Literature, Philosophy, Nihilism: The Uncanniest of Guests

Literature, Philosophy, Nihilism The Uncanniest of Guests

Shane Weller

Literature, Philosophy, Nihilism

Also by Shane Weller BECKETT, LITERATURE, AND THE ETHICS OF ALTERITY A TASTE FOR THE NEGATIVE: Beckett and Nihilism

Literature, Philosophy, Nihilism The Uncanniest of Guests Shane Weller

© Shane Weller 2008 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–55154–1 ISBN-10: 0–230–55154–8

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This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Weller, Shane. Literature, philosophy, nihilism: the uncanniest of guests/Shane Weller. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–230–55154–8 (alk. paper) 1. Nihilism (Philosophy)—History. 2. Literatures—Philosophy— History. I. Title. b828.3 W435 2008 149’.8—dc22 2008016425 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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Contents Preface

ix

Introduction: What’s in a Name?

1

1

2

3

4

Absolute Devaluation: Friedrich Nietzsche

11

The time of nihilism Art, or the ‘superior counterforce’ The transfiguration of nihilism The aesthetic/ascetic turntable

11 21 27 31

Homelessness: Martin Heidegger

35

‘Real nihilism’: Germany, 1933–5 From forgetting to ‘radical killing’ Abandonment and default Total demobilization Poetry and the becoming homely of a people Who are you? – the question of the poet’s friend

35 41 44 46 49 58

Fatal Positivities: Theodor Adorno

63

Life after Auschwitz, or the blasphemy of affirmation Art: the ‘ever broken promise of happiness’ The ‘protocol sentence’: Hölderlin and the birth of modern literature The difference within the negative: Adorno’s Beckett

63 72

The Naïve Calculation of the Negative: Maurice Blanchot The anguished writer, the nihilist, and the question of positive values Literature, scepticism, nihilism: Blanchot after Kojève Ambiguities and the limits of the negative The ‘vermin of nihilism’: literature and inexistence Retreating before the uncanniest of guests

vii

78 81

86 86 89 94 103 109

viii Contents

5

6

7

8

Bad Violence: Jacques Derrida

111

Reading, misreading, not reading: deconstruction as nihilism ‘Rather than nothing’: deconstruction versus nihilism Literature, or the ‘nothing-ing of nothing’ Ashes, or the ‘nothing-ing’ of difference

121 126 135

The Fracture: Giorgio Agamben

137

The negative foundation and its liquidation The ‘imperfect nihilism’ of biopolitics from Aristotle to the camps The ethics of potentiality, or the power ‘not to’ Modern art: the ‘self-annihilating nothing’ The fracture of the human/animal

137 144 149 153 159

Distortions, or Nihilism Against Itself: Gianni Vattimo

163

112

Nihilism as literature: Paul de Man Nihilism as theoretical violence: Jean Baudrillard Nihilism as aesthetic consciousness: Gianni Vattimo

164 171

The Denial of (Greek) Thought: Alain Badiou

186

The ‘least-worst signifier’ In praise of ‘courage’, or the ethicalization of literature Literature and the spectre of happiness

186

175

198 205

Conclusion: Nihilism at the Door

212

Notes

216

Bibliography

222

Index

230

Preface In the course of my research for a book published in 2005 on the ways in which Samuel Beckett has been read since the 1950s as a writer whose work is essentially anti-nihilist in nature, I came to recognize the need for a study of a much more general phenomenon in the modern theorization of the literary, namely the repeated attempt to determine both the nature and the value of art – and, more precisely, of a variously defined literature – in terms of its powers of resistance to a variously defined but always explicitly named nihilism. The present book is an attempt to trace that tradition back to its principal point of origin in Nietzsche’s later thought, and to chart the fate of the concept of nihilism in the work of a series of European philosophers and literary theorists who have drawn on Nietzsche’s thinking of the relation between art and nihilism, in each instance redetermining both of those concepts but nonetheless remaining within the Nietzschean frame that binds them to what might be termed the ethico-aesthetic discourse of modernity. In selecting the figures to whom chapters are devoted in this book, I have certainly not sought to cover ever manifestation of the phenomenon under consideration – there are, to be sure, many other theorists of the literary who would warrant analysis under the same rubric. Rather, I have sought to focus on key figures, by which I mean those thinkers whose deployment of the concept of nihilism in relation to the literary marks a distinctly new phase in the interpretation of the concept of nihilism and a corresponding new privileging of the literary. Thus, what most obviously ties these various figures together, across borders that are both linguistic and political, and beyond the many antagonisms between them, is their attempt to deploy the concept of nihilism in their thinking of the literary and both to define and to justify literature as the privileged form of resistance to nihilism; above all, however, they are bound together by the manner in which the uncanniness of nihilism, upon which Nietzsche himself was the first to remark, manifests itself in their attempted deployments as a certain conceptual haunting which, for reasons that should become clearer in the course of this book, does not permit us in our turn to determine these deployments as themselves either isolated instances of nihilism or part of a more general nihilist tradition. Indeed, if there is a lesson to be drawn from the analyses offered in this book, then it is that any redetermining deployment of the concept of nihilism, any engagement in the scene of charge and counter-charge that constitutes the history of that deployment, cannot avoid this haunting – and this would be the case not least for the critical discourse on that haunting. ix

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*** Earlier, and considerably shorter, versions of Chapters 4 and 5 were first in the journal Forum for Modern Language Studies and in Simon Morgan Wortham and Allison Weiner (eds), Encountering Derrida: Legacies and Futures of Deconstruction (New York and London: Continuum, 2007) respectively. I wish to thank the publishers for permission to reproduce that material here. I would also like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to the School of European Culture and Languages at the University of Kent for supporting my application for research leave in the autumn of 2007, and to Paula Kennedy at Palgrave Macmillan for her commitment to the project and for all her assistance in bringing about its publication.

Introduction: What’s in a Name?

Despite the many obvious differences, at once philosophical and political, between Theodor Adorno and Martin Heidegger, differences upon which the former insists so polemically in his major works of the 1950s and 1960s, these two thinkers are nonetheless in unqualified accord on at least two – far from unrelated – points, namely the first appearance of the term ‘nihilism’ (Nihilismus) within the discourse of Western philosophy, and the privilege to be accorded to the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin for what they both take to be its power of resistance to, and even its surpassing of, that which would go by the name of ‘nihilism’. In his 1940 lecture course Nietzsche: The Will to Power (II. European Nihilism), first published in the two-volume Nietzsche (1961),1 Heidegger follows Otto Pöggeler’s lead when he identifies Friedrich Jacobi as the first to have put the term ‘nihilism’ to ‘philosophical use’ (philosophische Verwendung) (Heidegger 1982b: 3). Five years later, in Negative Dialectics (1966), Adorno also identifies Jacobi as the thinker who ‘first put the term to philosophical use [ philosophisch verwendete]’, adding that Nietzsche ‘adopted it, presumably from newspaper accounts of terrorist acts in Russia’ (Adorno 1973: 379). The philosophical Verwendung of ‘nihilism’ to which both Heidegger and Adorno are referring here is to be found in an open letter from Jacobi to Johann Gottlieb Fichte, dated 21 March 1799 and first published in the autumn of that year. In this letter, Jacobi argues that transcendental idealism of the Fichtean kind is the philosophy of a ‘will which wants Nothing’ in the sense that it concerns itself solely with what the ‘I’ can produce out of itself, and thus seeks to reduce to nothing all that lies beyond it, namely ‘the true’ or ‘God’ – of which, Jacobi claims, one can only ever have a ‘distant presentiment’, not a knowledge. ‘By the true’, Jacobi writes, ‘I understand something which is prior to and outside of 1

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knowing; which first gives knowing and the capacity for knowing, for reason, its value’ ( Jacobi 1987: 131). According to Jacobi, in its reduction to nothing of that which transcends philosophy as knowledge, and which gives that knowledge its value, Fichtean idealism is itself left with nothing – the ‘empty self’ – and thus, despite itself, becomes ‘the Philosophical Knowing of Nothing’. It is for this reason that such idealism may be characterized as ‘nihilism’ (Nihilismus) (Jacobi 1987: 136). However, to counter this nihilism, which he deplores, Jacobi proposes nothing positive, but rather a ‘Philosophy of Not Knowing’ or ‘Science of Ignorance’ ( Jacobi 1987: 136, 140). For Jacobi, then, the fundamental alternative is between a known nothing (the ‘I’) and an unknowable something (‘God’ or ‘the true’), or between nihilism and faith (see Jacobi 1987: 135). As we shall see, if his positing of faith as that which stands as the only alternative to nihilism might appear to be at odds with much of the later thinking of nihilism, in certain key respects – not least its privileging of an alterity beyond the grasp of any knowledge determined as Wissenschaft – Jacobi’s conception of nihilism, and of that which stands opposed to it, anticipates almost all the major redeterminations of nihilism over the subsequent two centuries. While Jacobi may be the first to put the term ‘nihilism’ to philosophical use,2 and to have done so in the form of a charge directed at a specific philosophical position, it is indisputably with what Adorno describes as Nietzsche’s ‘adoption’ of the term that it undergoes a radical inflation. It is, however, precisely Nietzsche’s role in the history of nihilism, and what is taken to be the dominance of his interpretation of nihilism, that recent contributions to the literature on nihilism have tended to challenge. This new consensus regarding Nietzsche’s place within the history of the thinking of nihilism is far from being matched by any consensus on the real shape or limits of that history. In one of the more ambitious recent claims for that history’s extension, Will Slocombe opens his Nihilism and the Postmodern Sublime (2006) with the assertion that, far from originating with Nietzsche, ‘philosophies of nihilism are evident from classical Greece to Enlightenment Europe’ (Slocombe 2006: 1). Certainly, as regards the earliest ‘philosophies of nihilism’, this claim would appear to require little more in the way of supporting evidence than the philosophical position attributed to the Sicilian sophist Gorgias of Leontini (c. 483–376 BC) in various histories of philosophy. Although perhaps best known as a teacher of rhetoric, author of the extant Encomium of Helen, and the first of Socrates’ interlocutors in Plato’s Gorgias, he is also reputed by a number of classical writers to have been the author of a lost treatise entitled On Nature or the Non-Existent, in which, as John Burnet

Introduction: What’s in a Name?

3

puts it in Greek Philosophy: From Thales to Plato (1914), he is thought to have argued: ‘(1) that there is nothing, (2) that, even if there is anything, we cannot know it, and (3) that, even if we could know it, we could not communicate our knowledge to anyone else’ (Burnet 1914: 120). While Wilhelm Windelband, in his influential History of Philosophy (1892; English translation, 1893), labels this philosophical position simply ‘the doctrine of “nihilism” (“there is no being”)’ (Windelband 1893: 105), Burnet carefully distinguishes between the ‘cosmological nihilism’ of Gorgias and the ‘ethical nihilism’ of Thrasymachus of Chalcedon (who flourished c. 430–400 BC), as presented in Book One of Plato’s Republic. Whereas the ‘cosmological nihilism’ of Gorgias treats the nature of being – responding to the question of essence: ‘What is . . .?’ (ti esti . . .), to which Gorgias answers: ‘Nothing is’ – the ‘ethical nihilism’ of Thrasymachus treats the nature of justice (dik¯e) and right (dikaiosun¯e), and maintains that both of these are ‘simply what is in the interest of the stronger party’ (Plato 1987: 77; 338c).3 That the history of nihilism within Western thought has to be traced back beyond Nietzsche, although not as far as Slocombe claims, has been the argument of two important, if very different, recent works: Michael Allen Gillespie’s Nihilism before Nietzsche (1995) and Conor Cunningham’s Genealogy of Nihilism (2002). According to Gillespie, while Nietzsche’s interpretation of nihilism in terms of the ‘death of God’ has dominated almost all subsequent analyses of the subject, this interpretation fails to grasp both the ‘essence of nihilism’ and its ‘true significance’ (Gillespie 1995: xi). According to Gillespie, far from lying in a loss of religious faith, the origin of what Nietzsche terms ‘European nihilism’ is in fact located in the severing of the relation between reason and revelation that occurs with the fourteenth-century nominalist reconception of God as ‘an omnipotent divine will unconstrained by any rational notion of the good’ (Gillespie 1995: xiii). It is just such a ‘nihilist’ conception of the will detached from reason that Gillespie proceeds to trace in a philosophical tradition that runs from Descartes to Nietzsche, by way of Fichte, the German Romantics, and Schopenhauer. Indeed, far from Nietzsche’s interpretation of nihilism being either the first or the correct one, Gillespie sees Nietzsche’s thinking of the overcoming (Überwindung) of nihilism through the Dionysian as itself the consummation of nihilism. While this conclusion repeats Heidegger’s, Gillespie identifies the latter’s own fundamental ontology as itself one more manifestation of nihilism, since, according to Gillespie, it remains governed by that radical division instituted by fourteenth-century nominalism: ‘Being in [Heidegger’s] thought is an omnipotent power beyond

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nature and beyond reason, akin to the deus absconditus of nominalism’ (Gillespie 1995: xxii). Despite his challenging of what he takes to be the Nietzschean and Heideggerian interpretations of nihilism, however, Gillespie remains very much aligned with both Nietzsche and Heidegger in two crucial respects: first, he undertakes what he sees as a necessary diagnosis of nihilism; and, secondly, this diagnosis has as its aim the overcoming of nihilism. Whereas Gillespie locates the origin of nihilism in the ‘collapse of the scholastic synthesis’ of reason and revelation (Gillespie 1995: xxiv), Cunningham’s ‘genealogy of nihilism’ traces nihilism considerably further back, although again not as far back as the pre-Socratics. According to Cunningham, it is Plotinus who inaugurates a tradition of ‘meontological’ thinking that grounds being in non-being (me on), this already ‘realized logic of nihilism’ extending from Plotinus right up to what Cunningham takes to be the most recent manifestations of such ‘meontology’ in Derrida and Deleuze. Among the many significant differences between Cunningham’s and Gillespie’s interpretations of nihilism is the fact that, unlike Gillespie, Cunningham makes no distinction between what Gillespie terms ‘nihilism’ and ‘explicit nihilism’ in his charting of this meontological tradition, the expression ‘explicit nihilism’ being reserved by Gillespie for ‘nihilism’ as it is deployed by those who make use of the term, above all Nietzsche and those who follow in his wake. This distinction between ‘nihilism’ and ‘explicit nihilism’ is significant not only because it is precisely the radical inflation of ‘nihilism’ in Nietzsche that constitutes the point of departure for a series of countering redeterminations and redeployments of the concept of nihilism (a series to which both Gillespie and Cunningham belong), but also because it is with Nietzsche that the uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit) of ‘nihilism’ is first named. When, in the autumn 1885–autumn 1886 notebook that also contains an early draft plan for a work to be entitled The Will to Power: Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values,4 Nietzsche declares that ‘Nihilism stands at the door’ (Der Nihilismus steht vor der Thür), he immediately proceeds to ask: ‘whence comes to us this uncanniest of all guests?’ (woher kommt uns dieser unheimlichste aller Gäste?) (Nietzsche 1968: 7, translation modified; 1999: xii. 125). If, for Nietzsche, nihilism is ‘the danger of dangers’ (die Gefahr der Gefahren) (Nietzsche 1968: 44–5, n.39; 1999: xii. 109; Nietzsche’s emphasis), then this is precisely on account of its status as the ‘uncanniest of all guests’. One of the central arguments of the present book is that this very uncanniness, which is not necessarily to be understood in Nietzsche’s own terms, prevents any effective appropriation of the concept of

Introduction: What’s in a Name?

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nihilism in the interests of critique in the manner of, for instance, Stanley Rosen’s Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay (1969). Rosen’s stated aim is to accomplish a ‘critique of modern nihilism’, a critique grounded in ‘the premise that the Platonic–Aristotelian conception of the relation between reason and the good is superior to the modern, or predominantly modern, conception’ (Rosen 1969: 138). According to Rosen, the two principal manifestations of what he terms ‘modern nihilism’ are Wittgenstein’s ‘ordinary language philosophy’ and Heidegger’s ‘fundamental ontology’, with the essence of this ‘modern nihilism’ lying in a radical separation of the concept of reason from that of the good. If the critique of ‘modern nihilism’ must engage above all with Heidegger, then this is not simply because Heidegger’s ‘statement’ of the ‘nihilist implications of the post-Hegelian philosophical world’ is ‘inadequate’, but also, and indeed above all, because that statement ‘is itself an expression, rather than an overcoming, of nihilism’ (Rosen 1969: xvii). In a number of key respects, Rosen’s critique of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology as nihilist repeats that of Karl Löwith in Heidegger: Thinker in a Destitute Time (1953), including the latter’s claims regarding the pure formalism of Heideggerian resoluteness (Entschlossenheit), the contentless nature of facticity, radical finitude (or the exclusion of ‘eternity’), historicism, and the dire political consequences of each of these. To nihilism thus conceived, Rosen opposes a ‘Platonism’ that sees ‘no difference between philosophy and the good life’ (Rosen 1969: xviii), and that insists on the indissoluble unity of reason and the good. However, rejecting (as does Heidegger) the possibility of any decisive overcoming of nihilism, Rosen claims that nihilism is a ‘perennial human danger’ or ‘pestilence’, and that it ‘cannot be “solved” without the dissolution of human nature’ (Rosen 1969: xx). Although he shows no awareness of the irony here – an irony the implications of which we shall have reason to consider at some length when analysing the sequence of major redeterminations of the concept of nihilism since Nietzsche – by charging Heidegger with nihilism Rosen is, like Löwith before him, in fact repeating against Heidegger the very charge directed by Heidegger against Nietzsche: a proposed overcoming of nihilism is in fact the expression or even the consummation (Vollendung) of nihilism. Rosen’s entire argument rests, of course, on the assumption that the various manifestations of something called ‘nihilism’ may both be identified and effectively countered through critique. Indeed, for Rosen, it is precisely through critique that both Wittgensteinian and Heideggerian nihilism may be shown to take the form of a self-cancellation: ‘in each case, the principles of the teaching, when correctly and consistently

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formulated in the terms approved by their own masters, lead to the negation of those principles, or to silence. And speech that is indistinguishable from silence is nihilism’ (Rosen 1969: xix). Perhaps understandably, given his avowedly ‘Platonist’ position, at no point does Rosen address the question of whether it is in fact possible to launch a critique of nihilism from a position located safely beyond its borders, even though that critique appears to disclose the logic of nihilism as one of reversal, whereby, as in the case of Heidegger (as Rosen interprets him), the critique of nihilism can become the expression of nihilism. As we shall see, what Rosen misses here is precisely the manner in which, in its extreme uncanniness, nihilism tends to return to haunt the very discourses that would counter it, with this haunting being of a kind that does not permit one in one’s turn simply to identify a given counter-discourse as itself nihilist. Rosen’s critique of ‘modern nihilism’ produces, then, a concept of nihilism as a philosophical position that is self-undoing, and that is to be countered for precisely this reason. In a reversal of the kind that is more than merely one characteristic among others of the history of the redetermination and redeployment of the concept of nihilism since Nietzsche, this determination of nihilism as self-undoing has recently been revalorized by Slocombe as a nihilism possessing radical emancipatory force, saving us – but who exactly? – from both philosophical and political fundamentalism, of which Rosen’s ‘Platonism’ would, from Slocombe’s perspective, no doubt be an instance. While insisting on the distinction between his own position and that of Gianni Vattimo (to which I turn in Chapter 7), Slocombe undertakes a revalorization of nihilism on the grounds that, as ‘the philosophy of absence and nothingness’, it ‘must remain paradoxically present within philosophy and culture. Its eradication would hail a new fundamentalism, a new Enlightenment perhaps even more damaging than the first’ (Slocombe 2006: xi). However, just as both Nietzsche and Vattimo find it necessary to distinguish between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ nihilism, so for Slocombe this revalorization requires a radical division within nihilism. Rejecting what he takes to be David Levin’s massive oversimplification of nihilism as a ‘rage against Being’ (Levin 1988: 5), Slocombe discriminates between ‘modernist’ and ‘postmodern’ nihilism, and proceeds to find examples of the latter in a range of literary texts. Whereas the ‘rage against Being’ would be the essence of ‘modernist nihilism’, a ‘postmodern nihilism’ is ‘intrinsically self-reflective and deconstructive’ (Slocombe 2006: xiii). According to Slocombe, this ‘postmodern nihilism’ breaks with the ‘sum of the historical nihilisms’, all of which

Introduction: What’s in a Name?

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would fall neatly within the category of ‘modernist nihilism’ determined as ‘a totalitarian nothingness where nothing else but nihilism can exist’ (Slocombe 2006: 100). Locating the origin of all such ‘historical nihilisms’ in atheism – ‘The rise of nihilism as a cultural entity historically begins with the rise of atheism in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries’ (Slocombe 2006: 8) – Slocombe sees a migration within ‘historical’ nihilism from religion to politics and then, with the publication of Nietzsche’s The Will to Power (1901; expanded edition, 1906), to philosophy.5 Slocombe argues that ‘postmodern nihilism’ breaks with all historical nihilisms because it directs its negativity not only against the entire Western cultural tradition but also against itself, in an act of radical self-undoing: ‘If . . . nihilism is to be a valid philosophy and one that has emancipatory potential, it must be something that destroys itself. That is, one must read “there is no truth” as a semantic paradox: even the statement itself is not true’ (Slocombe 2006: 100). In this respect, ‘postmodern nihilism’ would differ not least from a Nietzschean ‘active nihilism’, which remains ‘modernist’ precisely because, according to Slocombe, it fails to turn its critical light back upon itself – unlike Vattimo, Slocombe sees both Nietzsche and Heidegger as writing ‘from “outside” nihilism, rather than from “within” it’ (Slocombe 2006: 101). What soon becomes clear, then, is that the theorization of an emancipatory ‘postmodern nihilism’ is no less dependent upon a critique of nihilism – in the form of ‘historical nihilisms’ – than is Rosen’s self-declared ‘defence of reason’. Furthermore, just as Rosen seeks to produce a thinking that is ethical (through its reuniting of reason with the good), so Slocombe aims to theorize a ‘postmodern nihilism’ that is properly ethical in that, as a self-cancelling act of ‘performative contradiction’, it opens itself up to ‘absolute alterity’ (Slocombe 2006: 166, 104): ‘By “being-Not”, we are not being “for-the-Other” but allowing the Other simply “to be” without us’ (Slocombe 2006: 170). In this respect, Slocombe’s reinterpretation of nihilism falls squarely within a thinking of the ethical in terms of alterity that may be traced back to Jacobi and in which a certain ‘faith’ plays a fundamental role. However different their approaches and their conclusions might be, then, Rosen and Slocombe share the assumption that the concept of nihilism may be appropriated in the interests of a liberating critique, and that this critique is governed by an ethics. As in both Gillespie and Cunningham, however, so too in Rosen and Slocombe, no account is taken of that uncanniness to which Nietzsche refers when he announces nihilism’s being ‘at the door’. And, as we shall see, it is precisely

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this uncanniness that interferes with any effective appropriation of the concept, either for the purposes of a critique of nihilism from a position taken to be beyond its borders or for a revalorization of nihilism from within those borders. Indeed, to begin to try to think this Unheimlichkeit requires a reflection upon nihilism precisely in terms of the border or limit, and upon the status of any distinction between the homely (heimlich) and the unhomely (unheimlich), between unheimlich and unheimisch, between the home (Heim), the homeland (Heimat), and homelessness (Heimatlosigkeit), between Latinity and Germanness (das Deutsche) – for the philosophical Verwendung of Nihilismus is the entry of a decidedly Latinate word not simply into Western but precisely into German philosophy, from which it very quickly migrates to the so-called Romance languages.6 Above all, however, if one is to begin to think the uncanniness of nihilism, one has to consider what it might mean for nihilism to be ‘at the door’ (vor der Thür) – and to do so in a manner that is not necessarily Nietzschean, assuming that one could in fact establish what the ‘Nietzschean’ is here. The present book will have been an attempt to do just this: to consider what being ‘at the door’ might mean in the case of that which goes by the name of ‘nihilism’, while bearing in mind Heidegger’s point that ‘A name always hides within itself an interpretation’ (Ein Name birgt stets eine Auslegung in sich) (Heidegger 1982b: 176). In a manner that is neither strictly historical nor genealogical, the present book may be distinguished from all of the above studies in a number of fundamental respects. First, I focus upon a sequence of major redeterminations and redeployments of an explicitly identified ‘nihilism’ within a tradition of philosophical and cultural critique that commences with – and remains tied to – Nietzsche. This sequence – which includes, but is certainly not limited to, the various philosophers and literary theorists included in this book – traverses any posited divide between the modern and the postmodern, not least on account of the privilege that continues to be accorded to certain forms of the literary for what is taken to be their power of resistance to nihilism, a privilege that stands in such striking contrast to the place assigned to art (Kunst) in Hegel’s Aesthetics, where it is adjudged to be ‘far removed . . . from being the highest form of spirit’ and ‘for us a thing of the past’ (Hegel 1975: i. 13, 11). Secondly, I aim to show that the uncanniness of that which goes by the name ‘nihilism’ manifests itself as a haunting return in the theorization of that which is taken to constitute the greatest resistance to nihilism, namely ‘art’, ‘poetry’, or ‘literature’. But if nihilism turns back upon those who would deploy it, this turning back is never strictly philosophical or literary-theoretical in nature. Rather, when a philosopher

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or a theorist of the literary finds it necessary to redetermine and redeploy the concept of nihilism, which almost always means to denounce it, to expose it, to identify it where it would dissimulate itself – be it as ‘idealism’, or ‘realism’, or ‘science’, or ‘positivism’, or ‘fundamental ontology’, or ‘metaphysics’, or ‘deconstruction’, to name but a few of its reputed masks, fronts, or haunts – one may be sure that among the borders philosophy and literary theory have already crossed is the one that would separate these discourses from the political. For nihilism is always as political as it is philosophical, and not merely when – as is the case with Wyndham Lewis, for instance – it is determined as the politicization of art.7 Thus, while Nietzsche may be said, as Adorno puts it, to have ‘adopted’ the term from a political discourse, he certainly cannot be said to have freed it from the political, rendering it purely philosophical. Indeed, there is arguably no concept less purely philosophical than the concept of nihilism. And if, as Adorno also asserts, Nietzsche ‘used the word to denounce the opposite of what it meant in the practice of political conspirators: to denounce Christianity as the institutionalized negation of the will to live’ (Adorno 1973: 379), this reversal is only the first of many in the sequence that will be considered in this book. Furthermore, just as the concept of nihilism cannot be detached from the political, so that which is taken to be the privileged form of resistance to nihilism – be it art, poetry, or literature – cannot be detached from either the philosophical or the political. While Alain Badiou may be right to identify Nietzsche as the ‘great “inventor” of contemporary anti-Platonism, at the dawn of the suture of philosophy and the poem’ (Badiou 1999b: 98) – a suturing that is never simply, as Rosen claims, the complete disappearance of any distinction between philosophy and poetry (see Rosen 1969: xvi) – the recognition of the problematical nature of the relation between the deployment of ‘nihilism’ and the privileging of art, poetry, or literature does not necessarily mean that we can envisage the kind of de-suturing of philosophy from the poem (poème) that Badiou takes to be both possible and necessary – and, indeed, necessary because it is possible. This de-suturing would first have to master ‘nihilism’, and the very possibility of such mastery is, as I aim to demonstrate, what remains in question, not least in Badiou’s own call for a return to Platonism. Precisely because my aim is to show the uncanniness at work in the various major redeterminations and redeployments of the concept of nihilism from Nietzsche to Badiou, and to consider the implications of this uncanniness for any attempt to use (verwenden) the concept of nihilism, my approach should not be mistaken for either one more

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critique or one more valorization of nihilism – assuming, concesso non dato, that the latter may be clearly distinguished from the former – any more than it should be mistaken for either an attempt akin to Glicksberg’s (1975) to identify a ‘literature of nihilism’ or one more valorization of the literary as a privileged site of resistance to nihilism. Each of these procedures is called into question as soon as one registers the manner in which ‘nihilism’ returns to haunt the very discourses that would deploy it, and to do so precisely there where the resistance to, or the surpassing of, nihilism is theorized as taking place. If I begin with Nietzsche, then this is not simply because it is with the later Nietzsche that philosophy takes as its explicit and overriding task the overcoming (Überwindung) of that which will henceforth go by the name of ‘nihilism’; it is also because Nietzsche inaugurates a sequence of redetermining deployments of the concept of nihilism in which art in one form or another will be accorded a particular privilege on account of what is taken to be its power of resistance to nihilism; and, above all, because it is with Nietzsche, and those who attempt to redetermine and redeploy the concept of nihilism in his wake, that one finds what may perhaps be most economically expressed as the resistance of nihilism, a phrase in which both the subjective and the objective genitive would be operative. As we shall see, not only do the various – and often very different – forms taken by this resistance of nihilism in the work of the philosophers and literary theorists considered in this book traverse and – to say the least – complicate the distinction between the modern and postmodern, but they also traverse and complicate the distinctions between ‘nihilisms’, not only the five kinds of nihilism identified by Donald A. Crosby – namely political, moral, epistemological, cosmic, and existential (see Crosby 1988: 8) – or the five kinds identified by Karen L. Carr – epistemological, alethiological, metaphysical or ontological, ethical or moral, and existential or axiological (see Carr 1992: 17–18) – but also those added to Carr’s list by Slocombe – theological, political, and semantic (see Slocombe 2006: 7). In short, the uncanniness of nihilism, as the resistance of nihilism, is to be found wherever an attempt is made to put the concept of nihilism to work for the purpose of critique, whenever there is a Verwendung of nihilism in the interests of an ethics – which, in each of the instances considered in this book, is always an ethico-aesthetics.

