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Filozofski vestnik | Volume XLII | Number 2 | 2021 | 71–92 | doi: 10.3986/fv.42.2.04
* University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, Nebraska, USA
Roland Végső*
On Acosmic Realism
As far as the idea of the “world” is concerned, the basic coordinates of our his-
torical moment could be briefly outlined in reference to the following three 
points:
1. We are living in a historical era that is increasingly defined by a general-
ized sense of cultural disorientation. This experience is often described 
as the loss of a common or shared world.
2. However, it is no longer possible to tie the subjective experience of this 
loss to the simple objective loss of the world (which was the dominant 
paradigm of the 20th century). Rather, the current moment is defined by 
a peculiar tension: on the one hand, the subjective sense of loss corre-
sponds to the uncontrollable objective proliferation of technologically 
enhanced mediated worlds (to everyone their own world); on the other 
hand, the looming specter of a global climate catastrophe threatens us 
with the total destruction of the human world. To use the artist Hito Stey-
erl’s diagnosis, we are suffering from having “too much world.”1
3. A common response to this excess of worlds threatening us with a com-
plete loss of the world today is a growing desire for re-orientation. Where 
will we find a stable foundation, something finally real or something ab-
solute, which could give us back our lost sense of order? Should we cre-
ate a new common world? Or should we dream up a workable confedera-
tion of many new worlds? Or should we simply let the inherent infinity of 
worlds guide us toward our shared destiny with the hope that, at the end 
of the day, it will have been worth it?
In the end, what the current situation might reveal to us, however, is that this 
common sense of loss is partially structured by an illusion – an illusion that we 
1 See Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, New York, Verso, 2019, 
p. 148.
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now have a chance to lose. We all know that the argument according to which 
we once had a shared common world that we have lost only yesterday is simply 
false: in our most recent histories, we would be hard put to identify a shared 
world that was not also at the same time a world of countless exclusions of 
various degrees of cruelty. The suspicion arises here that this shared, common 
world that we are already mourning today has never existed. If that is the case, 
however, it is not entirely clear why we would expect it to save us. In order to 
at least start imagining a history beyond this illusion, therefore, let us begin 
here by briefly examining some of the philosophical aspects of this unsettling 
situation.
Subjective Weltschmerz: Epistemological Delirium
While today hardly anyone needs a reminder that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 
bequeathed to us the much cherished concept of Weltliteratur, it appears to be 
of significantly less academic interest these days that the optimism of this pro-
tean category has been immediately undermined by another popular 19th-cen-
tury literary term that is often indirectly derived from Goethe’s works as well: 
Weltschmerz.2 Arguably, these two categories of Goethean descent could be 
treated as opposing twin paradigms of the 19th-century literary imagination of 
the “world”. While Weltliteratur designates a hope for a nascent universality 
beyond the nation, Weltschmerz evokes the pain and suffering caused by not 
being able to find our proper place in this world. The tension between the two 
terms is quite palpable: while one of them celebrates the coming literary con-
stitution of the world, the other already begins to mourn this world. What this 
juxtaposition reveals is that, in spite of the fundamentally pejorative connota-
tions that the term Weltschmerz had accrued by the end of the 19th century, we 
2 While the first appearance of the term Weltschmerz is attributed to Jean Paul’s posthu-
mously published 1827 novel Selina (“Gott, um den Weltschmerz auszuhalten, muß die 
Zukunft sehen”), the general literary phenomenon that it now names is usually derived 
by historians of literature from Goethe’s Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers (1774). Although 
throughout its history the concept has accumulated various theological, political, so-
cial, psychological meanings, there appears to be a general critical consensus that it is a 
“genuinely modern phenomenon.” See Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek, “Weltschmerz”, in C. 
Rohde, T. Valk, and M. Mayer (eds.), Faust Handbuch: Konstellationen, Diskurse, Medien, 
Stuttgart, J. B. Metzler Verlag, 2018, p. 254. For the specifically philosophical meaning of 
the term, see Frederick C. Beiser, Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860-
1900, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016.
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on acosmic realism
could treat it as a symptom of the impossibility of Weltliteratur. In this sense, 
it functions as a displaced recognition of the fact that “world” and “literature” 
cannot be linked together into a single concept without at least some pain and 
suffering. Going beyond the context of the 19th century, then, we could argue 
that something akin to the historical phenomenon of Weltschmerz emerges 
every time the ideological constitution of the world fails.
We seem to be living today in an age that once again is reactivating these 
19th-century debates – albeit in ways that are now adjusted to a different his-
torical situation. On the one hand, all the available empirical evidence seems 
to suggest that we are living in an era of “world literature”. The uncontrollable 
proliferation within the humanities of the debates about “world literature” are 
just one manifestation of this tendency of our times.3 In fact, we might be able 
to go further than this obvious diagnosis and speak of the ideological hegem-
ony of a new kind of Weltliteratur that goes beyond the strictly speaking “liter-
ary” products and their academic interpretations so as to include all kinds of 
discourses about the “world” today – from officially endorsed theories of eco-
nomic globalization, to scientific treatises on the Anthropocene, environmen-
tal protest movements, philosophical pamphlets, all the way to world-historical 
conspiracy theories, etc. On the other hand, all of these discussions have been 
conducted in an increasingly more ominous apocalyptic tone. The only thing 
that seems to be able to match the self-evidence of this fetishization of “world 
literature” is the certainty that the world as we know it is about to end. The 
religious variety of this kind of contemporary apocalypticism is the least sur-
prising development of our times. Our “discontent” with our civilizations has 
apparently reached a new intensity that seems to have rendered obsolete the 
fundamental coordinates of collective knowledges. We no longer seem to be 
able to find our home in this world that this new world literature promised us.
