1. As a short and incomplete sample, see Silvia Benso and Brian Schoeder (eds) Between Nihilism and Politics: The Hermeneutics of Gianni Vattimo (New York: SUNY Press, 2010), William Brumfield, “Bazarov and Rjazanov: The Romantic Archetype in Russian Nihilism” (The Slavic and East European Journal. Vol. 21(4), 1977), Karen Carr, The Banalization of Nihilism – Twentieth Century Responses to Meaninglessness (SUNY Press, 1992), Conor Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism (Routledge, 2002), Bulent Diken, Nihilism (New York: Routledge, 2009), Joseph Frank, “Nihilism and ‘Notes from Underground’“ (The Sewanee Review Vol. 69 (1), 1961), Stanley Rosen, Nihilism – A Philosophical Essay (Yale University Press, 1969), Shane Weller, Literature, Philosophy, Nihilism (Palgrave, 2008), and of course Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (Vintage, 1968) and Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Penguin Classics, 1974).
2. Andrew Cutrofello, All for Nothing – Hamlet’s Negativity (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2014), 75.
3. Bulent Diken, Nihilism (New York: Routledge, 2009), 29.
4. Andrew Cutrofello, All for Nothing – Hamlet’s Negativity, 74.
5. Bulent Diken, Nihilism, 24
6. See for instance Michael Allen Gillespie, “Nietzsche and the Anthropology of Nihilism” (Nietszche Studien Vol 28(1), 1999) and the James Buel’s classic Russian Nihilism and Exile Life in Siberia (Arkose Press, 2015).
7. Simon Critchley, Very Little … Almost Nothing (Routledge, 2004), 32.
8. Related examples of this may be found in Michael Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life – Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Zero Books, 2014), Robert Pfaller, On the Pleasure Principle in Culture – Illusions Without Owners (Verso, 2014), Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia (Zero Books, 2011) and in Elizabeth Povenelli’s depictions of exhaustion in Economies of Abandonment – Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Duke University Press, 2011).
9. Stanley Rosen, Nihilism – A Philosophical Essay.
10. See for instance Anne Line Dalsgaard and Martin Demant Frederiksen, “Out of Conclusion – On recurrence and Open-endedness in Life and Analysis” (Social Analysis Vol. 57(1).
11. See Ghassan Hage, Alter-Politics: Critical Anthropology and the Radical Imagination (Melbourne University Press, 2015) and Joao Biehl, “Ethnography in the Way of Theory”. (Cultural Anthropology Vol. 28(4), 2013).
12. Lisa Stevenson, Life Beside Itself – Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic (University of California Press, 2014), 2-13.
13. Michael Taussig, I Swear I Saw This – Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own (The University of Chicago Press, 2011), xi.
14. For another example of this approach, and a more thorough depiction of it, see Tobias Hecht, After Life – An Ethnographic Novel (Duke University Press, 2006).
15. Simon Critchley, Very Little … Almost Nothing (London and New York: Routledge), 32.
16. Some parts of the text have appeared elsewhere as articles or contributions, but they return here in alterated forms, either by having been cut to pieces and spread throughout the text or by having been elaborated upon. These include “Joyful Pessimism – Disengagement, Marginality and the Doing of Nothing” (Focaal Vol. 78, 2017), “Waiting for Nothing – Nihilism, Doubt and Difference without Difference in Post-Revolutionary Georgia” (Ethnographies of Waiting. Bloomsbury, 2017), “The Wind in the Mirror – Some Notes on the Unnoteworthy” (Anthropology Inside-Out – Ethnographers Taking Note, Sean Kingston Publishing, 2018) and “Conscious Sedation” (a … issue, Vol. 4, 2016). A number of people have read and commented on various drafts of the manuscript, or engaged in general conversations about nothingness, nihilism and meaninglessness during the last couple of years, including Sally Anderson, Andreas Brannstrom, Elizabeth Cullen Dunn, Jane Dyson, Tim Flohr Sørensen, Rikke Elisabeth Frederiksen, Katrine Bendtsen Gotfredsen, Craig Jeffrey, Paul Manning, Tine Roesen, Katharina Stadler and Oto Zghenti, and my colleagues from the Center for Comparative Cultural Studies at University of Copenhagen: Andreas Bandak, Esther Fihl, Lars Højer, Regnar Kristensen, Birgitte Stampe Holst, Stine Simonsen Puri, Michael Ulfstjerne and Rane Willerslev. As has been the case before, I owe my thanks to Renee Caleta Meroni for hosting me during a writing retreat during which main parts of the manuscript were finalized. The main fieldwork on which the book is based was made possible through a generous grant from the Danish Council for Independent Research: Humanities. Most of the people depicted in the book appear under pseudonyms.
1. Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Rider, 2004), Irvin Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy (Basic Books, 1980).
2. Janne Teller, Nothing (Anthenum Books, 2010).
3. Dorte Washuus, “Ud af ‘Intet’ kom den store betydning” (Kristelig Dagblad, January 28th 2011).
4. Andrei Sinyavsky, Retten er sat (Copenhagen: Det Schoenbergske Forlag, 1961), 33.
5. Michael Ende, The Neverending Story (Penguin Books, 1993).
6. Mladen Dolar, “Nothing has Changed”. In: Daniela Caselli (ed.) Beckett and Nothing: Trying to Understand Beckett (Manchester University Press, 2012), Martin Demant Frederiksen, “Waiting for Nothing – Nihilism, Doubt and Difference without Difference in Post-Revolutionary Georgia” in Manpreet Janeja and Andreas Bandak (eds) Ethnographies of Waiting (Bloomsbury, 2018).
7. Mladen Dolar, “Nothing has Changed”, 52.
8. Mladen Dolar, “Nothing has Changed”, 56.
9. John Valentine, “Nihilism and the Eschaton” in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot”. (Florida Philosophical Review. Volume IX (2), 2009), 138, emphasis in original.
1. Quoted from Phillip Strick, “Tarkovsky’s Translations” in: John Gianvito (ed.) Andrei Tarkovsky – Interviews (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2006), 71.
2. Nadia Seremetakis, “The Memory of the Senses, Part II: Still Act” in Nadia Seremetakis (ed.) The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity (The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 38.
3. Paul Stoller, “‘Conscious’ Ain’t Consciousness: Entering ‘The Museum of Sensory Absence’“ in Nadia Seremetakis (ed.) The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity (The University of Chicago Press, 1994).
4. Tako Svanidze, “Pilgrims Seek Miracles at Opening of Saints Tomb”. (www.genda.ge, 22 February 2014).
5. Jimsher Rekhviashvili, “Reports of Holy Vision Sparks Mass Pilgrimage in Georgia”. (www.rferl.org (Radio Free Europe), 7 January 2014).
1. Quoted from Walter Nord and Ann F. Connell, Rethinking the Knowledge Controversy in Organization Studies: A Generative Uncertainty Perspective (New York and London: Routledge, 2011). See also Steve Hays, “On the Skeptical Influence of Gorgias’s On Non-Being” (Journal of the History of Philosophy Vol. 28(3), 1990).
2. Katja Maria Vogt, “Scepticism and Action” in Richard Bett (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Scepticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 165-170.
3. Richard Bett, “Introduction” in Richard Bett (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Scepticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010a), 3.
4. Richard Bett, “Scepticism and Ethics” in: Richard Bett (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Scepticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010b), 181.
5. Manfred Weidhorn, An Anatomy of Skepticism (Lincoln: iUniverse Books, 2006), 6.
6. Robert Kaplan, The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1. See also Charles Seife, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (New York: Penguin Books, 2000).
7. Andrew Cutrofello, All for Nothing – Hamlet’s Negativity, 30.
1. Tim Ingold, Lines – A Brief History (Oxon and New York: Routledge), 167.
2. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology – Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham and London: Duke University Press 2006), 16.
3. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 82.
4. Thomas Redwood, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Poetics of Cinema (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010), 105-106. In the first draft of the screenplay for Mirror, where the film was entitled A White, White Day, the scene plays out somewhat differently and does not mention any repetition. See Andrei Tarkovsky, Collected Screenplays (London and New York: faber and faber, 1999), 269.
