobility of purpose. In contrast to such “worthwhile” deaths—all which could be said to work in the service of anchoring—Aerith’s demise accomplishes nothing other than instilling in players a feeling of uselessness (malignant futility, as Ligotti might put it). According to another of the game’s designer’s, Tetsuya Nomura, the death is meant to strike players as “sudden and unexpected.”58 Certainly, he is correct, but the death also accomplishes something much more and much less than surprise. In achieving nothing, Aerith’s unavoidable death-for-no-reason vividly demonstrates to players their utter lack of agency. Unlike other of the Final Fantasy installments, wherein character deaths further the game’s plot and are ultimately accepted as necessary sacrifices by players, Aerith’s meaningless death invites a pointless and, possibly, continuing pointless, examination of how it could have been avoided. The second reason that Aerith’s death is so crushing for players is that Aerith exists at the intersection of four distinct identities. In the first place, Aerith is the first character that players encounter in the game, a fact that The Interactive Pessimism of Final Fantasy VII

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immediately marks her as an important plot point. While not entirely in keeping with the “damsel-in-distress” stock character type, such as Zelda or Princess Peach, Aerith is nevertheless a damsel to be discovered, an object of player interest and speculation. Unlike Zelda or Princess Peach, however, players meet Aerith relatively early, roughly two to three hours into the game, at which point Aerith transforms into an interlocutor, someone with whom the players discuss their pasts, their dreams, and even flirt with. Players then travel to Aerith’s house and meet her mother, an encounter that helps foster in players a deeper understanding of and connection to the character than they would experience vis-à-vis more disposable NPCs whose death merely serves to advance the plot. Given the game mechanics of Final Fantasy VII, however, Aerith inhabits yet a third role, that of a controlled protagonist. Unlike most NPCs, players have the opportunity to control Aerith in combat, just as they control the “main” character, Cloud. What’s more, this playability of Aerith is not a brief interlude nor is it optional. Players must take a turn playing as Aerith for several hours of time—though in all likelihood she has been part of the player’s party for around ten hours prior to her death. Aerith as player avatar is thus profoundly significant because it connects both her life and death with the player’s own. Unlike previous deaths in the game, however, the player cannot dissociate from Aerith at the moment of her death in order to plan a better strategy that would keep her alive; instead the game simply moves forward. Finally, Aerith exists as a set of computational procedures that allows the player to move through the game in a particular way. Aerith specializes in magic and has a variety of powerful healing abilities that are unavailable to other characters. The death of Aerith likely disrupts the balanced party composition set up by the player, with characters like Cloud dealing damage and Aerith providing first aid. This procedural absence serves as a constant reminder of Aerith’s absence, making it much more difficult for players to put her out of their minds, as they can do with relative ease with respect to standard NPCs.59 Aerith’s existence at the intersection of these four identities therefore complicates players’ ability to deny her death, which is at once their own, having been integrated so thoroughly into both the game’s structure and players’ virtual identities. Tried-and-true strategies suited to one identity—dissociating from her avatar at the moment of death, for example—fail to account for her myriad roles in the game. For these reasons, Aerith’s death is not simply a point of morbid fixation, much less something that can be evaded. Rather, Aerith’s death forces a confrontation, at the level of agency, between the player and that which is one’s ownmost. A Feeling of Wrongness

Aerith Lives

When Sephorith kills Aerith, Cloud responds, “This can’t be real,” a sentiment shared by many of the game’s players. In many ways, this is an entirely understandable response. Video games are designed to give players a sense of agency; indeed, this is one of the primary purposes of the medium. Final Fantasy VII is therefore remarkable, in the first instance, because it reinforces this sense of agency only to subvert it by way of death. The intense disconnect created by the clash between a linear narrative involving Aerith’s inevitable death and players’ sense of agency is by no means academic but caused a massive level of cognitive dissonance for its legions of fans. Representative of this user effect is the anonymous player who writes, “I . . . stopped playing FFVII for a week because I was so upset. So I’m glad that a lot of people felt the same way about her death as I did.”60 Many gamers, however, were not immediately driven to despair but rather, encouraged by the game’s previous elevation of player agency, sought a solution. Released in 1997, Final Fantasy VII debuted in the early days of the internet, prior to “lets plays” that use video to chronicle an entire game and demonstrate to less experienced players how best to advance in a particular game. In general, reliable information of any kind about video games was relatively scarce and unreliable. In this environment, it is only natural that rumors to the effect of “Aerith may not have to die” would proliferate. These rumors began with “Lansing,” who claimed to be an employee at Square assigned to translate Final Fantasy from the original Japanese to English.61 Lansing offered a cryptic and complicated set of steps a player could take to save Aerith from death. This initial rumor spread and then mutated through cyberspace, to such a degree that many other gamers adopted the mantel of “revivalists”—even after Lansing admitted his solution was a hoax.62 For these revivalists, death could be avoided if only the player distracted the right fish or discovered a secret, level four healing power. A Final Fantasy VII rumors site from around the release of the game catalogues eleven different ways to revive Aerith.63 Most of the recommendations were literally impossible, and, of course, no combination of player behaviors could prevent Aerith’s death or bring her back to life. Despite the constant debunking, however, new revivalists continue to emerge, in a desperate, doomed-to-fail attempt to flee from a virtual beings-toward-death. In 2013, Christine Love released the game Hate Plus, which had an achievement “Level Four Revive Material,” earned by beating the game without the death of the character “*Mute.” The achievement was impossible to earn and this was hinted at in its name “Level Four Revive The Interactive Pessimism of Final Fantasy VII

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Material,” which references the fabled (but nonexistent) fourth level of healing power that online rumors claimed would revive Aerith. Notwithstanding the reference to a nonexistent item, the “Level Four Revive Material” achievement resulted in a lengthy forum thread dedicated to achieving the impossible.64 In its final incarnation, the thread grew to no fewer than sixty-eight pages and contained many posts from people who “seemed to genuinely believe Aeris [Aerith] could be revived in Final Fantasy.”65 Sixteen years after the release of Final Fantasy VII, people still cling to the possibility of Aerith’s salvation. From one perspective, such “revivalists” may appear to embody an optimistic, even admirable, willingness to believe, while from a contrary, pessimistic perspective it would seem to epitomize an unwillingness to confront the horror of virtual death, to champion an apocryphal, quasi-religious faith. Most religions, however, locate their moment of spiritual confirmation subsequent to an individual’s death. This is to say that most religious truths cannot be corroborated in the sensible, temporal realm, if at all. The various ways to revive Aerith, however, could be tested (and, in all likelihood, were put to the test by any number of “devoted” gamers). Nevertheless, these doomed attempts to cheat death through the reclamation of agency worked only to intensify the disappointment of the faithful. For by repeatedly raising the prospect of avoiding death, Final Fantasy repeatedly dashes those hopes, driving home the message that death is not avoidable, that attempts to flee from death are malignantly futile, that death’s denial is, in the long-range, worse than acceptance. To the existential chagrin of revivalists, the belief that things could be otherwise translates in practice to the increasing despondency that is heir to Sisyphean failure, forcing an awareness of the illusoriness of agency in the face of one’s ownmost, which is nonrelational, and which is not to be outstripped. In addition to undermining the attempt to preserve an inauthentic beings-toward-death, Final Fantasy also undermines Zapffe’s four coping mechanisms—indeed, the sabotage of death-denial precludes any other counterpessimistic strategy, no matter how spontaneous or ingrained. For there is no need to distract, to isolate, to anchor, or to sublimate Aerith’s death if one can simply utilize his or her agency to alter the course of events. Thus, unavoidability of death renders the other four strategies rhetorically null. Players may anchor Aerith’s death in their initial playthrough, rationalizing that she must die to advance the story. However, when they find a rumor online posted by someone claiming to have discovered a way to avoid Aerith’s death, these same players repudiate anchoring, change their A Feeling of Wrongness

attitudinal course, and try to save her. When they realize the online solution will not work, they reanchor, but this time on a much weaker foundation. The cycle continues, with the most optimistic players eagerly trying their hand at the most recently discovered deus ex machina. Some players (perhaps the same ones)—perhaps also operating on an expectation of agency—took their revivalist efforts outside of the game. A group of Japanese players sent a lengthy petition to Final Fantasy VII’s developers requesting Aerith’s return.66 This strategy met with as much success as the revivalists’ digital efforts. Some people are simply determined to flee from death until, like the Russian spy, it is staring them in the face. Staring at the Sun, Staring at Death

François de La Rochefoucauld writes, “Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily,” a maxim even more true about one’s own inevitable death.67 Like the sun, death hangs over us all, but is easy enough to ignore in one’s daily life. What’s more, those relatively few who do engage with the concept of death typically do so in a shallow, self-protective manner, or morbid manner—ultimately fleeing from death just as most everyone else but doing so with less honesty. The task of forcing others to confront death as one’s ownmost becomes in many ways, like asking them to stare into the sun: they cannot because they have been habituated to an incapacity to orient themselves to a being-towards-death; hence, even if they were to reorient themselves such that their lives were projected onto the horizon of their death, such a projection would likely fail to enrich their life in any meaningful way. They would simply not be up to the task of wresting meaning from the fact of their death. One’s death is agreeable, or not anathema, only when it exists at a temporal distance, when it can be held at arm’s length as personally meaningless abstraction, as a “situation” that one day will be dealt with—but not today. Safely distanced and properly sanitized, death from this vantage can even become palatable, a delectable treat for the morbid aesthete. And yet, there is another relevant metaphorical aspect of the sun. As another French intellectual, Georges Bataille, understands it, the sun is first and foremost a figure of unrestrained energies resulting in death, ironically comparable to the anus as a symbol of residual waste.68 That is to say, the sun’s stare is constant, irrespective of whether its gaze is reciprocated. The sun-as-death is an ever-present reality. By means of innovating storytelling and the video game medium, Final Fantasy VII employs a rhetorical The Interactive Pessimism of Final Fantasy VII

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legerdemain whereby players are made painfully aware of the sun’s unrelenting rays, of death not as fact but as one’s ownmost. It accomplishes this sleight of hand by presenting the player with notions of agency only to swap it for the inevitable. Players fail to save Aerith and fail again, each time bringing into relief their powerlessness against a death that is theirs and from which there can be no escape. 136

A Feeling of Wrongness

5 “All Hope Abandon” Transhumanism’s Hidden Hellscape Variety notwithstanding, most optimistic strategies for responding to pessimism consist of either the avoidance or justification of the world’s suffering. As we have seen, some of the most powerful of these strategies rely for their rhetorical effectiveness not on the force of rational argumentation but on the immediacy and intensity of deep-seated, life-affirming biases: life is good, whereas pain, suffering, and death are bad; life, though at times painful, is ultimately rewarding; in order to find happiness, one must ignore what is unpleasant; “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade”; and so on. None of these bromides, by their very nature, forward a well-thoughtout worldview, and yet that very lack goes a long way toward explaining the efficacy of Zapffe’s four anti-pessimistic strategies of isolation, anchoring, distraction, and sublimation. Sentiments and their manifestation as sound bites are much more difficult to counter than explicit arguments, much less entire worldviews that are buttressed by rational argumentation. No, much better that the optimist stick with what is proven to work, namely, with deploying frames of acceptance and rejection in order to highlight what is good and positive about life while bracketing or transmuting that which is negative and disagreeable.1 After all, most audiences are already primed for such messaging, having been socialized into that very pattern of reality selection-deflection. Hence, while most people may have doubts about the means of achieving happiness—what are they, which among them is most efficacious, and so on—like Pericles at the crossroads, they are much less unsure of what happiness actually consists of: namely, a state of pleasure or contentment, satisfaction with the quality or standard of life. To be sure, such assurance about the content of happiness makes it possible to lump together an otherwise motley crew of orientations and worldviews, to confer on them

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a common identity while simultaneously respecting their differences. At the same time, this confidence helps to preserve the alterity of those outlooks that either deny the viability or reality of happiness or exclude it from the temporal realm. What it cannot do, however, is account for anomalies that do not accord with this basic dichotomous structure. While history is no stranger to such peculiarities of belief, recently, one of the more significant to appear is the twentieth-century theory that the human race can evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations, especially by means of modern science and technology. Commonly referred to as transhumanism, this belief system makes no bones about life’s unpleasantness—certainly no apologies—but rather promises a disembodied paradisal future, so blissfully splendid that it justifies any kind or amount of present suffering. While Zapffe would most likely classify transhumanism as a subheading of Western anchoring—thereby dismissing it as merely rhetorical—his critique is only meaningful so long as the transhumanist paradise never arrives, which is to say that it is only provisionally valid. Nevertheless, Zapffe’s schema of anti-pessimistic reasoning makes possible the compelling dismissal of transhumanism as an instance of collective wish fulfillment. Some very smart, inventive people, however, beg to differ. The American computer scientist, futurist, and inventor Ray Kurzweil is one such person. As an inventor, Kurzweil lays claim to having created the first device capable of achieving text-to-speech synthesis (converting print into audio), as well as the first omni-font optical character recognition; he was also the principal member of the team responsible for developing the first charge-coupled device flatbed scanner.2 These accomplishments notwithstanding, Kurzweil’s primary claim to fame consists in his reputation as an evangelist for the transhumanist movement. In a series of books reminiscent of Alvin Toffler’s popular futurist trilogy, Kurzweil describes a near future in which the exponential increase in various technologies will, among other things, enable human beings to transcend their corporeal-cognitive limitations.3 Embracing a term that had been popularized by Vernor Vinge in a 1993 essay, “The Coming Technological Singularity,” Kurzweil writes in The Singularity Is Near, “We will gain power over our fates. Our mortality will be in our own hands.”4 Such augmentation will be accomplished, he argues, by merging the human brain with nonbiological intelligences, such that human consciousness will eventually be transferred from its biological storehouse and uploaded into computers at once intelligent and spiritual.5 Once this technological transcendence has been achieved—an event predicted to occur somewhere between 2040 and 2045 (either all at once, on A Feeling of Wrongness

Vinge’s view, or gradually, according to Kurzweil)—human intelligence will undergo exponential growth, as suggested by Moore’s Law.6 As a function of this breakneck technological innovation, newly emergent digital beings will be able to program their own individualized, computer-generated paradises, while an artificial superintelligence capable of unprecedented self-improvement will likewise prove itself capable of solving, literally, all of humanity’s problems—that is, what had previously been understood as “human” problems. Kurzweil writes, “To this day I remain convinced of this basic philosophy: no matter what quandaries we face—business problems, health issues, relationship difficulties, as well as the great scientific, social, and cultural challenges of our time—there is an idea that can enable us to prevail.”7 Kurzweil, however, is hardly the only prophet of transhumanism. Austrian-born robotics theorist Hans Moravec, American mathematical physicist and cosmologist Frank J. Tipler, Cambridge researcher Aubrey de Grey, Oxford philosopher and futurist Nick Bostrom, and MIT’s Rodney Brooks among many others, believe in some form of technological salvation.8 At the same time, interest in transhumanism has, during recent years, extended beyond the relatively narrow reach of scholarly exegesis to penetrate the popular imagination. In February 2011, Kurzweil’s ideas were even able to secure the front cover of Time Magazine with the feature article “2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal.”9 Philosopher Nick Bostrom gave a popular TED Talk on transhumanism all the way back in 2005, and, before that, Kurzweil’s book The Age of Spiritual Machines provided the foundation for a concept album by the Canadian alternative rock band Our Lady Peace.10 At present, the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia enumerates seventy-three pop culture references to transhumanism, a conservative estimate, which nevertheless spans a range of media, from film and television to comics and video games.11 Variety notwithstanding, virtually all of these instances share in common an expressive belief, however rudimentary or incipient, in the positively transformative and redemptive powers of medical but primarily digital technologies. In the more fully developed instantiations, this belief functions as a substitute for or secular alternative to religion, offering, in Kurzweil’s view, “new perspectives on the issues that traditional religions have attempted to address: the nature of mortality and immortality, the purpose of our lives, and intelligence in the universe.”12 Yet something curiously and accidentally rhetorical takes place in consequence of this aspirational maneuver: in acting as a carrier of a tendency that is at once nonreligious and spiritual-ethical, Transhumanism’s Hidden Hellscape

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transhumanism excludes from its imagined world any notion of evil and suffering. In theological terms, it imagines an absolute, totalized realm that is all heaven and no hell, in which hell simply has no ontological possibility of existence. Hell is not, according to this world-building conception, radically other; rather, hell just simply is not. Such a position, however, is as rhetorically untenable as it is logically and structurally unsound. For evil and suffering cannot merely be imagined away—or if imagined away, cannot stay away indefinitely. Indeed, it is precisely because of the hardwired propensity to ward off pessimistic claims and conclusions that human consciousness cannot easily exist without fear, if it can exist at all. Consequently, we argue that the transhumanist promise to exorcise, finally and decisively, the maleficent specters of human misery and torment is doomed to produce a certain rhetorical failure: for either the promise itself is not persuasive, in which case it is patently not successful, or it is (either completely or to some degree), in which case it makes possible what psychoanalysts refer to as the return of the repressed. That is to say that the successful transhumanist pitch is subject to, or “committed” to, performing, a specific form of the boomerang effect, one in which the specters of pain and suffering are suppressed and eo ipso return to haunt human consciousness, sometimes in extraordinarily creative and horrifying ways. This chapter aims to show just how and why this is the case, in other words, how a vision of disembodied human perfection, of an uploaded and immortalized human consciousness, could produce its opposite—indeed, how and why it cannot but haunt itself. Tales from a Dark Future

In everyday discourse the terms “optimism” and “pessimism” are treated as rather inflexible. Whether regarded subjectively as dispositions (i.e., dichotomous, attitudinal lenses through which individuals orient themselves vis-à-vis their environment) or philosophically as objective representations of fundamental reality, each approach frames the optimism and pessimism as relatively fixed evaluative standpoints, which therefore operate more or less independently from worldly conditions. For many people, however, optimism or pessimism cannot be easily separated from actual lived experience or from future expectations. For instance, in making the case for antinatalism, David Benatar refers to the Old Testament story of Job, a prosperous man whose patience and piety were tried by “undeserved” misfortunes and who, during his bitter lamentations, curses not only God but also his A Feeling of Wrongness

own life. For Benatar, what is essential is Job’s eventual repudiation, for it serves as a dramatic representative anecdote for his antinatalist position. One cannot help but wonder, however, whether Benatar was a bit hasty in his selection and for two reasons. First, Job curses his own birth only after having suffered an exhaustive list of deprivations—children, house, health, good name, and property. Covered with boils from “the sole of his foot to the crown of his head,” Job sat upon the ashes he poured over his head and scraped himself with a potsherd. Only then, and only after his wife reviled him with “Curse God and die,” did Job wish never to have been.13 What’s more, there is a very good reason why Job’s story has been used, for millennia, for the purpose of Christian edification: namely, that Job, in spite of passionate expression of self-pitying grief, ultimately remained confident in the goodness and justice of God. There is, however, the rather unflattering and unedifying interpretation that Job’s faith in the God was rejuvenated after the return of Job’s material wealth and the blessings of a new family. Regardless of which interpretation one chooses to believe, both work against the inflexibility of pessimism (or its opposite) that Benatar seemingly takes for granted and attempts to instantiate by way of the Bible’s telling of Job. For both interpretations underscore the importance of circumstances vis-à-vis the selection of and identification with worldviews—regardless of however unconscious such selection may be or whether the selected worldviews are viewed through an epistemological or ontological lens. Given that the specifics of one’s well-being (however construed) play a determining role in one’s identification with pessimism or optimism, the transhumanist ideology poses a peculiar challenge—for pessimism, to be sure, but also for optimism—and in a way that complicates their conceptual demarcation. This challenge—which, as we will see is the carrier of a certain religious tendency—emerges despite the fact that transhumanism shares with pessimism one of the latter’s most abhorred valuations: namely, an extreme indifference toward humanity, which borders on opprobrium.14 Both transhumanists and pessimists desire to bring about humanity’s end. Transhumanism, however, is not pessimism and conceives of the end of life as the end of a certain form of human life (the biological). Hence, what sets the transhumanists apart from their pessimistic counterparts is the “distinctly optimistic” way in which they understand extinction—not as the mushrooming of the void but as a qualitatively transformative improvement, as positive evolution.15 Nevertheless, despite the obvious optimism with which transhumanists couch the coming singularity, such optimism is at once guided and complicated by what we could call a pessimistic sensibility. For unlike Transhumanism’s Hidden Hellscape

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optimists—who, in the melodic words of Monty Python, “always look on the bright side of life”—transhumanists take seriously the massive amount of suffering that attends human existence, so seriously that, like the pessimists, they regard it as an indictment of this, our only experientially known, world. Transhumanism therefore complicates the pessimism-optimism divide not because it is underdeveloped or indecisive but because it affords an optimist vision that is in keeping with the presuppositions and attendant sentiments of philosophical pessimism. This common ground, combined with a shared status as “fringe ideologies,” is perhaps the best explanation as to why the transhumanists are one of the few groups that have seriously and consistently engaged with pessimistic ideas. One of the most visible interlocutors is the English philosopher and transhumanist advocate David Pearce, who writes: “The only way to eradicate the biological substrates of unpleasantness—and thereby prevent the harm of Darwinian existence—is not vainly to champion life’s eradication [e.g., in the manner of antinatalists like Benatar and Jim Crawford], but instead to ensure that sentient life is inherently blissful . . . If we succeed, then coming into existence will be intrinsically good.”16 Notwithstanding the title of Pearce’s manifesto, The Hedonistic Imperative, the blissful life envisioned by Pearce and other likeminded transhumanists is not primarily intended to increase life’s pleasures but to effect a radical restructuring of humanity’s relation to the world and in such a way that would “abolish suffering throughout the living world.”17 At first glance, then, transhumanism would appear to want its pessimistic cake and to eat it with optimism, too. On the one hand, transhumanists do not disagree with pessimism’s insistence that life and living are intrinsically bad, that existence is pain; indeed, that the world as currently experienced by sentient life is unpleasant functions as the major premise (often unstated) in the transhumanist’s rhetorical use of logos. On the other hand, transhumanists can only peaceably engage with pessimism up to a point, for unlike the pessimists transhumanists believe that the “world” of human beings—that is, the basic structure or features that differentiate human beings from all other entities and characterize the way in which they are encountered—is identical to, and reliant on, certain phenomenal-empirical material (what Heidegger would call “earth”): specifically, organic, sentient matter.18 While pessimists do not discount the role of the senses in making possible a certain quality and quantity of pain, physical suffering constitutes only part of the problem of existence. For pessimists (and here Schopenhauer provides the model) the individual phenomenological will—consciousness—is the ground of all suffering, not the body. A Feeling of Wrongness

Consequently, transhumanists’ desire to move the human being beyond the corporeal realm, to where it might enjoy a disembodied mode of existence, does not remove humanity from the never-ending cycle of suffering; at best, it merely removes one causal source of suffering.19 Hence, while others may call into question the feasibility of the transhumanist vision of perfect bliss in a post-singularity world, or even scoff at the 2025–2045 predictions, pessimists qua pessimists would argue that such practical considerations are beside the point.20 Pessimists, as it turns out, have been honing their philosophical perspective for millennia. So when a twenty-first-century transhumanist stuns contemporary audiences with the seemingly audacious claim that one should not worry about dying before the technological rapture because future technologies will allow for resurrection, we might imagine a pessimist like Schopenhauer responding, first, with “What does it matter?” and then, “I think I’ve heard this before.”21 And in point of fact, our hypothetical Schopenhauer’s suspicion would be correct. For transhumanism is largely derivative of a religious species of thought, one that is mostly, though not exclusively, Christian in origin. Christian Parallels

