The Digital Dionysus: Nietzsche and the Network-Centric Condition

Can Nietzsche be considered a thinker of media and mediation, as the German media theorist Friedrich Kittler declared in his influential book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter?Nietzsche was a truly transdisciplinary thinker, one who never fit into his own nineteenth-century surroundings and who recognized himself as a “herald and precursor” of the future, of our globally-reticulated digital present. Perhaps not since Kittler has there been a study — let alone an anthology — that re-assesses and re-evaluates Nietzsche’s thought in light of the technically mediated and machinic conditions of the human in the age of digital networks.Drawing on the first four years of conference-proceedings from the annual Nietzsche Workshop @ Western (NWW, Western University), which culminated in the “New York NWW.IV”: Cyber-Nietzsche: Tunnels, Tightropes, Net-&-Meshworks (held at the Center for Transformative Media, Parsons The New School for Design), The Digital Dionysus explores Nietzschean themes in light of the problems and questions of digitization, information and technical mediation, offering its readers the opportunity to consider Nietzsche’s contemporary relevance in light of emerging theories in new media studies, political studies, critical aesthetics, the digital humanities and contemporary post-continental philosophy.Co-edited by Dan Mellamphy and Nandita Biswas Mellamphy (Western University, UWO) for the CTM Documents Initiative imprint (Center for Transformative Media, Parsons School of Design, The New School), the volume features essays and works by leading and emerging philosophers, artists, [h]activists, and political media theorists.TABLE OF CONTENTS // 00. Nietzsche & Networks, Nietzschean Networks: The Digital Dionysus, by Dan Mellamphy & Nandita Biswas Mellamphy / 01. #Digital Alexandrians: Greek as Musical Code for Nietzsche & Kittler, by Babette Babich / 02. The Internet as a Development from Descartes’ Res Cogitans: How to Render it Dionysian, by Horst Hutter / 03. Networked Nightmares: On Our Dionysian Post-Military Condition, by Manabrata Guha / 04. A Philosophy of the Antichrist in the Time of The Anthropocenic Multitude: Preliminary Lexicon for the Conceptual Network, by Gary Shapiro / 05. Occupying God’s Shadow: Nietzsche’s Eirōneia, by Julian Reid / 06. Reading Nietzsche in the Wake of the 2008–9 War on Gaza, by C. Heike Schotten / 07. Nietzsche’s Amor Fati: Wishing and Willing in a Cybernetic Circuit, by Nicola Masciandaro / 08. Outing the ‘It’ that Thinks: On the Collapse of an Intellectual Ecosystem, by R. Scott Bakker / 09. All for Naught, by Eugene Thacker / 10. A Horse is Being Beaten: On Nietzsche’s ‘Equinimity,’ by Dominic Pettman / 11. The Rope Dancer’s Fall: ‘Going Under’ as Undergoing Nietzscheo-Simondonian Transindividuation, by Sarah Choukah / 12. The Will to Obsolescence: Nietzsche, Code, and the Digital Present, by Jen Boyle / 13. Farmville, Eternal Recurrence, and the Will-to-Power-Ups, by Dylan Wittkower / 14. Aesthetic States of Frenzy: Nietzsche’s Aesthetic Palimpsest, by Joseph Nechvatal / 15. ‘Philosophizing With a Scalpel’: From Nietzsche to Nina Arsenault, by Shannon Bell / 16. ‘Nietzsche in Drag’: Thinking Technology through the Theater of Judith Butler, by Arthur KrokerABOUT THE EDITORDan Mellamphy and Nandita Biswas Mellamphy (Western University) are inaugural and ongoing Fellows of the Center for Transformative Media at Parsons School of Design, The New School, Founders of the annual Nietzsche Workshop @ Western (NWW, UWO Canada), and Directors of the international Electro-Governance Group (EGG, UWO Canada), an interdisciplinary multi-departmental research center. They have published — together and independently — in the journals Deleuze Studies, Foucault Studies, Dalhousie French Studies, Culture Machine, Fibreculture, Parrhesia, Paideusis, Platform, Collapse, Symposium and Modern Drama (among others), and in anthologies such as Nietzsche as Political Philosopher; Nietzsche & Political Theory; Alchemical Traditions from Antiquity to the Avant-Garde; Leper Creativity; The Imaginary App; Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures; and Marshall McLuhan’s & Vilém Flusser’s Communication & Aesthetic Theories Revisited (among others). Nandita is the also the author of The Three Stigmata of Friedrich Nietzsche: Political Physiology in the Age of Nihilism (Palgrave, 2011) and Dan is also the author of Beckett Beckons: Abductive Approaches to the Post-human Present (in progress).

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