#nihil unbound

[triste-le-roy]

Cover to Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (unknown artist/designer, 2007). (via Amazon)

[funeral]

Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound

[bustakay]

Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound.

[grandpasessions]

Nature is not our or anyone's 'home,' nor a particularly beneficent progenitor. Philosophers would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. Philosophy should be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem. Nihilism is not an existential quandry but a speculative opportunity. Thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of the living; indeed, they can and have been pitted against the latter.

Nihil Unbound Ray Brassier

[mercadera]

The thing about nihilism

I will agree with is, life is pointless but meaningless, no.

[anthropofugal]

[E]verything’s dead already if this infinite reserve from which you now draw energy to defer answers, if in short thought as quest, dies out with the sun (Lyotard, The Inhuman).

Everything is dead already. Solar death is catastrophic because it vitiates ontological temporality as configured in terms of philosophical questioning’s constitutive horizonal relationship to the future. But far from lying in wait in for us in the far distant future, on the other side of the terrestrial horizon, the solar catastrophe needs to be grasped as something that has already happened; as the aboriginal trauma driving the history of terrestrial life as an elaborately circuitous detour from stellar death. Terrestrial history occurs between the simultaneous strophes of a death which is at once earlier than the birth of the first unicellular organism, and later than the extinction of the last multicellular animal.

Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction.

[activatedsilence]

According to Adorno and Horkheimer, Enlightenment reason is driven by an inexorable drive to conceptual subsumption which subordinates particularity, heterogeneity, and multiplicity to universality, homogeneity, and unity, thereby rendering everything equivalent to everything else, but precisely in such a way that nothing can ever be identical to itself. Thus conceptual identification stipulates a form of differential commensurability which, in their own words, ‘amputates the incommensurable’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002: 9). ‘Instrumental rationality’ (which will later be called ‘identity thinking’) is an anthropological pathology expressing a materially indeterminate yet ubiquitous ‘power’ whose sole determination consists in its differentiation into dominating and dominated, rather than any historically determinate configuration between conditions and relations of production. In the speculative anthropology proposed by Adorno and Horkheimer, instrumental reason is the extension of tool-use and hence a function of adaptational constraints.

Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction

[heaveninourarms]

There is nothing to do and there is nowhere to go. There is nothing to be and there is no-one to know.

Thomas Ligotti