10 responses to “Apocalypse According to Cioran for ArranJames”
Hahaha! Thanks. I’ve seen it before but I think this evening I’ll watch it again.You gotta love a thinker who accused Nietzsche of juvenile optimism.
I hadn’t heard of him before finding your own work and appreciate his willingness to stick with the problem, one of my concerns about moving too quickly “post” nihilism is that people still can’t take in the gravity of our situation, TimMorton and Bifo write all too briefly about the need for mourning and depression but who is actually willing to do the work of dwelling in the ruins of modernity?
by the way I don’t think that they are in denial as they aren’t repressing things that have struck them at some deep/fundamental level they just can’t take them in, more like antibodies and foreign bodies or disgust reactions than dream-work.
That’s something Michael and I sometimes disagree on. I think the “post” isn’t an “after” but a within. Though in reality that difference usually comes down to one f emphasis.
sure, part of why I prefer to talk in terms of ongoing collapses rather than nihilism, reads clearer I think in relation to the news of our times and hopefully avoids too many merely academic arguments, but something worth continuing to experiment with as who knows what people will make of these various and tangled threads
I believe any attempt to think or ‘make-sense’ or interpret or give meaning to the objectivity of nihilism or the collapse of absolute coherency is always already a movement forward (a “post). Chronos waits for no person. There is the advent of nihilism (even if for some it has yet to reach consciousness) and then there is what we do with it. The doing is takes us post. Those who have realized the advent are faced with negotiating it via raw adaptation and do not have the luxury of fetishizing the collapse and sitting motionless. Even the act of making a mythic song of its negative potency is an ‘attempt at living’ or overcoming. We must eat and think and fuck. Post-nihilism is not a transcendence or getting beyond’ but an unavoidable coping-with. The hyphen provides critical distance with which to observe and to do work. Post-nihilism is a recognition of the collapse of meaning and the degenerate trajectory of currents assemblages and then a reengagement with/in those conditions. The moment the nihilistic threshold is crossed there is no going back. Nothing in this reality stands still. We immediately live in the future now and now and now. In other words, the post-nihilist turn (which is never an ‘ism’) is both a catastrophic fall from the towers of the Cathedral and a re-turning to the flesh of this world that can not be anything other than a dwelling within. We cannot escape the dark mesh of planetary consequences. So there is no going beyond. There is only the ruins and what we do within them.
With this we could very well adopt Arran’s term “catastrophia” for the attitude/psychology of dwelling in the ongoing and unevenly distributed apocalypse. I certainly like the resonance. My interest in the term post-nihilism speaks more to what the more general collapse or catastrophe does to and for theorizing and abstract thought. Nihilism is the rational-emotive response to catastrophic developments in science, religion, politics, philosophy/theory, but also in an ecological-material sense. How are we to existentially and culturally code: 1) the collapse of certainty via the demonstrable inherent blindness in human thought (hominid thetics) as demonstrated in the technical areas of mathematics, physics, and cognitive science, as well as by folks such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Laruelle, Rorty, Foucault, etc, 2) the effect degenerating earth systems has on our world views, and 3) the practical necessity of coping-thinking-with the knowledge of finitude and incompleteness in thought and meaning? As I suggested above, the moment nihilism is realized our inherent tendency to cope-with and adjust kicks in and we start reconstructing a narrative or folk-cosmology to make-sense of our objective existence. Even a narrative of ‘dwelling within’ is a move beyond the pitch black unreality of nihilism. To live perpetually in nothingness and the final consequence of collapse is to extinguish self and thought (or reach Nirvana). But thats not what we are doing. With this site and with all our comments and rambling were are post-nihilists building from the ruins. We are not just sitting down and dying within them.
As a wise philosopher wrote:
“A thought of post-nihilist pragmatics, what I have also been calling catastrophia and/or “catastrophic thought“, is a thought that is about what works after nihilism. This is not just about what works after nihilism, what is efficacious but that takes the question of practices as fundamental. If meaning collapses, if it is always going to collapse, if it is tied to our finitude, then how do we have practices of significance? How do we have such practices in a manner that doesn’t revert to the kind of heroism that fascism founds itself on? The reason I speak of the catastrophic and of a love of the catastrophic is not out of morbidity or because I want to declare that the emperor has no clothes. I take the term catastrophe from Aristotle claim from the Poetics, that it is ‘an action bringing ruin and pain on stage, where corpses are seen and wounds and other similar sufferings are performed’ but also from the Beckett play of the same name. The catastrophe is the part of the play when things are revealed for what they are; the hopelessness of the situation is made visible, the wounds are shown. Vulnerability once meant having the capacity to be wounded and to wound. Vulnus meant the literal wounds of the body, the body that we are thrown back on as our after nihilism, that we rediscover we always already are.”
I think we ought to investigate Wu Ming a little more on precisely these questions of narrative/ folk-cosmology.
I take your point M, just as I understand the technical value/use of talking in terms of nihilism, but surely we must be not just concerned with our intentions but with the reception of our gestures and in our times “post” as in post-human all too often has a sense of being-after, and not of being-in-the-midst of (In media res as it were) but yes we are always already doing, recasting our lots to some present gestalt impulse.
synthetic zerØ 
Hahaha! Thanks. I’ve seen it before but I think this evening I’ll watch it again.You gotta love a thinker who accused Nietzsche of juvenile optimism.
