Worldlessness After Heidegger

Roland Végső opens up a new debate in favour of abandoning the very idea of the world in both philosophy and politics. Opening with a reconsideration of the Heideggerian critique of worldlessness, he traces the overlooked history of worldlessness in Hannah Arendt, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Alain Badiou.

As Heraclitus once said, to suppose the world was not already beautiful and orderly, without the aid of reason, would turn it into nothing but a pile of garbage. Drawing on this fundamentally anti-Platonic theme, Végső reveals that the gesture shared by many post-war philosophies is the reduction of the possibilities of "worldlessness" into an unquestionably negative category, thereby foreclosing the positive attitudes of approaching the manner in which the world worlds today. In response, Végső proposes a unique and timely approach to affirming the conditions of worldlessness as the "limit-experience" of contemporary philosophy.

Roland Végsö is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the author of The Naked Communist: Cold War Modernism and the Politics of Popular Culture (Fordham University Press, 2013). He is co-editor of Life After Literature: Constructions of Life in Literature and Theory (Springer, forthcoming).