Ray Brassier Research Articles

Nihilism Lost and Found: Brassier, Jonas, and Nishitani on Embracing and/or Overcoming Nihilism

Abstract This essay confronts Ray Brassier’s vindication of nihilism with other two important but frequently underexamined philosophical attempts to overcome nihilism: Hans Jonas’ and Keiji Nishitani’s. By putting these different takes on nihilism into dialogue, it explores some blind spots in Brassier’s position, as well as some of the practical consequences, for our current planetary situation, of undertaking a radical divorce between the normative and the natural that results from his radical nihilism. The article opts for a more moderate acceptance and eventual self-overcoming of nihilism, according to which, even if natural entities are indifferent to human reasons and meanings, this does not entail that nature is bereft of a human-independent normative dimension. In other words, the essay argues that care must be taken not to confuse criticisms of an anthropocentric conception of reasons and meanings with the belief that meaning is completely absent from the natural world. Thus, the central contention of the article is that, given our current climate and ecological catastrophe, one of the most pressing tasks of contemporary philosophy is to understand normativity in non-anthropocentric ways, so that humans are no longer considered as the only entities that respond to normativity. Such an attitude conceives humans as estranged normative creatures amidst a meaningless, indifferent natural world, toward which they would have no ethical responsibilities. The essay finishes by suggesting ways in which to develop an account that does not fall into this ethical vacuum.

Theory of the Death Drive as a Model for Speculative Philosophy: Land, Brassier, Negarestani, and Bataille

This paper deals with Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of the death drive from the perspective of speculative philosophy. For this purpose, three philosophers have been chosen: Nick Land, Ray Brassier, and Reza Negarestani. I claim that they gradually radicalised the Freudian thought: Land expanded it to capitalist economy and terrestrial geotrauma; Brassier shifted it towards a solar catastrophe and the prospect of extinction; Negarestani incorporated it into the exteriority of cosmic contingency. This way, Freud’s legacy emerges as a transcendental, epistemological and speculative instrument to tackle Meillassoux’s problem of correlation. I consider why this trajectory has ceased: I suggest a hypothesis that Bataille’s influence has not been overcome, especially in the case of Negarestani. I offer several vectors, according to which, Bataille could serve as an opportunity for openness to the Outside and a chance to continue the trajectory of the speculative death drive. I suggest that it is possible to reconsider Bataille as one of the precursors to the contemporary speculative thought.

Nihilism: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Now

AbstractIn this article, I discuss how Nietzsche’s critique of nihilism concerns the complicity between Christian morality and modern atheism. I unpack in what sense Schopenhauer’s ascetic denial of the will signifies a return to nothingness, what he calls thenihil negativum. I argue that Nietzsche’s formulation of nihilism specifically targets Schopenhauer’s pessimism as the culmination of the Western metaphysical tradition, the crucial stage of its intellectual history in which the scientific pursuit of truth finally unveils the asceticwill to nothingnessthat motivates it. I contend that Nietzsche’s critique of Schopenhauer anticipates current scholarly debates around the significance of thenihil negativumand offers a compelling objection against contemporary proponents of philosophical nihilism such as Eugene Thacker and Ray Brassier.

How does one Cosmotheoretically Respond to the Heat Death of the Universe?

AbstractThis article asks what an adequate philosophical response to the certainty of heat death would be: the moment in the timeline of the universe when all possible energy transformations have been actualized and life, thought, and action cease to be possible. Through a reading of Hans Jonas’s existential work on Gnosticism, the article begins by defining what is meant by the notions cosmotheoretical and cosmoethical as well as offering a description of what Jonas calls “cosmic nihilism.” After this, the article looks at two extreme philosophical responses to heat death. The first response examined is by Friedrich Nietzsche, whose eternal return is shown to be a reactive philosophical response to the linear entropic finitude that heat death implies. The second response is by Ray Brassier. Different from Nietzsche, Brassier is shown to affirm the extinction that heat death promises. However, his insistence that heat death partakes of the transcendentalandthe real, but not the ideal, is demonstrated to be amphibolous. In the final part of the article, I offer what could be called a thermodynamic architectonic response to the heat death of the universe, arguing that heat death should be understood as a guiding transcendental Idea in the Kantian sense of the term.

