This results in an unbound nihilism that vacates life of meaning and filters politics through ressentiment.

Writing in the nineteenth century, Nietzsche argued that nothing was more deeply characteristic of the modern world than the power of nihilism.43 Nietzsche’s intervention here allowed us to move beyond the well-rehearsed attack upon Platonic reason or Christian faith, to focus instead upon ‘the radical repudiation of value, meaning and desirability’.44 Nihilism, thus understood, referred to the triumph of reactive thinking. It was all about the negation of life as it appeared to be incapable of affirming that which is properly and creatively different to human existence. Hence, for Nietzsche, nihilism was not simply reducible to some historical event in time, i.e. an exceptional moment in history which could be shamefully written into annals of human suffering. Nihilism was the recurring motor of history as the operation of power leads to a will to nothingness that strips life of any purposeful meaning. Crucially, as Nietzsche understood, this repudiation of the affirmative realm of experience is something we create for ourselves. 45 Nihilism, in other words, is to be understood through a sophisticated manipulation of desires such that the individual subject depreciates itself to such an extent that it actively participates in a custom of political self-annihilation. Central to Nietzsche’s thinking on the perpetuation of nihilism is the notion of ressentiment. In his On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche explains this in terms of the slave mentality. This produces a feeling of impotence which not only translates into vengefulness, but more problematic still, teaches the slave that the only way it can become free is to give over to the prevailing reason mastery has set in place. Sloterdijk equates this ressentiment with rage, the basis of all great theisms.46 Such a condition, as Nietzsche understood, was ‘paralysing’ insomuch as it annuls the possibility of thinking and acting otherwise, and it was ‘exhausting’ insomuch as life was forced to compromise with the very lethality that put its condition originally into question. Through a ‘spirit of revenge’ what is lacking is therefore produced in a double movement, for lack is not some original gesture, it derives out of the ressentiment to deny us the opportunity to bring something different into the world. This raises a number of pressing questions: Could it be that not only have we become slaves to our biological existence, but in claiming false mastery of the earth we have given to ourselves an illusionary sovereignty? For how can we have mastery if that which we claim to be able to dominate as the principle force makes us increasingly vulnerable with each passing moment? Have we not, then, become slaves to ourselves and slaves to the earth, and resentful of them as a result? Nihilism has never been alien to liberal biopolitics. It is arguably its most potent expression. Its early development can be traced to Kant’s Copernican revolution of the mind. Placing life at the centre of its universe, Kant forced us to look for meaning beyond the realms of theological destiny. Whilst this moved us beyond the suffering and lament of the Christian subject which so irked Nietzsche, Kant’s universal substitute proved to be no substitute at all. The universal was actually denied to us due to the limits of our reason and our imperfections as finite beings – imperfections that significantly proved incapable of moving us beyond the reductionism of metaphysical idealism and its crude representations, towards a more affirmative form of metaphysics that worked in practice. As Drucilla Cornell writes, ‘Martin Heidegger famously wrote that Kant takes us to the limit of the very notion of critique and ultimately raises, but does not fully address, the question of ‘who’ is this finite being that must think through the transcendental imagination’.47 In a remarkably potent yet tragic stroke, Kant wrote the death of the omnipotent God and the types of docile subjects it produced who were rendered immobile due to its vengeance and fury, while putting in its place a fallen subject that was fated to be forever incomplete because of the burdens of its own actions. While Kant’s thinking paved the way for new eschatological forms of power to emerge that took leave of traditional sovereign moorings, the fallen subject was compelled to become resentful of its biological existence. Bios were to remain forever imperfect by design and fated to be judged accordingly. With life fated to live a biologically endowed existence, it is stripped of its capacity to have a meaningful existence beyond the limits of its bodily formations, while political strategies operate by governing through the problem of finitude, even though the finite inevitably became a philosophical problem too difficult to comprehend. As a result, forced to endure a growing resentment of its unfolding drama, liberalism slowly became morally equipped to continually intervene upon the souls of the living simply by offering to prolong the subject’s existence better than any other political rationality. Such was the realization of our finite entrapment in the bodily form that the ability to philosophically transgress the injunction between life death became increasingly impossible. Indeed, as and we shall point out later, while liberal societies have a particular relationship to the question of dying as our existence is continually put into question, such that with each passing second we learn to survive until we become truly meaningless in the end, the idea of death remains incommensurable to the liberal subject. No longer does the resilient subject solely project its resentfulness onto the souls of ‘Others’. It resents the living world, for it too is radically endangering. It is here that catastrophic imaginaries begin to truly thrive. The resilient subject is shaped and anxiously mobilized by the prospect of the coming catastrophe. It fears the transformation of the subject, just as it fears the transformation of the ecosystem that gives sustenance to life. Our rage as such, to borrow from Sloterdijk, has become truly limitless. As everything becomes the source of our endangerment, we internalize the ressentiment and proliferate our impotence with unrivalled intensity and absolute necessity. Hence this produces a form of nihilism which is ‘unbounded’. For no longer do we simply resent the teleological unfolding of history as we phase shift from masters to slaves to masters; there is no mastery to speak of and as a result all our lament filters into a politics of ressentiment as we are left to simply govern through our continually unfolding state of unending emergency. This brings us to an important conceptual point that must be addressed in our critique. Adaptation in the face of the catastrophic is not the same as political transformation. The former accepts its conditions of insecurity and vulnerability. Adaptation conflates resistance with resilience such that politics becomes a sheer matter of survivability. Without challenging the fundamental tenets of a catastrophic existence, to adapt is to concede defeat to the avatars of liberal reason which continue to proclaim no political alternative except the pathological. Transformation, in contrast, finds enough reasons to believe in the irreducible spirit of the world such that we may affirm a different sensual and aesthetic relationship to its natural forces. This has nothing to do with a fatalism that accepts the inevitability of human extinction (even though it is inevitable). Nor does it seek to make light of the real experiences of oppression, destitution and daily struggle faced by the majority of the world’s inhabitants. On the contrary, it has everything to do with reintroducing political meaning back into the world, such that our relations do not dismiss the sense of wonder of experience one enjoys in those poetic moments with fellow humans and the earth which cannot be reduced to the techno-scientific conceit of biopolitical rule. And it has everything to do with a willingness to challenge indifferences to the political with more affirmative expressions that demand replacing the vulnerability of catastrophic rule with a poetic confidence in the creation of worlds to come.