I hadn’t heard of him before finding your own work and appreciate his willingness to stick with the problem, one of my concerns about moving too quickly “post” nihilism is that people still can’t take in the gravity of our situation, TimMorton and Bifo write all too briefly about the need for mourning and depression but who is actually willing to do the work of dwelling in the ruins of modernity?
by the way I don’t think that they are in denial as they aren’t repressing things that have struck them at some deep/fundamental level they just can’t take them in, more like antibodies and foreign bodies or disgust reactions than dream-work.
That’s something Michael and I sometimes disagree on. I think the “post” isn’t an “after” but a within. Though in reality that difference usually comes down to one f emphasis.
sure, part of why I prefer to talk in terms of ongoing collapses rather than nihilism, reads clearer I think in relation to the news of our times and hopefully avoids too many merely academic arguments, but something worth continuing to experiment with as who knows what people will make of these various and tangled threads
I believe any attempt to think or ‘make-sense’ or interpret or give meaning to the objectivity of nihilism or the collapse of absolute coherency is always already a movement forward (a “post). Chronos waits for no person. There is the advent of nihilism (even if for some it has yet to reach consciousness) and then there is what we do with it. The doing is takes us post. Those who have realized the advent are faced with negotiating it via raw adaptation and do not have the luxury of fetishizing the collapse and sitting motionless. Even the act of making a mythic song of its negative potency is an ‘attempt at living’ or overcoming. We must eat and think and fuck. Post-nihilism is not a transcendence or getting beyond’ but an unavoidable coping-with. The hyphen provides critical distance with which to observe and to do work. Post-nihilism is a recognition of the collapse of meaning and the degenerate trajectory of currents assemblages and then a reengagement with/in those conditions. The moment the nihilistic threshold is crossed there is no going back. Nothing in this reality stands still. We immediately live in the future now and now and now. In other words, the post-nihilist turn (which is never an ‘ism’) is both a catastrophic fall from the towers of the Cathedral and a re-turning to the flesh of this world that can not be anything other than a dwelling within. We cannot escape the dark mesh of planetary consequences. So there is no going beyond. There is only the ruins and what we do within them.
With this we could very well adopt Arran’s term “catastrophia” for the attitude/psychology of dwelling in the ongoing and unevenly distributed apocalypse. I certainly like the resonance. My interest in the term post-nihilism speaks more to what the more general collapse or catastrophe does to and for theorizing and abstract thought. Nihilism is the rational-emotive response to catastrophic developments in science, religion, politics, philosophy/theory, but also in an ecological-material sense. How are we to existentially and culturally code: 1) the collapse of certainty via the demonstrable inherent blindness in human thought (hominid thetics) as demonstrated in the technical areas of mathematics, physics, and cognitive science, as well as by folks such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Laruelle, Rorty, Foucault, etc, 2) the effect degenerating earth systems has on our world views, and 3) the practical necessity of coping-thinking-with the knowledge of finitude and incompleteness in thought and meaning? As I suggested above, the moment nihilism is realized our inherent tendency to cope-with and adjust kicks in and we start reconstructing a narrative or folk-cosmology to make-sense of our objective existence. Even a narrative of ‘dwelling within’ is a move beyond the pitch black unreality of nihilism. To live perpetually in nothingness and the final consequence of collapse is to extinguish self and thought (or reach Nirvana). But thats not what we are doing. With this site and with all our comments and rambling were are post-nihilists building from the ruins. We are not just sitting down and dying within them.
As a wise philosopher wrote:
“A thought of post-nihilist pragmatics, what I have also been calling catastrophia and/or “catastrophic thought“, is a thought that is about what works after nihilism. This is not just about what works after nihilism, what is efficacious but that takes the question of practices as fundamental. If meaning collapses, if it is always going to collapse, if it is tied to our finitude, then how do we have practices of significance? How do we have such practices in a manner that doesn’t revert to the kind of heroism that fascism founds itself on? The reason I speak of the catastrophic and of a love of the catastrophic is not out of morbidity or because I want to declare that the emperor has no clothes. I take the term catastrophe from Aristotle claim from the Poetics, that it is ‘an action bringing ruin and pain on stage, where corpses are seen and wounds and other similar sufferings are performed’ but also from the Beckett play of the same name. The catastrophe is the part of the play when things are revealed for what they are; the hopelessness of the situation is made visible, the wounds are shown. Vulnerability once meant having the capacity to be wounded and to wound. Vulnus meant the literal wounds of the body, the body that we are thrown back on as our after nihilism, that we rediscover we always already are.”
I think we ought to investigate Wu Ming a little more on precisely these questions of narrative/ folk-cosmology.
I take your point M, just as I understand the technical value/use of talking in terms of nihilism, but surely we must be not just concerned with our intentions but with the reception of our gestures and in our times “post” as in post-human all too often has a sense of being-after, and not of being-in-the-midst of (In media res as it were) but yes we are always already doing, recasting our lots to some present gestalt impulse.
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I know Wu Tang and how cash rules everything around me, but not this Wu Ming you speak of…