5. Valerie Orpen, Film Editing: The Art of the Expressive (London: Wallflower Press, 2003), 2.
6. Nariman Skakov, The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky – Labyrinths in Time and Space. (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2012), 7.
7. Nariman Skakov, The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky – Labyrinths in Time and Space, 117.
8. Sean Martin, Andrei Tarkovsky (Harpenden: Kamera Books, 2011), 33. For similar comments see Philip Strick, “Tarkovsky’s Translations” in John Giavito (ed.) Andrei Tarkovsky – Interviews (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press), 70-73.
9. Andrei Tarkovsky, Time within Time – The Diaries 1970-1986 (London and Boston: faber and faber, 1994), 73.
1. Concept and Theory – Tbilisi, “In Support of Campus Studio, Tbilisi” (www.conceptandtheory-tbilisi.com, 2015). Text abbreviated.
2. See Martin Demant Frederiksen, “De Umenneskelige – Ateisme, Meningløshed og Subjektivitet i Georgien” (Nordisk Østforum, Vol. 29(1)).
1. John D. Barrow, The Book of Nothing (London: Vintage Books, 2011), 6
2. Ronald Green, Nothing Matters – A Book About Nothing (iff Books, 2010), 87, 108. For a range of further examples see Anna Dezeuze, Almost Nothing – Observations on Precarious Practices in Contemporary Art (Manchester University Press, 2017).
3. William James, The Principles of Psychology (Dover Publications, 1950).
4. Gabriele Schwab, Imaginary Ethnographies – Literature, Culture, Subjectivity (New York, Columbia University Press), 2.
5. Martin Esslin, The Theater of the Absurd (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 5.
6. Esslin, The Theater of the Absurd, 146-147.
7. Esslin, The Theater of the Absurd, 110.
8. Schwab, Imaginary Ethnographies, 4.
9. Zizek has argued along similar lines in his interpretation of Tarkovsky’s Solaris that “within the radical Otherness, we discover the lost object of our innermost longing”, quoted here from Robert Bird, Andrei Tarkovsky – Elements of Cinema (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 65.
10. Michael Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 97. For the original quote see William S. Burroughs, “The Literary Technique of Lady Sutton-Smith” (Times Literary Supplement, 6 August 1964), 682.
1. For a series of examples see Katrine Bendtsen Gotfredsen, “Invisible Connections: On Uncertainty and the (Re) Production of Opaque Politics in the Republic of Georgia” in Ida Harboe Knudsen and Martin Demant Frederiksen, (eds) Ethnographies of Grey Zones in Eastern Europe: Borders, Relations and Invisibilities (Anthem Press, 2015).
2. Joel and Ethan Cohen, The Big Lebowski (Working Title Films, 1998).
3. Ronald Green, Nothing Matters – A Book about Nothing (iff Books, 2011), 95.
4. Larry David, “The Pitch” (Seinfeld, Season 4, Episode 3).
5. Larry David “The Finale, Part 2” (Seinfeld, Season 9, Episode 24). For other representations of Nothing or Nothingness on TV see Thomas S. Hibbs, Shows about Nothing – Nihilism in Popular Culture (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2012).
6. Sarah Green, “Making Grey Zones at the European Peripheries” in Ida Harboe Knudsen and Martin Demant Frederiksen (eds), Ethnographies of Grey Zones in Eastern Europe: Borders, Relations and Invisibilities (London: Anthem Press), 182.
7. Sarah Green, “Making Grey Zones at the European Peripheries”, 175.
1. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (The MIT Press, 1995).
2. Tom Lutz, Doing Nothing – A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006).
3. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Emotions, Learning and the Brain – Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2016), 44.
4. Immordino-Yang, Emotions, Learning and the Brain, 45.
5. Lutz, Doing Nothing, 30.
6. Lutz, Doing Nothing.
7. Julian Jason Haladyn, Boredom and Art – Passions of the Will to Boredom (Winchester and Washington: Zero Books).
8. See Martin Demant Frederiksen and Anne Line Dalsgaard, “Introduction: Time Objectified” in Anne Line Dalsgaard, Martin Demant Frederiksen, Susanne Højlund and Lotte Meinert (eds), Ethnographies of Youth and Temporality – Time Objectified (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014).
