Category Archives: ArtsOne

Antigone

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antigone

It is not always entirely clear who (if anyone) or what is the tragic hero(ine) in Sophocles’s Antigone, or what exactly is the nature of their tragedy. One might have thought that the tragic figure was the eponymous Antigone herself, but the Chorus suggests otherwise. Their focus, at least as the play ends, is rather on her uncle, King Kreon, who likewise seems to feels the burden of tragedy lies mainly on himself: “No, no! / I’m rising on horror, and horror flies. / Why don’t you hack me down? / Has someone a sword? / I and grief are blended. I am grief” (71). And as for the cause of his downfall, the Chorus has already proposed that “Kreon has shown that there is no greater evil / than men’s failure to consult and to consider” (69). Hence perhaps their conclusion, that “For their grand schemes or bold words / the proud pay with great wounds” (72).

And yet Kreon shows little of the complexity and ambiguity that we associate with the tragic hero. For modern audiences especially (but not only), the focus of the play is surely throughout on Antigone, torn between the edicts of the state and the responsibilities of kinship. She is, on the whole, a far more sympathetic figure, even if–or perhaps because–we recognize from the start (as she certainly does) that her principled stand is bound to lead to her destruction. She sacrifices herself for the sake of loyalty to her dead brother, whose corpse Kreon has declared should remain unburied because he died fighting against his own city. But though it may just be true that the Chorus’s final lines are directed at her, too, it is surely a harsh judgment to blame her for “grand schemes or bold words” or to accuse her above all of pride. Or rather, though she has indeed spoken boldly and refused to renounce her pride in familial identification with her kin, to pinpoint these sins seems to miss the mark or misjudge the tone of all that has gone before. We may justifiably feel that the Chorus perhaps hasn’t really understood Antigone, even by the play’s close. Which leaves us with a curious sense of irresolution at the end.

One response to this problem is to point out how wrong, perhaps in this play above all, is the common notion that the audience is expected to identify with the Greek tragic Chorus. For in Antigone there is from the outset something discordant and misguided about their pronouncements. That sense that they are somehow out of tune and don’t really understand is palpable at the time, and not merely in hindsight. Indeed, unlike Oedipus the King, this is not a play about hindsight at all–at least not for Antigone herself. She knows exactly what she is getting into, and we do, too, when she declares to her sister, Ismene: “Leave me alone, with my hopeless scheme; / I’m ready to suffer for it and to die” (25). Kreon may not anticipate the results of his ill-thought edict (and so for him it is perhaps a tragedy of hindsight), and the Chorus may be likewise blind to what is coming, but for the rest of us this is a play that holds few if any surprises. We see a woman march, with open eyes, towards her fate. To put this another way, we could say that this is not a play about hegemony. At least, it has to be admitted that Antigone is outside of any hegemonic relation; this is what constitutes her subalternity.

But is then Antigone in fact a tragedy of hegemony by default? It is Kreon’s tragedy precisely that he thinks he can institute a hegemonic pact with his citizens? And perhaps the Chorus’s tragedy that they think so, too… and indeed continue to think so to the last, never less than in their conviction that the moral of the story is that rulers should rule with more consultation. Here, then, is perhaps the source of our distance from the Chorus, our strange sense that their discourse has little purchase on the actions we see unfold before us, little relation to the speeches that other characters make–and that this is the case right from the start and on beyond the play’s closing lines. The tragedy of hegemony is its irrelevance, the way in which it (here, literally) misses the plot and continues to do so.

Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria

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Freud, Dora

In one of his final essays, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (1937), Sigmund Freud writes that “it almost looks as if analysis were the third of those ‘impossible’ professions in which one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfying results. The other two, which have been known much longer, are education and government.” In some ways this is a rather dispiriting conclusion to a life’s work, though it fits with the melancholy tone of much of Freud’s later pronouncements, written in exile from Nazism and in the shadow of impending world war. See for instance the last sentence tacked on to the end of Civilization and its Discontents in 1931, tempering its hitherto relatively upbeat conclusion about the return of Eros: “But who can foresee with what success and with what result?”

