True Detection - Traditionally, the detective genre deals with the problem of epistemology – how to know something that one doesn't know. These essays reveal knowledge becoming an enigma to itself, revealing the brilliant futility of the epistemological project

True Detection. Edited by Edia Connoile, Paul J. Ennis and Nicola Masciandaro. Schism Press, 2014.

A collection of philosophical and critical essays on the television series True Detective.

"Traditionally, the detective genre deals with the problem of epistemology – how to know something that one doesn't know. There are some things we cannot know, and some things we should not know. Sometimes clues just give way to more clues, and epistemic tedium rules the day. These essays reveal knowledge becoming an enigma to itself, revealing the brilliant futility of the epistemological project." – Eugene Thacker

 "The television event of the year - I would say many years - is without doubt True Detective. One deserving of forensic, unflinching, and unrelenting philosophical treatment." – Simon Critchley

"The most intelligent series in TV history has opened strange crypts for explorers. This excellent essay collection reveals just how far the dark tunnels lead. Let it coax you from the comforts of death and fear, into detection of the guttering nightmare that is life, coldly seen." – Nick Land
 

CONTENTS

I. Black Stars

Gary J. Shipley – Monster at the End: Pessimism’s Locked Rooms and Impossible Crimes

Edia Connole – Contemplating the Crucifixion: Cohle and Divine Gloom

Nicola Masciandaro – I Am Not Supposed To Be Here: Birth and Mystical Detection

II. Separate From Itself

Fintan Neylan – The Labour of the Pessimist: Detecting Expiration’s Artifice 

Paul J. Ennis – The Atmospherics of Consciousness

Ben Woodard – Nothing Grows in the Right Direction: Scaling the Life of the Negative

III. There Was A Videotape 

Niall McCann – True Detective, Jean-Luc Godard and Our Image Culture: ‘This May Well be Heaven, this Hell Smells the Same’

Daniel Fitzpatrick –  ‘True Dick’ . . . The Accelerated Acceptance and Premature Canonisation of True Detective

IV. It’s Just One Story

Scott Wilson – The Nonsense of Detection: Truth Between Science and the Real

Erin K. Stapleton – The Corpse is the Territory: The Body of Dora Kelly Lange in True Detective 

Caoimhe Doyle & Katherine Foyle – The Flat Devil Net: Mapping Quantum Narratives in True Detective

Daniel Colucciello Barber – Affect Has No Story

V.  And Closure–No, No, No

Dominic Fox – koyntly bigyled

Charlie Blake, Daniel Colucciello Barber, Edia Connole, Paul J. Ennis, Gary J. Shipley – Bird Trap

Edge to Edge

Caoimhe Doyle & Katherine Foyle – The Chole Story

 . . . already I detect our whimpers, I even hear our screams. And the night that will descend upon our bones will not bring peace . . . but fear. – E. M. Cioran, History and Utopia

. . . an objective teleology cannot be elaborated and justified without a number of illusions, whose main defect is that they can easily be detected by a penetrating eye.– E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

Aligning criminal detection and nihilistic terror, Nic Pizzolatto’s TV series True Detective saves the significance of detection from forensic positivism and restores its essential negativity (de-tect) to the immanent cosmic and existential horizon, that is, to the diurnal hell that is ‘you’. Against the anglo-historicist forensic norm of truth as something still there to be known, the crime show refreshingly advances the essential negativity of knowing, namely, the fact that truth is not an object of knowledge, but a swampy, lived matter of uncovering and exposure which perforce must stay open to its own most pessimal possibilities. The true detective, a secret friend of the irreligious saints of cosmic pessimism (Cioran, Ligotti, Thacker, et al.), is here one who entertains and contemplates the absolute worst. If he offers any salvation from evil, if he fulfills his duty to protect and to serve, it is at best in the name of the personally terrifying principle that there is no one to be saved. This symposium, taking shape around the dark intellectual subtexts of this mass entertainment, and in the midst of not knowing how the story does or should end, seizes itself as an opportunity for spontaneous reflection upon the shared fate of crime, investigation, and cosmic horror. It offers, on the formal grounds of True Detective’s narrative double frame, a speculative detection of detection upon the precipices of the true abyss.  - thewhim.blogspot.com/2014/03/true-detection-in-works.html