Those of us who live in the shadow of Copernicus, must choose whether to adopt an eliminative approach to the cosmos or to withdraw into a pre-modern account, which privileges the irreducible enigma of things long before they’ve been touched by human desire. In each case, we are guided by the fundamental uncanniness of life itself, a life that ostensibly has no place in the universe, except as an appearance of the living dead. The problem of life enters the stage of thought as an aberration of nature. If life can be characterised in biological terms as a blind striving toward change and growth, then the other side of this striving is the sense of a deformation in the cosmos catching sight of itself being abjected from nothingness. Nowhere is this realization of the fundamental strangeness of life clearer than in the materiality of the human body.
Dylan Trigg, The Thing: A Phenomenology of Horror, pg. 36-37
