The Science of Worldlessness

The chapter examines the role of worldlessness in the works of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. The first half of the chapter concentrates on Freud and the way the worldlessness of life becomes the central problem of his metapsychological reflections. This inquiry allows us to define the Freudian unconscious as the location where the worldlessness of life and the worldlessness of thought meet. The second half of the chapter traces the idea of worldlessness in the works of Lacan. It focuses on Lacan’s discussions of the signifier, psychosis and anxiety. It concludes by arguing that Lacan defines psychoanalysis as the science of worldlessness.

The Politics of Worldlessness

The chapter examines Hannah Arendt’s critique of martin Heidegger and concentrates on the way Arendt tries to subvert the Heideggerian paradigm of worldlessness. While for Heidegger, the ontological paradigm of worldlessness was the lifeless stone, in Arendt’s book biological life itself emerges as the worldless condition of the political world of publicity. The theoretical challenge bequeathed to us by Arendt is to draw the consequences of the simple fact that life is worldless. The worldlessness of life, therefore, becomes a genuine condition of impossibility for politics: it makes politics possible, but at the same time it threatens the very existence of politics. The chapter traces the development of this argument in three of Arendt’s major works: The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, and The Life of the Mind.

Contra mundum (A Conclusion)

The conclusion provides a brief summary of the book’s speculative arguments in the form of ten propositions. These theses are designed to clear the ground for a new theoretical engagement of the problem of worldlessness. They lay the foundations of an affirmative definition of worldlessness. In order to put forward a positive definition of this project, the book concludes by an inversion of the Deleuzian formula for perversion. While Deleuze claimed that perversion consists in the construction of a ‘world without Others’, the conclusion argues that our task today is to engage ‘Others without a world’.

The Logics of Worldlessness

The final chapter provides a close reading of Alain Badiou’s The Logics of Worlds. It argues that the theoretical conflict between Being and Event and The Logics of Worlds plays out in the space defined by the tension between the ontological primacy of worldlessness and the phenomenological necessity of worlds. While the ontology of radical multiplicity introduced in Being and Event provides us with one of the most compelling arguments in favour of worldlessness, in the sequel to Being and Event Badiou turns to a novel phenomenology to account for the necessity of worlds. The chapter argues that it is the Heideggerian contradictions expounded upon in Chapter 1 that will help us make sense of a fundamental contradiction in Badiou’s philosophy: a conflict between the ontology of worldlessness and the politics of world-creation. To put it differently, in Badiou’s thought we encounter two forms of worldlessness: on the one hand, Being is worldless (which is a positive enabling condition) and, on the other hand, Capital is worldless (which is a negative historical condition).

Orbis non sufficit (An Introduction)

The introduction draws some of the consequences of what we could call the contemporary fetishization of the concept of the world. It argues that the problem of worldlessness has functioned as the unacknowledged centre of reflection for continental philosophy after WWII. The second half of the 20th century inherited some of the basic contradictions of Martin Heidegger’s definition of worldlessness. As a result, continental philosophy remained limited in its scope by the Heideggerian heritage. In place of the fetishization of the world, the introduction offers a new starting point for our discussions that can be summarized in the simple proposition: ‘the world is not enough’.

The Phenomenology of Worldlessness

The chapter follows Jacques Derrida’s development from one end of his career to its conclusion and argues that the whole project of deconstruction must be understood in relation to the concept of worldlessness. The first part of the chapter is concerned with Derrida’s critique of Edmund Husserl. Derrida argues that the phenomenological concept of worldlessness is based on the auto-affective structure of the transcendental ego and, therefore, it remains captive of a metaphysics of presence. The second part of the chapter focuses on Derrida’s readings of Heidegger and tries to show that, for Derrida, Dasein’s supposed worldliness is dependent on an ontology of worldlessness. The closing section of the chapter provides a reading of Derrida’s final seminars and tries to show that, in the end, in spite of the discovery of the centrality of worldlessness, Derrida nevertheless chooses the world over worldlessness as the foundation of any deconstructive ethics.

The Metaphysics of Worldlessness

The first chapter provides an overview of Martin Heidegger’s works by tracing the way he defines the world and worldlessness at various stages of his career. The first half of the chapter examines the role the concept of worldlessness plays in Being and Time and the existential analytic of Dasein. The second half of the chapter examines Heidegger’s later works and his critique of modernity. The chapter argues that Heidegger starts with the assumption that the stone is worldless but ends up concluding that Being is worldless. Thus, the objective of Chapter 1 is to trace the trajectory of this shift from the lifeless object to Being itself as the site of worldlessness. The chapter concludes by examining the political stakes of the Heideggerian definition of worldlessness.