Thoughts?

No he likes Deleuze. Nihil Unbound is Brassier taking like 10 philosophers of the past 200 years, explaining the nihilist currents in their thought and then saying 'but look- we can make it even more nihilist, these guys were too optimistic'

sounds like an edgelord. how is deleuze a nihilist?

as someone who studies this horseshit for a living i feel a tiny iota of smugness that this is trivially easy to understand but mostly anger that he's taking something that could be explained to a layperson reasonably well and not only failing to translate it into simpler terms, but actually adding a bunch of little flourishes that make it more opaque for no reason

what i never understood about this style is this: you're ostensibly writing for other people who understand kant and deleuze. those people know both kant and deleuze, and can reflexively, procedurally translate all the highfalutin shit into more prosaic mental imagery and simpler terms. so that person is going to SEE all the gay little flourishes you're doing, right? like i can see brassier's? but the effect of that isn't for me to go,
>Ah, ah yes, quite erudite, Brassier. Nice work.
it's for me to go
>....OK. Why did you add a bunch of gay flourishes.

it's like if you know ancient greek and read something by another guy who reads ancient greek. that's impressive to lots of laypeople, but within the context of that situation, you're just two specialists who have the same specialty. isn't it intuitively more impressive TO ANOTHER SPECIALIST to get to the fucking point and show that you're skillful at excising the wheat from the chaff? wouldn't the measure of skill be how quickly you could cut to the chase, manipulate the essential elements in a complex passage or analysis, without being distracted by all the superfluities that WOULD impress a layperson?

you wouldn't show off your snazzy knowledge of the superfluities to another guy who can do the same fucking thing. he'd just be like "yeah dude, we both know that.. i can do the same thing you're doing, so why are 'performing' for me? why are you doing these parlour tricks? they're clearly not for me, because i can do them too, and see how factitious they are as YOU do them. but they clearly aren't for the absent layperson who would never read this article either, because he'd be impressed by you just flatly stating 'i read greek'. so who are you performing for??"

there is a real joy in reading something generally considered difficult, like heidegger let's say, when you truly understand it. because when he uses a highly specific or metaphorically complex word, it has a big payoff of sense. that's why they do that, because it has a payoff, and they can skillfully deploy those words in highly complicated contexts to convey a lot of meaning in a single punch. they aren't simply doing this:
getyarn.io/yarn-clip/50907114-29b6-4fe6-a258-357e9050ff40
and spouting off as many abstract/"weird" words as possible just for the sake of using them.

Deleuze’s vitalism boils down to a single fundamental conviction:
time makes a difference that cannot be erased. Yet in Deleuze’s account,
the only difference which time makes is a difference in and as thought,
a difference which is indissociable from thinking. The alternative is not
that time makes no difference but rather that it should not be privileged
over space and that neither time nor space should be reduced to any
variety of difference which depends for its expression on thinking. As
suggested in the previous chapter, the task is to uncover the identity of
space-time in the form of an objectivity which is at once determining
for thought and irreducible to thinking; an objectivity that is no more
reducible to the trajectory of entropic dissolution than to that of creative differentiation. Space-time should not be posited as an ontological
principle, whether as entropic dissolvent or negentropic differentiatior;
it should only be presupposed as an identity, but an identity devoid of
ontological substance and hence commensurate with the real as beingnothing. To refuse vitalism is not to favour the stasis of indifference
over the movement of difference but to affirm the irreducible reality of
physical death along with the autonomy of absolute space-time as identity of difference and indifference, life and death (though as we saw in
Chapter 5, this identity should be understood non-dialectically). The
reality of the object can be made to yield the ultimate determinant for
philosophical thought, but in the form of an identity that unbinds
the correlational synthesis of thinking and being, just as it separates
the irrecusable reality of physical death from its vitalist idealization

That's the summary at the end of the chapter on Deleuze. He's not calling Deleuze a nihilist he's saying that Deluze's theories imply a nihilistic outcome(here the ''unbinding of thinking and being'')

Not going to argue with you about that, I find the way Brassier writes insufferable. I am not formally trained in philosophy, I just read it for fun, but I enjoy Brassier's ideas if not their presentation.

yeah i'm being kind of unfair to brassier because he is actually doing a really good job of conceptual analysis, and it's not THAT bad. most of the people who do the thing i'm bitching about are much shallower and much worse at it, usually saying nothing.

but i think that's why it pisses me off extra. i feel like once you pass the sophomoric threshold of being skillful enough to do complicated things in complicated ways, the next logical step is doing complicated things in artfully simple ways.

it feels like brassier is making a conscious choice to be abstruse, at key points where it can only possibly divide his audience into two groups: people who don't have the necessary background to understand it, but who therefore would have been impressed by much less, so it was pointless and unappreciated showing off; and people who do have the necessary knowledge to understand it, who will just look down on you for trying pathetically to show off.