3 After its initial formulation by Goethe in the early 19th century and its mid-20th-century 
reprisal by Eric Auerbach, the category of “world literature” took on new life in the 1990s. 
Based on the works of Djelal Kadir, Pascale Casanova, David Damrosch, Franco Moretti, 
Gayatri Spivak, and countless others, the term has become the focus of endless debates. 
Since this critical literature is too expansive to review here in a meaningful way, I will 
merely refer to the following two titles both for the synthesis that they offer as well as for 
their polemical ambitions: Emily Apter, Against World Literature, New York, Verso, 2013; 
and Pheng Cheah, What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature, Dur-
ham, Duke University Press, 2016.
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What are the most salient characteristics of our contemporary Weltschmerz? 
As Bruno Latour put it, “the abandonment of a common world leads to episte-
mological delirium.”4 This “epistemological disaster” that we have been living 
through over the last few decades might be understood as a generalization of 
this new Weltschmerz.5 While in the 19th century, arguably, the problem regis-
tered by this term was that the alienated European intellectual could no longer 
find his or her class basis in a rapidly transforming society and became home-
less, today the phenomenon can no longer be localized so evidently. We could 
say that Weltschmerz has been “globalized” – both in the sense that it is no 
longer possible to tie it to one specific geographical location, and also in the 
sense that it can emerge from any segment of society. As such a mobile and gen-
eralized condition, it is now no longer the symptomatic exception, but increas-
ingly the norm of dominant discourses. The carefully coordinated distance that 
kept the optimism of Weltliteratur and the pessimism of Weltschmerz apart from 
each other in the 19th century seems to have collapsed. Mourning the loss of a 
shared world is the only Weltliteratur we are left with today.
Thus, precisely when the world of the old Weltliteratur was about to be real-
ized, a new kind of Weltschmerz emerged. This one, however, is not the lyrical 
melancholia of the failed petit bourgeois poet, nor the naïve enthusiasm of the 
adolescent mind, but something altogether different as it is based on confronta-
tions with new types of universality – among which ecological disaster stands 
out as certainly one of the most threatening. This new Weltschmerz (although 
not without its own histories), then, assumes that our current historical mo-
ment is unprecedented. Yes, we can trace the histories of how we got to this 
point, teetering on the edge of the simultaneous realization of global humanity 
and the total destruction of our living environments. But the magnitude of the 
catastrophes that we are facing is without meaningful precedent. We are no 
longer or not yet in the field of historical repetition. The old Marxian maxim, 
according to which history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce, no longer 
seems to apply. The tragedy we are currently facing (which might reach the 
scale of the literal ending of the world) breaks down the logic of this repetition 
– we are deprived of the mental relief of the prospect of farcical futures. Should 
4 Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, trans. C. Porter, Cam-
bridge, Polity, 2018, p. v.
5 Ibid., pp. 22–23. 
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on acosmic realism
this understanding of history be correct, we would find ourselves in a strange 
situation: the present is outside repetition since it is unprecedented (it is not the 
repetition of the past) and, therefore, by ending this specific history, it will not 
be incorporated into a future history in which it could be repeated. The idea of a 
final ecological catastrophe itself implies that humanity as such will undergo it 
only once. The lesson of our times is, therefore, clear: the Weltliteratur of global 
humanity ends with the Weltschmerz of extinction.
One of the more remarkable recent documents of this new Weltliteratur is Débo-
rah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s The Ends of the World (first pub-
lished in 2014 and revised in 2015). What makes this book so noteworthy is that 
Danowski and de Castro systematically map the basic coordinates of our con-
temporary Weltschmerz. In effect, they designed a combinatory machine that, 
based on structural principles, constitutes a system of eight available positions. 
The only two necessary elements of this matrix are the “world” and “us” (the 
inhabitants of this world), while everything else can be derived from the mu-
tual irreducibility to each other of these two categories. In other words, the 
pain of our world is still born of the same old conflict that gave us Weltschmerz 
in the first place: there is no possible reconciliation between the self and the 
world. We can, then, proceed from here following the logic of subtraction. In 
other words, we can take away one of the elements of the self/world dyad and 
proceed as if the other did not exist. Next, these two options can be expanded 
upon by way of positing a temporal priority: we can imagine that one of the 
two elements existed “before” or will continue to exist “after” the other. These 
four basic options can be redoubled by attributing a fundamentally “posi tive” 
or “negative” value to this absence/priority. Accordingly, today, we can im-
agine a “world without us” (for example, speculative realism), an “us without a 
world” (Kantian transcendental idealism and accelerationism), a “world before 
us” (the religious discourse on Eden or the Romantic discourse on nature as 
wilderness), and a “world after us” (as in Alan Weisman’s The World Without 
Us, or in the so-called Voluntary Extinction Movement). Depending on our own 
dispositions, each of these four positions can serve as a source of exhilarated 
jubilation or a cause for cosmic alarm.6
6 Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Ends of the World, trans. R. Nunes, 
Cambridge, Polity, 2017, pp. 19–22.