Transhumanism’s frequent references to such technological breakthroughs as neural uploads, whole-brain emulation, and artificial intelligence may give the impression that the transhumanist vision is a hyper-, if not uniquely, contemporary idea. To a certain extent this is, of course, true—and with respect to actual technologies absolutely true—but the challenge that transhumanism poses to pessimism (or rather thinks it poses) echoes certain religious doctrines grounded in Christianity and spanning most, if not all, of its history. Little surprise, then, that many important Christian thinkers, especially the premodern ones, take a rather dim view of the world. Joshua Dienstag, for instance, argues that “Augustinians are today called ‘Christian Pessimists,’” for they “consider that this world is fundamentally disordered, that it will always contain evil, and cannot be set right, except, perhaps, by God at the Last Judgement.”22 Nevertheless, the “escape hatch of another world” means that Augustinians, like transhumanists, cannot properly be considered pessimists.23 Much like today’s transhumanists, Christian pessimists ultimately depart from philosophical pessimism by reconfiguring what qualifies as “good” or “bad,” in other words, what can legitimately factor into one’s axiological calculations, and pointing to a shared futuristic vision of a perfect state of Transhumanism’s Hidden Hellscape

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affairs. The existence of heaven—understood in Christianity as the abode for the righteous dead in the afterlife and in transhumanism as a “Digital Ascension” wherein people who die in the flesh are “uploaded into a computer” and remain “conscious”—ultimately excuses the problem of suffering, as identified by the pessimistic likes of Schopenhauer and Ligotti.24 Heaven, in other words, compensates human beings for all the pain and misery that they may and will likely experience as inhabitants of the natural, sensible world, functioning either as self-interested reward or moral justification. Although the Bible frames this vindication in terms of a divine agent, the essence of its promissory statement expresses a rhetorical power in which both Christianity and its secular analog, transhumanism, have a share: “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”25 As the culmination of humans’ hopes and desires, this vision of the “perfect” event not only inspires in audiences an unimaginably idyllic future but also simultaneously reveals the limitations of the current, actual situation and, ipso facto, the limitations in thought of those who cannot project beyond the realm of the actual (including the probable). Hence, according to the Christian and transhumanist narrative, pessimists are not so much discerning philosophers whose love of wisdom commits them to the pursuit of truth, as they are myopic emissaries whose dreary pronouncements on the will to suffer are merely representative of a fossilized worldview. Unwilling or unable to think boldly, pessimists, according to both Christians and transhumanists, can only account for and wallow in their dissatisfaction with an old order, which will soon be at an end. The fact that one form of salvation is metaphysical while the other is “merely” ontological makes little difference, for the dichotomous (present-future) structure is the same, as well as the spiritual content and import. Pessimists, however, have developed a variety of strategies to oppose the Christian and, by extension, transhumanist objection, only one of which is to expand the scope of what it might mean to suffer, as glossed above. Certainly, the most direct and obvious response is simply to deny the existence or possibility of a future salvation by rejecting the reality of God or gods. Schopenhauer, for example, is widely thought to have been an atheist, a rarity for nineteenth-century Europe.26 Schopenhauer’s atheism is of course implied, as official statements of atheism would have been dangerous at the time. Unlike his nineteenth-century predecessor, however, contemporary pessimist Jim Crawford enjoys the luxury of crude bluntness and writes, “[Here] we are, denizens of the 21st century, grandchildren of A Feeling of Wrongness

the Enlightenment, still held hostage by a bunch of primitive yokels burning incense to a tyrannical sky wizard.”27 Other pessimists have similarly expanded on this line of disbelief, with some treating the idea of heavenly salvation as a dangerously optimistic mythology. Zapffe, for example, explicitly cites “the Church” as an anchoring mechanism designed for the purpose of maintaining the existing state of sociopolitical affairs. What’s more, following Nietzsche, Zapffe asserts that religious utopianism is not exclusive to properly religious institutions and cultural forms but is so rhetorically effective in fostering broad-based consensus that even optimistic atheists find themselves welcoming—even advocating for it—in schools (a statement perhaps truer of mid-twentieth-century Norway than liberal enclaves in present-day California, but nevertheless still telling).28 Another pessimistic countertactic involves identifying obscure Judeo-Christian sects that display (closeted) pessimistic inclinations. Ligotti, for example, discerningly identifies the second-century Gnostics as representative of such pessimistic proclivities. Partly of pre-Christian origin, Gnosticism emerged as a prominent heretical movement in the second century. In addition to teaching the doctrine that esoteric knowledge (gnosis) of a remote supreme divine being enabled the redemption of the human spirit, Gnostics viewed the world as so fundamentally broken that they prohibited reproduction (though they permitted nonprocreative sexual practices, including sodomy).29 The fact that the Catholic Church mostly wiped out the gnostic heresy is of little consequence, for it points up a quasi-cryptic, even if otherwise unpopular, tendency of Christianity toward a pessimistic worldview.30 The same holds true for the equally revealing religious thought of Philipp Mainländer, a nineteenth-century German philosopher and poet, who believed that God, so profoundly unhappy with existence, created humanity as a means to disperse its consciousness and ultimately extinguish itself.31 Another monotheist in the pessimist camp, Miguel Unamuno wrote, “I am in agony, as a human being, as a Christian, contemplating the unrealizable future, contemplating eternity.”32 Ligotti, however, is not alone in employing the technique of “immanent critique,” nor is such critique restricted to Christianity. Extending this critique to Judaism, Benatar points to an obscure debate between two ancient rabbinic schools, the house of Hillel and the House of Shammai, on whether it was good for humanity to have been created at all. The House of Shammai, which argued against the proposition, won the debate and thus, on Benatar’s view, earned its place in the pantheon of pessimistic saints.33 The über-fringe writer, and self-identified Catholic, Andy Nowicki takes this argument one step further: rather than calling on Transhumanism’s Hidden Hellscape

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past thinkers, Nowicki articulates his own idiosyncratic form of monotheistic pessimism, in his strange, vulgar, and deeply problematic book Considering Suicide.34 Finally, pessimists also respond to Christian objections by attempting to posit a priori concerns that, they claim, supersede any putative benefits of an infinite paradise. In arguing for antinatalism, for example, Benatar writes, “[A] life filled with good and containing only the most minute quantity of bad—a life of utter bliss adulterated only by the pain of a single pin-prick—is worse than no life at all.”35 How he arrives at this conclusion is a bit complicated, but suffice it to say that it carries obvious implications for the Christian idea that an afterlife of supreme bliss in which one is in the presence of God amounts to an adequate justification for sufferings of this world. According to Benatar’s argument, not even a state of eternal bliss would outweigh the benefits of nonexistence, much less compensate for or justify the disadvantages of life and living. Similarly, other pessimists argue that Godly salvation cannot create meaning in a meaningless world and that the mere presence of God does nothing to positively modify the nihilistic reality that all is void, that there is nothing rather than something. As Cioran succinctly puts it, “Without God, everything is nothingness; and with God? Supreme nothingness.”36 Logical coherence notwithstanding, however, these critical arguments are likely to fall flat with the community of the faithful. To be clear, this observation is not itself a criticism of lay Christian reasoning, nor is it intended to be: as virtually every important rhetorician since antiquity has emphasized, rhetoric—if it is to be successful—must ground itself in a particular community’s endoxa, that is, its common beliefs and opinions; indeed, such “commonness” is the referent of “common sense.”37 Rather, non-Christian pessimists’ criticism of heaven (either as idea or justification for suffering) runs up against Christianity as a rounded system of anchoring and, by its very nature, is incapable of accommodating itself to the inherited, collective main firmaments upon which the idea of a blissful, compensatory hereafter is grounded. Of course, an additional and not-unrelated constraint is the common belief in the insincerity of professional rhetors (or “sophistry”). With the possible exception of the eccentric Nowicki, one can easily imagine all the major pessimists as “Godless atheists,” less concerned with pursuing the truth and enlightening others than with arguing merely to win and demonstrate intellectual superiority. All of which is to say that the non-Christian pessimist, when arguing against major tenets of Christian belief, encounters a dual problem: one concerning the poor reception of rhetorical logos, the A Feeling of Wrongness

other pertaining to the perception of bad faith, possibly even ill will, toward the audience on the part of the rhetor—a problem of ethos, in other words (eunoia, specifically). In point of fact, the incongruity between pessimists’ perceived credibility and character, on the one hand, and Christian audiences’ self-identified values and interests, on the other, is so pronounced that it renders ineffective the pessimistic strategy of embracing Christian doctrine as a justification for nonexistence. Unlike today’s transhumanist ideology, Christian theology posits the existence of a spiritual realm of evil and suffering. If heavenly salvation rewards the faithful in spirit while excusing life’s cycle of suffering, then hell, as heaven’s dark counterpart, damns the wicked and unsaved by forever perpetuating, and intensifying by an unfathomable magnitude, all the pain and misery divinely imaginable. Arthur Schopenhauer, in one of his short philosophical essays, famously explores the concept of hell as a deeply pessimistic aspect of Christian doctrine, the modern understanding of which is rooted in Augustinian thought: Augustine’s dogma of Predestination is connected with another dogma, namely, that the mass of humanity is corrupt and doomed to eternal damnation, that very few will be found righteous and attain salvation, and that only in consequence of the gift of grace, and because they are predestined to be saved; whilst the remainder will be overwhelmed by the perdition they have deserved, viz., eternal torment in hell. Taken in its ordinary meaning, the dogma is revolting, for it comes to this: it condemns a man, who may be, perhaps, scarcely twenty years of age, to expiate his errors, or even his unbelief, in everlasting torment; nay, more, it makes this almost universal damnation the natural effect of original sin, and therefore the necessary consequence of the Fall. . . . [It] looks as if the Blessed Lord had created the world for the benefit of the devil! it would have been so much better not to have made it at all.38 Although written in Schopenhauer’s inimitable style, this line of reasoning has more recently been appropriated and extended by other philosophical pessimists. Jim Crawford, for instance, has raised as a difficult moral question for Christians the ethics of procreation. For how in good conscience, he asks, can a Christian consent or plan to have children knowing full well the possibility that his or her offspring may suffer eternally in hell?39 Perhaps the darkest of such arguments comes in the form of a morbid encomium Transhumanism’s Hidden Hellscape

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to Andrea Yates, the Texas mother and nondenominational Christian, who confessed to having drowned her five children in a bathtub on June 20, 2001, in order to ensure that the children would die as innocents and thus be spared from eternal damnation.40 While this line of thought has not penetrated mainstream Christianity, it does seem to be growing in popularity among non-Christian pessimists, as well as humanities scholars who do not fit within the traditional parameters of philosophical pessimism, as seen for example in the law and philosophy professor Kenneth Einar Himma’s essay on salvific exclusivism.41 Thus, notwithstanding the problem of ethos—not to mention the incongruity between pessimism and the conspicuous optimism that prevails in much of modern day Christianity—pessimism’s provocations concerning hell take Christianity seriously and gravely so. Even so, this fidelity is not sufficient to penetrate, much less make progressive inroads, into the Christian sensus communis; the anchoring machine that is modern Christianity simply includes too many subjective preventatives for pessimism to take root in the hearts and minds of the community members. In the first place, many of today’s Christians are conditioned, from a very young age, to embrace the whole of Christianity—with all of its messy implications, including the possibility of eternal damnation. Second, despite this trend toward holism, polls continue to show that, where there is a discrepancy in belief with respect to what is “good” versus what is “bad” within Christian doctrine, preference is given to the former—as is seen, for instance, among today’s Britons, among whom the number of individuals that believe in a Biblical hell tends to lag behind the number that believes in its heavenly counterpart.42 What’s more, these poll numbers reflect and help to account for the success of an evangelical work like Love Wins. Written by the American author, motivational speaker, and former pastor Rob Bell, the treatise claims, controversially, to refute the possibility of hell, arguing instead for a form of “universal reconciliation” or “universal salvation,” according to which all sinful and alienated souls will ultimately—by means of divine love, mercy, and grace—be reconciled to God. He writes: “It’s been clearly communicated to many that this belief (in hell as conscious, eternal torment) is a central truth of the Christian faith and to reject it is, in essence, to reject Jesus. This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus’ message of love, peace, forgiveness and joy that our world desperately needs to hear.” Regarding universal reconciliation as a theological alternative to special salvation, he states, “Whatever objections a person may have of [the universalist view], and there are many, one has to admit that it is fitting, proper, and Christian to long for it.”43 Finally, A Feeling of Wrongness

although the influence of universal reconciliation is, at present, mostly limited to a particular school of Christian theology (Christian Universalism), the narrative of salvation as such—whether conditional or universal—arms Christians with the confidence that God’s mercy is so great that He does not condemn sinners to everlasting punishment.44 Taken together, these pillars of Christian anchoring help to ensure that, despite the resemblance between philosophical pessimism and certain currents of Christian thought, modern Christianity in the main is resistant rather than amenable to pessimistic influence. Even more discouraging for the pessimists is that such resistance is not exclusive to Christianity but constitutes something of an endoxastic substratum for much of Western secular culture, an abstract and intangible fund of sensibilities in which all people participate by virtue of their communal status. In this capacity, then, Christian belief helps shape not only what is commonly known (or thought to be known or assumed to be true) but also what is felt or intuited in any number of domains. Thus while significant numbers of people may not espouse a particular system of Christian faith and worship, or even consciously identify as “Christian,” the Christian religion nevertheless provides the larger context within which a broad swath of those persons’ judgments are both possible and communicable. Western society culture, in other words, do not require actual Christians to remain, in some very real sense, Christian. Nevertheless, and despite the increasingly secular appearance of Western society, most individuals are still brought up in a religious household, meaning that most people are inculturated with religious doctrines even if they do not consciously or explicitly identify with them.45 From a broadly rhetorical perspective, then, persons who are raised in a Christian household are not markedly more Christian in their ways of being, doing, and saying than “non-Christians” who are brought up in a society that still fundamentally adheres to a Christian understanding of the world (recall that the Bible is even today one of the top cultural reference points in most Western societies).46 Consequently, Christians and non-Christians alike are in possession of—or possessed by—cognitive channels and affective pathways that are generally and equally responsive to Christian eloquence, that is, to the effective use of organizing symbols and poetic categories that join together particular realities and appearances with Christian values, meanings, and possibilities. The case has even been repeatedly made that many secular ideologies borrow the language, structure, and spirit of religion, specifically Judeo-Christianity, even as they vehemently reject it.47 Undoubtedly, part of this level of influence is due to the breath of Transhumanism’s Hidden Hellscape

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vision offered by Christian eloquence, which, when combined with its focus on eschatology, can be powerfully motivating. But one cannot discount the powerful socializing effect of a society’s dominant religion, which not only inculcates a series of philosophical assumptions but also primes its members to accept arguments and ideologies that speak its language. Transhumanism, which partakes of this sensus communis, or what Kant identifies as “idea of the public sense,” is thus particularly challenging to philosophical pessimism because it both implicitly and explicitly appeals to our religious desires and sensibilities, all the while refraining from language that might alienate the self-identified non-Christian (or agnostic or atheist).48 Shorn of over-appeals to God’s mercy and grace, it nevertheless speaks the inclusive language of universal reconciliation, of salvation for everyone. What is more, it combines this religiosity with another profoundly influential system of faith and worship, one that has historically been at variance with monotheistic religions, namely, modern science and technology. As a result of this synthesis, in the current era transhumanism finds itself in the enviable position of being able to offer what is perhaps the most powerful argument for optimism, both in terms of impact and scope, especially for those who are nonpracticing Christians or who have foregone religion altogether. It is no coincidence, then, that the influence of transhumanism is most felt in the United States, the land of transhumanism’s most visible proponents, from Kurzweil to Tipler to transhumanist politician Zoltan Istvan. In the first place, 79 percent of American adults agree with the statement that science has made life easier for most people, while a majority thinks that the impact of science on the quality of health care, food, and the environment is mostly positive.49 Moreover, an incredible 90 percent of people believe the next five years will be better than the present.50 The techno optimism of the United States and large swaths of the world, creates a fertile environment for transhumanism, an ideology whose ambitions are second to none. Transhumanist Heaven: With Blessings Like These, Who Needs Hell?

The ability to upload one’s consciousness into a machine offers the prospect of a technologically attainable paradise, a digital world where exist few if any material constraints on happiness. If one desires a two-thousand-mile-long swimming pool, for instance, then that person needs only to adjust some zeros and ones within the system’s code and presto! A two-thousand-mile-long swimming pool comes into existence. Or you can take the pleasure of eating a delicious piece of cheesecake, multiply it by ten, and beam it directly into A Feeling of Wrongness

your consciousness. And so on. Little wonder, then, that the singularity envisioned by transhumanists has garnered so many comparisons to the Christian conception of heaven. There is, however, a crucial difference between the two and that is doctrine. In contrast to heaven, the path to a post-singularity state of existence requires no set of beliefs (that is, apart from the army of scientists and thinkers whose innovations make the singularity possible); it does not prescribe certain belief-guided forms of action, nor does it prohibit other behaviors as disqualifying. Indeed, access to the singularity does not even mandate adherence to the singularity qua possibility. One can be a naysayer one’s entire life, an out-and-out unbeliever, and still enjoy the benefits of an uploaded consciousness. The singularity will happen and—crucially—will be accessible or made available to any and all individuals willing to ascend (and perhaps capable of covering the costs for the virtual ascension). Unbounded by the constraints imposed by Christian doctrine, the rhetoricity of transhumanism benefits from the motivational advantages of positing a putatively antiauthoritarian worldview. For according to this techno-secular eschatology, there is no supreme, omnipotent being directing human or post-human fortunes, no superhuman moral spirit ensuring that pain and pleasure are mete out according to a divinely sanctioned system of justice. In the singularity the only “presence” is indiscriminate pleasure. Appealing as this promotional view of life after the singularity may be—and despite its rhetorical advantages—the possibility of eternal pleasure unintentionally destabilizes itself and on two counts. In the first place, the transhumanist vision of a secular, virtual heaven necessarily implies its opposite. Just as one cannot think of heaven without being reminded of hell, so too the possibility of a technologically enabled world of everlasting and undetermined bliss requires as a precondition of coherence the possibility of endless pain and suffering. Hell as an idea, in other words, cannot so easily be extirpated as merely promising a realizable state of enduring happiness. What’s more, probabilistic reasoning would suggest that if there exists a technology capable of creating infinite pleasure for an infinite number of post-human beings, then there would also exist a technology capable of creating limitless pain—perhaps the very same technology that is said to provide for infinite joy and delight. This latter possibility occasionally gets a serious hearing. For instance, not too long ago the Atlantic magazine published an article that speculates on the dangers of uploading one’s consciousness to a computer without the provision of a suicide switch. In the article, Conor Friedersdorf argues that while “[the] promise of a radically extended lifespan, or even immortality, would tempt many . . . it seems to me that they’d Transhumanism’s Hidden Hellscape

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be risking something very much like hell on earth,” adding that “[their] descendants might damn them to it.”51 For once salvation is separated from its theological anchoring in a divinely ordained duality of heaven and hell, the prospect of hell returns and is secularly reproduced—surreptitiously, unexpectedly—as a structural blip or necessary accident. What the celebratory rhetoric of transhumanist eschatology conceals—with its promise of a realizable, anti-exclusionary heaven—is the impossibility of finality, of a definite close or end, combined with the illusoriness of an inside that is forever protected against infiltrations originating from an excluded outside. The transhumanists’ vision of heaven, in other words, is not and cannot ever be the end of human history, nor is it or could it ever be a totally safe space. In promising a fundamental horizon that would make impossible any “beyond” or anything “outside” of the singularity—in other words, a heaven without a hell—transhumanists allow for hell’s return by virtue of its very repression. By that very act, and through the mechanism of repression, transhumanists pave the way for a future state characterized not of universal reconciliation but of perpetual haunting, a world wherein the specters of great suffering and unbearable experience torment the blessed, either as nightmarish possibilities or grim actualities.52 Hell, in this scenario, does not so much disappear as it burrows underground, exiting the field of battle so that it may threaten, at any time, to emerge from within—as an irruptive, and perhaps even unidentifiable, force, a secret, malevolent presence that exists within rather than outside of heaven’s gates: hell, through the trapdoor, in other words. To illustrate how this might occur, or what such a haunting might look like, Conor Friedersdorf suggests a future world wherein convicted parties are not only imprisoned but also condemned to live out multiple life sentences. But given that the concept of “life” would in this scenario be entirely antiquated, multiple life sentences would thus approximate, if not outright constitute, eternal damnation. (What’s more, the qualifier “multiple” would be superfluous, since life in the singularity is never ending.) Equally horrifying is the possibility that a simple glitch or computer error could leave one’s consciousness stranded in nothingness for 15.7 million years. Pessimists, as one might imagine, have produced their own versions of such hypothetical counterarguments. Not one to be outdone as a prognosticator of horrific possibilities, Jim Crawford envisions a digital universe in which sadistic potentiality is an ineradicable feature of its code: Imagine a malignant personality or organization with unrestricted access to your very soul, dear reader. Your mind a playground for the A Feeling of Wrongness

most gross perversions imaginable—indeed, beyond what is imaginable. Heinous torments drawn out for decades, yet so compressed in time that each hour might be made to correspond with a subjective millennium. Suffering completely off the scale of present-day human experience, and your only hope for surcease manufactured by your torturers as something to be intermittently raised and quashed, used only as a tool to further intensify the quality of your pain. A literal hell on earth, embedded in the code.53 Truly, these descriptions of transhumanist heaven provide a compelling counterpoint to the utopias painted by advocates like Kurzweil and company. But the winner in the debate of techno heaven versus techno hell does not come down to descriptive abilities, but rather the deep rhetorical structures that—in this instance—give the pessimistic interpretation a variety of advantages. In the first place, transhumanists’ vision of a secular afterlife lacks the range and quality of Christian apologetics, the history of which engenders and helps to maintain Christian optimism in the face of physical and spiritual torment. As a result, the transhumanists’ message of a secular heaven does not enjoy an ancient message distribution network boasting over two billion members worldwide, weekly meetings, national and local television programs, and the world’s most widely read and distributed book.54 In contrast, transhumanist writings reach an incredibly niche audience. Crucially, however, the same is true of philosophical pessimism: its esotericism, like that of transhumanism, is intended for and likely understood by only a small number of people with either specialized knowledge or interest in the subject matter. Consequently, if circumstances are such that pessimistic interpretations of transhumanism enjoy a rhetorically superior position vis-à-vis the transhumanists’ glad tidings, then we must imagine that this has very little, if anything, to do with philosophical pessimists’ ability to capitalize on this advantage. As we have maintained throughout this study, philosophical pessimism fails rhetorically because it relies almost solely on logical exposition. In general, such an unimaginative, lopsided strategy is rhetorically misguided but even more so when the subject matter in question deals with fundamental values, attitudes, and cognitive belief structures, when what is called for is not only the tools of formal reasoning, detailed accounting, and logical analysis—or not primarily those devices—but also powerful and resonant emotional appeals, when the most efficacious appeals are not those grounded in propositions and facts but rather in powerful images that live in people’s imagination and make them feel ideas that logic can only explain. Transhumanism’s Hidden Hellscape

