Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction

by Ray Brassier

This book pushes nihilism to its ultimate conclusion by linking revisionary naturalism in Anglo-American philosophy with anti-phenomenological realism in French philosophy. Contrary to the 'post-analytic' consensus uniting Heidegger and Wittgenstein against scientism and scepticism, this book links eliminative materialism and speculative realism.

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, Nonfiction, Science

275 pages, Paperback

First published November 2, 2007

About the author

Raymond Brassier (born 1965) is a British philosopher. He is a member of the philosophy faculty at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, known for his work in philosophical realism. He was formerly Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University, London, England.

Brassier is the author of Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction and the translator of Alain Badiou's Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism and Theoretical Writings and Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. He first attained prominence as a leading authority on the works of François Laruelle.

Reviews

[Daniel · Rating 2 out of 5]

First of all, I agree with Bradley that this book is largely a literature review. Brassier looks at and criticizes the materialisms of the Churchlands, Adorno, Meillassoux, Badiou, Laruelle, Heidegger, and Deleuze. Throughout, his main contention is with the vitalist claim "that physical and chemical principles cannot explain biological functions and processes" (168) though, as is clear from his chapter on the Churchlands, he is not quick to say precisely how physical processes can account for life. What Brassier does say is that the reality of future extinction proves that there will be something physical without some vital correlate. Because the fact of extinction-to-come shows that it is possible for there to be a world without mind, future extinction is evidence for realism. Since the vitalist, it seems, accepts the correlationist's premise (that there is an ongoing relationship between world and thought), extinction-to-come and the realism it supports challenges the distinction between life and matter: the future scenario in which there is matter without thought affects our current understanding of the relationship between thought and world: "[e]xtinction turns thinking inside out, objectifying it as a perishable thing in the world like any other (and no longer the imperishable condition of perishing)" (229). In colloquial parlance: which is more fundamental, the death of thought or the death of the body? For Brassier, the death of the body is ultimately fundamental, showing that thought is grounded in the body or in material processes. If vitalists go on to say that life can exist beyond this universe, they reveal their spiritual commitments. And, because Brassier is so enthusiastic about the disenchantment of the world ("[t]he disenchantment of the world deserves to be celebrated as an achievement of intellectual maturity, not bewailed as a debilitating impoverishment"), spiritual commitments, for him, are necessarily naive. (I strongly disagree with him on this point).

Now, having written all this, I must confess that the above summary might be wrong. If it is, please let me know. And I must also confess that I'm not familiar with enough of the writers Brassier deals with to offer enlightening critiques of all his readings of them.

But I will look at his reading of Heidegger. In Chapter Six, Brassier criticizes Heidegger for failing to properly articulate the difference between physical/third-person time and existential/first-person time. Heidegger's claim that physical time is subordinate to existential time falls pray to Meillassoux's realism, in which physical time (through the arche-fossil and the fact of future extinction) is shown to be more fundamental than existential time: "every attempt to stipulate a transcendental disjunction between ontological temporality and bio-physical time surreptitiously occludes the empirical conditions of instantiation through which the former supervenes upon the latter" (161). In other words, every attempt to make existential time the ground of physical time does not acknowledge the fact that existential time and thought have arisen through evolutionary and physical processes. Moreover, Brassier goes on, Heidegger fails to explain both how Dasein comes into being (becomes possibly) and advances towards death and how Dasein dies. Both birth and death are dark areas and are unable to be explained through a (phenomenological) method that privileges the careful description of subjective and current experience over and above the systematic articulation of real processes. As a result, Brassier reprimands Heidegger for not justifying his ontic-ontological distinction as well as assertions about death: "Heidegger simply stipulates ontological difference as the appropriate interpretatve horizon required for the excavation of Dasein's pre-theoretical self-understanding and dismisses requests for its justification as symptoms of the forgetting of this difference. Similarly, there can be no question of demonstrating the necessity of the absolute disjunction between biological and existential death which lies at the root of Heidegger's account of finite transcendence; this disjunction is a precondition of Heidegger's interpretative strategy, not its result" (162). Hence Heidegger penchant for subordinating the physical (present-at-hand/scientific/third-person) to the existential (ready-to-hand/phenomenological/first-person) is grounded on a fuzzy and ultimately incorrect understanding of the relationship between thought and the world.

First of all, Brassier fails to understand that (Heidegger's version of) the phenomenological method is not committed to using justification and evidence in the way that the sciences use them. At some level justification falls apart because it is ultimately impossible to avoid begging the question if one is fully committed to justifying all claims: what is one's justification for always requiring justification? Phenomenology works at a level below evidence and justification, for as Heidegger's articulation of truth makes clear, before there can be a correspondence between thought and an object, the object must reveal itself. And so Heidegger's phenomenology is engaged in revealing. Only after revelation does evidence and justification make sense.

Now, the subordination of physical time to existential time challenges Meillassoux's and others' commitment to realism because it supposes that the world is, at least in some sense, always correlated to thought. Brassier quotes Heidegger's claim in the Introduction to Metaphysics that without Dasein there is no time. This flies in the face of the fact of future extinction when there will be time Dasein. Now, in order for Brassier to be so certain that there will be a time when there is a world without thought, he must forgo the possibility of there being a God and/or an afterlife. If there is an eternal God or/and an eternal afterlife, then there will be no matter without thought. In this case, the argument for realism based on the arche-fossil and the fact of future extinction are rendered void. Hence, if anything, perhaps Brassier's critique of Heidegger reveals Heidegger's phenomenology to be theologically grounded (something Sean McGrath argues in Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy). Brassier's commitment to realism is ultimately grounded on his commitment to the absence of God, a commitment he nowhere justifies. Hence, we can use Brassier's own words against against himself: "[Brassier] simply stipulates [the non-existence of God] as the appropriate interpretatve horizon required for the [subversion of Heideggerian phenomenology] and dismisses requests for its justification as symptoms of [unsophisticated thinking]" (162).

In the end, Brassier's thought, like the thought of all other thinkers, is ultimately grounded on a(n) a/theological commitment.

[Bradley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really a dense book. The only criticism I have of this brilliant text is that he relies almost completely on the "Heavy Hitters" of Continental Philosophy (Adorno and Horkheimer, Heidegger, Deleuze, Nietzsche, Lyotard, etc.). While I greatly appreciate the Lit. Review that this book provides, I'm not necessarily sure if it says anything new.

Brassier begins with an amazing rehashing of an ongoing debate between Folk Psychologists and Cognitive Psycholgists (namely Wilfrid Sellars and Paul Churchland), but throughout this text I kept thinking of other books I'd have to master before sinking my teeth into this one. It is really a shame because Brassier is getting lots of attention in the current philosophical circles - along with Graham Harman (who does roughly the same thing, but with Heidegger exclusively)... this sort of inter-textual mish mash of quotations from other works tends to leave me feeling stale.

I had high hopes for this when I ordered it as a desk copy, but soon realized that I could never use this in a meaningful classroom setting. There are several points in the text where I had to sit back and re-read, notably his work on "The Pure and Empty Form of Death" - a juxtaposition of Heidegger and Deleuze. But overall, it seemed like a condensation of other books that one could argue are more important. Brassier's main thesis seems to be a rekindling of the Enlightenment view on Representation, instead of its rebuke (ala Foucault, who incidentally is not indexed or footnoted at all, probably because Foucault does the exact opposite of Brassier in this regard)... All in all, I had high hopes, but was disappointed.

An extremely dense text. It may take several readings to fully grasp the complexity of the argument. Not entirely certain if the payoff is worth the effort. Definitely something for aspiring graduate students who deal with Continental Philosophy in an inter-disciplinary manner (such as myself)... overall, not a light read by any stretch of the imagination.

[Jonathan Norton · Rating 1 out of 5]

An argumentative survey of a very narrow range of contemporary philosophy. We hear about the Churchlands, as token representatives of Anglo-American writing, and then after that we're firmly in the "continental" world, where a great big statue of Heidegger looms over the landscape, blotting out the sun.

The discussion of Churchlandian elminitivism is fairly handled, but in the end Brassier endorses a slightly more sophisticated version of the "self-refutation" objection, coached in terms of representation rather than the vaguer notion of "meaning". He could have looked at other figures in the Quinean/Sellarsian community, but I don't suppose they would be any more relevant to his agenda about enlightenment and nihilism.

I've already reviewed Meillasoux' "After Finitude" (which Brassier translated), and I would repeat most of what said there. I think Quentin would benefit greatly from examining analytic work on modal logic and the recent books by Ted Sider and other Anglophone work in metaphysics and epistemology, since he seems to want to write in the mode that is considered unremarkable in Oxford or Harvard, but apparently seems alien in Paris.

The quality of Brassier's writing is in steady decline through this book, as he moves more and more on to topics and authors he is most familiar with, and with which he seems to assume greatest familiarity in his readers. Already exposition is getting quite poor in the Meillasoux chapter, and it becomes execrable in the following chapters. I cannot fathom what Badiou's arguments or ideas are supposed to be, so I can't judge the fatal problem Brassier thinks he has discerned in them. Equally, Laruelle seems to be little more than someone who generalises about the history of philosophy without bothering for any examples, so he hardly deserves the extended attention he gets here.