1 Absolute Devaluation: Friedrich Nietzsche

The time of nihilism If the term ‘nihilism’ (Nihilismus) enters the discourse of Western philosophy in 1799 as a charge directed against Fichtean idealism, it is in Nietzsche’s later works (1886–8), and in the notes, drafts, and fragments published posthumously in The Will to Power (1901; expanded edition, 1906), that the concept of nihilism undergoes its first radically inflating redetermination.1 There is undoubtedly some truth to Michael Allen Gillespie’s claim that the perceived centrality of the concept of nihilism in Nietzsche’s thought is owing principally to the privilege accorded to it by the editors of The Will to Power and to the widespread misperception of that work as Nietzsche’s magnum opus, fulfilling the promise made in On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) regarding the ‘meaning of the ascetic ideal’ for the contemporary world: ‘I shall probe these things more thoroughly and severely in another connection (under the title “On the History of European Nihilism”; it will be continued in a work in progress: The Will to Power: Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values)’ (Nietzsche 1989: 159–60). Certainly, Heidegger’s 1940 lecture course European Nihilism, first published in 1961, and his essay ‘The Word of Nietzsche: “God Is Dead”’ (1943), rely almost entirely on The Will to Power for their interpretation of Nietzsche’s conception of nihilism. However, an analysis of Nietzsche’s deployment of the term in both his notebooks and his published works reveals that, while there may be some justification for the assertion that ‘nihilism is not the central question of Nietzsche’s thought’ (Gillespie 1995: 178), the concept of nihilism nonetheless plays a decisive role in his later thinking of the will to power (Wille zur Macht), the eternal recurrence of the same (ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen), and the Dionysian. Indeed, it is precisely through his deployment of the concept 11

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of nihilism that these three key aspects of Nietzsche’s later thought are coordinated. Although the term is to be found in his notes as early as 1880, Nietzsche’s reflections on a phenomenon explicitly identified as ‘nihilism’ commence in earnest in his autumn 1885–autumn 1886 notebook, with the announcement that ‘Nihilism stands at the door’ (Der Nihilismus steht vor der Thür), and the concomitant question: ‘whence comes to us this uncanniest of all guests’ (woher kommt uns dieser unheimlichste aller Gäste) (Nietzsche 1968: 7; 1999: xii. 125; translation modified).2 The importance of this question for Nietzsche’s later thought is made clear in his summer 1886 draft outline of a volume to be entitled The Will to Power: Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values, of which the first part will treat ‘the danger of dangers’ (die Gefahr der Gefahren); that is, nihilism ‘as the necessary consequence of our valuations so far)’ (Nietzsche 1968: 44–5, n.39; 1999: xii. 109; Nietzsche’s emphasis). The first of Nietzsche’s published works in which the term ‘nihilism’ appears is Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (1886), in which it serves as a label for those ‘fanatics of conscience who would rather lie dying on an assured nothing than an uncertain something’ (Nietzsche 2002: 11). Then, between 1886 and the end of 1888, the term is not only repeatedly deployed in works intended for publication, but also written back into earlier works – including his first published book, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872). In the ‘Attempt at a Self-Criticism’ that prefaces the 1886 edition of this work, republished under the title The Birth of Tragedy, or: Hellenism and Pessimism, Nietzsche imagines the book being charged with ‘a will that is not too far removed from practical nihilism’ (Nietzsche 1967: 25), and recasts the work as treating the fundamental antagonism between the aesthetic and the moral interpretation of existence, which, by 1886–7, has become a principal concern, as demonstrated by On the Genealogy of Morals. In the ‘Attempt at a Self-Criticism’, the moral interpretation of existence is identified as reaching its most extreme form in Christianity and being ‘a “will to negate life” [ein “Wille zur Verneinung des Lebens” ], a secret instinct of annihilation [Vernichtung]’, and thus as ‘the danger of dangers’ (die Gefahr der Gefahren) (Nietzsche 1967: 23), this latter phrase being the one used of nihilism in the summer 1886 draft outline for The Will to Power. Similarly, in the section devoted to The Birth of Tragedy in Ecce Homo (written in late 1888, but not published until 1908), the term ‘nihilist’ is used of Christianity as that which is ‘neither Apollonian nor Dionysian’, that which ‘negates all aesthetic values [negirt alle ästhetischen Werthe]’, and is thus ‘nihilistic in the deepest sense [im tiefsten Sinne nihilistisch]’ (Nietzsche

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2005: 108; Nietzsche’s emphasis). ‘Nihilism’ is also written back into The Gay Science. While the term does not appear in the four-book 1882 edition of this work, it is deployed in Book Five of the 1887 edition, in which Nietzsche remarks upon the function of the term in Russian political discourse, referring to ‘nihilism à la Petersburg’ (Nihilismus nach Petersburger Muster), which he defines as ‘the belief in unbelief even to the point of martyrdom)’ (Nietzsche 1974: 289; Nietzsche’s emphasis). In those books written after the 1885–6 notebook entry in which Nietzsche announces that nihilism is standing ‘at the door’, the terms Nihilismus and nihilistisch are deployed repeatedly, if far less frequently than ‘decadence’ (décadence) and ‘decadent’ (décadent). The term appears nine times in On the Genealogy of Morals,3 and, in the books written in 1888, once in The Case of Wagner,4 five times in Twilight of the Idols,5 six times in The Anti-Christ,6 and three times in Ecce Homo.7 The most extended analyses of nihilism in works either published during Nietzsche’s lifetime or clearly intended for publication by him are to be found in the third essay in On the Genealogy of Morals – ‘What Is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals?’ – and, to a lesser extent, in The Anti-Christ. In all of the above works, the term is almost always used in reference to Christianity, with, for instance, the phrase ‘Christians and other nihilists’ recurring in Ecce Homo, and Christianity and Buddhism being labelled both ‘nihilistic religions’ and ‘religions of decadence’ (Nietzsche 2005: 16). While none of these explicit deployments of ‘nihilism’ in the published works compares either in its elaboration, or in its discriminations between various kinds and phases of nihilism, with those to be found in the notebooks of the period 1886–8, the final sections of the Genealogy do focus explicitly on the relation between nihilism (Nihilismus), art (Kunst), and science (Wissenschaft), and the declaration towards the end of that work that he intends to write a ‘History of “European Nihilism”’ makes it clear that Nietzsche regards such a history (Geschichte) to be an essential part of his proposed revaluation of all values. The fact that this history was not written cannot simply be put down, however, to the fact that Nietzsche lapsed into madness before being able to complete it. Rather, on the evidence of the notebooks and the published works, it becomes clear that any history of nihilism as Nietzsche determines that concept, any elucidation of the ‘meaning’ of ‘nihilism’ for us ‘today’, and any theorization of its overcoming (Überwindung) would have to engage with complications that are anything but incidental or local. These complications are far from being reducible to terminological inconsistencies or imprecisions, with ‘nihilism’ being on occasion a synonym for ‘decadence’, and with references in the notebooks to ‘philosophical

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nihilism’ ( philosophischer Nihilismus), ‘practical and theoretical nihilism’ ( praktischer und theoretischer Nihilismus), ‘active’ (activ) and ‘passive’ ( passiv) nihilism, ‘genuine nihilism’ (eigentlicher Nihilismus), ‘incomplete nihilism’ (unvollständiger Nihilismus), ‘perfect’ or ‘accomplished’ nihilism (vollkommener Nihilismus), and ‘radical nihilism’ (radikaler Nihilismus).8 If the deployments of ‘nihilism’ in the works of 1886–8 tend, for the most part, to relate it to Christianity, in the notebooks of the same period Nietzsche moves between two general positions. This movement is already apparent in the autumn 1885–autumn 1886 notebook entry in which he announces that ‘Nihilism stands at the door’. In this entry, he claims, on the one hand, that nihilism is ‘rooted’ (steckt) in ‘one particular interpretation, the Christian-moral one’, an interpretation which is itself already nihilist, and, on the other hand, that ‘The end [Untergang] of the moral interpretation of the world which no longer has any sanction after it has tried to escape into some beyond, leads to nihilism [endet in Nihilismus]’ (Nietzsche 1968: 8; 1999: xii. 125–6). In other words, the Christian religion is both a ‘nihilistic religion’ and also the cause of nihilism. Things are complicated still further when Nietzsche asserts, on the one hand, that ‘The entire idealism of mankind hitherto is on the point of changing into nihilism – into the belief in absolute worthlessness, i.e. meaninglessness’ (Nietzsche 1968: 331; 1999: xii. 313; Nietzsche’s emphasis), and, on the other hand, that the Greek philosopher Pyrrho is ‘more nihilistic’ (nihilistischer) than Epicurus (Nietzsche 1968: 241; 1999: xiii. 277), and that the ‘philosophers of Greece, e.g. Plato . . . represent one after the other the typical forms of decadence [die typischen Décadence-Formen]: the moral-religious idiosyncrasy, anarchism, nihilism (adiaphora), cynicism, obduracy, hedonism, reaction’ (Nietzsche 1968: 239; 1999: xiii. 272; Nietzsche’s emphasis). It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that in a notebook entry of 1887–8 the time of nihilism should be characterized by a radical paradoxicality that militates against any datable advent (Heraufkunft) and linear history (Geschichte) of nihilism. On the one hand, nihilism belongs to the future, but to a future that can already be related in the form of a history on the basis of the signs (Zeichen) by which it is now declaring its advent: What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent [Heraufkunft] of nihilism. This history can be related even now; for necessity itself

Absolute Devaluation: Friedrich Nietzsche 15

is at work here. This future speaks even now in a hundred signs, this destiny announces itself everywhere . . . (Nietzsche 1968: 3; 1999: xiii. 189; Nietzsche’s emphasis) On the other hand, however, nihilism is that which belongs to the past in the sense not just that it commenced with Plato, or that it follows upon ‘pessimism’ in the period 1830–50 (see Nietzsche 1999: xii. 202), but also that it has already been surpassed in the one who announces its coming and who takes it as his task to write its history before its arrival – that is, ‘the first perfect nihilist of Europe’ (der erste vollkommene Nihilist Europas), the one who has ‘even now lived through the whole of nihilism, to the end, leaving it behind, outside himself’ (den Nihilismus selbst schon in sich zu Ende gelebt hat – der ihn hinter sich, unter sich, außer sich hat) (Nietzsche 1968: 3; 1999: xiii. 190). The uncanniness of ‘European nihilism’ as that which stands ‘at the door’ is already indicated in this strange temporality where nihilism belongs to the past as that which is to come, and thus remains alien to the very present from which its history would be produced. In Nietzsche and Philosophy (1965), Gilles Deleuze attempts to solve these complications by arguing that, for Nietzsche, nihilism in its ‘primary and basic’ sense has three essential elements: (1) ‘the value of nil taken on by life’; (2) ‘the fiction of higher values which give it this value’; and (3) ‘the will to nothingness which is expressed in these higher values’ (Deleuze 1983: 147). Although, to the question ‘What does nihilism mean?’, Nietzsche’s response in his autumn 1887 notebook is ‘That the highest values devaluate themselves [sich entwerthen]’ (Nietzsche 1968: 9; 1999: xii. 350; Nietzsche’s emphasis), Deleuze identifies this devaluation (Entwerthung) as a secondary (and historically subsequent) form of nihilism, when it ‘is no longer the devaluation of life in the name of higher values but rather the devaluation of higher values themselves. Devaluation no longer signifies life taking on the value of nil, the null value, but the nullity of values, of higher values’ (Deleuze 1983: 148). In making this claim, Deleuze follows Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche in his 1940 lectures, in which he asserts that, for Nietzsche, ‘Nihilism is not only the process of devaluing the highest values, nor simply the withdrawal of these values. The very positing of these values in the world is already nihilism’ (Heidegger 1982b: 44; Heidegger’s emphasis). However, whereas Heidegger identifies three forms of nihilism in Nietzsche’s thinking, Deleuze sees the history of nihilism as devaluation as being constituted by two principal phases, with the transition from the first to the second being the critical moment within the history of

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nihilism, since it constitutes the moment when the negation of values covers the entire field of the thinkable, and when the meaning of nihilism becomes ‘the radical repudiation of value [Werth], meaning [Sinn], and desirability [Wünschbarkeit]’ (Nietzsche 1968: 7; 1999: xii. 125). Following Deleuze’s reconstruction of Nietzsche’s unwritten history of European nihilism, in its first phase nihilism is a devaluation that, in what is only a seeming paradox, posits the three fundamental values of purpose (Zweck), unity (Einheit), and truth (Wahrheit). These values are common to both Platonism and Christianity, and their positing is already a devaluation in that it negates existence as becoming (Werden) in its purposelessness, its lack of unity, and its truthlessness. It is on the basis of this determination of nihilism that Nietzsche can claim that ‘philosophers are always decadents – in the service of the nihilistic religions’ (Nietzsche 1968: 254; 1999: xiii. 320; Nietzsche’s emphasis), since they posit a ‘suprasensuous’ or ‘suprasensible’ world that is not only beyond ‘this world’ but also the ‘true’ world. With Christianity, this negation of becoming reaches its most extreme point, with the human being determined as both a telos beyond all becoming and ‘an absolute value [einen absoluten Werth], as opposed to his smallness and accidental occurrence in the flux of becoming and passing away’ (Nietzsche 1968: 9; 1999: xii. 211; Nietzsche’s emphasis). This primary devaluation is, however, also a falsification, since the suprasensible realm that it posits is a ‘lie’. With this assertion, we encounter the major difficulty faced by any attempt to establish the truth of Nietzsche’s own determination of nihilism. Nihilism as the negation of becoming is perpetrated in the name of ‘truth’ as a value, and yet that truth is a ‘lie’. In other words, the truth of nihilism is the lie. According to both Heidegger’s and Deleuze’s reconstructions, the second major phase in the history of nihilism – and, in Nietzsche’s notebooks, the phase that is often presented as that which leads to, or is the cause (Ursache) of, nihilism – commences when the (Platonic–Christian) moral interpretation of the world turns back upon itself, and judges itself as a falsification. With this turning back, the values of purpose, unity, and truth ‘devaluate themselves’ (sich entwerthen). This is the moment that Nietzsche captures in the expression ‘death of God’, first announced at the end of the 1882 edition of The Gay Science, four years before the first deployment of ‘nihilism’ in any of his published works. On the one hand, Nietzsche sees this turning back upon as occurring in accordance with the internal logic of the moral interpretation, which is to say nihilism as ‘the logical result of decadence’ (Nietzsche 1968: 27; 1999: xiii. 265).

Absolute Devaluation: Friedrich Nietzsche 17

On the other hand, however, he also seeks external reasons. This is the case, for instance, when in On the Genealogy of Morals he accounts for the emergence of ‘pessimism’ in the nineteenth century in the following manner: European ‘Weltschmerz’, the ‘pessimism’ of the nineteenth century, is essentially the result of an absurdly precipitate mixing of classes; or from an injudicious emigration – a race introduced into a climate for which its powers of adaptation are inadequate (the case of the Indians in India); or from the aftereffects of age and exhaustion in the race (Parisian pessimism from 1850 onward); or from an incorrect diet (the alcoholism of the Middle Ages; the absurdity of the vegetarians who, to be sure, can invoke the authority of Squire Christopher in Shakespeare; or from degeneration of the blood, malaria, syphilis, and the like (German depression after the Thirty Years’ War, which infected half of Germany with vile diseases and thus prepared the ground for German servility, German pusillanimity). (Nietzsche 1989: 130–1; Nietzsche’s emphasis) Clearly, explanations of this kind are incompatible with that necessity (Nothwendigkeit) which would make possible the writing of European nihilism’s history as that which is to come. If the second phase in the history of nihilism is its ‘most extreme form’, this is because it maintains that ‘every belief, every consideringsomething-true, is necessarily false because there simply is no true world’ (Nietzsche 1968: 14; 1999: xii. 354; Nietzsche’s emphasis). This devaluation of the highest values leaves only what, in his March 1887– November 1888 notebook, Nietzsche terms the ‘feeling of valuelessness [Werthlosigkeit]’, or: the realization that the overall character of existence may not be interpreted by means of the concept of ‘aim’ [‘Zweck’], the concept of ‘unity’ [‘Einheit’], or the concept of ‘truth’ [‘Wahrheit’]. Existence has no goal or end; any comprehensive unity in the plurality of events is lacking; the character of existence is not ‘true’, is false. One simply lacks any reason for convincing oneself that there is a true world. (Nietzsche 1968: 13; 1999: xiii. 48; Nietzsche’s emphasis) Not the least important aspect of this turning back against itself of the moral interpretation is that suffering suddenly loses its value: ‘the belief in God and an essentially moral order becomes untenable [. . .] one has

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come to mistrust any “meaning” in suffering, indeed in existence. One interpretation has collapsed; but because it was considered the interpretation it now seems as if there were no meaning at all in existence, as if everything were in vain’ (Nietzsche 1968: 35; 1999: xii. 212; Nietzsche’s emphasis). For all its dramatic potency, the phrase ‘God is dead’ tends to obscure the fact that it is also reason (ratio) as the principle of science (Wissenschaft) that is devaluated in this phase of nihilism. Indeed, as Nietzsche asserts in his November 1887–March 1888 notebook, the three highest values are categories of reason (Vernunft-Kategorien) – they are produced by and serve reason, and their devaluation is itself the result of reason being applied to them: ‘The faith in the categories of reason is the cause [Ursache] of nihilism. We have measured the value of the world according to categories that refer to a purely fictitious world [auf eine rein fingirte Welt beziehen]’ (Nietzsche 1968: 13; 1999: xiii. 49; Nietzsche’s emphasis). In accordance with the highly paradoxical time of nihilism, however, if a belief in reason is the cause of nihilism, it is also already nihilism, since the application of reason to becoming is already a (falsifying) devaluation of it. So it is that neither the diagnosis of nihilism’s causes and nature, nor the writing of its history, nor the theorization of its overcoming can rely upon the categories of reason. The devaluation of the highest values results, then, in the ‘feeling of valuelessness’, the sense that existence has neither purpose nor unity nor truth. Above all, suffering loses any sense – Christianity being the religion par excellence in which suffering is imbued with meaning. In his autumn 1887 notebook, Nietzsche identifies two possible responses to this sense of valuelessness, both responses being themselves forms of nihilism, namely ‘active’ and ‘passive’ nihilism (see Nietzsche 1968: 17–18; 1999: xii. 350–1). While both these forms of nihilism might be seen as reactive in the sense that they responses to an originary nihilism, Nietzsche privileges active nihilism because it clears the ground for, or opens the path towards, the overcoming of nihilism. Passive nihilism, on the other hand, promises nothing: it takes the devaluation of the highest values as that which ought not to have happened. The truth of becoming in its truthlessness ought not to be the case. In other words, as Nietzsche observes in his November 1887–March 1888 notebook, passive nihilism remains a moral interpretation, an adherence to the negative imperative mood: ‘The philosophical nihilist is convinced that all that happens is meaningless and in vain [sinnlos und umsonstig]; and that there ought not to be anything meaningless and in vain’ (Nietzsche 1968: 23; 1999: xiii.

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45). In an autumn 1887 notebook entry, this is the definition of the nihilist as such: A nihilist is a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist. According to this view, our existence (action, suffering, willing, feeling) has no meaning: the pathos of the ‘in vain’ is the nihilists’ pathos – at the same time, as pathos, an inconsistency on the part of the nihilists. (Nietzsche 1968: 318; 1999: xii. 366; Nietzsche’s emphasis) Buddhism, Christianity, Socialism, and Schopenhauer’s philosophy are identified by Nietzsche as forms of such passive (that is, inconsistent or self-contradictory) nihilism in that they are all negations of ‘this world’ that remain moral interpretations. In Schopenhauer, for instance, the denial (Verneinung) of the will to live that is presented as the only genuine escape from suffering, a denial that can have for its goal only the nothing (Nichts), or that for which ‘we lack image, concept, and word’ (Schopenhauer 1969: ii. 609), is presented as ethical in nature. Passive nihilism continues, then, to be governed by a moral interpretation: it clings to the ought, or, more precisely, to the ought not: it is ‘full of morality that is not overcome: existence as punishment, existence construed as error, error thus as a punishment – a moral valuation [moralische Werthschätzung]’ (Nietzsche 1968: 7; 1999: xii. 126). Of the imperative that governs passive nihilism, Nietzsche asks: ‘But whence this: there ought not to be?’ (Nietzsche 1968: 23; 1999: xiii. 45). Passive nihilism may therefore be seen as a kind of spectral nihilism, since it is a moral interpretation (that is, ‘nihilism’) which continues despite its own collapse. In attempting to take his distance from both Schopenhauer and Wagner in his later thinking, Nietzsche is aiming to free himself from just such a spectral nihilism, which, as he determines it, cannot ever lead to an overcoming of nihilism, since it never breaks with those values which it nonetheless now takes to be valueless. The spectrality of such nihilism lies in an interminable self-negation of values – in short, a failure of the negative. Ironically, it is to be condemned precisely because it is inconsistent, unreasonable. In contrast, as a ‘violent force of destruction’ ( gewaltthätige Kraft der Zerstörung) (Nietzsche 1968: 18; 1999: xii. 351; Nietzsche’s emphasis), active nihilism opens the way to an overcoming of nihilism, and it does so by being not less but more nihilist than passive nihilism. Indeed, active nihilism is what in his autumn 1887 notebook Nietzsche defines as ‘genuine nihilism’ (Nietzsche 1968: 69; 1999: xii. 468; Nietzsche’s

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emphasis). If, unlike passive nihilism – which is a ‘decline and recession of the power of the spirit’ – active nihilism is ‘a sign of increased power of the spirit’ (Nietzsche 1968: 17; 1999: xii. 350), it is nonetheless an entirely destructive force, this force being directed against the very moral interpretation that remains spectrally at work within passive nihilism. Thus, in its radical ambiguity (Zweideutigkeit), nihilism is not only at once of the past and of the future, it is also at once the ‘danger of dangers’ and that which promises the avoidance of this danger: ‘It could be the sign of a crucial and most essential growth, of the transition [Übergang] to new conditions of existence, that the most extreme form of pessimism, genuine nihilism [der eigentliche Nihilismus], would come into the world’ (Nietzsche 1968: 69; 1999: xii. 468; Nietzsche’s emphasis). If passive nihilism is a form of spectral interminability, it is in active nihilism that the most critical of reversals or border-crossings takes place, since it is here that, carried to its limit, negation can become affirmation. As Gillespie puts it, active nihilism ‘is not content to be extinguished passively but wants to extinguish everything that is aimless and meaningless in a blind rage; it is a lust for destruction that purifies humanity’ (Gillespie 1995: 179). But this ‘lust for destruction’ may equally be thought as an affirmation of becoming in its purposelessness, its lack of unity, and its truthlessness, and active nihilism reaches its most extreme form precisely as the affirmation (Bejahung) of the eternal recurrence of the same – which, in a notebook entry dated 10 June 1887 and headed ‘European Nihilism’, Nietzsche defines as ‘existence as it is, without meaning or aim, yet recurring inevitably without any finale in nothingness’. The thought of eternal recurrence thus conceived is, according to Nietzsche, ‘the most extreme form of nihilism [die extremste Form des Nihilismus]: the nothing (the “meaningless”), eternally!’ (Nietzsche 1968: 35–6; 1999: xii. 213), and the perfection or consummation (Vollkommenheit) of nihilism requires the affirmation of this most extreme form. It is in this sense that active nihilism as the affirmation of eternal recurrence is the passage to the limit of nihilism. So it is that, on the one hand, there is a nihilism (passive) that is nothing but an endless exacerbation, a nihilism that cannot ever arrive at its own limit. This form of nihilism remains a moral interpretation, and, as such, tied incoherently to the very values that it negates. And, according to Nietzsche: ‘Attempts to escape nihilism without revaluating our values so far [. . .] produce the opposite, make the problem more acute’ (Nietzsche 1968: 19; 1999: xii. 476). This passive nihilism is an endless, spectral living-on of nihilism. On the other hand, there is a nihilism (active) that effects a passage to the limit of nihilism, but a passage that

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can only be accomplished through a negation that is also an affirmation, for, without the affirmation of eternal recurrence, active nihilism cannot reach its most extreme form. The obvious problem that arises here may be expressed as follows: if the self-overcoming (Selbstüberwindung) of nihilism requires the absolute negation of the moral interpretation, then how can one justify the claim that it is better for nihilism to be overcome than for it to continue – unless, that is, one has already accomplished the (non-moral) revaluation of all values? To what value can active nihilism appeal to justify its affirmation of eternal recurrence – unless that nihilism has already been overcome? In short, how can the critique and indeed the overcoming of nihilism take place unless that overcoming has already taken place? It is precisely for this reason that Nietzsche will have to take the overcoming of nihilism to have already – indeed, to have always already – taken place. Not only is there a time before nihilism – that is, the time before Plato (or before the Socrates of The Birth of Tragedy) – but there is also (and always already) a time after nihilism, from which the critique of nihilism as devaluation may be launched. As we have seen, when Nietzsche identifies himself as the ‘first perfect nihilist of Europe’ – in that he has affirmed eternal recurrence as the most extreme form of nihilism – this perfection (Vollkommenheit) lies precisely in his having ‘lived through the whole of nihilism, to the end, leaving it behind, outside himself’ (Nietzsche 1968: 3; 1999: xiii. 190). If the ‘living through’ (zu Ende leben) of nihilism is not to be its interminable ‘living on’ (as fortleben rather than überleben), it will have to have always already taken place. If nihilism is not both that which is yet to come and that which already belongs to the past, then its overcoming is unthinkable. Thus, when Slocombe claims that Nietzsche writes from ‘outside’ nihilism, he is only partly right; in fact, Nietzsche finds its necessary to write at once from before, within, and beyond nihilism, from inside it, from outside it, and on its very border or limit. For Nietzsche – and the implications of this will be apparent in each major redeployment of the concept of nihilism to be considered in this book – the time of this before-within-beyond nihilism, and the place of this inside-outside-onthe-limit-of nihilism, is the time and the place of art. It is in art that the question of the limit – and, above all, the limit between negation and affirmation – becomes critical.

Art, or the ‘superior counterforce’ We have seen that, in what Deleuze terms its ‘primary and basic’ sense, nihilism as Nietzsche redetermines the concept is ‘the value of nil taken

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on by life’, or what in On the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche himself terms a ‘No to life’ (Nietzsche 1989: 19), the negation of life as a value. As for what Nietzsche takes to be the necessary overcoming of nihilism thus determined, it is to be accomplished by way of art (Kunst) as an affirmation of life. That art is to be accorded such a privilege is expressed most clearly in a fragment in Nietzsche’s May–June 1888 notebook, in which he defines it as the ‘only superior counterforce’ (einzig überlegene Gegenkraft) to the devaluation of life, art being that which is ‘anti-Christian, anti-Buddhist, antinihilist par excellence’ (Nietzsche 1968: 452; 1999: xiii. 521). That said, in his ‘Attempt at a Self-Criticism’, Nietzsche appears to criticize the ‘artists’ metaphysics’ (Artisten-Metaphysik) that finds expression in his first book, and it thus becomes necessary to clarify how the absolute privilege accorded to art as the counterforce to nihilism might be distinguished from such a metaphysics. Nietzsche’s claim in the ‘Attempt at a Self-Criticism’ that the only values to be affirmed in The Birth of Tragedy are aesthetic values certainly appears to be fully justified. The original preface (addressed to Richard Wagner) declares that ‘art represents the highest task and the truly metaphysical activity of this life’ (Nietzsche 1967: 31–2), and, fourteen years later, this assertion is recast such that there can be no mistaking the opposite of this activity: ‘Already in the preface addressed to Richard Wagner, art, and not morality, is presented as the truly metaphysical activity of man’ (Nietzsche 1967: 22; Nietzsche’s emphasis). Furthermore, The Birth of Tragedy is punctuated by the claim that ‘it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified’ (Nietzsche 1967: 52, 141; Nietzsche’s emphasis). As Nietzsche makes clear in the Genealogy, this opposition between art and morality permits no possible reconciliation: where there is morality, there cannot be art; and where there is art, there cannot be morality. Although, as noted above, the term ‘nihilism’ appears nowhere in The Birth of Tragedy itself, what Nietzsche will later see as that phase in the history of nihilism when existence is taken to lack all meaning or purpose is already present in nascent form as the sense of the ‘horror or absurdity of existence’ that follows upon the ‘annihilation of the veil ¯ a’ ¯ (Nietzsche 1967: 60, 40). As this reference to the veil of may ¯ a, ¯ of may makes clear, Nietzsche draws directly here on Schopenhauer for his evocation of existence as without aim or reason, and in which the human individual has no value. And, as is well known, just as he will later theorize two possible responses to originary nihilism – that is, active and passive nihilism – so in The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche theorizes two aesthetic responses to the experience of this ‘horror or absurdity’, namely

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the Dionysian and the Apollinian as the two ‘primordial artistic drives’ (Nietzsche 1967: 137). As will be the case with active and passive nihilism, so with the Dionysian and the Apollinian, one response is clearly privileged over the other precisely because it is taken to be a remaining with the real rather than a flight from it. The Dionysian – and, according to Nietzsche, every tragic hero is essentially Dionysian – is that which has ‘looked truly into the essence of things’ (Nietzsche 1967: 60) and remained with that essence. While the Apollinian must also have a sense of this essence, it constitutes a flight from it – that is, a flight into a value-bestowing illusion: If we could imagine dissonance become man [eine Menschenwerdung der Dissonanz] – and what else is man? – this dissonance, to be able to live, would need a splendid illusion [herrliche Illusion] that would cover dissonance with a veil of beauty [Schönheitsschleier]. This is the true artistic aim of Apollo in whose name we comprehend all those countless illusions of the beauty of mere appearance that at every moment make life worth living [lebenswerth machen] at all and prompt desire to live on in order to experience the next moment. (Nietzsche 1967: 143) What this suggests, however, is that a purely Dionysian art would in fact not be an art at all, but rather the very experience of the reality of nature (Naturwirklichkeit) – unless, of course, that Naturwirklichkeit were itself already art, a possibility to which we shall soon have reason to return. The relation between the Dionysian and the Apollinian in The Birth of Tragedy is considerably more complicated than Gillespie takes it to be when he claims that the Apollinian is simply a ‘projection’, ‘mask’, ‘moment of’, or ‘metaphor for’ the Dionysian, it being ‘in and through this Apollinian mask that the primordial will is able to ennoble, affirm, and thus redeem its pain’ (Gillespie 1995: 209). According to Nietzsche, the fraternal union (Bruderbund ) achieved between the Dionysian and the Apollinian in Aeschylus and Sophocles is anticipated by the lyrist, in whom, as in Attic tragedy, the Dionysian moment necessarily precedes the Apollinian: In the first place [zuerst], as a Dionysian artist he [the lyrist] has identified himself with the primal unity, its pain and contradiction. Assuming that music has been correctly termed a repetition [Wiederholung] and a recast [ein zweiter Abguss] of the world, we may say that he produces the copy [Abbild ] of this primal unity as music.

