Geology of the Night

A futurospective glimpse into the Twilight of Reason through a fin-de-siècle saga of a perishing cosmos.



Geology of the Night is an étude in the philosophy of futility, contributing to the project of the horror of philosophy. Where Endarkenment begins from the organon of extinction of all thought as its philosophical starting point, Mstyslav Kazakov takes a steep turn onto an unbeaten path, starting from the primal feud between Mind and Time (arguably, the most terrible thing in the Universe). The book hails philosophy as an organon of decay, arguing that the absolute exteriority and contingency of time confront and eventually annul the Enlightenment dream of Reason’s infinite potential as a collective, intersubjective endeavor. Kazakov takes Kant’s Enlightenment as “a moment of Reason’s maturity” to its edge, showing that Reason is diachronic: not a supranatural eternity but a perishable thing subject to decay. Perishing differently from material putrefaction, it is still not exempt from the fate of all things. Utilizing fictioning as method, Kazakov explores the conditions of Reason’s undoing by inhuman temporality—diachrony. This culminates in a close reading, as philosopheme, of The Night Land (1912): a last epic saga of a perishing cosmos, a foundation yet underexplored masterpiece of speculative horror by William Hope Hodgson, a British author killed on the battlefields of WWI.