An online collection of published and unpublished writings
Alongside other experienced fiction/non-fiction writers and editors, I’m launching a new service, Insensitivity Readers, to provide honest feedback on your manuscript/idea for a reasonable fee. We can provide line editing and/or general constructive feedback, as well as publishing advice – whatever you need!
Please contact me at ninapower[at]gmail[dot]com and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.
The vast majority of my new writing/projects/links to podcasts can be and will be found on my Substack, which can be found here. Many things planned for 2025!
I’m teaching again at Mary Ward Centre (Stratford, East London). Friday afternoons 2-4pm, starts Oct 4th. Email ninapower[at]gmail[dot]com with any questions.
It’s an in-person course on the Philosophy of Nature, in lecture/seminar format. We’ll start with the Greeks, esp. Aristotle, Lucretius, Aquinas, Spinoza, Kant (including the ether hypothesis of the late Opus Postumum!), Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Hegel and the German Romantics, Whitehead, Feyerabend, not to mention some of the wackier evolutionary ideas such as the Aquatic Ape hypothesis and the Cosmic aspect of the second wave, etc, etc. We will cover how we think about nature, what our relation to nature might be and questions of natural kinds, as well as natural law and evolutionary ideas.
The link to sign up can be found here.
[This was originally published in 2019]
What you really just want to say is – you can’t be friends with this person.
Why can’t you be friends with this person?
Because ‘we’ have cancelled them already – didn’t you get the memo! – because we – this fragile cobweb called something like ‘the left’ or ‘the artworld’ or ‘antifa’ or just ‘people we know and like… and not these other people we either don’t know and don’t like, or do know and don’t like, or once knew and liked and now don’t like’. The ‘we’ that has decided in favour of rumours and anonymous accusations and allegations, that has decided a lie is easier to believe than than truth, which is always more complicated.
[This was originally published in 2019]
I had originally decided not to respond to the bafflingly stupid and anonymous ‘Open Letter’ following the youtube stream I participated in with Justin Murphy and DC Miller on 28th Feb (which you can watch here if you want to see 1hr 30 of three people sitting in my office late at night drinking coffee and talking about feminism, free speech and paganism/Catholicism etc.), but I’m still getting messages asking me about it and people are expressing concern for me, both politically and personally, so here goes.
It is tempting in these sorts of situations to opt for a ‘never explain, never apologise’ tactic, to trust that people will make up their own minds, that they will investigate claims, especially anonymous, outlandish and extreme claims, about a person, that they will check the sources, trust their instincts and even if they decide that something has gone wrong, or a mistake has been made, or that a line has been crossed, they will do so on the basis of their own thinking.
I’ll be teaching a four-week course at Verdurin, a new art space in East London in August.
Details can be found here. No previous experience needed!
The future turned out to be…well what exactly? Having imagined everything from off-world mining to governments run by horses, it turns out that we’d rather spend our time watching ourselves. If the twentieth century space race strove to understand outer space, today’s ambitions are rather more inner-directed. The quest for individuality has descended into the desire to be the same; mimesis and representation have collapsed into the NPC (non-player character), a meme so threatening that, in 2018, major platforms banned anyone pretending to be one; we are happy, though, to have AI mash up our entire visual history. The machine can pretend to be us, but we are not allowed to pretend to be it. Who, or what, exactly, can we say is running things? Returning to the cliché, that dead phrase or reused character-type that we are supposed to avoid in the name of the new, helps us here, because we are a long way beyond wanting novelty.
Continue reading “From Cliché to the World”
[This is a longer version of a piece that was published in The Critic as “In a World Without God, What Does Suicide Mean?”]
[All photographs mine]
Nina Power & Pierre d’Alancaisez
If life becomes unliveable, who would you turn to? A friend? A doctor? A priest?
Today we no longer imagine ourselves God’s creation, with all the concomitant demands to look after ourselves that might entail. On the contrary, we belong only to ourselves, and can dispense with ourselves as we see fit. No more bonds, duties, or higher values. No more worrying about eternal damnation, but no reason to be grateful for the gift of life either: when pain outweighs pleasure, why not simply disappear?
We live in the era, not only of the fully administered life, as Max Horkheimer put it, but of the total bureaucratising of death. In this vision of the world, suicide becomes simply one more thing to check off the list.
In his 1974 critique of modern medicine Medical Nemesis, Ivan Illich declares that “In every society the dominant image of death determines the prevalent concept of health.” What today does death resemble? A lonely pill.
Continue reading “Piece on Suicide”
A Greek goat, Summer 2023: there are, apparently, more than a hundred references in the Bible to goats, mostly positive…
I really should update this site more often…
In any case, here are some forthcoming events.
I’m co-organising two evening talks on the planets at the excellent British Interplanetary Society.
There’s one on November 9th, on Mars, Jupiter & Saturn: tickets available here. Speakers: Noah Kumin (Mars Review of Books), Jacob Phillips (author of Obedience is Freedom) and me (on Saturn).
Another on December 7th, on Uranus, Neptune & Pluto: tickets available here. Speakers TBA!
I’m teaching a course on EVIL in January at the Mary Ward Centre. Every Friday afternoon, IN PERSON, in Stratford for 12 weeks (Jan 12th March 22nd). Sign up here. Philosophical, theological, psychological and literary conceptions of evil (and critiques of the concepts) will all be covered. Thinkers covered include Arendt, Augustine, Bataille, Kant, Leibniz, Midgley, Nietzsche, Plantinga, Plotinus, de Sade.
I have a Substack here, which largely contains poetry.
My main occupation these days is Senior Editor with the excellent Compact Magazine. Please do subscribe!
I am available to write essays on a whole variety of topics, and for one-on-one tutoring (Philosophy, theory, crits).
I’ll be teaching an in-person course at Mary Ward Centre (42 Queen Square) on Friday afternoons 1-3pm from Jan 20th – March 31st 2023. The details and sign-up can be found here.
Nina Power