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Topic

Affect After the End of the World: Uncanny Disorientation, Nihilism in Bad Faith, and the Crisis of Modernity

Department of Political Science

Date & location

• Monday, December 15, 2025

• 9:30 A.M.

• Clearihue Building, Room B007

Reviewers

Supervisory Committee

• Dr. Simon Glezos, Department of Political Science, ӣ��Ӱ�� (Supervisor)

• Dr. Arthur Kroker, Department of Political Science, UVic (Member)

• Dr. Peyman Vahabzadeh, Department of Sociology, UVic (Outside Member) 

External Examiner

• Dr. Jarius Grove, Department of Political Science, University of Hawai’i at Manoa 

Chair of Oral Examination

• Dr. Donald Juzwishin, School of Health Information Science, UVic

Abstract

The central claim of this dissertation is that for modern subjects the world has already ended, insofar as the modern world upon which their subjective orientation had been based has been rendered inoperative. Several questions then follow from this claim: How does it feel, affectively, to live on after the end of the world? And what kinds of activity—social, political, aesthetic, etc.—follow from these affective experiences? It is my contention that the basic affective structure of contemporary reality, after the end of the world, is one of uncanny disorientation: an unsettling feeling of creeping strangeness that leaves the modern subject unable to orient themselves in relation to once familiar things. This affective sense of uncanny disorientation then produces a mode of subjectivity that I have termed nihilism in bad faith, or a form of passive nihilism in which the subject acknowledges their own nihilistic tendencies only in order to flee from them through a reinvestment in the very modes of life that produced their nihilism in the first place. This theoretical framework of uncanny disorientation and nihilism in bad faith will then be applied to three case studies—the aesthetic turn toward nostalgia; the current resurgence in overt white supremacist movements; and contemporary plans for Mars colonization—to demonstrate how these seemingly disparate forms of activity can be understood as reactions to feelings of uncanny disorientation and examples of nihilism in bad faith.