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Nihilism is not a philosophy. It is just the affective truth content of a Sunday after your friends have been beaten up and arrested by cops, and you can neither write a coherent sentence nor hit a jump shot. It is the dysphoric calm before the storm, that bare acrid taste that won't go away, that tight weariness of every and all, that vile correspondence of thought and thing, that keening whine of stasis and building charge. It is a house to be built to be burned.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is mereological nihilism an ontology?

ECW said...

I'm perhaps the wrong person to answer such a question, given the loose informality of my category distinctions (and approach to philosophy proper), but I'll write a real post in response to this. My short answer, until then, is that it is insofar as even the description of non-parthood designates a consequent mode of relation, even if it is a negated relation, but that the real issue is to think of such a nihilist "position" as not a position but an operation, a sort of realist acid bath, that is ultimately impossible but that nevertheless constitutes a moment in the attempt to develop an ontology. To reverse my opaque and hasty last line, nihilism is a house to be burned to be built.

R.D. said...

I've re read this post like 40 times. You're definitely onto something.

ECW said...

thanks, R.D. Writing more on this as we speak, I'll post soon...