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Revenge, estrangement, nihilism. These are the main feelings identified by historians to describe the political culture and anthropology of the subversive far right, from the second post-war period to the years of terrorism. Social scientists have placed at the centre of their analysis the radical right's process of coming to terms with the grief caused by the defeat of the fascist regimes in the Second World War. The emphasis on pessimism, however, has pushed into the background the specificity of the elaboration of defeat within right-wing radicalism. The efforts of far-right intellectuals, in fact, had been aimed at overcoming 'nostalgism', that particular form of political melancholy, widespread in neo-fascism, which led to regret rather than overcome the fascist experience. In this perspective, the outbreak of global protest in the 1960s opened a difficult generational confrontation within the Italian far right. Neo-fascist youth movements rediscovered the myth of the 'fascist revolution in its original form'. The division even ran through families, opposing veterans of the Italian Social Republic with extra-parliamentary militants who later entered underground terrorism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary times mark a fundamental shift in our sense and experience of the world. The postmodern condition — as remarked by Fredric Jameson (1991) and Jean-Francois Lyotard (1979), among others — calls for new conceptions of lived reality. Nevertheless, profound uneasiness with notions of space and time is not only a postmodernist obsession. Modernist cinema, on account of its aesthetic self-reflexivity, also grapples with ways of inscribing spatiality and temporality. The 1980s saw a resurgence of European heritage films, reminiscent of interwar years of empire (early 1920s–late 1930s), produced in Kenya. Out of Africa (dir. Sydney Pollack, 1985), White Mischief (dir. Michael Radford, 1987), and The Kitchen Toto (dir. Harry Hook, 1988) became global audience staples. Not only do these films perpetuate Western viewers' 'master-race' instincts; they also reproduce 'cult images' of an 'exotic' African locale. This paper phenomenologically reflects on White Mischief's nostalgic reconstruction of a colonial settler village, the Happy Valley, and its ultra-privileged white hedonists. It explores how materiality of physical space can aid re-inscription of time and vice versa. Turning the colonial gaze upon itself, in critical self-reflection, my analysis foregrounds profound ruptures, discontinuities and contradictions in the historical fact and experience of European colonialism in Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores four crucial problems regarding wu 無 (nothingness or nonexistence), a central concept in Chinese philosophy: (1) What is wu, and how does it relate to you 有 (somethingness or existence)? (2) Does ‘you arise from wu’ (you sheng yu wu 有生於無), and if so, how does this ‘arising’ occur? (3) Which takes precedence in Chinese philosophy, wu or you? (4) Does pursuing wu risk leading to nihilism? Drawing on Saul Kripke’s interpretation of possible worlds, I propose that wu represents a realm of potential possibilities. I align with Kripke’s view that possible worlds lack actual existence but are anchored in the actual world. This view clarifies the seemingly paradoxical nature of Chinese philosophy: it is rooted in the mundane world while embracing a transcendental wu. Moreover, it helps avoid the nihilism that might arise from interpreting wu as a groundless void. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the application of Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy to literature, specifically the works of John Banville. It explores the concept of "virtuous egoism" in Nietzsche's philosophy and suggests that characters in Banville's novels embody this idea. The article also examines the theme of death in Banville's works and its connection to ethics and optimism. The document accompanying the article is a list of references and sources related to Nietzsche's philosophy, including translations of his work and books analyzing his ideas. These resources would be valuable for library patrons researching Nietzsche and his philosophy. [Extracted from the article]

This paper explores hope as a dominant framing for critical social theory in the era of the Anthropocene. It suggests that with the dissolution of modernist assumptions of human exceptionality, universal causality and temporal progress, critical social theory can be understood as having shifted fields. This shift is from the field of the seen – the field of appearances (i.e. the world of politics, of rational subjects, instrumental rationality and aspirations of progress) – to the field of the unseen (towards approaches which can be understood as working with or drawing upon a world which is beyond or below appearances). It will be argued that the Anthropocene is central to this shift from the centrality of questions of transparency and of politics to those of opacity and hope. This is in part because the Anthropocene is seen to have emerged behind the backs of political reason, unseen and unintended. If the Anthropocene as a condition is the product of taking a narrow reductive approach to the world, as framed in the modern ontology, then access to the unseen world becomes a necessity. The different forms of hope engaged with in this paper articulate distinct understandings of this 'other world' beyond appearances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking the slogan "no lives matter" as a starting point to diagnose the nihilism of our contemporary political culture, in this essay I tie the rise of nihilism to the resurgence of far-right political movements, chiefly the neo-reactionary thought of Nick Land. Following my discussion of Land and the culture of apocalyptic nihilism, I elucidate a Black feminist and decolonial perspective that, I argue, resists