At the same time, there is also a resigned determination here reminiscent of Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable: “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” Just because an enterprise is doomed to failure doesn’t mean it’s not worth undertaking. The fact that something is impossible doesn’t necessarily mean we should cease striving towards it. Few would suggest we give up on education or government however much they, too, are destined to “unsatisfying results.” Like Sisyphus, we roll the stone up the hill once more.

What is interesting is that, for all the confident tone of Freud’s earlier writings, in which he presents himself as the heroic scientist or explorer uncovering an entire new world, failure was always inscribed into the heart of psychoanalysis. Famously, he seldom held up much hope for a cure to the human condition or the various psychological maladies that afflict us. As early as Studies in Hysteria (1895), the most that he felt able to promise was to transform “hysterical misery into everyday unhappiness.” Moreover, his first published case study, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905), ostensibly presented as the confirmation of certain of Freud’s insights on dream analysis and symptomology, is also manifestly a narrative of a failed analysis. After a mere couple of months, the patient gives up on the treatment as though quitting a bad habit at year’s end: “she said good-bye to me very warmly, with the heartiest wishes for the New Year, and–came no more” (100).

Not that Freud is all that apologetic for his failure with Dora. If anything, quite the contrary: he takes her decision to break off the analysis as confirmation of his interpretation of her symptoms, and of his theories in general. For the problem with Dora is her “craving for revenge” (101), exacted against all those who show her affection. She treats those around her (particularly the men) with what Freud calls “an almost malignant vindictiveness” (96). No surprise, then, that he should characterize her behavior with him as “an unmistakable act of vengeance on her part” (100). That is just how she is. And the fact that Freud should be receiving the same treatment as she doled out to her mother, her father, and family friend “Herr K.” merely demonstrates that the analysis is working, and that transference is setting in. After all, Freud concludes, “No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed” (100).

There are some harsh words here reserved for Dora. It is as though it were a case more of exorcism than of therapy. No doubt the young woman in question would have her own choice words to say in return. But she is damned if she does and damned if she doesn’t: continuing the analysis legitimates her treatment as much as breaking it off also ended up doing; when she is on the couch, all her protestations are taken simply as instances of denial. And at the end of the day, when this “talking cure” is written up, it is Freud who does all the talking (and none of the cure).

The sad irony is that the reason Dora comes (or is brought) to Freud in the first place concerns a story she tells that nobody will believe. She has been out for a stroll with an older man (Herr K.), who apparently propositioned her, getting a slap across the face for his efforts. K., who is married (though in a somewhat sordid ménage a quatre his wife turns out to be Dora’s father’s mistress), vehemently denies that anything of the sort took place. And though Freud believes Dora’s story, he does so only to turn the tables on Dora’s own denial that she was interested in K. Isn’t she secretly in love with him after all, the analyst asks? Doesn’t she turn him down only because she was jealous that he had (it seems) earlier also tried to force himself on his family’s governess? Or was she simply playing hard to get? After all, she didn’t even mention the scene until a fortnight afterwards, as she was waiting “so as to see whether he would repeat his proposals; if he had, [she] would have concluded that he was in earnest, and did not mean to play with [her] as he had done with the governess” (98). K. himself, meanwhile, can hardly be blamed for being disappointed at Dora’s apparent rejection of him: surely “he must long before have gathered from innumerable small signs that he was secure of the girl’s affections” (39).

All this has understandably raised the hackles of feminists. Not least because it goes against the grain of the prevailing mantra by which men are (rightly) reminded that women’s agency should be respected: “No means no.” What to do then with a psychoanalytic theory that claims so definitively that “there is no such thing at all as an unconscious ‘No'” (50) and that therefore advises the “inquirer” not to “rest content with the first ‘No’ that crosses his path” (18)?

One response might be to suggest that there is a distinction between an encounter by a lake (or in a bar or wherever) and the analytic couch. Out and about, in normal circumstances, we should take a “no” at face value; perhaps therapy presents a space where such denials can and should be questioned and challenged. But how distinct are those two settings really? Isn’t the danger that the analyst repeats the traumatic situation that inspired the call for help (and this is manifestly his aim: “a whole series of psychological experiences are revived” through transference [106]) only also to replicate the cultural prejudices that were the true source of the trauma… “You did want it, didn’t you?” There are few points at which Freud, for all his scandalous iconoclasm, more clearly reveals himself to be a man of his time, and psychoanalysis to be an agent of normalization and (ultimately) repression. So no wonder its work is never done: as analytic theory itself tells us, repression is never either total or complete.

