The Congress of Pessimism started with Dylan Trigg's philosophy-performance On an Unhuman Phenomenology: Horror of the Cosmos & Horror of the Body at the Unsorcery stand.
These lectures take their inspiration from a question central to contemporary philosophy: to what extent is our sense of identity informed by the materiality of our bodies? If phenomenology has attended to this question, then it has done so largely from the perspective of lived experience within a personal history. But there is another side to this relation between materiality and subjectivity which resists experience. Darker and more obscure, and at all times portending to something unknowable, this other side of the body has for the most part been overlooked by phenomenology. It is a body that is alien, alienated, and alienating. These two lectures approach the alien materiality of the body from joint perspectives: cosmic horror and body horror, both poles are united by an overarching thesis: the horror of the cosmos is the horror of the body and the horror of the body is the horror of the cosmos. This intertwining of the alien and the human inhabiting the same body is termed unhumanity.
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These lectures take their inspiration from a question central to contemporary philosophy: to what extent is our sense of identity informed by the materiality of our bodies? If phenomenology has attended to this question, then it has done so largely from the perspective of lived experience within a personal history. But there is another side to this relation between materiality and subjectivity which resists experience. Darker and more obscure, and at all times portending to something unknowable, this other side of the body has for the most part been overlooked by phenomenology. It is a body that is alien, alienated, and alienating. These two lectures approach the alien materiality of the body from joint perspectives: cosmic horror and body horror, both poles are united by an overarching thesis: the horror of the cosmos is the horror of the body and the horror of the body is the horror of the cosmos. This intertwining of the alien and the human inhabiting the same body is termed unhumanity.
More here
