This book argues that philosophical pessimism can offer vital impulses for contemporary cultural studies. Pessimist thought offers ways to interrogate notions of temporality, progress and futurity. When the horizon of future expectation is increasingly shaped by the prospect of apocalypse and extinction, an exploration of pessimist thought can help to make sense of an increasingly complex and uncertain world by affirming rather than suppressing the worst. This book argues that a cultural logic of the worst is at work in a substantial section of contemporary philosophical thought and cultural representations. Spectres of pessimism can be found in contemporary ecocritical thought, antinatalist philosophies, political thought, and cultural theory, as well as in literature, film, and popular music. In its unsettling of temporality, this new pessimism shares sensibilities with the field of hauntology. Both deconstruct linear narratives of time that adhere to a stable sequence of past, present and future. Mark Schmitt therefore couples pessimism and hauntology to explore the spectres of pessimism in a range of theories and narratives—from ecocriticism, antinatalism and queer theory to utopianism, from afropessimism to the fiction of Hari Kunzru and Thomas Ligotti to the films of Camille Griffin, Gaspar Noé, Denis Villeneuve and Lars von Trier.

A deep analysis of an enigmatic artist whose oeuvre opens new spaces for understanding feminism, the body, and identity Popular and pioneering as a conceptual artist, Rosemarie Trockel has never before been examined at length in a dedicated book. This volume fills that gap while articulating a new interpretation of feminist theory and bodily identity based around the idea of schizogenesis central to Trockel’s work. Schizogenesis is a fission-like form of asexual reproduction in which new organisms are created but no original is left behind. Author Katherine Guinness applies it in surprising and insightful ways to the career of an artist who has continually reimagined herself and her artistic vision. Drawing on the philosophies of feminists such as Simone de Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone, and Monique Wittig, Guinness argues that Trockel’s varied output of painting, fabric, sculpture, film, and performance is best seen as opening a space that is peculiarly feminist yet not contained by dominant articulations of feminism. Utilizing a wide range of historical and popular knowledge—from Baader Meinhof to Pinocchio, poodles, NASA, and Brecht—Katherine Guinness gives us the associative and ever-branching readings that Trockel’s art requires. With a spirit for pursuing the surprising and the obscure, Guinness delves deep into a creator who is largely seen as an enigma, revealing Trockel as a thinker who challenges and transforms the possibilities of bodily representation and identity.

The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer Studies in Pessimism Translated By T. Bailey Saunders The Essays here presented form a further selection from Schopenhauer's Parerga, brought together under a title which is not to be found in the original, and does not claim to apply to every chapter in the volume. The first essay is, in the main, a rendering of the philosopher's remarks under the heading of Nachtrage zur Lehre vom Leiden der Welt, together with certain parts of another section entitled Nachtrage zur Lehre von der Bejahung und Verneinung des Willens zum Leben. Such omissions as I have made are directed chiefly by the desire to avoid repeating arguments already familiar to readers of the other volumes in this series. The Dialogue on Immortality sums up views expressed at length in the philosopher's chief work, and treated again in the Parerga. The Psychological Observations in this and the previous volume practically exhaust the chapter of the original which bears this title. The essay on Women must not be taken in jest. It expresses Schopenhauer's serious convictions; and, as a penetrating observer of the faults of humanity, he may be allowed a hearing on a question which is just now receiving a good deal of attention among us.

Collected here are nine short essays, On the Sufferings of the World, The Vanity of Existence, On Suicide, Immortality: A Dialogue, Psychological Observations, On Education, Of Women, On Noise, and A Few Parables, by the world renowned philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.