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.
