Exposing the religious roots of our ostensibly godless age, this study reveals that modernity is much less secular than conventional wisdom suggests. Beginning with the collapse of the medieval world, it argues that from the very beginning, moderns sought not to eliminate religion but to support a new view of religion and its place in human life.
Nietzsche's deepest thought -- Nihilism and the superhuman -- Nietzsche and the anthropology of nihilism -- Slouching toward Bethlehem to be born: on the nature and meaning of Nietzsche's Übermensch -- Nietzsche as teacher of the eternal recurrence -- What was I thinking? : Nietzsche's new prefaces of 1886 -- Nietzsche's musical politics -- Life as music: Nietzsche's Ecce homo -- Nietzsche's final teaching in context -- Nietzsche and Dostoevsky on nihilism and the superhuman -- Nietzsche and Plato on the formation of a warrior aristocracy
Table of Contents Preface Introduction 1: Descartes and the Deceiver God 2: Descartes and the Origin of the Absolute I 3: Fichte and the Dark Night of the Noumenal I 4: The Dawn of the Demonic: Romanticism and Nihilism 5: The Demons Unbound: Russian Nihilism and the Pursuit of the Promethean 6: From the Demonic to the Dionysian 7: Dionysus and the Triumph of Nihilism Epilogue List of Abbreviations Notes Index.
Michael Boyce Gillespie shifts the ways we think about black film, seeing it not as the representation of the black experience, but as the visual negotiation between film as art and the social construction of race, as well as an interdisciplinary form that enacts black visual and expressive culture.