I suggest in this essay that the responses to the coronavirus pandemic by the North Atlantic elite ought to be accounted in part to the circulation of nihilism as a structure of feeling under late capitalism. I then pose the question, how ought we think of meaning and meaning making under the shadow of ongoing extinction?

This chapter assembles theses — a distinctive genre of writing that articulates an intervention in a political, economic, or cultural practice — on the form and animating vision of intellectual practice.