Towards a new envisioning of ubermensch: a trans-Nietzschean response to nihilism in the digital age

This thesis interrogates Nietzsche's ubermensch, a figure capable of overcoming the universal absence of value, and asks how it might logically be realised in light of postmodern developments in nihilism, capitalism and technology. We argue that in order to exist beyond the nihilistic nature of capitalism, one possible solution might be superintelligent artificial intelligence. We first explore the oft-overlooked problem of the village atheist, who rejects god whilst still clinging to theological values. We next look to nihilism in postmodemity, analysing semiotic and hermeneutic developments and highlighting the forces that dictate contemporary society. We then tum to capitalism, understood as a repetition of Christianity, redefining the village atheist as a figure trapped in the nihilism of semiocapitalism. Finally, we tum to technology and the future, where we reject transhuman narratives as farther repetitions of salvation, instead developing an understanding of superintelligent AI as ubermensch based on its potential to exist beyond the trappings of manmade value. This thesis simultaneously outlines the difficulties of overcoming nihilism through transhumanism whilst highlighting the dangers of embracing ubermensch, instead suggesting that a reclamation of the human posits greater grounds for survival, where the embrace of a hermeneutics of nihilism allows for smaller short-term truths

‘It’s duty boy.’ Masculinities, masculine subjects and their representation in the twentieth century American war novel.

This thesis examines and explores twentieth century literary representations of American masculinity at war. It aims to demonstrate the manner in which American novels responding to the First and Second World Wars and the Vietnam conflict reflect symbolic, mythic and material anxieties regarding America‟s masculine identities. The thesis examines in particular the pervasive myth of the American Adam and its influence on behaviours, ideologies and narrative. Each text and each conflict operates under the influence of Adamic myth. I argue that prose fiction offers a space in which to scrutinise, engage and ultimately resist such mythic singularity. The incorporation of gender theory into such a study provides an original critical perspective with which to read crucial artistic responses to major events of the American twentieth century. Its central arguments engage with anxieties existing between ideological representations of hegemonic American masculinity and the graphic truth of experience for the corporeal and psychological subject. As well as thematic aspects of the literature, the thesis analyses shifts in narrative technique and the manner in which they reflect the growth and pluralising of wider narratives within the fields of modernism, American naturalism and postmodernism. The contemporary era is marked by commemoration and reflection regarding twentieth century conflict and by anxiety regarding the unstable post 9/11 world. In addition to this, there is resurgence in scholarly, political and popular interest in gender and its representation. These factors mean that this is a timely and vital study that reflects on literary history and current literary debates. The authors and their work in this thesis are considered in chronological order and cover a significant part of the American twentieth century. Chapter one examines John Dos Passos‟ Three Soldiers and Ernest Hemingway‟s A Farewell to Arms. Chapter two engages with two Pacific war novels; Norman Mailer‟s The Naked and the Dead and James Jones‟ The Thin Red Line. Chapter three explores post-war existential angst and early postmodernism in Joseph Heller‟s Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut‟s Slaughterhouse-Five. The final chapter offers analysis of Larry Heinemann‟s Close Quarters and Paco’s Story and Tim O‟Brien‟s Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried

Technological Politics and the Political History of African-Americans, 1995

This dissertation is a critical study of technopolitical issues in the history of African American people. Langdon Winner's theory of technopolitics was used to facilitate the analysis of large scale technologies and their compatibility with various political ends. I contextualized the central technopolitical issues within the major epochs of African American political history: the Atlantic slave trade, the African artisans of antebellum America, and the American Industrial Age. Throughout this study I have sought to correct negative stereotypes and to show how "technological gauges" were employed to belittle people of African descent. This research also has shown that the mainstream notion that Africans had no part in the history of technology is false. This study identifies and analyses specific technologies that played a major role in the political affairs of Africans and African Americans. Those technologies included nautical devices, fort construction, and automatic guns in Africa, and hoes, plows, tractors, cotton gins, and the mechanical cotton pickers in America. The findings of this study suggested that African Americans have been disengaged and victimized by western technologies. This dissertation proposes how to overcome the oppressive uses of technology

Mind over matter: the thinking and speaking machine in fiction of the long nineteenth century

This doctoral thesis analyses the autonomous thinking and speaking body machine in fiction in the long nineteenth century in Europe and the USA. An autonomous body machine is, in my definition, a mechanical device which, either in form or function, either fully or in part, is self-governed and replicates a human being. My research is set out as a two-part question: firstly, how is the autonomous thinking and speaking machine represented in the fiction of this period, and, secondly, in its historical context, what does its autonomy signify? With the long nineteenth century I denote the period demarcated by the invention of Wolfgang von Kempelen’s (1734-1804) mechanical chess player in 1770 and George Bernard Shaw’s (1856-1950) 1912 play Pygmalion. The desire to simulate thought and speech became the predominant driving force behind late eighteenth-century automaton building. Whereas the previous generation of automata had focused on external motion, these new automata differ in their focus on the replication of the internal faculties of thought and speech and, I argue, expanded the definition of life from mechanical motion to cognisance and the definition of prostheses from mechanical replacements to bodily enhancements. I scrutinise the thinking and speaking body machine at the intersection of these changing definitions and demonstrate how in the discussed period these machines’ prosthetic/corrective potential was addressed metaphorically in fiction and employed to comment on contemporary cultural phenomena. I focus on the fiction of E.T.A Hoffmann (1776-1822), Edgar Allan Poe (1809- 1849), Samuel Butler (1835-1902) and Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (1838-1889). A common factor in their fictions is the thinking and/or speaking machine embodying the far horizon of Enlightenment potential. In the discussed fictions, I argue, the new definition of life converged with that of the new definition of prostheses