The seocnd half is mostly taken up with exposition of Heidegger and Deleuze, which merely confirms the impression that the former was just a naive idealist who shrouded his ideas in redundant terminology, whereas the latter was just a manufacturer of quasi-scientific vacuities, in the vein of the old German naturphilosophie. What unifies all this stuff is that the French authors are struggling to get away from Martin's pernicious legacy, which left French philosophy stuck in a cave for the past 70-odd years. That doesn't really connect with the Churchlands or anyone else over the water, since they were never stuck with any requirement to anchor every concept phenomenologically, quite the opposite.

I am giving this 1 star because I did not like it. It was not written well enough for the commentaries to give me any new perspectives on the authors under discussion, nor could I make enough sense of Brassier's overall argument. Incidentally, I *don't* think that analytic philosophy is the only worthwhile tradition, or that all French or German writing is rubbish. But that doesn't mean I have to join in with conventional enthusiasms. For what it's worth, I think Nathalie Sarraute was a more interesting philosopher than any of the overpraised peacocks of post-structuralism, even though her books are classed as "novels".

[Sean · Rating 2 out of 5]

Though of interest as a critical and resolutely anti-anthropocentric survey of contemporary Franco-German thought, one cannot help but feel that by confining himself to the scholastic cul-de-sac of Continental discourse (aside from a brief engagement with Churchland's eliminative materialism) Brassier neglects at the expense of his own intellectual project the rich efforts made elsewhere to develop Sellars' synoptic philosophy.

Nihil Unbound's ostensible goal of radicalizing the Enlightenment imperative to affirm the contingency of the 'human' -- contra Kant and his legacy -- would have been far better served by following through with the advancements of the Pittsburgh school of Sellarsians, or expanding upon the 'rainforest realism' of Ladyman & Ross (which, granted, was likely still in development at the time of Brassier's writing). Brassier's constructive naturalism ultimately fails to engage with the full breadth of the natural sciences, especially cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary biology (two fields with obvious implications for his project). It is no overstatement to suggest that The Origin of Species incidentally accomplishes with tenfold power the philosophical venture here, and with a much thinner bibliography at that.

[Michael A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's an extremely dense book and at times totally opaque (I had particular difficulty with the Deleuze section). I had trouble following the argumentative thread (the 'bigger picture') a lot of the time. I question his conclusion that "we are already dead" because of the possibility (inevitability?) of extinction. I'm unsure about his extreme pessimism, but his embrace of nihilism (as "asubjective meaninglessness" as Adrian Johnston in his review of this book puts it) is refreshing, as is his embrace of the 'disenchantment of the world' by natural science: "The disenchantment of the world deserves to be celebrated as an achievement of intellectual maturity, not bewailed as a debilitating impoverishment."

I personally come away from this book with a new perspective on philosophy. That is, I find "continental realism" to be a breath of fresh air, as I have been largely submerged in phenomenological revelations and psychoanalytical analyses of subjectivity. A reviewer on this book states that Brassier's thinking, like most thinkers, is based on an [unjustifiable] a/theological commitment. I think this is true, and at the moment I have an atheological commitment and I have been coming to an uncomfortable conclusion that the "correlationist" philosophies (roughly speaking, Kant up to phenomenology and post-structuralism) rests on some sort of (quasi-)theological commitment (or at the very least, leaves open a space for theological commitment), which I think largely explains why, for the most part, they have been initially seductive but eventually disappointing to me. And I'm not sure I could have realized this without this book, which counts for a lot, I think.

[Aung Sett Kyaw Min · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brassier's aim is to recover a sober realism about the in-itself beyond thought and mind's mediation of it. This entails an overcoming of Kantian "philosophy of access" to some degree, including and especially the rejection of Kant's notorious interdiction that we can think the noumenon but not 'know' it positively. But what then is the noumenon? To cut to the chase, according to Brassier, it is the being-nothing that objectifies and externalizes thinking, turning it outside in. When thinking entertains the thought of the demise of thought, it actually registers the traumatic truth that it was itself all along determined by the real outside of it without being able to constitute or shape the real in return. This 'being-nothing' is indexed by the speculative cosmological thesis, which Brassier perhaps uncritically endorses, that space-time will at one point go extinct once and for all. But here's the nub: this extinction has already "occured", in the precise sense that thinking has always-already been annulled of its capacity to constitute or shape the real. Extinction is a real, "pre-unthinkable" transcendental whose transcendental function becomes effectuated only at a certain point in cosmic history:

"Extinction is real yet not empirical, since it is not of the order of experience. It is transcendental yet not ideal, since it coincides with the external objectification of thought unfolding at a specific historical juncture when the resources of intelligibility, and hence the lexicon of ideality, are being renegotiated."