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Hence, here, too, the pessimists’ advantage (if it exists) will tend to be cultivated outside the boundaries of traditional philosophical discourse through the artful deployment of elements of narrative and style, in the domains of creative expression where philosophical claims are embedded in narrative stories that give meaning to ideas and “life” to beliefs—the best among them combining narrative fidelity with narrative probability. Fortunately for pessimism, the scholarly nonfiction treatise makes up only one avenue of presenting a hellish alternative to transhumanism’s incorporeal utopia. Even more fortunate is the fact that these other approaches—all of them narratively based—are more popular, enjoy wider circulation, and benefit from a variety of fictional modalities, from short stories to books and video games. For rhetoricians and scholarly devotees of hell alike, this should come as little surprise. Depictions of hell, or wastelands in general, are more graphic, more violent, more dramatic, and generally more exciting than portrayals of heaven, or utopia. Unlike our images of heaven, artistic renderings of hell present audiences with a scene fraught with conflict and uncertainty, suspense and shock, climax and struggle. For that reason, while the fiery image of hell has been memorably represented in its share of official Church media—perhaps most notably in the eighteenth-century sermons of the Calvinist preacher Jonathan Edwards, which were reported to have sent parishioners into fits of fainting—it has largely captured the public imagination via extraliturgical avenues. Dante’s Divine Comedy probably wins the title of most famous portrayal of hell—this, despite the fact that it relies more on allusions to pagan rather than Biblical antiquity, Aristotle in particular.55 Passion plays, too, which represented Christ’s Passion from the Last Supper to the Crucifixion, offered horrifying depictions of hell to medieval audiences, in a ritual that has been updated in the contemporary form of the “Hell House.”56 Beyond that, countless movies, video games, TV shows, paintings, and sculptures have offered any number of disturbing, if not always convincing, portrayals of divine damnation. As Playboy’s longtime fiction editor Alice K. Turner writes, “The landscape of Hell is the largest shared construction project in imaginative history, and its chief architects have been creative giants—Homer, Virgil, Plato, Augustine, Dante, Bosch, Michelangelo, Milton, Goethe, Blake, and more.”57 This imaginative space carved out in collective cultural literacy provides a foundation to build secular visions of hell. “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”

There is no shortage of popular media artifacts depicting a future replete with dangerous machines. Film alone offers such exemplars of technological A Feeling of Wrongness

menace as Metropolis; The Terminal Man; Westworld (and now the Westworld spin-off television series for HBO); Terminator and its sequels; Blade Runner; Videodrome; Hardware; Total Recall; The Lawnmower Man; the Matrix trilogy; Minority Report; I, Robot; and, more recently, Avengers: Age of Ultron and Ex Machina—not to mention the many futuristic war films such as Universal Soldier. Such representations, however, rarely haunt the transhumanist vision of heaven in the form of “spectral” incursions or immanent torsions but rather treat the world as fundamentally unchanged. The drama, then, consists of protagonists discovering new means of combating essentially familiar problems, which despite the appearance of radical alterity remain human, all too human. Even in the apocalyptic future depicted by the Terminator series, the worst fate a human can expect is a quick death at the hands of a cyborg’s machine gun (or some other familiar weapon, e.g., shotgun, motor vehicle, blade, molten steel, etc.). What’s more, the antagonists themselves tend to be driven by what are recognizably human motives. Robots, for instance, while conspicuously nonhuman entities, are nevertheless guided by impulses that are on the whole rational, at times even political. Indeed, the robots populating the world of I, Robot are not-so-subtle substitutes for oppressed peoples struggling against a state of involuntary servitude: hence the robots’ approach to dealing with their human creators, while violent, is not the reflection of some inhuman or inhumane essence but rather remains within the ambit of human sympathy. To be sure, these and other similarly staged conflicts diverge from the transhumanists’ promise of eternal bliss. But in the last analysis, science fiction’s techno-futuristic dystopias address the technological singularity on its own terms, as singularity.58 While relatable stories of technological violence and robotic insurrection tend to dominate the sci-fi action genre, audiences are occasionally treated to representations that morbidly embrace the existentially alienating implications of a technologically engendered singularity, one in which fantastic, beneficent innovation makes possible and becomes indistinguishable from nonhuman suffering. Perhaps the best example of a story to depict such a world is the short story “I Have No Mouth, but I Must Scream,” by the prolific and genre-bending author Harlan Ellison.59 The story takes place in the distant future, at some point after the military computer AM has gained sentience and destroyed much of the human race. While the setup remains rather mundane for a story about evil robots, the story radically and abruptly departs from convention when the reader discovers that the five human protagonists who have survived the AI-induced nuclear holocaust are in fact the unlucky ones. Kept “virtually immortal” for at least 109 years by their Transhumanism’s Hidden Hellscape

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Figure 6 From the comic adaptation of “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,” depicting the protagonists meeting one of AM’s nightmarish creations. In Harlan Ellison’s Dream Corridor #3, written by Harlan Ellison and John Byrne and illustrated by Chris Chalenor.

robot jailer, the five humans wish only for death. Starvation, cannibalism, electrocution, earthquakes, impalement, mythic monstrosities ready to rend flesh, AM inflicts countless torments; however, it brings the five to the brink of death only to return them back to life to suffer further. What is remarkable about this simple if horrifying story is not so much that it takes the idea of the singularity on its own terms but that, in so doing, it reveals the ontological—or, in Derrida’s terminology, hauntological—consequences of attempting to extirpate from the notion of heaven the specter of hell and its eternity of multitudinous torments. Indeed, Ellison’s story would appear to dramatize the counter-transhumanist claim that the attainment of such a goal is an onto-religious impossibility—that hell is either the corollary of heaven, existing as the latter’s distinct, antithetical “other,” or else it intrudes upon it from within—as double, as shadow—in which case the two become virtually indistinguishable, their difference ultimately undecidable. In either case, hell is not, and cannot, merely be done away A Feeling of Wrongness

with, at least not permanently. Sci-fi critic Charles J. Brady gestures toward this interpretation of the story by chronicling its use of a range of religious imagery, such as allusions to “Locusts” and “manna,” as well as a death that occurs in a manner similar to that of the Jewish sacrifice of the paschal lamb. What’s more, he argues, the narrative structure as a whole mirrors the book of Exodus.60 In Brady’s view, the work’s religious subtext is indicative of “a powerful anti-God statement,” according to which “[the] relentless, sadistic AM presents a totally repulsive vision of God.”61 Certainly one can read the story as an indictment of religion. Ellison himself bolsters such a reading when, in an interview, he responds to questions about the story by paraphrasing Mark Twain: “Mark Twain said that if you really believe there is such thing as a God, you know, this bearded entity sitting up there somewhere, and watching what it is that you do every day, and you look around you at the condition of the world, you are forced to the intellectable conclusion that God is a malign thug. Now that ain’t a god that I care to worship, and if there is a god let that god take care of me when I croak.”62 But of course, many people do believe that the Christian God sentences individuals to endless torment or at least allows them to undergo such suffering. More important, however, is that despite Ellison’s thoughts on religious belief, the story operates on a different register: rather than indicting God or calling its beneficence into question, Ellison’s narrative subverts the concept of eternal, supreme bliss. And given the story’s internal dramatic context, in conjunction with the status of science and technology in the modern world, this subversion is most salient vis-à-vis secular, man-made utopias, particularly the transhumanists’ vision of the technological singularity. So although the story depicts a merciless, seemingly omniscient higher being, that malevolence operates within and is made possible only by virtue of a nightmarish vision of heaven. Hence, while Brady is not wrong in connecting many of the religious motifs in “I Have No Mouth” to the Old Testament, the most obvious analogue is the Christian concept of hell, as described by the Apostle Matthew, Dante, and countless others. Indeed, AM makes hell the explicit reference point when he murmurs to one of the characters, “To hell with you,” adding, “But then you’re there, aren’t you?” So on one level “I Have No Mouth” responds to the transhumanist salvation myth by presenting a different possibility: namely, that instead of ushering in some kind of medicinal-digital heaven, technological advances may be steering the human race toward a virtual, but nonetheless very real, hell—or, at the very least, toward a state of existence in which the difference between heaven and hell is profoundly blurred.63 Given the acceptance Transhumanism’s Hidden Hellscape

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of popular culture depictions of hell over heaven, it should come as no surprise that Ellison’s story has traveled much further and gained much more rhetorical traction than nonfiction treatises aiming to deconstruct, somewhat pessimistically, transhumanist heaven. Ellison certainly makes the case that this is true, claiming “I Have No Mouth” is “now one of the ten most reprinted stories in the English language, it’s taught in hundreds of Universities.”64 While it is difficult to find evidence for Ellison’s specific claims, the story did make a list of most reprinted science fiction stories and has been adapted as a video game, radio play, and comic book.65 And unlike transhumanism, whose idea has spread as a vague referent point, Ellison’s story has spread intact, with all of its horrifying implications for our future. Not only has “I Have No Mouth” spread far beyond its original publication in the magazine IF: Worlds of Science Fiction, but because of its genre it poses a particular threat to transhumanism. This is because science fiction writing is an important transmission route for transhumanist ideas, as David Simpson argues: Transhumanist or Posthuman science fiction’s days as only a sub-genre are numbered, because as I argued fervently in my recent Foreword to The Robot Chronicles, transhumanist/singularity science fiction is the most important genre of literature that there is, not just in science fiction, but in fiction in general. That might sound shocking for someone to hear or read at first, but I agree with Ray Bradbury, who said that science fiction is the history of our species birthing itself, and we’ve entered a moment in history where the science has outstripped the fiction in most instances, with most visions of the future in popular science fiction being way too conservative, and as Arthur C. Clarke would surely echo, “laughably” so.66 The dark depiction of a transhumanist future interrupts a key transmission route for transhumanist theology, and given hell’s natural signal boost over heavenly fiction, it risks having an impact far greater than its initial signal should warrant. Like our previous case studies, “I Have No Mouth” does not merely present pessimistic information, but deploys a unique pessimistic rhetorical strategy, this one grounded in the historical heritage of the Christian afterlife.67 Paideia: The Purposiveness of Hell

Religious studies scholar Meghan Henning argues that many Christian depictions of hell have a very particular purpose: to teach paideia (cultural values).68 A Feeling of Wrongness

Historically, descriptions of hell have mostly consisted in detailed imagery of suffering but that suffering was almost always contextualized in terms of the individual sinful behavior that caused it. So while the evangelist Luke describes a man burning in eternal flame, this punishment is connected to the man’s failure to care for the poor.69 Hence, the Christian emphasis on excruciating torment works rhetorically to drive home the fundamentally Christian (or Judeo-Christian) values that are enumerated throughout the Old and New Testaments, as well as many other biblical writings. Henning makes the case that these early Christian leaders make use of the rhetorical technique of ekphrasis, what Greek scholar Ruth Webb defines as “the use of language to try and make an audience imagine a scene.”70 The Christian rhetor seeks to make the audience take a mental presence in the hellish landscape. Often ekphrasis takes on a tour-like structure, with the narrator acting as a guide to hell as in the writings of Peter and Paul.71 The narrators’ descriptive efforts are aided by enargeia (vividness), an especially important skill when trying to make a place, inaccessible to the audience, real. For example, Matthew describes hell repeatedly as a place of “weeping and gnashing of teeth,” a scene that Henning describes as “audibly painful—both physically and emotionally.”72 The pain serves a purpose, however, as the horrifying images of the suffering dead serve as a lesson for the living, a lesson that can be summarized in a single sentence: “Follow the Christian teaching and you can avoid these terrible fates.” Consciously or not, Ellison certainly uses ekphrasis in “I Have No Mouth”—and to great rhetorical effect. The character Ted, for instance, acts as guide, directing the reader through the many domains of AM’s kingdom: And we passed through the cavern of rats. And we passed through the path of boiling steam. And we passed through the country of the blind. And we passed through the slough of despond. And we passed through the vale of tears. And we came, finally, to the ice caverns.73 But although Ted directs the reader’s attention to various important details— whether the exsanguinated body of his companion Gorrister or a monstrous carrion bird—unlike apostles such as Matthew, Luke, and Paul, Ted is not safe from harm. Rather, he guides the reader while suffering and imprisoned. Ellison’s writing is also as vivid as any description of hell. His depiction of hunger (one of the less fantastic torments awaiting his characters) clearly demonstrates this: Transhumanism’s Hidden Hellscape

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The hunger was something that had come to life, even as AM had come to life. It was alive in my belly, even as we were in the belly of the Earth, and AM wanted the similarity known to us. So he heightened the hunger. There is no way to describe the pains that not having eaten for months brought us. And yet we were kept alive. Stomachs that were merely cauldrons of acid, bubbling, foaming, always shooting spears of sliver-thin pain into our chests. It was the pain of the terminal ulcer, terminal cancer, terminal paresis. It was unending pain.74 Sci-fi historians Brian Wilson Aldiss and David Wingrove describe Ellison’s prose as “almost hysterically overwritten,” though nevertheless “powerfully effective.”75 The same observation holds for most Biblical descriptions of hell. The ekphrasis deployed in Christian descriptions of hell, however, is ultimately optimistic: the reader is led by a tour guide who has visited or seen visions of hell and safely returned, while the eternal damnations are tied to Christian dogma and moral teachings. Damned souls do not merely “find themselves” in hell but undertook a variety of immoral and irreligious choices to earn their spot. The sufferings experienced in hell are ultimately righteous because they enforce the will of an infallible being. Thus, the anguish the reader feels over having to serve as witness to others’ eternal pain and torment becomes a catalyst for personal transformation. None of this is the case in Ellison’s story. First, the suffering has no justification, as Ted remarks, “None of us knew why AM had saved five people, or why our specific five, or why he spent all his time tormenting us, or even why he had made us virtually immortal.” This does not appear to be willful ignorance either, for nothing seems to connect the five humans or give insight into why they were chosen (if, indeed, they were). That one is black and formerly rather chaste, another a gay college professor, another a conscientious objector, is all we learn about the characters’ pasts. Second, AM lacks the status of a righteous, infallible agent. Despite having enormous power over the characters, AM is depicted as “trapped” within the computer that houses his mind, incapable of wonder or belonging. Even its power over the characters is not absolute, as Ted and Elaine prove when they kill their companions against AM’s wishes. And of course, even if AM were all-powerful that power would not have the metaphysical foundation required of a superior ethic. (It was, after all, created by humans and as a war machine, no less.) Over against Christian depictions of hell, which use justified suffering to motivate changes in and through the world—thereby providing for the A Feeling of Wrongness

basis of a new anti-pessimistic defense mechanism—the gratuitous suffering presented in “I Have No Mouth” has no point. For that reason, readers of the story receive no positive clarifying catharsis but are simply present to register the characters’ emotional and physical suffering. In that capacity, the story functions like a rhetorical version of the elaborate torture device featured in Kafka’s short story “In the Penal Colony.” The reader, like the protagonists, is condemned merely to be scarred by a harrowing experience of pointless suffering—though obviously to a lesser degree than the story’s characters. In either case, there is no release and no meaning. Characters and reader alike suffer endlessly for no reason and with little-to-no hope of escape. The only bright spot is that Ellison’s story does not proclaim to describe reality, in contrast to the writings of the apostles. But given the story’s predictive nature, this is no cause for celebration. Roko’s Basilisk

We have seen at least one manifestation of this type of dread in the form of Roko’s Basilisk. Roko, a user on the Less Wrong forums, “[a] community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality” and a mainstay of transhumanist thinkers, posited that future artificial intelligence may blackmail humans to change their behavior in the present.76 This seems counterintuitive, but the idea is that the computer may want to, for example, ensure its own creation. If people are familiar with the logic beyond Roko’s Basilisk, they would know the computer would want to be created. The computer could thus torture those that did not help it come into existence, perhaps creating digital versions of the incompliant individuals and subjecting them to centuries of abuse (even if those individuals have died prior to the development of the artificial intelligence). The knowledge that this could occur means that individuals now have an incentive to do what they believe the computer wants. The strange logic at the heart of the argument caused one individual to say, “The dumbest thing on the entire Internet is Roko’s Basilisk. I don’t care what else you’d suggest: This is dumber,” but it was taken incredibly serious in some circles.77 Transhumanist and founder of the Less Wrong forums Eliezer Yudkowsky responded to Roko’s ideas: One might think that the possibility of [AI] punishing people couldn’t possibly be taken seriously enough by anyone to actually motivate them. But in fact one person at [the forums] was severely Transhumanism’s Hidden Hellscape

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worried by this, to the point of having terrible nightmares, though he wishes to remain anonymous. I don’t usually talk like this, but I’m going to make an exception for this case. Listen to me very closely, you idiot. you do not think in sufficient detail about superintelligences considering whether or not to blackmail you. that is the only possible thing which gives them a motive to follow through on the blackmail.78 Yudkowsky banished the original post and compared the very idea of Roko’s Basilisk the equivalent of the forbidden knowledge in Lovecraft’s Necronomicon.79 But that forbidden knowledge is only dangerous if you are predisposed to transhumanist ideas, as Slate writer David Auerbach argues: “If you do not subscribe to the theories that underlie Roko’s Basilisk and thus feel no temptation to bow down to your once and future evil machine overlord, then Roko’s Basilisk poses you no threat. (It is ironic that it’s only a mental health risk to those who have already bought into Yudkowsky’s thinking.)”80 This demonstrates that while the average person may not feel a deep unease at the prospect of the malignant AI at the heart of “I Have No Mouth,” those that take the idea of AI seriously are likely predisposed to feel differently. There is no evidence that Roko was inspired by Ellison’s story, but the idea of a malignant AI torturing humans for eternity does bear a remarkable resemblance to it. So much so that if one had read “I Have No Mouth” prior to hearing about Roko’s Basilisk, it is difficult to imagine that person not using the story to inform their understanding of Roko’s concern. A google search reveals a variety of message board comments, like “Roko’s basilisk was def ripped off i have no mouth [sic]” and “Does Roko’s Basilisk remind anyone else of AM in Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream?”81 Some version of Ellison’s techno hell then does appear to haunt transhumanists, just as Edward’s depictions terrified his parishioners. There Shall Be Wailing and Gnashing of Teeth

Transhumanism may not boast the highest enrollment, but it poses a unique threat to pessimism. It speaks to those disaffected with life seeking a better world but lacks the (explicit) metaphysical component of religions. Both transhumanists and pessimists seek to convert the educated, self-aware, atheists unhappy with the world as it is. History is full of internecine rhetorical A Feeling of Wrongness

battles between marginal philosophies (take for example the unending online feuds between anarcho-capitalists and anarcho-communists). At a purely argumentative level, however, transhumanists enjoy the advantages of promoting optimism in a society variously, and seemingly everywhere, primed to accept salvation narratives. Nevertheless, as we have had opportunity to observe, the promise of salvation cannot be totalized without rhetorical consequence. For just as the human being is predisposed to shun the insights of philosophical pessimism, so too is it ever on the lookout for those things that would do it harm, either with or without malefic intent. The hypothetical horrors of Roko’s Basilisk and Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth” may or may not have any claim to reality. But that is beside the point, rhetorically speaking. Their accomplishment consists in demonstrating the futility of the techno-spiritual optimism embodied by transhumanism. For each one brings to light the torsions, the aporias, and the inner demons that are inextricably of a piece with the transhumanism promise of “all Heaven, no Hell.” The transhumanism’s promised salvation gains its rhetorical purchase by drawing upon a cultural understanding of heaven. This cultural understanding cannot be separated from heaven’s dialectic with hell. Thus, even when not mentioned, heaven always conjures its counterpart, whether that heaven is secular or religious. “I Have No Mouth” may be the best pessimistic exploitation of this holy/unholy union, sharing a flank that remains, for the time being at least, exposed.

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Conclusion Pessimism Never Won Any Battles? This book, while devoted to the study of pessimism, is not itself a pessimistic work. The structure of its arguments and even its rhetorical flourishes all operate within the grammar of optimism. Although this fact may constitute something of a superficial torsion or tension, we maintain that it is not a failing. After all, our book seeks only to catalogue various forms of pessimistic persuasion as they manifest across a range of media, not to replicate those strategies, either in substance or tone. The risk, if there is one, of falling into the familiar grooves of optimistic discourse is more a concern for the Schopenhauers, Benatars, Michelstaedters, and Ligottis of the world—for those, in other words, who would opt to deploy the post-Enlightenment prose style of the academy as a conduit for pessimistic ideas—than it is for the nonpessimist scholar or the scholar who, while perhaps privately pessimistic, does not actively seek to promote pessimistic arguments in his or her work. That is not to say, however, that either traditional modes of argumentation or scholarly conventions are fundamentally incompatible with philosophical pessimism, only that the two are very different creatures whose compatibility is atypical. To clarify, then, our book treats pessimistic ideas, while taking seriously their rhetorical effectuations. Formally and attitudinally, however, the work is disinterested in producing pessimistic effects. Of course, the glaring difficulty for all would-be pessimistic rhetorics consists in the optimistic or nonpessimistic tendencies that inhere in all systems of meaning and representation, particularly language. For nothing is ever as value neutral as it may appear. To repurpose an idea central to Marshal McLuhan’s media ecology, “the medium is the message”; hence, the message is almost always one of optimism or, at the very least, of nonpessimism. In one of the books to which we have had recourse throughout

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this study, Better Never to Have Been, David Benatar attempts to convince his readers of a highly pessimistic and consistently antinatalist argument through traditional argumentative means. He marshals a surfeit of statistics demonstrating the prevalence of torture, starvation, enslavement, rape—in a word, virtually all the conceivable forms that human misery can take— before concluding that “a charmed life is so rare that for every one such life there are millions of wretched lives.”1 Thomas Ligotti argues similarly (and correctly on our estimation) that such a strategy is doomed from the start, no matter how carefully executed, because optimism arises from “animal instincts to survive and reproduce,” making it “the default condition of our blood [that] cannot be effectively questioned by our minds or put in grave doubt by our pains.”2 The faculties of human reason and understanding are the greatest enemy of philosophical pessimisms, in other words, because they work hand in glove with instinct and sensation to intercept messages sent via the traditional channels of argumentation and rhetoric, contorting meaning for the ultimate and generic purpose of affirmation. With these observations in mind, we analyzed a certain cross section of pop cultural artifacts in order to see whether and how nontraditionally argumentative discourses could advance pessimistic ideas while simultaneously circumventing standard optimistic reroutings. This sample consisted of a literary subgenre, a crime drama television series, an adult animated science-fiction sitcom, a role-playing video game, and a futurist ideological movement. In ways at once similar and distinct, these case studies suggest that arguments for pessimism gain in rhetorical efficacy insofar as they dissimulate their purpose, whether intentionally (as in most of the cases) or by accident, as we saw in the example of transhumanism. We must conclude, then, that philosophical pessimism constitutes a positive rhetorical force when it operates below the radar, so to speak, when it acts as a coded communiqué, one that is just obscure enough to bypass some of the mental walls and guards that evolution and culture have worked millennia to erect, just furtive enough, inscrutable enough, to reach that tiny corner, tucked away in the deep recesses of our primordial mind, that pocket of potential insurgency that murmurs, “No, everything is not all right.” So what, then, could pessimistic rhetoric (or argument or persuasion) be said to consist of? What are its dominant, successful tendencies? The first observation would seem to be that pessimistic argument tends to avoid categorization, as this better allows for the creation of an unwelcoming communicative ecosystem. Nevertheless, there appear to be a few broad themes, or foci (other than those of pessimism and pop culture), which A Feeling of Wrongness

run through each of our case studies. Chief among these is the strategic notion of esotericism. While we focused extensively on Leo Strauss’s esoteric hermeneutics in chapter 2, the idea of rhetorical hiddenness is a common thread connecting each of our pop cultural artifacts. Strauss, as we have seen, posited esoteric communication as a prudent response mode for those situations in which society as a whole harbors deep hostility toward one’s message. Although pessimism is not transgressive per se—for example, public adherence to it will most likely not result in meaningful social ostracism or destitution—it certainly registers as one of the most universally reviled philosophies, the world over but especially in the Anglosphere. For that reason, it makes good rhetorical sense to find exoterically nonpessimistic discourses functioning as carriers of secret pessimistic tendencies. Supernatural tales, video games, and animated sitcoms are not the grim, dusty tombs one may associate with the disagreeable heading of “pessimism.” If it is true that these case studies embody pessimistic rhetoric, then it is fair to say that pessimistic rhetoric is not direct or explicit but instead indirect and, when not accidental, covert. Indeed, one could engage seriously with any of our case studies and never suspect it as a pessimistic text. Of course, on some level, this suggests a “weak” form of persuasion, but this weakness is necessary to sneak past the various hardwired optimistic censors or defense mechanisms identified by Zapffe. But as Edmund Burke wrote, quite some time ago, “It is one thing to make an idea clear, and another to make it affecting to the imagination. . . . To make any thing very terrible, obscurity in general seems to be necessary.”3 Second, our case studies also reveal a pessimistic aesthetic, one that subverts and upends optimistic structures and tropes, rather than existing independently from them. That is to say that all of our case studies are clearly identifiable as various genres—RPG, sitcom, horror story, prestige TV, science fiction—even as they undermine the conventions that make these genres at once identifiable and optimistic. The existence of pessimistic aesthetics in a liminal space is necessary to avoid cooption by optimism. We might recall, here, that tragedy and comedy, widely viewed as antithetical dramatic forms, are both optimistic. In fact, a purely pessimistic dramatic form could very well find audiences adjusting to its form—thereby domesticating it and robbing it of its pessimistic potentiality—just as audiences have accustomed themselves to tragic drama, an art form that seems on its face inescapably pessimistic. Comic tragedy, however, is uniquely capable of working in and by virtue of the interstices between optimistic forms. One possible effect of such maneuvering is the subversion or upending of the Conclusion

