The constant inundation of the affect and information experienced by contemporary individuals exposes the tragic nature of the world, making nihilism an epistemologically reasonable response. To counter the threat of nihilism, Elijiah Prewitt-Davis argues that knowledge must be replaced by belief. Against the common protestant concept of belief as strictly personal and interior, he proposes believing in the world as an absurd and immanent faith in the impossible—a belief that allows one to see and feel the potentialities simmering within the world as it is. Following Gilles Deleuze call to “transform belief,” Prewitt-Davis explores how belief heightens an affective attachment to our embeddedness on the world, revealing the potentialities with which time is always pregnant. Believing in the world as it is paradoxically becomes the mode of transforming the world inasmuch as the potential for something impossibly new is always immanently present. 

Elijah Prewitt-Davis is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA