+++
title = "Nihilism"
glassblowers = ["sanjabojanic.md"]
+++

> Even with the world in an emergency state, then, where we may want every scholarly hand on deck, it is essential to have a moat between academic and political life. This moat is vital to protecting reflection, imagination ![](shard:senseofimagination.md), and accountability in knowledge production and dissemination. It is essential to protecting an understanding and practice of facticity against indifference to it generated by nihilism but faithful to the complexity of knowledge formation. It [Max Weber] distinguishes the place where values are struggled for from the place where they can be queried and analyzed, doubted, taken apart, reconsidered. Or, as Stuart Hall shaded the matter in discussing the difference between theory and politics, it distinguishes the theoretical domain, where we scrutinize the construction of facts, analyze narratives, and explore the inherent slide of meaning ![](shard:sense-countersense.md), from the political domain, where we seek to establish hegemonic narratives and arrest meaning’s slide ![](shard:artformula.md). Housing is a human right, trees have standing, no human is illegal, science is real, abolish the carceral state, this land is stolen, love makes a family—such claims cannot be subjected to finegrained analysis in the midst of political battle but, along with challenges to them, must be opened and queried in academic analysis and in the classroom.”

**Reference**

![](bib:8279e226-382e-41d7-9acb-f3cf87df21a6) p. 99.
