Ray Brassier > Quotes

“Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity.”
― Ray Brassier

“There is no nature worth revering or rejoining; there is no self to be re-enthroned as captain of its own fate; there is no future worth working towards or hoping for.”
― Ray Brassier

“Nietzsche saw that ultimately the problem of nihilism is the problem of what to do with time: Why keep investing in the future when there is no longer any transcendental guarantor, a positive end of time as ultimate reconciliation or redemption, ensuring a pay-off for this investment? Nietzsche's solution — his attempted overcoming of nihilism — consists in affirming the senselessness of becoming as such — all becoming, without reservation or discrimination. The affirmation of eternal recurrence is amor fati: the love of fate. It's an old quandary: either learn to love fate or learn to transform it. To affirm fate is to let time do whatever it will with us, but in such a way that our will might coincide with time's. The principal contention of my book, and the point at which it diverges most fundamentally from Nietzsche, is that nihilism is not the negation of truth, but rather the truth of negation, and the truth of negation is transformative.”
― Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction

“Hope is reactionary: it cocoons actuality in the gossamer of the tolerable, dulling the thirst for change. Despair is revolutionary: it grinds the knife-edge of the intolerable against the whetstone of actuality, sparking the will to change. Whoever tolerates the present will never risk everything to change it. Only those who realize they have no future left to lose will be willing to stake everything on the total transformation of the present; a transformation in which every envisageable future is abolished, the better to invite the facelessness of what will come. The only appropriate mode of thinking for a culture on the edge of extinction is the thinking that stimulates pain.”
― Ray Brassier

“If you can't tell the difference between the extermination of a people and the use of a concept, you're an imbecile.”
― Ray Brassier

“Real negativity splits the logos from within, while from without it splits signification from reality.”
― Ray Brassier

“Human history unfolds catastrophically, in a ceaselessly reiterated overturning of origin and end driven by the twin pulses of libidinal repetition and social reproduction.”
― Ray Brassier

“Everything is dead already. Solar death is catastrophic because it vitiates ontological temporality as configured in terms of philosophical questioning’s constitutive horizonal relationship to the future. But far from lying in wait for us in the far distant future, on the other side of the terrestrial horizon, the solar catastrophe needs to be grasped as something that has already happened; as the aboriginal trauma driving the history of terrestrial life as an elaborately circuitous detour from stellar death. Terrestrial history occurs between the simultaneous strophes of a death which is at once earlier than the birth of the first unicellular organism, and later than the extinction of the last multicellular animal.”
― Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction

“A change of body is just a way of postponing thought’s inevitable encounter with the death that drives it in the form of the will to know. And a change of horizon is just a means of occluding the transcendental scope of extinction, precisely insofar as it levels the difference between life and death, time and space, revoking the ontological potency attributed to temporalizing thought in its alleged invulnerability to physical death.”
― Ray Brassier

“Natural science produces ancestral statements, such as that the universe is roughly 13.7 billion years old, that the earth formed roughly 4.5 billion years ago, that life developed on earth approximately 3.5 billion years ago, and that the earliest ancestors of the genus Homo emerged about 2 million years ago. Yet it is also generating an ever-increasing number of ‘descendent’ statements, such as that the Milky Way will collide with the Andromeda galaxy in 3 billion years; that the earth will be incinerated by the sun 4 billions years hence; that all the stars in the universe will stop shining in 100 trillion years; and that eventually, one trillion, trillion, trillion years from now, all matter in the cosmos will disintegrate into unbound elementary particles. Philosophers should be more astonished by such statements than they seem to be, for they present a serious problem for post-Kantian philosophy.”
― Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction

“Ultimately, it is difficult to divorce the positive evaluation of suffering from the claim that suffering means something, in accordance with the strictures which the manifest image imposes upon our understanding of meaning. But to invest suffering with the varieties of ‘meaning’ concomitant with the manifest image is to automatically reinscribe woe into a spiritual calculus which subordinates present suffering to some recollected or longed-for happiness. By way of contrast, to acknowledge the meaninglessness of suffering is already to challenge the authority of the manifest image, since it is precisely its senselessness that renders woe resistant to redemptive valuation. Once the senselessness of suffering has been acknowledged, it becomes more apposite to insist that ‘woe is deeper than heart’s ecstasy’. This of course would be contrary to the explicitly stated goal of Nietzsche’s transvaluation, viz., that suffering no longer be counted as an objection to life. Nevertheless, unlike its affirmative antithesis, to which, as we shall see below, Nietzsche attributes a redemptive function vis-à-vis suffering, it is precisely the refusal to affirm or redeem woe that challenges the authority of the manifest image.”
― Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction