Nihilism frees the will from the very values meant to discipline it

Evidence

In this consequential turn, where nihilism intersects neoliberalism, freedom is torn out of the habitus in traditional values by which it was to be contained and disciplined in the original neoliberal formation. The combination of neoliberalism’s deprecation of the political and the social and a desublimated, wounded white masculinity together generate a disinhibited freedom, one symptomizing ethical destitution even as it often dresses in religious righteousness or conservative melancholy for a phantasmatic past. This freedom is paradoxically expressed as nihilism and against nihilism, attacking and destroying while faulting its objects of derision for the ruin of traditional values and order. It is freedom unbridled and uncultured, freedom to put a stick in the eye of accepted norms, freedom from care of the morrow. This is the freedom remaindered by nihilism, in the making for centuries and intensified by neoliberalism itself. It is the freedom of “I will because I can, because I believe in nothing and I am nothing other than my will to power.” — Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, 291

Categorization

• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source
• XREF: connects to: Unmoored values lose force but persist as fungible instruments — Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise…, 278; Nihilism is value-unmooring, not value-absence, dissolving truth and fake news distinctions — Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise…, 657; A value grounded in being would destroy value and enslave the will (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Nihilism is value-unmooring, not value-absence, dissolving truth and fake news distinctions #expands (0.78) — Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, 657
• A value grounded in being would destroy value and enslave the will #corroborates (0.75)
• A more profound freedom than will underlies all volitional acts #expands (0.75)
• Belief in free will functions as a defense against acknowledging environmental determinism #complicates (0.72) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1154