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conventions that work to safeguard the optimism of dramatic form. We saw this interstitial play in the case of Rick and Morty, to be sure, but also in the idiosyncratic Final Fantasy VII, which, though it appears to follow the guidelines of a conventional video game, is simultaneously advancing a subtly profound message about an authentic being-towards-death. Tying these points together, we might reasonably conclude by arguing that pessimism as a communicative entity is not isolated to those regions that we might consider its natural habitat—or rather that the meaning of pessimistic texts is not where one typically finds the meaning of texts. To the extent that pessimists take rhetorical considerations seriously, they will not announce their intentions. In fact, it would be in their best interests, rhetorically speaking, to eschew the advice given to all students of the basic speech course, namely, to tell audiences what you, the speaker, are going to tell them, then tell them, then remind them of what you’ve told them. Even the style of the long-winded academic, who detours frequently but concludes with some profound insight, is inadvisable, for the end is rarely the point—a message perhaps also suited for Ellison, who ruminated that the conclusion to “I Have No Mouth” was profoundly optimistic. So, too, although Cloud triumphs at the end of Final Fantasy VII, that triumph can only be interpolated or made intelligible by Aerith’s untimely, nonrelational death. Finally, despite these common traits, pessimistic aesthetics must have some singular quality. For once a pessimistic transit route has become sufficiently routine, optimism has no trouble with quashing it or converting it to its own purpose, as we see in the case of dramatic form. While the comic tragedy of Rick and Morty is pessimistic, one can imagine that if the series spawned a host of imitators that then the genre would lose its pessimistic bite and may even become as optimistic as comedy and tragedy. Similarly, the remake of Final Fantasy VII is likely to lack the pessimistic punch of its predecessor. One sees this danger for pessimistic persuasion as weird fiction gathers more entries and those entries gain more recognition. Both because one can imagine the avid reader of weird fiction becoming inured to its effects as they devour more and more of the canon and because society has taken extra literary steps to defang many of the genres more disturbing elements (see plush Cthulhu dolls). The Future

At first glance, this study may appear to be about as niche as academic studies come. Pessimism, as Singer reminds us, has few defenders, but even those A Feeling of Wrongness

defenders largely avoid the forms we identify as pessimistic rhetoric. What is more, few of the creators responsible for our case studies explicitly identify as pessimists. Pessimistic rhetoric, then, appears either too small to matter or the opposite: it appears so “hidden” that one begins to see its outline everywhere (“Did you see that new diet Coke ad? Soooo pessimistic . . .”). Nevertheless, despite its thin presence, pessimistic persuasion has important implications for the study of persuasion (read: optimistic persuasion) more broadly. Studying the laborious lengths that pessimists must go to avoid optimistic problematic structures helps to reveal the typically unstated and overlooked endoxa at work behind most rhetorical acts. For rhetoric is often understood by both scholars and practitioners only in relation to its meaning-creating function; hence, the common topoi and tropes tend to engender, maintain, and controllably disseminate meaning. Pessimists seek to destroy meaning and thus cannot rely on these tropes. Finding pessimistic rhetoric in situ can be meaningfully compared to find organisms living on Earth from an extraplanetary genesis. These creatures, though they may be small in number, would obviously serve as a point of deep fascination for biologists. How could life adapt itself to an alien environment, an inhospitable habitat? Perhaps these organisms survived by mimicking some aspects of their Earthly neighbors. Though scientists would no doubt cite the intrinsic value of studying alien life, they would also be right to say that studying these organisms would tell us a lot about life that evolved on Earth. The same holds true for alien rhetorical entities—valuable in and of themselves, doubly valuable for what they reveal about discourses that are more familiar. And while pessimistic rhetoric maintains few outposts, there is reason to believe that it extends beyond the case studies of our five chapters. For starters, pessimistic content slips into (or seeps out of ) popular culture with unexpected frequency. Take this exchange from the American television comedy The Office: Dwight: That’s how it goes sometimes, you know. You lose everything, and everything falls apart. And eventually you die, and no one remembers you. Michael: That is a very good point, Dwight.4 Or this dialogue from the animated sitcom The Simpsons: Marge: I think Bart and Lisa are feeling a little upset right now. Isn’t there something you’d like to say? Conclusion

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Homer: There sure is. Kids, you tried your best, and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.5

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Or consider the fact that M*A*S*H, a television comedy that aired for a decade (1972–1983), had an opening theme that was an ode to suicide (“Suicide Is Painless”). But beyond such offhanded references to pessimism, a cursory investigation in the presence of pessimism within popular culture suggests a diverse range of aesthetically pessimistic choices, even beyond those examined in the present study. These aesthetics, while esoteric and genre-liminal, may deploy a variety of techniques, some multimodal, that have the effect of counteracting or slipping by our anti-pessimistic defense strategies. Certain varieties of music, for example, can be deeply unsettling in a way that either primes audiences for pessimism or directly produces a pessimistic state of mind. New neuroscience research suggests that the pleasure of music comes from the establishment and then meeting of expectations ( just as the pleasure of all formal appeals). Great music manipulates these needs, taking audiences on a winding journey before delivering the payoff. Composers and performers frequently take advantage of such phenomena and manipulate emotional arousal by violating expectations in certain ways or by delaying the predicted outcome (for example, by inserting unexpected notes or slowing tempo) before the resolution so as to heighten the motivation for completion.6 Music that sets up and then leaves expectations unfulfilled can produce the reverse effect, producing a discomfort that may create greater reception to pessimism. Certainly, experimental drone metal bands such as Sun 0))), Earth, and early Boris—with their combination of slow tempos, heaviness, and long-duration tones—could potentially be read as a form of pessimistic persuasion. More demonstrable in terms of pessimistic effect, the 1913 premier of Stravinsky’s The Rites of Spring, with its atonal score and disjointed and unnatural choreography, created such a hostile reaction that it literally resulted in a riot.7 Children’s stories also provide fertile ground for pessimistic persuasion. If Zapffe’s various optimistic bulwarks are in part socialized, one imagines that children may lack the fullness of their defenses. One can imagine pessimistic concepts hidden in children’s stories may be absorbed unknowingly, acting as hidden mines to be fully triggered latter in life. Take the upbeat Pixar film Inside Out. In the film, a young girl named Riley navigates a difficult family move under the guidance of various anthropomorphized emotions

A Feeling of Wrongness

that exist in a mental command center. On the one hand, Inside Out is a literal lesson in optimistic catharsis, as the main character embraces sadness to heal the woes in her life. On the other hand, the film shows a rather pessimistic depiction of human agency, with Riley in many ways a slave to the primordial emotions of fear, joy, anger, disgust, and sadness, rather than an autonomous being. The movie The Neverending Story from 1984 is yet another children’s story rife with pessimistic themes. The main antagonist is “The Nothing,” an indescribable void that seeks to devour the world of Fantastica. When confronted with this void, the citizens of Fantastica do not flee in horror but are instead drawn irresistibly to throw themselves into nonexistence. Rhetorical Futures

At first glance these insights into the available means of pessimistic rhetoric may appear to be of only limited use, applicable primarily, if not only, to the very narrow group of pessimists actively interested in persuading others of their beliefs; however, we maintain that such rhetorical tactics and operations have something of value to offer any group that might seek to weaken audiences’ convictions, to alter their perceptions regarding the possible or the real, or “simply” to convert them to an alternate set of beliefs or values. In other words, the type of pessimistic rhetoric examined throughout this study—and whose main contours are outlined above—affords a generic model of symbolic effectivity but one that is most suited to groups who, like philosophical pessimists, find themselves at the margins of common belief and opinion, albeit for various and quite different reasons. Hence, while dyed-in-the-wool pessimists may insist that to challenge life’s intrinsic meaning and value remains the ultimate social taboo, an Afro-pessimist, for instance, could easily counter that society values antiblackness just as much as, if not more than, optimistic assumptions about life and living. Similar counterstatements could be raised and effectively championed in connection with heteronormativity, settler colonialism, patriarchy, able-ism, or any of the other systems of inequality that scholars and activists point to as foundational to the creation and maintenance of structures of domination and oppression. Just as pessimists find traditional modes of communication to be severely lacking and overly constrained with respect to its rhetorical ends, voices of other marginalized discourses tend to run afoul of any number of persuasive constraints that constitute the long-established conditions of

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rhetorical effectivity. For Afro-pessimists, traditional modes of rhetoric and argumentation are virtually unusable because they are structured in accordance with a libidinal economy that preserves antiblack fantasies, as an objective value, within both the politicoeconomic life of society and the psychic life of culture.8 Similarly, contemporary feminist critics have made the case that persuasion itself is inescapably patriarchal and thus renders feminist polemics self-defeating from the outset.9 Responding encouragingly to such structural impasses, the post-colonial literary theorist Walter Mignolo has argued that decolonial thinking, in order to move forward, must “build its own genealogy of thought,” lest it “fall prey to genealogies of thought already established.”10 However, while one broad strategy for the advancement of alternative modes of rhetorical discourse might therefore consist in building up new, emancipatory modes of being, doing, and thinking—those that exist outside of and are resistant to extant mechanisms of control and domestication—another, perhaps antecedent, strategy would be to explode or deterritorialize what Herbert Marcuse describes as “the monopoly of established reality.”11 Given the cult-like, ritualistic nature of popular culture—its intrication into the rhythms of everyday life and consumption—it is uniquely positioned to act as a conduit for the subversion of that “reality” which is incorporated in our dominant social institutions. As we hope to have shown, popular culture, especially as it exists at the fringes, has served and continues to advance the deterritorializing rhetoric of philosophical pessimism. In addition, then, to recommending a pessimistic model of rhetorical effectivity, the present study puts forward the idea that subversive rhetors of all stripes might get a lot of mileage out of applying that model—productively as well as critically—to various mass-mediated texts of popular culture. Take, for example, Jordan Peele’s recent indie-horror film, Get Out (2017), which uses horror as a medium to examine and personify antiblack racism. The movie created a stir recently when it was entered into the Golden Globe awards competition in the category of comedy.12 Peele seemed to relish in the controversy and argued that Get Out “sort of subverts the idea of genre.”13 He has since signed on to create four other “social thrillers,” each of which will use horror as a means to examine patterns of structural oppression. While a deep analysis of the film goes beyond the scope of this chapter, Get Out would appear to be an Afro-pessimistic film suitable for the kind of rhetorical criticism performed throughout the current study: it subverts genres, engages in esoteric messaging, and possesses a singular quality, which allows it to resist being

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pigeonholed by critics and lay audiences alike. While pessimists may regard queer-pessimists and Afro-pessimists as “not pessimist enough,” there’s no reason why the rhetorical avenues made available by nontraditional modes of rhetoric should not work for all forms of pessimism. There are, however, certain limitations on the pessimistic or disruptive potentiality of non- or quasi-pessimistic discourses—that is to say, of discourses that make use of rhetorical pessimism’s tactics and operations without committing to substance or end of philosophical pessimism itself. Patricia MacCormack’s idiosyncratic readings of monsters and weird fiction provide a good case in point.14 At one level, the rhetorical hermeneutic she employs is very similar to our own, as is her selection of text. Like our interpretation of the weird, MacCormack’s infers a destabilizing tendency aimed at undermining, among other things, the conceptual underpinnings of our prevailing societal norms and structures. However, whereas MacCormack posits that such disruption “opens up the very possibilities of ethical alterity and encounters premised on the destruction of the privileged subject,” a more thoroughly pessimistic reading would suggest that these new possibilities make up the basis of a new form of sublimation.15 Sublimation, however, when detached from a psychotherapeutic context, is a uniquely pessimistic concern. That is to say, if the rhetor or rhetorical critic does not set out to demonstrate the intrinsic badness of life, then any residual or muted affirmation is irrelevant. Rhetors interested in subverting established reality (minus its life-affirming aspects) can thus put to good use the stratagems afforded by the pessimistic model of rhetoric, just as vegetarian could make use of a nonvegetarian cook book: follow the recipe, leave out the meat, maybe add in some vegetarian substitutions. Writing extensively about pessimism and pessimists makes clear the seriousness of pessimisms as a philosophical frame. Violence, degradation, suffering—all exist in a scope that is unpleasant to contemplate. The facts on the ground militate against complete optimistic hegemony, a situation demonstrated clearly by existence of rhetorical passages for pessimism. Optimism then can assuage pessimism, not in dialectic and confrontation, but by subsuming its distributed machinery. Pessimism recirculated offers regeneration and interval, a dynamic and transformative response to pessimism, rather than the staid bromides that circulate now. Even as it acts to annihilate the Hegelian logic behind the current sacrosanct order, it provides a diffuse apparatus to replace its functions. Pessimism recirculated acts as a formal way to combat claims to our universal

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inhumanity and alienation. Like the story of the Yellow King that functions both intertextually and as a form of metafiction, commentary pessimism, as meme can function both as insight and respite to the human condition.

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Notes

Introduction 1. Cary Joji Fukunaga, dir., True Detective, “The Long, Bright Dark,” written by Nic Pizzolatto, HBO, January 12, 2014. 2. E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 108. 3. Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horrors (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2010), 76, passim. 4. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, 2 vols. (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 1:311. 5. Michael J. Hyde, The Ethos of Rhetoric (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), xiii. 6. Roland Barthes, “The Old Rhetoric: An aide-mémoire,” in The Semiotic Challenge, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1988), 16. 7. Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, trans. George Alexander Kennedy, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1.2.21. 8. Carlo Michelstaedter, Persuasion and Rhetoric, trans. Russell Scott Valentino, Cinzia Sartini Blum, and David J. Depew (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 63–77. 9. Peter Wessel Zapffe, “The Last Messiah,” trans. Sigmund Kvaløy and Peter Reed, in Wisdom in the Open Air: The Norwegian Roots of Deep Ecology, ed. Peter Reed and David Rothenberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

10. Ligotti, Conspiracy Against the Human Race, 47. 11. Ibid., 4. 12. Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, in Theban Plays, trans. Peter Meineck and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), 1225–28. 13. Arthur Schopenhauer, Arthur Schopenhauer: Essays and Aphorisms, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penquin Books, 1970), 53. There is a noticeable stretch of time separating nineteenth-century Germany from classical antiquity, and, to be sure, a range of eclectic pessimists appeared throughout that long “interval,” from Euripides and Lucretius to Montaigne and the Marquis de Sade. For those interested in sampling the variety of pessimistic thought, see Alan R. Pratt, ed., The Dark Side: Thoughts on the Futility of Life from the Ancient Greeks to the Present (New York: Carol Citadel Press, 1994). 14. Nietzsche discusses his relationship to Schopenhauer through his colorful, wideranging works. However, his most sustained commentary may be found in the essay “Schopenhauer as Educator,” in Untimely Mediations, ed. Daniel Breazeale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 125–94. 15. David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1. 16. Samuelson de Brito, “The Arrogance of Breeders,” Sydney Morning Herald, May 2, 2015; Tania Lombrozo, “Is Having a Child a Rational Decision?” NPR, March 11, 2013; Peter Singer, “Should This Be

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the Last Generation?” New York Times, June 6, 2010; Google Scholar, “Better Never to Have Been Citations,” https://scholar.google .com/scholar?cites=17546949840062959718 &as_sdt=80000005&sciodt=0,23&hl=en. 17. Julio Cabrera, A Critique of Affirmative Morality: A Reflection on Death, Birth, and the Value of Life, 3rd ed. (Brazil: Julio Cabrera Editions, 2014), 30. 18. Jim Crawford, Confessions of an Antinatalist (Charleston, W.V.: Nine-Banded Books, 2010). 19. Sarah Perry, Every Cradle Is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide (Charleston, W.V.: Nine-Banded Books, 2014), x. 20. “Say No to Life,” Blogspot, http:// saynotolife.blogspot.com/; “I Say What They Wont,” Wordpress, https://isaywhatthey wont.wordpress.com/. 21. “R/ Antinatalism,” Reddit, https://www .reddit.com/r/antinatalism/. 22. Benatar, Better Never to Have Been, 222–23; Ligotti, Conspiracy Against the Human Race, 47. 23. Singer, “Should This Be the Last Generation?” 24. Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, 1:147. 25. E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, 23–25; Cioran, A Short History of Decay, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2012), 146–47. 26. Ligotti, Conspiracy Against the Human Race, 170–71; Crawford, Confessions of an Antinatalist, 141. 27. Crawford, Confessions of an Antinatalist, 96–99; Benatar, Better Never to Have Been, 9, 209. 28. Zapffe, “Last Messiah,” 43. 29. Perry, Every Cradle Is a Grave, viii. 30. Eugene Thacker, Cosmic Pessimism (Minneapolis, Minn.: Univocal, 2015), 13. 31. This sense of deep rhetoric should not be confused with the sense in which Crosswhite uses the phrase. In fact, the two meanings are essentially antithetical. Whereas Michelstaedter’s refers to a kind of non-agential heteronomy whereby humans become possessed meanings not of their own making, Crosswhite understands deep rhetoric as a philosophical enterprise that is useful for the management of conflict, the accomplishment of justice, and the apprehension of the human condition. See James Crosswhite,

Notes to Pages 7–12

Deep Rhetoric: Philosophy, Reason, Violence, Justice, Wisdom (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013), esp. 16–29. 32. Rosamond Kent Sprague, ed. The Older Sophists (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1972), 80B.1. 33. Thomas B. Farrell, Norms of Rhetorical Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 27, 25. 34. Raymie McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis,” Communication Monographs 56, no. 2 (1989): 91–111. 35. Lloyd F. Bitzer, “The Rhetorical Situation,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 1, no. 1 (1968): 6. 36. See Aristotle, On Rhetoric,1.6–7. 37. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 2014), 14. 38. The straw person attacks on Benatar are ubiquitous on the internet, but also present in the writings of serious academics. See for example, Christopher Belshaw, “David Benatar Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence,” Notre Dame Philosophy Reviews (2007), http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/better -never-to-have-been-the-harm-of-coming -into-existence/. 39. Sami Pihlström, “Ethical Unthinkabilities and Philosophical Seriousness,” Metaphilosophy 40, no. 5 (2009): 657. 40. Chaïm Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 16. 41. David Zarefsky, “Future Directions in Argumentation Theory and Practice,” in Perspectives on Argumentation: Essays in Honor of Wayne Brockriede, ed. Robert Trapp and Janice Schuetz (Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1990), 295. 42. Thacker, Cosmic Pessimism, 31. 43. Zapffe, “Last Messiah,” 52. 44. Ray Brassier, “Introduction” to Ligotti’s Conspiracy Against the Human Race, 10. 45. Eugene Thacker, “Cosmic Pessimism,” Continent 2, no. 2 (2012): 75. 46. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 2007), 18. 47. Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 229–30.

48. Ibid., 265–68. 49. E. M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Arcade, 1976), 168. 50. Joshua Foa Dienstag, “Werewolves, Pessimism, and Realism in Europa and Melancholia,” Theory and Event 18, no. 2 (2015). 51. Ibid. 52. Brian Zager, “Existence Occulted: Rhetorical Pessimism and the Worldwithout-Us,” Horror Studies 8, no. 1 (2017): 16. 53. Ibid., 22. 54. Dienstag, Pessimism, 268. 55. Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, 2:169. 56. The notion of a “restricted” field of cultural production originates with the French anthropologist and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, by which he understands a social universe in which independent participants hold a shared set of collective beliefs and practices necessary for distinguishing between a specific class of objects (say, for instance, works of art) and simple, ordinary things and conferring upon the former the status of a candidate for rarified appreciation. See Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 254ff. 57. Nicole Seymour, “Down with People,” in International Perspectives in Feminist Ecocriticism, ed. Greta Gaard, Simon C. Estok, and Serpil Oppermann (New York: Routledge, 2013). 58. Ibid., 210. 59. Herman Tennessen, “Happiness Is for the Pigs: Philosophy Versus Psychotherapy,” Journal of Existentialism 7, no. 26 (1967): 184. 60. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 29. 61. Michael Snediker, “Queer Optimism,” Postmodern Culture 16, no. 3 (2006). 62. Frank B. Wilderson, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of Black Antagonisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 57–59. 63. Jared Sexton, “Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word,” Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 29 (2016). 64. Patricia MacCormack, Posthuman Ethics (London: Routledge, 2016).

65. On Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concepts of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, as well as the distinction between relative and absolute deterritorialization, see A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 174–91 passim, especially 174–75. 66. Patricia MacCormack, private correspondence. 67. The concept of the Overton window refers to the range or “window” of tolerated ideas and policy proposals within public discourse. Everything inside the window is acceptable, sensible, or popular, while everything outside the window is radical, ridiculous, and unthinkable. For a brief overview, see Joseph G. Lehman, “An Introduction to the Overton Window of Political Possibility” (Mackinac Center for Public Policy, 2010), https://www.mackinac.org/12481. 68. Brian L. Ott and Robert L. Mack, Critical Media Studies: An Introduction (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 100. See also, Barry Brummett, Rhetorical Dimensions of Popular Culture (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991); Martin J. Medhurst and Thomas W. Benson, eds., Rhetorical Dimensions in Media: A Critical Casebook (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt Publishing, 1984). 69. For a suggestive argument on the possible historical relationship between cult ritual and culture, see Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 217–51. Chapter 1 1. H. P. Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” in At the Mountains of Madnesss: The Definitive Edition (New York: The Modern Library, 2005), 108. 2. Ibid. 3. S. T. Joshi, The Modern Weird Tale (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2001), 1–11. 4. Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer, “Introduction,” in The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, ed. Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer (New York: Tor, 2011), xvi.

