Thomas Ligotti | The Puppet's Curse: Why Consciousness Is Humanity's Greatest Horror

Vote on what comes next: https://www.sleepyphilosophyradio.com/voteThomas Ligotti wrote horror fiction as philosophical argument, producing the most uncompromising pessimist literature of the last century.Tonight we trace the life and work of Thomas Ligotti, from a Catholic childhood in Detroit to the crisis at seventeen that broke his inherited sense of the world, through the decades he spent as a reference editor by day and a weird-fiction writer by night. We follow him into the small-press debut that announced a strange new voice, through the mature collections that refined it into something closer to philosophical argument, into the corporate-horror novella about a man pushed out of his job, and into the quieter late stories of decayed towns and malignantly useless factories. We examine the long, obscure tradition of philosophical pessimism that stood behind his fiction, and we turn at last to the treatise in which he finally stated his position in his own voice. A slow journey through the darkest and most carefully written American horror of our time.Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.(0:00:00) A Catholic Childhood in Detroit(0:10:52) The Inheritance of Poe and Lovecraft(0:20:26) The Pessimist Lineage from Schopenhauer to Zapffe(0:32:21) Songs of a Dead Dreamer(0:41:06) The Frolic and the Metaphysical Criminal(0:49:42) The Dreamed Dreamer and the Puppeteer(0:59:00) Grimscribe(1:08:03) The Last Feast of Harlequin(1:17:10) Nethescurial and the Infectious Document(1:26:25) Noctuary and Direct Philosophy(1:35:19) The Medusa(1:44:03) My Work Is Not Yet Done(1:53:09) Frank Dominio and the Great Black Swine(2:02:45) Teatro Grottesco and the Malignantly Useless(2:12:26) The Red Tower(2:21:19) The Bungalow House(2:30:53) The Conspiracy Against the Human Race(2:40:35) Consciousness as Tragic Over-development(2:50:36) Isolation, Anchoring, Distraction, and Sublimation(3:00:39) The Puppet as the Human Situation(3:10:09) Antinatalism and the Asymmetry of Harm(3:20:32) The Spectral Link and the Silence After(3:30:15) True Detective and the Voice in the Patrol Car(3:40:41) Legacy and the Readers Who Will ComeSUGGESTED READINGThomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror, Hippocampus Press: https://amzn.to/4cw0HN4Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe, Penguin Classics: https://amzn.to/4eIa79EThomas Ligotti, Teatro Grottesco, Virgin Books: https://amzn.to/3QxrccnThomas Ligotti, My Work Is Not Yet Done: Three Tales of Corporate Horror, Virgin Books: https://amzn.to/4cMyGQaArthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation Volume 1, translated by E. F. J. Payne, Dover Publications: https://amzn.to/42zl9GRArthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation Volume 2: https://amzn.to/3P1JbHtEmil Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born, translated by Richard Howard, Arcade Publishing: https://amzn.to/48RVFYWEugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy Volume One, Zero Books: https://amzn.to/3QylAi2All research and writing is done personally. Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License.If this helped you rest, consider following Sleepy Philosophy Radio for more gentle, longform philosophy.