this creeping nihilism, and instead offers avenues of engaged political praxis for recuperating the politics of personhood. Using Sylvia Wynter's work as an exemplar of such a perspective, I perform a rhetorical criticism of Land's essay "The Dark Enlightenment" through the lens of Wynter's understanding of the human. Critiquing his arguments, I argue that Wynter's work offers a radical alternative to Land's apocalypticism and antihumanism, one that maintains a commitment to reimagining the human rather than disavowing it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Tyranny and Revolution: Rousseau to Heidegger" by Waller R. Newell explores the concept of freedom and revolution in the political philosophy of German thinkers from Rousseau to Heidegger. The book examines how these philosophers viewed freedom and revolution as interconnected, with revolution often seen as a means to restore or simulate the lost freedom of humanity. The author also discusses the influence of classical Greek political thought on these philosophers and their critiques of modernity. The book provides a comprehensive analysis of the philosophical tradition and its implications for understanding freedom and revolution. [Extracted from the article]

Zhuangzi often is portrayed as a kind of ethical relativist. This popular reading has been challenged by Philip Ivanhoe, who argues that Zhuangzi is not a relativist but rather that Zhuangzi articulates a normative theory of benignity. In this paper we argue against Ivanhoe's interpretation. We further argue that Zhuangzi is an ethical nihilist, who rejects all ethical positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper has two main aims. I first argue that ontological nihilism, that is, the view that there are no things is a consistent position. Second, I discuss an argument for the view that nihilism is not just possible but actually true, that is that there actually are no things (This paper is not meant as an addition to the considerable literature on the question of why there is something rather than nothing. Of course, any attempt to answer this question would have to presuppose the conclusion of the first section, that is, that nihilism is a consistent position. But if the argument in the second section goes through the question we would then have to answer is not why there is something rather than nothing, but why there is nothing rather than something). My argument is based on two main premisses, eliminativism ('only the fundamental exists') and non-foundationalism ('it's dependence all the way down') which jointly entail ontological nihilism. I conclude with some reflections on the consequences of the nihilist position for the project of constructing a fundamental metaphysical theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with an important strand of nihilistic arguments to be found in the works of two philosophers who have so far never been studied comparatively: the sophist Gorgias and the Buddhist monk Nāgārjuna. After having reconstructed Gorgias' moves in the first section of On What is Not (Sections 1-4), the paper shows how the nihilist arguments Gorgias uses mostly feature, under a new light, in the philosophy of emptiness developed by Nāgārjuna (Sections 5-8). The paper ends with a hermeneutical suggestion: that is, to replace traditional 'sceptical' interpretations of Gorgias and Nāgārjuna with an alternative one, which takes them as possibly committed to nihilism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I reflect on what may be termed 'omnipotent passivity and omniscient oblivion' which are some of the key paradoxes within schizophrenia. I discuss various aspects of insight and self-awareness as components of clinical recovery and argue that the minds affected by schizophrenia can in fact be very insightful, albeit a different kind of insight entirely. I argue that the nature of schizophrenia means that one's experience of the illness may be conceptualized as a nonevent or non-experience due to the detachment from subjectivity and replacement/withdrawal of will. I draw parallels between the (again, paradoxical) experience of such nonevents with psychological annihilation and physical death, as well as with some intensely reflexive states of mind in philosophical pursuits. I also put forward an argument for the importance of investigating the kinds of nothingness, solitude and nihilism intrinsic to schizophrenia and how these might be studied or perhaps even understood from the angle of paradoxicality, which I consider to be the core psychopathology of schizophrenia and which may aid differential diagnosis with higher specificity. Lastly, I urge clinicians and researchers to redirect their passion away from "solving" the puzzle of schizophrenia and toward realizing the humanity in their patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates Nietzsche's assessments of Pascal's embrace and rejection of various branches of skepticisms that Montaigne embodies or ignores. Nietzsche admires Pascal for intellectual probity and skepticism. Pascal finds fault with Montaigne's Academic Skepticism, viewing it as insufficiently honest, because it ceases to inquire into Nature, and takes the self as the anchor of psychological tranquility. Inspired by Pascal's criticism of Montaigne's Skepticism in his Essais III.13, in D 46, Nietzsche also disapproves of Montaigne's sluggish tranquility and deems this a symptom of feebleness and nihilism. Some scholars claim that Nietzsche admires Montaigne's earthly cheerfulness and probity as that of a free spirit regarding Montaigne's adoption of Pyrrhonian. By contrast, I argue that Nietzsche misinterprets Montaigne's Academic Skepticism in the Essais III.13.1218 as Pyrrhonian Skepticism, because the Skepticism here is characterized by ignorance and incuriosity instead of probity. Montaigne's very Academic Skepticism vexes Pascal because of the latter's complacent lack of curiosity about the supernatural world. Regarding