About the Book

Aims

In tandem with ‘Existential’, ‘Phenomenological’ and ‘Continental’ thinkers this books seeks to reclaim, rejuvenate and recover a notion of atheism that has been lost in favour of what has conventionally become scientific atheism. Utilizing thinkers like Heidegger, Nietzsche, Bataille, Rancière, Virno and Sartre, I attempt to open up a new path for atheist thought based on questions of time, truth, objects, and equality in opposition to more traditional scientific materialist accounts of atheism. This book offers an attempt to uncover the historical possibilities of atheism for overcoming nihilism. The originality of the book stems from demonstrating the manner in which a radical atheism can offer a response to the question of nihilism; a response which renders redundant the theological anxiety about nihilism. This is firmly opposed to traditional humanist and scientific forms of atheism, and their attendant discourse of rights, inherent value, and political liberalism which limits the role and expanse of atheism. This book focuses more specifically on the particular concepts that we can retrieve from ‘Continental Philosophy’ insofar as they offer a positive account of what a ‘lived atheistic’ experience might look like in terms of ethics and politics.  Here I engage with 5 key moments that I argue allows us to build a new conceptual discourse for atheism. More specifically, the concepts I retrieve are as follows: Nietzsche’s response to nihilism, the rejection of objectification and a new theory of objects, an atheistic interpretation of Heidegger’s account of time, the strange relation between truth and violence, and a refiguring of notions of the common.