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5. Ibid. 6. Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” 107. 7. E. T. A. Hoffman, “The Sandman,” in Tales of Hoffman, ed. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin Books, 1982). 8. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (New York: Penguin, 2003), 150–51; see also, 54. 9. Ibid., 124. 10. Ligotti, Conspiracy Against the Human Race, 85. 11. Aristotle, On Rhetoric 1.2.13. 12. Ligotti, Conspiracy Against the Human Race, 89. 13. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001), 1. 14. According to S. T. Joshi, Ambrose Bierce and M. R. James are two of the six originators of the modern weird tale—the others being Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, and H. P. Lovecraft. S. T. Joshi, The Weird Tale (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1990). 15. Edgar Allen Poe, “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Masque of the Red Death,” in The Portable Edgar Allan Poe, ed. J. G. Kennedy (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 208–14, 37–42. 16. Michel Houellebecq, H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, trans. Dorna Khazeni (San Francisco: Believer Books, 2005), 51. 17. Stephen. King, “Lovecraft’s Pillow,” introduction to Michel Houellebecq’s Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, ed. Michel Houellebecq (San Francisco: Believer Books, 2005), 17. 18. Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” 134. In Lovecraft’s writings (both his fiction and nonfiction), the uncanny is closely associated with cosmic fear—fear of humanity’s insignificance in the universe, combined with the futility of all human striving. 19. Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), 271b. 20. Lawrence W. Rosenfield, “The Practical Celebration of Epideictic,” in Rhetoric in Transition: Studies in the Nature and Uses of Rhetoric, ed. E. E. White (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980), 135.

Notes to Pages 25–33

21. Richard McKeon, “The Uses of Rhetoric in a Technological Age: Architectonic Productive Arts,” in Rhetoric: Essays in Invention and Discovery (Woodbridge, Conn.: Oxbow Press, 1987), 19. 22. Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, 2:584. 23. Plato, Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube and C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1992), 514a–20c. 24. Plato, Republic 517a. 25. Plato, Gorgias, trans. Donald J. Zeyl (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 500a–505b. 26. Kenneth Burke, CounterStatement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 31; David Zarefsky, “Dialogic and Rhetorical Argument,” in Rhetorical Perspectives on Argumentation: Selected Essays by David Zarefsky, ed. David Zarefsky (New York: Springer Press, 2014), 12; Aristotle, Poetics: With the Tractatus Coislinianis, Reconstruction of Poetics II, and the Fragments of the On Poets, trans. Richard Janko (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 1450b24. 27. Carl T. Ford, “Interview with Thomas Ligotti,” in Born to Fear: Interviews with Thomas Ligotti, ed. Matt Cardin (Burton, Mich.: Subterranean Press, 2014), 22. 28. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 161. 29. Both of these questions are left unresolved in Robert Aickman’s contemporary classic “The Hospice,” in Cold Hand in Mine: Strange Stories (New York: Scribners, 1975). 30. Fritz Leiber, “The Black Gondolier,” in Night Monsters (New York: Ace, 1969), 31. 31. See for example, Fritz Leiber, “Smoke Ghost,” in Fritz Leiber: Selected Stories, ed. Jonathan Strahan and Charles N. Brown (San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2010), 5–18; Ramsey Campbell, “Mackintosh Willy,” in Alone with the Horrors: The Great Short Fiction of Ramsey Campbell, 1961–1991 (New York: Tor, 1993), 237–49); T. E. D. Klein, “Children of the Kingdom,” in Dark Gods (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985), 1–71; Thomas Ligotti, “Purity,” in Teatro Grotesco (London: Virgin Books, 2008), 3–21. 32. Joyce Carol Oates, “Introduction,” in Tales of H. P. Lovecraft,

ed. Joyce Carol Oates (New York: The Ecco Press, 2000), xiii. 33. Caitlín R. Kiernan, “A Redress for Andromeda,” in To Charles Fort, with Love (Burton, Mich.: Subterranean Press, 2005); Julio Cortázar, “Axolotl,” in Fantastic Worlds: Myths, Tales, and Stories, ed. Eric S. Rabkin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). 34. Isabella van Elferen, “HyperCacophony: Lovecraft, Speculative Realism, and Sonic Materialism,” in The Age of Lovecraft, ed. C. H. Sederholm and J. A. Weinstock (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 81; H. P. Lovecraft, “The Whisperer in Darkness,” in The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Penquin Books, 2002). 35. Clive Barker, “The Bare Bones: An Introduction,” in Scared Stiff: Tales of Sex and Death (New York: Tor, 1987), 13. 36. Matt Cardin, “It’s All a Matter of Personal Pathology,” in Born to Fear: Interviews with Thomas Ligotti, ed. Matt Cardin (Burton, Mich.: Subterranean Press, 2014), 131. 37. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven,” in The Portable Edgar Allan Poe, ed. J. G. Kennedy (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 422–25. 38. Indeed, the narrator’s final revelation is that “every branch of human knowledge if traced up to its source and final principles vanishes into mystery.” Arthur Machen, “Novel of the White Powder,” in The Great God Pan and Other Weird Stories, ed. S. T. Joshi (Welches, Oreg.: Arcane Wisdom, 2011), 172. 39. Algernon Blackwood, “The Willows,” in Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 43. 40. Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 14. 41. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 57–60. 42. Leiber, “Smoke Ghost.” 43. Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Zero Books, 2011), 130. 44. Aristotle, On Rhetoric 2.5.1. 45. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 109.

46. Plato, Timaeus, in Plato Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper, trans. Donald J. Zeyl (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 33b, 34a, 37a–c. 47. Carl Sagan, “Carl Sagan: CosmosStars—We Are Their Children,” Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLPk pBN6bEI; Neil DeGrasse Tyson, “Neil Degrasse Tyson: ‘That’s Kinda Cool,’” Youtube, https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=UmOThpcCkf4. 48. Dienstag, Pessimism, ix–x. 49. Lloyd P. Gerson, From Plato to Platonism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013). 50. H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu,” in The Call of Cthulhu and Other Stories, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Penquin Books, 2002), 165–6. 51. Ibid., 165. 52. Patricia MacCormack identifies Lovecraft’s use of the concept of nonEuclidean space, as well as many other tropes, with an assault on current anchoring social structures. Nevertheless, contrary to Lovecraft’s apolitical intent, MacCormack sees associative possibilities as an opportunity for the flourishing of a radically different humanity—rather than, say, as the opening for the negation of life. See MacCormack, “Lovecraft’s Cosmic Ethics,” in The Age of Lovecraft, ed. Carl H. Sederholm and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 204. 53. Lovecraft, “Call of Cthulhu,” 148. 54. Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet, 77. 55. Aickman, “Hospice,” 98. 56. Ibid., 106. 57. H. P. Lovecraft, “From Beyond,” in The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 28. 58. Charles Strouse and Martin Charnin, “Tomorrow,” (1977). 59. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 89–91. 60. Nietzsche, Gay Science, 162; see also, op. cit.: 94–95. 61. See for example, Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations, trans. A. Kerrigan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); Giacomo Leopardi, The Moral Essays, trans. P. Creagh (New York: Columbia University Press,

Notes to Pages 33–40

179

180

1983); E. M. Cioran, History and Utopia, trans. R. Howard (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2015); Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, Harper Torchbooks (New York: Harper, 1959). 62. See for example, Clark Ashton Smith, “Ubbo Sathla,” in The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Penguin Books, 2014). 63. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia (New York: Hippocampus, 2004), 90. 64. Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet, 93. 65. Leiber, “The Black Gondolier,” 13. 66. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1869), i, 8. 67. Roger Scruton, The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 8–18. 68. Cioran, Short History of Decay, 179. 69. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, 61. 70. H. P. Lovecraft, “The Hound”; Robert W. Chambers, The King in Yellow (New York: Ace, 1965); Thomas Ligotti, “Masquerade of a Dead Sword,” in Songs of a Dead Dreamer (New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, 1989); Clark Ashton Smith, “The Devotee of Evil,” in The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Penguin Books, 2014); Thomas Ligotti, “Dream of a Mannikin,” in Songs of a Dead Dreamer (New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, 1989). 71. Arthur Machen, “The Great God Pan,” in The Great God Pan and Other Weird Stories, ed. S. T. Joshi (Welches, Oreg.: Arcane Wisdom, 2011), 33. 72. Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (Washington, D.C.: Zero Books, 2012), 3. 73. See for instance, Stephen Asma, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy; Bradley A. Will, “H. P. Lovecraft and the Semiotic Kantian Sublime,” Extrapolation 43, no. 1 (2002). 74. Tennessen, “Happiness Is for the Pigs,” 203. 75. Thomas Ligotti, “The Last Feast of Harlequin,” in Grimscribe: His Lives and Works (New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, 1991), 40.

Notes to Pages 40–48

76. Lovecraft, “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,” in The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Penguin Books, 2004) 156–57. 77. Ligotti, Conspiracy Against the Human Race, 42. 78. Aristotle, Poetics 1450b27. 79. Gustav Freytag, Freytag’s Technique of the Drama: An Exposition of Dramatic Composition and Art, trans. Elias J. MacEwan, 3rd ed. (Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1900). 80. Peter Wessel Zapffe, “The Task of the Theater: Seen in the Light of a Biological Outlook,” https://web.archive.org /web/20080907181936/http://sirocco.blog some.com/2006/05/23/peter-zapffe-on -the-theater/. 81. Rhetoric also follows a similar structure to drama in the form of the topoi. One should lay out the problem, cause of the problem, and solution (James Jasinski, Sourcebook on Rhetoric: Key Concepts in Contemporary Rhetorical Studies [Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2001], 61). While the rhetor may present a problem with the world, they are structurally obliged to offer a solution and solutions by their very nature do not comport to a pessimistic worldview. Even Ligotti maintains the argumentative topoi in Conspiracy, beginning with a description of the world’s problems, laying the blame on the conspiracy against the human race, and ending with a plea to end human life. This structure is inherently optimistic— regardless of how unlikely and unpleasant its resolution—because it presupposes the possibility of meaningful human action. 82. H. P. Lovecraft, “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” in The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Penguin, 1999), 268–335. 83. Arthur Machen, “The White People,” in The Great God Pan and Other Weird Stories, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Penquin Books, 2011). 84. Ambrose Bierce, “An Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge,” in The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce, ed. Ernest Jerome Hopkins (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 313. 85. Oates, “Introduction,” xv. 86. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. Judith Norman, in The

Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 170. Chapter 2 1. Sarah Hughes, “True Detective: ‘I Didn’t Want It to Be Just Another SerialKiller Show,’” Guardian (2014), https://www .theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/feb/17 /true-detective-nic-pizzolatto-mcconaughey -harrelson. 2. “True Detective,” Metacritic, http:// www.metacritic.com/tv/true-detective /season-1. 3. Nick Land, “Synopsis,” Abe Books, https://www.abebooks.com/9780692277379 /True-Detection-Gary-Shipley-Edia-06922 77374/plp. 4. “From ‘Lost’ to ‘Leftovers’: Show Creators Embrace Ambiguity and the Unknown,” NPR, http://www.npr.org /2015/12/02/458143133/from-lost-to-leftovers -show-creators-embrace-ambiguity-and-the -unknown. 5. Robert Howse, “Reading Between the Lines: Exotericism, Esotericism, and the Philosophical Rhetoric of Leo Strauss,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 32, no. 1 (1999): 61. 6. Fukunaga, True Detective, “Long, Bright Dark.” 7. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 69, 146. 8. Michael Calia, “Writer Nic Pizzolatto on Thomas Ligotti and the Weird Secrets of ‘True Detective,’” Wall Street Journal (2014), http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2014/02/02 /writer-nic-pizzolatto-on-thomas-ligotti -and-the-weird-secrets-of-true-detective/. 9. Alex Abad-Santos, “The True Detective Plagiarism Controversy: Explained,” Vox (2014), http://www.vox .com/2014/8/7/5975769/true-detective -a-work-of-plagiarism-a-guide. 10. As a side note, the book for which Pizzolatto is accused of plagiarizing is itself in many ways a reiteration of an assortment of ideas from pessimistic luminaries like Schopenhauer and Freud. 11. Tim Surette, “News Briefs: True Detective Is HBO’s Most-Watched New Series since 2001,” tv.com (2014), http://www .tv.com/shows/true-detective/community /post/true-detective-ratings-139449092217/.

An email correspondence with the publisher suggests sales hit around 8,500 copies as of the end of 2014 (Derrick Hussey, 2015). 12. Ian Crouch, “What’s So Funny About “True Detective?” New Yorker March 7, 2004, http://www.newyorker.com/culture /culture-desk/whats-so-funny-about-true -detective. 13. Fukunaga, True Detective, “Long, Bright Dark.” In the original script, he tells his partner, Marty Hart, “Look, if you want, I could lend you some Schopenhauer. Start there.” 14. Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, 53. 15. Cary Joji Fukunaga, dir., True Detective, “The Locked Room,” episode 3, written by Nic Pizzolatto, HBO, January 26, 2014. 16. Cary Joji Fukunaga, dir., True Detective, “The Secret Fate of All Life,” episode 5, written by Nic Pizzolatto, HBO, February 16, 2014. 17. Nietzsche discusses this idea throughout his middle to later works. For his earliest and clearest expression of the idea, see Gay Science, 162, 285. 18. Fukunaga, True Detective, “Secret Fate of All Life.” 19. Nietzsche, Gay Science, 194, 341. 20. Ibid., 157, 276. 21. Fukunaga, True Detective, “Locked Room.” 22. Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, 2:411. 23. Zapffe, “Last Messiah,” 44. 24. A similar critique of consciousness is explored in an episode of the British science fiction anthology series Black Mirror, “The Entire History of You,” Netflix, December 18, 2011, written by Jesse Armstrong, directed by Brian Welsh. In it, characters obsessively live much of their lives through the ubiquitous use of “grains”—implants that record everything a person sees and hears and allow for replay via “re-dos.” 25. Fukunaga, True Detective, “Long, Bright Dark.” 26. Cary Joji Fukunaga, dir., True Detective, “Seeing Things,” episode 2, written by Nic Pizzolatto, HBO, March 2, 2014. 27. Ibid. 28. Benatar, Better Never to Have Been, 65. 29. Fukunaga, True Detective, “Long, Bright Dark.” 30. Fukunaga, True Detective, “Locked Room.”

Notes to Pages 49–57

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182

31. Fukunaga, True Detective, “Seeing Things.” 32. Fukunaga, True Detective, “Locked Room”; True Detective, “Seeing Things.” 33. Fukunaga, True Detective, “Locked Room.” 34. Fukunaga, True Detective, “Seeing Things.” 35. Zapffe, “The Task of the Theater: Seen in the Light of a Biological Outlook.” 36. Cary Joji Fukunaga, dir., True Detective, “Form and Void,” episode 8, written by Nic Pizzolatto, HBO, March 9, 2014. 37. Fukunaga, True Detective, “Form and Void.” 38. Erik Adams, “True Detective: ‘Form and Void,’” A.V. Club, March 10, 2014, http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/true -detective-form-and-void-201999. 39. Fukunaga, True Detective, “Locked Room”; Cary Joji Fukunaga, dir., True Detective, “After You’ve Gone,” episode 7, written by Nic Pizzolatto, HBO, March 2, 2014. 40. Andrew Romano, “How ‘True Detective’ Will End,” Daily Beast (2014), http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014 /03/02/how-true-detective-will-end-what -we-know-up-to-episode-7-after-you-ve-gone .html. 41. Marlow Stern, “Craziest Theories of How ‘True Detective’ Will End: Killer Marty, the Five Horsemen, and More,” Daily Beast (2014), http://www.thedailybeast.com /articles/2014/03/05/craziest-theories-of-how -true-detective-will-end-killer-marty-the -five-horsemen-and-more.html; Christopher Orr, “True Detective: Spoiler-Y Speculation About the Finale,” Atlantic (2014), http:// www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive /2014/03/-em-true-detective-em-spoiler -y-speculation-about-the-finale/284288/; Laura Hudson, “Who Is True Detective’s Yellow King? Here Are Our 6 Favorite Theories,” Wired (2014), https://www.wired .com/2014/02/true-detective-theories/. 42. Fukunaga, True Detective, “Locked Room”; Fukunaga, True Detective, “Seeing Things.” 43. Fukunaga, True Detective, “Locked Room”; Fukunaga, True Detective, “Seeing Things”; Fukunaga, True Detective, “After You’ve Gone.” 44. Alan Yuhas, “True Detective Review: Season One Finale—Form and Void,” Guardian, March 10, 2014, https://

Notes to Pages 57–65

www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio /tvandradioblog/2014/mar/10/true-detective -season-one-finale-recap. 45. David Haglund, Willa Paskin, and June Thomas, “Crawling out of the True Detective Rabbit Hole,” Slate, March 10, 2014, http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat /2014/03/10/true_detective_finale_on_hbo _form_and_void_a_recap_and_debate.html; “The ‘True Detective’ Roundtable: ‘The True Detective Finale: That’s It?’” Atlantic, March 10, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com /entertainment/archive/2014/03/the-em-true -detective-em-finale-thats-it/284312/; “True Detective’ Finale: All We Have to Do Is Let Go,” Grantland, March 10, 2014, http://grant land.com/hollywood-prospectus/true -detective-finale-all-we-have-to-do-is-let -go/; Yuhas, “True Detective Review: Season One Finale—Form and Void”; Marshall Crook, “‘True Detective,’ Season 1, Episode 8, ‘Form and Void’ (Season Finale Recap),” Wall Street Journal Blog, March 9, 2014, http:// blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2014/03/09/true -detective-season-1-episode-8-form-and -void-recap-season-finale/; Luke O’Neil, “Was True Detective Trolling Us?” Esquire, March 9, 2014, http://www.esquire.com /blogs/culture/true-detective-finale. 46. Emily Nussbaum, “The Disappointing Finale of ‘True Detective,” New Yorker, March 10,2014, http://www .newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/ the-disappointing-finale-of-true-detective. 47. Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, reprint (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 36. A defense of this hermeneutic can be found in Strauss’s essay, “On a Forgotten Kind of Writing,” Chicago Review 8, no. 1 (1954): 64–75. 48. Strauss, Persecution, 32. For further clarification on the necessity of such “writing between the lines,” see Stanley Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 112–14; Michael S. Kochin, “Morality, Nature, and Esotericism in Leo Strauss’s Persecution and the Art of Writing,” Review of Politics 64, no. 2 (2002): 261–83; and Catherine and Michael Zuckert, The Truth About Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 136–54. 49. Strauss, Persecution, 18. 50. Ibid., 25. 51. Ibid., 30.

52. Howse, “Reading Between the Lines,” 66. 53. Haglund, Paskin, and Thomas, “Crawling out of the True Detective Rabbit Hole.” 54. Strauss, Persecution, 147. 55. Hughes, “True Detective.” 56. Justin Steele, “True Detective’s Nic Pizzolatto on Ligotti,” Arkam Digest January 30, 2014, http://www.arkhamdigest .com/2014/01/true-detectives-nic-pizzolatto -on.html. 57. Kate Aurthur, “The “True Detective” Creator Debunks Your Craziest Theories,” Buzzfeed, March 6, 2014, https://www.buzz feed.com/kateaurthur/true-dectective-finale -season-1-nic-pizzolatto?utm_term=.ckRN Bxq7Y#.aioQW1mLN. 58. Spencer Kornhaber, Christopher Orr, and Amy Sullivan, “The True Detective Finale: That’s It?,” Atlantic, March 10, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment /archive/2014/03/the-em-true-detective-em -finale-thats-it/284312/. 59. See for instance, Harvey Mansfield, Taming the Prince (New York: Free Press, 1989); Thomas L. Pangle, Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). 60. Arthur M. Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014 ), xii–xvi. 61. Fukunaga, True Detective, “Long, Bright Dark.” For those who may think this explicitly rules out a Straussian reading, Marty recants this position in episode 3 when Papania and Gilbough ask if Rust “led the case where he wanted it to go.” Fukunaga, True Detective, “Locked Room.” 62. Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 73–88; Strauss, Persecution, 144. 63. Strauss, Persecution, 36. 64. Aristotle, On Rhetoric 3.2.4. 65. Fukunaga, True Detective, “Long, Bright Dark”; Fukunaga, True Detective, “Seeing Things.” 66. Fukunaga, True Detective, “Long, Bright Dark.” 67. Fukunaga, True Detective, “Locked Room.” 68. Cary Joji Fukunaga, dir., True Detective, “Who Goes There,” episode 4, written by Nic Pizzolatto, HBO, February 9, 2014.

