Papers by Evrim Bayındır
15 Years After Speculative Realism / Editors: Hilan Bensusan, Charles William Johnes / Zero Books / Forthcoming, 2023
Chiasma: A Site for Thought, 2023
Deleuze and Guatari Studies in India Collective Volume 3 / Routledge (Editors: Daniel W. Smith, George Varghese K., Manoj NY)
Publication date to be announced.
Review Essays by Evrim Bayındır
Deleuze and Guattari Studies, Edinburgh University Press, 2023
indebted to Deleuze. One of the essential aspects of Brassier's work is his discovery of a nihili... more indebted to Deleuze. One of the essential aspects of Brassier's work is his discovery of a nihilistic extinction, an idea developed as a direct polemic against the affirmationist and vitalist Nietzscheanism of Deleuze (Brassier 2007: 220, 239). Harman is known for his defence of the autonomy of objects, a commonly disparaged concept throughout the history of philosophy, and a concept that he poses against the primacy of a pre-individual intensive space or 'virtual realm' with which Deleuze's philosophy is frequently identified (Harman 2009: 101). Finally, Deleuze falls within the scope of the 'correlationism' that Meillassoux famously attacks, representing one of the 'strong' and higher forms of a long tradition of reducing being and thinking to one another, hence leaving no room for an independent conception of reality (Meillassoux 2008: 37). With these positions in mind, Kleinherenbrink's untimely juxtaposition could not be more forceful in its portrayal of Deleuze as both the 'forerunner' and the 'high point' of speculative realism, and particularly of object-oriented philosophy (p. 9). Thus, one of the aims of Against Continuity is not merely to shed speculative realist light on Deleuze's
Talks by Evrim Bayındır
DG Studies Conference in Stockholm (17-19 June), 2025
Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy Conference, 2024
Royal Geographical Society Conference, 2024
Thought in Action: Conversations About Cinema, University of the West of England, 2023
15 Years of Speculative Realism: A Retrospective Symposium [Senate House Library], 2024
Centre for Continental Philosophy Conference, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2024
Society for European Philosophy Conference, Cardiff University, 2024
This presentation argues that Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy and Difference and Repetition ca... more This presentation argues that Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy and Difference and Repetition can be read as attempts to explain how nihilism gained a transcendental status. In Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze writes that nihilism "is the transcendental principle of our way of thinking". This brings a paradox: How could an a posteriori or historical emergence such as nihilism impose itself as an a priori condition? If this is true, nihilism should have-in a rather miraculous way-retrojected itself in the origin. This illusory retrojection occurs when reactive forces create an inverted image of the origin. This wouldn't be allowed, however, if active forces weren't marked by an unfortunate weakness. If a resentful memory can invade consciousness to the extent that the entirety of experience is confused with traces, this is only because the active force of forgetting was previously exhausted. Difference and Repetition offers a different conception of exhaustion or fatigue, which can be seen as an alternative response to the same problem. Here fatigue becomes a feature of the passive syntheses of the "contemplative souls" which are the first witnesses in the encounter with groundlessness. While the initial function of fatigue is to draw a difference, it can well be misunderstood as "lack" from the perspective of the active synthesis of memory. Memory thus exploits the fatigue of contemplative souls by triggering "the history of the long error" which culminates with the "retroject[ion]" of "identity onto the originary difference". In both books, Deleuze attributes an essential fatigue to the affirmative forces in order to explain the subsequent retrojections which endow nihilism with a transcendental sense. However, he doesn't provide an answer to why active forces are prone to failures and reactive forces are all the more skillful in exploiting these failures.
Deleuze and Guattari Studies Conference, TU Delft, 2024
This presentation argues that Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy and Difference and Repetition ca... more This presentation argues that Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy and Difference and Repetition can be read as attempts to explain how nihilism gained a transcendental status. In Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze writes that nihilism "is the transcendental principle of our way of thinking". This brings a paradox: How could an a posteriori or historical emergence such as nihilism impose itself as an a priori condition? If this is true, nihilism should have-in a rather miraculous way-retrojected itself in the origin. This illusory retrojection occurs when reactive forces create an inverted image of the origin. This wouldn't be allowed, however, if active forces weren't marked by an unfortunate weakness. If a resentful memory can invade consciousness to the extent that the entirety of experience is confused with traces, this is only because the active force of forgetting was previously exhausted. Difference and Repetition offers a different conception of exhaustion or fatigue, which can be seen as an alternative response to the same problem. Here fatigue becomes a feature of the passive syntheses of the "contemplative souls" which are the first witnesses in the encounter with groundlessness. While the initial function of fatigue is to draw a difference, it can well be misunderstood as "lack" from the perspective of the active synthesis of memory. Memory thus exploits the fatigue of contemplative souls by triggering "the history of the long error" which culminates with the "retroject[ion]" of "identity onto the originary difference". In both books, Deleuze attributes an essential fatigue to the affirmative forces in order to explain the subsequent retrojections which endow nihilism with a transcendental sense. However, he doesn't provide an answer to why active forces are prone to failures and reactive forces are all the more skillful in exploiting these failures.