Apropos Nietzsche, this is where nihilism comes in as a speculative opportunity and a vehicle of unbinding the correlation between thinking and being:

"[...] In this regard, it is precisely the extinction of meaning that clears the way for the intelligibility of extinction. Senselessness and purposelessness are not merely privative; they represent a gain in intelligibility. The cancellation of sense, purpose, and possibility marks the point at which the ‘horror’ concomitant with the impossibility of either being or not-being becomes intelligible. Thus, if everything is dead already, this is not only because extinction disables those possibilities which were taken to be constitutive of life and existence, but also because the will to know is driven by the traumatic reality of extinction, and strives to become equal to the trauma of the in-itself whose trace it bears. In becoming equal to it, philosophy achieves a binding of extinction, through which the will to know is finally rendered commensurate with the in-itself. This binding coincides with the objectification of thinking understood as the adequation without correspondence between the objective reality of extinction and the subjective knowledge of the trauma to which it gives rise. It is this adequation that constitutes the truth of extinction. But to acknowledge this truth, the subject of philosophy must also recognize that he or she is already dead, and that philosophy is neither a medium of affirmation nor a source of justification, but rather the organon of extinction.

Readers who are cut for time but nontheless want to tackle this impressive (even if oft times scatter brained) piece of anti-continental continental philosophy may want to skip to chapters 3, 5 and 7 after the opening chapter, which sees Brassier reckoning with the black sheep of analytic phil mind--Churchlandian eliminative materialism, itself a right wing Sellarsian radicalization of the Sellars own dichotomy of the Manifest Image (holds intentionality, freedom, etc as sacrosanct) and the Scientific Image (possibly doing away with these categories). The intimidating sections on Adorno, Laruelle and Deleuze are not for the faint of heart or the uninitiated. I found myself scratching my head every five sentences. Thankfully, I was familiar with Laruelle enough to appreciate Brassier's own appropriation of Laruelle's diagnosis of the [illicit] hybridization of the empirical with the transcendental (immanence is first surreptitiously divided into the immanent and the transcendent and only afterwards spliced together). Ultimately, the merit of Brassier's book lies in its attempt to formulate a defensible version of what has come to be known as speculative realism, that doesn't throw the representational baby out of the correlationist bathwater.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't read all that much in the way of philosophy, so perhaps it's not surprising that probably 90% of this book went completely over my head. I was able to follow the first 3 chapters pretty well, and the final chapter also, but all of part two (and the first chapter of part 3) are a blur to me. My main interest in this book are mainly its connections to the theme of horror: such as the Ligotti quote that serves as an epigraph to the book, a footnote that references Cronenberg's "The Fly," a nod to the "blind idiot god" of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. Sometimes the writing comes off as poetic (such as when Brassier mentions "the awakening of an intelligence which is in the process of sloughing off its human mask"), but more often than not it is dry and abstract. If anything, it makes me curious to look into Nietzsche again, and it certainly has exposed me to some new words I've never seen before (such as ipseity, rebarbative, propaedutic, sublation, qualiaphilia, perplication, and so on).

[David Peak · Rating 3 out of 5]

Something of a review of post-Kantian philosophies, centered around the concept of nihilism, or as Brassier refers to it "...a vector of intellectual discovery which philosophy should try to push to its ultimate conclusion." The sections on Meillassoux ("The Enigma of Realism"), Heidegger ("The Pure and Empty Form of Death"), and Nietzsche ("The Truth of Extinction") proved to be the most compelling. Fairly difficult reading but nonetheless a valuable resource.

[Eric Phetteplace · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brassier is doing important and interesting work, but his style tends to work against the stunning conclusions which animate his thought. This book functions better as an overview of the unique theories of the day rather than an original work in itself. Brassier gives trenchant summaries and critiques of Badiou, Meillassoux, Deleuze, Laruelle, and Eliminative Materialism (i.e. Paul & Patricia Churchland). But after spending a whole chapter describing a theory, he takes about one or two sentences from it and moves on, leaving much of the work as just that: descriptive rather than creative. The book as a whole lacks a coherent direction due to this constant summarization without returning. I also couldn't quite catch what the purpose of certain engagements were; what was the use of the chapter on Adorno? or the brief foray into Levinas at the end? Most of Speculative Realism has been framed in contrast to the textual turn (Levi Bryant argues this repeatedly on his blog, for instance), wherein philosophy becomes merely analysis and interpretation of texts by philosophers, but Nihil Unbound is almost entirely that, albeit without the underlying correlationist slant.
I also had trouble following the Badiou/Laruelle chapters. I'm sure someone with a broader background in theory wouldn't, though. I actually found the Laruelle chapter to be among the most interesting, along with the closing one.

