Evil Spirits : Nihilism and the Fate of Modernity

by Edited by Gary Banham and Charlie Blake

• ISBN13: 9780719056437
• ISBN10: 0719056438
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2001-01-06
• Publisher: Manchester University Press

Summary

Incorporating a diversity of approaches from a variety of disciplines, this book provides a major reassessment of the question of nihilism in modernity and interrogates this through the growing interest in angels and demons in contemporary philosophy. The collection examines the uncanny return of angelic and demonic principles in current cultural production and thinking and aims to show that the repression of thought about spiritual entities at the onset of modernity is linked to the appearance of a new form of evil that manifests itself through nihilism.

Author Biography

Gary Banham is Lecturer in Philosophy at Bolton Institute of Higher Education.

Charlie Blake is Lecturer in English and Cultural Studies at University College, Northampton.

Table of Contents

List of contributors	viii
Acknowledgements	x
Introduction	1	(6)
Gary Banham
Charlie Blake
Mourning Satan	7	(15)
Gary Banham
Kierkegaard's writing machines: epistemotopology of the demon	22	(18)
Joanna Hodge
The God of Evil	40	(12)
Alphonso Lingis
The gravity of angels: space, time and the ecstasy of annihiliation	52	(20)
Charlie Blake
Interminable intensity: Nietzsche's demonic nihilism	72	(17)
Jill Marsden
`An angel on all fours': `inverts' and their dogs	89	(18)
Diane Morgan
Deleuze and the threat of demonic nihilism	107	(17)
James Williams
Spectropoiesis and rhizomatics: learning to live with death and demons	124	(22)
Keith Ansell Pearson
Freud's spectres	146	(19)
Antony Easthope
Unfamiliar haunts: the primitive ontology of Heidegger's Der Spiegel interview	165	(30)
Daniel Conway
The spiritual daylight of the present: Hegel, Blake and the advent of spirit	195	(9)
Howard Caygill
The contemporary city of angels	204	(19)
Graham Ward
Index	223