15h International Deleuze and Guattari Studies Conference [Institute of Philosophy and Social Theory in cooperation with the Faculty of Media and Communications, Serbia and University of Plymouth, England], 2023
July 10-12
Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy Conference / November 28-30, 2022
VI. National Congress of Graduate Students in Philosophy Institute of Philosophy / Pontifical Catholic University of Chile / November 7-10, 2022
Society for European Philosophy 2022 Conference / Newcastle University, 2022
Deleuze carves out from Nietzsche the idea that the collapse of nihilism is going to be an autono... more Deleuze carves out from Nietzsche the idea that the collapse of nihilism is going to be an autonomous event, that is to say, it is going to happen no matter what, regardless of whether the free-spirits and the associated active forces manage to destroy it or fail to do so. This means that nihilism will be defeated solely by the reactive forces that created it. Nevertheless, the very active forces that allow Deleuze to posit the self-annihilation of nihilism effectively restricts him from thinking and experiencing this event. The paradox of affirmationism is that its reactive forces are not sufficiently autonomous from active forces and do not possess the power to destroy nihilism. There is thus a discrepancy between the project of overcoming nihilism and its result, in a similar manner with the kind of failure Deleuze finds in Kant’s project. I suggest that the emergence of post-Deleuzian negativities, whose diverse examples are found in the accelerationist, speculative realist, neo-rationalist, and afro-pessimist literature, marks the inception of the autonomous collapse of nihilism or the result of Deleuze’s project. This negativist orientation in thought can be conceived as a series of experiments with the autonomization and creation of new reactive forces that are capable of effectuating a non-nihilistic or non-resentful reaction and that does not fit into the Deleuzean schema of forces. My focal point will be Ray Brassier, whose equation of the death of thinking with the fully autonomous real represents the high point of the negativist turn. However, unlike Brassier, by situating the death of thinking as a continuation of the death of God and the human, I would like to show that autonomy must be understood not as the future trauma of the death of thinking, but as the non-traumatic self-annihilation of nihilism that is currently happening.
London Conference in Critical Thought / School of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London, 2022
Deleuze carves out from Nietzsche the idea that the collapse of nihilism is going to be an autono... more Deleuze carves out from Nietzsche the idea that the collapse of nihilism is going to be an autonomous event, that is to say, it is going to happen no matter what, regardless of whether the free-spirits and the associated active forces manage to destroy it or fail to do so. This means that nihilism will be defeated solely by the reactive forces that created it. Nevertheless, the very active forces that allow Deleuze to posit the self-annihilation of nihilism effectively restricts him from thinking and experiencing this event. The paradox of affirmationism is that its reactive forces are not sufficiently autonomous from active forces and do not possess the power to destroy nihilism. There is thus a discrepancy between the project of overcoming nihilism and its result, in a similar manner with the kind of failure Deleuze finds in Kant’s project.
I suggest that the emergence of post-Deleuzian negativities, whose diverse examples are found in the accelerationist, speculative realist, neo-rationalist, and afro-pessimist literature, marks the inception of the autonomous collapse of nihilism or the result of Deleuze’s project. This negativist orientation in thought can be conceived as a series of experiments with the autonomization and creation of new reactive forces that are capable of effectuating a non-nihilistic or non-resentful reaction and that does not fit into the Deleuzean schema of forces.
My focal point will be Ray Brassier, whose equation of the death of thinking with the fully autonomous real represents the high point of the negativist turn. However, unlike Brassier, by situating the death of thinking as a continuation of the death of God and the human, I would like to show that autonomy must be understood not as the future trauma of the death of thinking, but as the non-traumatic self-annihilation of nihilism that is currently happening.
Unlearning Nihilism Conference / Joint Event of Royal Holloway's Centre for Continental Philosophy and The New Centre for Research & Practice, 2022
Deleuze carves out from Nietzsche the idea that the collapse of nihilism is going to be an autono... more Deleuze carves out from Nietzsche the idea that the collapse of nihilism is going to be an autonomous event, that is to say, it is going to happen no matter what, regardless of whether the free-spirits and the associated active forces manage to destroy it or fail to do so. This means that nihilism will be defeated solely by the reactive forces that created it. Nevertheless, the very active forces that allow Deleuze to posit the self-annihilation of nihilism effectively restricts him from thinking and experiencing this event. The paradox of affirmationism is that its reactive forces are not sufficiently autonomous from active forces and do not possess the power to destroy nihilism. There is thus a discrepancy between the project of overcoming nihilism and its result, in a similar manner with the kind of failure Deleuze finds in Kant’s project.