Hobbes, Leviathan

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Five Questions on Leviathan 

1. Hobbes indicates how the state should be ruled in certain ways. But does he mention how people should obey under certain powers/rules?

2. Hobbes has atheistical views in some parts, whereas in other part of the book he emphasizes the power of religious authorities. What is it that he is trying to discuss?

3. Is religion a tool for power?

4. Can a person only be categorized in one of the two parts, “good and evil”? Who makes these judgments? If people are following the rules of God, then does God have a right to enforce human beings between happiness and unhappiness?

5. Is freedom of an individual equaled to an unlimited power of a ruler?

 

what the devil

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So, before I go rambling on:
1. be ready for the rambling. prepare yourself. buckle down. close this tab. whichever.
2. know that I didn’t finish the book. As I write this, I mean. I have a lot more to go. I probably won’t be finished until Friday. Just so you’re aware.
3. I tend to focus on the little things, which is something you’l notice as this post goes on. This is mostly because I haven’t finished the book yet, ha.

Before I read the books on our lovely, long list I usually read a summary of them first. Just to make sure I’m getting the gist of things in terms of theme and other rhetorical blah blah. That being said, here’s what the summaries I read told me about The Master and Margarita.

There are several things at play. Bulgakov weaves in satire and realism, art and religion, and history and contemporary social values. The lecture on Monday gave me a ton of helpful context to better understand the little pieces Bulgakov gives that relate to the Russian society he was living in. There are also three story lines. There’s that of Professor Woland, his assistants, and their shenanigans. (I just used the word shenanigans, what is going on?) That of the Master and his Margarita. And the story of Pontius Pilate and Yeshua. It wasn’t until lecture that I learned that Pilate’s story goes through several reworkings, a fact I find extremely important and interesting, and something I’ll probably read later. Anyway, before I started reading I learned that Pilate’s story would connect the two stories of Professor Woland and the Master. This is probably one of the more interesting aspects of the novel for me. And probably a cool discussion point too; just in terms of how the story of Pilate connects the two, why, the dynamics of each story and how they reflect each other, and so on and so forth.

In all seriousness I can probably realistically blog with full awareness and understanding about the first ten chapters. Excuse me while I weep with self-pity. I shall, however, finish this cursedly thick thing. And learn to love it. Or understand it, at least. It’s interesting so far, I’ll give it that.

Here are some things I picked up as I read. Some of them I tossed around. Some of them were actually relevant. Some of them I had to ditch as I went on because they turned out to not mean what I thought they did.

  • Case in point: the devil’s glinting eye. In his retelling of Pilate’s story Kaifa’s eyes flash and later when the devil finishes the story he says he was there. I briefly entertained the notion that the eye flashing was connected and that the devil was Kaifa (which would have been crazy interesting, btw). Alas, it was not meant to be. So I ditched that observation.

Now for the more promising observations.

  • At first the constant mentioning of “to the devil” and “what the devil” and “how the devil” around said devil was amusing for me. I mean, it still is amusing, but I’m starting to notice that it has more meaning. At first I thought it was Bulgakov throwing in some more irony. But then I started thinking about speech and the power of word and its relation to action (calling back to Antigone anyone?). Much of the pivotal moments in terms of action in this novel start as forms of speech. People seem to invoke the devil just by thinking about him or saying “devil.” Speech and power are related! Eureka! *commence fervid discussion*
  • Will someone please tell me if there’s a symbolism in the sparrow because that blasted little bird keeps showing up and I don’t know much about the spiritual meaning of sparrows. So I kind of just notice it and go “what are you doing here” and keep reading. But it shows up in Pilate’s story and it flies again in The Seventh Proof on page 44. What are you doing in this novel little bird?
  • Another nature element I’m curious about! The sun. And with that comes of course: shadow, light, being blinded and so on. I mostly noticed it in Pilate’s story when Yeshua shied away from the sunlight as it got closer to his feet. What was that about? And then Pilate, who seems to be eternally bothered by his headaches and the heat and then he gets blinded by the sun and guilt and wow, Pilate’s life really sucks doesn’t it? And let’s not forget that moment when Kaifa’s shadow “shrunk to nothing by the lion’s tail” on page 37. Just how small is by the lion’s tail anyway? And my goodness sun, what are you up to?
  • Tiny side note in relation to the sun. There’s an east/west dynamic at play here and I remember reading it, but didn’t mark the page. Story of my life, ugh.
  • Other tiny side note! The diamond triangle? What is that supposed to look like? The first thing that popped up in my head was a Delta. It most likely does not look like a Delta. But it shows up twice in relation to the devil. Is it his symbol or? (I just google imaged it – it does not really look like a Delta, but I’m not entirely crazy because Deltas are, in fact, triangles.

