Facing the Fall: Humanism after Nihilism in Christos Tsiolkas's Writing

Abstract

Abstract The novels of Christos Tsiolkas provide a powerful portrayal of the hollowing out of radical political ideologies and the disaggregation of cultural bonds. The struggle of living in a world where both Marxism and multiculturalism are seen as failures has been expressed through a narrative form that at first resulted in nihilism and more recently led to an evocation of a form of embodied solidarity with the other. In this article, I contrast the ambivalent resort to nihilism in Tsiolkas’s work with the theoretical commentary by Sloterdijk and Žižek.