I suggest that the emergence of post-Deleuzian negativities, whose diverse examples are found in the accelerationist, speculative realist, neo-rationalist, and afro-pessimist literature, marks the inception of the autonomous collapse of nihilism or the result of Deleuze’s project. This negativist orientation in thought can be conceived as a series of experiments with the autonomization and creation of new reactive forces that are capable of effectuating a non-nihilistic or non-resentful reaction and that does not fit into the Deleuzean schema of forces.
My focal point will be Ray Brassier, whose equation of the death of thinking with the fully autonomous real represents the high point of the negativist turn. However, unlike Brassier, by situating the death of thinking as a continuation of the death of God and the human, I would like to show that autonomy must be understood not as the future trauma of the death of thinking, but as the non-traumatic self-annihilation of nihilism that is currently happening.
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Papers by Evrim Bayındır
Review Essays by Evrim Bayındır
We might say that the nomad should be related to the eternal return, as Saldanha also attempts to do. This cannot take place by simply spatializing the eternal return, however, but only by supplementing the nomad with an eternal willing.
Talks by Evrim Bayındır
I suggest that the emergence of post-Deleuzian negativities, whose diverse examples are found in the accelerationist, speculative realist, neo-rationalist, and afro-pessimist literature, marks the inception of the autonomous collapse of nihilism or the result of Deleuze’s project. This negativist orientation in thought can be conceived as a series of experiments with the autonomization and creation of new reactive forces that are capable of effectuating a non-nihilistic or non-resentful reaction and that does not fit into the Deleuzean schema of forces.
My focal point will be Ray Brassier, whose equation of the death of thinking with the fully autonomous real represents the high point of the negativist turn. However, unlike Brassier, by situating the death of thinking as a continuation of the death of God and the human, I would like to show that autonomy must be understood not as the future trauma of the death of thinking, but as the non-traumatic self-annihilation of nihilism that is currently happening.
I suggest that the emergence of post-Deleuzian negativities, whose diverse examples are found in the accelerationist, speculative realist, neo-rationalist, and afro-pessimist literature, marks the inception of the autonomous collapse of nihilism or the result of Deleuze’s project. This negativist orientation in thought can be conceived as a series of experiments with the autonomization and creation of new reactive forces that are capable of effectuating a non-nihilistic or non-resentful reaction and that does not fit into the Deleuzean schema of forces.
My focal point will be Ray Brassier, whose equation of the death of thinking with the fully autonomous real represents the high point of the negativist turn. However, unlike Brassier, by situating the death of thinking as a continuation of the death of God and the human, I would like to show that autonomy must be understood not as the future trauma of the death of thinking, but as the non-traumatic self-annihilation of nihilism that is currently happening.
We might say that the nomad should be related to the eternal return, as Saldanha also attempts to do. This cannot take place by simply spatializing the eternal return, however, but only by supplementing the nomad with an eternal willing.
I suggest that the emergence of post-Deleuzian negativities, whose diverse examples are found in the accelerationist, speculative realist, neo-rationalist, and afro-pessimist literature, marks the inception of the autonomous collapse of nihilism or the result of Deleuze’s project. This negativist orientation in thought can be conceived as a series of experiments with the autonomization and creation of new reactive forces that are capable of effectuating a non-nihilistic or non-resentful reaction and that does not fit into the Deleuzean schema of forces.
My focal point will be Ray Brassier, whose equation of the death of thinking with the fully autonomous real represents the high point of the negativist turn. However, unlike Brassier, by situating the death of thinking as a continuation of the death of God and the human, I would like to show that autonomy must be understood not as the future trauma of the death of thinking, but as the non-traumatic self-annihilation of nihilism that is currently happening.
I suggest that the emergence of post-Deleuzian negativities, whose diverse examples are found in the accelerationist, speculative realist, neo-rationalist, and afro-pessimist literature, marks the inception of the autonomous collapse of nihilism or the result of Deleuze’s project. This negativist orientation in thought can be conceived as a series of experiments with the autonomization and creation of new reactive forces that are capable of effectuating a non-nihilistic or non-resentful reaction and that does not fit into the Deleuzean schema of forces.