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the middle of this thing right now. The first chapter was so damn hard but the ideas were, in my opinion, kind of a restatement of certain philosophical maxims for which I myself have great sympathy, except it was explained through examples from neurosphilosophy. Second chapter, which I just finished, is a MONSTER. Devastates Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment. This guy is in the category of "scary smart." I'm afraid, however, like many other people in the "scary smart" category, he comes off as a bit of a meanie.

[R Montague · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ray Brassier’s very compelling addition to the growing body of “speculative realist” thought. Working from the basic premise that long-term extinction is inevitable, Brassier walks us through and expounds upon a number of thinkers, all with the intent of undermining the Kantian conceit of a world that is centered around us. Readers need at least a passing familiarity with European philosophical discourse, and the general trends within the “Continental” schools of philosophy.

[Shulamith Farhi · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book I've ever read in my life.

[Dana · Rating 1 out of 5]

garbage

[Virga · Rating 3 out of 5]

Toks jausmas, kad knyga kažkaip be pabaigos. Lauki lauki išvados ir taško, bet sulauki tik daugtaškio - ir taip toliau, ir taip toliau, ir taip toliau. Gal čia tokia faina nauja stilistika, pateikti daug interpretacijų vienu pjūviu, ir daugiau nieko. Tai interpretavimo pjūvis aiškus, bet - nu ir kas...

[J. · Rating 3 out of 5]

it’s very funny (especially for a humorless book) that brassier (who i met once on the outskirts of berlin and seems humble and pleasant and a little shy) argues that a fully scientific worldview is what clinches things for nihilism—but also decides that the way to demonstrate this is with the work of six or seven famous philosophers from the 20th century. it’s guesses about other people’s guesses!

this methodological choice should make anyone feel a little suspicious. chemistry and astronomy give us nihilism, but i have to prove it with meillassoux and laruelle, because that’s how my discipline works

[Will O'Hara · Rating 5 out of 5]

tres fantastique. spec realism is the real deal

[Jess · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think one of the reasons that causes this book to read somewhat like an extensive book review, is also one of the factors which determines why it is an interesting read; namely, its intellectual honesty. Often, scholars will half-heartedly explicate theories that they do not believe in, which makes it so much more effortless to subsequently put forth what reads like an impressive thesis. However, Ray Brassier doesn't cut any corners when reviewing the literature that he uses (at least not intentionally, according to my judgement), which means that one could convincingly understand, for example, the overarching tendencies of the 'Dialectics of Enlightenment' from reading this book.

Perhaps I would not go so far as to argue that this should be the golden standard in terms of presenting an argument or theory, as the actual convergence of the preceding chapters only comes together in the last few pages. But even with a discrepancy between argument and review, it should be more prevalent to account for an opposing position so convincingly, that the opposing author in question would feel satisfied reading it.

As far as the writing goes, this book is not for anyone who recently picked up philosophy, you should be at least three years in and be comfortable with a lot of recurring philosophical jargon. If dialectics, realism/idealism, constructivism, metastructure or turns of phrase like 'In the last instance' are unfamiliar or difficult concepts for you, you will likely find this a tedious read. On top of that, Brassier is not afraid to flash his fairly impressive vocabulary, which has left me with at least four or five new expressions that I love to use.

I won't delve too far into the content, because it would be such a lengthy endeavor, but in short, Brassier is going to argue that you're essentially already dead and philosophy has nothing to do with your own personal whim, it is not there to comfort you and the sooner you understand this the better, because this will free your mind to ponder about much greater things. But in getting to this he goes through a row of different points to ontologically and epistemically set the stage, by investigating the antagonistic nature of the manifest and the scientific image of man on the basis of a row of assorted great works.

I wouldn't recommend reading this book for the argument, I wouldn't recommend reading it for his account of other great authors either (since it is harder than just reading the original texts), but I would recommend reading this book if you would like a challenge; to see how much you know about philosophy and to test your ability to conduct abstract thinking, as you will find on several occasions that Brassier balances multiple concepts in short succession, which may cause you to put down the book and go over it in your head to get a proper mental image.