Now onto the little things I pondered about as I read.

  • Ivan and Misha/Mikhail react very differently to the devil. This probably has to do with the fact that Mikhail sees the checkered man before the devil shows up and Ivan does not. But there has to be something else, right? Something I/we don’t necessarily know? What is clear, however, is that their relationship and how the devil affects their lives is connected to this. This then ties in to all the notes I scribbled around how the devil spoke (key word SPOKE) about Mikhail’s death, predicted it and all, and how he implored Mikhail right before he dashed off to believe in the devil. Would Mikhail not have died if he did?
  • This is also the point where I have to say how much you can pull out of Pilate’s story just from the first telling. The things brought up, the relationships that you could dissect! Oh, it’s like candy. But it also needs time. And I should probably read the retellings of Pilate’s story further in the book. So we’ll save that for another blog post.
  • Tiny question: is the seventh proof the devil’s proof? seriously, whose proof is it?
  • When the devil said that he was alone and always alone on page 43 I couldn’t help but wonder about Doctor Faustus there. In Faustus those who pledge their souls to the devil can’t have real lovers or partners, marriages and the like – only concubines and meaningless flings that fill pleasure and distract. Nothing wholehearted and such. Interesting and relevant since this novel is seen as a retelling of the Faust legend. Moving on.
  • My interest in how the sun is mentioned throughout the novel comes in again on the last page of The Seventh Proof. Berlioz sees a “gold-tinged moon” just as he died and I couldn’t help but think of how that would appear like a drained sun in terms of color. And what does it mean to see the sun or the moon? Then there’s the passing of hours and time in the novel. I haven’t really noted each one but eleven kept popping up for a few consecutive chapters so it’s probably something I’ll keep in the back of my mind.
  • I also couldn’t help but relate Ivan’s chase of the professor to be much like that of Polyphemus and Oedipus. Ivan keeps imploring people to find the consultant and send guns after him and catch him, but he seriously forgets that no one knows who the consultant is or what he looks like. So Ivan now has the pleasure of being Polyphemus in my head as he tries to send anyone who will listen to him after Nobody, resulting in people thinking he’s crazy.
  • Oh, and can someone please clear up what happened to Riukhin in the last pages of Schizophrenia, As Was Said because after he says “devil take them!” some really weird stuff starts happening and I’m not sure if I should read into it or not.
  • In the disappearances of the naughty apartment there are technically eight or nine of them. I don’t count Berlioz because he died, he didn’t disappear in the way the rest of them did. And I’m not sure if I should count Grunya because the devil admits to sending her on vacation. The number of disappearances probably isn’t as important as the fact that they’re happening so this point is really just a random musing. Carry on.

Right, okay. I just realized I ran out of observations.
So I wish this could be more cohesive, but it really isn’t. Read the book, self, then it will be.
Thank goodness I don’t have to come up with direct questions just yet. I hope this wasn’t too all over the place if you managed to get all the way to the end without thinking I was a bit insane or something. Let it be noted that I did not proof read this blog post because I’m about to rush off to dinner.
I’m leaving for Walk the Moon in a little over an hour so I wanted to get this typed out and up. Me going to a concert also means I will not be fully functional tomorrow. Oh joy.