My focal point will be Ray Brassier, whose equation of the death of thinking with the fully autonomous real represents the high point of the negativist turn. However, unlike Brassier, by situating the death of thinking as a continuation of the death of God and the human, I would like to show that autonomy must be understood not as the future trauma of the death of thinking, but as the non-traumatic self-annihilation of nihilism that is currently happening.
It has without exception been agreed that the distinguishing feature of speculative realism is the revival and deepening of probably the most central polarisation of the history of philosophy, which is the idealism/realism divide. Irrespective of the vast differences among its proponents, speculative realists effectuate this with an uncompromising defence of a radical realism. What they understand by realism is broadly the idea that transcendence or “in itself” cannot be reduced to a correlate of thinking. In this regard, the history of philosophy, from pre-Socratics to post-structuralism, is depicted either as an idealism that prioritizes thinking over being or as a correlationism that can do nothing but expand on Parmenides’s assertion that being and thinking are the same.
I will challenge this standard reading of speculative realism and argue that what lies beneath the surface duality between idealism and realism is the deeper alternative between affirmation and negation. The fervent advocacy of the great outdoors by the speculative realists is a symptom of their taking side for negativity by introducing a new mode of nihilism into contemporary philosophy. This new nihilism should be considered as a continuation of the three stages of nihilism that Deleuze charts in Nietzsche and Philosophy (negative, reactive, and passive). After presenting an outline of the basic features of this fourth stage, I will conclude by offering a Deleuzian perspective that makes use of the discoveries of this new nihilism to rethink its project of the overcoming of nihilism.
Arjen Kleinherenbrink’s recent book Against Continuity: Gilles Deleuze’s Speculative Realism aims to “reconstruct” Deleuze’s work both as a “speculative realism” and an “object-oriented philosophy”. Such an untimely positioning of Deleuze shows that he is simultaneously the “forerunner” and “high point” of these philosophical movements. The immediate consequence of this assertion is that –contrary to the “popular image” of Deleuze as the philosopher of a heterogeneous yet continuous “virtual realm” providing the genesis of discontinuous entities– individual bodies or objects are the original and real units of Deleuze’s ontology. Refusing the existence of a universe or any relationality that can contain and surpass objects, Kleinherenbrink argues that we are living in a reality in which “each body is more than everything else”.
In this respect, Kleinherenbrink’s work consists of an operation of relocating some of Deleuze’s most important concepts as the internal components of objects, so that there remains no intensive “space”, transcendental “field” or “pre-individual” singularities that would account for the emergence of discrete units. Conversely, these spaces, fields and singularities belong to the private reality of bodies that is irreducible to any contact with the outside.
My aim in this presentation is twofold: I will first demonstrate how Kleinherenbrink’s valorisation of body presents a radically new interpretation of Nietzsche’s idea of the “untimely”. Against Continuity shows that the untimely emerges exclusively as body or body is untimely as such. Body is both outside the history as a whole and beyond any metaphysical conception of time. Second, I will try to explain how the untimeliness of body relates to its two most fundamental features: withdrawal and unleashing. I will show that withdrawal explains the pre-historical dimension of objects while unleashing determines objects as post-historical.
February 20-22, 2020
One of the most decisive yet under-researched ideas that Deleuze develops in Nietzsche and Philosophy consists of an overall reconception of domination. What is striking here is that domination is radically valorised and gains an entirely positive sense. From now on, it ceases to be the practice of nihilism, power relations, and state sovereignty and becomes an indispensable element of affirming life. “Dominant” now designates the active/life-affirming forces while reactive/nihilistic forces are defined by their obedience. The problem with what we have known as domination throughout the history of humanity is not that it is an act of inequality and hierarchy but that it is unable to perform what it purports to, and tends towards a state of equilibrium where all inequality and hierarchy are cancelled. Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche shows that what characterizes nihilism and power is not domination but separation and autonomization of that which is by nature submissive. The task of thinking is thus to put an end to the independent lives of forces that have carried nihilism to power and discover new modes of domination that reveal the affirmative essence of inequality and hierarchy.
Although the influence of Nietzsche on Deleuze has been widely investigated in Deleuze studies, there is little research on the meaning and possible consequences of the affirmative usage of domination. Deleuze studies is instead governed by the tendency to affirm difference, inequality, and hierarchy without having to dominate any reactive force. This is partly because in the later books Deleuze himself abruptly abandons the affirmative usage of the term “domination” and leaves behind the concept of “force” and the related “active-reactive” distinction by reproblematizing the issue through the creation of new concepts such as intensity, desiring-machines, and war machine. In this presentation, I would like to turn back to Nietzsche and Philosophy and follow a path that Deleuze opened but didn’t walk from. The precise focus on Nietzsche and Philosophy will be justified by offering a solution to the problem of how to dominate a reactive force, which has been loosely addressed in the works on Deleuze and tends to be erased in the subsequent books of Deleuze himself.