I may be imagining this but the instinctive impression I get of his writing is that he's doing it as some sort of 'fuck you' to his fellow academics. Because I agree that he is waving his dick around in terms of diction and phrasing, but almost defensively as though the density of the writing were some kind of shield against an anticipated criticism.

Again I have no contact with the academic world so I don't know what the social context is here, but there is a genuine sense of hostility to some of the writing. Towards the beginning of the book he writes the rather butthurt sounding phrase 'Philosophy should be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem.' which to me sounds like it is directed at other contemporary philosophers. When you put this in your book I assume you are announcing an attack of sorts.

What does he think about Nietzsche?

Also who are the other 9 philosophers he talks about?

Wilfrid Sellars, Paul Churchland, Adorno and Horkenheimer, Quentin Meillassoux, Alain Badiou, Francois Laruelle, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Levinas, Lyotard

He talks about a bunch of other people obviously, Kant and Hegel pop up a lot because theyre Kant and Hegel

Ultimately, the claim that the affirmation of recurrence marks the
turning point in the history of nihilism generates more difficulties than
it can possibly resolve. The conclusion to be drawn here is that being is
no more susceptible to affirmation than to negation: there is no more
reason to opt for its differentiation through affirmation than its identification through negation

Basically that Nietzche's solution to nihilism doesn't work. The nietzsche section is rather long and hard to summarize

Is it worth reading?

Ray brassier

ALL DAY

I shit and pissed but didn't cum or puke.

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sure: its just as easy to focus on whats different in every repetition as it is to focus on whats the same.

>guess the author of this quote
>PPL-UK_NU-Brassier_CH006.qxd 8/10/2007 6:51 Page 163
Good job retard

Brassier afaik does criticize Deleuze in a similar manner to Meillassoux, namely they say that Nietzsche and Deleuze create certain concepts based on human experiences and project them onto the universe.

From what I can tell it's quite simple yet the language makes it seem very difficult (as pointed out). Basically Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason (the so-called 1st Critique) goes for three "entry points" in trying to grasp the relation between reason, understanding and sensibility. Keep in mind that Aesthetic for Kant meant, like for the Greeks, something related to perception and sensibility rather than a theory of the beautiful as it became later. For Deleuze, there is no point in first separating reason, understanding and sensibility since this starting point is already an artificial one, one can treat concepts as things rather than something different from things. In this way the connection is not between concepts and things, but between things and things and as such a genuine multiplicity is formed (between the movement of words in your head and the movement of external things for example). Of course the problem becomes more complex when we introduce the virtual which is a more complete reality than what is actualized (remember Proust's formula for it: Ideal, but not abstract. Real, but not actual). Because a thing always exceeds its actualizations, because it has countless "potential" connections "floating" around it at all times and because concepts are such things as well, the connection between concept and object is never exhausted by an actualization, but this is so by its very nature as part of the virtual rather than due to an asymmetry between the word and the thing (ideal versus real). As a consequence however, every actualization is real even if it is flawed, if you can only see evil everywhere you look this is real even if you're wrong (it is who you currently are so to speak). This goes against the Kantian notion of seeking the conditions of possible experience, which would be too abstract, and towards a logic of the encounter where the Idea is already out in the world and we can miss many of its crucial connections or connect to it in a meaningful way depending on many things. Deleuze gives the example of greening as a reality that precedes being green or not being green. By comparison, the already "green tree" taken as an abstraction is no longer alive in the sense that it no longer participates in the verb greening, however there are no such trees in the world (even evergreens have their becoming, just not tied to greening in the same way as other trees).

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Will i get laid if i read it? What page number do i have to get to know before ill get laid? I need to know.

He criticizes everyone he mentions in the book, I mean it is philosophy, but he is very complimentary towards Deleuze.