[Tyler · Rating 3 out of 5]

A refreshing book to read when the climate of Philosophy has been over-saturated with social criticism, postmodern takes on language, identity politics and obsessions with the "Other". In other words, it works to remove the deadlocks brought on by Postmodernism and its preoccupation with social critiques in the guise of "overcoming metaphysics". It is also a good challenge to someone like me, firmly in the phenomenological camp inaugurated by Husserl. Brassier's task is to think the reality of extinction as a refutation of Post-Kantian correlationism and to provide a Philosophy adequate to the image of man brought on by Science. Brassier's task is to accelerate disenchantment and to bring forth Nihilism as the guiding light of Philosophy.

However, at times it feels like a lit review and this is where it falls short for me. Brassier rounding out his approach a little bit more would of been appreciated. If you have not read one of the Philosophers he devotes a chapter to, you will have a very hard time understanding it since he assumes familiarity. While he handles their work carefully, it got a bit distracting from the thesis of the book until it is wrapped up in the last chapter. I look forward to seeing where Brassier goes with this line of thought in future works.

[Onur özcan · Rating 5 out of 5]

He took Meillassoux' challenge to its radical conclusions.

He subverts Deleuze&Heideggerien anti-exact scientism.

He totally undermines a certain type of approach to the nature of experience in philosophy. From Nietzschean and Bergsonian vitalisms to all types of phenomenology take a lot of stick by Brassier. We can generalize their mutual approach as an "affirmativist" one in the context of experience. Of course, this would be an umbrella term for which only their attitudes toward negation is criticized by Brassier in the same way.

He extracts dialectics from the negation and puts forward a very original reading of what Adorno and Horkheimer call Enlightenment.

He promotes Freud against Lacan. prime motive as silent and sneaky death drive against prime motive as talkative and pretentious one.

Apart from all those continental readings that can be regarded as having "obscure" terminology, he applies also to analytic philosophy. From Sellars to Chalmers he problematises the issue regarding experience just like those analytic philosophers do.

Most importantly, he draws an original distinction between knowing what consciousness "is" and knowing what it "means".

[J.]

Chapter 4, “Unbinding the Void”, is a solid secondary source on the set-theoretical roots of Badiou’s ontology. The thematization of "unbinding" - or as I would say, of the non-being of relation - is helpful and rare among receptions of Being and Event. There's no better hinge concept to focus on for understanding the relation between Badiou's ontology and his ethics.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

I just don't know about these new folks. I enjoyed parts of this book but when it came down to the topic of Speculative Realism where Brassier camps I still find myself struggling to know whether I'm lost or that S.R. is just incoherent by nature. I get the general gist of it, but where they (Brassier, Meillassoux, Harman) take it just eludes me. I find Heidegger or Derrida easier to follow.

[Marty · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well..that was a challenge. There are many good things in here. Brassier's breadth of knowledge is impressive and i find myself generally in agreement with his sentiment. This is a no-joke survey of contemporary trends in continental philosophy along with a study of aspects of Nietzsche and Heidegger.

[Zac ?̸̳̙͈̙́̌̈́̚͝͝ͅ · Rating 4 out of 5]

A difficult book that I need to revisit, but I do believe Brassier is just about the best philosopher working today. His essays are essential (I've linked two below).

http://stasisjournal.net/index.php/jo...

https://uberty.org/wp-content/uploads...

[Carrie Lorig · Rating 4 out of 5]

i resist a lot of this particularly the writing style which is very MANSPLAINER COMING THROUGH but this also gave me so much to think about and vibrate on. particularly the phrase, "stellar corpses." also READ THIS WITH MELANCHOLIA you dark pony you.

[Brandon · Rating 3 out of 5]

On the face of it, Nihil Unbound is basically unable to be recommended. While I personally believe it to be important and am glad that I struggled through it, I cannot say that in good conscience without some necessary qualifiers. But first, the good.

Ray Brassier genuinely shocked me with his almost scary level of penetrating insight. Nihil Unbound is formulated as a literature review which covers the Churchlands’ Eliminative Materialism, Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, Meillassoux’s After Finitude, Alain Badiou’s overall project but centered in Being and Event, Laruelle’s Non-philosophy, the early Heidegger, Deleuze in Difference and Repetition, and Nietzsche’s work, with brief mentions of Freud, Lyotard, and Levinas. Nearly all of these projects get completely dismantled according to their most basic assumptions being violated, most of the time by their own logic. How Ray Brassier manages to understand these various projects enough, let alone critique them, amazes me and humbles me. Admittedly, I cannot speak to the overall quality/truth value of his attacks, but as he presents them, they stand pretty strongly.

The best section for me was Heidegger’s section, where he gave voice to some problems I’d felt, yet had been much too scared to actually follow through on out of aversion to being called stupid, and others that I genuinely just was too stupid to even realize were there, yet still rang true according to my own meager understanding. Brassier praises Nietzsche as his main philosophical ancestor and final philosophical obstacle, and shows how Nietzsche falls victim to the very problems he had tried to overcome. I also enjoyed Meillassoux’s section and really want to read After Finitude, especially because I actually anticipated Brassier’s criticism of that project before he explicated it. I also liked the section on Eliminative Materialism, though it’s hard for me to fully agree with that idea, though Brassier doesn’t really either.

I think, as reductive as this may seem, one of Brassier’s biggest contributions to philosophy with Nihil Unbound is to try and reintroduce some “common sense” to philosophy, which recently has increasingly been caught up in rampant subjectivism and idealism. Brassier works to re-emphasize thought’s subordination to reality rather than the other way around, and to my mind, he’s rather successful in doing this.

Why 3 stars? Yeah, ultimately, this is a book review and not a philosophical critique. People who know me can tell from the list above that I haven’t read most of the thinkers that he covers… and yeah those sections were really tough. Admittedly, I ended up skimming Deleuze’s section because I couldn’t make heads or tails of it, and didn’t really have the desire to push through, nor the patience. Other sections, with multiple re-reads, healthy doses of ChatGPT, and some grit, allowed me to get through with general understandings even if I would definitely have trouble articulating the details.

The problem is that sometimes, Brassier has no interest in explaining. These are the worst sections, when just jumps into lengthy analysis with little build up and no breaks to make sure the reader is caught up. Other times, Brassier will “explain”, but his explanations are impossibly jargon-filled and tend to barely shed a sliver of light on his overall argument. Then, there still are times where Brassier writes at a fully understandable level and, perhaps through sheer relief, comes off in an enjoyable manner. The distribution of these three types baffles me. The fully understandable explanations tend to come through when they are least needed - the simpler ideas. Lamentably, the reverse is true, the lack of explanations tend to be felt when the most nebulous and arcane ideas are being analyzed. Again, it baffles me because of the presence of the better explanations. If they weren’t there, I could at least say that Brassier has no interest in explaining at all because this book is written for a specialized audience and assumes familiarity with the thinkers involved. But, this is patently untrue because of the presence of those extremely unnecessary sections of exposition, or even pages that do help to ease the reader into unfamiliar territory.

This is kind of just gets worse when combined with Brassier’s preferred density of writing combined with the generally nebulous terminology and poor definitions which, admittedly, isn’t always his fault given who he is responding to.

Obviously, one could object to my thoughts that really, it’s my fault I’m not acquainted with the thinkers above and it would have been WAY easier to read if I was. While certainly true in part, the flaw in this objection lies in Laurelle’s inclusion who, Brassier himself says, has had very little engagement in the field. Thus, it would be genuinely insane to expect even a specialized audience to be familiar with him and he really should have given more word count to explaining. Of course, he doesn’t.

Good book that I hope to return to in like twenty years when I have read more.

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Without making any final decision on the strong theses of this text, nihilism as a speculatively fecund logical conclusion of the "adventure of philosophy," or the "speculative realism" forwarded here, what I appreciate most about Brassier's work here is the careful readings that he subjects the authors treated here to. While finding something helpful in each thinker's provocations, he then turns to a patient critique of each's thought, bringing to the surface the implications of each's claims to the question of representation, to the relation between thinking and being, in the wake of the advent of Kantian "correlationism." Sellars and Churchland, Adorno and Horkheimer, Meillassoux, Badiou, Laruelle, Heidegger and Deleuze, and Nietzsche, Lyotard, Levinas, and Freud, are all provided commentaries here. We begin with "folk psychology" and its eliminative materialist (neuroscientific) critique, which Brassier critiques in turn, through an attentiveness to the distinction between a level and its meta-level (presentation and what it presents). Brassier questions the rigorous distinction between mimesis and mimicry in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, between concept and nature, sublimation and sacrifice, adding a further twist to Adorno and Horkheimer's critique of sacrificing sacrifice in favor of the concept remaining within the frame of sacrifice. Here, he rejects the Hegelian "solution" of dialectic, which will also inform his critique of Badiou, where he insists on the distinction between isomorphism and analogy (between ontology and meta-ontology), though he doesn't reject the "circularity" of the equation of thinking and being. Brassier is perhaps closest to Meillassoux, examining how the ancient temporality of the arche-fossil, the diachronicity of the pre-condition, cannot be made consistent with the temporality of the present, the conditioned. And while Brassier critiques Laruelle for equating "decision" (which fuses immanence and transcendence) with philosophy tout court, which he reads as an over-extension of the concept, he finds Laruelle useful insofar as he can be mobilized as a critique of correlationism. Brassier's critique of phenomenology in general is quite simple, exemplified in his critique of Husserl's uncritical treatment of givenness or perception, and Brassier finds Heidegger's treatment of ground, or condition of possibility, unsatisfactory, turning to Deleuze for an alternative account of death, intensity, and temporality (though I don't see why Lacan could not have been referenced on the difference between biological and symbolic death). Brassier finally turns to Nietszche on overcoming the aporia of nihilism, belief in non-belief, which he sees as a result of a folk-psychological confusion between phenomenological experience and psychological reality, rejecting the affirmation of woe as the victory of the manifest image. Unfortunately, I find the conclusion underwhelming, for it seems that every critique of correlationism requires some (immanent) transcendent horizon that I cannot but help feel is simply a reification: the necessity of contingency in Meillassoux becomes the inevitability of the extinction (of life, thought) here, an "anterior posteriority" instead of the mere anteriority of ancestrality, though I agree with the project of an ontology of the unconscious, the traumatic trace.