Through a reading of Nietzsche and Philosophy, I will make the inference that the dominant-dominated complex has a profound connection with the relationship between time and space. The first part of this paper will consist of explaining how reactive forces are essentially spatial. In the second part, I will demonstrate how active forces are defined with their temporality. The third part will show that the Bergsonian idea that space finds its genesis in time should be improved by saying that time not only creates space but also dominates it, just as active forces dominate reactive ones. In conclusion, I will explain how the faculty of forgetting and promising as temporal and active forces can subordinate and precipitate memory and consciousness that are qualified as reactive and spatial.
August 27-29, 2019
In this presentation, I will to a large extent restrict myself to a reading of Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy and try to understand the specific way it relates temporality to spatiality or topology. I will use this substantial work strategically to push Deleuze towards a direction of anti-topology in favour of temporality. I do not want to consider space and time as equals as conventionally accepted, but locate the former as the subservient of the latter. Although Deleuze doesn't make this claim explicitly and never examines time and space on their own, my aim here is to show that his exposition of active forces relies clearly on their temporal qualities, while that of reactive ones on their obvious spatial features. Just like active forces are qualified as acting and reactive forces as being acted, temporal relations are superior to topological or spatial ones. Time dominates space, in precisely the same way as active forces dominate reactive forces.
First, I will briefly touch upon Deleuze's own explicit but narrow account of topology in Nietzsche and Philosophy, where spatiality gains a completely negative sense. Second, I will show in three stages that there is a broader implicit critique of topology that pervades this work. It will then be concluded that topology amounts to nihilism and metaphysics in general. Third, I will benefit from Deleuze's interpretation of Nietzsche's dice throw metaphor with the intent to explain how this broader topology is transmuted into an entirely temporal mode of thinking. The dice throw finds its ultimate practice in the test of the eternal return by which forces become both temporal and active, and gain the ability to dominate topological reactions or reactive becomings.
June 25-27, 2012
Deleuze treats the Nietzschean idea of dice throw as a means to create artworks. According to him, a work of art is always the result of a dice throw. The artist-player shakes the dice (the process of production) and throws them to see the resultant combination (artwork as the end product). In this presentation, I would like to argue that not only the artist but also the spectator can be considered as a player or a "type". In this sense, to spectate is not a passive contemplation but an active creation parallel to that of the artist. The confrontation with a work of art can be an exploration of the processes which gave rise to the work (shaking the dice) and a testimony to its emergence (the final number). In this context, I will use Antony Gormely's sculpture A Case for an Angel II (1990) as a case for experiencing spectation as a productive process of casting a dice throw. This will also allow us to shed new light on stillness and motion, which are arguably the central problems of the art of sculpture.
The essential premise of this presentation is that the dice throw is continously taking place within Gormley's sculpture. This means two things: (a) the sculpture is the number that comes out of the dice throw, and (b) it is also the region wherein the dice are shaken. These two confluent aspects of Gormley's work correspond to Deleuze's characterization of the dice throw as the correlation of chance and necessity. While chance is defined by the moment when the dice are shaken, necessity is the moment when the dice fall onto the ground and show the combination. The whole point of the dice throw is to affirm chance by bringing together all forces governing existence. The produced combination is the necessity which does not abolish chance, but which is affirmed by chance and affirms chance by repeating the dice throw.
In the light of this, it can be said that the extravagant wings of Gormley's Angel gather together and affirm all chance at once. Besides, the stillness of the sculpture, which conditions it as its unavoidable and fundamental element, starts to function as the moment of chance which will later produce the fatal combination (flight). The very basic fact that the sculpture does not fly, that it is motionless, becomes the condition for it to create new flights. What still lasts in the single moment of stillness of Gormley's Angel is the unceasing production of immense flights and dice throws. However, this demands for a new type, the active spectator who is able to experience the chance-necessity division within the very moment the encounter with the work of art takes place. The active spectator turns stillness into a power of reuniting all forces (chance) and motion into the emergence of thought (necessity).
Horror has widely been regarded as the affect that has the highest significance for philosophy. Moreover, it has been detected at philosophy’s origin: Maoilearca suggested that the Platonic “wonder” that inaugurates philosophical questioning is identical with or at least as a preliminary form of horror (2015); similarly, Wood wrote that the Coleridgean “sacred horror” that is arising from the experience of pure, objectless existence is the direct correlate of Aristotle’s initiation of “being in its essence” as “a distinct theoretical enterprise” (2002). Indeed, this was already the concern of Nietzsche in his characterization of not only Greek philosophy but also the entire Greek culture as an experimentation with the play between horror and joy (1999).
