CAPAS RESEARCH PROJECT - Amin Samman Nihilism and the ends of finance
Nihilism provides a unique vantage point on contemporary forms of apocalyptic imagination, foregrounding their affective dimension and inviting us to relate such moods to the broader context in which they take shape. Nietzsche did this for the late nineteenth century with his concept of “European nihilism”, linking widespread malaise to the self-dissolution of the Platonic-Christian worldview—but what about the present day? To the extent that our time is once again a moment of disorientation and despair, what is it about the contemporary world that makes us engage it through the thought of its falsification, destruction, or transcendence? In this project, “financial nihilism” is proposed as a heuristic for theorizing relations between the diverse worlds of financial capitalism and the forms of apocalyptic nihilism that accompany these. This will entail two phases of research. The first will focus on conceptions of nihilism, seeking to develop a new typology that clarifies the forms of apocalypse attached to nihilism over the centuries. The second phase will bring this typology into conversation with contemporary accounts of finance and financial society, using this as a springboard for exploring the financialization of apocalyptic nihilism in the twenty-first century.