In a couple of senses, nihilism and anti-humanism might be said to define our present moment. On the one hand, we can read the actions of many political leaders and economic elites as marked by a type of nihilism. Even nominal commitments to truth and to the common good, it seems, have been jettisoned in favor of post-truth obscurantism and all-encompassing market logics. On the other hand, we might read popular forms of nihilism or anti-humanism as exhausted responses to the indifferently hostile, and apparently immovable, systems that structure human life: capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, heteronormativity, nationalism, the state. As truth becomes politically impotent and liberal democracy proves incapable of fulfilling its promises, many begin to see politics as inherently meaningless and, interpellated by a meaningless system, become nihilistic political subjects. This negativity finds particular expression in popular culture, with examples ranging from the hedonistic nihilism and anti-humanism of Grandpa Rick in the popular television show Rick and Morty to the philosophical pessimism and antinatalism of True Detective’s Rust Cohl.
While expressions of nihilism, pessimism, and anti-humanism often lack the coherence of a formal academic field, this sense of exhaustion and frustration in the face of collapsing political myths has been taken up by a range of scholars. A significant example is Lauren Berlant’s notion of “cruel optimism,” a term used to describe instances in which our optimistic attachments are precisely what prevents us from flourishing. We might also look to Calvin Warren’s recent work on black nihilism and political apostasy which, pivoting on similar claims about how optimism can betray us, suggests, paradoxically, that our only hope is the nihilistic rejection of all political hope. This broadly pessimistic impulse finds significant elaboration within critical trends like afro-pessimism, accelerationism, and the focus on negative affects within affect studies. What these diverse approaches to social, political, and cultural criticism have in common is an animating pessimism that emerges from the seemingly intractable disappointments of contemporary political life. The aim of this panel is to explore this animating pessimism—what Raymond Williams might call a “structure of feeling”—and to take seriously the nihilistic and anti-humanistic sensibilities that reverberate throughout contemporary culture and thought.
To open this discussion, David Kumler examines nihilistic and anti-humanistic impulses within contemporary horror fiction, specifically taking up Victor LaValle’s 2016 Lovecraftian horror novel The Ballad of Black Tom. While a surface-read of the novel reveals a pointed commentary on H. P. Lovecraft’s virulent and vocal racism, Kumler reads LaValle’s critique as deeper than this, undermining not merely the obvious aspects of Lovecraft’s racial hatred but also Lovecraft’s (often disavowed) humanism. While one might debate the degree to which Lovecraft was a humanist, it’s nevertheless true that his fiction pivots on a very humanistic fear: For Lovecraft, the most horrifying thought is that, in the scheme of the cosmos, humans don’t matter. LaValle turns this notion on its head, suggesting that human insignificance is precisely where hope begins. Far from mere apathy, LaValle entertains the notion that active political nihilism can represent a proto-revolutionary impulse that, in accelerating the collapse of myth, breaks our cruelly optimistic investments and makes possible new forms of political participation and subject formation.
As Mark Fisher reminds us, when we enjoy anti-capitalist or otherwise revolutionary narratives, we run the risk of allowing culture to perform our resistance for us, enabling us to feel revolutionary feelings without actually performing revolutionary actions. In our next presentation, Rachel Kunert-Graf draws on Bong Joon-Ho’s 2013 film Snowpiercer to suggest a similar critique, reminding us that the very idea of revolution may be nothing more than a neo-liberal fantasy, a fantasy of individual free-choice that conditions us to tolerate our own exploitation and makes us complicit in the exploitation of others. It is often true that revolutionary fantasies amount to little more than cruel optimism. Given this bleak possibility, Kunert-Graf asks whether we might find spaces for optimism that is not cruel and potentialities that are not captured by the circular logics of revolutionary fantasy, suggesting that such possibilities can only emerge once we stop mistaking familiarity for safety or, worse, for justice.
If, as Kunert-Graf suggests, resistance can easily become a mechanism of control, this is also true for nihilism and anti-humanism. Our final presentation thus takes as its starting point not the (potentially) proto-revolutionary nihilism of the multitude but, rather, the cruel and solipsistic nihilism of the despot. Through a reading of Ridley Scott’s 2017 Alien: Covenant, Michael Garcia examines the figure of the monstrous solipsist, a familiar figure not only in literary and religious traditions, but also in the real world of dictators, moral nihilists, and totalitarian societies. Garcia’s discussion reminds us that, even as the category of the human reproduces structures of domination, narcissistic anti-humanism can produce the same, or worse, results. Garcia’s presentation thus posits a crucial concluding question for this panel: Given our nihilistic and anti-humanistic moment, how ought we to understand the obligations of sentient beings to other sentient beings—especially of the powerful to those with less power?
Each panelist will present for 18 minutes, allowing for 15 minutes of unstructured discussion.
Ultimately, while nihilism, pessimism, and anti-humanism are often read at best as defeatist and at worst as social diseases, this panel takes up these forms of political negativity and asks how they might serve as the basis for positive political action and solidarity.