In order to be able to raise the question of the “world” today in an effective way, we have to reactivate the Goethean categories of Weltliteratur and Weltschmerz for a critique of our own historical moment. We need to understand the phenomenon of Weltschmerz as a symptom of the impossibility of Weltliteratur. Going beyond the context of the original formulation of these categories, we could argue that something akin to the historical phenomenon of Weltschmerz emerges every time the ideological constitution (...) of the world threatens to fail. Today, we live in an age of a generalised state of cultural disorientation that has produced its own Weltliteratur, which includes a wide range of discourses about the “world” – from officially endorsed theories of economic globalisation, to scientific treatises on the Anthropocene, environmental protest movements, philosophical pamphlets, all the way to world-historical conspiracy theories. Yet, an anxiety concerning the impossibility of world-formation in general is also recorded in these documents. In order to be able to capture our contemporary Weltschmerz, the article turns to the young Walter Benjamin’s suggestion that the task of this age is to produce an “objective” Weltschmerz. However, the most effective tools to conceptualise this objective Weltschmerz come from the traditions of philosophical acosmism. It is a notable philosophical development of our times that some elements of the acosmic tradition have recently resurfaced in speculative realism. Thus, speculative realism could be described as a possible site of our contemporary Weltschmerz: its acosmic metaphysics is repeatedly tamed by a mournful longing for the world. (shrink)

This book investigates what Bataille, in "The Pineal Eye," calls mythological representation: the mythological anthropology with which this unusual thinker wished to outflank and undo scientific anthropology. Gasché probes that anthropology by situating Bataille's thought with respect to the quatrumvirate of Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud. He begins by showing what Bataille's understanding of the mythological owes to Schelling. Drawing on Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud, he then explores the notion of image that constitutes the sort of representation that Bataille's innovative (...) approach entails. Gasché concludes that Bataille's mythological anthropology takes on Hegel's phenomenology in a systematic fashion. By reading it backwards, he not only dismantles its architecture, he also ties each level to the preceding one, replacing the idealities of philosophy with the phantasmatic representations of what he dubs "low materialism." Phenomenology, Gasché argues, thus paves the way for a new "science" of phantasms. (shrink)

The article examines the role of the Last Judgment in Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy. It argues that the central ontological structure of Agamben’s early thought is that of the perpetually occurring origin. The figure of the perpetual final judgment captures precisely this ontological structure. In order to explicate this figure, the article examines Agamben’s relation to the Heideggerian project of the “destruction of judgment” in two steps. First, it examines the way Agamben turns the methodology of “destruction” into the project of (...) “decreation.” Second, it examines the Agambenian critique of judgment in terms of the perpetually occurring Last Judgment. The essay concludes with a brief examination of the Homo Sacer project and argues that “bare life” should be understood as life lived under this perpetual final judgment. (shrink)

The task this essay set for itself is a reconsideration of the status of the “object” in contemporary forms of philosophical realism that postulate “flat ontologies.” I argue that the theoretical construction of the “object” often comes about in these ontologies through a fetishistic disavowal that effectively makes these objects speak. As a result, the construction of the generalized field of objectivity passes through a double articulation. On the one hand, since contemporary realism defines itself as a rejection of all (...) forms of linguistic idealism, it also tries to shift the focus away from human language as the primary medium of the construction of objectivity. On the other hand, however, this demotion of language proceeds in these works simultaneously with the elevation of the concept of “translation” to an ontological principle: these non-linguistic objects exist through their perpetual translations of each other. The fetishistic disavowal at work in realism introduces the modality of fiction into the very heart of objectivity. This fictional dimension constitutive of objectivity can be described through an engagement of the Kantian notion of “purposiveness.” I argue that these translations that supposedly constitute objectivity rest on the fundamental presupposition that guides the entire Kantian system: we must presuppose purposiveness even where we can detect no evidence of it at all. Hence, today, the theory of the “democracy of objects” must be supplemented by its necessary correlate, a theory of the “conspiracy of objects.”. (shrink)