Violence and nihilism / edited by Luis Aguiar de Sousa, Paolo Stellino.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Aguiar de Sousa, Luís, editor.

Stellino, Paolo, editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Nihilism (Philosophy).

Violence.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (330 p.)

Place of Publication:

Berlin ; Boston : De Gruyter, [2022]

Summary:

Nihilism seems to be per definition linked to violence. Indeed, if the nihilist is a person who acknowledges no moral or religious authority, then what does stop him from committing any kind of crime? Dostoevsky precisely called attention to this danger: if there is no God and no immortality of the soul, then everything is permitted, even anthropophagy. Nietzsche, too, emphasised, although in different terms, the consequences deriving from the death of God and the collapse of Judeo-Christian morality. This context shaped the way in which philosophers, writers and artists thought about violence, in its different manifestations, during the 20th century. The goal of this interdisciplinary volume is to explore the various modern and contemporary configurations of the link between violence and nihilism as understood by philosophers and artists (in both literature and film).

Contents:

Frontmatter

Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

Part 1: Philosophy and Politics

Nihilism and Violence from Plato to Arendt

Kierkegaard’s Aesthetic Stage and the Ideology of Nihilism

“To smear his boots with the other’s fat”: Conscious and Unconscious Violence

Cruelty, Bad Conscience, and the Sovereign Individual in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality

Walter Benjamin’s Media Theory in the Times of Platform Nihilism

‘Like ants’: The Mafia’s Necropolitics as a Paradigm of Nihilistic Violence

Against the Kinship: State, Terror, Nihilism

Part 2: Literature and Film

Nihilism in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature and Thought

Violence, Evil and Nihilism: Nietzschean Traces in Guimarães Rosa’s Grande Sertão: Veredas

Signifying Nothing? Nihilism, Violence, and the Sound/Silence Dynamic in Cinema

Aestheticizing Murder: Hitchcock’s Rope, Nietzsche, and the Alleged Right to Crime of Superior Individuals

Nihilism, Violence, and the Films of Michael Haneke

“Supposing Truth is a Woman?”: Nihilism and Violence in Nietzsche’s The Antichrist and Von Trier’s Antichrist

“Is Something Funny, Asshole?”: Joker’s Nihilist Violence

Notes on the Contributors

Names index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

3-11-069921-4