LITCS 114
Teaching Associate: Patrick Mooney
Bldg. 494, room 160B
Fall 2015
It is increasingly difficult to comprehend the world in which we live and of which we are a part. To confront this idea is to confront an absolute limit to adequately understand the world at all.(Thacker 1)
thinking enigmatically confronts the horizon of its own possibility – the thought of the unthinkable that philosophy cannot pronounce but via a non-philosophical language.(2)
When the world as such cataclysmically manifests itself in the form of a disaster, how do we interpret or give meaning to the world? […] In modernity, the response is primarily existential – a questioning of the role of human individuals and human groups in light of modern science, high technology, industrial and post-industrial capitalism, and world wars.(3)
tragically, we are most reminded of the world-in-itself when the world-in-itself is manifest in the form of natural disasters.(5)
we have even imagined what would happen to the world if we as human beings were to become extinct.(5)
the world can mean many things(2)
the world-for-us(or
the World) is the world as we experience it, the world as a phenomenological construct with which we interact. (4)
the world-in-itself(or
the Earth) is the world that
‘bites back,’ resists, or ignores our attempts to mold it into the world-for-us.This is the world as an object of scientific study; it is also an imaginary construct that
constitutes a horizon for thought, always receding just beyond the bounds of intelligibility.(4-5)
the world-without-us(or
the Planet) is an unknowable (
spectral and speculative) construct in which we attempt to subtract human meaning and activity from
the Earth.(5-6)
the worldare infused with human values and human constructions based on human activities.
[T]he world-without-us is not to be found in a ‘great beyond’ that is exterior to the World […] or the Earth […]; rather, it is in the very fissures, lapses, or lacunae in the World and the Earth.(7-8)
I would propose […] that horror be understood about the the limits of the human as it confronts a world that is not just a World, and not just the Earth, but also a Planet (the world-without-us).(8)
the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.(3)
Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.(6)
He thought if he lived long enough the world at last would all be lost. Like the dying world the newly blind inhabit, all of it slowly fading from memory.(18)
A blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up. No sound but the wind in the bare and blackened trees. He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark.(15)
In those first years the roads were peopled with refugees shrouded up in their clothing. […] Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland. The frailty of everything revealed at last.(28)
The mummied dead everywhere. The flesh cloven along the bones, the ligaments dried to tug and taut as wires. Shriveled and drawn like latterday bogfolk.(24)
Then he picked up the phone and dialed the number of his father’s house in that long ago. The boy watched him. What are you doing? he said.(7)
They trucked on along the blacktop. Tall clapboard houses. Machinerolled metal roofs. A log barn in a field with an advertisement in faded ten-foot letters across the roofslope. See Rock City.(21)
Dont you want to see where I used to live?
No. (25)
the last instance of a thing takes the class with it: 28
a message and a warning: 90-91
charred ruins of a library: 187
A formless music for the age to come: 78
the worldby the boy and the man.