thomas-ligotti-the-conspiracy-against-the-human-race-a-contrivance-of-horror-3

FOREWORD Ray Brassier We know what verdict is reserved for those foolhardy enough to dissent from the common conviction according to which "being alive is all right," to borrow an insistent phrase from the volume at hand. Disputants of the normative buoyancy of our race can expect to be chastised for their ingratitude, upbraided for their cowardice, patronized for their shallowness. Where self-love provides the indubitable index of psychic health, its default can only ever be seen as a symptom of psychic debility. Philosophy, which once disdained opinion, becomes craven when the opin­ ion in question is whether or not being alive is all right. Suitably ennobled by the epithet "tragic," the approbation of life is im­ munized against the charge of complacency and those who deni­ grate it condemned as ingrates. "Optimism"; "pessimism": Thomas Ligotti takes the measure of these discredited words, stripping them of the patina of fa­ miliarity that has robbed them of their pertinence, and restoring to them some of their original substance. The optimist fixes the exchange rate between joy and woe, thereby determining the value of life. The pessimist, who refuses the principle of ex­ change and the injunction to keep investing in the future no matter how worthless life's currency in the present, is stigma­ tized as an unreliable investor. The Conspiracy against the Human Race sets out what is perhaps the most sustained challenge yet to the intellectual blackmail that would oblige us to be eternally grateful for a 9

10 T H E CONSPIRACY AGAINST T H E H U MAN RACE "gift" we never invited. Being alive is not all right: this simple not encapsulates the temerity of thinking better than any platitude about the tragic nobility of a life characterized by a surfeit of suffering, frustration, and self-deceit. There is no nature worth revering or rej oining; there is no self to be re-enthroned as cap­ tain of its own fate; there is no future worth working towards or hoping for. Life, in Ligotti's outsized stamp of disapproval, is MALIGNANTLY USELESS. No doubt, critics will try to indict Ligotti of bad faith by claiming that the writing of this book is itself driven by the im­ peratives of the life that he seeks to excoriate. But the charge is trumped-up, since Ligotti explicitly avows the impossibility for the living to successfully evade life's grip. This admission leaves the cogency of his diagnosis intact, for as Ligotti knows full well, if living is lying, then even telling the truth about life's lie will be a sublimated lie. Such sublimation is as close to truth-telling as Ligotti's ex­ acting nihilism will allow. Unencumbered by the cringing def­ erence towards social utility that straightjackets most professional philosophers, Ligotti's unsparing dissection of the sophisms spun by life's apologists proves him to be a more acute pathologist of the human condition than any sanctimoni­ ous philanthrope.