9. Billy Ehn and Ovar Lofgren, The Secret World of Doing Nothing (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2010), 221. See also Razvan Nicolescu, “The Normativity of Boredom: Communication Media Use among Romanian Teenagers” in Anne Line Dalsgaard, Martin Demant Frederiksen, Susanne Højlund and Lotte Meinert (eds), Ethnographies of Youth and Temporality – Time Objectified (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014).
10. Ehn and Lofgren, The Secret World of Doing Nothing, 220.
11. See for example Philippe Bourgois, In Search of Respect – Selling Crack in el Barrio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Jay MacLeod, Ain’t No Making It (Boulder, San Francisco and Oxford: Westview Press, 1995), and Stephen Morton, “Marginality: Representations of Subalternity, Aboriginality and Race” in Shirley Chew and David Richards (eds), A Concise Companion to Postcolonial Literature (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).
12. Deborah Durham, “Apathy and Agency – The Romance of Youth in Botswana” in Jennifer Cole and Deborah Durham (eds), Figuring the Future – Globalization and the Temporalities of Children and Youth (Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2008), 168.
13. Durham, “Apathy and Agency”, 151.
14. Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor (Berkeley: California University Press, 2005).
15. Durham, “Apathy and Agency”, 165.
16. Ghassan Hage, “Eavesdropping on Bourdieu’s Philosophers”, in: Veena Das, Michael Jackson, Arthur Kleinman and Bhrigupati Singh (eds), The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014), 139.
17. Hage, “Eavesdropping on Bourdieu’s Philosophers”, 142.
18. Hage, “Eavesdropping on Bourdieu’s Philosophers”, 155.
19. Hage, “Eavesdropping on Bourdieu’s Philosophers”, 157.
20. Alessandro Duranti, The Anthropology of Intentions: Language in a World of Others (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015).
21. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 9.
22. Arendt, The Human Condition, 177.
23. Arendt, The Human Condition, 184.
24. Arendt, The Human Condition, 177.
1. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (London: Wordsworth Classics, 1993), 37.
2. Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, 44. For an ethnographic depiction of void-like existence see Elizabeth Cullen Dunn, “Humanitarianism, Displacement and the Politics of Nothing in Postwar Georgia” (Slavic Review Vol. 73(2), 2014.
3. Leah Hadomi and Robert Elbaz, “Alice in Wonderland and Utopia” (Orbis Litterarum Vol. 45, 1990), 136.
4. Jesper Gulddal and Martin Møller, Hermeneutik (Haslev: Gyldendal, 1999).
5. E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).
6. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (Basic Books, 1973), 5.
7. Cheryl Mattingly, Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots – The Narrative Structure of Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 8.
8. Mattingly, Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots, 77.
9. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity – A Particular History of the Senses (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 16, emphasis in original.
10. David Kleinberg-Levin, Beckett’s Words – The Promise of Happiness in a Time of Mourning (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 157.
11. Quoted from Kleinberg-Levin, Beckett’s Words, 287. Dr. K Takes the Waters at Riva is part three of W.G. Sebald’s four-part novel Vertigo in which Kafka appears as the character Dr K. (New Directions, 2001).
12. Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? – A Book of Essays (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 132. Conversely, although Hitchcock was a master of suspense he in fact also tarried with not revealing the cause of an event, particularly in The Birds where we never find out what the cause of their presence actually is. As Mark Fisher notes, “what the birds threaten is the very structure of explanation that had previously made sense of the world”. See Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (London: Repeater Books, 2016), 66.
13. Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, 156.
14. Christopher Devenney, “What Remains? In Henry Sussman and Christopher Devenney (eds) Engagement and Difference – Beckett and the Political (State University of New York Press, 2001), 146-147.
15. Charles Bukowski, Pulp (Virgin Books, 2009), 83.
16. Michael Connelly, “Introduction”. In: Charles Bukoski, Pulp (Virgin Books, 2009), viii.
17. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending – Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press), 127.
18. Quoted from Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, 130.
19. Michael Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), viii.
1. Laura Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), 3.
2. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 19.
3. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 2.
4. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 2.
5. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 6.
6. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 10.
7. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 259.
8. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism – Is There No Alternative? (Winchester and Washington: Zero Books, 2009).