Nihilism Now!

For too long contemporary thought has been dominated by a depressed 'what is to be done?'. In this 'postmodern' world all is regarded to be in vain, nothing is deemed real, nothing new is seen under the sun. Such a lament is easily confounded with an apathetic reluctance to think engagedly. This volume aims to inspire a return to the energetics of Nietzsche's prose and the critical intensity of his approach to nihilism and to give back to the future its rightful futurity. The contributors draw on the variety of topical issues including the future of life, the nature of life-forms, the techno-sciences, the body and religion as a way of tackling the question of nihilism's pertinence to us now. They take as their lead Nietzsche's suggestion that this world is a 'monster of energy, without beginning or end' without, for all that, naively assuming that this world possesses an infinite novelty or miraculous power of regeneration. Neither dully resigned to uninventive and ultimately entropic repetition of the same, nor believing in an inexhaustible fund of resources which will inevitably save the world from destruction, this collection hopes to encourage debate on the meaning of value at the begining of the new millennium.