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The Abbild produced by the Dionysian drive is then reprocessed in the Apollinian phase: Now, however, under the Apollinian dream inspiration, this music reveals itself to him again as a symbolic dream image [wie in einem gleichnissartigen Traumbilde]. The inchoate, intangible reflection [Wiederschein] of the primordial pain in music, with its redemption in mere appearance, now produces a second mirroring as a specific symbol or example [eine zweite Spiegelung, als einzelnes Gleichniss oder Exempel ]. The artist has already surrendered his subjectivity in the Dionysian process. The image [Bild ] that now shows him his identity with the heart of the world is a dream scene [Traumscene] that embodies the primordial contradiction and primordial pain, together with the primordial pleasure, of mere appearance [die jenen Urwiderspruch und Urschmerz, sammt der Urlust des Scheines, versinnlicht]. (Nietzsche 1967: 49; Nietzsche’s emphasis) The terminological distinctions upon which Nietzsche’s argument rests here – between Dionysian repetition (Wiederholung), recasting (ein zweiter Abguss), copy (Abbild ), and reflection (Wiederschein) on the one hand, and an Apollinian second mirroring (zweite Spiegelung), symbol (Gleichniss), example (Exempel ), or dream image (Traumbild ) on the other – are themselves grounded in the distinction between the experience of primordial pain (Urschmerz) and primordial pleasure (Urlust). These two series of re-presentations come together, however, as an image (Bild ) that embodies (versinnlicht) both the Dionysian Urschmerz and the Apollinian Urlust. Rather than the Apollinian being simply a ‘mask’ of the Dionysian, then, as Gillespie claims, it is that image (Bild ) in which the Dionysian copy (Abbild) is reproduced in an embodiment (Versinnlichung) of primordial pain and primordial pleasure, the latter being tied to the Apollinian phase.9 When it comes to Attic tragedy, however, Nietzsche not only offers a rather different version of the process by which the Dionysian and the Apollinian relate to each other, but also relocates primordial pleasure in the Dionysian, as he had already done in the essay ‘The Dionysiac World View’ (1870): In the total effect of tragedy, the Dionysian predominates once again. Tragedy closes with a sound which could never come from the realm of Apollinian art. And thus the Apollinian illusion [Täuschung] reveals itself as what it really is – the veiling [Umschleierung] during the

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performance of the tragedy of the real Dionysian effect; but the latter is so powerful that it ends by forcing the Apollinian drama itself into a sphere where it begins to speak with a Dionysian wisdom and even denies itself [sich verneint] and its Apollinian visibility. Thus the intricate relation [das schwierige Verhältniss] of the Apollinian and the Dionysian in tragedy may really be symbolized by a fraternal union of the two deities [durch einen Bruderband beider Gottheiten zu symbolisieren]: Dionysus speaks the language of Apollo; and Apollo finally the language of Dionysus; and so the highest goal of tragedy and of all art is attained. (Nietzsche 1967: 130) In place of an image (Bild) that embodies (versinnlicht) both the Dionysian and the Apollinian, we now have an intricate relation (schwieriges Verhältniss) of voices, with both the Dionysian and the Apollinian speaking the language of the other, even if the Apollinian again follows the Dionysian: it is only finally (schliesslich) that Apollo speaks the language of Dionysus. In order to maintain the priority accorded to the Dionysian here, however, Nietzsche finds it necessary to insist not only that the vision of existence in its ‘horror or absurdity’ upon which all art is founded is Dionysian rather than Apollinian, but also that the Dionysian does not have to await the Apollinian in order for primordial pleasure (Urlust) to be experienced: ‘The Dionysian, with its primordial joy experienced even in pain, is the common source of music and tragic myth.’ If, on the one hand, the Apollinian might appear to lose any essential role as soon as pleasure is already located in the Dionysian, on the other hand the Apollinian incorporates the Dionysian as soon as the latter is itself presented as a form of veiling. And this is precisely what occurs when Nietzsche defines the ‘highest and, indeed, the truly serious task of art’ as being ‘to save the eye from gazing into the horrors of night and to deliver the subject by the healing balm of illusion [Balsam des Scheins] from the spasms of the agitations of the will’ (Nietzsche 1967: 118). As Paul de Man observes: ‘Contrary to all earlier claims, the Dionysian is then called one stage of delusion [Illusionsstufe] among others’ (de Man 1979: 99). If the Dionysian is to remain an artistic drive, then it would appear that it too must function as illusion-producing, and, in that case, the very distinction between the Dionysian and the Apollinian moment cannot be sustained other than within a more general theory of art as such as veiling or illusion-producing. And the obvious problem for Nietzsche with such a conception of art (even in its Dionysian aspect) is that the determination of art as the counterforce to nihilism would itself be unsustainable,

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given that it is precisely as veiling or illusion-producing that nihilism will be defined in a spring 1888 notebook entry: ‘I rebel against the translation of reality into a morality: therefore I abhor Christianity with a deadly hatred, because it created sublime words and gestures to throw over a horrible reality the cloak [Mantel] of justice, virtue, and divinity –’ (Nietzsche 1968: 364; 1999: xiii. 304). If all rests on the distinction between two kinds of veiling – that is, an artistic veiling and a moral veiling – then a more fundamental analysis of the veil and of veiling (Verschleierung or Umschleierung) is required if the critique of nihilism is to be maintained. It is no doubt in part on account of the problems besetting the distinction between the Dionysian and the Apollinian that the conception of art in terms of two fundamental artistic drives becomes considerably less important in the course of Nietzsche’s argument in The Birth of Tragedy, and, above all, in his thinking of art as that which stands opposed as the ‘superior counterforce’ to what will later be termed ‘nihilism’. Indeed, beyond any distinction between artistic drives, it is art as such that soon comes to be privileged. Confronted with the ‘horror or absurdity of existence’, man is in the greatest danger, and art’s function becomes the aversion of that danger: Here, where the danger to his will is greatest, art approaches as a saving sorceress, expert at healing. She alone knows how to turn these nauseous thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live: these are the sublime as the artistic taming of the horrible, and the comic as the artistic discharge of the nausea of absurdity. (Nietzsche 1967: 60; Nietzsche’s emphasis) Arguably, the key difference between Nietzsche’s thinking of art in The Birth of Tragedy and in his later works concerns this turning of the nauseous into the sublime and the comic. In The Birth of Tragedy, Attic tragedy (as the highest form of art) is said to grant ‘metaphysical comfort’ (metaphysischer Trost) (Nietzsche 1967: 108). It is to this conception of art, which so closely echoes Schopenhauer’s conception of art as an ‘occasional consolation’ (einstweilen ein Trost) for the ‘constant suffering’ of being (Schopenhauer 1969: i. 267), that Nietzsche is referring when, in his ‘Attempt at a Self-Criticism’, he mocks the Artisten-Metaphysik in his first book. The voice of such an Artisten-Metaphysik is certainly to be heard in The Birth of Tragedy; it is the voice that advocates ‘a new art, the art of metaphysical comfort [die Kunst des metaphysischen Trostes]’ (Nietzsche 1967: 26). By 1866, it is precisely this conception of art that is rejected in

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favour of an ‘art of this-worldly comfort’ (die Kunst des diesseitigen Trostes) (Nietzsche 1967: 26; Nietzsche’s emphasis). In other words, while art remains a matter of comfort (Trost), there are two radically distinct kinds of comfort – ‘metaphysical’ and ‘this-worldly’ – and it is the latter that, according to the Nietzsche of 1866, genuine art would grant us. It is on the basis of this distinction that the Dionysian–Apollinian distinction is superseded by that between art and nihilism in Nietzsche’s later thought.

The transfiguration of nihilism Far from deranging The Birth of Tragedy as a whole, the disruption of the Dionysian–Apollinian distinction serves a purpose that will prove in the longer term – which is to say, beyond Nietzsche’s early valorization of Wagner’s art – to be of the utmost importance. As we have seen, while Gillespie takes the Apollinian in The Birth of Tragedy to be simply a mask, the relation between the Dionysian and the Apollinian is in fact much more complicated than this. No less questionable is Gillespie’s claim that the Dionysian eventually comes to wear ‘a Socratic mask’, and that the later Nietzsche is ‘not the disciple of an Apollinian Dionysus who creates a dream image of unity’, but rather ‘the disciple of a Socratic Dionysus who reveals the abyss and the fundamental chaos of existence but is also able to transfigure it through his art into a beautiful whole’ (Gillespie 1995: 226–8). Already in The Birth of Tragedy, the Dionysian– Apollinian opposition comes to be sidelined by what Nietzsche describes as a ‘new opposition’, namely that between the Dionysian and the Socratic (Nietzsche 1967: 82). Crucially, this new opposition is not within art itself – it is not between two artistic drives; rather, it is between the artistic and the theoretical, the latter being incorporated within the moral in On the Genealogy of Morals. In The Birth of Tragedy, Socrates is first presented as the ‘opponent of tragic art’ on the grounds that it is not philosophy: ‘Like Plato, he regarded it [tragic art] among the flattering arts which portray only the agreeable, not the useful; and therefore he required of his disciples abstinence and strict separation from such unphilosophical attractions’ (Nietzsche 1967: 87, 90). As an opponent of tragic art, however, Socrates is an opponent of what in The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche takes to be the highest form of art, and is thus an opponent of art in its essence, exhibiting not merely a tragic-art-destroying but a more general ‘artdestroying tendency’ (kunstmörderische Tendenz) (Nietzsche 1967: 107). Indeed, as the very ‘type of the theoretical man’ (Nietzsche 1967: 94; Nietzsche’s emphasis), Socrates is the antithesis of the creative man.

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He is the ‘archetype and progenitor’ of science (Wissenschaft) (Nietzsche 1967: 110). In Socrates, then, Nietzsche presents the birth of non-art in the form of a third (entirely non-aesthetic) response to the ‘horror or absurdity of existence’. This third response is the theoretical or scientific (wissenschaftlich), which is to say thought governed by the ratio: a systematizing, logical procedure orientated towards knowledge and governed by the principle of non-contradiction. In place of that ‘metaphysical comfort’ that in The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche takes to be the gift of art, Socrates advocates the panacea (Universalmedizin) of knowledge (Wissen) and insight (Erkenntnis) (Nietzsche 1967: 97). If the Trost granted by art is superior to the Universalmedizin granted by science, then this is above all because the former does not entail any falsifying negation. Here, however, we encounter a problem concerning the negative in its relation to art that will continue to haunt Nietzsche’s thinking of art to the very end. If the thesis of art’s superiority to science is to be maintained, then art cannot be a negation or denial (Verneinung) of becoming in its ‘horror or absurdity’. In The Birth of Tragedy, however, we find art’s relation to that ‘horror or absurdity’ being conceived in two ways. On the one hand, art is presented as a veiling (Umschleierung or Verschleierung) of that ‘horror or absurdity’; on the other hand, as ‘a metaphysical supplement’ (ein metaphysisches Supplement) that transfigures (verklärt) it (Nietzsche 1967: 140). In fact, it is the principle of transfiguration (Verklärung) that brings together the Dionysian and the Apollinian moments in this text, since the latter is but a ‘new transfiguring illusion’ (ein neuer Verklärungsschein) which is necessary ‘in order to keep the animated world of individuation alive’ (Nietzsche 1967: 143). And, as a ‘metaphysical supplement’ to natural reality, art as transfiguration constitutes the self-overcoming rather than the denial of that reality: ‘art is not merely imitation of the reality of nature [Naturwirklichkeit] but rather a metaphysical supplement of the reality of nature, placed beside it for its overcoming [Überwindung]’ (Nietzsche 1967: 140). As Verklärung, art is, then, neither an imitation (Nachahmung) nor a veiling (Verschleierung). Above all, it is nothing negative. As an entry in his spring 1888 notebook reveals, what Nietzsche later terms the ‘grand style’ is nothing other than a reconception of art as transfiguration: The greatness of an artist cannot be measured by the ‘beautiful feelings’ he arouses: leave that idea to females. But according to the degree to which he approaches the grand style, to which he is capable of the grand style. [. . .] To become master of the chaos one is; to compel one’s chaos to become form: to become logical, simple, unambiguous,

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mathematics, law – that is the grand ambition here. (Nietzsche 1968: 443–4; 1999: xiii. 246–7; Nietzsche’s emphasis) As Heidegger observes (see Heidegger 1979: 158–9), this ‘grand style’ has in turn to be thought together with what Nietzsche terms ‘grand politics’ (die grosse Politik), since the transfiguration that is the essence of art would bring about not simply a national cultural renewal but an entirely transfigured Europe – that is, a Europe that would itself have accomplished both the consummation and the overcoming of what in On the Genealogy of Morals and repeatedly in the notebooks of 1886–8 is identified not simply as nihilism but as European nihilism. Heidegger is no doubt right when he claims that, for Nietzsche, ‘Art is the most genuine and profound will to semblance [Schein], namely, to the scintillation of what transfigures [verklärt]’ (Heidegger 1979: 216). However, the distinction between Verklärung and Verschleierung upon which the overcoming of nihilism depends, remains problematical – to say the least – in Nietzsche’s thinking of art. Indeed, at times he hesitates as to whether an overcoming transfiguration ever takes place. This hesitation is already apparent, for instance, when in The Birth of Tragedy he asserts that the ‘horror or absurdity of existence’ is ‘again and again overcome by the Greeks with the aid of the Olympian middle world of art; or at any rate it was veiled [verhüllt] and withdrawn from sight’ (Nietzsche 1967: 42: Nietzsche’s emphasis). It is by way of the ‘Attempt at a Self-Criticism’ that one can connect the thought of art as transfiguration, and its fundamental opposition to science, in The Birth of Tragedy with his later thinking of art and its relation to an explicitly named ‘nihilism’ identified as the ‘danger of dangers’. We have seen that in the ‘Attempt at a Self-Criticism’ Nietzsche claims – as he will again in Ecce Homo – that in The Birth of Tragedy Christianity is treated with a ‘careful and hostile silence’ (Nietzsche 1967: 23), and that his first book should now be understood in terms of an opposition more fundamental than the intra-aesthetic one between the Dionysian and the Apollinian, and even that between art and science, namely the opposition between art and morality (with Christianity as the latter’s most life-hostile form). In short, the opposition that lies at the heart of Nietzsche’s later thought, and which he attempts to write back into his first book, is that between the aesthetic and the moral interpretation (Auslegung) of the world, or between art and nihilism: In truth, nothing could be more opposed to the purely aesthetic interpretation and justification of the world which are taught in this book

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than the Christian teaching, which is, and wants to be, only moral and which relegates art, every art, to the realm of lies [. . .]. Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life’s nausea and disgust with life . . . , at bottom a craving for the nothing. (Nietzsche 1967: 23; Nietzsche’s emphasis) If Christianity as the moral interpretation of the world is a ‘craving for the nothing’, or a ‘No to life’, then the aesthetic interpretation must be an affirmation of that same life. The life (Leben) that is to be affirmed, however, is itself nothing other than art, as is made clear when Nietzsche asserts that ‘all of life is based on [ruht auf ] semblance [Schein], art [Kunst], deception [Täuschung], points of view, and the necessity of perspectives and error’ (Nietzsche 1967: 23). Thus, if art is a ‘supplement’ to natural reality, as an affirmation of life it is in fact an affirmation of itself. It is not simply that life overcomes itself as art, then, but rather that art overcomes itself as art. What art transfigures is nothing other than itself. While this conception of art as self-transfiguration will continue to dominate Nietzsche’s later thinking of art, one of the most important differences between his earlier and later conception of this selftransfiguration concerns the possibility of its realization in actual works of art. The element in The Birth of Tragedy that Nietzsche most obviously turns away from in his later work is the claim that Wagner’s art constitutes that renewal which will once again result in a culture akin to the Greek culture at its height, a culture characterized as the highest form of art. As is well known, Nietzsche comes to see Wagner’s art as ‘decadent’, a flight into illusion from, rather than a transfiguration of, the ‘horror or absurdity of existence’. While his praise of Bizet’s Carmen (1875) in The Case of Wagner, and the writing of the posthumously published Dithyrambs of Dionysus, might encourage the belief that Nietzsche simply comes to valorize a new kind of artwork, in The Birth of Tragedy there are already clear signs that art is being thought beyond the artwork as that term is generally understood. Above all, the work of art is not to be seen as the reified product of an artist who would be distinguishable from it in the way that subject would be distinguishable from object. Thus, while in Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche might follow Paul Bourget’s assessment of Flaubert as ‘nihilist’ (see Nietzsche 2005: 160; cf. Bourget 1912: i. 147ff.), to interpret Nietzsche as thinking in terms of nihilist and anti-nihilist artists (for instance, Goethe) tends to obscure the manner in which his thinking of art in relation to nihilism is ultimately a thinking of art as a non-reifiable process of transfiguration.

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That this is the case is already suggested in The Birth of Tragedy when Nietzsche claims that in the Dionysian experience man ‘is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art’ (Nietzsche 1967: 37). And the artwork into which the artist has been transfigured is nothing other than existence itself, refigured as an aesthetic phenomenon: ‘we have our highest dignity in our significance as works of art – for it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified’ (Nietzsche 1967: 52; Nietzsche’s emphasis). Towards the end of the book, Nietzsche clarifies what is meant here by an aesthetic phenomenon when he states that ‘it is precisely the tragic myth that has to convince us that even the ugly and disharmonic are part of an artistic game that the will in the eternal amplitude of its pleasure plays with itself [mit sich selbst spielt]’ (Nietzsche 1967: 141). This characterization of the will as at play with itself stands in direct contrast to Schopenhauer’s conception of the will as that which is constantly at war with itself, producing at the level of the representation (Vorstellung) both the tormentor and the tormented in their mutual non-self-recognition (see Schopenhauer 1969: i. 354). Through the transfiguration that is art, this playing-with-itself of the will becomes what it always already is. Thus, the strange temporality of nihilism is precisely the same as that of the will as aesthetic transfiguration. In short, art for Nietzsche becomes the self-transfiguration (Selbstverklärung) of nihilism.

The aesthetic/ascetic turntable If art as the self-transfiguration of nihilism is ultimately affirming rather than negating, then this is because, unlike both the moral and the scientific interpretation of the world – and, according to Nietzsche, the scientific interpretation is in fact a moral interpretation – art produces values. This conception of art as value-producing comes to the fore in On the Genealogy of Morals, in which nihilism is named and in which the privilege accorded to art is located explicitly in its opposition to this nihilism. The second essay (‘“Guilt”, “Bad Conscience”, and the Like’) ends with the declaration that the ‘Antichrist and antinihilist; this victor over God and nothingness – he must come one day’ (Nietzsche 1989: 96; Nietzsche’s emphasis), and, in the third essay (‘What Is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals?’), Nietzsche fleshes out his conception of this prophesied ‘antinihilist’ in relation to art. Revisiting the opposition first proposed in The Birth of Tragedy between art and science, Nietzsche relocates that opposition within the more general – and, as he now sees it, more fundamental – opposition between art and morality, or between the

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artist and the ascetic priest: ‘The ascetic priest has ruined health wherever he has come to power; consequently he has also ruined taste in artibus et litteris’ (Nietzsche 1989: 143). In section 25 of the third essay, Nietzsche turns to the relation between science, art, and nihilism. Science, he claims, is nihilism because it ‘never creates values’ (Nietzsche 1989: 153). In this, it is aligned with the ascetic ideal, since both accept the already produced highest values, and above all the value of truth, instead of generating new values: ‘This pair, science and the ascetic ideal, both rest on the same foundation – I have already indicated it: on the same overestimation of truth (more exactly: on the same belief that truth is inestimable and cannot be criticized)’ (Nietzsche 1989: 153). The scientific interpretation seeks to make sense of the world in terms of reason, its ‘panacea’ taking the form of a faith in the ‘explicability of nature’ (Nietzsche 1989: 106) – that is, in knowledge (Wissen) rather than tragic wisdom (Weisheit). The moral interpretation (to which science now belongs) also has an explicative function, since it seeks to make sense of suffering: In it, suffering was interpreted; the tremendous void seemed to have been filled; the door was closed to any kind of suicidal nihilism.[. . .] man was saved thereby, he possessed a meaning, he was henceforth no longer like a leaf in the wind, a plaything of nonsense – the ‘senseless’ – he could now will something; no matter at first to what end, why, with what he willed: the will itself was saved. (Nietzsche 1989: 162: Nietzsche’s emphasis) But this closing of the door on ‘suicidal nihilism’ is precisely that for which the moral interpretation is to be criticized, since it blocks what in his spring 1888 notebook Nietzsche terms ‘the deed of nihilism’ – ‘a great purifying nihilistic movement [Nihilismus-Bewegung]’ (Nietzsche 1968: 143; 1999: xiii. 222; Nietzsche’s emphasis); that is, the active nihilism that would clear the ground for a revaluation of all values, even if it cannot itself step across the threshold into a region beyond nihilism. While both the scientific and the moral interpretation present themselves as resisting nihilism through their attempts to make sense of nature and suffering respectively, these apparent salvations from nihilism are in fact manifestations of that nihilism in its passive form. The validity of this claim is itself threatened, however, by Nietzsche’s critique of truth as a value: ‘The will to truth requires a critique – let us thus define our own task – the value of truth must for once be experimentally called into question’ (Nietzsche 1989: 153; Nietzsche’s emphasis). Thus, only an interpretation that is not governed by truth can overcome nihilism, and

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it is precisely here that the aesthetic interpretation comes in. In contrast to both science and Christianity (as moral interpretations), art is repeatedly characterized by Nietzsche in terms of the lie, semblance (Schein), deception (Täuschung): ‘[Art,] in which precisely the lie is sanctified and the will to deception has a good conscience, is much more fundamentally opposed to the ascetic ideal than is science: this was instinctively sensed by Plato, the greatest enemy of art Europe has yet produced. Plato versus Homer: that is the complete, the genuine antagonism’ (Nietzsche 1989: 153–4). Artistic transfiguration has to be understood, then, as lie or deception. But if art is that which is most fully opposed to nihilism, even to the point of being its overcoming through transfiguration, it is also, and for this very reason, that in which the greatest betrayal is possible. Indeed, the artist as the anti-nihilist force par excellence may all too easily become the arch-nihilist: ‘To place himself in the service of the ascetic ideal is therefore the most distinctive corruption of an artist that is at all possible; unhappily, also one of the most common forms of corruption, for nothing is more easily corrupted than an artist’ (Nietzsche 1989: 154; Nietzsche’s emphasis). The strength of anti-nihilism is thus also its weakness. If, as Nietzsche claims, the overcoming of nihilism requires its consummation (Vollendung), that overcoming of nihilism through art as transfiguration also remains in absolute proximity to this consummation. In fact, we find ourselves contemplating the possibility of an endlessly reversible border crossing, for just as the artist can all too easily betray art by becoming the ascetic priest, so the ascetic priest is already at odds with himself as a nihilist. Indeed, the ascetic priest is the contradiction at the very heart of nihilism, proof that nihilism is ambiguous (zweideutig), a kind of double sign. In an irony the calculation of which is far from easy to accomplish, the ascetic priest is, despite himself, the great affirmer: ‘this apparent enemy of life, this denier – precisely he is among the greatest conserving and yes-creating [ Ja-schaffende] forces of life’ (Nietzsche 1989: 120–1). So it is that the essence of nihilism lies in a rendering positive of the negative: ‘the hypnotic sense of nothingness, the repose of deepest sleep, in short absence of suffering – sufferers and those profoundly depressed will count this as the supreme good, as the value of values; they are bound to accord it a positive value, to experience it as the positive as such’ (Nietzsche 1989: 134; Nietzsche’s emphasis). It is with just this point that Nietzsche both opens and closes On the Genealogy of Morals: nihilism as ‘a will to nothingness, an aversion [Widerwillen] to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life [. . .] is still and remains a will!’ (Nietzsche 1989: 162–3; Nietzsche’s emphasis).

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It would seem, then, that nihilism as Nietzsche determines it is ultimately impossible, given that the arch-nihilist is in fact already a ‘yes-creating’ force; and, as we shall see in Chapter 4, Maurice Blanchot takes Nietzsche to demonstrate precisely the impossibility of nihilism. However, just as the ascetic priest is ambiguous, so too is the artist. We have seen that the aesthetic interpretation is in fact an absolute affirmation of nihilism: a ‘yes’ to life as becoming. This affirmation takes the form of a transfiguration, and it is through this transfiguration that we pass from the consummation of nihilism to its overcoming. In claiming to be the ‘perfect nihilism’ (der vollkommene Nihilist), the one who has left nihilism ‘behind, outside himself’, and thus demonstrated that nihilism is a phase or intermediate condition (Zwischenzustand ) with determinable limits, Nietzsche is claiming to have accomplished this transfiguration. However, we have also seen that what is transfigured by art is nothing other than art itself, and that this transfiguration is in fact the self-overcoming (Selbstüberwindung) of art – and, indeed, that this transfiguration cannot be a purely affirmative act. For, although Deleuze claims that Nietzsche ‘is opposed to every form of thought which trusts in the power of the negative’ (Deleuze 1983: 179), it is nonetheless the case that, just as the ascetic priest is characterized by an affirmation, so the artist is characterized by negation, and more precisely by a negation in the form of a self-transfiguration, which is always also a mode of veiling. Both the artist and the ascetic priest stand at once inside and outside nihilism, or rather on a border between inside and outside. In both, there is a resistance to nihilism in the form of an affirmation of life, and in both there is a negative moment. Furthermore, just as the relation between affirmation and negation is not a dialectical one in either the artist or the ascetic priest, so the relation between these two figures is not dialectical. Neither can it be controlled simply by an appeal to the distinction between strong and weak values. It is in the relation between these two figures that a resistance of nihilism is located in which both the subjective and the objective genitive are at work. In Nietzsche, then, the uncanniness of nihilism, as that which belongs neither inside nor outside what he terms ‘metaphysics’, as that which begins as unheimisch and ends as unheimlich (see Nietzsche 1999: xiii. 144), comes to manifest itself as an endless reversibility – of the artist and the ascetic priest, of aesthetic and moral interpretation, of affirmation and negation, of the revaluation and devaluation of all values – a reversibility that is the very form of the border between the arrival and the overcoming of ‘genuine nihilism’.

2 Homelessness: Martin Heidegger

‘Real nihilism’: Germany, 1933–5 While the terms ‘nihilism’ (Nihilismus) and ‘nihilist’ (nihilistisch) are deployed in the majority of Nietzsche’s works from Beyond Good and Evil (1886) to Ecce Homo (written in 1888), the privilege accorded to the concept of nihilism by the editors of The Will to Power (1901; expanded edition, 1906) is undoubtedly the principal reason for its being taken to lie at the heart of Nietzsche’s later thought in the reception of his work in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. It was, however, above all the politico-philosophical status of the concept of nihilism within the field of cultural critique that led to its centrality in the appropriation of Nietzsche’s thought by the ideologues of National Socialism, principally through the stewardship of Alfred Baeumler, professor of philosophy in Berlin from 1933 to 1945 and author of Nietzsche the Philosopher and Politician (1931). It is precisely as a countering of this National Socialist appropriation of Nietzsche – and, in particular, his thinking of nihilism – that Martin Heidegger characterizes his own major engagement with Nietzsche’s thought from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s; that is, in the series of four lecture courses on Nietzsche delivered at Freiburg University between 1936 and 1940, and first published in the two-volume Nietzsche in 1961, and the various short treatises on Nietzsche, especially ‘The Word of Nietzsche: “God Is Dead”’ (written 1943), ‘Nihilism as Determined by the History of Being’ (written 1944–6), and ‘The Essence of Nihilism’ (written 1946–8). In a letter of 4 November 1945 to the rector of Freiburg University, for instance, Heidegger not only presents himself as having engaged in a ‘spiritual resistance’ of National Socialism in the lecture courses, but claims to have done so above all in the form of a 35

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debate or confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) with Nietzsche’s thinking of nihilism: Beginning in 1936 I embarked on a series of courses and lectures on Nietzsche, which lasted until 1945 and which represented in even clearer fashion a declaration of spiritual resistance. In truth, it is unjust to assimilate Nietzsche to National Socialism, an assimilation which – apart from what is essential – ignores his hostility to anti-Semitism and his positive attitude to Russia. But on a higher plane, the debate with Nietzsche’s metaphysics is a debate with nihilism as it manifests itself with increased clarity under the political form of fascism. (Heidegger in Wolin 1993: 65; Heidegger’s emphasis) While it is indeed the case that the 1936–40 lectures on Nietzsche to which Heidegger refers in this letter constitute an attempt to counter the biologistic and racialist interpretation of Nietzsche, these lectures are in fact neither Heidegger’s first public engagement with Nietzsche’s thought, nor the first occasion on which he deploys the term ‘nihilism’. And, at the time of that first deployment, Heidegger presents National Socialism not as a clearer manifestation of nihilism, but precisely as the privileged form of ‘spiritual resistance’ to it. Although there are very few references to Nietzsche in Being and Time (1927) and none at all in the 1929 inaugural lecture What Is Metaphysics?, in his 27 May 1933 Rectoral Address, The Self-Assertion of the German University, Heidegger refers to what he will later term Nietzsche’s ‘word’ (Wort) – ‘God is dead’ – and anticipates his own later thinking of nihilism by setting this ‘word’ alongside the thought of ‘the forsakenness [Verlassenheit] of modern man in the midst of what is [inmitten des Seienden]’ (Heidegger 2003b: 5). Neither in the Rectoral Address, nor in the various political speeches delivered during his rectorship of 1933–4, however, does Heidegger deploy the term ‘nihilism’. Indeed, his first public deployment of the term occurs only after the charge of nihilism has been levelled against his own thought. Although The Self-Assertion of the German University certainly exhibits Heidegger’s commitment to the National Socialist revolution, to the leader principle (Führerprinzip), and to the political alignment of the university with the Nazi Party (Gleichschaltung), it is nonetheless the case that the Rectoral Address was denounced in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung as ‘the expression of an abysmal and destructive nihilism’ (quoted in Farías 1989: 110), while, in an article published in the National Socialist periodical Volk im Werden in 1934, Ernst Krieck, professor of philosophy and education studies

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at the Pedagogical Academy in Frankfurt, claimed that ‘The meaning of [Heidegger’s] philosophy is downright atheism and metaphysical nihilism of the kind that used to be represented in our country mainly by Jewish literati – in other words, an enzyme of decomposition and dissolution for the German people’ (quoted in Safranski 1998: 268). No doubt largely as an act of self-defence against these charges of nihilism, the second of which places him in the same (obviously highly dangerous) category as ‘Jewish literati’, Heidegger proceeds to deploy the term in his 1935 lecture course, Introduction to Metaphysics (first published in 1953), in relation to the possibility of a thinking and speaking of the nothing (das Nichts) already broached in What Is Metaphysics?, but now for the first time addressed by way of the concept of nihilism. Looking back in 1955 on the reception of What Is Metaphysics?, Heidegger observes that ‘people have seized upon and extracted “the” nothing and made the lecture into a testament to nihilism’ (Heidegger 1998b: 317). In What Is Metaphysics? itself, Heidegger declares that, for science (Wissenschaft), the nothing is ‘an outrage and a phantasm’ (Heidegger 1998b: 84). Six years later, however, in Introduction to Metaphysics – that is, after certain ‘people’ have turned the 1929 Inaugural Lecture into a ‘testament of nihilism’ – Heidegger claims that, from the perspective of ‘logical’ or ‘scientific’ thinking, to speak about the nothing is ‘pure nihilism’ (reiner Nihilismus) (Heidegger 2000b: 26). According to Heidegger, that charge is not only misplaced, but itself comes from ‘real nihilism’ (der eigentliche Nihilismus) – an expression that will recur in the 1944–6 treatise ‘Nihilism as Determined by the History of Being’. In 1935, then, Heidegger seeks to turn the charge of nihilism back upon those who have directed it at him. Neither in Introduction to Metaphysics nor in the many later texts in which he explicitly addresses the question of nihilism, however, does the logic governing this primal scene of charge and counter-charge become the object of Heidegger’s own analysis. Heidegger’s deployment of the term in the 1935 lecture course is the point of departure for a complete redetermination of the concept of nihilism inherited from Nietzsche, a redetermination that involves the turning back of the charge of nihilism not only against those who would accuse Heidegger himself of nihilism but also against Nietzsche’s own determination of nihilism as devaluation (Entwerthung). To ask after the nothing is, Heidegger argues, the very opposite of nihilism, since it is, albeit indirectly, to ask after Being (Sein) – and that, he asserts, is the sole path towards the overcoming (Überwindung) of ‘real nihilism’, which lies in the forgetting or oblivion of Being (Vergessenheit des Seins). It is not in

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the attempt to think the nothing that this ‘real nihilism’ is ‘at work’ (am Werk), but rather: where one clings to current beings [geläufigen Seienden] and believes it is enough to take beings, as before, just as the beings that they are. But with this, one rejects the question of Being and treats Being as a nothing (nihil), which in a certain way it even ‘is’, insofar as it essentially unfolds. Merely to chase after beings in the midst of the oblivion of Being – that is nihilism [In der Vergessenheit des Seins nur das Seiende betreiben – das ist Nihilismus]. Nihilism thus understood is the ground for the nihilism that Nietzsche exposed in the first book of The Will to Power. (Heidegger 2000b: 217) Leaving aside the fact that, strictly speaking, Nietzsche exposed nothing about nihilism in the ‘first book’ of The Will to Power, since that book consists of a collection of notes, drafts, and fragments drawn together by the work’s editors (on the basis of one among many outlines for such a work) to give the impression that Nietzsche had undertaken such an exposure, the above statement in Introduction to Metaphysics encapsulates Heidegger’s own countering redetermination of nihilism. For Heidegger, the essence of nihilism lies not in devaluation, as Nietzsche claims, but rather in the negation of the difference between Being and beings. Moreover, far from constituting the overcoming of nihilism, Nietzsche’s own thinking of Being in terms of value (Wert) is itself the consummation (Vollendung) of nihilism. As for the ‘symptoms’ of nihilism grasped as the forgetting of Being, these are identified by Heidegger in 1935 as: the ‘spiritual decline of the earth’; the ‘darkening of the world’; the ‘flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the reduction of human beings to a mass, the hatred and mistrust of everything creative and free’; ‘a disempowering of the spirit [eine Entmachung des Geistes], its dissolution, diminution, suppression, and misinterpretation’; and ‘the onslaught of what we call the demonic’ (Heidegger 2000b: 40, 47, 49; Heidegger’s emphasis). While Heidegger’s rhetoric here is, in certain respects, akin to Nietzsche’s – the reference to the creative (das Schöpferische) and the free (das Freie), in particular, cannot but recall Nietzsche – there are also notable departures, the demonic (das Dämonische) being anything but a mere symptom of nihilism for Nietzsche. In his first public deployment of the term, then, Heidegger attempts to redetermine nihilism against those who appeal to reason and science, against those National Socialist ideologues who have accused him of nihilism, and against Nietzsche’s determination of nihilism as

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devaluation (based as it is on a thinking of Being as a value). Furthermore, Heidegger’s redetermination of ‘real nihilism’ as the forgetting of Being is one in which, in 1935, the emphasis falls upon the objective genitive: nihilism is a forgetting to Being by those who cling to and pursue ‘current beings’, those who should be asking after Being rather than treating it ‘as a nothing’. And just as the responsibility for this forgetting of Being appears to lie principally with those who ‘reject the question of Being’, so the responsibility for the overcoming of nihilism lies with those who recall this question by way of a thinking of the nothing, the ‘first [. . .] fruitful step toward the true overcoming of nihilism [zur wahrhaften Überwindung der Nihilismus]’ lying in a going ‘expressly up to the limit of Nothing [bis an die Grenze des Nichts] in the question about Being’ (Heidegger 2000b: 217–18; Heidegger’s emphasis). From the outset, then, the overcoming of nihilism is thought by Heidegger in terms of the limit or border (Grenze). That, in 1935, Heidegger takes nihilism to be a ‘disempowering’ against which a countering ‘step’ is not only possible, but urgently required, is evident not least from the exhortatory nature of his rhetoric. What is at stake for Heidegger at this time, and in this place, is nothing less than the future of what he terms ‘Europe’ and the ‘West’. If ‘Europe’ is, ‘in its unholy blindness’ (in heilloser Verblendung), ‘always on the point of cutting its own throat’, in 1935 this threat from within is conjoined with another threat, this time from beyond its borders, since ‘Europe’ now finds itself caught between the ‘great pincers’, with ‘Russia on the one side and America on the other’. While one might imagine that these two threats are quite distinct, and even antithetical, Heidegger insists that, seen ‘metaphysically’ rather than politically or economically, Russia and America are in fact ‘both the same: the same hopeless frenzy of unchained technology and of the rootless [bodenlosen] organization of the average man [Normalmenschen]’ (Heidegger 2000b: 40). As he reiterates thirty years later in his 1966 interview with Der Spiegel, Heidegger sees Russia and America as the ‘same’ precisely in their nihilism, which in both cases takes the form of an ‘unchained technology’ that ‘tears men loose from the earth and uproots them’ (Heidegger 2003b: 37). In neither Russian communism nor American capitalism does one find a ‘genuine confrontation’ with technology (Technik) as that which uproots and renders the human Dasein homeless (heimatlos). As the forgetting of Being, then, nihilism has to be thought as a subjection to technology as deracination (Entwurzelung). To see this deracination not as a liberation but as the decline (Verfall) that it is – this, according to Heidegger, requires ‘spiritual strength’ (geistige Kraft).