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Nevertheless, the way “speculative realism” appears in this apocalyptic fresco 
so skillfully painted by the authors remains quite instructive. Relying on the 
works of Quentin Meillassoux and Ray Brassier, Danowski and de Castro offer 
us two different (potentially conflicting) images of this philosophical position: 
in one of them, speculative realism is a radical affirmation of the world; in the 
other, it declares the world to be always already dead. On the one hand, spec-
ulative realism appears here as a representative of the “world without us” sce-
nario due to its radical reassertion of “a world independent of all experience.”7 
Rejecting the inherent worldlessness of all forms of philosophical idealism, 
speculative realism teaches us the “absolute pre-eminence of a world without 
people as the ultimate guarantee of any authentic materialism.”8 On the oth-
er hand, however, the authors also conclude that, for speculative realism, the 
end of the world is the very mode of existence of the world: “One could say 
that, for these thinkers, to speak of an ‘end of the world,’ far from a pragmatic 
contradiction […], is, on the contrary, a sheer metaphysical tautology, a trivial 
ontological pleonasm: the end is the world’s mode of ‘existence.’”9 Speculative 
realism gives us a “a world, in fact, that is radically dead.”10 After all, it appears 
that the worldlessness of idealism (which holds that the transcendental subject 
can never access the world in itself) is countered here by the worldlessness of 
realism (which posits a radically dead world that only exists in the mode of its 
ending). Does this paradoxical absolute affirmation and absolute negation of 
the world make speculative realism itself a symptomatic site for our contempo-
rary Weltschmerz?
Objective Weltschmerz: Too Much World
In order to be able to move beyond the confines of the map provided by Danowski 
and de Castro, it might be time to pick up one of the young Walter Benjamin’s 
suggestions from 1913: “We want the Weltschmerz at last to become objective.”11 
7 Ibid., p. 31.
8 Ibid., p. 32.
9 Ibid., p. 35.
10 Ibid., p. 31.
11 See Walter Benjamin, “Romanticism: Reply of the ‘Unsanctified’”, in Walter Benjamin: 
Early Writings 1910-1917, trans. H. Eiland, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2011, 
p. 132. In addition, for more discussions on this modern pain of the world, see also in the 
same volume the essay “The Happiness of Ancient Man”, p. 228.
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on acosmic realism
Benjamin’s goal was the rejection of the misguided Romanticism of his own 
generation. He calls for a Romanticism that is now “objective” rather than “sub-
jective” in orientation – in the context of our current discussion, we could call 
it a realist rather than an idealist Weltschmerz. We can take Benjamin’s strategy 
seriously: in order to fight the neo-Romantics of his time, he proposes a new 
kind of Romanticism that is finally devoid of Romantic subjectivism (he calls 
it a “sober Romanticism”). Similarly, we could counter the apocalypticism of 
our times by turning its Weltschmerz against itself. Although Benjamin him-
self does not make this connection explicitly, in his early works we can find a 
model for this objectivized Weltschmerz in the concluding sections of his essay 
“On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” (1916) where he discusses 
the “deep sadness of nature”: “It is a metaphysical truth that all nature would 
begin to lament if it were endowed with language. […] Because she is mute, na-
ture mourns.”12 Following this logic, then, our task could be to imagine a field 
of objectivity that already includes in its very constitution a certain principle 
of “mourning”. Even before or independently of the advent of the subject, the 
world was already suffering – a radically dead world that nevertheless exists in 
the mode of its perpetual ending is a world that mourns itself.
So, what would this finally “objective” Weltschmerz look like today? Its pre-
supposition would not be that the human subject cannot be reconciled to the 
world, but that the world cannot be reconciled to itself. In other words, suffer-
ing would no longer be located in the human subject as it would have to be in-
scribed objectively into the world. The world itself suffers from something – but 
this something cannot be conceived in transcendent terms. To put it differently, 
the call for objectivism here means that the world is not suffering from some-
thing other than itself (which prevents it from finally becoming a world) but 
simply suffers itself. “Suffering”, as an objective process could be conceived as 
a technical term for a desubjectivized mode of existence that is haunted by an 
inexistence (the mourned object). The manner of existence of mind-independ-
ent reality is this suffering: undergoing or being subjected to being. The human 
“pain” that Schmerz refers to would be merely one possible modality of this ob-
jectivized suffering: the subjectivized human suffering. In fact, what we know 
12 See Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man”, trans. E. Je-
phcott, in Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 1913-1926, M. Bullock and M. W. Jennings (eds.), Cam-
bridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1996, pp. 72–73.
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as the human subject might very well be nothing other than one specific way 
the world suffers this non-existence. The most extreme form of articulating this 
inexistence, however, would be to turn this mourning against itself: the world 
itself suffers from the suspicion that it does not exist.
But the difficulty of imagining a world that mourns and even mourns itself is 
quite evident. Before we even begin to imagine it, the project of this objectiva-
tion immediately runs into an obvious problem: the category of the “world” 
is (to say the least) overdetermined. To provide an objective definition of 
Weltschmerz, we might have to first produce a definition of the world itself – not 
a particularly easy or enjoyable task. To make things more complicated, it is 
quite obvious that the category of the “world” has been employed in cosmolog-
ical, ontological, phenomenological, theological, political, aesthetic, etc., dis-
courses in a number of different ways – often simultaneously in multiple regis-
ters. Already the Kantian “destruction of the cosmos” introduced the suspicion 
that the idea of the world will never meet its corresponding empirical object.13 A 
new kind of objective Weltschmerz emerges here: objectively speaking, it is not 
clear whether we can even speak about the world.