69. Viewers are also not likely to regard Cohle’s brilliance as a misperception on the part of his colleagues, as the series repeatedly portrays Cohle as the driving force behind the investigation, making a number of crucial, astute observations about individuals. The examples are almost too numerous to mention: he correctly identifies Dora Lange as a prostitute, Hart’s objections notwithstanding; upon investigating the first crime scene, he accurately concludes that the killer had murdered previously; he makes the connection between the Lange murder and the disappearance of Marie Fontenot; he locates the church that Lange had attended and which had been vandalized by the killer; he links the killer to the death of Reanne Olivier; and so on. Cohle’s seemingly preternatural skills of observation even extend beyond his police work, as he correctly deduces that Hart is having an extramarital affair and with whom. 70. Fukunaga, True Detective, “Locked Room.” 71. Fukunaga, True Detective, “Long, Bright Dark.” 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid. 74. Fukunaga, True Detective, “Locked Room.” 75. The elimination of Errol Childress, for example, is ultimately no more important than the death of Reggie Ledoux, whom Hart kills in the fifth episode (True Detective, “The Secret Fate of all Life”). For the evidence makes clear that Childress could only have been a bit player in the dark events of the show. 76. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 1–34; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 1 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 7, 8. 77. Fukunaga, True Detective, “Long, Bright Dark.” 78. Jonathan Dunn, “The Foundational Wisdom in Freud’s and Loewald’s Metapsychologies,” Modern Psychoanalysis 34, no. 1 (2009). 79. Fukunaga, True Detective, “Seeing Things”; Nic Pizzolatto, “True Detective: The Long Bright Dark. Chapter One: Long Red Dark,” http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~ina22

Notes to Pages 65–72

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/splaylib/Screenplay-True%20Detective-Pilot .pdf, 18. 80. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 63. 81. S. T. Joshi, The Yellow Sign and Other Stories: The Complete Weird Tales of Robert W. Chambers (Ann Arbor, MI: Chaosium, 2004), xiv; Sunand T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, An H .P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001), 38; Anthony B. Pearsall, The Lovecraft Lexicon: A Reader’s Guide to Persons, Places, and Things in the Tales of H. P. Lovecraft (Tempe, Ariz.: New Falcon Publishers, 2005), 436. 82. Fukunaga, True Detective, “Seeing Things.” 83. Michael M. Hughes, “The One Literary Reference You Must Know to Appreciate ​True Detective,” io9, February 14, 2014, http://io9.gizmodo.com/the-one -literary-referen. 84. Aristotle, On Rhetoric 1.2.16–18. 85. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, trans. Ronald Speirs (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 105–6; Aristotle, Poetics 1449b25–27. 86. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 39. 87. Kenneth Burke, “Terministic Screens,” in Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 45. 88. Gwynne Watkins, “The True Detective Finale Recap: One More Light in the Darkness,” GQ, 2014, http://www.gq.com /story/true-detective-episode-8-finale-recap. 89. Fukunaga, True Detective, “Locked Room.” 90. Strauss, Persecution, 57. 91. Ibid. Chapter 3 1. Nietzsche, Gay Science, 120. 2. Ibid., 109, 99. Of course, with the phrase “God is dead,” Nietzsche was invoking both the philosopher Hegel and the theologian Martin Luther, both of whom had earlier made the same diagnosis. Nietzsche did, however, popularize the phrase, repeating it throughout his middle and later works. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra,

Notes to Pages 73–83

trans. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 3–16. 3. Justin Roiland, dir., Rick and Morty, “Pilot,” written by Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland, Cartoon Network, December 2, 2013; Dominic Polcino and Pete Michels, dirs., Rick and Morty, “The Ricks Must Be Crazy,” written by Dan Guterman, Cartoon Network, August 30, 2015. 4. Wesley Archer and Pete Michels, dirs., Rick and Morty, “Get Schwifty,” written by Tom Kauffman, Cartoon Network, August 23, 2015. 5. Although the main narrative arc of the episode is a parody of Stephen King’s novel Needful Things, the episode’s title is a play on Ray Bradbury’s classic novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes—which itself was parodied by the adult cartoon series South Park, in the episode “Something Wall-Mart This Way Comes.” 6. John Rice and Pete Michels, dirs., Rick and Morty, “Something Ricked This Way Comes,” written by Mike McMahan, Cartoon Network, March 24, 2015. 7. Dominic Polcino and Pete Michels, dirs., Rick and Morty, “Look Who’s Purging Now,” written by Dan Harmon, Ryan Ridley, and Justin Roiland, Cartoon Network, September 27, 2015. 8. For a concise overview of these ethical theories, see Duncan Richter, Why Be Good?: A Historical Introduction to Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 9. While one could argue that characters like Arthricia and Fart would be regarded by their respective in-groups as immoral, each character’s actions are depicted as comporting with her or his community’s rules of ethical conduct. 10. Bryan Newton and Pete Michels, dirs., Rick and Morty, “Rixty Minutes,” written by Tom Kauffman and Justin Roiland, Cartoon Network, March 17, 2014; Juan Jose Meza-Leon and Pete Michels, dirs., Rick and Morty, “Interdimensional Cable 2: Tempting Fate,” written by Dan Guterman, Ryan Ridley, and Justin Roiland, Cartoon Network, September 20, 2015. 11. Although the quality of the characters’ alternate realities varies greatly—whereas Jerry discovers a reality where he is a movie star, Summer has trouble finding any other realities of herself apart from a brief moment of playing Yahtzee with her family—no

reality can evidently avoid the pessimistic binary, according to which one’s lived reality either could or could not be more interesting than it is. 12. Meza-Leon and Michels, Rick and Morty, “Interdimensional Cable 2: Tempting Fate.” 13. Zack Handlen, “Rick and Morty: ‘Interdimensional Cable 2: Tempting Fate,’” A.V. Club, September 20, 2015, http://www .avclub.com/tvclub/rick-and-morty-interdi mensional-cable-2-tempting-f-225607. 14. Meza-Leon and Michels, Rick and Morty, “Interdimensional Cable 2: Tempting Fate.” 15. Dienstag, Pessimism, 163, n5. 16. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 42. 17. Roiland, Rick and Morty, “Pilot.” 18. Newton and Michels, Rick and Morty, “Rixty Minutes.” 19. Bryan Newton and Pete Michels, dirs., Rick and Morty, “Meeseeks and Destroy,” written by Ryan Ridley, Cartoon Network, January 20, 2014. 20. Dienstag would disagree. In introducing the two poles of response available to a pessimistic diagnosis—resignation, on the one hand, and spontaneity, or futurity, on the other—he adds that the latter “is not a last-minute rejection of pessimism—not a back-door optimism that a dishonest theory leaves open for itself. Rather, it is a form of self-conduct that values the life we are given in spite of the pessimistic diagnosis of its condition” (Pessimism, 40). However, Dienstag’s differentiation of pessimism and optimism is not the consensus view among philosophical pessimisms (or even nonpessimistic philosophers) but rather a persuasive definition rooted in a preference for Nietzsche’s heroic “Dionysian” pessimism. As the current project is a work primarily of rhetorical criticism and not philosophy, it makes more analytical sense to adhere to the more common-sense understanding of pessimism, according to which the world is as bad as it could be and evil will ultimately prevail over good. 21. Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 6. 22. Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 51.

23. In the post-credits of “Raising Gazorpazorp,” an aged Morty Jr. is interviewed on television about a book he wrote, titled My Horrible Father. Outwardly much calmer and apparently having suppressed his urge to kill and destroy, Morty Jr. blames his earlier violent temperament on the childhood trauma he experienced at the hands of his father, Morty. While to all appearances, he would seem to have “come to terms” with the absurd through sublimation, his attribution of blame, Camus would point out, is not a confrontation or full acknowledgment of the absurd but a refusal and avoidance of absurd reasoning—an attempt to retroactively assign some originary meaning or purpose to one’s existence. Jeff Myers and Pete Michels, dirs., Rick and Morty, “Raising Gazorpazorp,” written by Eric Acosta and Wade Randolph, Cartoon Network, March 10, 2014. 24. Newton and Michels, Rick and Morty, “Meeseeks and Destroy.” 25. Ibid. 26. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigee Books, 1934), 142. 27. Rice and Michels, Rick and Morty, “Something Ricked This Way Comes.” 28. Bryan Newton and Pete Michels, dirs., Rick and Morty, “Auto Erotic Assimilation,” written by Ryan Ridley, Cartoon Network, August 9, 2015. 29. Although one could argue that this isn’t a suicide attempt per se but rather a defiance in the face of death, it nevertheless represents a suicidal tendency, much like that of Mel Gibson’s character, Martin Riggs, in Lethal Weapon. Juan Jose Meza-Leon and Pete Michels, dirs., Rick and Morty, “Total Rickall,” written by Mike McMahan, Cartoon Network, August 16, 2015. 30. Ligotti, Conspiracy Against the Human Race, 161. 31. Cioran, Trouble with Being Born, 32. 32. Wesley Archer and Pete Michels, dirs., Rick and Morty, “A Rickle in Time,” written by Matt Roller, Cartoon Network, July 26, 2015. 33. Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulations,” in Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 170. 34. Ibid., 171. 35. Jeff Myers and Pete Michels, dirs., Rick and Morty, “M. Night Shaym-Aliens!,” written

Notes to Pages 84–93

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by Tom Kauffman, Cartoon Network, January 13, 2014. 36. Mocking both Rick and, by extension, the audience, Prince Nebulon says, “Aww. Look at his face. He’s trying to figure out if he’s in a simulation still. Are you, Rick? Are you? [laughs and walks away] You’re not [walks back]. Or are you?” (“M. Night Shaym-Aliens!”). 37. Gorgias in Sprague, Older Sophists, 82.B.3; 42. 38. Dominic Polcino and Pete Michels, dirs., Rick and Morty, “Mortynight Run,” written by David Phillips, Cartoon Network, August 2, 2015. 39. Myers and Michels, Rick and Morty, “M. Night Shaym-Aliens!” 40. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 42–45. 41. Pessimist Sarah Perry suggests that those who value their own presumably “real” life while holding to the belief that life in an experience machine would be somehow less meaningful are suffering from status-quo bias. In a variation on Nozick’s hypothetical situation, Perry proposes the notion of a “reverse experience machine,” by means of which a subject would come to realize that the life it believed was its own is in fact a simulation. In that event, would the subject be inclined to attach less significance to an existence it had previously viewed as highly meaningful? See Perry, Every Cradle Is a Grave, 61–79. 42. Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End, trans. Chris Turner (Stanford, Calif.: Polity Press, 1994), 15. 43. Shane Ryan, “Could Human Life Be a Simulation, and Why Is That So Disturbing?,” Paste Magazine (2015), https:// www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2015/10 /could-human-life-be-a-simulation-and-why -is-that-s.html. 44. Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee, Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe, paperback ed. (New York: Copernicus, 2003), 282. Ward and Brownlee go on to argue that the absence of alien life can act to recenter humanity. 45. Thacker, “Cosmic Pessimism,” 68. 46. Ibid. 47. Lovecraft, “Call of Cthulhu,” 139. 48. The multiverse at first may seem like an incredibly convenient if wholly improbably source of plot devices, but the

Notes to Pages 93–102

multiverse idea comes with an impressive scientific pedigree. While not quite holding the cachet of heliocentrism, the multiverse theory has its share of prominent defenders, like Stephen Hawking, “Cosmology from the Top Down,” in Universe or Multiverse?, ed. Bernard Carr (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). The existence of infinite universes solves a number of thorny questions raised by quantum mechanics, such that, as alien and incomprehensible as it sounds, it may very well be true. 49. Stephen Sandoval and Pete Michels, dirs., Rick and Morty, “Close Rickcounters of the Rick Kind,” written by Ryan Ridley, Cartoon Network, April 7, 2014. 50. Stephen Sandoval and Pete Michels, dirs., Rick and Morty, “Rick Potion #9,” written by Justin Roiland, Cartoon Network, January 27, 2014. 51. Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 123. 52. One extremely well-argued fan theory that gained considerable cachet online, makes the case that in fact we are witnessing something far more elaborate. The video argues that the entire episode has actually followed a different Rick and Morty and that this alternate Rick and Morty star in at least one other episode of the show. At the risk of another esoteric analysis, another well-developed fan theory posits that the Morty we see is in fact not C-137 Rick’s original Morty. The original Morty, they claim, dies in one of the opening credit vignettes that never gets aired as part of an episode. Bryan Menegus, “The Totally Plausible Rick and Morty Fan Theory That Fixes Season 2’s Ending,” i09 (2016), http://io9.gizmodo.com /the-totally-plausible-rick-and-morty-fan -theory-that-fi-1773589228. 53. In fact, Rick and Morty briefly enter the world of the Simpsons for one of the Simpson’s “couch gags”: http://simpsons .wikia.com/wiki/RickandMortyCouchGag. 54. Thacker, “Cosmic Pessimism.” 55. For an overview of this theory’s dominance, see Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003), 41–75. 56. The exception to this millennialong trend of finding meaning via tragedy is George Steiner, who argues that true tragic drama is and must be unremittingly bleak, “an absolute tragedy” immune from hope.

See for example, The Death of Tragedy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 6ff. 57. Roland Barthes quoted by Alain RobbeGrillet as the epigraph to “Nature Humanism and Tragedy,” trans. Barbara Wright, in Snapshots and Towards a New Novel (London: Calder and Boyars, 1965), 75. 58. Bertolt Brecht, “The Literarization of the Theatre,” in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 43–47; Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Christian Lenhardt (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 42. 59. Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Towards History (Berkley: University of California Press, 1984), 44. 60. Ibid., 58. 61. See ibid., 33–44. 62. Olga Khazan, “The Dark Psychology of Being a Good Comedian,” The Atlantic, February 27, 2014, https://www .theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/02/the -dark-psychology-of-being-a-good-comedian /284104/. 63. Daniela S. Hugelshofer, “Humor’s Role in the Relation Between Attributional Style and Dysphoria,” European Journal of Personality 20, no. 4 (2006). 64. Mark Twain, Following the Equator (Hartford, Conn.: Jungleland Publishing, 1897), 61. 65. Justin Roiland, “Time for Your Weekly Episode of Rick and Morty!,” Reddit, January 21, 2014, https://www.reddit.com/r /videos/comments/1vqhhw/time_for_your _weekly_episode_of_rick_and_morty /cev1b00/. 66. Angela Carter, Wise Children (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1991), 213. 67. Juan Jose Meza-Leon and Wesley Archer, dirs., Rick and Morty, “The Rickshank Rickdemption,” written by Mike McMahan, Cartoon Network, April 1, 2017. Chapter 4 1. Elizabeth Harman, “Critical Study: David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence,” Nous 43, no. 4 (2009); Bearrorist, Spiked, 2015, http:// disq.us/p/113rlqc. 2. Ligotti, Conspiracy Against the Human Race, 227.

3. Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism, trans. Thomas Bailey Saunders (New York: Humbolt Publishing, 1900), 49. 4. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, 26. 5. David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been, 5. 6. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1962), 291. 7. “Thus,” Heidegger writes, “death reveals itself as that possibility which is one’s ownmost, which is non-relational, and which is not to be outstripped [unüberholbare].” Ibid., 294. 8. Ibid., 306ff. 9. Ibid., 299, 311. 10. Plato, “Phaedo,” in The Trial and Execution of Socrates, trans. Peter George (London: The Folio Society, 1972), 103. 11. Indeed, for Heidegger authentic being-toward-death is necessary for the passionate awareness of one’s freedom, for only the acceptance of one’s mortal limitations makes possible the affirmation of one’s own life. For that reason, he maintains that being-towards-death is identical to “an impassioned freedom towards death” (italics and boldface in original). At the same time, however, this freedom is, in a sense, counterbalanced by the basic state of mind that, Heidegger maintains, characterizes authentic being-towards-death, which is not peace and contentment but angst (“dread” or “anxiety”). While an optimist might thus conclude that inauthentic being would be preferable— insofar as it lacks angst—Heidegger argues that the alternative to authentic beingtowards-death is characterized by a state of mind that is arguably equally unpleasant—or at the very least no better—namely, cowardly fear. Heidegger, Being and Time, 311, 10. 12. Ibid., 305, 304. 13. Ibid., 297. 14. Ibid., 298. 15. Ibid., see 310–11. 16. Tennessen, “Happiness Is for the Pigs,” 190. 17. For the notion of representative anecdote, see Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 59–61. Although an eventual authentic being-towards-death could later be cultivated (for those for whom death is not imminent, this about-face remains a

Notes to Pages 103–112

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possibility), such authenticity is not in the realm of immediate subjective effects; terror comes first. 18. To that point, Nietzsche’s criticism of the cathartic model of tragic drama owes to his repudiation of the attempt to rationalize suffering; to ascribe to it a moral-therapeutic function, see Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 105–6. 19. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), 563, 68, and 73–74. 20. Although not generally considered to be a pessimist, Ernest Beck forwards a very similar view, one that reads almost as if it had been intended to articulate Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology with Zapffe’s philosophical pessimism. In Beck’s view, human civilization functions as a complex, symbolic defense mechanism against the human being’s acknowledgment of its own mortality. See his magnum opus, The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973). 21. “In the 1980s People Feared Video Games Would Ruin Kids,” NBC News, 2017, http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/flashback /video/in-the-1980s-people-feared-video -games-would-ruin-kids-488647235568. 22. Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996), 20. 23. Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken (New York: Penguin Books, 2011); Asi Burak and Laura Parker, How Video Games Can Save the World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017). 24. In general, video games are uniquely poised as a medium to accomplish what the postmodern critic Roland Barthes describes as a writerly text. S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1974), 4–5; Burak and Parker, How Video Games Can Save the World. 25. Stephen Williams, “Attack of Killer Video Games: Highly Realistic, Violent New Video Games Are the Rage, but a Parental Backlash May Be Coming,” Orlando Sentinel, October 22, 1993, http://articles .orlandosentinel.com/1993–10–22/lifestyle /9310210356_1_mortal-kombat-video-back lash. 26. James Paul Gee, Why Video Games Are Good for Your Soul: Pleasure and Learning

Notes to Pages 116–124

(Australia: Common Ground Publishing, 2005), 4. 27. Jane McGonigal, “Gaming Can Make a Better World,” in TED Talks, ed. TED Talks, 2010, http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgon igal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world. 28. Adam Ramsey, “Game Review: Life Is Strange,” Guardian, January 3, 2016, http://www.theguardianonline.com/arts andentertainment/2016/01/03/game-review -life-is-strange/. 29. “Gamestop Profits Nearly Triple,” Gamespot, 2008, http://www.gamespot .com/articles/gamestop-profits-nearly-triple /1100–6196490/. 30. Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (New York: Free Press, 1997). 31. Alec Charles, “Playing with One’s Self: Notions of Subjectivity and Agency in Digital Games,” Eludamos 3, no. 2 (2009). 32. Mike Mahardy, “Collector Has First and Only English Super Mario Bros. Review,” IGN, 2014, http://www.ign.com /articles/2014/01/30/collector-has-first-and -only-english-super-mario-bros-review. 33. Gerald Villoria, “Mass Effect,” Game Spy, 2007, http://xbox360.gamespy.com /xbox-360/mass-effect/836239p1.html. 34. William J. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, 4th ed. (New York City: Fordham University Press, 1993), 37. 35. Emru Townsend, “The 10 Worst Games of All Time,” PC World, 2006, http://www .pcworld.com/article/127579. 36. Liz Finnegan, “E.T. the ExtraTerrestrial Was the Most Important Video Game Ever Made,” Escapist, 2015, http://www .escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video -games/columns/pixels-and-bits/14240-Disas trous-ET-Game-Buried-in-Arizona-Desert -Landfill-Was-Actuall. 37. “Bioshock,” Metacritic, http://www .metacritic.com/games/platforms/pc /bioshock. 38. Rowan Tulloch, “‘A Man Chooses, a Slave Obeys’ Agency, Interactivity and Freedom in Video Gaming,” Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds 2, no. 1 (2010): 32. 39. Ibid., 36. 40. Seth Gordon, “The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters,” (New York: Picturehouse, 2007).

41. “You Died,” Dark Souls Deaths, http:// darksoulsdeaths.com/cgi-bin/stats.py. 42. A. Lange, “Extra Life: Über das Sterben in Computerspielen,” in Game_Over: Spiel, Tod und Jenseits, ed. Museum für Sepulkralkultur (Kassel: Arbeitsgemeinschaft Friehof und Denkmal, 2002), 96–97. 43. B. Neitzel, “Selbstreferenz Im Computerspiel,” in Mediale Selbstreferenz, ed. W. Nöth, N. Bishara, and B. Neitzel (Cologne: Hale, 2008), 158. 44. Karin Wenz, “Death,” in The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, ed. Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (New York: Routledge, 2014), 314. See also, Rolf F. Nohr, “Restart After Death: ‘Self-Optimizing,’ ‘Normalism,’ and ‘Re-entry’ in Computer Games,” in The Game Culture Reader, ed. Jason C. Thompson and Marc A. Ouellette (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013). 45. Wenz, “Death,” 315. 46. In both of the above cases, however, the simulation of death is inextricably tied to the notion of human agency, whether it functions as a means of optimizing performances or as way to increase the intensity of player enjoyment. When death has little cost, the player accepts death as an inevitable part of the game—specifically, a part of the game that hones their skills. When death has a relatively large cost, the player meditates on its possibility as a form of enjoyment, as in, “Whoa, that was a close call.” In either case, when death does come it inspires better play with future characters. 47. Feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian gives a long, though hardly comprehensive, list of non-player-controlled female characters that die in games. The deaths Sarkeesian identifies have a gendered component, further emphasizing agency: male player character (agency) typically contrasting with female non-player character (passivity). The dynamics are still in effect, however, in non-gendered NPC deaths, such as that of Roman Bellic in Grand Theft Auto IV (2008): Anita Sarkeesian, “Damsel in Distress: Part 2—Tropes vs. Women in Video Games,” 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toa _vH6xGqs. 48. Tennessen, “Happiness Is for the Pigs,” 201. 49. Jeremy Parish, “Where Final Fantasy Went Wrong, and How Square Enix

Is Putting It Right,” US Gamer, November 26, 2014, http://www.usgamer.net/articles/where -final-fantasy-went-wrong-and-how-square -enix-is-righting-it. 50. Molly Smith, “Playstation’s Final Fantasy VII Marketing Blitz Continues,” Business Wire, 1997, https://www.thefreeli brary.com/PlayStation%27s+Final+Fantasy+V II+Marketing+Blitz+Continues%3b+Consum ers . . . -a019701566. 51. Parish, “Where Final Fantasy Went Wrong, and How Square Enix Is Putting It Right.” 52. Kat Bailey, “Why Final Fantasy VII Still Resonates After All These Years,” US Gamer, 2016, http://www.usgamer.net /articles/why-final-fantasy-vii-still-resonates -after-all-these-years. 53. “Top 100 Video Game Moments,” IGN, http://www.ign.com/lists/video-game -moments/1. 54. John Teti, “The Most Compelling Final Fantasy Death Isn’t the One Everybody Talks About,” A.V. Club, August 21, 2014, http://www.avclub.com/article/most -compelling-final-fantasy-death-isnt-one -every-208347. 55. Remy Carreiro, “Final Fantasy 7 Remake: The Dread of Reliving the Death of Aeris,” Forever Geek, 2015, http://www .forevergeek.com/2015/06/final-fantasy -7-remake-the-dread-of-reliving-the-death -of-aeris/. 56. “Date Mechanics,” Final Fantasy Wiki, http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki /Date_mechanics. 57. “The Making of Final Fantasy VII,” Edge Magazine, 2003, http://www.ff7citadel.com /press/int_edge.shtml. 58. “Afterthoughts: Final Fantasy VII,” Electronic Gaming Monthly, no. 196 (2005), https://web.archive.org/web/20071011164522 /http://ff7citadel.com/press/int_egm.shtml. 59. Sabine Harrer, “From Losing to Loss,” Culture Unbound 5 (2013): 612. 60. Ibid., 613. 61. Brian Taylor, “Save Aeris: How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Aeris Gainsborough?” Kill Screen 3, 2011, http:// btphotographer.com/blog/2011/09/04/save -aeris-how-can-we-be-moved-by-the-fate-of -aeris-gainsborough-kill-screen/. 62. Ibid. 63. “Aeris,” Final Fantasy VII Rumors, http://ff7rumors.tripod.com/aeris.htm.

Notes to Pages 124–133

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64. Icevail, “Level Four Revive Material Achievement *Spoiler Warning*,” 2013, https://steamcommunity.com/app /239700/discussions/0/86497611578 2047791/. 65. Patricia Hernandez, “The Steam Achievement That Nobody Unlocked,” Kotaku, July 29, 2014, http://www.kotaku .com.au/2014/07/the-steam-achievement -that-nobody-unlocked/. 66. “The Making of Final Fantasy VII.” 67. François de La Rochefoucauld, Collected Maxims, trans. E. H. and A. M. Blackmore and Francine Giguère, vol. 26 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 11. 68. Georges Bataille, “The Solar Anus,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 5–9. Chapter 5 1. The terms “frames of acceptance” and “frames of rejection” derive from Burke, Attitudes Towards History. By frames of acceptance, he understands “the more or less organized system[s] of meanings by which a thinking man [sic] gauges the historical situation and adopts a role with relation to it.” Our systems of meaning, or symbolic structures, “are designed to produce such ‘acceptance’ in one form or another” (5). As a result of this production, these structures end up producing by-products of rejection, for what does not fit within one’s frame of acceptance is by default relegated to a frame of rejection (see 19–20). 2. “Raymond Kurzweil,” National Inventors Hall of Fame, http://www.invent .org/honor/inductees/inductee-detail /?IID=180. 3. Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Bantam Books, 1970); The Third Wave (New York: Bantam Books, 1980); Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century (New York: Bantam Books, 1990); Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines (New York: Viking, 1999); The Singularity Is Near (New York: Viking, 2006); Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever (New York: Rodale, 2004).