Although Kant’s discovery of transcendental subjectivity carries out a radical disenchantment of the old world, it not only becomes helpless in the face of the problem of horror but also exacerbates it, as Land points out (1992). As such, wonder’s lapse into horror is seen as taking a whole new turn in Kant`s discussion on the sublime, Jacobi`s detection of nihilism in Fichte, and the subsequent growth of pessimism in 19th-century idealism. What we witness is the unfolding of an ever more traumatizing horror which is peculiar to a reason that claims to demystify the speculations of previous tragic thought and classical metaphysics.
Notwithstanding, it was not until—Nietzsche and Heideggerian phenomenology influenced—20th-century preoccupation with existential questioning and radical experience that horror has become a fully autonomous site for philosophical investigation. Levinas stands at the apex of this orientation when he conceives the traumatic horror of there is as the inevitable outcome of the question “what is being?” (2001). This is the moment in which the analysis of horror becomes an inseparable component of the analysis of being.
More recently, the increasingly close ties between conceptual abstraction and horror have been scrutinized from various “post-continental” perspectives, under the title “concept-horror” (2008). The affinity of concept and horror indicates that horror is what happens to thought when it reaches its outer limits. In this sense, horror is the affect that is closest to thought. Furthermore, horror is proposed, as Harman puts it, as a “research programme” to explore the “weird reality” that escapes the residual idealisms of continental philosophy.
The progressive identification of horror and thinking does not explain, however, why thought’s wonder for and venture into the mystery of existence each time tragically arrives at horror and why this inherently traumatic encounter constitutes the horizon of our affectivity. Can it be the case that philosophy is marked with a dogmatic belief in the superiority and the irrecoverability of trauma? If so, can there be ways out of the paradigm of horror?
Taking these various viewpoints and possibilities under consideration, this stream invites applications that examine the historical and contemporary implications of the links between philosophy and horror. Topics include but are not limited to:
—Horror in Greek and medieval philosophy.
—German idealism and the horrors of disenchantment.
—Horror in continental philosophy (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille, Deleuze, Kristeva…).
—Horror as an object of scientific investigation (as in cognitive sciences).
—Phenomenological perspectives on existence and affect.
—Philosophical consequences of the precise ways literature and various artistic disciplines (cinema, painting, music…) relate to horror.
—Psychoanalysis, death-drive, and trauma.
—The relationship between horror, negation, nothingness, death and nihilism.
—Horror in contemporary thought: Non-philosophy, speculative realism, new materialism.
—Horror in relation to the prospect and knowledge of extinction.
—The tension between horror and joy (can there be a philosophical and/or scientific criterion to choose one over the other?).
References:
Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation (London: Routledge, 1992).
Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Duquesne University Press, 2001).
John Ó Maoilearca, All Thoughts Are Equal: Laruelle and Non-Human Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Collapse: Philosophical Research and Development, ed. Robin Mackay, volume 4, 2008.
David Wood, Thinking After Heidegger (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002).
The term “nihilism” has received conflicting definitions throughout the history of modern European thought. Its first appearance is in Jacobi’s pessimism, where it is considered to be the inevitable consequence of German idealism and is defined as a horrific loss of meaning and reality. In contrast, Russian revolutionaries, feminists and anarchists found the meaning of nihilism not only in the recognition of the meaninglessness of the established powers, but above all in acts conducive to revolution. Later, many continental philosophers — following Nietzsche — understood nihilism as the establishment of values superior to and hostile to life, and hence the overcoming of nihilism became a basis for a radical critique of metaphysics and power.
Today, however, while currents such as new materialism, speculative realism, afro-pessimism, non-philosophy, and neo-rationalism have retained these objectives, nihilism has either been cast to the wayside or provocatively embraced with inspiration from neurobiology, pragmatism, and analytic philosophy. Nihilism can thus be conceived of as one of the inflexion points from which the continental and its beyond are to be articulated as distinct discourses. This conference will be a space to discuss, learn and unlearn how numerous manifestations of nihilism have been addressed throughout the history of philosophy.
With that being said, nihilism has always been a theme that has taken on not only conceptual but also artistic and cultural forms, a theme underlying the theory and practice of the sciences and a theme present in political, spiritual, and theological thought. Hence, by bringing together various metaphysical, aesthetical, epistemological and western and non-western theoretical perspectives, this conference is also an attempt to think about conflicting narratives of the renunciation and embrace of nihilism as a problem across disciplines.