Marx, Praxis and Socialism from Below

This thesis distinguishes between a scientistic-deterministic Marxism and a critical-emancipatory Marxism in order to establish Marx within the tradition of socialism from below, a conception which affirms the principle of self-emancipation. The thesis argues that Marx developed the most powerful practical critique of the capital system that exists. I shall demonstrate that the point of Marx's emancipatory project was to facilitate the recovery of human subjectivity from behind the alienated forms through which sociability has come to be expressed, thus affirming conscious, creative human agency in a self-made social world. I shall further argue that Marx could only go so far conceptually and theoretically so as to leave the space for the reality creating constitutive power of praxis. I shall argue that Marx belongs to the tradition of ‘socialism from below’, a tradition which emphasises democratisation as a process based upon the principle of self-emancipation. This tradition is defined against the tradition of ‘socialism from above’. I argue that the abandonment of the principle and the practice of self-emancipation lies behind the distortions and deviations of Marxism in the twentieth century. To demonstrate this clearly it is necessary but not sufficient to expose the failures of party political and state socialism. The thesis, therefore, also identifies some deep-rooted conceptual problems in the Marxist tradition, highlighting those principles which remain pertinent to emancipatory struggles in the modern world. Marx is shown to have made the move from theory to practical struggles in order to transform the world from within its own material sphere. Marxism can, in this sense, reclaim its relevance as a viable emancipatory-revolutionary project capable of being a factor in the transformation of society. And it is as such that Marxism remains the most intellectually and politically cogent hope we have in the struggle against the rule of capital

Transgression, Disruption and Fragmentation in the Work of Chuck Palahniuk and Victor Pelevin

Marija Pavlović's dissertation, Cold War Kids in Neoliberal Dystopia: Transgression, Disruption, and Fragmentation in the Work of Chuck Palahniuk and Victor Pelevin, examines the evolution of transgression, disruption, and fragmentation in literature from postmodernism to contemporary forms. Introducing hypertrashrealism, she articulates this new literary movement as both a response to and a development beyond postmodern tendencies. The study significantly draws on Ihab Hassan's theory of postmodernism, providing a comparative framework that underscores key shifts in narrative and thematic approaches in the works of Palahniuk and Pelevin. This analysis emphasizes the critical transformation in literary styles and themes, reflecting contemporary societal and cultural dynamics, aiming to define a contemporary narrative alternative to the exhausted term "postmodernism" and the cumbersome "post-postmodernism.

From Ashes to Dust: Vampire Capitalists Throughout the Long Twentieth Century

It’s often forgotten that the folkloric Eastern European vampire was neither conventionally rich nor attractive. It is only after the vampire’s nineteenth century migration into Western culture that the figure becomes a representation of the suave aristocrat – from John Polidori’s Lord Ruthven (1819) to Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula (1897). Throughout the twentieth century, the association between the vampire and high-class wealth has continued to establish itself within American vampire literature, yet this association has been a surprisingly marginal focus of twentieth century Gothic research. Several twentieth and twenty-first century critics, including Franco Moretti, Nick Groom, and Ken Gelder, emphasize the nineteenth century vampire to be a historical representation of specific phases of capital in which they exist, but do not expand the scope of their approach to include the socio-historical conditions shaping representations of the American twentieth century vampire. Furthermore, critics who do provide greater insight into the twentieth century American vampire, including Gina Wisker, Sue-Ellen Case, and George E. Haggerty, tend to centre the focus of their exploration on identity-based politics. Through an intersectional framework this study demonstrates that social class is the connecting control variable throughout twentieth century American vampire literature, which creates the underlying foundations upon which differing aspects of cultural identity can be built, whether this be race, gender, or sexuality. To demonstrate the primacy of class in representing the American vampire, the thesis will examine both familiar and unfamiliar texts, ranging from George Viereck’s House of the Vampire (1907) to Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976), and will shine light on hitherto critically marginalized narratives

In Search of Ecopolis

This book identifies the contemporary environmental crisis as a call to create a new biocentric civilisation. Proceeding from the identification of the constants of civilized life, the argument seeks to build constructive ecological models by relating Green politics to philosophy and ethics. This approach seeks to develop a practical, institution building orientation out of fundamental Green principles. In the process, the gap between the 'is' of the real world and the 'ought to be' of philosophy is closed via notions of cognitive praxis and ecological praxis. Ensuring the unity of subject and object is a way of recovering the original meaning of politics as creative human self-realisation. Eudaimonia in Aristotle and conatus in Spinoza are identified as crucial to human flourishing, identified as definitive of the good life. Reason is shown to be central to this conception of happiness and the constitution of the common good. The book criticises market society and its atomistic relations as a reversion to the lowest form of reasoning in the Prisoner's Dilemma. In relating ecological praxis to civilisation, the book calls for the extension of communicative and cooperative structures in order to foster and embed the rational restraint crucial to long term freedom for all in social relations and institutions.. The contributions of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, Hegel, Marx and Habermas to this view are all emphasised