Pigs All the Way Down: Capitalist Realism and Neo-reaction in Thomas Ligotti's My Work Is Not Yet Done

This paper examines class politics, metaphysics, and the trope of the monstrous swine in Thomas Ligotti's novella My Work Is Not Yet Done. It argues that the text presents a portrait of alienation under late capitalism and initially seems to enact a drama of anti-capitalist revenge, one challenging the precepts of capitalism by invoking a metaphysical reality outside of capitalist hegemony. Drawing on the work of Mark Fisher and the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, as well as Ligotti's own pessimism, the paper focuses on the figure of the "swine" as a multivalent symbol for exploited labour, exploitative capital, and, ultimately, for the monstrous world-in-itself, showing how the novella's examination of philosophical speculation and late capitalist superstructure reinscribes capitalist realism rather than overturning it, leading not to revolutionary action but to neo-reaction.