Thus, before venturing a proper definition, we might have to set ourselves a 
seemingly more modest (or even more “objective”) initial task: let us look 
around ourselves and count the number of worlds we find around us. In order 
to find some stable points of reference for this exercise, we could rely here on 
the classic metaphysical categories that we inherited from various ontological 
doctrines: monism, dualism, and pluralism. How many worlds are there? Here 
are some of the, no doubt, already familiar common answers:
1.  There is one world: Cosmologically speaking, among the ancients, we 
could refer to Aristotle as one of the most influential proponents of the 
fundamental unity of the world. Then, through the scholastic mediation 
of Aristotelian ideas, this position has also become a fundamental as-
sumption of early modern science (for example, in Newton). 
13 On this Kantian destruction of the cosmos, see Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Ab-
sent Centre of Political Ontology, New York, Verso, 2000, pp. 59–66; Philipp Weber, Kosmos 
und Subjektivität in der Frühromantik, Leiden, Wilhelm Fink, 2017, pp. 27–56.
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2.  There are two worlds: We often blame Plato or, more precisely, Platonism 
for establishing the kind of “two-world” theories that have provided the 
fundamental framework for a significant part of Western thought. Even 
if Plato’s cosmos is on some fundamental level singular and One, this 
cosmos is nevertheless divided between the visible and invisible worlds. 
Hence the traditional separation of mundus sensibilis and mundus intel-
ligibilis that has remained an operative force for so long (for example, 
Hannah Arendt classified any form of thought that distinguishes true 
Being from mere Appearance as such a “two-world theory”).14 Yet, the 
most familiar form of this duality in the West comes to us from Christian-
ity (and, in its negative form, from Nietzsche’s critique of the Hinterwelt). 
3.  There are many worlds: Among the Ancients, Atomism and Stoicism pro-
vided two basic paradigms of the plurality of worlds (spatial and tempo-
ral plurality). Thereafter, the question whether (both ontologically and 
phenomenologically) we need to be able to speak about the plurality and 
even the infinity of worlds has been a recurrent problem for philosophy. 
In different forms, we can trace this question in the works of Descartes 
and Leibniz all the way to Alain Badiou.15
Of course, this hasty sketch remains insufficient for a number of different rea-
sons. In reality, it is difficult to find pure cosmological systems in the Western 
philosophical tradition that do not end up mixing some of these categories. 
Nevertheless, this quick outline does allow us to reconstruct a recurrent logical 
sequence composed of three crucial steps: [1] even if we assume that there is a 
singular “world” that can be grasped somehow conceptually, [2] we find that 
this unity is often impossible to describe without reference to some kind of a 
fundamental internal division or antagonism (for example, the split between 
being and appearance) that reproduces the question of the unity of the given 
world in the form of an internal reduplication of this world, [3] which, finally, 
turns out to be an uncontrollable movement of the proliferation of internal di-
visions that can be escalated to such a degree that the initial conceptual unity 
of the world itself is undermined. As a result of this movement, the question of 
the unity of the world does not necessarily disappear from the problem of the 
14 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, New York, Harcourt, 1981, pp. 23–26.
15 For a useful summary of these debates, see Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Worlds without End: 
The Many Lives of the Multiverse, New York, Columbia University Press, 2014.
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world, but is perpetually displaced in a series of repetitions and merely returns 
on different scales. Based on the model of a “hermeneutical circle”, we could 
call this sliding effect a “cosmological circle”: unity leads to division – which in 
turn leads us back to the question of unity.16
The mere act of counting worlds, therefore, seems to lead us into the drift of this 
circular argument with the force of an unavoidable fate. The one leads to the 
many – which leads us to infinity – which leads us back to the question of the 
one since even the infinity of infinities seems to contain some principle of struc-
turation that forces us to identify minimal units of existence. A conclusion that 
could be drawn from this state of affairs is that worlds cannot be counted (in the 
sense that the act of “counting” already presupposes a pre-established unit of 
counting: the world). It appears that this difficulty itself is a sign of the objective 
nature of Weltschmerz. How can we get out of this circle, then? As a first step, in 
order to move beyond the reductive arithmetic of the three options listed above 
(one, two, infinity), we can immediately cite here two additional cosmological 
traditions whose calculations end up with quite different conclusions: Gnosti-
cism and acosmism. What is potentially interesting about these two traditions 
in this context is that, at least temporarily, they shift our attention away from 
the endless dialectic of the one and infinity toward a calculus of smaller magni-
tudes: under their guidance, we enter the domain of the “less than one.”
Thus, in this context, we would underline the significance of the Gnostic here-
sy for the simple reason that it could allow us to talk about a “failed world”: a 
world that is not quite one without being nothing. Strictly speaking, of course, 
Gnostic worldlessness would still fall within the domain of Christian “two-
world” theories: even if our human world is an incomplete project, the world 
of God, the world of salvation, is still posited as another real world. So, the 
fundamental dualisms of Gnosticism are still there but the world (our world) is 
now reduced to the status of a literal demi-monde (a Halbwelt): a partial world 
that exists without being a closed unity. This world that is not one anymore 
becomes the model of a recurrent pattern that is often evoked in discussions of 
Gnosticism but seems to point beyond this specific tradition. In a similar spirit, 
16 For example, in Worlds without End, Mary-Jane Rubenstein argues that in these cosmologi-
cal systems singularity and infinity always end up mixing with each other. She calls these 
dynamics “multiplicity.” See ibid., p. 26.
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on acosmic realism
Peter Sloterdijk has recently argued that Gnosticism reduced the world to the 
status of mere “bad partial objects.”17 The Gnostic hostility toward the world 
was based on the Pauline “as if not” that established the necessary distance 
from the world that would eventually allow a wholesale negation of the world 
itself. But first, this world had to be dissembled before it could be negated. 