Notes to Pages 134–139

4. Kurzweil, Singularity Is Near, 9. See also, Vernor Vinge, “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the PostHuman Era,” Whole Earth Review (Winter 1993); Irving John Good, “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine,” Advances in Computers 6 (1965). John Von Neumann coined the term “the singularity” in 1958, according to Stanislaw Ulam, “John Von Neumann, 1903–1957,” Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 64, no. 3 (1958). 5. Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 26. 6. Named after the American businessman and cofounder of Intel Corporation, Gordon Earle Moore, Moore’s Law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. See Gordon Moore, “Moore’s Law at 40,” in Understanding Moore’s Law: Four Decades of Innovation, ed. David Brock (Philadelphia: Chemical Heritage Foundation, 2006). For Kurzweil’s prediction of 2045, see Singularity Is Near, 135–36. 7. Kurzweil, Singularity Is Near, 2. 8. Representative publications include Hans Moravec, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); Frank J. Tipler, The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God, and the Resurrection of the Dead (New York: Doubleday, 1994); Aubrey de Grey and Michael Rae, Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2007); Nick Bostrom, “Human Genetic Enhancements: A Transhumanist Perspective,” Journal of Value Inquiry 37, no. 4 (2003); Rodney Brooks, Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us (New York: Vintage, 2003). 9. Lev Grossman, “2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal,” Time, http://con tent.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,91 71,2048299,00.html. 10. Nick Bostrom, “A Philosophical Quest for Our Biggest Problems,” TED Talks, https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_bostrom _on_our_biggest_problems/transcript ?language=en.

11. “Mind Uploading in Fiction,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki /Mind_uploading_in_fiction. 12. Kurzweil, Singularity Is Near, 370. 13. Benatar, Better Never to Have Been, 132, 222. 14. As a “carrier of tendency,” transhumanism is unavoidably rhetorical. In a general rhetorical sense this is sufficient to classify it as religious, or “sermonic” in Richard Weaver’s phraseology, since it gives “impulse to other people to look at the world, or some small part of it, in our way” (224). While we agree with this view, we also want to suggest here, in a preliminary fashion, that transhumanism is religious is a more restricted sense as having something “gnostic” about it. On the connection between rhetoric and religion, see Richard Weaver, “Language Is Sermonic,” in Richard M. Weaver on the Nature of Rhetoric, ed. Richard L. Johannesen (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1970). 15. David Benatar, “Introduction,” in Life, Death, and Meaning: Key Philosophical Readings on the Big Questions, ed. David Benatar (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010), 10. 16. David Pearce, “Selection Pressure and Radical Anti-Natalism,” The Abolitionist Project, http://www.abolitionist.com/anti -natalism.html. Cofounder of Humanity Plus (a.k.a. Humanity+, Inc., formerly the World Transhumanist Association), an international organization that promotes the ethical use of emerging technologies to enhance human capabilities, Pearce is best known for his book-length internet manifesto, “The Hedonistic Imperative” (1995), in which he defends the moral obligation to eliminate all forms of suffering from human and nonhuman life. “The Hedonistic Imperative,” https://www.hedweb.com/hedab.htm. Pearce has labeled coordinated efforts toward accomplishing this end the “abolitionist project.” 17. David Pearce, “The Abolitionist Project,” The Abolitionist Project, http:// www.abolitionist.com/. 18. For Heidegger, “world” and “earth” exist in eternal “strife”: a world needs to shape earth in the manner that it, the world, requires, but earth—that is to say, that out of which a world is built—resists being incorporated. In other words, Heidegger sees

different historical epochs as having fundamentally different worlds that succeed one another. See Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1971), 15–88. 19. Schopenhauer’s argument can be simplified as follows. First, as conscious beings possessing a will, human beings need and want things (whatever those things may be). Consequently, human beings either suffer deprivation—as a result of failing to satisfy their desires—or are satiated, in which case satisfaction turns into boredom. A state of suffering in and of itself, boredom also leads to the arousal of greater and more demanding desires, each of which is increasingly more difficult to gratify. Hence, Schopenhauer’s pronouncement that the “will to life”—to will to live (and here we can include the possibility of one’s willing to live post-singularity) is to suffer. Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism, 16–19. 20. Hank Pellissier, “Immortality Will Arrive Via Singularity, Nanotech, or Genetic Engineering—Say 800+ Transhumanists,” Institute for Emerging Technology and Ethics, http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more /pellissier20120815. 21. John Berman, “Futurist Ray Kurzweil Says He Can Bring His Dead Father Back to Life through a Computer Avatar,” ABC News, http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/futurist -ray-kurzweil-bring-dead-father-back-life /story?id=14267712; Tipler, Physics of Immortality. 22. Dienstag, Pessimism, 245. 23. Ibid., 245. As we show below, transhumanists also cannot be properly considered Christian—or cannot be said to fit within the ethical and metaphysical parameters of “mainstream” Christianity— whether Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant. 24. “Digital Ascension” is the term employed by Jaron Lanier, see You Are Not a Gadget, 26; for a critique of “Singularitarianism” as religion, see John Horgan, “The Consciousness Conundrum,” Spectrum, http://spectrum.ieee.org/bio medical/imaging/the-consciousness -conundrum/0. 25. Revelation 21:4–8. 26. David Berman, “Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Atheism,” in Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion, ed. David A. Leeming

Notes to Pages 139–144

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(New York: Springer, 2014); Timothy J. Madigan, “Schopenhauer’s Atheistic Morality,” Philo 1, no. 2 (1998). 27. Crawford, Confessions of an Antinatalist, 116. 28. Zapffe, “Last Messiah.” Similar criticism can also be leveled against more earthbound uses of utopian imagery. Indeed, it is almost commonplace to point out that while rhetorical strategies of utopia can be used to liberate and empower and uplift others, some of the worst crimes in history were enabled by those who used the power of utopia to justify acts of terror and oppression. 29. Ligotti, Conspiracy Against the Human Race, 34. 30. As the conservative political philosopher Eric Voegelin has famously argued, the influence of gnostic thought is today no longer limited to the fringes of monotheistic religion but, since at least the official prohibition of Gnosticism as a religious sect, has transmogrified into a pervasive mode of political theorization. Such gnostic currents, he argues, are present in all political thinkers and ideological movements (from Karl Marx to Martin Heidegger and from Communism to National Socialism) that seek to ascribe to humankind an understanding and control over reality that is godlike. See Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics, and Gnosticism (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1968), 55ff. 31. Ligotti, Conspiracy Against the Human Race, 34–38. For Philipp Mainländer, see his major work, which is as yet untranslated, Philosophie Der Erlösung, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Theodor Hofman, 1879); Philosophie Der Erlösung, vol. 2 (Frankfurt: C. Koenitzer, 1886). 32. Miguel De Unamuno, Selected Works of Miguel De Unamuno: The Agony of Christianity and Essays on Faith, trans. Anthony Kerrigan, vol. 5 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 11. 33. Benatar, Better Never to Have Been, 222–23. 34. The book is problematic more for its rampant homophobia than its take on suicide. Andy Nowicki, Considering Suicide (Charleston, W.V.: Nine-Banded Books, 2009). 35. Benatar, Better Never to Have Been, 48. 36. E. M. Cioran, All Gall Is Divided: The Aphorisisms of a Legendary Iconoclast,

Notes to Pages 145–148

trans. Richard Howard (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1999), 74. 37. For a useful overview on the conceptual -historical connection between common sense and common belief or opinion (sensus communis in Latin), see HansGeorg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 18–32. 38. Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, trans. E. F. J. Payne, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 365. 39. Crawford, Confessions of an Antinatalist, 123–24. 40. “Initial Harm Part Three: Evolved Hostility and the Burden of Belief in Belief,” Hoover Hog, http://hooverhog.typepad.com /hognotes/2007/07/initial-harm-pa.html. 41. Kenneth Einar Himma, “Birth as a Grave Misfortune: The Traditional Doctrine of Hell and Christian Salvific Exclusivism,” in The Problem of Hell: A Philosophical Anthology, ed. Joel Buenting (London: Routledge, 2010), 179–98. 42. USA: “Religion,” Gallup, http:// www.gallup.com/poll/1690/religion.aspx .US; Britain: Josephine Mazzuca, “Britons Look on the Bright Side of Afterlife,” Gallup, http://www.gallup.com/poll/7045/britons -look-bright-side-afterlife.aspx; Australia: David Marr, “Faith: What Australians Believe,” in Sydney Morning Herald, http:// www.smh.com.au/national/faith-what -australians-believe-in-20091218-l5qy .html; Global data: Azim F. Shariff and Mijke Rhemtulla, “Divergent Effects of Beliefs in Heaven and Hell on National Crime Rates,” PLOS One, http://journals.plos.org/plosone /article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0039048 #pone.0039048-World1. 43. Rob Bell, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived (New York: Harper One, 2012), 111. The book, which was excoriated by a number of reformed church leaders, caused such a major controversy within the evangelical community that it was the subject of a Time magazine cover story and a featured article in the New York Times. See Jon Meacham, “No Hell? Pastor Rob Bell Angers Evangelicals,” Time, 2011, http://content.time.com/time /magazine/article/0,9171,2065289,00.html; Erik Eckholm, “Pastor Stirs Wrath with His Views on Old Questions,” New York Times,

March 4, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com /2011/03/05/us/05bell.html?_r=0. 44. This is essentially the argument offered in 2008 by the Russian Orthodox bishop Hilarion Alfeyev of Vienna, in his presentation at the First World Apostolic Congress of Divine Mercy, held in Rome. Phil Lawler, “Divine Mercy Congress Ends— Spiced by Theological Disagreement,” Catholic World News, April 7, 2008. 45. That figure entered the double digits when a 2012 study showed that 11 percent of people born after 1970 said they had been raised in secular homes. “‘Nones’ on the Rise,” Gallup, http://www.pewforum .org/2012/10/09/nones-on-the-rise/. 46. Tim Beal, Biblical Literacy: The Essential Bible Stories Everyone Needs to Know (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), xv–xvii. 47. Long before Voegelin’s critique of modern Gnosticism, Friedrich Nietzsche took pains to highlight how and to what extent Christian motives and sensibilities animated a number of putatively secular ideologies and political movements—from democracy to socialism to anarchism—arguing that they all participate in the same spiritual destitution, while relying on and cultivating herd or slave mentality. See for example Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 208–9, 13–14, 16. See also Nietzsche’s predecessor Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1995), who argued that religion and political ideology were essentially alike in that they deprived the subject of its autonomy, taking it over in a kind of possession. 48. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 160. 49. Cary Funk and Lee Rainie, “Public and Scientists’ Views on Science and Society,” Pew Research Center, http://www .pewinternet.org/2015/01/29/public-and-sci entists-views-on-science-and-society/. 50. “The Whole World Is Optimistic, Survey Finds,” Live Science, http://www .livescience.com/5444-world-optimistic -survey-finds.html. 51. Conor Friedersdorf, “Immortal but Damned to Hell on Earth,” Atlantic, https:// www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive /2015/05/immortal-but-damned-to-hell-on -earth/394160/.

52. On the notion of specters and haunting, see Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994), esp. 20–21, 160, 219. Similarly, within the field of rhetorical studies Kenneth Burke demonstrates how any term for substance is made intelligible only presupposing that which it excludes. See his A Grammar of Motives, 21 ff. 53. Crawford, Confessions of an Antinatalist, 132–33. 54. “Global Christianity—a Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Christian Population,” Pew Research Center, http://www.pewforum.org/2011/12/19 /global-christianity-exec/; “Best-Selling Book of Non-Fiction,” Guiness Book of World Records, http://www.guinnessworldrecords .com/world-records/best-selling-book-of-non -fiction/. 55. See in particular the first part of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Inferno, trans. Stanley Lombardo (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2009), xxxi–xxxiv. 56. Madelon Hoedt, “Hell to Pay: Christian Haunted Houses and Audience Reception,” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 24, no. 2 (2012 ); Brian Jackson, “Jonathan Edwards Goes to Hell (House): Fear Appeals in American Evangelism,” Rhetoric Review 26, no. 1 (2007). 57. Alice K. Turner, The History of Hell (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1993). In contrast, divine heaven gets short shrift. The theologians or poets or painters or survivors of “near-death experiences” who have tried to describe it shy away from specifics. . . . The concept of Heaven is instinctively understood as a metaphor . . . Hell . . . has always been taken more literally.” Turner’s analysis is perhaps too polite; put more simply, heaven is boring. Case in point, despite Dante’s Inferno’s status as a perennial classic, almost no one reads. Hellishness simply lends itself better to distribution through popular mediums and this is true for secular as well, as much as for divine depictions of hell. Robert Baird, “Why Doesn’t Anyone Read Dante’s Paradiso?,” Slate, December 24, 2007, http://www.slate.com/articles/arts /books/2007/12/paradise_lost.html. 58. Even in the rare instances in which our robot overlords seek to keep humanity around, it isn’t to torture us. In

Notes to Pages 149–155

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the Matrix, for example, the machines need human bodies as a form of energy, so they imprison humanity within a computer simulation (the eponymous Matrix) comparable to the mental digital uploading envisioned by transhumanists. Rather than a hellish torture-scape, however, the Matrix is notable primarily for how it replicates mundane human life. The first movie even has a subplot dedicated to a character who prefers the digital prison to life in the “real world.” 59. Harlan Ellison, “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” in The Harlan Ellison Collection (New York: Open Road, 1983), 13–30. More recently, transhumanist ideas have provided the British science-fiction television series Black Mirror with a number of compelling plot devices. While some of the episodes are indeed deeply pessimistic, on balance the anthology television series adopts an ambivalent posture with respect to technology and the technological singularity, in particular. In an Emmy-winning episode, the series promotes a rather positive vision of a future in which the individual is able to upload its consciousness into a computer post-death: “San Junipero,” Netflix, October 21, 2016, written by Charlie Brooker, directed by Owen Harris. Yet in what are virtually the antitheses of “San Junipero,” the series depicts the horror of having one’s consciousness uploaded into a simulation where it can be tortured forever. See for example, “White Christmas,” Netflix, December 12, 2014, written by Carl Tibbetts, directed by Owen Harris; “Black Museum,” Netflix, December 29, 2017, written by Charlie Brooker, directed by Colm McCarthy; and Black Mirror, “USS Callister,” Netflix, December 29, 2017, written by Charlie Brooker and William Bridges, directed by Toby Haynes. “USS Callister” is very much indebted to “I Have No Mouth.” It even contains a rather explicit reference to the Ellison story during a scene in which the sadistic owner of a computer simulation removes the mouth of one of his digital prisoners. 60. Charles J. Brady, “The Computer as a Symbol of God: Ellison’s Macabre Exodus,” Journal of General Education 28, no. 1 (1976): 59–60. 61. Ibid., 60. 62. J. Michael Straczynski and Harlan Ellison, “Harlan Ellison Interview,” Game Nostalgia, http://www.game-nostalgia.com

Notes to Pages 155–158

/mouth/sites/no_mouth_mgm/harlan_elli son_interview_part1.html. 63. Nearly twenty years after the publication of Ellison’s short story, the British dark fantasy writer Clive Barker would explore a similarly undecidable territory in his novella The Hellbound Heart (New York: HarperCollins, 1986). In it, he juxtaposes in a supernatural setting the ambiguity between the extremities of pain and pleasure. This story would later form the basis for the popular Hellraiser franchise, which to date includes ten films, a series of comic books, and additional merchandise and media. 64. “Harlan Ellison Interview.” 65. William G. Contento, “Index to Science Fiction Anthologies and Collections, Combined Edition,” Galactic Central, http:// www.philsp.com/homeville/ISFAC/0start .htm. 66. Nikki Olson, “Transhumanist Science Fiction: The Most Important Genre the World Has Ever Seen? (an Interview with David Simpson),” H+ Magazine, August 30, 2014, http://hplusmagazine.com/2014/08/30 /transhumanist-science-fiction-important -genre-world-ever-seen-interview-david -simpson/. 67. Given the depiction of “I Have No Mouth” as pessimistic, it is worth reflecting on Ellison’s own interpretation of the story. He argues, “It is an upbeat ending. Infinitely hopeful and positive” (Harlan Ellison Collection, 39). This is because one of the human characters (Ted) murders (perhaps euthanizes is the better word) several of the others before AM can react, sparing them infinite future torment. Ellison is entitled to his own opinion, of course, and has chronicled his own sparring with academics about their esoteric readings of his stories. That said, it is fair to say that most readers probably do not leave the story in an optimistic frame of mind. Ted, the savior, is turned into a pile of sentient goo sans mouth, doomed to suffer forever without any hope of escaping through suicide or even find release through screaming. Furthermore, the noble act Ted engages in, stabbing his colleagues to a permanent state of death, does not even seem to be possible in Ellison’s fiction. Ellison writes, “My intent was to indicate that the story takes place actually and physically in the mind of the computer.” Ibid., 45. If the characters are digital beings (as they

explicitly are in the video game adaptation) there is no reason a digital wound could not be repaired by AM. Ted’s gesture should be entirely futile. 68. Meghan Henning, Educating Early Christians Through the Rhetoric of Hell: “Weeping and Gnashing of Teeth” as Paideia in Matthew and the Early Church (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014). 69. Ibid., 124–25. 70. Ruth Webb, Ekphrasis, Imagination, and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2016), 3. 71. Henning, 202–3. 72. Ibid., 162. 73. Ellison, Harlan Ellison Collection, 27. 74. Ibid., 26–27. 75. Brian Wilson Aldiss and David Wingrove, Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (Cornwall: House of Stratus, 2001), 297. 76. “Less Wrong Forums,” Less Wrong, http://lesswrong.com/. 77. Luke McKinney, “5 Hilariously Petty Abuses of Revolutionary Technologies,” Cracked, http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-pet tiest-misuses-world-changing-technology/; David Auerbach, “The Most Terrifying Thought Experiment of All Time,” Slate, http://www.slate.com/articles/technology /bitwise/2014/07/roko_s_basilisk_the_most _terrifying_thought_experiment_of_all_time .html. 78. “Roko’s Basilisk/Original Post,” Rational Wiki, http://rationalwiki.org/wiki /Roko%27s_basilisk/Original_post#Solutions _to_the_Altruist.27s_burden:_the_Quantum _Billionaire_Trick. 79. Eliezer Yudkowsky, “Lw Uncensored Thread,” https://www.reddit .com/r/LessWrong/comments/17y819 /lw_uncensored_thread/c8a3rqu/. 80. Auerbach, “Most Terrifying Thought Experiment of All Time.” 81. Mordy, ilXor, http://www.ilxor.com :8080/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet ?showall=true&bookmarkedmessageid=53500 28&boardid=55&threadid=1040; daniel .duffy20, Antipope, http://www.antipope.org /charlie/blog-static/2013/02/rokos-basilisk -wants-you.html.

Conclusion 1. Benatar, Better Never to Have Been, 92. 2. Ligotti, Conspiracy Against the Human Race, 64. 3. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1990), 54–55. 4. Craig Zisk, dir., The Office, “Dunder Mifflin Infinity,” written by Michael Schur, NBC, October 4, 2007. 5. Mark Kirkland, dir., The Simpsons, “Burns’ Heir,” written by Jace Richdale, FOX, April 14, 1994. 6. Valorie N. Salimpoor et al., “Anatomically Distinct Dopamine Release During Anticipation and Experience of Peak Emotion to Music,” Nature Neuroscience 14, no. 2 (2011). 7. Ivan Hewett, “Did The Rite of Spring Really Spark a Riot?” BBC, http://www.bbc .com/news/magazine-22691267. 8. Sexton, “Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word.” 9. Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin, “Beyond Persuasion: A Proposal for an Invitational Rhetoric,” Communication Monographs 62, no. 1 (1995). 10. Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 108–9. 11. Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 9. 12. Yohana Desta, “Is Get Out Really a Comedy? Don’t Ask Jordan Peele,” Vanity Fair, https://www.vanityfair.com /hollywood/2017/11/jordan-peele-get-out -golden-globes-comedy. 13. Ibid. 14. MacCormack, “Lovecraft’s Cosmic Ethics,” and MacCormack, Posthuman Ethics, 79–99. 15. MacCormack, “Lovecraft’s Cosmic Ethics,” 204.

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Index

absurdist comedy, 79, 83–84, 106 absurdist reasoning, 87–89, 185n23 absurdity, 85, 87–89, 96 Adorno, Theodor W., 5, 12, 103 Aerith Gainsborough. See Final Fantasy VII: Aerith Afro-pessimism, 17–18, 171–73 agency, human, 115–18, 122 agency, in video games Aerith’s death, as defying, 131–33, 136 Bioshock’s deconstruction of, 124 and death, 126–27 as important to players, 120 lack of, 120–24 limitations of, 121–22 popular versus critical perspectives, 121 presence of, 118–20 versus real agency, 122 Aickman, Robert, 38–39 anagnorisis, 105 anchoring. See also weird fiction: anchoring, tropes disrupting; Zapffe’s defense mechanisms absurdity weakening, 85 argumentation as, 43 Christianity as, 145, 148–49 definition of, 3 examples of, 34 functions of, 12, 18 purpose as, 90 rhetoric as, 37 Rick and Morty’s disruption of, 83, 90, 101 and suffering, 34, 39–40, 45 transhumanism as, 138 in True Detective, 60–61 via knowledge, 39–40 via time, 39–40 anthropocentricism, 39

antinatalism about, 56 Benatar’s, 6, 56, 109, 140–41, 146 and Christian doctrine, 146–48 aphorisms, 12–13 “A Redress for Andromeda” (Kiernan), 33 argumentation, 10–11, 31, 43, 166 Aristotle, 31, 36, 46, 75, 102 atheism, 80–81, 144–45 Augustinians, 143, 147 “Axolotl” (Cortázar), 33 Baudrillard, Jean, 93, 96 “being-towards-death” concept and denial, 110–12, 135 and fear, 111–12 and meaning, 135 overview of, 109–10, 187n7, 187n11 Russian spy anecdote, 111–14 and video games, 126–27 Benatar, David as antinatalist, 6, 56, 109, 140–41, 146 Better Never to Have Been, 6, 108, 166 detractors of, 10, 176n38 on existence versus nonexistence, 6, 15–16 Job story, use of, 140–41 on pessimists, lack of, 8 Bierce, Ambrose, 27, 32, 73 Bioshock, 123–24, 131 “The Black Gondolier” (Leiber), 32, 41–42 Blackwood, Algernon, 29, 34 Burke, Kenneth, 31, 35, 103–4 Cabrera, Julio, 7 “The Call of Cthulhu” (Lovecraft), 37–39 Camus, Albert on absurdism, 85, 87–89, 96 pessimism of, 85 on suicide, 95–96

212

catharsis, 75–76, 102, 104 chapter previews, 20–22 children’s movies, 170–71 Christianity. See also heaven; hell anchoring functions of, 145, 148–49 and antinatalist arguments, 146–48 Augustinians, 143, 147 evil and suffering in, 147 Gnostics, 145 Love Wins, 148, 192n43 optimistic bias of, 148 and pessimism, 143, 145, 147–48 transhumanism, parallels to endoxa, 150 heaven and hell, 151–53 resurrection, 143 salvation, 143–44, 150 Universalism, 148–49 Western society, influence on, 149 Cioran, Emil about, 6 aphorisms, examples of, 1 on death, 109 on God, 146 on knowledge and technology, 42 on pro-life views, 8 on suicide, 92 on time, 40 comedy as optimistic, 104 in Rick and Morty absurdist, 79, 83–84, 106 pessimism, as concealing, 80 tragic, 101–2, 104–6 as unanchoring, 83 and tragedy, 102–5, 167–68 comitragedy, 101–2, 104–6, 168 common sense. See endoxa consciousness, human in Black Mirror, 181n24 Schopenhauer on, 55, 142, 191n19 and suffering, 6, 142 and suicide, 92 in the technological singularity, 138, 140, 150–52 True Detective’s perspectives on, 54, 56, 71 weird fiction’s effects on, 31, 35 Zapffe on, 6, 55–56 The Conspiracy Against the Human Race about, 23, 27, 43 mentioned, 7, 60, 64 popularity of, 51 as sublimating for Ligotti, 46 True Detective, as inspiring, 51

