British Society for Phenomenology Annual Conference 2026. Heidegger 50 Years On – Is there still a god that can save us?
Convened by the Philosophy Department, Faculty of Media, Arts, & Humanities, University of Sussex, UK. Brighton, UK. 21 – 23 May 2026.

I: In the last years of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche famously declared god is dead, the death of god. Or at least, these words and this idea would very soon become famous.

II: No one would have believed that any modern philosopher or writer – in the wake of Nietzsche – let alone one steeped in Nietzsche’s work – would or could gainsay such a declaration. Let alone think we need, or should even want, a god, any god, to save us.

III: However, perhaps we should not be so hasty. Perhaps we can see a way to read Nietzsche so that the death of god, that god is dead, is but a moment in the systole and diastole of history.

IV: For, the gods have died twice in Nietzsche’s philosophy.

V: The second time was the philosophical proposal mentioned above, announced during Nietzsche’s middle period in the original edition of The Gay Science (1882: §108; §125). This would be repeated with vigour in the ‘Prologue’ of his subsequent work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883: §P2), and (in the wake of the Zarathustra books) appear as the first passage in the fifth chapter added to an expanded and reissued Gay Science (1887): ‘How to understand our cheerfulness’ (§343).

VI: The first time – some ten years earlier – and in Nietzsche’s first book – was under very different theoretical circumstances. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche saw Attic drama of some 2500 years ago arising through the tension between the forces of nature embodied by the god Apollo and the god Dionysus. Here tragedy justifies the world and existence (§5). But the rise of philosophy – Socrates and the post-Socratics – killed tragedy: killed Apollo, killed Dionysus. In this narrative, nonetheless, the death of tragedy allows for the hope of a rebirth…

VII: Returning to the death of tragedy gives us an alternative way to approach the death of god. One indeed echoed in Nietzsche’s final works. For the name of Dionysus returns.

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