Text page
mark-fisher-a-critique-of-practical-nihilism-agency-in-scott-bakkers-neuropath
A piece that uses Bakker's fiction to think nihilism, agency, and practical paralysis through Fisher's public-critical method.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
These pages matter because they show Fisher turning criticism directly into political method. Public theory here means using dialogue, polemic, and cultural reading to diagnose collective blockage, nihilism, and the management of desire.
The pages work by forcing abstract political vocabulary through public formats. Dialogue, polemic, and aesthetic analysis become fast-moving ways of building concepts that can circulate beyond academic theory space.
That matters because Fisher's distinctive power lies in keeping complex political thought public without flattening it into slogan. This cluster is one of the clearest records of that method at work.
How to read this text
Read for how the page moves from atmosphere, fiction, or scene to a claim about collective desire or ideological management.
Track where public tone becomes theoretical precision rather than mere polemical style. That is usually where the page earns its staying power.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
Incognitum Hactenus vol. 2 5 A Critique of Practical Nihilism: Agency in Scott Bakker’s “Neuropath” Mark Fisher
Definition · paragraph 14
But it must be remarked that plasticity is also the capacity to annihilate the very form it is able to receive or create.”[xvi] While thinking in terms of plasticity offers all sorts of new conceptual opportunities, we must now return to Bakker’s remarks on “practical nihilism”.
Definition · paragraph 14
But it must be remarked that plasticity is also the capacity to annihilate the very form it is able to receive or create.”[xvi] While thinking in terms of plasticity offers all sorts of new conceptual opportunities, we must now return to Bakker’s remarks on “practical nihilism”. For whatever the theoreti cal implications of neuroscience, Bakker is surely right that its practical applications will in the first instance be controlled by the dominant force on the planet: capital.
Definition · paragraph 13
Neuroscience is on the cusp between what Bakker calls “practical nihilism” and the theo retical nihilism which Ray Brassier has argued is the correlate of the Enlightenment.[xii] The question of “practical nihilism” in Neuropath reminds us that the world of the novel is not denuded of agency.
History · paragraph 15
2 12 [i] Paolo Virno, Grammar of the Multitude (Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2004) [ii] These remarks were made by Bakker in a comment responding to a December 2008 blog post on Neuropath by Steven Shaviro. www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=698 [iii] The paper was presented at the University of Western Ontario’s Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism in No vember 2008.
Appears in sections
Mark Fisher and Public Theory Primary section
Fisher as bridge figure, public critic, and one of the clearest routes into the archive's afterlife.