Pessimism

“No one ever needs pessimism”, writes Eugene Thacker; it is the “night-side of thought, a melodrama of the futility of the brain, a lyricism written in the graveyard of philosophy” (2018: 3). So why teach and attend a seminar about something no one needs and why read texts that aren’t going to unnecessarily raise your mood? Even if it might be the “lowest form of philosophy” (Thacker 2015: 3), pessimist thought has nevertheless been an irrepressible force in the history of modern Western philosophy. The thoughts of Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard and E.M. Cioran continue to haunt contemporary thinking, and like that annoying uncle you hate to meet at family gatherings, pessimism continues to outstay its welcome. Sometimes, it is even taken up as a virtue, such as in the political thinking of Antonio Gramsci, who armed himself with “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” (1977: 188) – an idea that was later adopted by Stuart Hall in his Gramscian analysis of Thatcherist British culture and politics (1988).

In this seminar, we will particularly look at the way pessimism informs attitudes towards the future in contemporary culture and how it has pervaded current cultural theory and philosophy in writers such as John Gray, Eugene Thacker, Thomas Ligotti, Sara Ahmed and Patricia MacCormack. We will also discuss how literature, film and popular culture express and represent pessimism in their aesthetics.

Please note:

Personal attendance during the first session is mandatory to maintain enrolment status. Please direct all inquiries about vacancies to britkult.fragen.fk15@tu-dortmund.de.

Most texts and films will be made available on Moodle, the EF library and the video library. In addition, please purchase the following novels before the start of the semester:

Natasha Brown. Assembly. Penguin, 2022.

Hari Kunzru: Red Pill. Simon & Schuster, 2021.

Introductory Reading:

Joshua Foa Dienstag. Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit. Princeton UP, 2006.

Joseph Packer & Ethan Stoneman. A Feeling of Wrongness: Pessimistic Rhetoric on the Fringes of Popular Culture. Penn State UP, 2018.

Mark Schmitt. Spectres of Pessimism: A Cultural Logic of the Worst. Palgrave, 2023.

Regular attendance, participation in an expert group plus additional assignments depending on your course of studies.