Index

Crawford, Jim as atheist, 144–45 on Christianity and procreation, 147 Confessions of an Antinatalist, 15 as non-academic, 7 on society, 8 on the technological singularity, 152–53 Dark Souls, 124 death. See also “being-towards-death” concept; Final Fantasy VII as abstraction, 114–15 fear of, 91–92, 107–8 in Final Fantasy franchise, 131 Heidegger’s aspects of, 109 and non-pessimists, 114–15 and optimism, 110–11, 115 and pessimism, 109–10, 115, 117 simulating, 125–26 simulations of, 125, 189n46 sun metaphor, 135–36 ubiquity of, 114 in video games, 124–27, 189n46, 189n47 death, denial of and agency, 115, 117–18 as anti-pessimism defense, 112–13 in “being-towards-death” concept, 110–12 definitions of, 108–9 Final Fantasy VII’s disruption of, 108, 132, 134, 136 Russian spy anecdote, 111–14 ubiquity of, 114–15, 118 and video game characters, 126–27 and Zapffe’s defense mechanisms, 112–13, 134–35 “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” (Tolstoy), 127 decentering, 94, 97–101 Dienstag, Joshua Foa on aphorisms, 12–13 on Melancholia, 13 on pessimism, 5, 143, 185n20 on postimpressionist painting, 14 on reality, 37 distraction. See also Zapffe’s defense mechanisms absurdity weakening, 85 definition of, 3 functions of, 18, 27 in Rick and Morty, 85–87 strength of, 30 and weird fiction, 24, 28 Donkey Kong, 124 drama, 46–47, 167–68, 180n81 Dynasty Warriors, 126

Eliade, Mircea, 40, 53 Ellison, Harlan, 155–58 endoxa, 26, 29–30, 146, 149, 169 esoteric reading of creative works, 67 criteria for, Strauss’s, 64–66 definition of, 50 and disreputable characters, 68 doubt in, 66–67 maps, 67–68 method for, Strauss’s, 50, 64–68 risks of, 67 esoteric writing, 63, 67–68, 167 eternal return, the, 40, 53–54 E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Atari), 123 evolution, 8 “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family” (Lovecraft), 40–42 fear, 36, 140. See also weird fiction feminism, 172 Final Fantasy franchise, 128, 131 Final Fantasy VII ad campaign, 128 Aerith, 107, 128, 131–32 Aerith, death of absence, as creating, 130, 132 design goals of, 130–31 gameplay, impact on, 132 meaninglessness of, 131 player agency, as defying, 131–33, 136 players, impact on, 107, 128–29, 131, 133 prevention rumors, 133–34 “revivalist” movement, 133–35 as rule-breaking, 130 characters in, 128 death, reversibility of, 129–30 death denial, preventing, 108, 132, 134, 136 as optimistic, 107 overview of, 127–28 player agency in, 129–30 remake of, risks for, 129, 168 success of, 128 and Zapffe’s defense mechanisms, 134–35 fragments. See aphorisms frames of acceptance and rejection, 104, 137, 190n1 Freud, Sigmund, 25, 72–73, 85 Friedersdorf, Connor, 151–52 “From Beyond” (Lovecraft), 39, 43 Galaga, 126 Get Out, 172–73 Gnosticism, 145, 191n14, 192n30

God of War, 126 “The Great God Pan” (Machen), 43 happiness, 137–38, 150–51 heaven and antinatalism, 146 in art, 193n57 and hell, as inseparable, 151–53, 156 and meaninglessness, 146 suffering, as excusing, 144 and transhumanism, 151–53 Heidegger, Martin, 142, 191n17. See also “being-towards-death” concept hell in Christian doctrine, 147–48, 159 descriptions of, Christian, 158–60 and heaven, as inseparable, 151–53, 156 and “I Have No Mouth, but I Must Scream,” 156–58 and optimism, 160 representations of, in art, 154 suffering in, nature of, 159–60 and transhumanism, 151–53 Henning, Meghan, 158–59 heroic pessimism, 5–6, 85, 92, 96, 106 horror, 28, 32–33, 35–36 “The Hospice” (Aickman), 38–39, 178n29 The House of Shammai, 8, 145 identity, individual relational argument, 100–101 in Rick and Morty, 94–96, 98–101 “I Have No Mouth, but I Must Scream” (Ellison) antagonist of (AM), 155, 160 ekphrasis in, 159–60 heaven, subversion of, 157 and hell, 156–57 overview of, 155–56 as pessimistic, 161, 194n67 popularity of, 158 religious motifs in, 156–57 and Roko’s Basilisk, 162 suffering in, nature of, 160–61 and the technological singularity, 155–57 transhumanism, as threat to, 157–58, 163 isolation. See also Zapffe’s defense mechanisms absurdity weakening, 85 and decentering, 96 definition of, 3 functions of, 18, 30–31 and Rick and Morty, 85–86, 98 weird fiction disrupting, 24, 30–34

Index

213

Job (biblical), 140–41 Johnson, Steven, 119 Joshi, S. T., 24–25 Judaism, 8, 145

214

The King in Yellow (Chambers), 73–74 knowledge as anchoring, 39–40 Cioran on, 42 Ligotti on, 43 pessimism’s approach to, 42 and suffering, 42 in True Detective, 70–71 weird fiction, as harmful in, 41–43 Kurzweil, Ray, 138–39, 150, 153 language, 48, 165 “The Last Feast of Harlequin” (Ligotti), 45 Leiber, Fritz, 32–33, 35, 41 Leopardi, Giacomo, 18, 40, 85 Ligotti, Thomas. See also The Conspiracy Against the Human Race aphorisms of, 1 on death, 33 as genre fiction author, 7 on Gnosticism, 145 on imagination, 31–32 on knowledge and language, 43 “The Last Feast of Harlequin,” 45 on optimism, 5, 166 pessimists, definition of, 4–5 settings used by, 32 on suicide, 91–92, 108 True Detective, influence on, 51, 72 on weird fiction, 26 on wrongness, 25 logic, 11, 153 Lovecraft, H. P. “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family,” 40–42 “From Beyond,” 39, 43 The King in Yellow, influence of, 74 Oates on, 33, 47 as pessimist, 23 plausibility of, 33 religion, use of, 46 space, use of, 37–38, 179n52 “The Call of Cthulhu,” 37–39 “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” 47 tropes used, 32 and the uncanny, 178n18 on weird fiction, 24–25, 29 MacCormack, Patricia, 18, 173, 179n52 Machen, Arthur, 29, 34, 43, 47

Index

Maimonides, 67, 77 Mainländer, Philipp, 108, 145 marginalized discourses, 171–72 Max Payne, 126 Melancholia, 13 Michelstaedter, Carlo, 2, 6, 8–9, 176n31 monsters, 35–36 Moore’s Law, 139, 190n6 morality and antinatalism, 147 and media technology, 119–20 in Rick and Morty, 81–83, 184n9 multiverse, the, 80, 98–101, 186n48 music, 170 Nietzsche, Friedrich on catharsis, 75 on Christianity, 193n47 “God is dead” phase, 184n2 on language, 48 Schopenhauer, influence of, 6 on time, 40, 54 on tragedy, 102, 188n18 in True Detective, 54, 72 Nintendo, 121, 123 nondiscursive texts, 4 “Novel of the White Powder” (Machen), 34 Nowicki, Andy, 145–46, 192n34 Nozick, Robert, 95–96 Oates, Joyce Carol, 33, 47 obscenity, 32 Oedipus, 5, 46, 60, 105 optimism agency in, 115 in argumentation theory, 10–11 death, attitudes towards, 110–11 as default, 166 happiness, views on, 137–38 Ligotti on, 5 and lived experience, 140–41 pessimism, responses to, 137–38 pessimistic forms, as coopting, 46–47, 168 in rhetoric, 2–3, 9, 11 and this book, 165 and time, 39–40, 53 Overton windows, 18–19, 177n67 partitions, 35–36, 38 Pearce, David, 142, 191n16 Perry, Sarah, 7–8, 186n41 pessimism, 17–18, 173 Afro, 17–18, 171–73 arguments for, requirements of, 166 and atheism, 144–45

Cabrera on, 7 of Camus, 85 and Christianity, 144–48 versus common sense, 30, 166 cosmic, 97 cultural production of, 14 death, view of, 109–10, 115, 117 Dienstag on, 5, 143, 185n20 diversity in, lack of, 14–15, 18 as experiential, 77 heroic, 5–6, 85, 92, 96, 106 ignorance of, general, 51 and lived experiences, 140–41 narrative, as useful to, 113–14, 153–54 and noir, 66 versus optimism, 1–2 and privilege, 16–18 recirculated, 173–74 salvation, rejection of, 143–44 sociocultural concerns, lack of, 15 and space, 37 Tennessen on, 16–17 Thacker on, 9, 12 and this book, 165 and time, 40 universalism argument, 15–16 pessimism, rhetorical challenges faced by. See also Zapffe’s defense mechanisms aesthetic resistance, 1 argumentation theory, 10–11 audience hostility, 3, 31, 167 Christian endoxa, ubiquitous, 149–50 common beliefs, rejection of, 1–2 communication paradox, 12 life-affirming biases, 137 logic, reliance on, 153 optimism as default, 166 optimistic biases of rhetoric, 2–3, 9, 11, 31 pessimists, lack of, 8 philosophical discourse, unpopularity of, 27 representational systems, optimism of, 165 pessimistic aesthetics, 167–68, 170 pessimistic media, 19–20 pessimistic rhetoric aspects of, 166–67 in children’s movies, 170–71 co-option, avoiding, 168 esoteric communication, 167 limits of outside pessimism, 173 marginalized groups, value to, 171–73 overview of, 12–14 persuasion, implications for, 169

in popular culture generally, 169–70, 172 structures of, 168 in True Detective, 68, 76–78 weak persuasion, value of, 167 weird fiction as, 26–27, 29, 31, 48 pessimists, 5, 7–8, 30, 108 philosophical books esotericism, Strauss’s criteria for, 64–66 esoteric versus exoteric meanings in, 63–65 readers, as filtering, 64 philosophy, premodern, 63–64 Pihlström, Sami, 10 Pizzolatto, Nic, 51, 66, 181n10 Plato cave allegory, 30–31 cosmology of, 36–37 Republic, 67–68 on rhetoric, 29 plot, 31, 47 Poe, Edgar Allen, 21, 23–24, 28, 34 popular culture texts. See also Final Fantasy VII; Rick and Morty; True Detective; video games; weird fiction pessimistic affect, creating, 4, 13–14 pessimistic rhetoric in, 169–70, 172 versus rhetoric, 4 subversive potential of, 172 postimpressionist painting, 14 purpose, 89–90 queer pessimism, 17–18, 173 The Raven, 33–34 religion. See also Christianity; heaven; hell Judaism, 8, 145 in Rick and Morty, 80–81 and transhumanism, 139–40 in True Detective, 58, 75–76 in weird fiction, 45–46 Zapffe on, 145 representative anecdotes, 81, 111–12, 141 rhetoric, traditional. See also pessimism, rhetorical challenges faced by; pessimistic rhetoric Afro-pessimism, as useless to, 172 and appearances, 9, 37 common beliefs reinforcing, 30–31 contemporary work in, 9 deep, 9, 176n31 drama, similarities to, 180n81 ekphrasis technique, 159 and endoxa, 26, 29–30, 146, 149, 169 functions of, 2, 9, 19

Index

215

216

rhetoric, traditional (continued) and meaning, 8–10, 30, 169 media as, 19 optimism, bias towards, 2–3, 9, 11 as patriarchal, 172 Plato on, 29 resolutions, assumption of, 2, 10 and space, 36–37 and subjective reality, 10 ubiquity of, 19 Rick and Morty absurdist reasoning in, 87–89, 185n23 anchoring, disruption of, 83, 90, 101 choice, as illusion, 99–100 comedy in absurdist, 79, 83–84, 106 pessimism, as concealing, 80 tragic, 101–2, 104–6 as unanchoring, 83 as comitragedy, 101–2, 104–6, 168 decentering in, 94, 98–101 distraction in, 85–87 episodes discussed “Close Rick-counters of the Rick Kind,” 99 “Get Schwifty,” 81 “Look Who’s Purging Now,” 82–83 “Meeseeks and Destroys,” 86, 88–89 “M. Night Shaym-Aliens!,” 93, 95, 186n36 “Mortynight Run,” 82–83, 94–95, 101 “Raising Gazorpazorp,” 88, 185n23 “Rick Potion #9,” 99–100 “The Rickshank Rickdemption,” 106 “The Ricks Must Be Crazy,” 87–88, 90–91 “Rixty Minutes,” 99–100 “Something Ricked This Way Comes,” 81, 90–91, 184n5 fan theories, 186n52 human exceptionalism, critique of, 84–85 identity in as indeterminate, 94–96 the multiverse’s disruption of, 98–101 influences, 79, 101–2 interdimensional television episodes, 83–85 and isolation, 85–86, 98 Jerry, 86, 95, 101 morality in, 81–83, 184n9 Morty, 82–83, 94–96, 105 multiple realities in, 83–84, 184n11 the multiverse in, 98–101, 186n48 overview, 79–80 purpose and meaning in, 89–91

Index



religion, attacks on, 80–81 rhetorical strategies of, 80, 86–87, 98, 102, 104, 106 Rick about, 79 as atheist, 80–81 death, fear of, 91–92 as hedonistic, 82 as heroic pessimist, 106 as manic, 90 as morally agnostic, 81–82 suffering of, 90–91, 185n29 versions of, 99 simulated realities, use of, 92–96, 186n36 sublimation, disruption of via decentering of individuals, 98 via futility, 87–88 via simulated realities, 92–96 Szechuan Sauce, 106 tradition in, 81–82 Roko’s Basilisk, 161–63 Russian spy anecdote, 111–14 Rust Cohle. See True Detective: Rust Cohle Schopenhauer, Arthur as atheist, 144 on Buddhism, 14 on Christianity, 147 on consciousness, 55, 142, 191n19 on death, 109 on human life, 1, 5–6, 30, 52, 72–73 legacy of, 5 on suffering and individuation, 15 True Detective, influence on, 52 William James on, 103 “will-to-leave” theory, 8 science fiction, 154–55, 193n58. See also “I Have No Mouth, but I Must Scream”; Rick and Morty scientific advances, 97 secrets, nature of, 77 self-awareness. See consciousness, human Sexton, Jared, 17 “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (Lovecraft), 47 simulation Baudrillard’s theory of, 92–93, 96 of death, 125–26 in Rick and Morty, 92–96, 186n36 Singer, Peter, 6, 8, 168 Smith, Clark Ashton, 24, 43 “Smoke Ghost” (Leiber), 35 space, 36–37 Strauss, Leo, 63–64, 67–68, 77, 167. See also esoteric reading

sublimation. See also Zapffe’s defense mechanisms and decentering, 98 definition of, 3 functions of, 18, 46 as pessimistic concern, 173 Rick and Morty’s disruption of via decentering of individuals, 98 via futility, 87–88 via simulated realities, 92–96 weird fiction disrupting, 24, 46–48 suffering. See also hell anchors for, 34, 39–40, 45 consciousness, as cause of, 6, 142 heaven, as excusing, 144 in “I Have No Mouth, but I Must Scream,” 160–61 and knowledge, 42 in Rick and Morty, 90–91, 185n29 Schopenhauer on, 15 in transhumanism abolition of, intended, 142 versus pessimism, 142–44 as physical only, 142–43 potential for, 151–53 repression of, 140, 152 suicide Camus on, 95–96 Cioran on, 92 and consciousness, 92 and pessimists, 108–9 pessimist views on, 91–92 in Rick and Morty, 87–88, 91 and simulated existences, 96 Super Mario Brothers, 121 technological singularity, the consciousness in, 138, 140, 150–52 and “I Have No Mouth, but I Must Scream,” 155–57 Kurzweil’s description of, 138–39 and transhumanism, 138–39, 150–51 technology, 42 Tennessen, Herman on humanity, 44 on pessimism and privilege, 16–17 Russian spy anecdote, 111–14 Thacker, Eugene on monsters, 35–36 on pessimism, 9, 12, 97 on space, 38 on tragedy and comedy, 102 time, 39–40, 53–54 topoi, 2, 10–11, 18, 169, 180n81

tragedy anagnorisis, 105 Aristotle on, 46, 75, 102 Barthes on, 103 as catharsis, 104 and comedy, 102–4, 167–68 as complaint, 103 in drama, 46–47, 167–68, 180n81 Nietzsche on, 102, 188n18 as optimistic, 102–3 in Rick and Morty, 101–2, 104–5 Steiner on, 186n56 Thacker on, 102 transhumanism about, 138 as anchoring, 138 as anti-authoritarian, 151 Christianity, parallels to endoxa, 150 heaven and hell, 151–53, 163 resurrection, 143 salvation, 143–44, 150 as doomed, 140 eschatology of, 151–52 fiction, influence on, 194n59 Friedersdorf on, 151–52 as gnostic, 191n14 as haunted, 152 ideological requirements, lack of, 151 and “I Have No Mouth, but I Must Scream,” 157–58, 163 Kurzweil on, 138–39, 153 optimism of, 138, 141–42, 150, 163 Pearce on, 142 pessimism, advantages over, 162–63 versus pessimism esotericism of, 153 extinction, 141 humanity, indifference towards, 141 salvation, 143–44 suffering, 142–44 target audiences, 162–63 in popular culture, 139 proponents of, 139 and religion, 139–40 rhetorical problems of, 151–53 and Roko’s Basilisk, 163 and science fiction, 158 sentient matter, belief in, 142 suffering and evil in abolition of, intended, 142 versus pessimism, 142–44 as physical only, 142–43 potential for, 151–53

Index

217

218

transhumanism suffering and evil in (continued) repression of, 140, 152 and the technological singularity, 138–39, 150–51 in the United States, 150 True Detective, 57–59 anchoring in, 60–61 catharsis in, 75–76 consciousness, perspectives on, 54, 56, 71 critical reception, 49 Easter eggs in, 61 Errol Childress, 59, 61–62, 73, 78, 183n75 esoteric reading of Cohle as map for, 68–73 fictional universe of, 74–75 pessimistic messages, 71, 73–76 pessimistic rhetorical strategies, 68, 76–78 reasons for, 50, 52, 64–66, 71 fans of, 49–50, 62–63 fan theories, 61–63, 65, 77–78 finale, season one Cohle’s optimism, 59–61, 68, 73, 75 fan disappointment, necessity of, 77–78 optimism in, 59–60 questions unanswered by, 62 reception, 61–62, 65 intertextuality in, 71–75 and The King in Yellow, 61, 74–75 knowledge and pessimism in, 70–71 Ligotti, influence of, 51 and Lovecraft, 74 Marty Hart, 57–59 as optimistic, 59–60 overview of, 49 as pessimistic, 50–51, 66, 71, 73 popularity, 51 rhetorical strategy of, 76–78 Rust Cohle as antinatalist, 56 as asocial, 57, 68 and cyclical time, 53–54 daughter, death of, 56, 61 and death, 52–53 as esoteric map, 68–73 and fan dissatisfaction, 71 on human consciousness, 54–56 intelligence of, 69, 183n69 investigative abilities, 69–71 as obsessive, 70–72 optimism, newfound, 59–61, 68, 73, 75 as pessimist, 50, 57, 68, 72 and police, 58

Index

as prophetic, 57–58 and religion, 58, 75–76 as Schopenhauerian, 52–55 speech of, 52 stories, emphasis on, 53 viewer bias against, 68 viewers and subject position of, 69–71 social institutions in, 58–60 and Zapffe’s defense mechanisms, 77 Twain, Mark, 104, 157 Unamuno, Miguel de, 5, 40, 145 uncanny, the, 25–26, 32, 35, 178n18 utopianism, 102n28, 145 Vanishing on 7th Street, 13–14 video games. See also Final Fantasy VII arcades, 124–25 and being-towards-death, inauthentic, 126–27 Bioshock, 123–24, 131 versus books, 119 crash of 1982, 123 critiques of, 119–20 Dark Souls, 124 death in, 124–27, 189n46, 189n47 Donkey Kong, 124 Dynasty Warriors, 126 E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Atari), 123 Galaga, 126 God of War, 126 Johnson’s defense of, 119 Max Payne, 126 Nintendo, 121, 123 player agency in Bioshock’s deconstruction of, 124 and death, 126–27 as important to players, 120 lack of, 120–24 limitations of, 121–22 popular versus critical perspectives, 121 presence of, 118–20 versus real agency, 122 and problem-solving, 120 rhetorical efficacy, lack of, 122–23 Super Mario Brothers, 121 unique aspects of, 107 weird fiction about, 23–24 agency in, 118 anchoring, tropes disrupting humanity as performance, 43–46 knowledge as harmful, 41–43

monsters, 35–36, 39 overview, 24, 34–35 spatial, 36–39 temporal, 40–42 anthropocentricism, as undermining, 39 “A Redress for Andromeda,” 33 “Axolotl,” 33 “The Black Gondolier,” 32, 41–42 “The Call of Cthulhu,” 37–39 consciousness, effects on, 31, 35 curiosity, as nurturing, 32, 34 and distraction, 24, 28 emotional impacts of, 33 as epideictic rhetoric, 29–30 “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family,” 40–42 familiar settings, use of, 32–33 fears, personalization of, 33–34 “From Beyond,” 39, 43 “The Great God Pan,” 43 versus horror, 28, 33, 35, 38 “The Hospice,” 38–39, 178n29 humanity, questioning of, 44 and imagination, 31–32, 35 isolation, disruption of, 24, 30–34 The King in Yellow, 73–74 language in, 43 “The Last Feast of Harlequin,” 45 Lovecraft on, 24–25, 29 as metaphysically subversive, 48 monsters in, 35–36, 38, 173 monstrousness in, 33, 36 narrative arc, rejection of, 47–48 “Novel of the White Powder,” 34 optimism, as coopted by, 168 pessimism, advantages for, 24, 26, 33–34 pessimism of, 27–29 as pessimistic rhetoric, 26–27, 29, 31, 48 plot structures, 31 popularity of, 27 puppets in, 43–44 religion in, 45–46 ritual in, 45 “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” 47 “Smoke Ghost,” 35 sublimation, disruption of, 46–48 supernatural elements in, 24–25 tropes, Lovecraft’s, 32 and the uncanny, 25–26, 32, 35 uncertainty in, 33 “The White People,” 47 “The Willows,” 34 and Zapffe’s defense mechanisms, 24 Wenz, Karin, 125–26

“The White People” (Machen), 47 “The Willows” (Blackwood), 34 Yudkowsky, Eliezer, 161–62 Zapffe, Peter Wessel on consciousness, 6, 55–56 on drama, 46 “human theatrics” concept, 59 on pessimists, lack of, 8 on religion, 145 Zapffe’s defense mechanisms. See also anchoring; distraction; isolation; sublimation absurdity weakening, 85 in children, 170 and death, denial of, 112–13, 134–35 and death, fear of, 107–8, 188n20 and decentering, 97–98 definitions, 3 efficacy of, 137 Final Fantasy VII’s disruption of, 134–35 functions of, 11–12, 18 and nondiscursive texts, 4 and Overton windows, 18–19 relations to each other, 87 True Detective’s circumvention of, 77 weird fiction subverting, 24 Zarefsky, David, 11, 31

Index

219