this, Nietzsche inveighs against Pascal's insufficient honesty as entangled with a dogmatic observance of Christian truthfulness instead of a free-spirited honesty, but advocates Montaigne's this-worldly naturalism. Nietzsche sees Pascal's unyielding application of Christian self-examination will finally lead to his skepticism of Christianity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this article is to conceptualize and evaluate the transhumanist movement by applying a Nietzschean critique to its techno-progressive agenda of human enhancement. The investigation itself is divided into three distinctive, yet methodologically intertwined steps: first, I will present an exegetical approach by circumscribing the discussion concerning the alleged similarities and disparities between the transhumanist notion of transforming the human into a posthuman being and Nietzsche's concept of education, understood as self-overcoming; secondly, in a more practical and future-oriented manner, I will consider some of the major aporias for conceptualizing a 'Nietzschean transhumanism' by confronting the techno-progressive idea of morphological freedom with Nietzsche's critical approach to the commerce- and consumer-oriented mentality of the non-creative modern individual; finally, I will employ Nietzsche's complex treatment of nihilism in order to formulate a critical evaluation of transhumanism's cultural implications. My fundamental conclusion will be that the techno-progressive agenda does not strive to overcome human limitations by coping with the tragic nature of life in a Nietzschean sense, but merely promotes the nihilistic dream of Zarathustra's 'last human' to establish a common happiness by eradicating the Dionysian reality of all existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an essentialist view that requires one to specify the set of necessary and sufficient properties of the things that exist when establishing definitions. The endorsement of essentialism for definitions in economics has been largely motivated by the Taxonomic Tower of Babel (TTB), which encompasses two intellectual fears. The fear of scientific aphasia is the fear that scientific progress is hampered because economists do not agree on the definitions they use. The fear of nihilism refers to the fear of the advent of an unmanageable proliferation of definitions of the same term. We advocate the abandonment of essentialism by offering three arguments. First, essentialism seems impracticable in economics because essences are either mostly unavailable or useless. Second, the TTB, rather than a bug, is a feature of economics. Third, the TTB does not necessarily display the negative implications presumably associated with its existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nihilism in its classic Nietzschean sense—the ruins of all values—is the general condition of existence of Trumpism. In contrast to Noam Chomsky's argument that Trump, while authoritarian, is not a fascist, this article analyzes Trumpism in relation to nihilism and argues that Trump is a machine of affirmations for the collapse of all values—democracy, equality, justice... caused by the profound alienation of labor in contemporary capitalism. The machinic affirmations produced by the Trump administrative apparatuses—Fox News, Republican National Committee, Newsmax, the Justice Department... —are given a political bond and a spiritual coherence by (a nihilistic) fascism. It is a fascism that replaces the "big words" with equally ground-less affirmations ("Make American Great Again") but, like all fascism, fails to overcome capitalism's devaluation of all values that has in the words of Marx and Engels, "drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fichte assigns 'intellectual intuition' a new meaning after Kant. But in 1799, his doctrine of intellectual intuition is publicly deemed indefensible by Kant and nihilistic by Jacobi. I propose to defend Fichte's doctrine against these charges, leaving aside whether it captures what he calls the 'spirit' of transcendental idealism. I do so by articulating three problems that motivate Fichte's redirection of intellectual intuition from being to acting: (1) the regress problem, which states that reflecting on empirical facts of consciousness leads only to further facts and so cannot yield a first principle; (2) the rhapsody problem, which states that the categories form a haphazard set and so lack necessity unless they derive from a first principle; and (3) the nihilism problem, which states that a first principle cannot lie outside our cognition of it, lest it be the cause of our cognition and, being first, the cause of all our actions, reducing us to machines. Crucially, Fichte's three motivating problems are in fact aspects of a single problem. Leaving any aspect unsolved spoils putative solutions to the other two. Consequently, Fichte requires a single unified solution to all three, which his doctrine of intellectual intuition provides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the enduring relevance of Victor Anderson's Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay in Religious and Cultural Criticism. Anderson rightly senses a close connection between the practice of African American cultural criticism and the ethical sensitivity required to do it well. He also recognizes the historical limits of ontological inquiry. I argue that these metaphilosophical assumptions afford more generative encounters with Black political and cultural life, especially its discursive ambiguities and practical incongruities. By engaging the writings of two contemporary critics, Tamura Lomax and Calvin Warren, I show the benefits of thinking alongside Anderson's important text and the dangers of not doing so. Scholars of religion, African American studies, and cultural studies ignore Anderson's work and the discourses it enjoins at their own peril. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the perspective of the television series Breaking Bad (2008–2013), Walter White, its antihero, is not just an "angry middle-aged white guy". He represents the repressed rage of countless ill-used Ph.Ds. This is why "he is the danger." The cultural moment of Breaking Bad may serve for us in Siegfried Kracauer's term as a "close-up shot or establishing shot." The series is an index of Kracauer's "law of levels." White has lived his life according to what he thought was standard and decent conduct. His life has been adequate. He echoes Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich whose life "was most ordinary and therefore most terrible." White also recalls Stavrogin from Dostoevsky's The Possessed. Stavrogin condemns himself because he can only have been satisfied by himself (in both senses). He is more Mephistopheles than Faust; he is never out of hell because he will not accept the possibility of anything outside himself. Breaking Bad also reifies Carlo Ginzburg's "estrangement." The screens that we carry with us transmit endless meaninglessness. We are consumed by consumerism. Therefore, Walter White is not an antihero: He is the perfect hero for a world in which the marketplace alone determines value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the implications of Giorgio Agamben's The Man Without Content for beliefs necessary to visual art practice. It examines in particular Agamben's critique of Kantian aesthetics and the use he makes of ideas of historicity. While Agamben has controversial but sometimes insightful and persuasive things to say about the modern art world, specifically aspects of making, spectating and exhibiting, his reading of Kant is distorted by his adoption of a technique of neutralising dialectical oppositions, and then his determination to find in key texts the grounds for this operation. At times Agamben's critical judgements, uncorrected by the perspective of practice, are indiscriminate and insensitive, and it is difficult to see how his politics escapes quietism or apathy on the one hand or an unwitting convergence with Kantian notions of moral providence on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gershom Scholem was always skeptical about the promises of Enlightenment, which did not necessarily accompany the emancipation of the Jews and all too often implied the negation of their collective identity. To counter the myth of Enlightenment that drove Jewish assimilation, he developed a counter-narrative that can be conceived of as a critical mythology. To do so, he refered to Counter-Enlightenment thinkers as different as the cultural critic Friedrich Nietzsche, the Catholic kabbalist Franz Joseph Molitor, and the Neo-Orthodox rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch. His historiography sketches a genealogy of Jewish Enlightenment that is not driven by abstract reason, but a result of an internal dialectics of the Jewish tradtion that culminates in antinomian sabbatinism. By depicting main protagonists of this genealogy, namely Sabbatai Sevi, Jakob Frank, and Moses Dobrushka, less as heroes than as ambivalent and obscure personalities, Scholem's narrative becomes even more complex and gives a fascinating account of how Jewish thinking can learn from Counter-Enlightenment thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I defend normative realism—the claim that there are mind-independent, absolute normative facts—mostly by arguing against its rivals. Against mind-dependent theories of normativity, I argue that at least one highly influential version of such a view, Lewis's dispositional theory of value, is subject to at least three severe problems: the problem of the implausible contingency of value, the problem of ideal conditions, and the problem of lack of convergence. Against relativistic conceptions of normativity, I argue that either they fail to evade a commitment to absolute normative truths, or they fail to distinguish themselves from Nihilism. Finally, against Nihilism, I argue that it is not a coherent option at least for the normative domain of rationality, since facts about rationality are presupposed by any judgment, including any judgment meant to express a skepticism about facts about rationality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a close reading of "The Geology of Morals," the third and possibly most important chapter, or plateau, of Deleuze and Guattari's magnum opus A Thousand Plateaus. I analyse some of the many philosophical and scientific sources informing Deleuze and Guattari's densely argued text. The authors' shift of emphasis from the critique of psychoanalysis to a geological or stratigraphic register is emphasized and explained by situating their project in relation both to contemporary debates surrounding the Anthropocene and to the problem of nihilism as this was articulated by Nietzsche and Heidegger. I argue that Deleuze and Guattari's stratigraphy, a topic that has received comparatively little attention in the secondary literature, helps us to understand the history of nihilism in terms of humanity's planetary impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Being an interdisciplinary field of study in the humanities, literature serves as a vehicle to varieties of philosophical thought. The purpose of this paper is to examine the theme of absurdity and the meaninglessness of life that manifests in the poems of Eshetu Chole. The article particularly deals with selected poems that correspond to the twentieth century absurd philosophical thoughts typically advocated by Albert Camus in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus. Although the notion of the absurd seems to be fading as a result of contemporary technological advancement, human beings cannot completely and permanently be deceived from the feeling of the absurd. The thematic analysis thus, significantly explored the fundamental absurd nature of human existence and sparks how individuals, once they are conscious of the absurd, should respond to it in day