Following along with the theme of anti-humanism, we will explore the piece The Nihilist as Not-Man by Stefan Bolea. Through the works of three different authors, one familiar to this group, and two less so, Bolea presents an idea of the nihilist subject as something certainly not-human, which is in contrast to Nietzsche's ubermensch. The writer of this post will be curious to hear which take each attendant of #nrg finds resonant.
at 11 UTC on jitsi! You can email bugs for the link
For next session we will be continuing with Cosmic Pessimism, and diving deeper into this poetic piece. If you missed last week you could definitely read the whole thing and come this week, and you may want to do so because this piece is very good (imo) and the conversation it provoked has been really interesting. As always email bugs [at} ni.hil.ist for the room invite code, or message me on mastodon, or get it from a friend!
Up next for reading group is a both meticulously and totally arbitrarily selected which somehow nicely lines up with the rest of our reading. Our next piece is Cosmic Pessimism by Eugene Thacker. We will be splitting this reading over 2 weeks, reading up to page 44 for next week (don't worry, the font is big, the pages are small, and there's lots of images). Hope to see you there :)
Reading: Chapter 3: Concepts, Intellectuals, Disobedience, Chapter 4: The Beiblatt: Individualist Anarchism and the Grotesque, and the Epilogue: Individualist Anarchism in the Twenty-First Century.
Theanarchistlibrary.org link
Meeting time: May 29th, 6pm CST
Get the jitsi link from bugs! (bugs) Ⓐni.hil.ist
For our next reading, we will begin Constantin Parvulescu's “The Individualist Anarchist Discourse of Early Interwar Germany.” This text lands us at the intersection of anarchism and bohemianism in Weimar Berlin: the years between two catastrophic wars. It focuses on the journal “Der Einzige,” and its contributors who were progenitors of many of the ideas we have been discussing thus far in the reading group. For anyone critical of “organized community, revolutionary practices and the idea of mobilization,” and is enticed by an “invitation to disobedient reading, creation and active forgetting...a vision of communal living centered on antihumanism, singularity and individual revolt.” We are looking to learn from the stories of these lesser-known thinkers, whose ideas are still resonanting 100 years later.
First reading: Introduction and Chapter 1
Theanarchistlibrary.org link
Meeting time: May 15th, 6pm CST
Get the jitsi link from bugs! (bugs) Ⓐni.hil.ist
The next part of our literary adventure finds us entering some very roughly mapped waters, ones which we could call anti-social magic, or egoist spirituality, though those titles don't speak to the contents at all.