Eugene Thacker breaks the world into knowable and unknowable, and explores what we do with the unknowable. He committed the unfortunate sin of writing a great title for his 2011 book, In the Dust of This Planet. Here's how that played out and what it says about where we are historically, hopefully without getting too deep into the abyss. Because it does indeed stare back.

Thacker writes that the universe organizes itself into three classes of sense data: the world-for-us, the world-for-itself, and the world-without-us. Interactions within these orientations can further be classified along three rough patterns of thought:

• The Mythological
  • Recognizes that the world is not completely under human control, and uses the concept of personhood to grapple with what cannot be controlled.
  • Deals with the-world-for-itself and the world-without-us by building stories about how these unknowable realms came to be how they are.
• The Theological
  • Assigns moral weight to the unknowable and extracts a value system based on presumptions about the unknowable. Sin, debt, and redemption are the main themes.
  • Sorts the world-for-itself and the world-without-us into moral dictates and judgements emanating from an unknowable realm with truths that serve as guidance.
• The Existential
  • Ignores the unknowable entirely, preferring the application of intellect to understand the knowable realm. Enlightenment philosophy and the rigor of scientific study are hallmarks.
  • Concerns the extraction of rules for governing human behaviour and understanding experience based on what is.

Categorized this way, we can explore what Thacker refers to as "the hiddenness of the world". Horror as a genre of popular media is illuminating entirely because it is honest about the nihilism at its root; it asserts 'hiddenness' as a requirement. Horror demands the acceptance of the impact of the unknowable on the knowable. It's precisely that dissonance that generates the tension so important to this genre.

Nihilism runs deep here – the idea that our experience cannot be total and thus its exploration is futile is a recurrent theme of In the Dust of This Planet. It's a freeing observation for Thacker, though. Horror is fun. It's a frame for what might otherwise be called absurd, and that crucible has given us some interesting notions.

It's impossible to discuss this stripe of philosophy without invoking a certain mustachioed syphilitic; "The most difficult thought" is Nietzsche's phrase for the idea that our ideas and actions don't actually matter. He meant it as a limit to human agency, something to be sad about, a reason to divine one's own ideas. Dogmatic belief was a bit of a problem for him.

So horror, then – the terrifying consideration of the universe's indifference and unknowable workings – is the greatest way to engage with a cosmos that doesn't give a single fuck about us, exactly because it breaks our minds. Put differently, Thacker sees a movement toward greater 'hiddenness' as the world getting stranger and less knowable. He sees the anger about it, and he sees horror as the relief valve, as the lens through which this relationship might be explored.

I'm inclined to side with Thacker's read – "our ideas and actions don't matter!" is the beginning of some serious introspection and rebirth, not the end of reasoned living. It's a blank slate, an opportunity to define what start is, then start.

And so the story of what happened because of his book title is actually kind of perfect.

Jay-Z and Beyonce announced a tour together. It took the internet and the music world by storm. Fifteen years ago. Not the point. These two media icons made a video announcing this tour, a slick action movie trailer. Their respective organizations got together and assembled this piece of media, a giant production involving a surprising number of A-list actors. Set design and props became a thing, and here's where Thacker's book title came into the picture.

At 00:37 in the video, Jay-Z is photographed from behind pointing a gun, wearing a leather jacket with the cover of Thacker's book on the back. It looks like this:

As part of her interview with Radiolab on the subject, June Ambrose, the creative director who decided to put Jay-Z in that jacket, explains:

I don't have to talk to you, but I can create a conversation with a pair of pants and how they fall and how they fit and the texture and the color and the feel. [I wanted something epic] but like, effortless. I knew I wanted a biker jacket because I knew there was a motorcycle scene. But I knew I couldn't just give him a black leather jacket, I needed it to say something, to feel like something, so we were on the hunt.

This is destruction in search of a cause. Nihlism's very soul. And so very much what Thacker is about. All this pondering of the unknowable, feeling around in the dark at the edges of philosophy, all of these big words and expansive minds and here it is.

Right in pop culture's angsty search for an excuse to break shit.

For a philosopher to have a mainstream cultural moment isn't without precedent. Catherine the Great courted Voltaire at a time when his words were most dangerous to her reign; de Toucqueville was popular among the very nobles he wrote to undermine. Sofia Isella muses about the number of grown men who attend her shows. Hegemonic systems of thought frequently embrace the seeds of their own destruction as a matter of course – it's seemingly part of the human experience.

What is different, though, is how loose the connection between the monarch and the thinker is in this modern version. Catherine read and argued with Voltaire; grown men go to Sofia Isella shows because they too believe. Asked about Voltaire and Isella, these hegemons could speak at length about the influence and importance of their idol. Jay-Z's invocation of Thacker is not only thoughtless, it's third-party. A prop.

A ghost of the idea. It's uncool. And that's the point – the symbol is the thing.

What better horror, then, but for Thacker's work to be taken up by royalty in this utterly disposable way. Imagine entertaining rigorous academic interviews, addressing hard questions, and explaining the more obscure points of your writing, then suddenly having to suffer banal questions about fashion from the likes of Fox News and other entertainment industry celebrities.

The image of Thacker's book cover is still available as an object of fashion. For real. The item description is hilarious. But consider how this came to be: a fashion designer and an artist collaborated to put the image of Thacker's cover on their clothing for one season. Much was made about fashionable nihilism. And then all the attention just stopped. As these things go.

Popular culture is at the same time the most contrived and most careless thing. If something is over-engineered, it's lame. If it's too casual, it's meaningless. Striking this balance is crucial for relevance. It is an uncritical view of the world-for-us; here the revolutionary spirit embraces a book about how limited our knowledge is and what we can do about it, without actually engaging with the ideas Thacker advances.

Because, well, that would be dangerous.