to day life. To achieve this, through an examination of the central point of the poems, the paper illuminates typical absurd characteristics of human nature squarely facing a life of infirmity, ignorance, helplessness, hopelessness, nostalgia, and the futility of searching for meaning in an ignorant world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existential nihilism is on the rise in modern societies, but no previous work has investigated the social psychology of seeing no meaning in life. In the current research, five studies (N = 1,634) show that targets' existential nihilist beliefs elicit a range of negative stereotypes about personality traits, commonly valued social traits, and targets' ability to perform basic adaptive social tasks. Results demonstrate that these negative stereotypes are mediated by belief that the target is depressed more than the belief the target is non-religious or that the target does not plan for the future. Unlike atheists, who are seen as competent, no positive stereotypes emerged for nihilists, suggesting both future research and interventions aimed at updating false beliefs about nihilists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The twenty-first century TV landscape is dominated by high-gloss quality dramas, experimental single-camera comedies, and auteur dramedies. These shows use nihilism and irony to signify their inclusion in the newest pantheon of sociopolitical relevance: Woke TV. A textual analysis of One Day at a Time (Netflix/Pop, 2017–2020) and The Baby-Sitters Club (Netflix, 2020–), however, challenges the ironic detachment that typifies Woke TV. By leaning into the nostalgia of the TV remake, these shows offer a blueprint for a more earnest and active version of the genre that relies not on detachment, but on an audience's emotional engagement with contemporary social, political, and economic issues. One Day at a Time embraces the artistic conservatism of the multicamera sitcom to, in true Woke TV fashion, shed light on the institutional structures that underpin hegemonic capitalist power and white supremacy. Similarly, The Baby-Sitters Club employs the sincere and earnest framework of the kids' show to advocate for optimism, responsibility, and fairness in private and civic discourse. Taken together, these two shows exemplify a more populist taxonomy of the Woke TV genre that co-opts, rather than rejects, the traditions of televisual genre and format. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What can the idea of eternal return tell us about contemporary financial society? In this essay I follow Nietzsche by deploying it as an existential provocation, linking the prospect of endless recurrence to the daily routines of the asset economy. This entails a departure from simple notions of cyclical time, typically associated with political economy and the study of economic history, in favor of a more complex view that sees recurrence and return as figures that organize and reflect the experience of life under the sign of finance. In particular, I argue that the reordering of class around the axis of asset ownership has produced two seemingly distinct structures of feeling—one based on the thrill of endless turnover and return on capital, the other on the drudgery of recurring payment schedules and debt rollovers. Though on the surface at odds with each other, both are anchored in a deeper libidinal economy associated with the asset form and ultimately nihilistic in character. The asset economy should therefore be seen as producing a very peculiar form of eternity based on the abolition of time through repetition. I conclude by foregrounding questions of culture and imagination, exploring these in connection with contemporary forms of on-demand television and the possibility of a time beyond the bad eternity of the asset economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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It is not by chance that the title of this article paraphrases Gustav Gustavovich Shpet's article "The Skeptic and His Soul" (1919). Is Stavrogin a skeptic? Yes, and the novel Demons is a narrative about how self-satisfied, self-flattering skepticism (skepticism for its own sake) leads man to devastation, to the dead end of absolute nihilism, to spiritual and literal suicide. Two circumstances lead us to this interpretation both of Dostoevsky's novel and of its central character, Nikolai Stavrogin: the striking, contemporary "recognizability" of the story, even at the narrative level (at least for contemporary Russia), and our familiarity with materials from Shpet's archives dedicated to Dostoevsky's work. Handwritten notes, a synopsis of Demons, and a wealth of correspondence show how Shpet (with other Russian thinkers of his time) was immersed in the theme of transformation of skepticism against the background of Russia's revolutionary upheavals. This immersion distinctly clarifies for us today the origins of the relevance of Demons, a novel recounting how skepticism tumbles into the void of nihilism. The article demonstrates how completely modern digital forms of self-expression and forms of "conversation" unfolding online are surprisingly commensurate with the form of social structure Dostoevsky presents in Demons. The form of conversation he found to express skeptical doubt turning into nihilism has become a reality today, vividly represented in social media, where conversation is transformed into "chat rooms." