The Conspiracy against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror

126 Pages·2016·0.8 MB·English

by  Ligotti, Thomas

THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE HUMAN RACE
Also by Thomas Ligotti
FICTION
Songs of a Dead Dreamer
Grimscribe
Noctuary
The Nightmare Factory
My Work Is Not Yet Done
The Shadow at the Bottom of the World
Teatro Grottesco
POETRY
I Have a Special Plan for This World
This Degenerate Little Town
Death Poems
SCREENPLAYS
Crampton (with Brandon Trenz)
The Frolic (with Brandon Trenz)
The Conspiracy against the Human Race
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A Contrivance of Horror
Thomas Ligotti
Hippocampus Press
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New York
Copyright © 2010 Thomas Ligotti. Foreword © 2010 by Ray Brassier. Thomas Ligotti photograph © 2010 by Jennifer Gariepy.
Parts of this work were published, in different form, in the following publications: “Literature Is Entertainment or It Is Nothing: An
Interview with Thomas Ligotti” by Neddal Ayad, Fantastic Metropolis (website), October 31, 2004; “Thomas Ligotti on Sweeney Todd,”
Horror: Another 100 Best Books, Stephen Jones and Kim Newman, eds., 2005; Introduction by Thomas Ligotti, The Tenant by Roland Topor,
2006; “‘It’s All a Matter of Personal Pathology’: An Interview with Thomas Ligotti” by Matt Cardin, The Teeming Brain (weblog), 2006.
All excerpts from the works of Peter Wessel Zapffe © Gisle R. Tangenes; used with permission. All excerpts from the writings of H.
P. Lovecraft © Robert C. Harrall; used with permission of Lovecraft Properties LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ligotti, Thomas.
The conspiracy against the human race: a contrivance of horror / Thomas Ligotti. – 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-9824296-9-3 (hardcover) – ISBN 978-0-9844802-7-2 (pbk.)
1. Horror in literature. 2. Literature–Philosophy. 3. Pessimism in literature. I. Title.
PN56.H6L55 2010
809’.9164–dc22
2010008781
Published by Hippocampus Press
P.O. Box 641, New York, NY 10156.
http://www.hippocampuspress.com
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the
publisher.
Cover design by Jennifer Gariepy. Cover production by Barbara Briggs Silbert. Hippocampus Press logo designed by Anastasia
Damianakos.
First Digital Edition(s) May 2012
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
ISBN 978-1-61498-030-8
Digital book(s) (epub and mobi) produced by Booknook.biz.
To the memory of Peter Wessel Zapffe
A
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to express my appreciation to Tim Jeski and Scott Wetherby for supplying me with
materials essential to the writing of this work; to the members of Thomas Ligotti Online and its
administrator, Brian Edward Poe, for participating in a forum of commentary on an early version of The
Conspiracy against the Human Race; to Robert Ligotti for being a ready test subject whenever I needed
an alert response from a mind akin to my own; and to Jennifer Gariepy for the encouragement and
insight she has afforded me over many years. In addition, I would be more than remiss not to
acknowledge the counsel and labors of S. T. Joshi, David E. Schultz, and Jonathan Padgett, with special
recognition reserved for Nicole Ariana Seary, who granted me the benefit of her talents and
experience during the most crucial stages of this book’s composition. Finally, I am indebted, as are all
devotees of philosophical pessimism who are not knowledgeable of the Dano-Norwegian language, to
Gisle R. Tangenes for his translations of and writings on the works of Peter Wessel Zapffe. The
responsibility for the use made of these valued contributions lies entirely with the author.
CONTENTS
Foreword by Ray Brassier
Introduction: Of Pessimism and Paradox
The Nightmare of Being
Who Goes There?
Freaks of Salvation
Sick to Death
The Cult of Grinning Martyrs
Autopsy on a Puppet: An Anatomy of the Supernatural
Notes
F
OREWORD
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 opinion in question is whether
or not being alive is all right. Suitably ennobled by the epithet “tragic,” the approbation of life is
immunized against the charge of complacency and those who denigrate it condemned as ingrates.
“Optimism”; “pessimism”: Thomas Ligotti takes the measure of these discredited words, stripping
them of the patina of familiarity 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 exchange and the injunction
to keep investing in the future no matter how worthless life’s currency in the present, is stigmatized
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 “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 rejoining; there is no self to be re-enthroned as captain 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 imperatives 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 exacting nihilism will allow.
Unencumbered by the cringing deference 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 sanctimonious philanthrope.
Look at your body—
A painted puppet, a poor toy
Of jointed parts ready to collapse,
A diseased and suffering thing
With a head full of false imaginings.
—The Dhammapada