We invite proposals for 20-minute paper presentations from researchers, scholars and practitioners working in different fields, using different interpretations of nihilism. Contributions can respond to the following themes, but also to many others:
• Historical and comparative studies in nihilism (ancient and medieval philosophy, German idealism, Nietzsche, existentialism, hermeneutics, deconstruction)
• Lived experience and nihilism (phenomenology of the body, spiritual techniques, Eros and Thanatos, psychoanalysis)
• Nihilism in sociology, human geography, anthropology and other social sciences
•Political philosophy and nihilism (anarchism, feminism, post-Marxist thought, capitalist realism, real abstraction, foundations of community, value of life, bio-politics, resistance and revolution, queer theory)
• Nihilism, theology, and Eastern philosophy (Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, yogic and other perspectives on creation, being and nothingness)
• Post-continental thought and nihilism (new materialism, speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, accelerationism, afro-pessimism, non-philosophy, neo-rationalism)
• Scientific theory, epistemology and nihilism (scepticism, scientific realism, information theory, cognitive sciences)
• Aesthetics and nihilism (existentialist and Russian literature, decadence and the arts)
• Analytic approaches (defining nihilism, nihilistic consequences of the pluralisation of logic)
For several decades now, post-Nietzschean philosophies of life have received a great deal of attention, perhaps best encapsulated by the every-increasing influence of Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of vital 'affirmation'. However, there have also been several important reactions against this trend — 'negativist' critiques of the affirmationist tendency. The aim of this stream is to reflect on the reasons, currency, and the future of the negativist orientation in contemporary continental thought and intersecting fields. The stream hopes to attract both advocates and detractors of this negativist orientation, in order to contribute to a rethinking of life amidst, and potentially after, the 'dark turn'.
The negativist orientation in contemporary continental thought has appeared in many different forms. Philosophers such as Nick Land, Ray Brassier and Eugene Thacker have, from different perspectives, contested vitalism for its tendency to reproduce anthropocentrism and proposed negativities that claim to be superior to affirmation. Quentin Meillassoux restricted life to an ex nihilo emergence whose radical contingency is liable to arbitrary disappearance. Graham Harman’s idea of the “withdrawal” of objects designates a form of negation by which even the most trivial objects escape not only being as an overarching identity but also life as creative difference. From a Marxist point of view, Benjamin Noys denounced the relevance of affirmationist politics by arguing that it is only through developing an advanced form of negation after and against Deleuze that we can counter the real abstractions of the capital. Reza Negarestani defines the task of philosophy as the production of an intelligence that frees thought from the immanence of life by providing an “outside view of ourselves”. It is also notable that, both the literature in Afro-pessimism, with its call for the destruction of the earth, and also the growing body of work in non-philosophy, with its stance against vitalism, can be said to take part in the same critical divergence from the prioritization of life.
Furthermore, not all tendency towards negativity is determined by anti-Deleuzean or anti-Nietzschean dispositions. Contrary to the mainstream affirmationist path, Deleuze scholarship has also produced an alternative Deleuzeanism that trace in Deleuze an undiscovered world of negativity. Among others, Eleanor Kaufmann’s development of Deleuze’s unfinished “dark ontology”, Joshua Ramey’s search for the dark hermeticism of Deleuze, and Andrew Culp’s provocative call for “cultivating a hatred for this world”, provide examples of subversive readings of Deleuze that respond to the impasses of affirmationism. However, the question concerning why has there been a need to either challenge Deleuze with superior negativities or to create darker images of Deleuze seems to remain obscure.
This stream invites participants with an interest in exploring the above negativist and affirmationist movements in contemporary continental thought and related fields. We are especially keen on attracting presenters that can develop dialogue between protagonists and offer new perspectives on the negativist/affirmationist debate, ideally leading to new ways forward.
Panel Overview:
The journey of nihilism in philosophy has undergone remarkable alternations beginning from its first detection in the 18th century as the corollary of idealism (Jacobi) to its determination as the degeneration of life (Nietzsche), and finally, to its recent positive reformulation as a strictly realist project for investigating the death of thinking and the non-correlational in-itself (Brassier). However, although the history of nihilism in philosophy presents to us an increasingly complex and heated picture, it has been a long time since the initial shock wave that it created in the idealist circles has disappeared, and it is debatable how much Nietzsche’s provocation to overcome nihilism is relevant today since it has gradually become a mere academic standard for political correctness and lost its status of an ambitious project as found in the examples of Heidegger and Deleuze. The realist appropriations of nihilism, on the other hand, presents an unexpectedly refreshing late rejoinder to nihilism’s initial idealist roots and a thought-provoking challenge to continental philosophy’s obsolescent anti-nihilism. Nevertheless, it needs more confrontation with topics as diverse as power, domination, state philosophy, violence, ressentiment, representation, patriarchy, life, birth, body, sexual difference, time, history, value, and meaning – topics that have undergone substantial transmutations through continental philosophy’s attacks on nihilism.