Nonetheless, as Sloterdijk’s paradoxical conclusion also shows, this is one of 
the essential limits of Gnosticism in this regard: “Even dark Gnosticism needs 
the scandalous world in order to flee from it.”18
Thus, in light of this contradiction, we have to consider the possibility that this 
“failed world” theory itself supposes too much about the world. At least this 
is the core message of that famous conversation between Max Brod and Franz 
Kafka that Brod reported in his 1921 essay “Der Dichter Franz Kafka” (the ur-text 
of all Kafka criticism):
I remember, Brod writes, a conversation with Kafka which began with pres-
ent-day Europe and the decline of the human race. 
“We are nihilistic thoughts, suicidal thoughts that come into God’s head,” 
Kafka said. This reminded me at first of the Gnostic view of life: God as the evil 
demiurge, the world as his Fall.
“Oh no,” said Kafka, “our world is only a bad mood of God, a bad day of his.” 
“Then there is hope outside this manifestation of the world that we know.” 
He smiled. “Oh, plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope – but not for us.”19
17 “But, before the total object ‘world’ could be taken distance from and criticized, the whole 
had to be dissembled into parts that could be negated – or, in modern parlance, into bad 
partial objects – and represented as such. The development of a position of animosity to 
the world is in fact accomplished through such steps both at the level of the history of 
affects and at the mythological level; it goes the whole way, from one bad aspect of the 
world to the badness of the whole of the world.” See Peter Sloterdijk, After God, trans. I. A. 
Moore, Cambridge, Polity, 2020, p. 50.
18 Ibid., p. 62.
19 Max Brod, “Der Dichter Franz Kafka” in Neue Rundschau (November 1921), p. 1213. The 
translation that I reproduced here is taken from the English translation of Walter Benja-
min’s “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death”, trans. H. Zohn, in Selected 
Writings, Vol. 2, 1927-1934, M. W. Jennings, H. Eiland, and G. Smith (eds.), Cambridge, MA, 
Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 798.
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These are certainly well-known sentences. What might be worth highlighting 
here once again is that this conversation suggests that, for Kafka, even Gnosti-
cism attributed too much consistency, too much substance, too much intention-
ality to our world. In order to understand our world, what we need is less than 
Gnosticism: not a fallen God but a suicidal one. We are presented here with 
the image of a God who is himself suffering from a kind of divine Weltschmerz. 
To be more precise, in God’s suffering, the human world is merely a nihilistic 
thought, a mere suicidal ideation: a God that wants to kill himself incidentally 
produces this world as a passing bad mood. The world is this God’s idea of the 
way he would kill himself. Yet, it appears that he does not do so in the end. In 
light of this God’s pain, the insignificance of human suffering is further exac-
erbated by the reference to this whole episode merely constituting “a bad day” 
(an inverted Sabbath when God is not doing anything – however not because 
his work has been completed, but merely because he is too depressed to even 
move). All this suggests that God did not go through with the act: for the time 
being, at least, the idea was abandoned and the pain continues.20
Can we retranslate this God’s suffering here as a kind of objectivized Welt-
schmerz? The problem is that this “world” now is nothing other than the way 
God suffers himself. In fact, the world is the suffering itself as it is objectivized 
in our world (the world is an objectivized mood and human Weltschmerz is just 
the re-subjectivization of God’s own suffering). Our own dissatisfaction with 
the world merely mirrors this God’s suffering. However, one could argue that, 
in the Kafka example, this suicidal God still represents a force that is external 
to the world – so we are not yet talking about a truly “objectivized” Weltschmerz 
here. In the anecdote, human subjective suffering is merely displaced to anoth-
er kind of subjectivity. While the world is now the objectivization of this higher, 
transcendent form of pain, the story still suggests that we could simply blame 
all our sufferings on God. Human subjective Weltschmerz is projected onto a 
divine subjectivity. A step in the right direction, but how would this scenario 
look different if we simply removed God from this equation? Would the world 
mourn this God if, in the end, he really did commit suicide?
20 To put it differently, one of the ultimate metaphysical surprises of Kafka’s world would not 
be simply that we human beings do not have hope, but that even God experienced its be-
ing as Joseph K. did his own.
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on acosmic realism
We should not forget, however, that we do know from the history of philoso-
phy a possible name for this “worldview” that offers us even less than a failed 
world: acosmism. The assertion of the absence or non-existence of the world. 
How many worlds are there? None. Unfortunately, we seem to know even less 
about acosmism as a philosophical tradition than about Gnosticism. In fact, it 
is a frequent complaint that, currently, no systematic treatment of philosoph-
ical acosmism in the literature seems to exist. As a result, it is a telling detail 
of the secondary literature that one of the most often cited starting points for 
discussions of acosmism remains Hans-Walter Schütte’s entry on “Akosmis-
mus” in the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie – a meagre paragraph that 
briefly evokes Hegel’s critique of Spinoza (in the context of the atheism debate) 
following a reference to Fichte’s quip that he would rather be called an “acos-
mist” than an “atheist”. While these words might suggest that acosmism is 
nothing more than a properly groomed version of atheism, Schütte’s summary 
judgment is quite telling: acosmism is a “doctrine of worldlessness” that “has 
not developed its own philosophical theory.”21 Caught somewhere between Spi-
nozist monism and Fichtean subjective idealism, acosmism appears to lack its 
own philosophical substance – it appears as a mere specter that haunts other 
philosophies.22 It is as if there were something not properly philosophical about 
the idea that the world does not exist and only a non-philosophy could devote 
proper attention to it.
