Description
Book SynopsisThis book recovers Dionysus and Apollo as the twin conceptual personae of life’s dual rhythm in an attempt to redesign contemporary theory through the reciprocal affirmation of event and form, earth and world, dance and philosophy. It revisits Heidegger and Lévi-Strauss, and combines them with Roy Wagner, with the purpose of moving beyond Nietzsche’s manifold legacy, including post-structuralism, new materialism, and speculative realism. It asks whether merging philosophy and anthropology around issues of comparative ontologies may give us a chance to re-become earthbound dwellers on a re-worlded earth.
Trade Review"This book reappraises the quality of Apollo as a conceptual and political necessity for a world whose nightmarish master signifier, and rule in the end, is one of instability, crisis, war, and – to use another important concept in this book – nihilism. Even chaos needs a form of meta-stability to display its beauty." – Frédéric Neyrat, University of Wisconsin-Madison "Dionysus and Apollo after Nihilism is an ambitious and timely intervention in the contemporary philosophical scene. Rich with insight and erudition, this book is a significant contribution to recasting critical diagnoses of the present and explorations 'otherwise' within the differential terrain of ontological pluralism." – Jarrad Reddekop, Camosun College
Table of ContentsList of Figures 1 Introduction 1 The Idea behind This Book 2 Mapping the Issues 3 Brief Outline of the Book’s Chapters and Their Sources 4 A Note on Style, Translations, and Conventions 2 Dionysus in Greece 1 Untamed Life 2 An Olympian God? 3 The Unity of the Living 4 An Integrative God 5 Dionysus and Ontology 3 The Greek Apollo 1 Apollo’s Gaze 2 Apollo’s Distance 3 Apollo’s Arrows 4 Apollo and the Birth of Philosophy 5 Apollo, Dionysus, and the Earth 4 The Modern Misadventures of Apollo and Dionysus 1 Achilles and Odysseus 2 Nietzsche’s Dionysian Philosophy 3 Dionysus’s Maelstrom 4 Winckelmann’s Apollo 5 A Queer Ideal? 6 Dionysus’s Bequest 5 Thinking with Apollo 1 Apollo’s Marble 2 Apollo’s Stereogram 3 Apollo’s Screen 4 Apollo’s Blackout 5 Apollo’s Silence 6 Wordling(s): the Earth’s Reflexivity 6 Dancing with Dionysus 1 Our Living Body 2 The Purpose of Dancing 3 Artaud and Hijikata 4 Butō: Animism redux 5 Intersections 6 A Twofold Legacy 7 Back to Structuralism? 1 Structuralism as a Philosophy of Difference 2 The Post-structuralist Waterline 3 Ontological Pluralism and the Neo-structuralist Worlding Star 8 Conclusion: Post-metaphysics and Its Doubles 1 On Post-nihilism and the Subject/Object Divide 2 Destiny and the Otherwise 3 Dionysus and Apollo, Twins 4 À rebours Appendix 1: Development of the Ontological Pentagram Appendix 2: Development of the Modal Pentagram Bibliography Index