In this context, this panel brings together various perspectives on nihilism in order to rethink issues such as the overcoming of nihilism, its relationship with current power relations, its potentials for new intellectual discoveries, the possibility of its self-annihilation, and the contemporary import of its essential “uncanniness” that was characterised by Nietzsche as a visitor standing at the door.
Papers will be precirculated. To receive the papers and more information on how to attend, please send an email to [email protected].
Panel 1 – 15 September 2021 5-7pm PM BST
Andrew Culp – “Afro-Pessimism and Non-Philosophy at the Zero Point of Subjectivity, History, and Aesthetics”
Jill Marsden – “Nietzsche, Nihilism, and the Orientation of the ‘Near’ in Contemporary Thought”
Ashley Woodward – “Nihilism and Information”
Panel 2 – 16 September 2021 5-7pm PM BST
Anna Longo – “How the True World Finally Became Virtual Reality”
Daniel Sacilotto – “To Come into Being: Hegel, Deleuze, and the Theater of Movement”
Nathan Widder – “Nothing New Under the Sun: Nihilism and the Time of the Event”
On October 20, at 1800 CET / 12 ET, The New Centre will air the second episode of the third season of Sheltering Places titled, "Deleuze and Speculative Realism: Continuity and the Method of Reconstruction" with our guest, Arjen Kleinherenbrink, moderated by our Researchers Evrim Bayındır & Carl Olsson.
Arjen Kleinherenbrink’s recent book "Against Continuity" seeks to upend decades of scholarship on Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy. In this episode Kleinherenbrink will participate in a critical discussion surrounding his groundbreaking interpretation of Deleuze, its connection with Speculative Realism and the method that brought it about. Deleuze’s work poses notorious challenges for interpreters because of its lyricism, its ever-changing vocabulary and the sheer extent of its close dialogue with the history of philosophy and other disciplines. It is perhaps as a result of these difficulties that there have been remarkably few attempts to reconstruct the heart of Deleuze’s positive philosophy.
"Against Continuity" is possibly the most ambitious such attempt to date. Kleinherenbrink portrays Deleuze’s philosophy as a Speculative Realism that is surprisingly close to the Object-Oriented Ontologies that have emerged in the last decade. According to Kleinherenbrink, Deleuze charts hidden dimensions of the real by inferring from the commitment that all relations are external to their terms. The result is a discontinuous ontology where machines are the fundamental units of ontology, each being more than the rest of the universe. In such a world, there is no hope of unveiling truth from behind a purported curtain. For there are infinitely many curtains, each of which shelters an object or machine that cannot ever be reduced to its relations.
On June 16, at 12 ET / 18 CET The New Centre aired the third episode of our public program Sheltering Places, titled "Political Philosophy & the Outside" with our guests Katerina Kolozova and Nathan Widder, and moderated by The New Centre Researcher Evrim Bayındır. The topic of this episode will be a philosophical one: how thinking can contribute to change and communicate with the emergence of unexpected futures.
Political Philosophy & the Outside /// From the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the well-accepted ideas has been that regardless of its fate, this global situation will mark a fundamental shift in the history of humanity –leading to the repetition of the cliché, "nothing is going to be the same." Now that we seem to enter into a period in which "things are getting back to normal," it is not entirely clear if the pandemic has created the radical change that was expected; it might be that the autonomy of the event and its capacity for change was overrated. No event exists independent of and indifferent to those who think it. Even if there are events that are radically exterior and indifferent to human intervention, thr issue still poses further challenges for thought. It is at this point that philosophy can delve into the intersections and fractures between Thought and Event, so that thinking might become a concrete power, actively participating in transformations.
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Sheltering Places first emerged as a response to the sudden disappearance of social interactions such as small talk at parties and heated discussions after lectures and conferences that all of us have been avoiding now in the hope of stopping the spread of COVID-19. Following the success of our previous season, we decided to continue compensating for this loss of casual exchange of ideas by creating online spaces that allow for a variety of conversation topics. As an online institution that has experimented with many different forms of knowledge production and communication across the globe since 2014, The New Centre can put this experience to use in the service of public good. As we confront the sense of urgency that pervades our world, Sheltering Places is meant to be a place for discussing and thinking together. We provide a Zoom-based format to stage informal conversations between invited guests while facilitating active contributions by a diverse community composed of The New Centre’s Instructors, Researchers, Students, and Members.