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By mid-twentieth century, liberal thought was in crisis. Its victory over fascism ill concealed the empty promise at the heart of liberalism, that freedom defined as an absence of compulsion could substitute for a sense of human purpose. Non-western writers saw this as clearly as Camus, Arendt, Niebuhr, and Marcuse did. This essay regards Naguib Mahfouz's 1965 novel, The Beggar, as a bid to critically intervene in debates around the crisis of liberal thought. It departs from approaches that see The Beggar as a thematization of political, Existentialist or Sufi discourses. Employing a close-reading method, it shows how the text ironizes its high-profile protagonist's mid-life crisis and quest for spiritual awakening. Analysis reveals that ostensibly secondary female characters, especially the protagonist's fourteen-year-old daughter, are part of a palimpsestic subtext that thematizes Christian–Muslim-Christian conversion and the potential role of faith as a corrective to the nihilistic void at the heart of liberal thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From Carl Becker's The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers to recent work on religion in the Enlightenment, it has been argued that the Enlightenment has significant religious elements, and that in many ways it represents a secularization of Christian values. This article argues that while, broadly speaking, the Christian view of the world is dualistic, the Enlightenment developed a pluralistic outlook in which values such as humanity and toleration took on a new force, and that between ages of confessionalism and nationalism, Enlightenment thought was distinguished by a more comprehensive and inclusive ideal of humanity. The article begins by looking at differences between theologically grounded religions and deism, then turns to recent historiography on the role of religion in the Enlightenment. It goes on to examine d'Alembert's article on Geneva in the Encyclopédie and eighteenth-century attitudes towards Jews to see how they reflect contemporary views on religion and Enlightenment, and more specifically, on toleration and humanity in a view of the world that had moved beyond the dualisms of chosen and not-so-chosen, saved and not-so-saved. It is also suggested that Becker's point in his Heavenly City is as much the difference between the loss of values reflected in the subjectivism and nihilism of his time and the assertions of objective truths in both Christian and the Enlightenment outlooks, as it is the hitherto neglected similarities between Christianity and the Enlightenment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marshall McLuhan claimed his ideas came from Wyndham Lewis, but criticised Lewis for his ambitions for art as a total new environment. He claimed Lewis was a Gnostic Manichee. His annotations to Lewis's books, his remarks in correspondence and his review(s) of Hugh Kenner's book on Lewis show his reading was mistaken, however. McLuhan's model of communication denied meaning or the aesthetic and led him to the same 'nihilism' he wrongly attributed to Lewis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers Bolton based community drama group, Melodramatics, and the ways in which their practice helps illuminate forms of relational activity that confront the nihilism of the resilient subject. If we accept resilience as a normative force that restricts the ability of the political subject to 'become otherwise', we are invited to turn towards methods of political discourse that facilitate subversive thought and activity at an ontological level. Through a consideration of Melodramatics' careful attention to one another as they devised the play Seeing Red, this article examines the capacity for theatre to resource politically significant practices of relational becoming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses East-West divide in the novel "Border State" by Emil Tode that features trespassers and stowaways in Eastern and Western Europe. Topics include the cultural stereotypes in the region, the nihilism behind the political integration of Europe, the metaphor of the Iron Curtain, and the non-material divides in Europe like language and culture.

This paper examines Heidegger's remarks about the worldlessness of Judaism in his Black Notebooks. In the first part of the paper I examine Heidegger's concept of the world in Being and Time and subsequent writings. In the second part, I analyze a distinction that Heidegger draws between mere human actuality and genuine human existence in a 1932 lecture course on The Beginning of Western Philosophy. This distinction, I suggest, relates to the development of Heidegger's thoughts on nihilism and what he conceives as its gravest danger. In the third part, I argue that the above-mentioned distinction can help us to better understand Heidegger's remarks on Judaism. In particular, I suggest that the Jewish figure comes to symbolize for Heidegger a kind of unessential human actuality that is irredeemably detached from the question of Being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers the hypothesis that, from the standpoint of the "sociological poetics" of the 1920s and contemporary literary epistemology, the structure of the polyphonic novel that Dostoevsky created and Bakhtin conceptualized (firstly in his 1929 book Problems of Dostoevsky's Art [Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo]) enables a reconstruing of the principles governing the writer's social imagination along with the political thinking and priorities associated with them. From this standpoint, polyphony can be seen as one of the most fruitful and wholistic artistic interpretations of modern sociality experienced in an era of catastrophe, a sociality requiring a rejection of political action aimed at social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many philosophers have noted that normative error theorists appear to be committed to saying 'Error theory is true, but I have no reason to believe it', which seems paradoxical. In defence of error theory, some have claimed that the word 'reason' in that statement is ambiguous between 'normative reason' and a purely descriptive sense of 'reason' that the error theorist can accept. I argue, however, that there is no descriptive sense of 'reason' that can prevent the paradox from re-emerging. Moreover, these implications of error theory probably provide good grounds for rejecting the