Absolute Weltschmerz: Speculative Realism
Is “acosmism”, then, the neglected philosophical tradition that could at least 
lead us one step closer to accomplishing the task of producing a finally objec-
tive Weltschmerz? The contemporary relevance of this question is certainly con-
firmed by the fact that some strands of acosmic thought did resurface recently 
in philosophical texts that also declare their allegiance to philosophical “real-
ism”.23 So, what are the chances of a contemporary acosmic realism that would 
21 Hans-Walter Schütte, “Akosmismus”, in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Vol. 1, J. 
Ritter, K. Gründer, and G. Gabriel (eds.), Basel, Schwabe, 1971, col. 128.
22 For a recent attempt to locate Romantic acosmism precisely in this tension between Spi-
noza’s and Fichte’s philosophies, see Philipp Weber, “Romantic Acosmism: On Friedrich 
Schlegel’s Theory of an Unfinished World”, The Germanic Review, 96 (1/2021), pp. 23–40.
23 One of the best-known versions of this “new realism” can be found in Markus Gabriel, Why 
the World Does Not Exist, trans. G. Moss, Cambridge, Polity, 2017.
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finally render Weltschmerz truly objective? If we see speculative realism as an 
expression of our contemporary Weltschmerz, the question that we need to pose 
here concerns the degree to which this philosophy can successfully objectivize 
the non-existence of the world. Countering Schütte’s diagnosis, we might hope 
that the doctrine of worldlessness is finally about to receive its own philosoph-
ical theory.
What happens to the world when the project of (idealist) “critique” is replaced 
by that of (realist) “speculation”? Before rushing to an answer, we should con-
sider here briefly Sloterdijk’s attack on what he calls the Weltschmerz of Critical 
Theory in his early text Critique of Cynical Reason. Reflecting on the lachry-
mose melancholia of the Frankfurt School, Sloterdijk writes: “Critical Theory 
was based on the presupposition that we know this world a priori, through 
Weltschmerz. What we perceive of the world can be ordered in psychosomatic 
coordinates of pain and pleasure. Critique is possible inasmuch as pain tells us 
what is ‘true’ and what is ‘false’.”24 As we can see, the core of this argument is 
that Critical Theory was essentially an attempt to turn subjective Weltschmerz 
into the guiding principle of an allegedly objective social analysis of a world 
that is no longer accessible to traditional epistemological critique. To put it dif-
ferently, Weltschmerz functioned as the a priori condition of possibility for any 
properly modern critique as it accomplished two things at the same time: on 
the one hand, by virtue of being an “a priori pain,” it established the necessary 
critical distance from the world by founding a specific standpoint from which 
the world can be judged; on the other hand, by virtue of being an “a priori 
pain,” it also provided a concrete program with clear content for this critique: 
rejecting the false pleasures of the world.25 What was registered in the works of 
Walter Benjamin, for example, was the pain of the times (Zeitschmerz): critique 
has become impossible due to the suffocating closeness of things precisely at 
a time when it was most necessary. This paradox gave rise to this “melancholy 
science” that Sloterdijk refers to as a “Sensitive Theory” that was often coded 
in terms of an elitist “aesthetic” critique of the world. But, and this is a crucial 
point here, in Sloterdijk’s hands, this evaluation of Critical Theory as a utopian 
weaponization of Weltschmerz turns into a critique of “critique” in general. To 
24 Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. M. Eldred, Minneapolis, University of 
Minnesota Press, 1987, p. xxxiii.
25 Ibid.
85
on acosmic realism
put it differently, the entire program of critique is grounded in this Weltschmerz 
whose time is finally up. Sloterdijk, on the other hand, wanted to “cheer us up” 
from the “melancholy stagnation” of this moody suffering.26
Regardless of how happy we might be with such a conclusion, we are now cer-
tainly a step closer to accomplishing the task set out by Benjamin. For the least 
we can say here is that this a priori Weltschmerz already moves the discussion 
to a transcendental level. Taken in this sense, Weltschmerz is still subjective, 
but it no longer falls into the domain of empirical psychology. Rather, it now 
designates an inherent possibility of transcendental subjectivity: it emerges as 
an effect of the ability to create a distance from exclusively empirical experi-
ences. It appears to be something like the affective (bodily) means of producing 
the transcendental/empirical difference itself – and, as such, if it is not neces-
sarily the condition of possibility of any “critique”, it is at least an important 
prelude to it. To the degree that the field of objectivity is constituted by this 
transcendental subject, then, this Weltschmerz now has a potential role in this 
constitution. In fact, what Sloterdijk’s analysis suggests is that the transcen-
dental subject of critique is by definition in a painful relation to the world that 
it itself co-constitutes. This suffering is the price the subject pays for having 
escaped the domain of pure empiricism. Thus, critique means suffering, since 
the transcendental subject that constitutes the world will never be fully part of 
this world.
Would it be possible to repeat Sloterdijk’s gesture here (his identification of “cri-
tique” with a priori pain) in relation to realism and ask whether “speculation” 
itself is a form of suffering? As we have seen, Danowski and de Castro have 
already introduced the idea that speculative realism is the simultaneous abso-
lute affirmation and absolute negation of the world. Is it possible to maintain 
this perplexing position without the mediation of some kind of suffering? Let 
us start by noting that, in the broader discourse around speculative realism, a 
similar duality has been produced with regard to the question of “subjectivity”. 
