About the book: 2016 / Mucus in all its manifestations and outflows can be called an "inconvenient phenomenon." Sticky, viscous and amorphous substances; trembling and elastic clots - lumps of protolife; viscous mixtures, colloids and emulsions; silt, mud, swamp. From the point of view of the usual ways for humans to schematize perception, all of this is the marginalia of life, its waste, which for a long time also remained on the periphery of philosophy, art, literature, or even science. But as existence is stripped of its anthropocentric illusions, the eternal return of the mucus becomes more obsessive and intense. What if the base materiality of mucus receives rights that were previously the lot of only privileged entities and matters? What then can the mucus “tell” about the structure of reality? The book by American philosopher Ben Woodard is devoted to conceptualizing the answer to this question. The impetus for this conceptualization is the horror of a diffuse, non-individual life that accompanies a slimy existence, the dynamics of which make the distinctions between individuation and individuality, inorganic and organic, homogeneity and the heterogeneity that appears through it, unsteady. The form is “dark vitalism”, according to which these already-indistinguishables are subsequently differentiated under the influence of the forces of space and time through the spread of network entanglement (instead of complexity), folding-unfolding (instead of development) and repetition (reinforcing pathology instead of structure). Materials include films and horror literature (from W. H. Hodgson and H. P. Lovecraft to Thomas Ligotti), 19th-century natural philosophy, graphic novels, speculative realism, modern science, and video games.