by Thom Hamer In the vast majority of cases, the existential weight of death is merely supervenient upon another matter: the threat of the negative. There is a kind of salience to the negativity inherent in death, with its corresponding dissolution of the self and perhaps even of experience per se. This is by far the predominant point of gravity in discourse around nothingness, but the existential problem at the heart of mortality should not be restricted to physical death. Indeed, the nullificatory logic inherent in death is omnipresent in life from a very young age, in experiences rangi ..read more

What is it all for? Everyone at least once in their lives enters this state of doubt—if you haven’t yet, watch the road ahead before it will jump out like a frantic deer and catch you by surprise. Existential questions can arise in anyone, whatever your age, educational background or socioeconomic status. They typically revolve around issues that are fundamental to life as such: death, meaning, freedom and consciousness, to name a few. How should we deal with the weight of all these things? There’s no shame in struggling. In fact, living life is notoriously difficult. It is rife with absurdity ..read more

by Thom Hamer It is at once petrifying and liberating—life flashing before one’s eyes. Suddenly, what was a matter of quotidian gravity becomes grave no more, but frivolous instead; and life steers into more purposive directions as if, paradoxically, of its own accord. In the face of death, we change radically. One is coaxed into reconsidering the meaning of one’s life and, especially, the extent to which one fails to live up to it—existential guilt. Everyone knows about this sudden transparency in the vicinity of death. If not they themselves, then someone near them has had a near-death ..read more

Tune in to the Metamodern Festival: a free online festival on contemporary art and culture on May 7th 2022, open to academics, artists and the general public alike. WHAT IS METAMODERNISM? The heyday of postmodernity is over. But what’s next? How should we understand the social condition that we’re in? Metamodernism is a term that aims to describe our contemporary condition: an age defined by the internet, reinvigorated fanaticism and a new sincerity, among other things. Essentially, metamodernism combines postmodern scepticism with the frenetic vigo ..read more

In Fight Club, both the book (1996) and the film (1999), death is ubiquitous. The first scene is the protagonist being held at gunpoint, almost swallowing the loaded pistol. Going back in time from this flashforward, it turns out that he has been suffering from insomnia. This leads him to join cancer support groups, in which he is allowed to experience his insomniac suffering, intimately, among the dying. Not unlike Siddhartha Gautama’s first step toward enlightenment, he goes beyond the vague vacuity of his life, to see death and decay in their unveiled brutality. Later, the protagonist is ur ..read more

It is no rarity to be feeling worthless. Nothing special; nothing new under the sun. For, contemplate the highly specific space you occupy, in space no less than in time, and think, think it over in all earnestness, without any Stockholm Syndrome behind the evaluation of your life, think about the radius of influence you have, the influence that any individual has for that matter. Will you not be crushed under the weight of that thought alone? There’s no doubt to it: we mean something. We bring joy to our families, friends and partners. The projects that we undertake are by no means meaningles ..read more

All-too-often, despite this maniacal energy and ambition and sheer love of being active and productive, I am overcome by inertia. My limbs turn limp. My head weighs on my body like a boulder of quartz, only vaguely translucent. It is not my desire to feel thus. It’s not in my interest. Come to think of it, this paradoxical state of mind exemplifies my very condition, that fuck-up anthropology of self-sabotage – homo sapiens as the “ungrateful biped.”[1] We are not rational. On the contrary, we progress far beyond stupid futilities, born from ignorance and lack and all the benign ineptitudes th ..read more

Don’t Look Up is the movie of a generation. Grown up in an absurd media landscape, characterized by superficiality, irony, informational fragmentation and all those postmodern qualities, all the while being haunted by major catastrophes like climate change and terrorism, we are in search of something. What it is, we don’t really know, but we need to do something. Meanwhile, our institutions are still under the incompetent yoke of postmodernity. Adam McKay’s movie embodies this struggle, expressing climate change anxieties, amplified through the genre of dark comedy. ATYPICAL DARK COMEDY This i ..read more

In the gradually unfolding discourse around the metamodern, a terminological distinction is vital: that between metamodernism and metamodernity. Although both terms refer to a “structure of feeling”[1] that is becoming more and more pervasive since the 2000s, they are fundamentally different in meaning. The distinction is parallel to that between postmodernism and postmodernity, despite the fact that there, too, the conceptual border is crossed on a regular basis. Such terminological transgression is committed even in one of the most influential critiques of postmodernity, Frederic Jameson’s P ..read more

My blog has been selected as number 66 in the Top 100 Philosophy Blogs on Feedspot! Find some of my most recent articles below! RECENT ARTICLES Nitegeka: Formalism and Figuration in the Ode to Black Series10 January 2022 Pascallian Absurdism in Turgenev6 January 2022 Sloth, Superfluity and Cognitive Dissonance in Goncharov’s Oblomov2 January 2022 The Power of the Scribble29 December 2021 Irony in the Concept of Metafiction21 December 2021 Nietzschean Blasphemy in Beckett’s Endgame (1957)17 December 2021 Spatiotemporal Insignificance in Turgenev’s Diary of a Superfluous Man13 Dec ..read more