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When Heidegger first publicly deploys the term ‘nihilism’, then, it stands for a technological deracination that has already spread ‘throughout the whole earth’ and that finds its most extreme forms in ‘Russia’ and ‘America’. And yet, the exhortatory nature of his discourse makes it clear that it is not yet too late for nihilism to be countered – and, indeed, to be overcome. That overcoming requires a ‘genuine confrontation’ with technology, and the responsibility for this confrontation falls not to human beings in general, but rather to a certain people (Volk), a people to, for, and from whom Heidegger takes himself to be speaking. The people in question are the people of the centre (Mitte), the ‘metaphysical people’, the ‘historical people’, the ‘most endangered people’ (Heidegger 2000b: 41) – in short, those whom Heidegger addresses as ‘our people’ (unser Volk). To counter nihilism is, quite simply, this people’s vocation (Bestimmung). What is required, if ‘Europe’ is to avoid annihilation (Vernichtung), is ‘the development of new, historically spiritual forces’ in this people of the centre (Heidegger 2000b: 41; Heidegger’s emphasis). If it is perfectly clear that this people to, for, and from whom Heidegger would speak here in the name of a struggle against nihilism is what he will elsewhere repeatedly refer to as the ‘German people’, what remains far less clear is precisely what he takes the essence and the borders of this particular people to be. In the speeches made as rector in 1933–4, Heidegger repeatedly refers not simply to the ‘German people’, but rather to ‘the German people as a whole’ and ‘the entire people’ (see, for instance, Heidegger in Wolin 1993: 48–9). Certainly, as is made clear by his 26 May 1933 speech to commemorate the death of the ‘German hero’ Albert Leo Schlageter, Heidegger does not consider this people of the centre to be limited to the then national borders of Germany. Are we, then, to understand by the expression ‘our people’ in Introduction to Metaphysics all those whose first language is German, including the many Jews who, in 1935, were already being stripped of their rights of German citizenship? To what extent does that people correspond to the ‘Germans’ as that term was determined by National Socialism? The least that can be said is that the concepts of both the German and Germanness (das Deutsche), which lie at the very heart of Heidegger’s thinking of nihilism and its overcoming in the 1930s, remain open to political inscriptions that counter any radical confrontation with the National Socialist determination of nihilism. Indeed, Heidegger himself appears to make just such a political inscription when, towards the end of the 1935 lecture course, he locates the ‘historically spiritual forces’ necessary for the overcoming of nihilism in the National Socialist movement itself, the ‘inner truth and greatness’ of which lies precisely in what at

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that time he takes to be its encounter (Begegnung) with technology – in other words, its encounter with ‘real nihilism’. That said, Heidegger’s aim here is to think National Socialism beyond the political – in other words, a National Socialism that constitutes a genuine confrontation with nihilism. Similarly, four decades later, he will insist in his Zähringen seminar that his interpretation of Marx ‘is not political. It is concerned with being and the manner in which it destines itself. It is in this perspective and from this vision that I can say that with Marx the position of the most extreme nihilism is reached’ (Heidegger 2003a: 77). As we shall see, it is just such a thinking of National Socialism beyond the political that Heidegger will attempt to accomplish by way of poetry (Dichtung).

From forgetting to ‘radical killing’ In 1935, the ‘inner truth and greatness’ of National Socialism – which is to say, that which makes this movement (Bewegung) a genuine confrontation with nihilism – is to be distinguished from anything championed by those who currently ‘peddle’ its ‘philosophy’ (Heidegger 2000b: 213). By the time of his summer 1936 lecture course on Schelling, however, Heidegger identifies Mussolini and Hitler as ‘The two men who in different ways introduced a countercurrent to nihilism’, and who both ‘learned, in essentially different ways, from Nietzsche’, but then places both of them among those for whom ‘the authentic realm of Nietzsche’s metaphysics still did not come into play’ (quoted in Pöggeler 1993: 220).1 It is just such a bringing into play of this ‘authentic realm of Nietzsche’s metaphysics’ that Heidegger sets out to accomplish in his 1936–40 lecture courses on Nietzsche and in the treatise ‘The Word of Nietzsche: “God Is Dead”’ (1943). In the first of the Nietzsche lecture courses, The Will to Power as Art (1936), Heidegger claims that Nietzsche is ‘the first to recognize and proclaim with full clarity’ the occurrence (Geschehen) of nihilism (Heidegger 1979: 90). As we have seen, however, in Introduction to Metaphysics Nietzsche’s thinking of Being in terms of value is already interpreted by Heidegger as the consummation of the forgetting of Being. And, in the section entitled ‘Nihilism’ in Contributions to Philosophy (written 1936–8), Heidegger declares that Nietzsche’s interpretation of nihilism as devaluation is ‘provisional, in spite of its importance’; the task for thought now is to grasp nihilism ‘more fundamentally as the essential consequence of the abandonment of being’ (Heidegger 1999a: 96). The difficulty of this task is owing not least to the fact that it is precisely when nihilism is taken

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to have been overcome that it is at its greatest. Thought in Nietzschean terms as the loss of all goals: the greatest nihilism is precisely where one believes to have goals again, to be ‘happy’, to attend to making equally available the ‘cultural values’ (movies and seaside resort vacations) to all the ‘people’ – in the drunken stupor of ‘lived-experience’ – precisely there is the greatest nihilism: methodically disregarding human goallessness, being always ready to avoid every goal-setting decision, anxiety in the face of every domain of decision and its opening. (Heidegger 1999a: 97) The future direction of Heidegger’s own thinking of nihilism is indicated above all by his insistence upon the danger of false overcomings, and by the emphasis that now falls upon Being as that which has abandoned beings, rather than upon those beings’ forgetting of Being: ‘Be-ing has so thoroughly abandoned beings and submitted them to machination and “lived-experience” that those illusive attempts at rescuing Western culture and all “culture-oriented politics” must necessarily become the most insidious and thus the highest form of nihilism’ (Heidegger 1999a: 97–8). Whereas in Introduction to Metaphysics the first step in the overcoming of nihilism is identified as a going ‘to the limit of Nothing’, by the time of Contributions to Philosophy ‘The preparation for the overcoming of nihilism begins with the fundamental experience that man as founder of Da-Sein is used by the godhood of the other god’ (Heidegger 1999a: 98; Heidegger’s emphasis). From the ‘nothing’ to the ‘other god’; from an emphasis upon the objective genitive to one upon the subjective genitive – these shifts testify to a thinking of nihilism that, as we shall see, is now shaped by the privilege accorded to poetry. In Contributions, Heidegger also asserts that what is ‘most imperative and most difficult regarding this overcoming [of nihilism] is the awareness of nihilism’, and that ‘This awareness dare not get bogged down in either the word or in an initial elucidation of what is meant [by nihilism] in Nietzsche. Instead this awareness must recognize the abandonment of being as essential sway’ (Heidegger 1999a: 98; Heidegger’s emphasis). Despite this warning against any ‘initial elucidation’ of the meaning of nihilism in Nietzsche, however, it is upon precisely such an elucidation that Heidegger embarks in the 1940 lecture course, European Nihilism. The central argument of this elucidation repeats and elaborates upon the position taken in Introduction to Metaphysics, namely that Nietzsche’s thinking of nihilism as devaluation – which is grounded in a thinking on Being as a value – is itself nihilistic, and that Nietzsche’s

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proposed overcoming of nihilism through a revaluation of all values is the consummation of nihilism as the forgetting of Being: ‘Nietzsche knew and experienced nihilism because he himself thought nihilistically. Nietzsche’s concept of nihilism is itself nihilistic’ (Heidegger 1982b: 22). While, as noted in Chapter 1, Nietzsche’s own explicit deployments of the term ‘nihilism’ in works intended for publication occur most often in relation to Christianity, Heidegger relies principally on the notes collected in The Will to Power to argue that Nietzsche’s attempted ‘history of European nihilism’ locates its origin in Plato. While himself producing just such a history of nihilism (redetermined as the forgetting of Being) in the 1940 lecture course – a history whose key moments are its Platonic origin (in which the thinking of Being as a value is ‘prefigured’), its Cartesian reorientation (with Being determined as subiectum), and its Nietzschean consummation (with Being determined as will to power) – Heidegger also claims that any such history of nihilism is impossible, since nihilism does not ‘have’ a history; rather, ‘Nihilism is history’ (Heidegger 1982b: 53; Heidegger’s emphasis). Indeed, ‘Nihilism determines the historicity of history. Consequently, for a comprehension of the essence of nihilism there is little to be gained by recounting the history of nihilism in different centuries and depicting it in its various forms’ (Heidegger 1982b: 53). For all his attempts to free the thinking of nihilism from any such history, and instead to identify the epoch of nihilism as ‘from Plato to Nietzsche’, however, contemporary history arguably impacts upon Heidegger’s own thinking of history as nihilism. By 1940, for instance, there is no longer any exhortation of ‘our people’ in the struggle against nihilism, but, as an example (Beispiel) of Nietzschean justification (Gerechtigkeit), Heidegger takes the British bombing of the French fleet on 3 July 1940, which, he claims, ‘was from their point of view “justified”; for “justified” merely means what serves the enhancement of power’ (Heidegger 1982b: 144; Heidegger’s emphasis). Three years later – and these were not just any three years for those whom Heidegger had in 1935 addressed as ‘our people’, since, with the German defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943, it was clear that a decisive turning point in the history of that ‘people’ had been reached – Heidegger’s thinking of nihilism is no longer couched in terms of the forgetting or abandonment of Being. Rather, in ‘The Word of Nietzsche: “God Is Dead”’ (1943), nihilism is redetermined as the ‘radical killing’ (das radikale Töten) of Being (Heidegger 1977: 108). Furthermore, in an irony of which Heidegger takes no account, Nietzsche’s interpretation of nihilism as devaluation – an interpretation presented in Book Three of The Gay Science (1882), prior

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to Nietzsche’s own deployment of the term ‘nihilism’, as the murdering of God2 – is now described by Heidegger as ‘murderous in a most extreme sense’ (in einem äußersten Sinne tödlich). In other words, for Heidegger, Nietzsche’s determination of nihilism as murder is itself murderous: Value-positing has brought down and slain [umgebracht, getötet] beneath itself – and has therefore killed as that which is for itself – all that is in itself. This ultimate blow [Schlag] in the killing of God is perpetrated by metaphysics, which, as the metaphysics of the will to power, accomplishes thinking in the sense of value-thinking. However, Nietzsche himself no longer recognizes this ultimate blow, through which Being is struck down [niedergeschlagen] to a mere value, for what the blow is when thought with respect to Being itself. (Heidegger 1977: 107–8; Heidegger’s emphasis) Between 1935 and 1943, then, nihilism passes from being the forgetting of Being to its radical killing, the radicality of this murderous act lying in its leaving no trace of Being: ‘It not only strikes down that which is as such, in its being-in-itself, but it does away utterly with Being [es bringt das Sein gänzlich auf die Seite]’ (Heidegger 1977: 108). The treatise ‘The Word of Nietzsche’ undoubtedly marks a culmination in Heidegger’s thinking of nihilism precisely on account of this refiguration of nihilism as radical killing; for, in the three major texts devoted explicitly to nihilism after 1943 – ‘Nihilism as Determined by the History of Being’ (written 1944–6), ‘The Essence of Nihilism’ (written 1946–8), and ‘On the Question of Being’ (1955) – he moves towards figurations of nihilism in which the emphasis falls much more heavily upon the history of Being itself as that which determines nihilism.

Abandonment and default Whereas nihilism is figured as the radical killing of Being in ‘The Word of Nietzsche’, in the 1944–6 treatise ‘Nihilism as Determined by the History of Being’ it is refigured as the abandonment (Verlassenheit) or default (Ausbleiben) of Being, with the emphasis falling now upon the subjective genitive. If metaphysics ‘skims over’ Being, nihilism is determined first by Being and becomes a ‘human concern’ – not the concern of ‘our people’ – only after this determination: ‘The essence of nihilism is not at all the affair of man, but a matter of Being itself, and thereby of course also a matter of the essence of man, and only in that sequence at the same time a human concern’ (Heidegger 1982b: 221; Heidegger’s emphasis).

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Since it is Being itself that ‘has brought [nihilism] to pass’, any attempt to overcome nihilism in the age of its consummation will necessarily prove futile: The struggle [Kampf] over nihilism, for it and against it, is engaged on a field staked out by the predominance of the nonessence of nihilism. Nothing will be decided by this struggle. [. . .] The will to overcome nihilism mistakes itself because it bars itself from the revelation of the essence of nihilism as the history of the default of Being, bars itself without being able to recognize its own deed. (Heidegger 1982b: 239–40; Heidegger’s emphasis) This is not to say, however, that Heidegger now thinks the overcoming of nihilism as simply impossible; rather, that overcoming is no longer to be thought as something that any ‘we’ might accomplish. Like Nietzsche before him, Heidegger thinks nihilism as radically ambiguous, at once a threat and a promise. On the one hand, the age of nihilism’s consummation is the darkest of times. It is the ‘age of confusion, of violence and despair in human culture, of disruption and impotence of willing. Both openly and tacitly, boundless suffering and measureless sorrow proclaim the condition of our world a needful one’ (Heidegger 1982b: 245). This is the age of the ‘actual an-nihil-ation [Ver-nichts-ung] of all beings, whose violence, encroaching on all sides, makes almost every act of resistance futile’ (Heidegger 1982b: 229). The homelessness (Heimatlosigkeit) brought about by nihilism is no longer the homelessness of an ‘historical people’, but ‘the homelessness of historical man within beings as a whole. The “where” of a dwelling in the midst of beings as such seems obliterated, because Being itself, as the essential occurring of every abode, fails to appear’ (Heidegger 1982b: 248). On the other hand, however, Heidegger maintains that, as a ‘mode of Being’, nihilism is to be thought as secret (Geheimnis), enigma (Rätsel), and promise (Versprechen) (Heidegger 1982b: 226–8). In short, the promise of the overcoming of nihilism comes from Being itself. And it is through this promise that thinking is ‘encouraged’ to undertake the ‘one thing’ that is ‘necessary’ – that is, ‘to encounter Being in its default as such’ (Heidegger 1982b: 225). But why should this encounter be thought as necessary? What possible justification can there be for it, given that any appeal to the value (Wert) of Being has to be ruled out on the grounds that thinking in terms of values is itself the consummation of nihilism? The answer lies in what at the end of the 1944–6 treatise Heidegger terms the worth

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(Würde) of Being. For obvious reasons, this worth has to be radically distinguished from any value: ‘the worth of Being, as Being, does not consist in being a value, even the supreme value’ (Heidegger 1982b: 250). To be sure, this distinction between worth and value cannot be merely one among others, since without it the appeal to a thinking of Being remains but one call among others in the political-philosophical wilderness. And yet, when in Introduction to Metaphysics the symptoms of nihilism are identified as annihilation (Vernichtung), decline (Verfall), darkening (Verdüsterung), destruction (Zerstörung), dissolution (Auflösung), and disempowerment (Entmachung), the labour of detaching this terminology from all evaluative thinking can scarcely be said to have been accomplished.

Total demobilization Whereas his first deployment of the concept of nihilism is a counterattack against Nazi ideologues such as Krieck, and initiates a confrontation with Nietzsche in which it is the latter’s thinking of nihilism as devaluation that is redetermined as the consummation of nihilism, Heidegger’s last major engagement with an explicitly named nihilism takes what is ostensibly the most respectful of forms – a contribution to a collection published in 1955 in celebration of Ernst Jünger’s sixtieth birthday. The publication in 2004 of volume 90 (Zu Ernst Jünger) of the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe demonstrates the major importance accorded by Heidegger to Jünger’s works – in particular, ‘Total Mobilization’ (1930) and The Worker (1932). That said, it is precisely against Jünger’s thinking of the overcoming of nihilism in the essay ‘Across the Line’ (‘Über die Linie’; first published in 1950, in a collection celebrating Heidegger’s sixtieth birthday) that Heidegger argues in ‘On the Question of Being’ (1955; originally published under the title ‘On “The Line”’ – ‘Über “Die Linie”’). The two points of departure for Jünger’s thinking of nihilism in ‘Across the Line’ are Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, and from both he takes a determination of nihilism as a loss of values (Werte) and the possibility of a going beyond nihilism – or, more precisely, a crossing of the line (Linie) that marks the ‘zero point’ of nihilism; that is, its most extreme form.3 According to Jünger, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky teach us to think nihilism as a phase in a ‘spiritual process’ through which it is necessary to pass – this phase cannot be avoided, but it can be surpassed. Although the term is almost always deployed polemically, nihilism is in fact ‘a great

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destiny, an original force’, albeit one that constitutes the greatest threat to the human. Nihilism is to be distinguished from sickness, evil, and chaos; relating what he nonetheless terms his ‘diagnosis’ of nihilism with his earlier treatise on the worker (Arbeiter) as the figure or type (Gestalt) of contemporary man, Jünger argues that nihilism produces human beings who function like war-machines – as the pure technologization of the human. For the Jünger of 1950, however, this process has already reached its completion, and the step beyond the zero point of absolute nihilism has in fact already been taken. Like Heidegger, Jünger turns to the poet (Dichter) and the thinker (Denker) for those spiritual forces that surpass nihilism. The three sites in which the crossing of the line takes place are the ‘desert’ (which is not to be confused with ‘romantic solitude’), ‘eros’ (which is not to be confused with a purely technologized sex of the kind to be found in the works of Henry Miller), and ‘art’ (the ‘authenticity’ of which lies in its self-consciousness, its rationality, and its critical selfcontrol). Both the thinker and the poet risk themselves on the ‘borders of nothingness’; both endure the ‘immense force of nothingness’; and both engage in a ‘sovereign and solitary struggle’ with this prevailing nothingness. For Jünger, it is only through this struggle that new values can come into being. For Heidegger, however, Jünger’s thinking of nihilism remains, like Nietzsche’s, itself nihilist, precisely because it is a thinking of nihilism in terms of values and thus constitutes a reduction to nothing of Being. Heidegger proceeds to counter what he takes to be Jünger’s Nietzschean thinking of the overcoming (Überwindung) of nihilism with what he terms its Verwindung, a word that, as we shall see in Chapter 7, plays a central role in Gianni Vattimo’s revalorization of a certain nihilism. Variously translated as ‘recovery’, ‘surpassing’, ‘incorporation’, ‘healing’, and even ‘distortion’, Verwindung is to be understood not as a movement across the line which, according to Jünger, constitutes the border of nihilism’s terrain, but rather a turning back (Rückkehr) to the essence of nihilism. Whereas, for the Heidegger of 1935, the first step (Schritt) in the overcoming of nihilism is a going ‘expressly up to the limit of Nothing [bis an die Grenze des Nichts] in the question about Being’, twenty years later – and in a Germany that is now not simply caught in the ‘pincers’ of ‘Russia’ and ‘America’, but itself divided – Heidegger argues that, ‘Instead of wanting to overcome nihilism, we must attempt to first turn in [einzukehren] toward its essence. Turning in into its essence is the first step [Schritt] through which we may leave nihilism behind us. The path of this turning takes the form and direction of a turning back [Rückkehr]’ (Heidegger 1998b: 319; Heidegger’s emphasis). This turning

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back is a recollective thinking (Andenken), not of Being itself, but of its oblivion. ‘On the Question of Being’ repeats a key gesture that is to be found throughout Heidegger’s thinking of nihilism. From the outset – and for all the differences between the determination of Being as forgetting (Vergessenheit), radical killing (radikales Töten), abandonment (Verlassenheit), withdrawal (Entziehung), and default (Ausbleiben) – Heidegger interprets what Nietzsche terms the uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit) of nihilism as homelessness (Heimatlosigkeit) or deracination (Entwurzelung). As we have seen, in Introduction to Metaphysics he claims that in Nietzsche’s thinking of Being as a value ‘the maximum in confusion and deracination [Entwurzelung] has been reached’ (Heidegger 2000b: 213). Twenty years later, in ‘On the Question of Being’, he writes: ‘It [nihilism] is called the “most uncanny” [“unheimlichste”] because, as the unconditional will to will, it wills homelessness [Heimatlosigkeit] as such. This is why it is of no avail to show it the door, because it has long since been roaming around invisibly inside the house [im Haus]’ (Heidegger 1998b: 292). What disappears – or, rather, what is reduced to nothing – in this interpretation of Nietzsche’s determination of nihilism as the ‘uncanniest of all guests’ is the thought of a nihilism the uncanniness of which would lie precisely in its being ‘at the door’ (vor der Thür), which is to say on the threshold, border, or line, rather than ‘inside the house’. If Nietzsche himself cannot be said to have mastered this uncanniness, then neither – although for very different reasons – can Heidegger. Indeed, by redetermining nihilism as the willing of homelessness, Heidegger produces a politics of nihilism, even though he determines the political as metaphysical and thus contained within nihilism. The haunting return of nihilism as the political is nowhere more evident than in Heidegger’s attempt to think poetry (Dichtung) as that which counters nihilism through its power to found a homeland (Heimat) for an ‘historical people’ – that is, to justify the claim made in his 1945 statement to the denazification commission that ‘the overcoming [Verwindung] of nihilism announces itself in the poetic thinking and singing of the German [im dichtenden Denken und Singen des Deutschen]’ (Heidegger 1983: 39; my translation) – a singing that, according to Heidegger, occurs above all in the poems of Friedrich Hölderlin written between 1801 and 1805, in which – as Heidegger puts it in his 1941–2 lecture course on Hölderlin’s ‘Remembrance’ – ‘for the first time, the realm [Bereich] of art and of beauty and all metaphysics, in which alone both have their place, are surpassed [überschritten]’ (Heidegger 1982a: 63).4

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Poetry and the becoming homely of a people We have seen that, when Heidegger first deploys the term ‘nihilism’ in his 1935 lecture course, Introduction to Metaphysics, he directs it as a charge against a thinking that would dismiss as nihilism the attempt to take into account the nothing. According to Heidegger, ‘real nihilism’ lies precisely in this dismissal of the nothing, since this is in fact a dismissal of Being, given that the nothing ‘belongs to’ Being. While such a thinking of the nothing is already present in Heidegger’s 1929 inaugural lecture, What Is Metaphysics?, there are a number of major differences between its treatment in the two works. In What Is Metaphysics?, not only is the word ‘nihilism’ not deployed, not only is there no exhortation of ‘our people’, but the fundamental mood (Grundstimmung) of anxiety (Angst), in which the nothing is experienced, is characterized as one that ‘robs us of speech’ (Die Angst verschlägt uns das Wort) (Heidegger 1998b: 89). In place of speech proper (das Wort), all that remains is ‘compulsive talk’ (ein wahlloses Reden), and this Reden ‘only proves the presence of the nothing’ (Heidegger 1998b: 89). By the time of Introduction to Metaphysics, however, the nothing is being rethought in terms of nihilism (Nihilismus), Germanness (das Deutsche), and poetry (Dichtung), with both the thinker (Denker) and the poet (Dichter) now being identified as those who can speak of the nothing, and in so doing counter the nihilism of ‘mere science’ (bloße Wissenschaft) as that which dismisses the very possibility of such speech:

Talking about Nothing [Vom Nichts zu reden] remains forever an abomination and an absurdity [Sinnlosigkeit] for science. But aside from the philosopher, the poet can also talk about Nothing – and not because the procedure of poetry, in the opinion of everyday understanding, is less rigorous, but because, in comparison to all mere science [aller bloßen Wissenschaft], an essential superiority of the spirit [eine wesenhafte Überlegenheit des Geistes] holds sway in poetry (only genuine and great poetry is meant). Because of this superiority, the poet always speaks as if beings were expressed and addressed for the first time. (Heidegger 2000b: 28)

This speaking of the nothing in ‘genuine and great’ poetry is not, however, immediate (unvermittelt) in the manner of a ‘description of a picture’ (Beschreibung eines Bildes), but rather an indicating (hinzeigen). According to Heidegger, it is just such an indicating that is to be found

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in Knut Hamsun’s 1933 novel The Road Leads On, in which a character embodying what Heidegger terms the ‘uprooted [entwurzelte], universal know-how of today’s humanity’ experiences what Hamsun describes as ‘true emptiness’, in which ‘nothing meets nothing and is not there, there is not even a hole. One can only shake one’s head in resignation’ (Hamsun quoted in Heidegger 2000b: 29). However, while in Hamsun’s text the emphasis falls upon resignation (Ergebung), in Heidegger’s thinking of poetry as that which counters ‘real nihilism’ the emphasis falls first upon an experience of the border (Grenze), and then upon a confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) with the foreign (das Fremde) that requires a passage beyond the borders of that which is own’s own (das Eigene) in the interests of a founding of a homeland (Heimat) for an ‘historical people’. The turn to poetry as that which counters ‘real nihilism’ is announced shortly after Heidegger’s resignation as rector of Freiburg University, at the end of his 1934 lecture course, Logic as the Question Concerning the Essence of Language, when he identifies Dichtung as ‘original language’ (ursprüngliche Sprache); that is, language as a ‘world-forming power’ (weltbildende Macht), as the speaking of Being (Heidegger 1998a: 170). As Heidegger makes clear two decades later, in What Is Called Thinking? (1954), Dichtung is to be radically distinguished not only from all ‘scientific’ discourse but also from literature (Literatur): Homer, Sappho, Pindar, Sophocles, are they literature? No! But that is the way they appear to us, and the only way, even when we are engaged in demonstrating by means of literary history that these works of poetry really are not literature. Literature is what has been literally written down, and copied, with the intent that it be available to a reading public. In that way, literature becomes the object of widely diverging interests, which in turn are once more stimulated by means of literature – through literary criticism and promotion. Now and then, an individual may find his way out of the literature industry, and find his way reflectively and even edifyingly to a poetic work; but that is not enough to secure for poesy the freedom of its natural habitat. (Heidegger 1968: 134) In his 1966 interview with Der Spiegel, Heidegger goes still further, characterizing ‘present-day literature’ as the very antithesis of Dichtung, the former being a manifestation of nihilism precisely as a will to homelessness: ‘According to our human experience and history, at least as far as I see it, I know that everything essential and everything great originated from the fact that man had a home and was rooted in a tradition.

