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I gave up on this book, By the second chapter I had no idea how the argument was meant to be working. Frustrating, as usually I can reconstruct something or other: perhaps the issue here was my lack of preparation / grounding in the literature.

But you can always skip to the last page:

the subject of philosophy must also recognise that he or she is already dead.

Is that the claim that philosophy can't or has never made sense of life? It would be a lie to say I sympathise with the claim: but may I ask what philosophers do or would say about it?

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    Was it Nietzsche that said Eastern philosophies were fatalistic? I read somewhere that Ben-Habib groused that European philosophy was more than half in love with death; I suppose this is one reason why I like Arendt - instead of theorising about mortality, she theorises on natality: that to be human, is to always have the capacity to start anew. – Mozibur Ullah Sep 27 '15 at 03:58

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Gee, no spoiler alert? I am reading "Nihil Unbound" at present, slowly, and about two-thirds done, so not really qualified to answer. It does need context in relation to Badiou and Meillassoux, with whom I'm scarcely familiar, and it certainly can get baffling.

The "death of the subject" is, of course, an old theme in the Continental tradition, and the pronouns lead me to assume Brassier is referring to such. First, it refers not to the "topic" but to whatever transcendental identity observes and constructs the "object" or "nature." The active, subjective equivalent of "substance," we might say. And known colloquially as the "human mind."

This unifying "subject" has presumably been "dying" ever since Hume's analysis of the "self," eroded and displaced by Copernicus, Marx, Darwin, etc., up to Derrida and company. At the same time, a strange inversion has taken place beginning with Kant. If there is no knowable "mind-independent" reality, then all of reality must in some way be indexed to mind, thus placing this disintegrating "subject" alone at the center of the universe. A void surrounded by an anthropocentric bubble. Philosophy as a big selfie stick. This is the delusion the "new realists," post-humanists, and radical ecologists want to reject.

Referring to Wilfred Sellars, Brassier points out the radical incommensurability of the phenomenal image of "man in the world" and the scientific image of man as a self-hallucinating cloud of neurons, atoms, cells, etc. As far as I get it, he sees the latter and the expansion of science as our "true being" yet one that steadily annihilates what we have called "meaning" or "humanity."

This is way too simplified. But he is attempting some unusual epistemological and logical contortions in the effort to arrive at a mind-independent foundation that is not a return to some pre-Kantian "naive" realism.

As to the quote.That our understanding of "ourselves" as coherent beings is "already dead" could be taken as a simple technological reality. We literally "live" inside a scientific-technical-mathematical support structure whose operating "truth" is an inhuman universe utterly indifferent to "human" existence and "already" in that sense mind-independent. The "view from nowhere" that science it criticized for holding is in fact the reality or "nowhere" we are creating.

It is an interesting radicalization of science. I'm also, personally, reading a bit of Marx into it. It reminds me of the way "living labor," including mental labor, transforms itself into the "dead capital" that replaces it. That's my quick take so far, but I'll have to grind on.

Nelson Alexander
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