In Decreativity: Mediating Shadows of Being and Horizons of Thought, Lexi Turner explores the philosophical possibility of a “successful failure” of communication – whether distortion or deterioration may not, in fact, constitute a mediation of a greater, ineffable, noumenal truth. To conceptualize this, Turner introduces the term decreativity: art and its analysis that exists at the point of convergence between mystical theology and pessimism as comparative philosophies of mediation. Developing this theory by placing these seemingly disparate schools of thought in dialogue with media that involves distortion or destruction of the medium, the message, and/or the messenger, Turner explores masochistic misrepresentation as political strategy in Afropessimism and blaxploitation horror, traumatic counter-actualization through atomized subjectivity in the work of Lingua Ignota, the coextension of aestheticized depression, monstrosity, and lo-fi production in black metal, and multiple forms of degradation of image and narrative in the cinematic avant-garde. To this end, Turner applies pessimism, theology, postmodernism, critical race theory, feminism, queer theory, film and media theory, sound studies and comparative literature to produce a holistic approach to thanatological meta-aesthetics, combined with elements of autoethnography and literary experimentation to try and conceive of the dark substrata to which successful failures in phenomenological mediation may give us access – however fleeting. Refusing the hierarchical distinctions of canon and taste, by placing in dialogue works of medieval saints with artists working along the margins of culture, Decreativity: Mediating Shadows of Being and Horizons of Thought insists upon a prefigurative univocity that allows for any instance of decreative ecstasy—as an extension of the self, away from the self—to be viewed as a meaningful potential point of encounter with the noumena within and without us, in pursuit of the unseeing vision of God as darkness, and darkness as God.