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Present-day literature for example is predominantly destructive’ (Heidegger 2003b: 37). Not only is poetry to be distinguished from literature, but, as Heidegger asserts in The Origin of the Work of Art (1935–6), it is also to be seen as the essence of all art (see Heidegger 1971b: 72–3). Furthermore, for a given ‘historical people’ – and, for Heidegger, there are in fact only two such peoples: the Greeks and the Germans – there will be just one true poet, which is to say one poet whose poeticizing founds that people through an establishing of its homeland. In the case of the Greeks, this founding poet is Sophocles; in the case of the Germans, it is Friedrich Hölderlin. It is this latter claim that Heidegger first sets out to justify in his 1934–5 lecture course on Hölderlin’s hymns ‘Germania’ and ‘The Rhine’, and then in two subsequent lecture courses on Hölderlin – the 1941–2 lectures on ‘Remembrance’, and the 1942 lectures on ‘The Ister’ – and in the essays collected in Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry (first published in 1944, with enlarged editions in 1951 and 1971). Heidegger’s public turn to Dichtung – and, more precisely, to Hölderlin’s ‘Germania’ and ‘The Rhine’ – in the winter semester of 1934–5 is certainly not simply a flight from the political. Indeed, the abiding concerns of the Hölderlin lectures between 1934 and 1942 might seem to be political through and through, and thus fully justify Lacoue-Labarthe’s claim that Heidegger’s ‘“Hölderlinian” preaching is the continuation and prolongation of the philosophico-political discourse of 1933’ (LacoueLabarthe 1990: 12) and the production of what Lacoue-Labarthe terms a ‘national aestheticism’. These concerns are poetry’s power (Macht) to found Being – (Der Dichter stiftet das Seyn) (Heidegger 1989: 184) – as the homeland (Heimat) for an historical Dasein, and what Hölderlin in a letter of 4 December 1801 to Böhlendorf terms the ‘free use of the national’ (das Nationelle frei gebrauchen). In each of the lecture courses on Hölderlin delivered between 1935 and 1942, however, Heidegger insists that true poetry is not patriotic (vaterländisch) or political (politisch) as these concepts are commonly understood. In the 1934–5 lectures, he declares that ‘The “fatherland” is Being itself’ (Das ‘Vaterland’ ist das Seyn selbst) (Heidegger 1989: 121–2; Heidegger’s emphasis),5 and, in the 1941–2 lectures, that the Vaterland which is founded by poetry is not to be mistaken for a ‘present political constellation’ (vorhandene politische Konstellation) (Heidegger 1982a: 47). It is also no mere coincidence that, at both the beginning and the end of the 1934–5 lecture course, Heidegger should comment at length on Hölderlin’s identification of Germania as ‘unarmed’ (wehrlos) in the penultimate line of the poem ‘Germania’ – a word later removed from editions of Hölderlin’s poetry published during

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the Nazi period. In fact, in the privileging of Dichtung as that which surpasses nihilism, everything depends for Heidegger precisely upon the locating of poetry before and beyond the political (das Politische), given that the political remains, in his view, a metaphysical concept, and thus within the history of – and history as – nihilism. In short, to think politically, and to politicize poetry, is nihilism – indeed, the most extreme form of nihilism. Thus, the claim that Hölderlin’s poetry is located outside all metaphysics, and that it announces the Verwindung of nihilism, can be justified only by a reading that is not itself politicizing. It is doubtless in no small part on account of the need to produce a non-politicizing elucidation of Dichtung that, with just one exception, Heidegger avoids the use of the term ‘nihilism’ not only in his lecture courses on Hölderlin but also in all his other writings on poetry, including his post-war essays on Rilke and Trakl.6 ‘Nihilism’ remains what in his 1943 treatise Heidegger terms ‘the word of Nietzsche’, and it is precisely what he sees as the politicizing misinterpretation of Hölderlin and Nietzsche as belonging together that Heidegger seeks ever more strenuously to challenge. At the end of the 1934–5 lecture course, he declares that, while Nietzsche succeeds in rediscovering the ‘essence of historical Dasein’ under the rubric of the Dionysian and the Apollinian, he does so in a manner that lacks both the purity (Reinheit) and the simplicity (Einfachheit) of Hölderlin (Heidegger 1989: 293–4). By the time of the 1941–2 lecture course on ‘The Ister’, however, Heidegger insists that an abyss (Abgrund) separates Nietzsche and Hölderlin. Whereas both Nietzsche and Jünger remain completely within metaphysics (that is, within nihilism), Sophocles and Heraclitus precede it, and Hölderlin as a poet (although not as a thinker) stands beyond it. Whereas Nietzsche’s distinction between the Dionysian and the Apollinian is metaphysical through and through, Hölderlin’s distinction between the Greek and the German is ‘the herald of the overcoming of all metaphysics’ (den Verboten der Überwindung aller Metaphysik) (Heidegger 1982a: 78, 143). For Heidegger, this means that Hölderlin’s poeticizing of the German or Germanness is not political – the homeland for an ‘historical people’ that he founds through his hymning of das Deutsche is not to be thought politically. It is not Germany as a nationstate but Being itself that is founded in his poetry, even if that homeland is necessarily tied to a people (Volk). If the homeland that is Being is necessarily historical (geschichtlich), it nonetheless precedes all possible political history. It might appear impossible to take a more anti-Heideggerian view of Hölderlin than that of Paul de Man, who in ‘Heidegger’s Exegeses of

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Hölderlin’ (1955) claims that Hölderlin says ‘the opposite of what Heidegger makes him say’ (de Man 1983: 255; de Man’s emphasis). And yet, when it comes to what for Heidegger is the essential – namely, a reading of Hölderlin that preserves his poetry as that which surpasses nihilism – de Man is in fact aligned with Heidegger, as indeed is Adorno, to whom we shall turn in the next chapter. For, according to de Man, while Heidegger’s commentaries on Hölderlin ‘were thought out just before and during World War II, and are directly linked to an anguished meditation upon the historical destiny of Germany’, this is in fact a ‘side issue’ of ‘secondary’ importance (de Man 1983: 254). In other words, the political in what Heidegger sees as its metaphysical sense does not impact in any essential way upon his readings of Hölderlin. What de Man leaves out of account, however, is the manner in which Heidegger’s thinking of poetry as that which surpasses a nihilism determined as homelessness ties his thinking of poetry to the political as that which Heidegger himself would reduce to the secondary. For the uncanniness of nihilism manifests itself in Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin not least as a political haunting. This haunting takes the form of subtle shifts in the thinking of the essence of poetry as a becoming homely (Heimischwerden), shifts which tie this thinking to those very political realities that, for Heidegger, must remain outside the essential determination of Dichtung. The 1934–5 lectures on ‘Germania’ and ‘The Rhine’ stand out from the other two lecture courses on Hölderlin, and from the various essays on Hölderlin collected in Elucidations, not least in their repeated emphasis upon that specific people (Volk) for, to, and from whom Heidegger takes himself to be speaking. Throughout these lectures, Heidegger speaks in the name of ‘our people’ (unser Volk), of Hölderlin’s hymns as concerning ‘the historical truth of our people’ (die geschichtliche Wahrheit unseres Volkes), and of the ‘great oppression [Bedrängnis] of our Dasein, that it must once again risk itself with the gods in order thereby to create an historical world’ (Heidegger 1989: 221). And Heidegger does not shy away here from thinking Hölderlin in terms of ‘“politics”’ (‘Politik’) – the term being adjudged safely deployable, with the border established by quotation marks. To contribute to Hölderlin’s poetry becoming ‘the power in the history of our people’ (die Macht in der Geschichte unseres Volkes) is, he claims, ‘“politics” in the highest and proper sense’ (‘Politik’ im höchsten und eigentichen Sinne) (Heidegger 1989: 214). Furthermore, Hölderlin is identified not only as both ‘the poet’s poet’ (der Dichter des Dichters) and the ‘poet of poetry’ (der Dichter der Dichtung), but also as the ‘poet of the Germans’ (der Dichter der Deutschen); indeed, he is the poet’s poet precisely insofar as he is the poet of the Germans (Dichter

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des Dichters als Dichter der Deutschen) (Heidegger 1989: 214). As LacoueLabarthe observes, in the 1936 Rome address, ‘Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry’, Heidegger retains his identification of Hölderlin as the ‘poet’s poet’ but abandons the identification of him as the ‘poet of the Germans’ (see Lacoue-Labarthe 2007: 60–1). The question this raises is, of course, why Heidegger should efface this identification of Hölderlin as the ‘poet of the Germans’. If it is not for essential – that is, for purely non-political – reasons, then this effacement, its not being said, itself becomes the trace of the political – and thus the trace of nihilism as determined by Heidegger himself. In 1934–5, Heidegger’s ‘poet of the Germans’ is located ‘on the border of the homeland’ (an der Grenze der Heimat) (Heidegger 1989: 226). Not only is this border the place of decisions (Entscheidungen), but decisions are themselves, according to Heidegger, always decisions over borders and the absence of borders (Grenzenlosigkeit) (see Heidegger 1989: 170). Whereas he claims at the end of the 1934 lecture course, Logic, that the true poet is never contemporary, and always belongs to both the past and the future, at the end of the 1934–5 course Heidegger nonetheless announces that ‘The hour of our history has struck’ (Die Stunde unserer Geschichte hat geschlagen) (Heidegger 1989: 294), and that it is now that decisions concerning ‘the border of the homeland’ (die Grenze der Heimat) have to be taken. Again, by the time of his 1936 Rome address, things are presented rather differently. Now, Heidegger identifies the poet as ‘one who has been cast out [ein Hinausgeworfener] – out into that between [Zwischen], between gods and men [Menschen]’ (Heidegger 2000a: 64; Heidegger’s emphasis). And, by 1941–2, his concern is less with the border – so many political borders having, of course, by this time been transgressed – than with the poet’s going across (Übergang) into the foreign. The founding of the Heimat is accomplished poetically only through a ‘confrontation with the foreign’ (Auseinandersetzung mit dem Fremden) (Heidegger 1982a: 123). For the German, the foreign is not the American – which lies, according to Heidegger, completely outside the historical, as the ahistorical (geschichtslos) – but the Greek. This encounter with the properly foreign is at once the great risk – indeed, it is the risk of annihilation (Vernichtung) – and the sole possibility for the founding of the Heimat. As becomes clear in Heidegger’s commentary on the line ‘The besouler would almost be scorched’ (Fast wäre der Beseeler verbrandt) in a draft of the final strophe of the elegy ‘Bread and Wine’ (1801), however, this risk is in fact limited – for there is one border that is not crossed. That commentary reads as follows: ‘The journeying into the unhomely must go “almost” to the threshold of being annihilated in order for the locality

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of the homely to bestow its gladdening and rescuing’ (Heidegger 1996: 134). The word ‘almost’ (fast) is in quotation marks here not because Heidegger wishes to cast suspicion upon it or keep his critical distance from it, but rather because, unlike ‘threshold’ (Schwelle), it is Hölderlin’s word. But what does it mean to go ‘“almost” to the threshold’ – and, more precisely, almost to the threshold of annihilation? The answer lies in the fact that this confrontation with the foreign is an Übergang that remains orientated from the outset and throughout by that which is one’s own (das Eigene). The sojourn (Aufenthalt) in the foreign is ‘not for the sake of the foreign, but for the sake of one’s own’ (nicht um des Fremden, sondern um des Eigenen willen) (Heidegger 1982a: 190). To go over into the foreign without remaining memorious of, and orientated towards, that which is one’s own would be to give oneself up to annihilation, to become absolutely unrooted, to become irremediably homeless. In the Hölderlin lectures, the name for such pure homelessness – in other words, for ‘pure nihilism’ – is ‘Americanism’ (Amerikanismus). If, according to Heidegger, the Greek is the properly foreign for the German, ‘America’ or ‘Americanism’ constitutes a kind of improper foreign. As ahistorical (geschichtslos) rather than either historical or unhistorical, Americanism is pure unrootedness, pure homelessness, without either past or future. For precisely this reason, Americanism is the greatest threat to the founding of the Heimat. But while all three lecture courses are punctuated by remarks on this threat, it is in the 1942 course on ‘The Ister’ that Heidegger devotes the greatest attention to it, in a statement that leaves no room for doubt that complete annihilation (Vernichtung) of the Heimat has announced itself in the form of a contemporary political event: We know today [Wir wissen heute] that the Anglo-Saxon world of Americanism has resolved to annihilate Europe, that is, the homeland [Heimat], and that means the commencement of the Western world. [. . .] America’s entry into this planetary war is not its entry into history; rather, it is already the ultimate American act of American ahistoricality [Geschichtslosigkeit] and self-devastation. (Heidegger 1996: 54–5) The ‘today’ to which Heidegger refers here is a very precise one. It is not the age of metaphysics; it is not even modernity as inaugurated by the Cartesian redetermination of Being as subiectum; rather, it is the early summer of 1942 – in other words, a few months after the entry of the United States into the Second World War in December 1941. That

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said, not only does Heidegger’s phrasing disguise the fact that it was Germany that declared war on the United States, but that phrasing assimilates ‘Germany’ and ‘Europe’. And by presenting America’s entry into the war as threatening the annihilation of the Heimat – that is, Europe as essentially German – Heidegger grants the political a power no less great than the power he accords to poetry. In short, if Dichtung is worldforming (weltbildend), Amerikanismus is world-annihilating. Whereas the confrontation with the Greek is one that remains orientated – and thus limited – by one’s own (das Eigene), the confrontation with Americanism cannot be a genuine Auseinandersetzung, since it is the confrontation with a ‘real nihilism’ that permits neither dialogue (Gespräch) nor a going across (Übergang) as a mode of homecoming (Heimkehr). Americanism, then, is absolute, annihilating prose, not simply the decline of the Germanic European, but its radical, unendurable other. Less than two years after the claim that Americanism has resolved to annihilate Europe, in his 6 June 1943 address ‘Remembrance of the Poet’, Heidegger’s tone is marked by a new desperation: ‘How much longer’, he asks, ‘are we going to prevent ourselves from experiencing beings as beings? How long will Germans continue to ignore the words which Hölderlin sang in the first stanza of the “Patmos” hymn . . . ?’ – the words in question being ‘Near and/Hard to grasp the god’ (Nah und/Schwer zu fassen der Gott) (Heidegger 2000a: 40). By 1946, in his essay on Rilke entitled ‘What Are Poets For?’, the emphasis falls elsewhere: neither upon the question of the border (Grenze) as it did in 1934–5, nor upon the passage into the foreign as it did in 1941–2, but rather upon the ‘destitute time’ (dürftige Zeit) named by Hölderlin in ‘Bread and Wine’; that is, the time of the gods’ absence: ‘The time of the world’s night is the destitute time, because it becomes ever more destitute. It has already grown so destitute, it can no longer discern the default [Fehl] of God as a default’ (Heidegger 1971b: 91). Where there was once ground (Grund), there is now abyss (Ab-grund). In his 1936 Rome lecture, Heidegger identifies the poet as the one who ‘holds firm in the Nothingness of this night’ (Heidegger 2000a: 65). In 1946, he declares that ‘In the age of the world’s night, the abyss of the world must be experienced and endured. But for this it is necessary that there be those who reach into the abyss’ (Heidegger 1971b: 92). From his 1934–5 lectures on Hölderlin to his 1953 essay on Georg Trakl entitled ‘Language in the Poem’, Heidegger’s argument certainly remains a consistent one: poetry founds the Heimat; it constitutes a homecoming – and thus a surpassing of nihilism determined as homelessness (Heimatlosigkeit). However, just as the readings of Hölderlin in

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the three lecture courses delivered between 1934 and 1942 are marked in various ways by a politicality that is precisely not ‘“politics” in the highest and proper sense’, so are his post-war texts on poetry and language (Sprache). We have seen that, in the 1934–5 lectures, Hölderlin is the ‘poet of the Germans’, and it is a specifically German homeland that his poetry would found, with the German being clearly identified as the essence of the West. By 1942, however, when the ‘law of becoming homely’ that is enunciated by Hölderlin is identified as the law ‘of Western and German humankind’ (Heidegger 1996: 137), the German and the Western remain bound together, but by a conjunction that also holds them apart. A movement away from the German to the Western is detectable. Indeed, Heidegger takes the time to clarify to, for, and from whom he is speaking now: ‘When we speak of “human beings” here and throughout these remarks, we always mean the essence of the historical human beings of that history to which we ourselves belong: the essence of Western humankind [abendländischen Menschentums]’ (Heidegger 1996: 43). By the time of his 6 October 1951 lecture ‘“. . . Poetically Man Dwells . . . ”’, this relocation is complete: the German no longer appears by name: ‘When Hölderlin speaks of dwelling, he has before his eyes the basic character of human existence’ (Heidegger 1971b: 215). Similarly, in his 1953 essay on Trakl, Heidegger thinks poetry in terms of the homecoming of an ‘unborn mankind’ (ungeborenes Menschengeschlecht). That said, Trakl remains ‘the poet of the yet concealed evening land’ (Heidegger 1971a: 197), which is to say the poet of the West (Abendland) to come. The poem ‘In the Dark’ is ‘one single call that the right race [rechten Schlages] may come to be, and to speak the flame of the spirit into gentleness’ (Heidegger 1971a: 195). According to Derrida, the essay on Trakl fails to free itself from a thinking of spirit that is Christian (see Derrida 1989b: 107–13), and, although this is not Derrida’s argument, the uncanniness of nihilism might also be seen to manifest itself in this way in Heidegger, rendering it a politico-religious haunting. If the ‘right race’ to which Heidegger refers is clearly Western (abendländisch), the claim made in the lecture courses of 1934–5 that the essence of the West is located in the people of the centre – in ‘our people’ (unser Volk) – is precisely what remains unstated here. However, this non-stating does not mark a shift in Heidegger’s position, the abandonment of the belief that the essence of the West lies in das Deutsche. Rather, this very non-stating of the Germanness of the homeland that is founded by Dichtung is itself the trace of the political in the Trakl essay. Nihilism haunts the essay in the form of a non-stating of the essential Germanness of that becoming homely (Heimischwerden) which poetry is

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for Heidegger. Germanness here becomes the unsaid, but it does so for reasons that remain inseparable from the political in what Heidegger sees as its improper – metaphysical, and thus nihilist – sense.

Who are you? – the question of the poet’s friend In the 1934–5 lectures on ‘Germania’ and ‘The Rhine’, Heidegger thinks the place (Standort) of the poet as being ‘on the border of the homeland’. By 1942, the poet is the one who undertakes a going over into the foreign – a passage orientated towards a homecoming into one’s own. By 1953, and now through a reading of Trakl, this homecoming is no longer that of ‘our people’, but rather that of a ‘right race’ into a ‘yet concealed evening land [Abendland]’. Although the term ‘nihilism’ occurs just once in Heidegger’s lectures and essays on Hölderlin, these works contain a thinking of the borders of nihilism that goes beyond that of the 1936–40 lectures on Nietzsche precisely because this thinking has now to locate the Dichter – Hölderlin. For Heidegger, the borders of nihilism are the borders of metaphysics, a region that stretches from Plato to Nietzsche. With Nietzsche, nihilism reaches its consummation, and yet not its end. For, in what Heidegger terms ‘Americanism’, nihilism becomes absolute rootlessness and homelessness, pure ahistoricity, a foreignness that is never the properly foreign for the German, the European, or the Western. In its measurelessness (Maßlosigkeit), ‘Americanism’ is borderless nihilism (Heidegger 1996: 70). What Nietzsche terms ‘European nihilism’, however, is a region whose borders Heidegger takes to be traceable – and thus surpassable. Nietzsche remains within those borders. The great Dichter and Denker of the Greeks – Sophocles and Heraclitus, to both of whom Heidegger devotes considerable attention in the Hölderlin lectures (to Heraclitus in 1934–5, and to Sophocles in 1942) – are located beyond those borders. The location of the German Dichter (Hölderlin) – with (one can assume) Heidegger himself as his complementary Denker – is rather more paradoxical in nature, for both find themselves at once inside and beyond the borders of nihilism. Paul de Man claims that Hölderlin ‘is the only one whom Heidegger cites as a believer cites Holy Writ’ (de Man 1983: 250). While there is considerable evidence to support this view, it not only neglects Heidegger’s appreciation of Trakl but also leaves out of account those instances when Heidegger counters even Hölderlin. These instances are in every case matters of translation – but translation is no secondary matter for Heidegger; indeed, in his 1942 lecture course on ‘The Ister’, he declares: ‘Tell me what you think of translation, and I will tell you who you are’ (Heidegger

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1996: 63). In the same lecture course, Heidegger remarks of Hölderlin’s translation of Antigone that ‘Sometimes it altogether fails to render what is essential’ (Heidegger 1996: 98). Indeed, according to Heidegger, Hölderlin fails in his translation of the fundamental word (Grundwort) of Greek antiquity – to deinon – which is arguably to say that, as Heidegger sees it, Hölderlin fails to grasp that very foreign by way of which any homecoming into one’s own is to be accomplished. As Heidegger observes, Hölderlin first translates deinon in the first choral ode as gewaltig (powerful or violent), and then as ungeheuer (monstrous). According to Heidegger, however, neither translation captures the essential, and in their place he proposes unheimlich, the meaning of which he clarifies as follows: ‘We mean the uncanny in the sense of that which is not at home – not homely in that which is homely’ (Das Unheimliche meinen wir im Sinne dessen, was nicht daheim – nicht im Heimischen heimisch ist) (Heidegger 1996: 71). Of course, as we have seen, Heidegger proceeds to argue that it is just such an unhomeliness that Hölderlin the Dichter speaks in that passage into the foreign which is the way back to das Eigene as the Heimat. Within Hölderlin, then, Heidegger insists upon a border between the Dichter on the one hand, and the translator-thinker on the other. The former would constitute a being beyond the borders of nihilism, the latter a simple being within those borders akin to Nietzsche’s. But matters are rather more complicated than this, for Hölderlin’s particularity lies not least in his naming the time of nihilism as the destitute time (durftige Zeit) from within which he poeticizes (dichtet); that is, the time between the flight and the return of the gods. In fact, Heidegger’s own position is anything but stable on this point: on occasion, he suggests that Hölderlin actually names Being; at other times, Hölderlin is presented as recollecting the oblivion or default of Being as the absence of the gods. Furthermore, if Heidegger’s Hölderlin inhabits the destitute time of nihilism, as the time between the gods’ flight and their return, he also poeticizes another time located within the time of nihilism thus conceived. This other time is also named in the question concerning the destitute time in the elegy ‘Bread and Wine’:

Meanwhile, I often think it is Better to sleep than so to be without friends, So to be always waiting and what to do and say in the meanwhile I do not know and what are poets for in a time of need?

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(Indessen dünket mir ofters Besser zu schlafen, wie so ohne Genossen zu seyn, So zu harren und was zu thun indeß und zu sagen, Weiß ich nicht und wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?) (Quoted in Heidegger 2000a: 65) That meanwhile (indessen) within the destitute time from which comes the poet’s question concerning the poet is, then, not simply the time of nihilism, but rather that time within the time of nihilism when the ‘I’ is inclined to think it ‘Better to sleep’ than to experience the friendless wait. In the poem itself, the answer to this question concerning the poet’s role in the time of destitution is that poets are ‘like those holy priests of the wine-god/Who travelled from land to land in holy night’. This answer comes, however, not from the poem’s ‘I’, but rather from the ‘you’ (du), the ‘friend’ (Freund) addressed in the strophe’s opening line: ‘But they are, you say [Aber sie sind, sagst du], like those holy priests’. So, it is the voice of the friend that would draw the poem’s ‘I’ from the thought of sleep, an inclination that is the meantime (indessen) within the mean time (dürftige Zeit) of what Heidegger thinks as ‘nihilism’. But who is this friend? Who is this ‘you’, and what authority does it have when it claims that the poet is like a holy priest of Dionysus? The answer usually given to this question is that the friend here is Wilhelm Heinse, to whom the poem is dedicated. But, if this is the case, then things immediately become rather complicated, since Heinse is not necessarily someone whose words are to be simply accepted in a poem by Hölderlin. According to David Constantine, for instance, if the poem ‘Bread and Wine’ is addressed to ‘the sun- and daylight-loving Hellenist Heinse, the poem is ‘in its argument, a tactful attempt to remind the friend that our condition is benightedness and that we shirk our responsibility if we pretend it to be otherwise’ (Constantine 1988: 166; Constantine’s emphasis). As for Heidegger, he makes no mention of Heinse in ‘Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry’, no doubt in part because he (Heidegger) takes himself to be Hölderlin’s friend – the first and indeed the only one to have heard the hymning of those who in the 1934–5 lectures he terms the ‘future Germans’ (künftigen Deutschen) (Heidegger 1989: 221).7 For Heidegger, it is through Hölderlin alone that the answer to the question of ‘Who we are’ (Wer wir sind) is to be sought (Heidegger 1989: 56). In 1934–5, that ‘we’ is the ‘German people’ – a category that remains far from clearly delimited, even if it demands borders. By 1936, the ‘we’ has

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become still less precise. By 1946, it is human beings (der Mensch), but human beings determined as the people of the West. And yet, in each instance, Heidegger takes himself to speak for, to, and from this ‘we’, and to do so as the poet’s friend. Heidegger is not, of course, alone in taking himself to be the true friend of Hölderlin; countless others have sought, and no doubt will continue to seek, to take on this role. As we shall see in the next chapter, one such is Theodor Adorno. Another is Paul de Man, when he claims that Hölderlin in fact says ‘the opposite of what Heidegger makes him say’. Far from being a poet whose poetry would name Being as presence, de Man’s Hölderlin is a deconstructive poet for whom there can be no reconciliation (Versöhnung), no accomplished homecoming into one’s own, and for whom the poetic is governed by an aporetic logic. For de Man’s Hölderlin, poetry cannot found Being, ‘for as soon as the word is uttered, it destroys the immediate and discovers that instead of stating Being, it can only state mediation’ (de Man 1983: 259). One might argue, of course, that the true friend of the poet is the one who could establish, beyond all doubt, whether or not the friend’s response to the question ‘What are poets for?’ is underwritten by the poem as a whole. Certainly, there are reasons to doubt the authority of the friend’s answer. However, beyond – or, rather, before – any attempt to identify who is in fact the true friend of the poet, and whether the friend’s words are underwritten by the poem, one has surely to consider the radical paradoxicality of a situation in which the temptation to sleep on account of being without friends or companions (ohne Genossen zu seyn) is one from which the poet might be dissuaded by the voice of the friend. In short, whence the voice of the friend to one who claims to be ohne Genossen, and who in the poem ‘Remembrance’ declares: ‘But I am alone’ (Ich aber bin allein)? Even if the friend or companion is read as a figure located within the ‘I’, this does not resolve the paradoxicality – one might even say the Unheimlichkeit, so long as this uncanniness is not determined as Heimatlosigkeit – of a scene in which the friendless and the befriended are drawn together. It is in turning to Hölderlin, then, that Heidegger’s thinking of nihilism as homelessness reveals not merely its own limits but its limiting function with regard to what Nietzsche, without whose thinking of nihilism Heidegger’s own redetermination of nihilism is quite simply inconceivable, names as the unheimlichste. From the ‘uncanniest of all guests’ to that which deprives a certain ‘us’ – but who exactly? – of a Heimat: this is the redetermination that occurs when Heidegger seeks to redeploy the concept of nihilism in the interests of a thinking that would surpass the political. And yet, by thinking das Unheimliche as

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an unhomeliness that remains limited by the thought of the becoming homely (Heimischwerden), Heidegger opens himself to nihilism’s haunting precisely by way of what he names the political, which is to say by way of that which he would limit to the secondary. This is not to say that Heidegger’s thought may in its turn simply be determined as nihilist – as is claimed, for instance, by Cunningham on the grounds that Heidegger thinks Being as Nothing (see Cunningham 2002: ch. 6). The uncanniness of nihilism is rather that of a being ‘at the door’, on the border or limit of the thought that would deploy it. This haunting takes many forms in Heidegger, and these include not simply what is said – of ‘Americanism’, for instance – but also what is not said, or what is no longer said – the non-stating of the ‘German’ in the later texts, for instance. It is, however, perhaps above all in the ‘us’ to, for, and from whom he takes himself to speak that this haunting becomes most acute in Heidegger. That ‘us’ – already present in Nietzsche’s question concerning nihilism: ‘Whence comes to us this uncanniest of all guests’ (emphasis added) – becomes in Heidegger the site upon which his entire thinking of nihilism and its overcoming depends, and yet also the very site of the political as itself a manifestation of nihilism.

3 Fatal Positivities: Theodor Adorno

Life after Auschwitz, or the blasphemy of affirmation The place of Theodor Adorno in the history of the deployment of the concept of nihilism since Nietzsche is decisive not least because Adorno thinks nihilism in explicit relation to ‘Auschwitz’, a name that, as we shall see, functions in his work as more than a synecdoche for the Nazi extermination of the Jews. However, in a twist that is characteristic of the tradition that is the focus of this book, while the connection that he makes between Auschwitz and nihilism is central to his critique of Heidegger, Adorno nonetheless finds it necessary not only to repeat Heidegger’s gesture of redetermining and redeploying the concept of nihilism, but also, like Heidegger, to turn the charge of nihilism back against the very philosopher from whom he inherits it, while also privileging a certain form of the literary as the most effective form of resistance to nihilism. Just as, in the mid-1930s, Heidegger identifies Nietzsche’s thinking of Being in terms of value as the consummation of nihilism, so Adorno, in Against Epistemology (1954),1 identifies Heideggerian ontology itself as nihilism: In Husserl’s pet discussions of the universal plague in which humanity dies off without the slightest danger threatening the phenomenological residuum, viz. the pure ego, one may even perhaps discern preliminary forms of that nihilism of the early Heidegger, which is both hostile to man and pointless, and indulged in being towards death and the negating nothingness. (Adorno 1982a: 189) Adorno’s redetermination of nihilism as that which is ‘hostile to man’ is far from being restricted, however, to either the pointless or the negating 63

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nothingness as these might manifest themselves in Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) or What Is Metaphysics? (1929). For, according to Adorno, that which is ultimately most hostile to man is the administered world (verwaltete Welt) in which human beings now find themselves. It is this world, characterized by reification and the domination of nature, and governed by the principle of identity, that reaches its consummation at Auschwitz as what in Negative Dialectics (1966) Adorno terms ‘absolute integration’ (Adorno 1973: 362). This integration is nihilist in that it takes the form of a reduction to nothing of alterity, and thus of life itself: ‘Auschwitz confirmed the philosopheme of pure identity as death’ (Adorno 1973: 362). It has often been claimed that the inadequacy of Heidegger’s own response to the Nazis’ attempted extermination of the Jews is apparent not only in his silences on this subject, but also in his one published comment on it, in a lecture delivered in Bremen on 1 December 1949 entitled ‘The Danger’, in which he claims that agriculture ‘is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps’ (Heidegger quoted in Lacoue-Labarthe 1990: 34). Whereas for Heidegger the full disclosure of what took place in the Nazi extermination camps does not entail a fundamental reorientation of his thinking of Being, this extermination being merely one instance among others of man’s domination by modern technology as Enframing (Ge-Stell), for Adorno the fact that Auschwitz took place changes everything, not only for philosophy, but for all of culture, not least the arts, and indeed for human life as such. In the first section of ‘Meditations on Metaphysics’ in Negative Dialectics, Adorno argues that after Auschwitz the traditional metaphysical separation between the immutable and the transitory, the temporal and the eternal, can no longer be maintained: After Auschwitz, our feelings resist any claim of the positivity of existence as sanctimonious, as wronging the victims; they balk at squeezing any kind of sense, however bleached, out of the victims’ fate. And these feelings do have an objective side after events that make a mockery of the construction of immanence as endowed with a meaning radiated by an affirmatively posited transcendence. (Adorno 1973: 361) This argument is clarified – as indeed is much else in the ‘Meditations on Metaphysics’ – by the last six lectures in the series Metaphysics: Concept and Problems, which Adorno delivered in Frankfurt in July 1965. Having

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completed his analysis of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Adorno turns in lecture 13 to metaphysics today, the concept of which has, he claims, ‘been changed to its innermost core’ by ‘what we have experienced in our time’ (Adorno 2000: 100–1). The name for that experience is ‘Auschwitz’, by which we are to understand not only that particular extermination camp or even the Nazis’ so-called Final Solution (Endlösung) as a whole, but also ‘the world of torture which has continued to exist after Auschwitz and of which we are receiving the most horrifying reports from Vietnam’ (Adorno 2000: 101). For Adorno, ‘Auschwitz’ in this more general sense constitutes the radical break in the history of metaphysics that originates with Plato and Aristotle: ‘that name stands for something unthinkable beyond the unthinkable, namely, a whole historical phase’ (Adorno 2000: 115–16). The ‘completely changed status’ of metaphysics after Auschwitz lies in the fact that one can no longer insist on ‘the presence of a positive meaning or purpose in being’ (Adorno 2000: 101–2) – and it is on moral grounds that such an affirmation of positive meaning or purpose has to be ruled out: The affirmative character which metaphysics has in Aristotle, and which it first took on in Plato’s teaching, has become impossible. To assert that existence or being has a positive meaning constituted within itself and orientated towards the divine principle (if one is to put it like that), would be, like all the principles of truth, beauty and goodness which philosophers have concocted, a pure mockery in face of the victims and the infinitude of their torment. [. . .] the assertion that what is has meaning, and the affirmative character which has been attributed to metaphysics almost without exception, becomes a mockery; and in the face of the victims it becomes downright immoral. (Adorno 2000: 101–4) Later in the same lecture series, Adorno goes still further, arguing that the affirmation of a positive meaning or purpose to being after Auschwitz is nothing less than blasphemous: I believe [. . .] that the metaphysical thesis of the inherent meaning of the world, or of a cosmic plan underlying everything which happens, must be called into question at the very moment when a meaningful connection can no longer be established between what has happened and the metaphysical ideas. [. . .] within the constellations which now define our experience all the traditional affirmative or positive theses of metaphysics [. . .] simply become blasphemies. (Adorno 2000: 121)

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Although Adorno rules out the affirmation of positive meaning or purpose after Auschwitz on moral grounds, the moral imperative to which he appeals here is not a Kantian one, for he insists that, just as metaphysics has been utterly transformed by Auschwitz, so too has morality – or what for Kant is the realm of practical, as distinct from pure, reason. After Auschwitz, the Kantian categorical imperative that one must act in accordance with ‘that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law’, and ‘in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end’ (Kant 1991: 84, 91), has to be replaced by a ‘new categorical imperative’, namely that ‘unfree mankind’ must ‘arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen’ (Adorno 1973: 365). Like the claim that we can no longer affirm a positive meaning or purpose to existence, this new categorical imperative cannot be based on logic; rather, it is to be grounded in ‘bodily feeling, in identification with unbearable pain’ (Adorno 2000: 116), or, as he puts it in Negative Dialectics: ‘the practical abhorrence of the unbearable physical agony to which individuals are exposed’ (Adorno 1973: 365). What has been changed by Auschwitz, however, goes beyond the question of how one should live to whether one can live at all. Adorno’s argument here is that life after Auschwitz is guilty life, since it is unavoidably life at the expense of the lives of others. This guilt renders life spectral – not in an ontological but in a moral sense: The only trouble with self-preservation is that we cannot help suspecting the life to which it attaches us of turning into something that makes us shudder: into a specter, a piece of the world of ghosts, which our waking consciousness perceives to be nonexistent. The guilt of a life which purely as a fact will strangle other life, according to statistics that eke out an overwhelming number of killed with a minimal number of rescued, as if this were provided in the theory of probabilities – this guilt is irreconcilable with living. (Adorno 1973: 364) This argument is in fact a generalization of the observation made by many survivors of the Nazi extermination camps, namely that they felt that their survival was predicated on the deaths of others, and that they were therefore in some sense responsible for those deaths. As Primo Levi puts it in The Drowned and the Saved (1986): ‘It is no more than a supposition, indeed the shadow of a supposition: that each man is his brother’s

