Q&A with Nicholas Low

What has been your experience engaging with the CSWR community?

I spent last year writing my dissertation on Nietzsche under the auspices of the dissertation completion fellowship, which can be fairly lonely and isolating. It’s just you and the computer for a year trying to hammer it out.

So, coming out of that, and being placed into this community, which is lively intellectually and personally, I already feel like the people I work with are friends to me. It reminded me just how badly I was missing those things, that collegial and communal experience, which is a part of doing academic work. It feels wonderful.

Who have you been engaging with?

My colleagues in the Transcendence and Transformation postdoctoral program are Tara Smith, Russ Powell, and Fabien Muller. We meet every month to review each other’s work, and that’s had a powerful impact on the way I’m thinking about what I’m trying to do.

Tara, for example, is doing a project based on reading Warhammer 40,000 through the lens of religious studies. And as it turns out, she and I are both reading a lot of the same material on play. She’s trying to think about the play space as a religious phenomenon or as related to religion. And I’m studying Nietzsche through ludic categories: play, laughter, humor, as well as darker expressions like madness. So, we have this shared syllabus which we’ve been able to discuss from our different perspectives.

Then there’s Fabien, who is working on a comparative theology project, but has a lot to say about the depredations of modern philosophy. It’s been very interesting to get to know him because our philosophical sensibilities are really similar. It’s sort of serendipitous that there are these strong resonances in our group between us personally and between the things that our work is focusing on and the questions we’re asking. It means that there are a lot of connections happening when we sit down and talk about our projects.

How has the CSWR affected the way you think about your work?

One of the things that draws me to Nietzsche’s writing is that it’s just different from other philosophical writing. It’s not like reading Kant or Hegel or Heidegger or Derrida. There’s something about reading Nietzsche that feels different.

It’s much more similar to sacred scripture or ecstatic writing than it is to other philosophy. And here at the CSWR, I’ve started thinking more about something else that sets it apart, which is its playfulness. It’s funny. It bends genres. It takes serious risks where typically for philosophers or scholars seriousness is sort of a prerequisite.

The CSWR is a perfect fit because it offers opportunities to meet and talk about challenging questions with people from different disciplines. You could be sitting next to a musicologist, or a physicist, or someone who studies medieval theology and talking in a shared language about the limits of knowledge and what is on the other side of those limits. I feel like it’s something you would have a hard time piecing together in many other academic environments.