“Kafka and His Precursors”

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Borges

Jorge Luis Borges’s “Kafka and His Precursors” begins oddly: “I once premeditated making a study of Kafka’s precursors.” The use of the verb “premeditate” is odd enough, in the Spanish (“Yo premedité alguna vez”) as much as in the English, not least because it is most usually found in juridical discourse: a premeditated crime is one that is considered and planned in advance, as opposed to a crime of passion or an outburst in the heat of the moment. This strange invocation of legal discourse might suggest that some wrong-doing is afoot, or that we are hearing some kind of confession. And yet–and this is the second strange aspect of Borges’s opening gambit–it is also suggested that the crime was never committed. “I once premeditated making a study” implies that the study remained unwritten or unmade; it was only planned. We have the guilty mind (mens rea) but not the guilty act (actus reus). The crime was averted, perhaps because some flaw was found in what was otherwise a perfect plan.

But this then leaves us asking ourselves about the status of the text that we have before us, which (as the title promises and as further readings confirms) turns out to concern precisely the topic of the projected but unwritten or abandoned study: “Kafka and His Precursors.” Yet if this is not that study (perhaps because it is too short, incomplete), nor is it the premeditation of that study: at best it is an account of that premeditation, a summary and reflection upon the preparatory “notes” that would have aided in the writing itself. It is an intervention between the plan and its execution, between intention and act.

In short, the text that we have here is perhaps triply parasitic, or three-times removed from its ostensible object: it is the summary of notes towards a study of Kafka and his precursors. It is also strangely located in time: it is the reflection on a plan in the past to write a study that is still unwritten (and so is postponed to the indefinite future) about a now-dead author and his precursors that (we soon find) proceeds by enumerating them “in chronological order,” beginning with the most far-distant.

As often in Borges, the part mimics the whole or (perhaps better) we find an almost fractal arrangement in which patterns are repeated at various orders of magnitude, albeit to produce less the comfort of familiarity than a vertiginous sense of the uncanny and a shattering of logic. Elsewhere, we see this effect in his description of the “aleph,” a shimmering ball (found in the banal surroundings of a Buenos Aires basement) that contains within itself the entire universe. But Borges also suggests that such apparent oddities (or impossibilities) are remarkably common, even quotidian: think long and hard about anything, and it soon becomes (or is revealed to be) an aleph of its own. Here, these opening lines anticipate the central problematic of the essay itself, which is about the ways in which texts are related and how strange fissures or reversals upset linear temporality, just as it in turn makes (or unmakes) its point through performance as much as through argument or exposition: for this text about Kafka and his precursors is in its own way about Borges and his precursors and in it Borges himself rewrites our collective past and disturbs our conceptions of sequence and priority.

Finally, if what Borges is ultimately saying is that a writer (that writing) has the strange power to intervene in history, to remake or remodel the past just as Kafka creates his own precursors (by making us see an otherwise disparate collection of historical texts as oddly “Kafkaesque” avant la lettre), he is also unabashedly claiming that there is nothing new in this notion. This observation precedes Borges and this text, and so confirms (what is now) his repetition of what can present itself as an established fact. For in another detail, a footnote–a classic paratext or parasite, neither fully part of nor fully detached from the text itself–draws our attention to T S Eliot’s Points of View, whose very title in this context becomes simultaneously uncanny and revelatory. After all, is this entire essay not about “points of view,” and the ways in which they are constructed, obscured, or undermined?

In a rather good essay on Joyce and Borges Patricia Novillo-Corvalán, whom I am here myself copying or appropriating to some extent, notes that “Eliot postulates an aesthetic principle, through which writers are not read in isolation, but as part of a living tradition in which the new alters the old, the present modifies the past and, as a result, texts are continually re-valued from the perspective of subsequent texts” (60). And Rex Butler’s “Everything and Nothing” points out that what makes Borges original–what makes the greatest authors the most original–is precisely the fact that they “can actually appear unoriginal, to add nothing to literature, to repeat what has already been written” (134).

At which point, as I observe that I in turn am in large part simply “repeat[ing] what has already been written,” remaking and remodeling it for my own purposes, creating precursors who sadly are not quite as disparate (or quite as unpredictable) as those of Borges and Kafka, perhaps it’s time to stop what is after all only a first approach to these issues. It’s time to end, in other words, so that we can at last begin.