Программа преодоления корреляционизма в кни­ге «Несвязанное Ничто: просвещение и вымирание» Рэя Брассье

The article provides a critical assessment of the project to overcome correlationism pre­sented in Ray Brassier’s book “Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction”. Brassier is usually considered to be among the “speculative realists”, since the starting point of his philosophy in the 2000s was the struggle against correlationism. We argue that in terms of understanding correlationism, the philosopher was influenced by his colleague in speculative realism, Quentin Meillassoux. Meillassoux proposes to understand corre­lationism as philosophical approaches that focus on the relationship (correlation) be­tween the poles: subject – object, signifier – signified, noema – noesis, etc. Meillassoux reproaches correlationists for not thematizing a reality independent of thinking, without which correlation itself would not exist. Meillassoux’s pathos is justified, since correla­tionism narrows the field of philosophical research, but Meillassoux himself cannot get rid of correlationism. Ray Brassier undertakes this task, drawing on the ideas of Wilfrid Sellars, Alain Badiou, and especially François Laruelle. Some natural-science theories also receive an anti-correlationist interpretation in Brassier’s book. Thus, the philoso­pher appeals to modern neurophysiology and eliminativism, as well as to cosmological physics. Based on the results of the study, it is concluded that Ray Brassier fails to over­come correlationism. The philosopher does not offer a convincing anti-correlationist in­terpretation of the ideas of Sellars, Badiou and Laruelle, and also does not justify the ap­peal to modern natural science. In addition, we come to the conclusion that the desire to oppose correlationism is productive, and for this, philosophy should shift its attention from correlation to the everyday pressure of reality itself, which the human subject can­not get rid of.

The Eye is in Things: On Deleuze and Speculative Realism

ABSTRACT Speculative realists have directed a radical critique towards what they call “correlationism,” the stance according to which we only have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other. Both Quentin Meillassoux and Ray Brassier have used Gilles Deleuze’s ontology as a paradigmatic example of correlationism. Instead of defending Deleuze from this accusation, I argue that we need to accept it, but that the correlation is drastically transformed when we take into account Deleuze’s panpsychism. I hence contend that Deleuze is a panpsychist, grounding my argument in (a) his theory of contemplations and (b) his account of the universe as a cinema in itself. This changes everything, since a panpsychist type of correlationism avoids the main problem that leads both Meillassoux and Brassier to try to overcome correlationism, namely, that of the possibility of existence before and after humans.

Thinking Against Nature: Nature, Ideation, and Realism between Lovecraft and Shelling

The article develops the possibilities of several philosophical concepts to ground a philosophy of nature that would be capable of withstanding correlationist critics. The author refers to Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s Naturphilosophie and exposes productivity of the concept of self-productive Nature by the means of contemporary speculative capabilities. Precisely, the traditionally evaded by process philosophy and “naive” realism issue of production of thought of the one that is being produced itself. The means for the new philosophy of nature the author finds in weird fiction of Howard Phillips Lovecraft and in “non-philosophy” of François Laruelle as read by Ray Brassier. Lovecraft’s unnameable and Schellings’ unconditioned eternal not only stand against metaphysics in the process philosophy. They also provide the means to formalize the thought that emerges out of Nature. The author criticizes Meillassoux’s metaphysical hyper-Chaos and Deleuzian virtuality for their prioritization of thought. He confronts them with the thought about the horrible as a challenge, with the escalation of thought up to the ontology which is incomparable to humane. Schelling’s Nature becomes the basis for the possible realism beyond the limits of common sense. Deep, endless objects do not contradict Nature but are being produced out of it against our epistemological restrictions. Schelling’s transcendental realism and naturalism turn out as a Lovecraftian-Schellingian realism, the result of horribly speculative reason. This reason operates in the Real, it is produced from the very Nature itself. Its formalizations point at the objects of deep Nature’s cosmic processes instead of descending to the limits, established by Kant. An object in such a philosophy of nature is a representation of the suspension of boundless Nature. Nature that produces itself and explores itself in such suspensions. The Nature that is shrouded in long timescales.

The Metaphysics of Speculative Materialism

Much has been made of the so-called “empirical turn” of “speculative materialism” with thinkers like Quentin Meillassoux championing the material sciences as a new route to absolute reality. According to Meillassoux, the material sciences “provide philosophers access once again to the great outdoors, the absolute outside,” of reality in-itself. One might expect from such encomia the attempt to engage with the products of contemporary science in order to develop a new metaphysics; but, Meillassoux spends almost no time in this way, focusing instead on the form and methods of the material sciences over their actual accomplishments. As a result, his praise rings hollow and his metaphysics remains undeveloped. This paper examines what would happen if we were to take seriously his claims that a new metaphysics be developed from a scientific accounting of material reality by surveying the conclusions of contemporary physics. The paper ends by contrasting such a new speculative and materialistic metaphysics with the speculative nihilism of Ray Brassier.

Passive nihilism and ontotheology: A reply to Husbands on derivative temporality

AbstractConor Husbands’ defense and expansion of Elena Esposito's temporality of finance is a much-needed intervention. However, in this response essay, I will show a few of the fundamental weaknesses of Esposito's project, and by extension will highlight some shortcomings of Husbands’ defense-expansion. The point is not to dismiss either project; the goal is rather to bring attention to certain philosophical presuppositions that ground both, and that enclose each in what Markus Gabriel would call an ontotheological orientation. In short, Esposito and Husbands operate via an orientation that attempts to think ‘the world’ as an all-encompassing domain, despite claims to the contrary. How this occurs will be explained below, paying particular attention to the stakes of thinking from such an ontotheological orientation in and to the world. After first presenting Husbands’ argument, I develop some critiques of Esposito and Husbands via the work of Suhail Malik, Ray Brassier, Elie Ayache, Jon Roffe, and Quentin Meillassoux. I then open the aperture towards emerging trends in philosophy that contest the foundations upon which Esposito's project is built, in order to suggest more robust readings of finance and society. The work of Sergei Prozorov and Markus Gabriel will be the focus here, but these thinkers merely serve as stand-ins for larger trends in speculative- and neo-realism.

Speculative Realism in the Context of Contemporary Philosophical Thought

Basing on the philosophers that are primarily associated with speculative realism (Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Ray Brassier), the author of the article examines the place of this phenomenon in the context of contemporary philosophy. The discourses concerning these thinkers are structured according to the central tendencies, or motives, of the philosophical thought that is close to speculative realism. The research shows that these tendencies are as follow: realism, anti-Kantianism, materialism, anti-anthropocentrism, and philosophical attention to mathematical and natural sciences. Speculative realism is an ontological realism that affirms the possibility of human thought to know a thought-independent reality. Thus, it is anti-Kantian by its nature. However, for the most part, philosophers associated with speculative realism propose to transgress the Kantian frame through the radicalization of (post)Kantianism itself. Speculative realism is often considered along with new materialism, but this concept is too wide and polisemantic today to provide considerable clarification concerning the nature of speculative realism. The latter is also characterized by its opposition to anthropocentrism, but this relation is not homogenous among speculative realists and, moreover, is somehow paradoxical, as their speculative stance reserves for humans the noblest ability: to know a thought-independent reality. Finally, the attempt to philosophically engage with natural and mathematical sciences plays a significant role in most of the examined philosophical projects. Speculative realism is inscribed in the speculative shift, or speculative turn, that is happening in the contemporary continental philosophy. This shift is a change in the attitude of the philosophical community towards the questions about “reality in itself” and about the “Great Outdoors.” The relevance of such problems is being restored, and they are becoming the subject of emerging realistic and speculative projects.Manuscript received 06.09.2020

The Anomaly of Anomaly of Anomaly

The Anomaly of Anomaly of Anomaly

Refugees’ Dreams of the Past, Projected into the Future

Refugees’ Dreams of the Past, Projected into the Future

Esposito's temporality of finance: Endogeneity and revisability in derivative transactions

AbstractRecent years have seen greater interest in the theoretical foundations of abstract finance and their intersection with questions of philosophy and sociology. In particular, exchanges between authors such as Donald MacKenzie, Timothy Johnson, Elie Ayache, and others have debated the deterministic or contingent dynamics of markets, as well as their interdependency with the theories that purport to describe them. Working in this tradition, Elena Esposito raises a novel question in her 2011 book, The Future of Futures: could the exchange of derivative securities within financial markets entail not so much the provision of liquidity, but the transaction of time? In this article, I reconstruct Esposito's analysis, arguing that the proper response to this question should be affirmative. Particular emphasis is laid on what I take to be the two fundamental and controversial premises which support this argument: first, the endogeneity of time-relations involved in financial markets; and second, the revisability of these time- relations. The advantage of recasting Esposito's position in this way is the defence it enables against various criticisms articulated in theory and philosophy circles, such as those of Ray Brassier. Finally, I discuss the significance of Esposito's theory, not only for this class of financial transactions, but also for certain issues in the philosophy of time.