In a sense, there is a crucial rift in speculative realism that becomes visible 
in the tension between asubjectivism and panpsychism. The same way that 
the idea of the world leads to a self-negating acosmism, the question of sub-
jectivity leads to tension between a totalizing asubjectivism (the whole of the 
26 Ibid., p. xxxvii.
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real is asub jective) and a totalizing subjectivism (the real is relational). The first 
position asserts that the absolute is asubjective: the only way to have (subjec-
tive) access to reality in itself is to conceive of it as completely devoid of subjec-
tivity. The object-oriented splinter group, however, has moved in the direction 
of panpsychism: in this view, the very difference between the object and the 
subject is undermined by the hypothesis of fundamentally “sentient” objects. 
Of course, both trends assert the existence of a mind-independent reality that 
remains untotalizable – but as far as the nature of this incomplete reality is 
concerned, they certainly disagree.
In this context, Quentin Meillassoux’s “strange” materialism confronts us with 
a new set of questions, for the issue will no longer be whether science can think 
but whether science can suffer. Scandalously bypassing the Heideggerian prob-
lematic, Meillassoux suggests that science is capable of thinking the absolute.27 
But this thinking is predicated upon a complete negation of suffering. Philoso-
phy begins where sufferings stops. Of course, the question is not whether indi-
vidual philosophers or scientists can suffer – the same way the Heideggerian 
question did not concern specific individuals who happened to be scientists. 
But when the thinking of the absolute becomes identical with the thought of 
radical contingency, philosophy is called upon to bear witness to a certain kind 
of “death”: on the one hand, the substance of the world is dead matter; on the 
other hand, the world as we know it can cease to exist at any moment without 
any reason whatsoever. While some might object that the idea that anything 
can happen anytime without reason is a positive prescription for a permanent 
state of anxiety, Meillassoux certainly does not attach an a priori affect to the 
thought of radical contingency. In this regard, his attitude is quite different 
from that of a Heideggerian anxiety (which, in Being and Time, is precisely pro-
duced by exposure to the worldliness of the world). On this count, Meillassoux 
is deliberately and consistently silent. There is no explicitly formulated Grund-
stimmung for speculative materialism – not even in the face of death.
27 For a discussion of the proposition that “science thinks”, see Frank Ruda, “The Specu-
lative Family, or: The Critique of the Critical Critique of Critique”, Filozofski vestnik, 33 
(2/2012), p. 58.
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on acosmic realism
This silence is understandable since Meillassoux is clearly just as allergic to 
subjectivism as to all forms of anthropomorphism when it comes to thinking 
the absolute. In its substance, then, the world is pure and simple death: 
If there is a true critique of the subject, it must also be a critique of the subjective, 
and of its hypostasis: such a critique thus cannot but be materialist, since only 
the materialist absolutizes the pure non-subjective – the pure and simple death, 
with neither consciousness nor life, without any subjectivity whatsoever, that 
is represented by the state of inorganic matter – that is to say, matter anterior to 
and independent of every subject and all life.28
But what is the price that we have to pay for the discovery of the world of pure 
matter? The stakes of this enterprise first become visible in the distinction 
Meillassoux makes between speculative materialism and science. Speculation 
requires a certain anesthetic ascetism (as Meillassoux puts it: “we prohibit our-
selves from speaking of what is – that is to say of what is actual – and speak 
only of that which could really be”). But the description of reality by science as-
sumes the form of an absolutely necessary empiricism, an unavoidable aesthet-
ic encounter with a “regime of experience” (Meillassoux defends “the exclu-
sive right of experience to describe the inexhaustible intricacies of the real that 
make up our world”).29 While there is no a priori suffering tied to speculation, 
science is after all a form of empirical suffering. The speculative philosopher 
gives up the world of experience and retreats into a dead world – in order to jus-
tify the scientist’s encounters with the living world. Standing on the sidelines, 
the materialist philosopher cheers on the scientist with the following chant: 
keep going, you have an absolute right to your suffering! Thereby, we now also 
have a categorical justification of an empirical Weltschmerz that proposes an 
unbridgeable abyss between the absolute (accessible only to speculative mate-
rialism) and the empirical sciences (whose role is now restricted to a descrip-
tion of the world as it is).
28 Quentin Meillassoux, “Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition: A Speculative Analysis of the 
Sign Devoid of Meaning”, trans. R. Mackay and M. Gansen, in S. Malik and A. Avanessian 
(eds.), Genealogies of Speculation: Materialism and Subjectivity since Structuralism, Lon-
don, Bloomsbury, 2016 p. 141.
29 Ibid., p. 144.
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Hence the fundamentally mournful tone of these discussions. For we should 
keep in mind that death appears in at least two different forms in Meillas-
soux’s arguments. First, individual death plays a crucial role in establishing 
the argument against correlationism. In essence, contrary to all correlationist 
objections, death becomes the first instance of an absolute that is thinkable. 
The absolute (that is, contingency) first becomes thinkable in the form of death 
(since death is a form of “the capacity-to-be-other” required by contingency).30 
Second, this death is then transposed into the absolute. Therefore, there is after 
all an anthropomorphic hypostasis at work here: not the hypostasis of human 
subjectivity but that of the death of the subject. When the generalized ontolog-
ical capacity-to-be-other is coded as “death” rather than some other form of 
lifelessness, a minimal degree of anthropomorphism is reintroduced into the 
absolute. For the absolute is just as much deathless as it is lifeless. To speak of 
death before the miraculous emergence of life would imply that this emergence 
was not ex nihilo (as Meillassoux would want it to be) but somehow preordained 
by the very structure of lifeless matter.31 The absolute is where the subject goes 
to die – a graveyard of human suffering. As a result, we now know for sure that 
there is a rift between the subject and the real.