view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In repeated rejections of the reality of free will, agency, self-consciousness and moral accountability, Nietzsche espouses views consistent with "cosmic" determinism. The salient features of determinism all follow from Nietzsche's own view of organic reality as will-to-power. His position denies also the substance of any ascription of merit or blame, hence any stable ground for the ranking of human ends or types. The crises Nietzsche forecasts, and the demands he makes on humanity, all fundamentally political, arise from this nihilistic stance. It projects the inevitable arrival of an era when Nietzsche's "deadly truths" are accepted by the great mass of humanity, sketching an essentially posthuman future. The article argues that Nietzsche's fundamental position is the reality of determinism and rejection of free will and even the coherence of the concept of willing; further, that a Nietzschean age when this is accepted remains to come, and in closing that appreciating these facts permits access to the key conceits of Nietzsche's philosophy, the will to power, the eternal recurrence and the Übermensch, and to amor fati as his formula for greatness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines legal nihilism, which represents a kind of calling card of Russian legal culture. Nihilism's penetration of the culture has found expression and has been substantiated in philosophy and literature. The study demonstrates the theoretical foundations of legal nihilism: logical negation, irrationalism, absurdity, and the paradoxical nature of existing. It reveals the ambivalence of legal nihilism: on the one hand, a denial of law, the state, and the church and, on the other hand, a recognition of moral law ("pan-moralism"), of "law as the minimum of morality," as well as "infectiousness," and the norm-establishing role of art. The author concludes that the distinguishing features of Russian culture are the priority of internal freedom and the shift in the formation of legal consciousness and norms not only into ethics but also into aesthetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops an understanding of the nature of sport fans that helps rebut the charge of nihilism leveled against identity anti-essentialism as represented in the work of Butler, Appiah, and Rorty. Through focusing on what Russell calls the 'arbitrary' yet committed nature of being a fan of sport (i.e. a fan's fandom has a causal explanation not a reasoned justification but nonetheless deep meaning for the fan), I argue that we can see the anti-essentialist accounts of gender, race, and selfhood offered by Butler, Appiah, and Rorty respectively as claiming that this arbitrary, but at the same time meaningful, nature is consistent across all identities. Passionate commitment in the face of often self-consciously recognized arbitrary fandom exemplifies identity anti-essentialism, and it is in terms of it that the charge of nihilism against identity anti-essentialism (i.e. identity anti-essentialism makes identity insubstantial and politically ineffective) leveled by those such as Nussbaum, Habermas, and Rawls, is undercut. With that case made, I conclude on a political note. I observe that the rise and role of identity in contemporary politics, especially nativist, nationalist, and populist politics, can be both explained (at least in part) as well as defended against by seeing the growing acceptance among elites of identity anti-essentialism and its fan-like quality. Galvanizing many on the 'right' to fight elites by fighting against the identity anti-essentialism binding them together, it is by 'doubling down' on identity anti-essentialism and its embrace of the fan-like play of identity that hope lies in fighting against nativism, nationalism, and populism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the end of the 1940s and early 1950s, the discussion among authors, philosophers and other intellectuals on the future of Europe took on themes from the inter war period like crisis, decline and nihilism, but they also added new takes. This contextual examination treats a transnational discourse on European cultural unity. As a starting point, it takes the changing framework of the postwar era with on the one hand the early repeating of the crisis-views and on the other hand the Iron wall and communist threat. The article includes four intellectuals from different countries. Among them, Salvador Madariaga and Denis Rougemont were stout Europeanists that opposed the idea of the nationalism already before the war. Also at that time Karl Jaspers and Stephen Spender critiqued their societies but came out as Europeanists only after the Second World War. They met at congresses and paid significant attention to the concept of Europe. I make use of the proceedings from the congress L'esprit européen (1946) and their treaties on Europe from the following years. The article investigates this discourse with a focus on how Jaspers, Madariaga, Rougemont and Spender assessed the intersection of European unity with nation and nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author turns to Maxim Gorky's literary–philosophical understanding of the meshchanstvo as a sociopsychological state and attitude to the world for which the main feature is the desire "to comfortably furnish the soul." In this manifestation, the meshchanstvo instills "the poison of nihilistic individualism" in man, placing his Ego in the center of the world, an Ego devoid of social and cultural self-identification, which destroys a person from the inside. The most acute and irreconcilable of his evaluations of the meshchanstvo appeared in so called "Okurov Series", which include The Town of Okurov, The Life of Matvei Kozhemiakin, and the unfinished Great Love. Gorky introduced a concept of "meshchanstvo" in two senses: a social/class sense and a spiritual/ethical sense, which, both individually and together, expressed a social force that was attempting to halt the passage of time. Recounting the daily worries and relationships of Okurov's inhabitants, Gorky paints gloomy pictures of their everyday life, one colored by a state of "sleepy stupor," which leads people toward a line behind which the original meanings of life disappear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Salvatore Scibona's novel The Volunteer joins and transcends the Vietnam War literary canon, placing the war in the context of America's post-9/11 decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Carl Schmitt, the supreme jurist of the Third Reich, bestowed legal legitimacy on Hitler's dictatorial rule. A genealogy of his primary writings of the German jurist shows that his romance with the Nazis was not the result of an historical accident, and proves that there is a thread running from his early theoretical writings to his juridical position and his radical political activity during the thirties. Schmitt is a member of the 'nihilist order'—thinkers, artists and cultural critics who promogulated the nihilistic position which at the same time was a dynamic structure on a totalitarian basis. The members of the 'nihilist order' generally moved from nihilistic criticism to totalitarian conclusions. Schmitt, on the other hand, took the opposite route—from totalitarianism to nihilism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reads 'The Buribunks' as a biopolitical parody of the Hegelian dialectic. Schmitt tells us that the essence of the Buribunk is the fact that they keep a diary. For the Buribunks, this is a means of realising reason in History and through it, they become the instruments of World-Spirit. Yet the 'noble realm' that emerges when the Buribunks overcome the Master-Slave relationship looks more like the world of biopolitical management that we find in Foucault, than the victory of freedom and equality that, according to Hegel, characterises the post-historical state. I also argue that Schmitt's story speaks directly to some of the fundamental problems of our digital era: like the Buribunk, the digital subject enables an apparatus of surveillance by voluntarily recording the minute details of their life; the vast archive this produces then deprives the subject of the comforts offered by the myths of progressivism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a lightly edited transcript of a plenary talk given at the Beyond Positivism conference, Montreal, August 8–10 2017. The talk followed others by Christopher Winship and Frédéric Vandenberghe, which are mentioned in the text. The paper argues that critical social science needs an ontology of values, and that a coherent ontology must recognize that values are created by human beings in social settings, rather than being objectively true. Recognizing this, however, need not expose us to the moral nihilism of extreme relativism. Drawing on the work of Habermas and the capabilities approach, I argue that we can reason about what sorts of basic values we should be committed to, without invoking the concept of objective values. This provides us with material that we can build on to construct more complex constructive critical arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a phenomenological analysis of the navigation of academia as experienced by two Black scholars, situated in dissimilar disciplinary and cultural traditions and origins. What is shared is an interest in the academic space that exists within which Black scholars may freely roam, and the structure and function of the boundaries that are present. The policing of Black thought and Black emotion within those boundaries, the violence with which the boundaries are enforced, and the strategies and rationales employed by Black academics in expanding, resisting, subverting, and acquiescing to said boundaries is explored by way of the authors' testimonies. Drawing on our lived experience of academia, we suggest that the academy functions as a frontier of racist violence, where the thinking that grounds state-based racist violence is taught, legitimated and fostered. Through a dialogue which brings to the fore the tensions and contradictions of the outlooks and strategies employed by Black academics, we testify to the emancipatory potential of Black pain, Black rage and Black thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the importance of truthful and precise language in the field of military ethics. It emphasizes the need for honesty and humility in grappling with complex ethical issues and making decisions in real-life situations. The article warns against lazy relativism and overcertainty, advocating for moral analysis that takes situational factors into account but is not wholly determined by them. The author concludes by expressing the hope that the article and future issues of the journal will honor George Orwell's 1984 on its seventy-fifth birthday. [Extracted from the article]

This article discusses two recent cases of environmental civic participation in Georgia involving resistance to development projects and the attempts to protect public space in the capital city of Tbilisi—the cases of Vake Park and “Panorama Tbilisi.” Despite their distinct lifecycles and levels of policy success, the two cases illustrate the same challenges to environmental civic participation in Georgia. The top-down challenge derives from government officials’ reluctance to involve outside actors in environmental policymaking and their strategy of labeling environmental activists as politically biased and controlled by the officials’ political opponents. The bottom-up challenge derives from environmental activists’ limited policy advocacy capacities, in terms of both strategic diversity and evidence-based argumentation. These two challenges, reinforced by a cultural context of civic participation characterized by social nihilism, work together to encourage the exclusion of activists from environmental policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]