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Cain, that each one of us [. . .] has usurped his neighbour’s place and lived in his stead. It is a supposition, but it gnaws at us; it has nestled deeply like a woodworm; although unseen from the outside, it gnaws and rasps’ (Levi 1988: 82). For Adorno, however, if life after Auschwitz must now remain in question, this is certainly not a justification for suicide, any more than the impossibility of affirming a positive meaning or purpose to existence permits an interpretation of life as meaningless (sinnlos). Rather, thought now finds itself governed by the imperative to prevent the repetition of Auschwitz, even if such an imperative remains an impossible one, since, as Adorno clarifies in his definition of ‘Auschwitz’ as a world in which torture has been institutionalized, ‘Auschwitz’ is in fact already repeating itself – in the Vietnam of 1965, for instance. In accordance with this new categorical imperative, Adorno argues that what is now required of thought is an abiding within the negative. As becomes clear in his 1965 lectures on metaphysics, it is precisely this abiding within the negative, this morally justified resistance to all positivity or affirmation, that distinguishes Adorno’s own negative dialectics from the Hegelian dialectic: Hegel’s philosophy contains a moment by which that philosophy, despite having made the principle of determinate negation its vital nerve, passes over into affirmation and therefore into ideology: the belief that negation, by being pushed far enough and by reflecting itself, is one with positivity. That, Ladies and Gentlemen, the doctrine of the positive negation, is precisely and strictly the point at which I refuse to follow Hegel. (Adorno 2000: 144) If, unlike the Hegelian dialectic, philosophy as negative dialectics is to avoid ever passing over into positivity or affirmation, then it has to remain open to the possibility of failure, since all certainty would fall within the category of the positive: if I said that the negation of the negation is the positive, that idea would contain within itself a thesis of the philosophy of identity and could only be carried through if I had already assumed the unity of subject and object which is supposed to emerge at the end. If, however, you take seriously the idea I put forward earlier today, that the truth of ideas is bound up with their possibility of being wrong, the possibility of their failure, you will see that this idea is invalidated by the proposition that, merely by negating the negation, I already have the positive. In that case one would be back in the sphere of

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false, deceptive and, I would say, mythical certainty, in which nothing can be wrong and in which, probably for that reason, everything one said would be all the more hopelessly lost. For thought there is really no other possibility, no other opportunity, than to do what the miner’s adage forbids: to work one’s way through the darkness without a lamp, without possessing the positive through the higher concept of the negation of the negation, and to immerse oneself in the darkness as deeply as one possibly can. (Adorno 2000: 144) To remain within the negative in this way can be achieved only through a critique that turns back upon itself: ‘If negative dialectics calls for the self-reflection of thinking, the tangible implication is that if thinking is to be true – if it is to be true today, in any case – it must be a thinking against itself’ (Adorno 1973: 365). In other words, thought as negative dialectics engages in a perpetual self-undoing, denying itself all strictly logical ground. This very imperative is itself grounded, however, in the concept of the ‘true’, but a ‘true’ that is moral rather than logical. The justification for remaining within the negative and resisting the temptation of all positivity is the moral imperative to prevent the repetition of that which is already repeating itself. Remaining within the negative; immersion in the darkness; resisting all temptation to assign a positive meaning or purpose to existence – does this not make negative dialectics a form of nihilism? Certainly, it is no coincidence that the third and final ‘model’ in Negative Dialectics contains a section entitled ‘Nihilism’, in which Adorno not only offers a brief history of the concept’s deployment since Jacobi ‘first put the term to philosophical use’ in 1799, but also remarks upon the manner in which, beginning with Nietzsche, the concept’s redeployments have taken the form of reversals. If Nietzsche appropriates the term from ‘newspaper accounts of terrorist acts in Russia’,2 there is ‘an irony to which our ears have been dulled in the meantime’ in his proceeding to use it ‘to denounce the opposite of what it meant in the practice of political conspirators: to denounce Christianity as the institutionalized negation of the will to live’ (Adorno 1973: 379). And as for those who come after Nietzsche – for, as Adorno rightly observes (although without reflecting on the possible reasons for this), ‘Philosophers would not give up the word’ (Adorno 1973: 379) – they submit the concept of nihilism to yet another reversal: ‘In a direction contrary to Nietzsche’s, they re-functioned it conformistically into the epitome of a condition that was accused, or was accusing itself, of being null and void’ (Adorno 1973: 379). As for the situation now – after Auschwitz – there is once

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again an ‘indignation at nihilism’, cultural commentators ‘mobilizing a word generally loathed and incompatible with universal good cheer’, and doing so for the purpose of ‘moral defamation’, the target having become those who refuse to accept ‘the Western legacy of positivity and to subscribe to any meaning of things as they exist’ (Adorno 1973: 380). In other words, Adorno here takes his own thought to be the target of this particular defamation – the charge of nihilism – since, as we have seen, it is precisely upon such a refusal to ‘subscribe to any meaning of things as they exist’ in an age determined as ‘after Auschwitz’ that he insists both in the 1965 lectures on metaphysics and in Negative Dialectics. Adorno’s response to what he takes to be the accusation of nihilism levelled at those who remain within the negative is not, however, simply to deny that his own thought is nihilist. Rather, repeating the very gesture of reversal to which he himself points as being characteristic of the history of the deployment of the term, he turns the charge of nihilism back upon the accusers by rejecting the very possibility of any overcoming (Überwindung) of nihilism, on the grounds that all ‘Acts of overcoming – even of nihilism, along with the Nietzschean type that was meant differently and yet supplied fascism with slogans – are always worse than what they overcome’ (Adorno 1973: 380). Furthermore – and in this he anticipates Gianni Vattimo – Adorno undertakes a revalorization of nihilism. In the face of a world of unimaginable suffering, of institutionalized torture, there is in fact a moral justification for asking ‘whether it would be better for nothing at all to be than something’ (Adorno 1973: 380). Rather than defending himself against the charge of nihilism, ‘A thinking man’s true answer to the question whether he is a nihilist would probably be “Not enough” – out of callousness, perhaps, because of insufficient sympathy for anything that suffers’ (Adorno 1973: 380). This revalorization of nihilism is, however, strictly limited, and one might even say that it is apparent rather than real, since Adorno, like Heidegger before him, continues to use the term ‘nihilism’ as the ultimate defamation. The section on nihilism in Negative Dialectics, for instance, ends with a radical distinction between those accused of nihilism for their refusal to assign a positive meaning or purpose to existence and those who make this accusation, it being the latter who are in fact guilty of nihilism: ‘The true nihilists are the ones who oppose nihilism with their more and more faded positivities [Nihilisten sind die, welche dem Nihilismus ihre immer ausgelaugteren Positivitäten entgegenhalten], the ones who are thus conspiring with the extant malice, and eventually with the destructive principle itself. Thought honors itself

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be defending what is damned as nihilism’ (Adorno 1973: 381). As for that which is damned as nihilism, Adorno is thinking above all here of the work of Samuel Beckett, to which he refers in precisely this section of Negative Dialectics. Although a number of commentators on Beckett in the 1950s, including Maurice Nadeau in France,3 characterized his work as nihilist, for Adorno that charge finds its principal spokesman in Georg Lukács. In his critique of Beckett and other avant-garde (avantgardeistisch) writers in his 1958 book The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (Wider der missverstandenen Realismus),4 Lukács repeatedly deploys the terms Nihilismus and nihilistisch, and it is arguably for this reason that Adorno finds it necessary not only to focus on the relation between Beckett and nihilism, but also to redetermine and redeploy the concept in his own thinking of the aesthetic. Lukács’s general argument in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism is that modernism as a whole is ‘based on nihilism’ (Lukács 1963: 81), with Joyce, Beckett, Ionesco, and Faulkner being among the principal writers whose works may be identified as nihilist. For Lukács, however, it is Kafka who is the supreme nihilist among the modernists, with the novels The Trial and The Castle being ‘nihilistic allegories’ (Lukács 1963: 52). In support of this claim, Lukács refers his readers to what he describes as Walter Benjamin’s ‘brilliant’ 1934 essay on Kafka, in which, as Lukács observes, Benjamin cites the following remark made by Kafka to Max Brod: ‘We are nihilistic thoughts [nihilistische Gedanken], suicidal thoughts, that come into God’s head’ (quoted in Benjamin 1999: 798; cf. Lukács 1963: 43). As for Beckett, Lukács sees his works as bringing together ‘Kafkaesque and Joycean motifs’, the result being ‘a fully standardized nihilistic modernism’ (Lukács 1963: 53). As for what Lukács actually means by ‘nihilism’ in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, the term functions as a synonym for existentialism, understood as a philosophical movement extending from Kierkegaard to Sartre, and including both Nietzsche and Heidegger. That said, Lukács applies neither Nietzsche’s nor Heidegger’s determination of nihilism. For Lukács, the essence of nihilism lies neither in a devaluation of all values, nor in the moral interpretation of phenomena, nor in the forgetting of Being, but rather in the negation of ‘objective reality’, the reduction of the world to the purely subjective, in which the possibility of all social relations is denied and the human individual becomes a radically isolated monad, thrown into a spectral realm of which it can make no sense. Whereas man is, in fact, as Aristotle claims, ‘zoon politikon, a social animal’ – this ‘dictum’ being ‘applicable to all great realist

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literature’, according to Lukács – the works of the modernists are governed by an ‘ontological view’ that is ‘the exact opposite of this’, which is to say that ‘Man, for these writers, is by nature solitary, asocial, unable to enter into relationships with other human beings’ (Lukács 1963: 19–20). The nihilism of the modernists takes the form, then, of a solipsistic derealization of ‘objective reality’ or an ‘attenuation of actuality’ (Lukács 1963: 25), which produces a nightmarish spectrality (see Lukács 1963: 45), Beckett’s novel Molloy (1951) being ‘perhaps the ne plus ultra of this development’ (Lukács 1963: 31). In the case of the supreme nihilist, Kafka, this derealization is accompanied by what Lukács terms the ‘transcendence of Nothingness’; in short, the production of a theological vision in which God, as the ultimate reality, is replaced by nothingness (Nichts): The supreme judges in The Trial, the castle administration in The Castle, represent transcendence in Kafka’s allegories: the transcendence of Nothingness [. . .] . If there is a God here, it can only be the God of religious atheism: atheos absconditus. [. . .] The hidden, non-existent God of Kafka’s world derives his spectral character from the fact that his own non-existence is the ground of all existence; and the portrayed reality, uncannily accurate as it is, is spectral in the shadow of that dependence. The only purpose of transcendence – the intangible nichtendes Nichts – is to reveal the facies hippocratica of the world. (Lukács 1963: 44–5) As for the cause of nihilism thus understood, it is not religious but socioeconomic: ‘Nihilism and cynicism, despair and angst, suspicion and selfdisgust are the spontaneous product of the capitalist society in which intellectuals have to live’ (Lukács 1963: 91). Although there is considerable justification for the claim that the entirety of Adorno’s reflections on the aesthetic from the late 1950s onwards may be seen as a response to this critique of the literary avantgarde as nihilist, Adorno’s first explicit response to Lukács is to be found in the review-essay ‘Extorted Reconciliation’, published in the 11 November 1958 issue of Der Monat, and later collected in the second volume of Notes to Literature (1961). In this essay, the neat binary nature of the opposition between critical realism and modernism that governs Lukács’s analysis reproduces itself in the relation between Adorno and Lukács, with Adorno championing precisely those writers whose works Lukács condemns. The ultimate justification for this complete reversal lies in Adorno’s claim that art is a form of negative knowledge

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(negatives Erkenntnis) which points us in the direction of a reconciliation of subject and object by way of the aesthetic image, a reconciliation that would not be governed by the principle of identity: In art knowledge is aesthetically mediated through and through. In art even what Lukács considers to be solipsism and a regression to the illusory immediacy of the subject does not signify a denial [Verleugnung] of the object, as it does in bad epistemologies, but rather aims at reconciliation [Versöhnung] with the object. The object is taken into the subject in the form of an image [Bild] rather than turning to stone in front of it like an object under the spell of the alienated work. Through the contradiction between this object that has been reconciled within an image, that is, spontaneously assimilated into the subject, and the real, unreconciled object out there in the world, the work of art criticizes reality. It represents negative knowledge of reality. (Adorno 1991: 224–5)5 For all their many important differences, however, Adorno aligns himself with Lukács in two key respects: first, he is no less opposed to existentialism (and in particular to Heidegger) than is Lukács; and, secondly, he takes art to have an essential role to play in the liberation of thought from ideology. That these two elements come together precisely on the terrain of a thinking of nihilism is no coincidence.

Art: the ‘ever broken promise of happiness’ Adorno’s most well-known – and most contentious – declaration on the subject of art after Auschwitz is to be found in his 1949 essay ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, in which he declares that ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’ (Adorno 1982b: 34). Over the subsequent two decades, however, Adorno returns repeatedly to this assertion, not only to clarify it but also to modify it considerably. While declaring in his 1962 essay ‘Commitment’ that he does not want to ‘soften’ the claim made in the earlier essay, he nonetheless now finds it necessary to observe that: hardly anywhere else does suffering still find its own voice, a consolation that does not immediately betray it. The most uncompromising artists of the period have followed this course. The uncompromising radicalism of their works, the very moments denounced as formalist,

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endows them with a frightening power that impotent poems about the victims lack. (Adorno 1992: 88) Here, however, Adorno is referring not to poetry but to art more generally. Three years later, in his 1965 lectures on metaphysics, he returns again to the question of poetry’s justification after Auschwitz, this time posing it as an antinomy, and also using poetry and art as synonyms, or at least slipping from one term to the other without remarking upon the fact: I would readily concede that, just as I said that after Auschwitz one could not write poems – by which I meant to point to the hollowness of the resurrected culture of that time – it could equally well be said, on the other hand, that one must write poems, in keeping with Hegel’s statement in his Aesthetics that as long as there is an awareness of suffering among human beings there must also be art as the objective form of that awareness. And, heaven knows, I do not claim to be able to resolve this antinomy, and presume even less to do so since my own impulses in this antinomy are precisely on the side of art. (Adorno 2000: 110; Adorno’s emphasis) This qualification of his 1949 statement on poetry also finds expression in Negative Dialectics, in which he concedes that ‘Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems’ (Adorno 1973: 362). As we have seen, however, by this time Adorno has extended his original argument to cover not just culture but human life as such: ‘it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living’ (Adorno 1973: 362–3). A year later, in the essay ‘Is Art Lighthearted?’ (1967), Adorno takes a rather different line from that in both the lectures on metaphysics and Negative Dialectics, arguing that while ‘The statement that it is not possible to write poetry after Auschwitz does not hold absolutely, [. . .] it is certain that after Auschwitz, because Auschwitz was possible and remains possible for the foreseeable future, lightheartedness in art is no longer conceivable’ (Adorno 1992: 251). Of course, to rule out lightheartedness (Heiterkeit) from art is scarcely comparable with the ruling out of art tout court or locating it in an antinomy such that it both should and should not be produced. In order to grasp the reasons for this rethinking of his original ban on poetry in 1949, and whether for Adorno the status of poetry is in fact consistently distinguishable from that of art (Kunst), a

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more general analysis of his conception of art is required, and in particular the impact on his theorization of the aesthetic of his encounter in the early 1950s with the work of Samuel Beckett, the importance of which is signalled not least by Adorno’s ultimately unrealized intention to dedicate Aesthetic Theory (1970) to that writer.6 At the heart of Adorno’s conception of art is the conviction that what in Aesthetic Theory he repeatedly terms ‘genuine art’ constitutes both a protest against the world as it is now and the promise of a better world, that is, the ‘promise of happiness’ (promesse du bonheur) – a phrase taken from Stendhal and deployed repeatedly in Aesthetic Theory with a significant alteration: the insistence that this promise of happiness is ‘ever broken’ (Adorno 1997: 136). In the 1957 essay ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, in which he defines ideology simply as ‘untruth, false consciousness, deceit’, Adorno argues that ‘The greatness of works of art [. . .] consists solely in the fact that they give voice to what ideology hides’ (Adorno 1991: 39). In other words, art reveals the ‘reification of the world’, the ‘domination of human beings by commodities that has developed since the beginning of the modern era, since the industrial revolution became the dominant force of life’ (Adorno 1991: 40).7 In addition to disclosing the reality of an entirely administered world, however, art also points towards another, better world: ‘In its protest the poem expresses the dream of a world in which things would be different’ (Adorno 1991: 40). As for the kind of art that not only discloses what ideology hides, but also constitutes such a promise of happiness, it cannot be either the politically didactic art both theorized and practised by Brecht or the ‘committed’ art championed by Sartre in What Is Literature? (1948), since both these forms of art remain tied to positivity or affirmation. According to Adorno, Sartre’s misconception of art lies above all in his failure to go beyond the conceptual element, and to take account of the fact that art is always more than the sum of its meanings (see Adorno 1992: 77). Indeed, Sartre leaves out of account precisely that which makes art what it is, namely its form; and it is through its form rather than through any meaning (Sinn) it might express that art constitutes a protest against the administered world: ‘Art is not a matter of pointing up alternatives but rather of resisting, solely through artistic form, the course of the world’ (Adorno 1992: 80). The critical nature of art lies, then, not in any direct representation of either the administered world or a ‘better world’, but rather in its form, and more precisely in a certain dissonance (Dissonanz), indeed a self-undoing that makes of art anti-art. Sartre’s own plays fail to be ‘genuine art’ because they rely upon

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meaning rather than radical formal innovation for their critique of the world as it is: ‘Sartre’s plays are vehicles for what the author wants to say; they have failed to keep pace with the evolution of aesthetic forms. They operate with traditional plots and exalt them with an unshaken faith in meanings that are to be transferred from art to reality’ (Adorno 1992: 81). The result of such traditionalism is that, for all their apparent radicality, Sartre’s works are immediately consumed by the culture industry: ‘The conjunction of readily graspable plots and equally graspable and distillable ideas has brought Sartre great success and made him, certainly against his own intentions, acceptable to the culture industry’ (Adorno 1992: 81). As for Brecht, while he is a ‘greater artist’ than Sartre, he too continues to rely on meaning, while, in a play such as The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (written 1951, first performed in 1958), he simply fails to confront the ‘true horror of fascism’ (Adorno 1992: 82–3). Adorno’s theorization of the aesthetic, which is developed through the essays collected in Notes to Literature in the course of the 1950s and 1960s, reaches its fullest, if also its most deliberately paratactic, expression in the posthumously published Aesthetic Theory (1970), in which he takes his distance from all the major theories of art from Aristotle to Benjamin, including those of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. As in his essays on a wide range of writers during the later 1950s and the 1960s, at the heart of what Adorno terms his ‘materialist-dialectical aesthetics’ is the claim that after Auschwitz ‘genuine art’ must necessarily be a ‘radically darkened art’ (Adorno 1997: 3, 19). Such an art confronts the horror of the world as it is, and refuses to perform a consolatory function: ‘To survive reality at its most extreme and grim, artworks that do not want to sell themselves as consolation must equate themselves with that reality. Radical art today is synonymous with dark art; its primary colour is black’ (Adorno 1997: 39). However, while art must resist the temptation of consolation (Trost), even at its darkest it nonetheless constitutes a form of resistance that is never purely negative: ‘Artworks detach themselves from the empirical world and bring forth another world, one opposed to the empirical world as if this other world too were an autonomous entity. Thus, however tragic they appear, artworks tend a priori toward affirmation’ (Adorno 1997: 1). For all his emphasis upon an abiding within the negative that would be common to both philosophy as negative dialectics and to art, then, for all his distancing himself from Hegel on the grounds that even Hegel ties the negative to the production of the positive, Adorno cannot bring himself to abandon the thought of an affirmation beyond all negation. Indeed, this affirmation is to be found even – one might say, above all – in ‘radically darkened art’.

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But what is it that genuine art would affirm? What can be predicated of that utopia towards which the most radically darkened art would point, that happiness for which it stands as the ever broken promise? The answer is captured by a single word, a word that recurs throughout Adorno’s writings on art from the mid-1950s onwards. That word is ‘reconciliation’ (Versöhnung).8 At the end of his 1956 essay on Heinrich Heine, Adorno declares that ‘The wound that is Heine will heal only in a society that has achieved reconciliation’ (Adorno 1991: 85), and, in a manner that bears more than a passing relation to Heidegger’s determination of nihilism, Adorno proceeds to clarify that the accomplishment of reconciliation is to be understood as the overcoming of homelessness (Heimatlosigkeit), for which Heine’s image is unrequited love. A century after Heine’s death: homelessness has also become everyone’s homelessness; all human beings have been as badly injured in their beings and their language as Heine the outcast was. His words stand in for their words: there is no longer any homeland [Heimat] other than a world in which no one would be cast out any more, the world of a genuinely emancipated humanity. (Adorno 1991: 85) In his 1963 essay on Friedrich Hölderlin, Adorno adds that reconciliation is that state in which ‘enthrallment to nature comes to an end’ (Adorno 1992: 148). For Adorno’s most comprehensive definition of reconciliation, however, one has to turn to Negative Dialectics: Reconcilement [Versöhnung] would release the nonidentical, would rid it of coercion, including spiritualized coercion; it would open the road to the multiplicity of different things and strip dialectics of its power over them. Reconcilement would be the thought of the many as no longer inimical, a thought that is anathema to subjective reason. (Adorno 1973: 6) Reconciliation is therefore to be understood as a multiplicity no longer governed by the principle of identity; and if, as Adorno claims in Aesthetic Theory, art glimpses this reconciliation, philosophy, too, as negative dialectics, takes this to be its goal (see Adorno 1973: 6). For Adorno, then, art and philosophy, Dichter and Denker, serve the same end. Indeed, beyond all their philosophical, political, and aesthetic differences, Adorno shares with Heidegger the assumption that

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the relationship between literature and philosophy is a complementary one. As Lacoue-Labarthe puts it, Adorno ‘never calls into question the absolutely privileged relation of (great) poetry to philosophy – a relation that, moreover, he goes out of his way to justify, over and against the philologists, at the beginning of his essay [on Hölderlin]. Thus, in a most paradoxical manner, a strange complicity is established’ (Lacoue-Labarthe 2007: 46–7). This complicity is certainly evident in Aesthetic Theory, in which Adorno asserts that philosophy and art ‘converge in their truth content’ (Adorno 1997: 130), and that in works of art this truth content ‘is not what they mean but rather what decides whether the work in itself is true or false, and only this truth of the work in-itself is commensurable to philosophical interpretation and coincides – with regard to the idea, in any case – with the idea of philosophical truth’ (Adorno 1997: 130–1). More generally, the complicity to which Lacoue-Labarthe refers is apparent in Adorno’s claim that both negative dialectics and genuine art constitute a ‘negative knowledge of reality’ (Adorno 1991: 224–5; cf. Adorno 1973: 405). Above all, however, the complicity between Adorno and Heidegger lies in their shared conviction that art constitutes a privileged form of resistance to what they both identify as ‘nihilism’. That for both Heidegger and Adorno such resistance is to be found in the late hymns of Friedrich Hölderlin is arguably more significant than the many differences between the two philosophers, differences upon which Adorno insists so polemically in Jargon of Authenticity (1964) and in his essay on Hölderlin (1963–4). That said, Adorno is rather more aware than Lacoue-Labarthe is prepared to acknowledge of the risk that he runs in his thinking of the relation between literature and philosophy as complementary. This is apparent, for instance, in his characterization of that relation as non-appropriative in nature. As he makes clear in his essay on Hölderlin, poetry’s relation to philosophy has to be understood in terms of the former’s truth content (Wahrheitsgehalt), a concept that Adorno takes from Benjamin and which is to be clearly distinguished from the content (Inhalt) as ‘what is said directly’ by the work (Adorno 1992: 115). Of the philosophical bringing to light of this truth content, Adorno states that, ‘While Hölderlin’s poetry, like everything that is poetry in the emphatic sense, needs philosophy as the medium that brings its truth content to light, this need is not fulfilled through recourse to a philosophy that in any way seizes possession of the poetry’ (Adorno 1992: 113). Of course, in order to judge the validity of this claim, it is necessary to turn to Adorno’s own readings of those writers of ‘poetry in the emphatic sense’, namely Hölderlin, Kafka, and Beckett.

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The ‘protocol sentence’: Hölderlin and the birth of modern literature It is in his 1963–4 essay on Hölderlin’s late poetry that Adorno undertakes his most extensive analysis of the German poet. The first half of this essay is taken up with a critique of Heidegger’s so-called elucidations (Erläuterungen) of the poet’s works, the essential failing of which lies, according to Adorno, in their complete neglect of the ‘specifically poetic’. In other words, just like his political antithesis, Lukács, Heidegger fails to address the question of aesthetic form: ‘Heidegger glorifies the poet supra-aesthetically, as a founder [Stifter], without reflecting concretely on the agency of form’ (Adorno 1992: 114). Adorno’s counter-reading of Hölderlin draws heavily on Walter Benjamin’s 1914–15 essay ‘Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin’,9 leading Lacoue-Labarthe to go so far as to claim that Adorno ‘does little more than apply (by extending them over the entirety of the œuvre) the “methodological” principles and the hermeneutic intuition that Benjamin had tested – in an essay that in this case can certainly be seen as a precursor – on the example of the late reworking, after the “return from France”, of an earlier poem’ (Lacoue-Labarthe 2007: 50). Above all, what Adorno takes from Benjamin and turns against Heidegger is the argument that the later hymns – that is, the works written between 1801 and 1805, in which, as we have seen, Heidegger finds the hymning of Germanness (das Deutsche) – enact a demythologization (Entmythologisierung) (see Adorno 1992: 143). Comparing the poems ‘The Poet’s Courage’ and ‘Timidity’, Benjamin argues that, whereas the subject of the first is ‘a destiny – the death of the poet’, the later poem produces ‘an unmythic, destiny-less concept of life stemming from a spiritually exiguous sphere’ (Benjamin 1996: 22, 24). Read as a revision of ‘The Poet’s Courage’, ‘Timidity’ constitutes a ‘dislocation of the mythological’ (Verlagerung des Mythologischen) (Benjamin 1996: 28). This dislocation is accomplished through the introduction of that which is radically other to Greek myth, such that while life as the ‘life of the individual’ may continue to be ‘shaped in the forms of Greek myth’, this is no longer exclusively the case. According to Benjamin: the Greek element is sublated [aufgehoben] in the last version and balanced against another element that (without express justification, to be sure) was called the Oriental. Almost all the changes in the later version strive in this direction, in the images, in the ideas introduced, and finally in the new meaning [Bedeutung] of death – all

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of which arise as unlimited against the formed, limited appearance [Erscheinung] resting in itself. (Benjamin 1996: 35) Similarly, Adorno argues that, whereas there is a ‘complicity with myth’ in Heidegger’s readings of Hölderlin (Adorno 1992: 121), in his later hymns Hölderlin in fact achieves a ‘genuine demythologization’ (Adorno 1992: 116), and he does so not least through an opening onto alterity that is to be distinguished from the going over into the foreign (das Fremde) for the sake of one’s own (das Eigene) that Heidegger finds in the poem ‘Remembrance’: ‘Hardly anywhere did Hölderlin prove his posthumous champion [Heidegger] more wrong than in his relationship to what is foreign. Hölderlin’s relationship to it is a constant irritant for Heidegger. For Heidegger, the love of a foreign woman requires an apology’ (Adorno 1992: 117). Adorno’s critique of Heidegger here finds its centre, then, in the question of love, and more precisely in the binary distinction between a love that is essentially narcissistic and a love that is directed towards an other that remains irreducible to the same; that is, a love that is not governed by the principle of identity – one might even say, a nonnihilist love. Adorno claims, for instance, that ‘Hölderlin is driven up hill and down dale [by Heidegger] in the service of a conception of love that circles around inside what one is anyway, fixated narcissistically on one’s own people: Heidegger betrays utopia to imprisonment in selfhood’ (Adorno 1992: 117). Love here has to be understood not least in political terms: Love of what is close at hand and nostalgia for the warmth of childhood have developed into something exclusionary, into hatred for the Other, and that cannot be eliminated from the word [fatherland (Vaterland )]. It has become permeated with a nationalism of which there is no trace whatsoever in Hölderlin. The right-wing German cult of Hölderlin has used his concept of what belongs to the fatherland in a distorted way, as though it were concerned with their idol and not with the felicitous balance between the total and the particular. (Adorno 1992: 119) That openness to alterity which Adorno finds in Hölderlin’s conception of love – which is to say, as a meaning in his work – is, of course, not sufficient to confirm that Hölderlin’s poetry is ‘genuine art’, since, as we have seen, according to Adorno, it is through aesthetic form that art resists the world as it is – that is, a world of fatal positivities governed

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by the principle of identity. So it is that Adorno turns to the question of form in the late hymns, where the love of the foreign would occur not thematically but syntactically, as parataxis. According to Adorno, these late hymns – and, above all, the third version of ‘Mnemosyne’ (one of the last works to be written before Hölderlin’s so-called Umnachtung) – exhibit an ‘anticlassical quality’ in their ‘rebellion against harmony’, a ‘paratactic revolt against synthesis’ through ‘artificial disturbances that evade the logical hierarchy of a subordinating syntax’ (Adorno 1992: 131–6). In short, Hölderlin’s method in these works is ‘an assassination attempt on the harmonious work’ (Adorno 1992: 139). What is produced through this revolt against synthesis, according to Adorno, is a radically new kind of dissonantal literature, for which the appropriate term would be not poetry (Dichtung) but prose, which is to say a ‘pure language’ like that of ‘sacred texts’ (Adorno 1992: 130). Here, too, Adorno’s analysis is clearly indebted to Benjamin, not only to the latter’s essay on Hölderlin but also to ‘The Task of the Translator’ (1923), in which Benjamin claims that, in their radical literality (Wortlichkeit), Hölderlin’s translations of Sophocles move in the direction of a pure language (reine Sprache), a language in which ‘meaning [Sinn] has ceased to be the watershed for the flow of language’ (Benjamin 1996: 262). As Lacoue-Labarthe points out, by referring to this pure language as prose, Adorno is also relying on the connection that Benjamin makes in The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism (1920) between Fichte’s claim that ‘the idea of poetry’ is prose and the principle of sobriety (Nüchternheit) advocated by Hölderlin. According to Benjamin, this principle of sobriety is ‘the essentially quite new and still incalculably influential leading idea of the Romantic philosophy of art; what is perhaps the greatest epoch in the West’s philosophy of art is distinguished by this notion’ (Benjamin 1996: 175–6). By insisting upon the prosaic nature of Hölderlin’s late hymns, Adorno is, of course, countering Heidegger, for whom poetry (Dichtung) would be ‘the absolute opposite of prose’ (Lacoue-Labarthe 2007: 58), the latter being a ‘decline’ from the essence of language as the saying (Sage) of Being as the sacred or holy (das Heilige). However, by following Benjamin here, Adorno remains, like Heidegger, tied to the notion of the literary text as itself in some sense heilig. Indeed, it is the notion of das Heilige that may be said to connect Benjamin, Adorno, and Heidegger in a manner that counters Lacoue-Labarthe’s attempt to align Adorno with Heidegger, while preserving Benjamin as the theorist of a demythologizing art. That Adorno follows Benjamin in his claim that the sacred text is to be understood as a text that is without meaning does not in itself

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suffice to maintain the distinction between Benjamin and Adorno on the one hand, and Heidegger on the other. It is this conception of the properly literary text as sacred in its being without meaning that is deployed by Adorno in order to support his claim that Hölderlin’s late hymns are in fact the first manifestation of that ‘darkened art’ which, according to Adorno, reaches its consummation in Beckett: ‘The idealistic Hölderlin inaugurates the process that leads to Beckett’s protocol sentences, empty of meaning [sinnleeren Protokollsätze]’ (Adorno 1992: 137). With this claim, one is of course returned to the question of art’s relation to nihilism. If ‘genuine art’ is constituted by such protocol sentences, then what is the difference between such an art and nihilism? For Adorno’s attempt to justify why an art that is empty of meaning (sinnleer) is not only irreducible to nihilism, but in fact the privileged form of resistance to it, one has to turn to his reading of Beckett.