At the other extreme of this spectrum we find Graham Harman explicitly call-
ing for a “speculative psychology” of objects (“a still nonexistent field” that 
would provide “speculations on the different levels of psyche at different levels 
of objects”).32 Of course, the point here is not to project human psychology onto 
objects but the exact opposite: to redefine human psychology itself as merely 
one instantiation of a larger cosmic pattern. Thus, this psychology is not in-
tended to be a direct projection of 19th-century Weltschmerz onto the cosmos: it 
“has nothing to do with a romantic conception of sensitive plants and weeping 
minerals.”33 Rather, following the logic of this reversal, the goal is to under-
stand human Weltschmerz itself as a specific manifestation of a larger problem. 
30 Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. R. Brassier, 
London, Continuum, 2008, pp. 55–57. 
31 For a discussion of the ex nihilo emergence of life out of lifeless matter, and consciousness 
out of life, see Quentin Meillassoux, “Excerpts from L’Inexistence divine”, trans. G. Har-
man, in Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: A Philosophy in the Making, Edinburgh, 
Edinburgh University Press, 2011, p. 175.
32 Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object, Winchester, Zero Books, 2011, p. 120. 
33 Ibid.
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on acosmic realism
Let us recall that, according to Harman, “the basic rift in the cosmos lies be-
tween objects and relations.”34 In other words, the classic form of Weltschmerz 
was correct to the degree that it posited an unbridgeable rift between the self 
and the world. But it was mistaken when it tried to universalize this abyss as 
a specifically human attribute because it assumed that “the human-world re-
lation is the basis for all others, or at least for knowing about the others.”35 In 
other words, one of the goals of this speculative psychology would be to final-
ly identify the objective conditions of human Weltschmerz. And the answer is 
clear. Relationality itself is the author of this universal tragicomedy: the real 
ontological break is “between [objects’] autonomous reality outside all relation, 
and their caricatured form in the sensual life of other objects.”36 The mere form 
of the relation of Weltschmerz is retained here in a purely objective manner: the 
entire dynamics take place in the relations between the inner essence and the 
sensual life of objects.
Yet, this “panpsychism” has to be articulated within a decidedly acosmic 
framework. To put it differently, in this infinite proliferation of objects, we do 
encounter an ultimate limit: “The cosmos has no bottom, but does have a sur-
face. There may be an infinite regress, but no infinite progress: no final, encom-
passing object that could be called a universe.”37 The world (in the sense of a 
single totality of all objects) cannot be objectivized since the logic of infinity 
undermines any objective totality. If every object is composed of other objects, 
we do have an infinite regress toward ever smaller objects; but there is no su-
per-object that could contain this infinite regress. This is one of the reasons 
why the “pan” of “panpsychism” is by definition a hyperbole that has to be 
tamed by a kind of “polypsychism”. If there is no “all” that could be fully psy-
chologized, we are left with the assumption that psychism does not apply to 
every object all of the time. It is possible to conceive of objects that are (at least 
temporarily) outside of all relationality.
But how does this definition of the partially psychologized infinite world re-
late to Harman’s understanding of objectivity in its most extreme (most pure 
34 Ibid., p. 119.
35 Ibid., p. 118.
36 Ibid., pp. 119–120.
37 Ibid., p. 122.
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and most objective) form? Careful to distinguish this domain of pure objectivity 
from mere death, Harman compares it to sleep: “dormant objects are the purest 
kind of objects we can study. They are not altogether lonely, since they do have 
pieces; they are simply not pieces of anything else, and therefore they do not 
perceive.”38 What is striking about this definition of the dormant object is that it 
fully inverts Harman’s definition of the untotalizable world: after all, there are 
world-like ultimate objects in the cosmos. If a dormant object no longer partic-
ipates in any higher relation (and does not itself perceive anything anymore), 
it does take on the function of the kind of super-object that a universe is sup-
posed to be: it effectively totalizes an infinity of relations. It is a lonely object 
to the degree that it is completely withdrawn from any other “higher” relation; 
but it is not completely lonely to the degree that it contains multitudes. While 
the cosmos cannot be reduced to a single universe, it does contain potentially 
infinite universes in itself: these are the sleeping objects that contain an infinite 
number of other objects in themselves without being in a relation to anything 
outside themselves. Yet, the psychology of these lonely objects remains an in-
herent limit to the future discourse of speculative psychology. Since they fully 
reproduce the solipsistic rift of classic Weltschmerz, they condemn this psychol-
ogy to an interminable suffering caused by its alienation from its own objective 
foundations: the withdrawal from the world.
Thus, caught between the desubjectivization of the absolute and the partial 
non-human psychologization of objectivity, we can detect the emergence of a 
certain pattern. If realism today is by definition acosmic, it is based on an in-
verted Weltschmerz. The agony of this science comes from a double relation to 
the world. On the one hand, we have to suffer from the consistent application of 
the idea that the world does not exist because it never existed. This is certainly 
not an easy task and it meets plenty of resistance along the way. On the other 
hand, we cannot deny the reality of the “idea” of the world. As an idea, the 
world still needs to be repeatedly accounted for. This is our new Weltschmerz, 
which surfaces in many discourses today but is quite palpable in the discourse 
of philosophical realism: although we know that the world does not exist, time 
after time we keep behaving as if it really did exist.
38 Ibid., p. 123.
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on acosmic realism
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