Foe

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J M Coetzee, FoeAs part of the Arts One Digital initiative (which I’ve mentioned before, we’re recording various lectures delivered as part of UBC’s “Arts One” program. You can see for instance my lecture on J M Coetzee’s Foe here, in various formats. The project is going from strength to strength, and I’m confident we’ll be able to ramp it up still further next year. We continue trying new things, and this afternoon my colleague Kevin McNeilly and I hope to record a podcast discussion on Foe and Eliot’s The Waste Land.

In the meantime, you may want to check out something I wrote a couple of years ago, on Foe as an “unwriting” of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.

Watchmen

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Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, WatchmenAlan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen offers something of a counter-factual history of the Cold War. In particular, it imagines the central role of two generations of masked do-gooders: a 1940s cohort of “Minutemen,” most of whom are somewhat ephemeral and more than slightly ridiculous (of “Mothman,” “Dollar Bill,” and “Silhouette” we hear very little) and a 1960s/1970s gang of “Crimebusters” who take themselves a little more seriously and have a much more sinister edge.

The Minutemen are nostalgically portrayed mostly through a faded sepia photo and are clearly out of their depth when it comes to derring-do that goes beyond picking up petty thieves and minor gangsters: at their inaugural meeting, in 1939, one of them nervously admits that “Just thinking about war, it scares me.” The Crimebusters are made of sterner stuff, and feature at least one member who is genuinely superhuman. This is Doctor Manhattan, a former nuclear scientist who thanks to an accident at work now has almost unlimited powers to decompose and recompose matter, to mutate and multiply himself, to survive in the harshest environments, as well as to see past, present, and (with some restrictions) future in one instant. It is thanks to Manhattan that (in this version of twentieth-century history) the USA has won the Vietnam War and is able to hold off the Soviet threat of nuclear annihilation. Vital for US national security, he is now the only costumed crusader who legitimately pursues his vocation. By the late 1970s, as the US urban infrastructure crumbled and even superheroes were viewed as more trouble than they were worth, all the others were forced to hang up their capes. All but Rorschach, that is, a particularly violent and uncompromising individual whose mask is an ever-shifting pattern of blots and who in one way or another is the story’s central character.

But if this is a novel that stresses decay, disintegration, and the loss of innocence–and it is–none-the-less its portrait of the past is not entirely rose-tinted. For the rot set in early, as did the general sense of ambivalence that surrounds all these supposedly “super” figures. Even in 1939, the sepia-tinged harmony is soon shown to be a sham: as soon as the photo session is over, a bloody fight erupts as the “Comedian” attempts to rape his fellow Minuteman (Minutewoman?) “Silk Spectre,” only to be beaten up in turn by a third of their number, the aptly-named “Hooded Justice.” There never was a Golden Age of heroism, and this inaugural violence and violation comes to taint the second generation of superheroes too: indeed, the Comedian is the only Minuteman to continue on to membership in the Crimebusters a generation later. His amoral cynicism and frank revelry in violence is presented as a constant temptation for vigilante avengers who choose to act outside the law without ever necessarily finding an alternative moral or ethical principle. At best, ultimately the book seems at first glance to endorse a very crude utilitarianism: that conspiracy and deception on a massive scale, not to mention the destruction of (here) the entire US Eastern Seaboard (and the deaths of many millions), is justified by a project to end the Cold War and bring perpetual peace. But this, after all, is precisely the logic of the Cold War itself.

Only Rorschach and (it is implied) the Comedian balk at this simplistic balance of the greater good. Rorschach’s words as he storms out of the utopian hero (or anti-hero)’s Antarctic lair are: “No. Not even in the face of Armageddon. Never Compromise.” But he and the Comedian are killed for their pains: indeed the two deaths bookend the narrative, as it’s the Comedian’s murder that kickstarts the plot, and Rorschach’s death takes place in the final act. Can we to sympathize with their doomed resistance to the calculations of power, however well-intentioned? I think and hope so, not least because the entire story is framed as Rorschach’s (he may have been eliminated, but he has got the word out against all odds), though in some ways this means that the end only takes us back to the beginning. More strikingly, it also means that the resulting ambivalence is extreme, almost unbearable: other characters, not least the second-generation “Nite Owl” and “Silk Spectre,” are much more immediately sympathetic, more “human.” In the end, however, we are asked to sympathize with an ultra-violent cynicism whose most obvious virtue is only that it is not so deadly as a rationalism that ends up indistinguishable from nihilism.