[0:50 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mainly, this contains incredibly good expositions of major "continental" thinkers. The guy knows how to write about Deleuze in an incredibly clear way. The exposition is loosely tied by the thematic of the subtitle which, to be honest, is slightly misleading. The book doesn't really have much to do with enlightenment as it mainly focuses on post-enlightenment thinkers: the biggest bogey man here is Heidegger yet he is far from an Enlightenment philosopher, same with Deleuze. Only the section on Adorno really focuses on Enlightenment. Of course Enlightenment is "there" in terms of legacy but that's obvious. There are approving nods toward Cartesian rationalism but the egological nature of phenomenology is described as "pathetic". I don't know.

There seems to be some general goal of rehabilitating philosophy's relation to science from a wilfully scientistic perspective but without doing much in the way of philosophy of science: throwing around words like biophysical and organic/inorganic-distinction without engaging with the philosophical underpinnings of the very notion of biology, even if Deleuze is (correctly) criticized for his biology-centrism. With neurobiology, things are ostensibly different, even if biology includes the notion of appearance of design and purpose, as even Richard Dawkins has stated in one of his books. The underlying stance here is certainly very provocative against the self-identity of philosophy as some kind of alternative force and perhaps if these considerations were turned maximally abstract, without any appeal to obvious facts, I could get behind the perspective. I guess that could ultimately be the point if one looks past the detail. As it stands, this book is a collection of positively superb commentary and exposition marred by a muddled and hasty agenda, even if the critical points are often incisive and agreeable.

As far as the thinkers presented go, the section on Deleuze was very, very helpful to read after D&R and the section on Laruelle was great and made me curious about his thinking.

[Eric Williamson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brassier offers a methodical, well-written excision of frameworks that attempt to “stave off nihilism,” peeling each back like layers of an onion. If you’re looking for a philosophical text that embraces speculative realism, and its “correlate,” (nihilism), then you’ve got it here.

However, if you’re in search of an ethical framework for how to live your life in light of nihilism, and post-capitalism, and ecological collapse, you’ll not find anything of the sort here. “Everything is dead already”…we are not, and if we are to continue to live, how do we do so, and do so well? Readers will need to bootstrap an answer.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Esto es una reseña totalmente ajena a la posible realidad mental del autor, es más una nota personal que propiamente una reseña:
1. Brassier, quizás sin saberlo (y así se realizan los mejores pensamientos) se acerco a un pensamiento del buda (mucho más de lo que hizo Schopenhauer y así cualquier otro nihilista [Nietzsche, el de la Voluntad de Poder, no es así un nihilista, sino un vitalista, pero de igual forma se le puede aplicar lo dicho], o la base de sus enseñanzas.
2. El Buda enseña: Las 4 nobles verdades como aquellas en las que el sufrimiento surge en las personas. El sufrimiento como apego, deseo, rechazo, odio, ignorancia, inconciencia, etc. Esas nobles verdades establecen:
a. La vida conlleva sufrimiento (Dukkha). Esta es debido a nuestros agregados, o las condiciones de posibilidad de la experiencia del mundo [mente/cuerpo por decirlo airadamente].
b. Su causa es nuestra emocionalidad insensate o la avidez de que algo sea como queremos que no es (...

[Aaron Schuschu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Honestly a little over my head but as far as I can tell it’s one of those it talks about what Heidegger kind of touches on in Being and Time and tries to relate it to what Messalioux puts in terms way over my head in After Finitude. But I just think comparing humans to the universe and the universe to humans is just apples and oranges. Like, things don’t not exist just because I’m not thinking about them, as much as I try to.