Laruelle Qua Stiegler: On Non-Marxism and the Transindividual

Alexander R. Galloway and Jason R. LaRiviére’s article “Compression in Philosophy” seeks to pose François Laruelle’s engagement with metaphysics against Bernard Stiegler’s epistemological rendering of idealism. Identifying Laruelle as the theorist of genericity, through which mankind and the world are identified through an index of “opacity,” the authors argue that Laruelle does away with all deleterious philosophical “data.” Laruelle’s generic immanence is posed against Stiegler’s process of retention and discretization, as Galloway and LaRiviére argue that Stiegler’s philosophy seeks to reveal an enchanted natural world through the development of noesis. By further developing Laruelle and Stiegler’s Marxian projects, I seek to demonstrate the limits of this vantage of “compression.” In turn, I also seek to create further bricolage between Laruelle and Stiegler while also further elaborating on their distinct engagement(s) with Marx, offering the mold of synthesis as an alternative to compression when considering Stiegler’s work on transindividuation. In turn, this paper seeks to survey some of the contemporary theorists drawing from Stiegler (Yuk Hui, Alexander Wilson and Daniel Ross) and Laruelle (Anne-Françoise Schmidt, Gilles Grelet, Ray Brassier, Katerina Kolozova, John Ó Maoilearca and Jonathan Fardy) to examine political discourse regarding the posthuman and non-human, with a particular interest in Kolozova’s unified theory of standard philosophy and Capital.
 Author(s): Ekin Erkan
 Title (English): Laruelle Qua Stiegler: On Non-Marxism and the Transindividual
 Journal Reference: Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 16, No. 1-2 (Summer - Winter 2019)
 Publisher: Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities - Skopje
 Page Range: 48-66
 Page Count: 19
 Citation (English): Ekin Erkan, “Laruelle Qua Stiegler: On Non-Marxism and the Transindividual,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 16, No. 1-2 (Summer - Winter 2019): 48-66.

Promethean and Posthuman Freedom: Brassier on Improvisation and Time

Ray Brassier's "Unfree Improvisation/Compulsive Freedom" (written for the 2013 collaboration with Basque noise artist Mattin at Glasgow's Tramway) is a terse but insightful discussion of the notion of freedom in improvisation. He argues that we should view freedom not as the determination of an act from outside the causal order, but as the reflective self-determination by action within the causal order. This requires a system that acts in conformity to rules but can represent and modify these rules with implications for its future behaviour.Brassier does not provide a detailed account of how self-determination works in improvisation. His text implies that the act of improvisation involves an encounter between rule-governed rationality and idiomatic patterns or causes but does not specify how such rules operate in music, what their nature is or how the encounter between rules and more rudimentary “pattern-governed” behaviour occurs.I will argue that, in any case, there are no such rules to be had. Instead, claims about what is permissible or implied in musical processes index highly-context sensitive perceptual and affective responses to musical events. I develop this picture in the light of recent accounts of predictive processing and active inference in cognitive science.This account provides an alternate way of expressing Brassier’s remarks on the relationship between music and history in “Unfree Improvisation” one that eschews normative discourse in favour of an ontology of social and biological assemblages, their affects, and the processes they entrain.This adjustment is of more than aesthetic interest. Brassier’s text suggests that the temporality of the improvising act models an insurgent relation to time: specifically, the remorseless temporality explored in his writings on Prometheanism and Radical Enlightenment. I will conclude by using use this analogy to elaborate the idea of a posthuman agency adapted to a hypermodern milieu of self-augmenting technological change.

Tract(atus) 23: Theory Is Waiting

Author(s): Gilles Grelet
 Title (French): Tract(atus) 23: Theory Is Waiting
 Translated by (French to English): Ray Brassier
 Journal Reference: Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 15, No. 1-2 (Summer 2018)
 Publisher: Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities – Skopje 
 Page Range: 109
 Page Count: 1
 Citation (English): Gilles Grelet, “Tract(atus) 23: Theory Is Waiting,” translated from the French by Ray Brassier, Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 15, No. 1-2 (Summer 2018): 109.

Giving an Identity: Coordinates of Invention. Heresy and Dissidence Among Non-Philosophers