The difference within the negative: Adorno’s Beckett There is an abundance of textual evidence to support the claim that, for Adorno, Beckett stands above all other writers in the epoch after Auschwitz, including the poet Paul Celan,10 on whose 1959 volume Speech-Grille Adorno projected writing an essay, on whom there is a substantial fragment in the ‘Paralipomena’ published with Aesthetic Theory (see Adorno 1997: 321–2), and between Beckett and whom he saw an elective affinity (Wahlverwandtschaft) (see Adorno 1994: 114). In his 1965 lectures on metaphysics, for instance, Adorno claims that Beckett’s plays are ‘the only truly relevant metaphysical productions since the war’ (Adorno 2000: 117), and in one of the fragments included in the ‘Paralipomena’ he identifies Beckett as the ‘pinnacle’ of ‘contemporary anti-art’ (Adorno 1997: 271). Beckett’s is, for Adorno, the most radically darkened art and constitutes the most thoroughgoing critique of the world as it is, while at the same time – and indeed for that very reason – being a ‘promise of happiness’, pointing towards a ‘better world’, which is to say a world characterized by reconciliation. This take on Beckett is, of course, completely at odds with that of Lukács, for whom, as we have seen, Beckett’s work is a ‘fully standardized nihilistic modernism’. That said, in his commentaries on the two works by Beckett that matter most for him – the play Endgame (1957) and what he describes as the ‘genuinely colossal’ novel The Unnamable (1953)11 – Adorno places the emphasis no less squarely upon the negative in Beckett than does Lukács. Indeed, Adorno’s abiding concern with Beckett’s works from the

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late 1950s onwards might be said to centre upon the question of Beckett’s relation to nihilism. It is therefore no coincidence that it should be to Beckett that Adorno turns towards the end of the section on ‘Nihilism’ in Negative Dialectics. Here, in one paragraph, Adorno sums up his argument on what becomes of the negative in Beckett. Adorno’s response to Lukács’s charge that Beckett’s works constitute a ‘fully standardized nihilism’ is a complicated one; for, while Adorno certainly defends Beckett against this charge, this defence takes the form of a splitting of nihilism against itself in a manner that echoes Benjamin’s gesture in his ‘TheologicalPolitical Fragment’,12 in which the latter proposes a ‘messianic’ nihilism (Benjamin 2002: 306).13 For Adorno, the real nihilists are those who, after Auschwitz, either: (1) affirm that existence has a positive meaning and a purpose, (2) deny that existence has any meaning or purpose, or (3) claim that the ultimate reality is a simple nothingness. It is between these positions that Adorno locates Beckett, along with Kafka, who for Adorno is Beckett’s great predecessor precisely because he anticipates the world after Auschwitz. In his ‘Notes on Kafka’, Adorno claims that to include Kafka ‘among the pessimists, the existentialists of despair, is as misguided as to make him a prophet of salvation. He honoured Nietzsche’s verdict on the words optimism and pessimism’ (Adorno 1982b: 269) – words, let it be noted in passing, that Heidegger also dismisses from any thinking of nihilism. This claim is repeated in Negative Dialectics, where Kafka’s world is characterized as one that ‘resists all attempts of a desperate consciousness to posit despair as an absolute’ (Adorno 1973: 404). Rather than an accomplished nihilism, Kafka’s work commits itself to what Kafka himself terms the task (Aufgabe) of the negative: ‘According to the testimony brought by Kafka’s work, in a world caught in its own toils, everything positive, every contribution, even the very work which reproduces life, helps increase that entanglement. “Our task is to do the negative – the positive has already been given us”’ (Adorno 1982b: 271). Similarly, Adorno argues that Beckett’s work is neither optimistic nor pessimistic, affirms neither meaning nor the absence of meaning. If one does insist on using the term ‘nihilism’ in relation to Beckett – and Adorno himself does just that in a 1968 television discussion, when he refers to a ‘nihilistic mysticism’ (nihilistische Mystik) in Beckett (Adorno 1994: 93–4) – then one has to think this nihilism as implying ‘the contrary of identification with nothingness’ (Adorno 1973: 381). Indeed, it is precisely a resistance to any such identification that would characterize Beckett’s œuvre: ‘What art, notably the art decried as nihilistic, says in

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refraining from judgments is that everything is not just nothing. If it were, whatever is would be pale, colorless, indifferent’ (Adorno 1973: 404). If neither Kafka nor Beckett can be seen as cosmological nihilists in the manner of a Gorgias, neither can they be seen as ethical nihilists in the manner of a Kallikles or a Thrasymachus. Indeed, the task of the negative to which both Kafka and Beckett commit themselves is, for Adorno, the only ethical one, since it constitutes a radical rejection of the world as it is, a world of institutionalized torture which it is ethically justifiable to see as ‘radically evil’: To Beckett, as to the Gnostics, the created world is radically evil [die radikale böse], and its negation [Verneinung] is the chance [Möglichkeit] of another world that is not yet. As long as the world is at it is, all pictures of reconciliation, peace, and quiet resemble the picture of death. The slightest difference between nothingness and coming to rest would be the haven of hope, the no man’s land between the border posts of being and nothingness [Die kleinste Differenz zwischen dem Nichts und dem zur Ruhe Gelangtem wäre die Zuflucht der Hoffnung, Niemandsland zwischen den Grenzpfählen von Sein und Nichts]. (Adorno 1973: 381) That, in Adorno’s reading of Beckett in relation to nihilism, everything hinges on this slightest difference (kleinste Differenz) within the negative is clarified both in the penultimate lecture in the 1965 lecture series on metaphysics and in the draft fragments for Adorno’s unwritten essay on The Unnamable. In the aforementioned lecture, Adorno asserts that while Beckett’s work ‘is, of course, anathema to all affirmative people’, in fact everything in that work ‘revolves around the question what nothingness actually contains; the question, one might say, of a topography of the void. This work is really an attempt so to conceive nothingness that it is, at the same time, not merely nothingness, but to do so within complete negativity’ (Adorno 2000: 135–6; Adorno’s emphasis). In other words, Beckett seeks to conceive a nothingness that is at odds with itself, a nothingness that is not governed by the principle of identity – which is, as we have seen, for Adorno the very principle of nihilism. The following notes in Adorno’s copy of the 1959 German translation of The Unnamable confirm this reading: the positive categories, such as hope, are the absolutely negative ones in B[eckett]. Hope is directed at nothingness [Hoffnung geht auf dem Nichts]. (Adorno 1994: 44)

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Is nothingness the same as nothing? [Ist das Nichts gleich nichts?] That is the question around which everything in B[eckett] revolves. Absolutely everything is thrown away, because there is only hope where nothing is kept back. The fullness of nothingness [Die Fülle des Nichts]. This is the reason for the insistence on the zero point [Nullpunkt].14 So it is that a never-realized nothingness becomes the negative image of a genuine reconciliation, an image that never presents itself other than as a slightest difference within the negative, which is to say a negative within the negative. It is no doubt on account of his commitment to such a negativity that Adorno finds Beckett’s remark – made in conversation with Adorno when they met in Berlin on 23 September 1967 – regarding a ‘a kind of positivity’ in ‘pure negativity’ to be ‘highly enigmatic’ (Adorno 1994: 24). Adorno’s interpretation of this remark – which appears to counter his own insistence on an abiding within the negative – is to make that positivity a ‘positive nothingness’ ( positives Nichts) or ‘nihil relativum’; that is, ‘the nothingness of something’ (das Nichts von etwas) (Adorno 1994: 82; Adorno’s emphasis). On the one hand, then, Beckett’s ‘radically darkened art’ discloses the horrific reality of the administered world, in which the subject has undergone complete disintegration, and reification has reached its consummation, the human being now nothing more than an endlessly fungible thing. On the other hand, Beckett maintains through a slightest difference within the negative, the non-self-identity of nothingness, an opening onto the absolute alterity of reconciliation. If Adorno’s reading of Beckett is to correspond to his own negative dialectics, however, the possibility of failure, or of being wrong, has to be maintained, and this can be achieved only if the question ‘Is nothingness the same as nothing?’ remains an open one; in other words, only if it remains in doubt whether that slightest difference within the negative is preserved, only if it remains in doubt whether Beckett’s works are in fact nihilist or not. As soon as one asserts either that they are nihilist or that they are not, the ‘perhaps’ disappears. And yet, as we have seen, while Lukács certainly commits himself to the belief that Beckett’s works are indeed ‘fully standardized nihilism’, at the end of the section on ‘Nihilism’ in Negative Dialectics Adorno commits himself to the opposite position: ‘The true nihilists are [Nihilisten sind] the ones who oppose nihilism with their more and more faded positivities, the ones who are thus conspiring with the extant malice, and eventually with the destructive principle itself’ (Adorno 1973: 381). With this turning of the charge of nihilism against those who see Beckett (and indeed Adorno) as nihilist, Adorno negates

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the ‘perhaps’ of nihilism. And it is just such a negation that one finds in Adorno’s treatment of the question of meaning (Sinn) in Beckett. In ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’, for instance, Adorno claims that the understanding of this play ‘can only mean understanding its unintelligibility, concretely reconstructing the meaning of the fact that it has no meaning [kann nichts anderes heißen, als seine Unverständlichkeit verstehen, konkret den Sinnzusammenhang dessen nachkonstruieren, daß es keinen hat]’ (Adorno 1991: 243). This statement makes it clear that, for Adorno, not only can Beckett’s play be determined as having no meaning, but that this very absence of meaning itself has a meaning. This is confirmed later in the essay when Adorno declares that in Endgame ‘Meaning nothing becomes the only meaning’ (Das nichts Bedeuten wird zur einzigen Bedeutung) (Adorno 1991: 261). What Adorno finds it necessary to negate in order to defend Beckett against the charge of nihilism, then, is nothing other than the ‘perhaps’ of nihilism – which is, of course, also the ‘perhaps’ of non-nihilism. And this ‘perhaps’ is precisely the uncanniness of a nihilism that cannot be determined as either present within or absent from the work, such that the work itself remains indeterminable as either nihilist or resistant to nihilism. That Adorno attempts to negate this ‘perhaps’ is itself not so surprising, since his aim is to save art as that which, like negative dialectics, would remain within the negative, but would do so in the interests of a better world in which the positive would no longer be fatal. But then, of course, one might be tempted to ask whether this negation of the ‘perhaps’ of nihilism is not itself the very consummation of nihilism. If one refrains for answering that question in the affirmative, then that is because what can be learned from Adorno is precisely the consequences of redeploying the concept of nihilism even in the interests of the negative and the non-identical, which is to say the kind of uncanny reversals within which one finds oneself caught as soon as one attempts to make use of this particular conceptual weapon – even, and perhaps above all – when this deployment is justified ethically in terms of the thought of a better world.

4 The Naïve Calculation of the Negative: Maurice Blanchot

The anguished writer, the nihilist, and the question of positive values As anticipated by Paul de Man in an essay first published in 1966,1 Maurice Blanchot has come to be considered one of the most significant French writers of the twentieth century, his theorization of the literary anticipating that of, among others, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, and his critical encounters with the thought of Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas in particular making him a touchstone in current thinking on the relationship between literature and what Leslie Hill has termed an ‘ethics of alterity’ (Hill 1997: 52). In the growing critical commentary on Blanchot, however, his engagement with the concept of nihilism in his theorization of the literary has remained little analysed, the term occurring rarely (if at all) in the major critical works on his essays, novels, and récits.2 It might therefore come as something of a surprise that Blanchot’s engagement with this concept is in fact a sustained one, the term being deployed as early as the first pages of his first collection of literary–critical essays, Faux Pas (1943), and as late as The Writing of the Disaster (1980). As we shall see, however, those commentators who have not remarked upon the role of nihilism in Blanchot’s thinking of the literary are in fact repeating one strain in his own engagement with it, namely the conviction that literature may be clearly distinguished from nihilism. That said, there is another strain in Blanchot’s critical writings in which any such watertight distinction between literature and nihilism comes under considerable pressure, and in which the experience granted by literature is arguably nothing other than the experience of nihilism. Only through an analysis of these two strains, and their complex relation to 86

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each other, is it possible to grasp the manner in which nihilism might be said to haunt Blanchot’s thinking of literature (littérature) and of what comes to be thought in his later works, in no small part as a consequence of his reading of Derrida, as writing (écriture). It is in the opening pages of Faux Pas that Blanchot first identifies what he takes to be the ‘naïve calculation’ (naïf calcul) of the nihilist with regard to the negative, a naïvety which, he claims, is avoided by the genuine writer – that is, the writer who experiences writing as anguish (angoisse). According to Blanchot, the naïvety of the nihilist lies in his dream of effecting ‘a destructive work’ (une œuvre destructrice), the negativity of which would be strictly limited and mastered, serving to clear the ground for ‘a limitless perspective of renewal, in the form of limited upheavals’ (Blanchot 2001: 6–7). It is just such a naïve hope that Blanchot would have the anguished writer outwit. Ultimately too canny for any such naïve calculation, the anguished writer is prepared, unlike the nihilist, to commit himself unreservedly to the negative: The hope of the nihilist – to write a work, but a destructive work, representing, by what it is, the undefined possibility of things that will no longer exist – is also foreign to [the writer]. [. . .] He obeys anguish, and anguish commands him to lose himself, without this loss being compensated by any positive value [sans que cette perte soit compensée par aucune valeur positive]. (Blanchot 2001: 6–7) Unlike the writer, then, the nihilist would remain tied to a positive value, the possibility of a new world to be constructed on the tabula rasa of the old. As will become clear in the course of Blanchot’s later writings, the nihilist’s conception of the negative bears a close resemblance here to Hegel’s, since the negative is taken by both the nihilist and the dialectic to be a power that operates in the interests of a possible future. As Blanchot puts it in The Writing of the Disaster, Hegelian negation is ‘destruction in view of possible construction’ (Blanchot 1986: 119). In direct contrast to this, the absolute self-sacrifice of the writer to the negative takes the form of a commitment to the impossible – or, more precisely, to the aporetic experience of both the necessity and the impossibility of writing. In a statement that anticipates by some years Samuel Beckett’s well-known formulation of the artist’s predicament in the first of his Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (1949), Blanchot declares that ‘The writer finds himself in the increasingly ludicrous condition of having nothing to write [de n’avoir rien à écrire], of having no means with which to write it, and of being constrained by the utter necessity

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of always writing it’ (Blanchot 2001: 3).3 But if Blanchot’s writer begins with ‘nothing to write’ (rien à écrire), it soon becomes clear that this does not mean that he is simply lacking material. Rather, ‘Nothingness is his material’ (Le rien est sa matière) (Blanchot 2001: 3). Thus, impossibility lies not in the writer’s being unable to find something to write, but precisely in his being unable to write the nothing in its purity. While the sign of the writer’s importance – in other words, what distinguishes the writer from any other language user – is that he has ‘nothing to say’ (rien à dire) (Blanchot 2001: 4), this nothing is precisely what he cannot say. Absolute negation – that is, a negation without the promise or the anticipation of any positive value – is here both the necessary and the impossible task of the writer: ‘He is looking for a “No” that is not “No” to this, “No” to that, “No to everything”, but “No” pure and simple [le non pur et simple]’ (Blanchot 2001: 3). In the attempt to say this pure ‘No’, however, the writer will always end up saying something – in effect, producing a work that is recognizable in the world as a work. For an example of how a something will always come to contaminate the purity of the nothing that is the artist’s essential material, Blanchot turns to Balzac’s novella The Unknown Masterpiece (1837), in which the painter Frenhofer produces a work that would be unrecognizable as a work were it not for the appearance of a woman’s ‘charming foot’ ( pied charmant) which survives the attempt on the artist’s part to produce the nothing in its purity. This foot is what the artist cannot help presenting in the attempt to present nothing: The unknown masterpiece always lets the tip of a charming foot be seen in a corner, and this delicious foot prevents the work from being completed; but it also prevents the painter from saying, with the greatest feeling of repose, in front of the nothingness of his canvas: ‘Nothing, nothing! Finally there is nothing.’ [‘Rien, rien! Enfin il n’y a rien.’ ] (Blanchot 2001: 16) The artist, then, experiences the impossibility of the ‘“No” pure and simple’, and always ends up producing something despite himself. Although Blanchot himself does not reflect upon the consequences of the artist’s unavoidable failure here, this something – a charming foot, for instance – is of course itself a positive value, and thus the writer is ultimately no less tied to such a value than is the nihilist. So it is that the rigorous distinction between the writer and the nihilist, upon which Blanchot insists from the outset, is already threatened. That difference will come down, it seems, not to what is actually accomplished by the negative,

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but rather to the comportment of the writer on the one hand and of the nihilist on the other. Unlike the nihilist, the writer gives up all commitment to positive values, and is thus not less but more nihilist than the nihilist. That this absolute commitment to the negative nonetheless results in the production of a positive value may be discounted because the writer’s readiness to sacrifice himself to the negative was more thoroughgoing than the nihilist’s. We are returned at this point, however, to the question of naïvety: can Blanchot’s writer really be said to escape the naïvety of the nihilist, given that he commits himself to the negative but ends up producing a positive? And what exactly are we to understand by naïvety here? As we shall see, these are questions that will continue to haunt Blanchot’s thinking of the relation between literature and nihilism for the rest of his writing life.

Literature, scepticism, nihilism: Blanchot after Kojève The opening pages of Faux Pas make it clear, then, that for Blanchot nihilism is a form of naïvety in relation to the negative that is to be radically distinguished from the experience of the negative in literature. That this conception of nihilism as a naïve calculation is no passing whim in Blanchot’s theorization of the literary becomes evident as soon as one turns from this 1943 text to his next major general essay on the literary, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’, first published in 1948 and then included as the final essay in the collection The Work of Fire (1949).4 Here, Blanchot establishes what will remain a fundamental distinction between two conceptions of the negative in his work. On the one hand, there is the negativity of the Hegelian dialectic; that is, negation as a power ( pouvoir) for the production of being in its meaning and truth. It is through this labour of the negative that ‘existence is detached from itself and made significant’ (Blanchot 1995: 343). The figure for this meaningand truth-producing negativity, which Blanchot draws from the preface to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), is death in its possibility: that an accident as such, detached from what circumscribes it, what is bound and is actual only in its context with others, should attain an existence of its own and a separate freedom – this is the tremendous power [ungeheure Macht] of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of the pure ‘I’. Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength. Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of Spirit is not

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the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then, having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. (Hegel 1977: 19) As glossed by Blanchot: ‘Death ends in being; this is man’s hope and his task, because nothingness itself helps to make the world, nothingness is the creator of the world in man as he works and understands’ (Blanchot 1995: 344). Combining Hegel – read by way of Alexandre Kojève’s commentaries on the Phenomenology in his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1947) – with Mallarmé, Blanchot argues that this power is the negativity of language as naming, and again it is a matter of the feminine, although this time as that which is stripped of being: For me to be able to say, ‘This woman,’ I must somehow take her fleshand-blood reality away from her, cause her to be absent, annihilate her. The word gives me the being, but it gives it to me deprived of being. The word is the absence of that being, its nothingness, what is left of it when it has lost being – the very fact that it does not exist. . . . when I say, ‘This woman,’ real death has been announced and is already present in my language; my language means that this person, who is here right now, can be detached from herself, removed from her existence and her presence, and suddenly plunged into a nothingness in which there is no existence or presence. (Blanchot 1995: 322–3) This negation of being effected by language goes for the speaking as well as the spoken being: ‘When I speak, I deny the existence of what I am saying, but I also deny the existence of the person who is saying it’ (Blanchot 1995: 324). As we have seen, this Hegelian form of negation has for its end the production of being in its meaning and truth, and just such a negation constitutes what Blanchot terms one of literature’s two slopes ( pentes, versants): ‘One side of literature is turned toward the movement of negation by which things are separated from themselves and destroyed in order to

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be known, subjugated, communicated’ (Blanchot 1995: 330). In short, negation of this kind produces ‘meaningful prose’ (Blanchot 1995: 332). In so far as it is governed by negation in this Hegelian sense, literature’s ‘only concern is true meaning; its only preoccupation is to safeguard the movement by which this meaning becomes truth’ (Blanchot 1995: 333). For Blanchot, Mallarmé is the ‘master of this art of negation’ (Blanchot 1995: 333). There is, however, another slope, another kind of negativity at work in literature, and, according to Blanchot, this is also to be found in Mallarmé – and, indeed, in all other ‘genuine writers’ (Blanchot 1995: 333). For Blanchot (as for Derrida after him), it is with Mallarmé (anticipated or prefigured by Hölderlin) that literature in the modern sense, literature as the experience of this other negativity, comes about. This negativity does not produce meaning and truth; rather, it leads to the experience of an ‘affirmation’ beyond all negation, an affirmation akin to what Levinas, in Existence and Existents (1947), terms the ‘there is’ (il y a).5 This negativity takes the form not of death in its possibility – that is, Hegelian death as a ‘terrible power’ (ungeheure Macht) – but of what in Faux Pas is already named ‘endless death’ (une mort sans terme) (Blanchot 2001: 3), or death experienced in its impossibility. This other negativity is a negativity in the wilderness, failing or erring, unable to effect the production of meaning and truth, of either being or non-being, and articulable only through a rhetoric of paradox: ‘it manifests existence without being, existence which remains below existence, like an inexorable affirmation, without beginning or end – death as the impossibility of dying’ (Blanchot 1995: 328). In short, this other negativity discloses an irreducible affirmation that cannot be mastered by any ontology or phenomenology. It is: The horror of existence deprived of the world, the process through which whatever ceases to be continues to be, whatever is forgotten is always answerable to memory, whatever dies encounters only the impossibility of dying [l’impossibilité de mourir], what seeks to attain the beyond is always still here. This process is day which has become fatality, consciousness whose light is no longer the lucidity of the vigil but the stupor of lack of sleep, it is existence without being, as poetry tries to capture it behind the meaning of words [le sens des mots], which reject it. (Blanchot 1995: 334; Blanchot’s emphasis) As for literature, its privilege lies in its being precisely that form of language in which this affirmation may be heard: ‘Literature is that experience through which the consciousness discovers its being in its inability to lose consciousness’ (Blanchot 1995: 331). In the works of

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Kafka, this impossibility of dying – which is to say, the impossibility of absolute negation – becomes a ‘theme’. The privilege of literature would lie, then, in its granting us the experience of this affirmation beyond all negation, an affirmation that can be characterized neither as being nor as non-being, but only as ‘existence without being’ (existence sans l’être). And, as in Faux Pas, so too in ‘Literature and the Right to Death’, the privilege of literature is framed by way of a radical distinction between literature on the one hand and nihilism on the other. When, in his analysis of Blanchot’s treatment of nihilism in Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot (2001), Leslie Hill characterizes Blanchot’s The Last Man (1957) as a text in which there is ‘no negativity: no seizing of the origin, no conceptuality, no dialectic, no work, no result. Instead, irreducible affirmation’, and which thus constitutes a resistant ‘response to philosophical nihilism’ (Hill 2001: 251), he is approvingly repeating Blanchot’s own position and thereby falling within that tradition to which Blanchot himself belongs and which is characterized by the privilege that it accords to a certain form of the literary – in this case, what Hill terms ‘“literature”’ (or literature in quotation marks that signal its distance from the philosophical concept of literature) – as that which constitutes the only genuine resistance to nihilism. According to Blanchot, the second slope of literature means that, for all its negativity, the literary work is in fact ‘not a truly negative, destructive act of transformation, but rather the realization of the inability to negate anything’ (Blanchot 1995: 315). Given this, Blanchot identifies the writer’s ‘main temptations’ ( principales tentations) as stoicism, scepticism, and the unhappy consciousness. These three temptations are, of course, derived from Hegel’s Phenomenology. As defined by Hegel, scepticism is a ‘negative attitude towards otherness’ (negative Richtung der Anderssein) (Hegel 1977: 123) that is ultimately self-contradictory: It affirms the nullity [es spricht die Nichtigkeit] of seeing, hearing, etc., yet it is itself seeing, hearing, etc. It affirms the nullity of ethical principles [sittlichen Wesenheiten], and lets its conduct be governed by these very principles. Its deeds and its words always belie one another [widersprechen sich immer] and equally it has itself the doubly contradictory consciousness of unchangeableness and sameness, and of utter contingency and non-identity with itself. But it keeps the poles of this its self-contradiction apart, and adopts the same attitude to it as it does to its purely negative activity [seiner rein negativen Bewegung] in general. (Hegel 1977: 125) Hegel does not, however, explicitly identify scepticism as nihilism, and neither does the word ‘nihilisme’ appear in the section on skepticism

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in Jean Hyppolite’s 1939 French translation of the Phenomenology. Blanchot’s debt to Kojève’s version of Hegel is evident, then, precisely in his following the latter’s labelling of scepticism as ‘nihilist’. In his commentary on this section of the Phenomenology, Kojève states that, out of boredom, ‘The Stoic Slave becomes the sceptic-nihilist Slave [l’Esclave sceptique-nihiliste]’ (Kojève 1980: 54; Kojève’s emphasis). Similarly, in ‘Literature and the Right to Death’, Blanchot identifies the sceptic as a ‘nihilist’ (nihiliste), and proceeds to argue that the sceptic-nihilist ‘does not simply negate this and that by methodical work which slowly transforms each thing: he negates everything at once, and he is obliged to negate everything, since he deals only with everything’ (Blanchot 1995: 318). Later in the essay, Blanchot rearticulates the argument made in Faux Pas that it is a certain nothing (rien) that speaks in literature, but that this speaking of the nothing is not to be confused with nihilism: a nothing demands to speak, nothing speaks, nothing finds its being in speech, and the being of speech is nothing [c’est un rien qui demande à parler, rien ne parle, rien trouve son être dans la parole et l’être de la parole n’est rien]. This formulation explains why literature’s ideal has been the following: to say nothing, to speak in order to say nothing [ne rien dire, parler pour ne rien dire]. That is not the musing of a high-class kind of nihilism [Ce n’est pas là la rêverie d’un nihilisme de luxe]. (Blanchot 1995: 324) Just as in Faux Pas, so here, Blanchot’s thinking of the negativity specific to literature requires that nihilism be taken into account, if only so that it can be dismissed as that which is located safely outside literature, as that other with which literature is above all not to be confused. And yet, in ‘Literature and the Right to Death’, it is the distinction between the Hegelian slope in literature – that is, meaning- and truth-producing negativity – on the one hand, and Blanchot’s definition of nihilism on the other, that threatens to give way, making nihilism itself one of literature’s slopes. It is precisely this possibility that is later articulated by Emmanuel Levinas when he argues that the literary as defined (and indeed practised) by Blanchot appears to incorporate nihilism, although Levinas locates this in the neuter (neutre): I think Maurice Blanchot’s work and thought can be interpreted in two directions at the same time. On one hand, it is the announcement of a loss of meaning, a scattering of discourse, as if one were at the extreme pinnacle of nihilism [l’annonce d’une perte de sens, d’une dissémination du discours, comme si l’on se trouvait à l’extrême pointe du nihilisme] – as if nothingness

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[le néant] itself could no longer be thought peacefully, and had become equivocal to the ear listening to it. Meaning [Le sens], bound to language, in becoming literature, in which it should be fulfilled and exalted, brings us back to meaningless repetition [ressassement insignifiant] – more devoid of meaning than the wandering structure or piecemeal elements that might make it up. We are delivered up to the inhuman, to the frightfulness of the Neuter. That is one direction. (Levinas 1996: 154) Levinas is also at pains, however, to counter this direction by identifying that which, by way of Blanchot’s works, may be conceived in terms of an ethics. Thus, while on the one hand we have a literature that gives the impression of being – within the safety zone of an ‘as if’ (comme si) – the ‘extreme pinnacle of nihilism’, on the other hand we have to consider ‘the world from which Blanchot’s literary space is excluded’, a world that ‘constitutes a totality in its indifference to values’: Blanchot reminds that world that its totality is not total – that the coherent discourse it vaunts does not catch up with another discourse which it fails to silence. That other discourse is troubled by an uninterrupted noise. A difference does not let the world sleep, and troubles the order in which being and non-being are ordered in a dialectic. This Neuter is not a someone, not even a something. It is but the excluded middle that, properly speaking, is not even. Yet there is in it more transcendence than any world-behind-the-worlds [arrière-monde] ever gave a glimpse of. (Levinas 1996: 154–5; Levinas’s emphasis) The possibility that nihilism cannot in fact be located safely outside the literary, and that an ‘as if’ will not suffice to keep literature and nihilism apart, is precisely what Blanchot himself will come to consider in the most explicit fashion, thereby considerably complicating the radical distinction between literature and nihilism that is asserted in his critical writings of the 1940s. In part, this complication is no doubt owing to the impact upon Blanchot of Heidegger’s thinking of nihilism, not least in the essay ‘On the Question of Being’ (1955), in which, as we have seen in Chapter 2, Heidegger challenges Ernst Jünger’s position on the possibility of any step beyond nihilism.

Ambiguities and the limits of the negative In ‘Literature and the Right to Death’, Blanchot claims that Kafka explicitly thematizes that ‘impossibility of death’ or that experience of

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‘existence without being’ – Levinas’s ‘there is’ (il y a) – which sets literature apart from nihilism in its naïvety. In his next major work of literary-critical analysis, The Space of Literature (1955), Blanchot explores just such an experience, principally by way of a series of readings of Kafka and two other modern writers, Mallarmé and Rilke. Blanchot’s aim here is to demonstrate that, for all their differences, Mallarmé, Rilke, and Kafka are exemplary precisely because their works grant us the experience of that ‘impersonal, anonymous affirmation’ beyond all negation which in The Space of Literature will be named ‘the neuter’ (le neutre) (Blanchot 1982: 23). For Blanchot, it is ultimately this neuter voice that characterizes literature and sets it apart from any nihilism. If The Space of Literature continues to develop the relationship between literature and the impossibility of death that is first articulated in the opening essay in Faux Pas, the emphasis now falls on what might be termed the failure of the negative. It is not that, as in ‘Literature and the Right to Death’, literature is characterized by two tendencies of the negative. Rather, in literature the Hegelian negative runs aground. Thus, Mallarmé’s Igitur (1869) is a work governed in the first instance by an attempt to accomplish an absolute negation of being that would be meaning- and truth-producing. As Blanchot puts it, Igitur is ‘not only an exploration but a purification of absence – it is an attempt to make absence possible and to glean possibility from it’ (Blanchot 1982: 110). Identified in ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ as the ‘master’ of the Hegelian art of negation, and in The Space of Literature as an artist ‘fascinated by the desire for mastery’ (Blanchot 1982: 117), Mallarmé is exemplary for Blanchot precisely because his work carries the art of negation as possibility to its absolute limit, at which point, in its very failure, it discloses that which lies beyond all negation: The absence that Mallarmé hoped to render pure is not pure. The night is not perfect, it does not welcome, it does not open. It is not the opposite of day – silence, repose, the cessation of tasks. In the night, silence is speech, and there is no repose, for there is no position. There the incessant and the uninterrupted reign – not the certainty of death achieved, but ‘the eternal torments of Dying’. (Blanchot 1982: 119) In a reading that explicitly counters Georges Poulet’s in The Interior Distance (1952), Blanchot argues that, far from being a work in which ‘voluntary death’ is properly accomplished, Igitur is ‘an abandoned narrative which bears witness to a certitude the poet was unable to maintain. [. . .] the movement which, in the work, is the experience of

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death, the approach to it and its use, is not the movement of possibility – not even of nothingness’s possibility – but rather a movement approaching the point at which the work is put to the test by impossibility’ (Blanchot 1982: 44, n.). This impossibility takes the form of that which resists all negation, that which is irreducible precisely because it belongs neither to being nor to nothingness. What emerges through literature – and herein lies the privilege of literature – is a language of affirmation beyond all possible negation: ‘in language at this point everything reverts to affirmation: in this language what denies affirms. For this language speaks as absence. Wordless, it speaks already; when it ceases, it persists. It is not silent, because in this language silence speaks’ (Blanchot 1982: 51). Those works of literature that may be defined as ‘genuine’ are, for Blanchot, precisely those in which this affirmation is to be heard. As in Faux Pas, so in The Space of Literature, the genuine writer can produce a work in which this affirmation is to be heard only through an act of complete self-sacrifice akin to the ‘absolute throwing away’ (absolutes Wegwerfen) that, as we have seen in Chapter 3, Adorno finds in Beckett: ‘The work requires of the writer that he lose everything he might construe as his own “nature”, that he lose all character and that, ceasing to be linked to others and to himself by the decision which makes him an “I”, he become the empty place where the impersonal affirmation emerges’ (Blanchot 1982: 55). This self-sacrifice is to be distinguished from voluntary death in two respects: first, it is a self-sacrifice without reserve; and, secondly, it fails to result in a complete negation of being, and is thus not meaning-, truth-, and being-producing. In addition to Mallarmé, Kafka remains a touchstone writer for Blanchot, essays on him being included in The Work of Fire (1949), The Space of Literature (1955), The Book to Come (1959), The Infinite Conversation (1969), and Friendship (1971), and these in turn being collected in the 1981 volume De Kafka à Kafka. In the sections devoted to Kafka in The Space of Literature, Blanchot identifies by way of a largely thematic, content-based analysis another failure of the negative, although here the emphasis falls slightly (but nonetheless significantly) differently. With Kafka, for the first time, the savage economy of art is disclosed: art is that which promises ‘salvation’ but only to lure the self into the experience of endless wandering in an outside (dehors) that lies beyond all possible relation to any inside, which is to say beyond the metaphysical distinction between inside and outside.6 Whereas in his analysis of Mallarmé it is the impersonality of the language that affirms beyond all possible negation that is emphasized by Blanchot, in his reading of Kafka the

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emphasis falls upon the experience of expulsion and exile. In The Castle, which Blanchot takes to be Kafka’s most profound exploration of the experience of the outside, the land surveyor’s failure to achieve his aim of penetrating the Castle is read by Blanchot in an essentially allegorical manner as the representation of the writer’s own attempt to appropriate the power of the negative. For Blanchot, then, Kafka’s land surveyor becomes a figure of the writer, who is located ‘outside salvation’ and who ‘belongs to exile, that region where not only is he away from home, but away from himself’ (Blanchot 1982: 77). Like the writer, the land surveyor is a figure of perpetual (if highly paradoxical) exile. He inhabits a ‘desert’ that is ‘never anything but the approach to the desert’. Here, in writing itself, where there is no present, where there is not even a past or future present, where everything is at once already over and forever to come, the land surveyor (as a figure of the writer) endures a negativity (the desert-to-come) that destroys the possibility of maintaining oneself intact precisely because it is a negativity that never operates in the here-and-now. What Hegel refers to as the ‘utter dismemberment’ of death – a dismemberment that would leave no trace at all, no body parts of the kind that Orpheus’s dismemberment at the hands of the Maenads will leave – does not take place. Anticipating Blanchot’s argument in The Writing of the Disaster, one might say that this dismemberment is all the worse for its not taking place. The Kafka that Blanchot produces in The Space of Literature is a writer who is writing in spite of himself, and against the very thing (salvation) that he writes to achieve. For Blanchot, Kafka is, like his work, profoundly double, and this doubleness is aporetic rather than dialectical. There is a Kafka who writes to appropriate the ‘tremendous power of the negative’, and who believes that art itself is that power, and there is another Kafka who senses (albeit obscurely) that art is anything but such a power, who senses that art leads us ever further into the experience of an endless loss of power, where there is no possibility of achieving anything at all, where death itself – as the power of a meaning- and truthproducing negation of being – is no longer possible. These two Kafkas belong together, they are as inseparable as they are irreconcilable, since without the one who believes in the possibility of achieving the work, the other Kafka would never appear. Thus: ‘Kafka, perhaps without knowing it, felt deeply that to write is to surrender to the incessant’ (Blanchot 1982: 81). Had he not felt this, in however obscure a fashion – had he remained faithful to the naïve belief that literature saves – then, according to Blanchot, Kafka would never have been a genuine writer at all.

