The Truth of Extinction

Brassier, Ray

doi:10.1057/9780230590823_7

Cited by 15 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…We might actually hit a nerve, activate something … maybe 71 McCarthy's novel activates the potential of noise not only by alluding to its power of deception and function as dynamo of unintended productive consequences in its content, but also through its episodic structuring and the curious future analeptic narration which draws on the speculative realist philosophy of Ray Brassier, who assumes that in the future we are already dead and everything has already happened so that, from this retrospective narratorial position, there is no chaos, just order. 72 Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) is an agglomeration of interlinked stories, with no central consciousness or central character, so that the structure mimics the imaginary architecture of our times when humans are networked and complexly connected. This is made explicit in Egan's short story 'Black Box' (2012), first published on Twitter, which transplants one of the characters of Goon Squad, Sasha, as a beautiful woman spy into to a future Mediterranean setting.…”

Section: Digital Aestheticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Information overload in literature

Groes

2016

Textual Practice

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Section: Digital Aestheticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Information overload in literature

Groes

2016

Textual Practice

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“…Or as Jean-François Lyotard once put it: `Suppose an earthquake destroys not only lives, but the instruments used to measure earthquakes directly and indirectly ' (1988: 56). Though Lyotard's seismic trope may have been metaphorical, there is every reason to believe that there are terrestrial and cosmic processes with the potential not only to join in the enactment of the human, but to radically unmake much or all of what passes for our humanity (Brassier, 2007). And this is a profound challenge not only for social thought, but for the social agencies charged with responding to global climate change.…”

Section: Thinking Across Thresholdsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Volatile Worlds, Vulnerable Bodies

Clark

2010

Theory, Culture & Society

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The abrupt climate change thesis suggests that climate passes through threshold transitions after which change is sudden, runaway and unstoppable. This concurs with recent themes in complexity studies. Data from ice cores indicates that major shifts in global climate regimes have occurred in as little as a decade, and that for most of the span of human existence climate has oscillated much more violently than it has over the last 10,000 years. This evidence presents enormous challenges for international climate change negotiation and regulation, which has thus far focussed on gradual change. It is argued that existing social theoretic engagements with physical agency are insufficiently geared towards dissonant or disastrous physical events. Wagering on the past and future importance of abrupt climate change, the paper explores a way of engaging with catastrophic climatic change that stresses the inherent volatility and unpredictability of earth process, and the no-less inherent vulnerability of the human body. Drawing on Bataille and Derrida, it proposes a way of nestling the issue of environmental justice within a broader sense of immeasurable indebtedness to those humans who endured previous episodes of abrupt climate, and considers the idea of experimentation and generosity without reserve.

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“…To a believing Muslim, nihilism (from the Latin nihil or nothing) evacuates divine purpose, meaning and value from existence. Originally tied to the assumed 'death of God', nihilism rejects transcendence (Nietzsche 1968;Rosen 1969;Heidegger 1998;Brassier 2007); it underscores the impossibility of securing meaning in a world conditioned by the absence of Absolute Truth. From the Islamic standpoint, societal projects uninformed by the quest of transcendence are self-defeating.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Islam, nihilism and liberal secularity

Pasha

2011

J Int Relat Dev

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The theme of nihilism offers fertile avenues for exploring the antinomies of classical liberalism. In its instantiation as violence, nihilism challenges classical liberalism and its recognised political settlement, notably received arrangements harnessed to cultivate uncontrolled passions or religious fervour. In its affinity to Islam, nihilism defies the secular settlement through its appeals to transcendence. By seeking legitimacy in the sacred, nihilism disrupts established boundaries between the religious and the secular. Nihilism exposes the difficulty of forging worlds of transcendence on the modern register of immanence. Transcendence affords the possibility of escape, immanence closure. The two can be reversed in politics, as the experience in several Islamic Cultural Zones (ICZs) suggests. Appeals to transcendence seek to reorganise the social world in the name of escaping it. Immanence, on the other hand, can rework notions of redemption and salvation into secular stories of progress. This paper explores how the presumed nihilistic tendency appearing in the ICZs destabilises the liberal settlement, not in the conventional sense of presenting a religious counterpoint, but in reworking religious themes into secularity. Nihilism illustrates both the contradictory character of modernity and modernity's potential to generate varied societal projects, including those informed by the sacred. The recognition that modernity can spawn discordant impulses in reconciling religion and politics helps rethink post-secular lives under the long shadow of disenchantment.Peer reviewe

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The Truth of Extinction

Cited by 15 publications

References 10 publications

Information overload in literature

Information overload in literature

Volatile Worlds, Vulnerable Bodies

Islam, nihilism and liberal secularity

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