Not known enough for his former publications in philosophy, François Laruelle’s attempt to institute a democratic field for all hermeneutic content and every philosophical knowledge is not that easy to re-enact starting from the Nietzschean and Levinassian apparatus of his early thought, and considering the refusal of reciprocity that is correlated with his theory of Unilaterality. This difficulty also manifests in the résumé of his philosophical career. Though presented for a long time as solitary, Laruelle recently acknowledged that his work had been built within the dynamic of colleagues and disciples as well. From there, an insight on the intersubjective past of non-philosophy will unfold the coextensive network of affects that are part of its construction as a matrix of Democracy. And since Heresy is one of the major figures of Laruelle’s thought, it is interesting to pay attention to how dissidences have been dealt with in his own discourse and posture while non-philosophy was emerging as an intersubjective assemblage. Two historical characters will be considered: Serge Valdinoci, an early collaborator in the 1980s, who built a specific method of immanence, europanalysis, and who distanced himself from non-philosophy at the turning of Philosophy III; and Gilles Grelet, a prominent disciple in the 1990s, who co-founded Organisation Non-Philosophique Internationale (ONPhI) with Ray Brassier, and who played such a major role in non-philosophy that it drove Laruelle to write Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy.
 Author(s): Narciso Aksayam
 Title (English): Giving an Identity: Coordinates of Invention. Heresy and Dissidence Among Non-Philosophers
 Journal Reference: Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 15, No. 1-2 (Summer 2018)
 Publisher: Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities – Skopje 
 Page Range: 118-156
 Page Count: 39
 Citation (English): Narciso Aksayam, “Giving an Identity: Coordinates of Invention. Heresy and Dissidence Among Non-Philosophers,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 15, No. 1-2 (Summer 2018): 118-156.

“The Sea, Not the Ocean”: Anthropocene Fiction and the Memory of (Non)human Life

Starting from the observation that the notion of the Anthropocene invites us to alter the ways in which we imagine human life (and the relations between different human lives), this essay argues that transnational accounts of literature and culture—in the fairly new field of oceanic studies, for instance—need to expand their scope from intercultural relations to include the relationships between different (human) forms of life and (human as well as nonhuman) life forms. The essay develops this argument through a dialogue between J. M. Ledgard's planetary novel Submergence from 2011 and contemporary theories of the posthuman (Ray Brassier, Eugene Thacker) and the Anthropocene (Ian Baucom, Dipesh Chakrabarty), in order to demonstrate that the literary novel has a vital role to play in the imagining of new forms of (non)human relatedness. Developing Submergence's distinction between the (radically nonhuman) ocean and the (human-related) sea, the essay puts forward the argument that human life in the Anthropocene is marked by what the essay theorizes, with the help of Emmanuel Levinas, Giorgio Agamben, and Walter Benjamin, as “immemorial life”: a relation to radically nonhuman life forms that cannot be actualized in the imagining and remembering of human life in the Anthropocene.

The hum of the Earth: From geomythology to epistemological leaps via art (draft for a future art practise)

Abstract The Hum is a phenomenon that only very few people experience, but for those this invasive low frequency humming, rumbling or droning noise is highly intrusive. The cause for the phenomenon has been widely speculated over four decades, and it looks like there are many valid reasons for it. In 2015 scientific researchers found out that one instance of the Hum originates from the movement and pressure of giant, slow-moving waves. The Hum acts as an example in this article to discuss art’s potential to deal with the human relation to what is alien to human perception – namely, natural phenomena. To deal with the alien, humans construct geomyths, which are as important in binding the human with nature as science – perhaps even more. I will bring in Steve Goodman’s work on vibrational force to bring depth into the Hum as a phenomenon. By looking more closely into Iain Hamilton Grant’s work on Schelling and Ray Brassier’s work on Sellars I will investigate what kind of methods art might learn from geomythology and epistemology for coexisting with that which is alien to human perception.

Is IR going extinct?

A global extinction crisis may threaten the survival of most existing life forms. Influential discourses of ‘existential risk’ suggest that human extinction is a real possibility, while several decades of evidence from conservation biology suggests that the Earth may be entering a ‘sixth mass extinction event’. These conditions threaten the possibilities of survival and security that are central to most branches of International Relations. However, this discipline lacks a framework for addressing (mass) extinction. From notions of ‘nuclear winter’ and ‘omnicide’ to contemporary discourses on catastrophe, International Relations thinking has treated extinction as a superlative of death. This is a profound category mistake: extinction needs to be understood not in the ontic terms of life and death, but rather in the ontological context of be(com)ing and negation. Drawing on the work of theorists of the ‘inhuman’ such as Quentin Meillassoux, Claire Colebrook, Ray Brassier, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Nigel Clark, this article provides a pathway for thinking beyond existing horizons of survival and imagines a profound transformation of International Relations. Specifically, it outlines a mode of cosmopolitics that responds to the element of the inhuman and the forces of extinction. Rather than capitulating to narratives of tragedy, this cosmopolitics would make it possible to think beyond the restrictions of existing norms of ‘humanity’ to embrace an ethics of gratitude and to welcome the possibility of new worlds, even in the face of finitude.