'Writing on what he calls “the horror of philosophy,” Eugene Thacker distinguishes between three dimensions of the world. First, there is the world-for-us, which is “the world in which we live.” Second, there is the world-in-itself, or the world as it exists apart from us. And third, there is what Thacker calls the world-without-us, a “spectral and speculative world” that exists at the limits of our thought. The first two worlds are familiar to us, as they are dialectically interrelated. The world-in-itself is independent from us; but we are always working to transform it into yet more of the world-for-us. This is what Hegel calls “the labor of the negative”; in more contemporary terms, we can say that this is the work of science and technology [...].
But the world-in-itself is never entirely subsumed by such transformations. We are continually reminded of the world’s autonomy from us; most notably, Thacker says, “in the form of natural disasters,” and in long-term processes such as climate change. These events and processes seem to elude all our efforts to grasp them and control them. Whatever their empirical status, they seem to have a more-than-empirical force. Like Kantian transcendental conditions, they cannot be experienced in themselves, but they define and delimit what we are able to experience. But where Kantian transcendentals are positive and necessary conditions, generated by our minds, these limit-conditions are entirely negative and contingent ones, and utterly alien to our own thought. The “enigmatic concept” of the world-without-us points to a reality that is actively defined by “the subtraction of the human from the world.” This reality has withdrawn from us, and dispensed with us altogether. We often attempt to grasp the world-without-us through concepts like Hegel’s “bad infinity,” Sartre’s “practico-inert,” Lacan’s impossible Real, and Žižek’s “remainder.” But such concepts are only of limited value, because they remain all-too-human ones. As Thacker says, they still “attempt to put things in human terms, in the terms of the world-for-us.” The world-without-us, however, is precisely indifferent to all such formulations [...].'
Steven Shaviro, 'Melancholia or, The Romantic Anti-Sublime', in Secuense 1.1