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As for Rilke, the third writer to whom Blanchot devotes sustained attention in The Space of Literature, here, too, we are presented with a figure who attempts to make of the negative a power that will be meaning- and truth-producing. For Rilke, ‘To sustain, to fashion our nothingness – such is the task. We must be the figurers and the poets of our death’ (Blanchot 1982: 126). In his analysis of Rilke, however, Blanchot emphasizes what he takes to be an essential misapprehension, an attempt to historicize the impossibility of an authentic, meaning-producing death. In The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), Rilke ‘slips from death’s essential neutrality to the idea that this neutrality is but an historical and temporary form of death, the sterile death of big cities’ (Blanchot 1982: 123). As with Mallarmé and Kafka, however, so with Rilke, this labour of the meaning- and truth-producing negative is derailed, resulting in the experience of that affirmation beyond all negation that is the impersonal voice of the neuter. One of the key elements that The Space of Literature adds to Blanchot’s earlier theorizations of the relation between literature and the negative, and to the privilege that is to be accorded to literature, is that literature is now taken to challenge the philosophical conception of the negative as it is articulated not just by Hegel but also by both Nietzsche and Heidegger: ‘The decision to be without being is possibility itself: the possibility of death. Three systems of thought – Hegel’s, Nietzsche’s, Heidegger’s – which attempt to account for this decision and which therefore seem, however much they may oppose each other, to shed light on the destiny of modern man, are all attempts at making death possible’ (Blanchot 1982: 96). This judgement will, in retrospect, be striking above all for its inclusion of Nietzsche, whose thought is rarely considered to constitute a system – Karl Löwith, for instance, arguing that Nietzsche has to be read as non-systematic (see Löwith 1997)7 – and who will later be taken by Blanchot himself as a writer of the fragmentary. In fact, the inclusion of both Heidegger and Nietzsche here extends that philosophical tradition which elsewhere in The Space of Literature is seen as reaching its limit with Hegel. This tradition would take the negative to be a power that may be mastered and made to serve in the production of meaning, truth, and being. This, according to Blanchot, is the negative ‘of Greek thought, of the Enlightenment and of Hegel. This is night that is dissolved or appropriated. The night as that negativity that is the force or “great promise” of the dialectic’ (Blanchot 1982: 167). The other form of the negative – or what Blanchot terms the

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‘other night’ – cannot be appropriated or mastered, remaining ‘always other’ (Blanchot 1982: 168). As we have seen, this ‘other night’ is in fact a form of affirmation, and is figured in 1955 (before Blanchot’s reading of Derrida) not as a written trace but as sound: ‘It is only muffled whispering, a noise one can hardly distinguish from silence, the seeping sands of silence. Not even that. Only the sound of some activity, some foraging or burrowing – at first intermittent, but once perceived it won’t go away’ (Blanchot 1982: 168). If Blanchot produces a history of the negative by associating negation as a meaning- and truth-producing power in the thought of the Greeks, the Enlightenment, and above all Hegel, he also proposes an historical moment for the emergence of literature as that which grants us the experience of the neuter as an affirmation beyond all possible negation. There is considerable evidence, both in The Space of Literature and in other works by Blanchot, to suggest that it is with Mallarmé that he considers literature in this new sense to have arisen. Indeed, commentators on Blanchot generally take Mallarmé to be the inaugural figure in Blanchot’s account of literature. Paul de Man, for instance, claims that there are ‘few figures that recur as the true centers of [Blanchot’s] concern. Mallarmé is undoubtedly one of them’ (de Man 1983: 67–8), while Timothy Clark argues that, for both Blanchot and Derrida, Mallarmé ‘serves as a name to mark all that is most challenging in the literary’ (Clark 1992: 74). Without seeking to refute this claim, one may nonetheless qualify it by observing that, in a move that repeats while also challenging Heidegger’s in the 1930s, both the final section of the main part of The Space of Literature, entitled ‘Literature and Original Experience’, and the final appendix of that volume return us to Hölderlin, which is to say to a poet who was Hegel’s contemporary and whose works of 1801–5, in particular the hymns (or, as Hölderlin termed them, die vaterländischen Gesänge) that Heidegger reads as constituting the surpassing of a nihilism determined as the forgetting of Being (Seinsvergessenheit), through a founding of Being as the homeland (Heimat) for an ‘historical people’. In an argument that shadows Heidegger’s precisely in order to challenge not its privileging of a certain form of the literary in relation to nihilism, but rather the reason for that privilege, Blanchot deploys an explicitly Hölderlinian language in his justification of literature. This move is already being made relatively early in The Space of Literature when Blanchot asserts that ‘in the time of distress which is ours, the time when the gods are missing, the time of absence and exile, art is justified, for it is the intimacy of this distress: the effort to make manifest, through the image, the error of the imaginary, and eventually the ungraspable, forgotten truth which hides

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behind this error’ (Blanchot 1982: 83). Towards the end of the book, Blanchot situates this condition historically: Forgetting, error, the unhappiness of erring can be linked to an historical period: to the time of distress when the gods are absent twice over, because they are no longer there, because they are not yet there. This vacant time is that of error, where we do nothing but err because we lack the certitude of presence and the conditions of a true here. (Blanchot 1982: 246) In claiming that what ‘awakens the work to the experience of its origin’ is precisely the gods’ withdrawal (Blanchot 1982: 233), Blanchot not only privileges Hölderlin – as the poet who names this withdrawal – but also evokes both Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s thinking of nihilism. In other words, the privilege of literature is determined here in relation to the experience of nihilism as that very withdrawal. In the final section of The Space of Literature, Blanchot makes the Hölderlinian connection between art and the sacred (le sacré; das Heilige). Evoking Hölderlin, but challenging Heidegger’s elucidation (Erläuterung) of his poetry, Blanchot claims that ‘The poem names the sacred, and men hear the sacred, not the poem. And yet the poem names the sacred as unnamable; in this silence it speaks the unspeakable. [. . .] The work bespeaks the divine, but only inasmuch as the divine is unspeakable. The work is the presence of the god’s absence, and in this absence it tends to make itself present’ (Blanchot 1982: 230–1). Here it becomes clear that, while Blanchot repeats not only Heidegger’s privileging of Hölderlin but also his thinking of Dichtung in its resistant relation to nihilism, he does not repeat Heidegger’s identification of that resistance as lying in the work’s power to name Being (Sein). Rather, littérature as it arises with Hölderlin – in direct relation to the experience of that double absence of the gods – gives voice to that which precedes both being and non-being, that which Blanchot names the ‘unnamable’ (innommable), the ‘inhuman’, that which is ‘devoid of truth, bereft of justice, without rights’ (Blanchot 1982: 232). The privilege accorded to littérature by Blanchot here is certainly no less great than the privilege accorded to Dichtung by Heidegger, and that privilege is no less intimately related to the thought of nihilism. The key difference between Blanchot and Heidegger, however, is that, according to Blanchot, while literature may still (as in Heidegger’s thinking of Dichtung) be related to authenticity and to a passage beyond subjectivity, it is the experience of error and exile rather than homecoming. In short, the principle of littérature is not a becoming homely (Heimischwerden) but

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precisely a becoming unhomely – unless, that is, error and exile are to be thought as a more originary home, which is in fact the claim reserved by Blanchot for the footnote on the final page of the main text of The Space of Literature: The artist and the poet seem to have received this mission: to call us obstinately back to error, to turn us toward that space where everything we propose, everything we have acquired, everything we are, all that opens upon the earth and in the sky, returns to insignificance, and where what approaches is the nonserious and the nontrue, as if perhaps thence sprang the source of all authenticity. (Blanchot 1982: 247, n. 8) That very Heimatlosigkeit which, according to Heidegger, is our condition in the time of nihilism, and which Dichtung both registers and counters through a becoming homely, becomes in Blanchot the experience that littérature grants us: ‘The poem is exile, and the poet who belongs to it belongs to the dissatisfaction of exile. He is always lost to himself, outside, far from home; he belongs to the foreign [appartient à l’étranger], to the outside which knows no intimacy or limit, and to the separation which Hölderlin names when in his madness he sees rhythm’s infinite space’ (Blanchot 1982: 237). It would appear, then, that Blanchot’s reading of Hölderlin is perfectly antithetical to Heidegger’s, and, more generally, that Blanchot’s littérature is perfectly antithetical to Heidegger’s Dichtung. Whereas the latter is a homecoming into Being, governed by a clear border or limit (Grenze) that would distinguish the foreign (das Fremde) from one’s own (das Eigene), the former is an expulsion into limitless exile, pure homelessness. What Blanchot’s littérature and Heidegger’s Dichtung share, however, is arguably more important than this difference, namely that both are posited as privileged forms of resistance to nihilism. Furthermore, like Heidegger, Blanchot sees the essence of what the former thinks as Dichtung and the latter as littérature as a founding. In a reworking of the Kantian thesis of art’s autonomy – which, as we have seen in Chapter 3, is also at the heart of Adorno’s conception of the aesthetic in its relation to a radical alterity – Blanchot argues that art’s autonomy, its refusal of the world, is what makes it that which, unjustifiable in itself, is the foundation of all justice, a founding by way of a radical reversal that makes of negation an affirmation: Nothing is more important than this absolute autonomy which is refusal and than this refusal which, through a change in sign, is also

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the most prodigious affirmation. For it is the gift, the creative gift, that dispenses without restraint and without justification, that never can be justified yet upon which justice is founded. (Blanchot 1982: 215–16) Thus, although Blanchot does not deploy the term ‘nihilism’ in The Space of Literature, the thought of nihilism can nonetheless be said to haunt that text both as that against which literature will be pitted and as that with which literature constantly threatens to merge. On the one hand, as the experience of an irreducible affirmation beyond the dialectic of affirmation and negation, literature is that privileged form in which the limits of the negative become visible. On the other hand, this very affirmation ‘affirms nothing’ (n’affirme rien) and ‘reveals nothing’ (ne révèle rien) (Blanchot 1982: 26); it is the ‘exhausting futility of repetition’ (Blanchot 1982: 241), and thus closely akin to what for Nietzsche is the most extreme form of nihilism: the thought of the eternal recurrence of the same. Like both Heidegger and Adorno, Blanchot finds it necessary to rely upon the concept of ambiguity in order to think the literary in its relation to nihilism. Towards the end of both ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ and The Space of Literature, Blanchot claims that ‘Literature is language turning into ambiguity [qui se fait ambiguïté]’ (Blanchot 1995: 341), that it is ‘the intertwining of the Yes and of the No, the ebb and flow of the essential ambiguity’ (Blanchot 1982: 239). In ‘Literature and the Right to Death’, the highly problematical distinction between ordinary language (la langue courante) and literary language is said to lie precisely in the former’s limiting of this ambiguity: ‘Every time we speak, we make words into monsters with two faces, one being reality, physical presence, and the other meaning, ideal absence. But ordinary language limits equivocation’ (Blanchot 1995: 341). Unlike ordinary language, literature retains the right (droit) to ‘affix a negative or a positive sign indiscriminately to each of its moments and each of its results’ (Blanchot 1995: 341). It is ultimately this right – and not, as Blanchot’s title for the essay suggests, the right to death (droit à la mort) – that proves to be the essential right of literature. As a result, the work is kept perpetually ‘in suspense in such a way that it can choose whether to take on a positive or a negative value [une valeur positive ou une valeur négative]’ (Blanchot 1995: 342). The privilege of literature lies, then, in this right to ambiguity in the matter of positive and negative values: ‘literature is the form in which this double meaning has chosen to show itself behind the meaning and value of words’ (Blanchot 1995: 344). However, in order to maintain the

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distinction between literature and nihilism, even to the point of excluding nihilism altogether from literature, Blanchot finds it necessary to limit this ambiguity by claiming throughout The Space of Literature that it is affirmation rather than negation that is primary beyond all ambiguity, beyond all intertwining of the ‘Yes’ and the ‘No’, and that the work of art constitutes this affirmation, albeit by way of the negative, which produces that ‘void’ in which this affirmation may take place: ambiguity does not consist only in the incessant movement by which being returns to nothingness and nothingness refers back to being. Ambiguity is no longer the primordial Yes and No in which being and nothingness would be pure identity. The essential ambiguity would lie, rather, in this: that before the beginning, nothingness is not on equal footing with being [le néant n’est pas à égalité avec l’être], but is only the appearance of being’s concealment, or again, that dissimulation is more ‘original’ than negation. (Blanchot 1982: 264, n. 1; Blanchot’s emphasis) Thus, the ambiguity that characterizes literature is ultimately weighted more towards affirmation than it is towards negation, and this precisely because, if literature is to retain its privilege as that which escapes nihilism, without resorting to a dialectical procedure that has already been identified with nihilism, it has to keep nihilism at a safe distance.

The ‘vermin of nihilism’: literature and inexistence Of all Blanchot’s critical writings, it is the late collection The Infinite Conversation (1969) that contains the most substantial explicit analysis of nihilism. This analysis occurs for the most part in the essay on Nietzsche entitled ‘Reflections on Nihilism’, in an essay largely on Albert Camus entitled ‘Reflections on Hell’, and in ‘Literature One More Time’.8 In the first of these three pieces, Blanchot returns to his 1943 characterization of nihilism as a form of naïvety, although he now qualifies that earlier claim by the insertion of an ‘almost’ ( presque). Today, he declares, the ‘thought of nihilism [. . .] seems – and even because of the verifications that time accords it – almost naïve [ presque naïve] and like the still tranquil dream of a “better” age’ (Blanchot 1993: 136). Furthermore, while Nietzsche’s thinking may remain ‘associated with nihilism’, the term ‘nihilism’ itself is ‘flat’ ( plat) (Blanchot 1993: 144, 451, n. 6). The problem with nihilism is not simply terminological, however, for conceptually it is characterized by a fundamental incoherence. As soon as it

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becomes a system, it contradicts itself, and this self-contradiction ‘only brings out its barrenness. The semantic play between the void, or nothingness [le néant] and nothing [rien] shows that it is apparently difficult to negate what has not first been affirmed’ (Blanchot 1993: 451, n. 6). We have seen that it is from Kojève that Blanchot derives the notion of scepticism as nihilism in ‘Literature and the Right to Death’. In ‘Reflections on Nihilism’, what is taken to be the self-contradictory nature of nihilism is derived less from Nietzsche than it is from Camus’s The Rebel (1951) and, again, from Hegel via Kojève’s Introduction (1947), where one finds the following: Man does not succeed in remaining in this sceptical-nihilist attitude [cette attitude sceptico-nihiliste]. He does not succeed because in fact he contradicts himself through his very existence: how and why is one to live when one denies the value and the being of the World and of other men? Thus, to take nihilism seriously is to commit suicide, to cease completely to act and – consequently – to live. (Kojève 1980: 54) In repeating Kojève, Blanchot touches on the key reason for what he will now identify as not simply nihilism’s naïvety but its impossibility. As we have seen, a consistent – and, arguably, the essential – element in Blanchot’s thinking of the literary from the early 1940s is its disclosure of an affirmativity that precedes all negativity. Leslie Hill is no doubt right to emphasize this point in his analysis of Blanchot’s ‘answer’ to nihilism. But this is for from being the end of the story, for it is precisely Blanchot’s own affirmation of this affirmativity preceding all negativity that limits the ambiguity which he repeatedly claims to be the defining feature of literary language. In ‘Reflections on Nihilism’, the impossibility of nihilism is identified as lying in the fact that for the very negativity of nihilism to be realized it requires an affirmation of the negative, a situation most simply expressed in the phrase ‘there is nothing’, in which the ‘there is’ is itself affirmative. This argument is in fact closely akin to Heidegger’s regarding the belonging to Being of the nothing (das Nichts) in What Is Metaphysics? (1929). As for Nietzsche’s own definition of nihilism as the devaluation of the highest values, this, Blanchot claims, ‘can no longer move us, so familiar has it become’ (Blanchot 1993: 144). That said, Blanchot proceeds to turn nihilism back upon itself by way of a rethinking of ‘the nihilist thought par excellence, the thought by which nihilism surpasses itself absolutely by making itself definitively unsurpassable’ (Blanchot 1993: 148), namely the eternal recurrence of the same. This thought,

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reconceived by Blanchot as ressassement éternel and central to his own thinking of writing in The Step Not Beyond and The Writing of the Disaster, is, as he reminds us, for Nietzsche the most extreme form of nihilism. Blanchot’s intervention here returns us to what he had earlier identified as the essentially self-contradictory nature of nihilism. In short, the eternal recurrence of the same as the most extreme form of nihilism is also the experience of the impossibility of nihilism: Until now we thought nihilism was tied to nothingness [néant]. How ill-considered this was: nihilism is tied to being. Nihilism is the impossibility of being done with it and of finding a way out even in that end that is nothingness. It says the impotence of nothingness [impuissance du néant], the false brilliance of its victories; it tells us that when we think nothingness we are still thinking being. Nothing ends, everything begins again; the other is still the same. Midnight is only a dissimulated noon, and the great Noon is the abyss of light from which we can never depart – even through death and the glorious suicide Nietzsche recommends to us. Nihilism thus tells us its final and rather grim truth [sa vérité dernière et assez atroce]: it tells of the impossibility of nihilism. (Blanchot 1993: 149) Blanchot sees this final truth of nihilism as lying in a highly paradoxical reversal. The ‘extreme point of nihilism is precisely there where it reverses itself’, with nihilism being nothing other than ‘this very turning itself, the affirmation that, in passing from the No to the Yes, refutes nihilism, but does nothing other than affirm it, and henceforth extends it to every possible affirmation’ (Blanchot 1993: 150). Blanchot’s principal target here is not Nietzsche’s thinking of nihilism, the paradoxicality of which he deploys in his turn, but rather Heidegger’s thinking of the truth of Being as aletheia or unconcealment. Indeed, just as for Adorno, so for Blanchot, it is Heidegger’s thinking of Being that becomes the very nihilism from which we must free ourselves, not least in our thinking of the literary: ‘Nihilism is invincible as long as, submitting the world to the thought of being, we entertain and seek truth on the basis of the light of its meaning [sens], for it is perhaps in light itself that meaning is dissimulated’ (Blanchot 1993: 162). ‘Reflections on Nihilism’ is significant within Blanchot’s own thinking of nihilism above all, however, because it is in this essay that, no longer treating nihilism simply as a naïve calculation of the negative, he divides nihilism from itself. On the one hand, there is that nihilism from which we must free ourselves by way of an abandonment of truth conceived

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in terms of light and indeed an ontological-phenomenological thinking of the world. On the other hand, when he redetermines nihilism as ‘the impossibility of being done with [being] and of finding a way out even in that end that is nothingness’ (Blanchot 1993: 149), the distinction between nihilism and literature as Blanchot determines it is again shaken, for it is precisely as the experience of an eternal return – as ressassement éternel – in which there can be no escape into absolute nonbeing that literature itself is repeatedly defined by Blanchot. In short, as soon as nihilism is thought as the impossibility of having done with being, it becomes that very affirmation beyond all negation which is to be heard in literature as what Blanchot terms the ‘neuter’. Nihilism would thus reside in literature’s very essence, albeit in the form of nihilism’s own impossibility. That Blanchot takes nihilism considerably more seriously in the ‘Reflections on Nihilism’ than in the opening essay of Faux Pas, that its ruses might require us no longer simply to identify it as a form of naïvety with which we might easily dispense, becomes clearer still in the essay ‘Reflections on Hell’, which was in fact written before ‘Reflections on Nihilism’. Here, Blanchot notes Albert Camus’s claim that ‘We are beginning to leave nihilism behind us’ (quoted in Blanchot 1993: 174). Just as Heidegger in ‘On the Question of Being’ (1955) counters Jünger’s claim in ‘Across the Line’ (1950) that the border marking the end of nihilism may be crossed, so Blanchot counters Camus on the possibility of any such leaving behind of nihilism: ‘Yes, but however assured this affirmation may be, it leaves in its wake a doubt it has not overcome. It is true, we have left nihilism; but this – perhaps – is because we have never even come into it, at least as concerns its collective form rather than the experience of an exceptional self’ (Blanchot 1993: 174–5). Again, far from making a simple, unqualified judgement on nihilism of the kind to be found in both Faux Pas and ‘Literature and the Right to Death’, Blanchot approaches nihilism with care in his analysis of what he takes to be the ruses to which it may resort in order to capture us: ‘It may be, in fact, that what we call nihilism has been at work in this obscure constraint that turns us away from it; that it was the very thing that hides it, the movement of detour making us believe we have always already put nihilism aside. [. . .] To look face-on at nihilism in order to seize it is also what it would be waiting for in order to seize us’ (Blanchot 1993: 177–8; Blanchot’s emphasis). In striking contrast to the position taken on nihilism in his works of the 1940s, Blanchot now locates the naïvety not in nihilism at all, but in the attitude that would take nihilism to be masterable: ‘this naïve

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concern [ce souci, naïf] with tearing the veil might not be the sign of our free desire to see clearly; this supposed lucidity could itself be fascinated, the work of fascination’ (Blanchot 1993: 178). Of course, the assumption underlying this remark is the one underlying Nietzsche’s, Jünger’s, and Heidegger’s analyses of nihilism, namely that it is something to be outwitted, resisted, and overcome, and that this outwitting has to be a canny one. However, just as in ‘Reflections on Nihilism’, so in ‘Reflections on Hell’, nihilism is rethought as double, not simply an other to be countered or resisted, but also that which lies at the heart of the literary experience, that which is located between being and non-being, an endless dying (mort sans terme) or eternal recurrence (ressassement éternel) – in short, without limit or border. This conception of nihilism emerges in Blanchot’s reading of Camus’s absurdist version of the myth of Sisyphus, in which the Sisyphean experience is placed explicitly the under the sign of nihilism: Sisyphus is the approach to this region where even the one who commits suicide by an act that is personal and a will that is resolute collides head-on with death as with a destiny no act can penetrate and that cannot be proposed as an end or a goal. A region that is announced by extreme suffering, by extreme affliction, by the desolation of shadows; a region approached in life by all who, having lost the world, move restlessly between being and nothingness: a swarming mass of inexistence, a proliferation without reality, nihilism’s vermin: ourselves [grouillement d’inexistence, prolifération sans réalité, vermine du nihilisme: nous-mêmes]. (Blanchot 1993: 179; Blanchot’s emphasis) It would be a mistake, however, to assume that Blanchot’s thinking of nihilism follows a clear trajectory of increasing complication, and that he moves from a rather naïve conception of nihilism in its naïvety towards a thinking of it in its radical paradoxicality and uncanniness, with the experience that lies at the heart of the literary (negativity in the wilderness) itself being identified as nihilism. That this is not the case is clear even in The Infinite Conversation, when Blanchot returns explicitly to the question of nihilism in the conversation (entretien) entitled ‘Literature One More Time’. Addressing the question of whether literature in its ‘critical’ and ‘mysteriously negative forces [. . .] dangerously opens itself to a nihilist perspective [une perspective nihiliste]’, he responds: ‘We could say so, if in speaking of nihilism we had the sense that we knew of what we were speaking. But nihilism is precisely one of those words that no longer

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suffices to convey what it points to [Mais le mot nihilisme est précisément l’un de ces mots qui ne suffisent plus à porter ce qu’ils indiquent]’ (Blanchot 1993: 402). Passing over the question – surely, not just one question among others – of which other words might fall into this category, or indeed which other words would not fall into this category, Blanchot proceeds to reiterate the argument made earlier in The Infinite Conversation that nihilism is something that ‘only assails us indirectly’, and that it ‘has always sought to lure us into challenging it immediately and to suggest we would come more openly to the end of it if we were to dare notice, looking straight-on at the Medusa’s head, that she herself is no more than a beautiful face with empty, already petrified eyes’ (Blanchot 1993: 402–3). Rather than develop this assertion into a thinking of how nihilism might be resisted more indirectly, however, Blanchot now recommends that we simply dispense with the term when thinking the specificity of the literary, and he does so in a manner that is strikingly reminiscent of Heidegger’s repeated dismissals of almost all things Latin – in Heidegger’s case, the word Nihilismus being the striking exception: As for nihilism, this dry and in any case Latin word [ce mot sec et latin par surcroît], I think it has ceased to reecho in the direction of what it cannot reach. So let us renounce employing it to situate what might come to us from literature – that is, if what came from literature did not itself always in some sense hold itself back in it, and did not hold literature itself back and as though in retreat. At bottom, if to say plainly of literature that it is creative seems to us to be an indiscreet claim, to say that it is nihilist, or in league with some force of nothingness [quelque puissance de néant], is no less pretentious and indiscreet. (Blanchot 1993: 403) For all his explicit complicating of nihilism as that which would seize us by luring us into addressing it directly, Blanchot’s analysis ends, then, with this call simply to renounce (renoncer) the ‘dry and in any case Latin’ word nihilisme in our thinking of the literary, as though nihilism (both as a word and as a concept) were indeed something of which one could unproblematically decide whether or not to make use (se servir). And yet, to frame the relation – or, more precisely, what he maintains to be the clear non-relation – between literature and nihilism in terms of pretension and indiscretion is striking, not least for the peculiarity of such terms within Blanchot’s literary-critical discourse more generally. Moreover, for all his insistence on our leaving behind this ‘Latin word’, Blanchot will in fact return – and, one might ask, in accordance with

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what strange necessity? – to the word ‘nihilism’ more than once in two of his major late works, The Step Not Beyond and The Writing of the Disaster.

Retreating before the uncanniest of guests In The Step Not Beyond (1973), Blanchot rearticulates the claim made as early as Faux Pas regarding the distinction between the genuine writer and the nihilist by declaring that the writer ‘does not hope enough to stop at nihilism’ (n’espère pas assez pour s’arrêter au nihilisme) (Blanchot 1992: 64). Ten years later, in The Writing of the Disaster (1980), he revisits his Kojève-inspired identification of scepticism and nihilism in ‘Literature and the Right to Death’. Now, however, it is precisely this identification that Blanchot wishes to undo. Whereas in the earlier text the sceptic is defined as a nihilist, in The Writing of the Disaster scepticism is realigned with writing (écriture) as that which is ‘not indubitable doubt; it is not simply nihilist negation [la simple négation nihiliste]: rather, irony. [. . .] Skepticism does not destroy the system; it destroys nothing; it is a sort of gaiety without laughter, which suddenly makes us uninterested in affirmation, in negation: thus it is neutral like all language [neutre comme tout langage]’ (Blanchot 1986: 76). In other words, Blanchot would now save scepticism for écriture, and to do so he has to free it from Kojève’s identification of it as nihilism. In both these late texts, then, Blanchot retreats from the complications introduced into his conception of nihilism in ‘Reflections on Nihilism’ and ‘Reflections on Hell’. And this retreat entails an engagement neither with the question of whether or not there might be a history to the very conception of nihilism as that which is to be resisted or overcome, nor with the thought of nihilism as that which may be in some sense the unavoidable. Certainly, Blanchot’s return to a conception of nihilism as tied to hope or to some form of naïve calculation of the negative can scarcely be said to do justice to the suggestion in The Infinite Conversation that ‘what we call nihilism has been at work in this obscure constraint that turns us away from it; that it was the very thing that hides it, the movement of detour making us believe we have always already put nihilism aside’ (Blanchot 1993: 177; Blanchot’s emphasis). Blanchot’s own critical trajectory with regard to nihilism, and its relation to literature, is characterized precisely by a non-engagement with the possibility that nihilism is in fact that detour which leads us to think that we have dispensed with it, and in so doing only takes firmer hold of us. And yet, Blanchot’s own repeated insistence on the simplicity and indeed the naïvety of nihilism is itself evidence, albeit of a paradoxical

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kind, that while he wishes to dispense with this ‘Latin word’, this is precisely what he cannot do. It is not simply a matter here, however, of Blanchot requiring the concept of nihilism in order to clarify what literature is not, or even of a need to refer to something called ‘nihilism’ because he suspects that his own conception of literature or writing risks being mistaken for nihilism by the naïve reader. Neither is it a question of a simple (and ultimately dialectically surpassable) contradiction between saying and doing: that is, the contradiction at the heart of scepticism, according to Hegel. Rather, as we have seen, nihilism finds its way into the heart of Blanchot’s conception of the literary, but only when it is thought in its doubleness, its impossibility, and its movement of detour. This is certainly not to claim that Blanchot’s conception of literature or of what in his later work goes by the name of writing is simply nihilist. Rather, it is to suggest that his conception of literature and then of writing remains haunted by a guest that is located neither inside nor outside literature or writing. While nihilism may well be, as Blanchot claims, a naïve calculation of the negative, it remains a calculation that Blanchot nonetheless finds himself making on behalf of literature, above all when literature is being thought as that in which a certain affirmation lies deeper than all negation.

5 Bad Violence: Jacques Derrida

We have seen that Heidegger’s deployment of the term Nihilismus in his 1935 lecture course Introduction to Metaphysics, and his politicization of the thinking of Being through the privilege accorded to a certain Volk in the resistance of a nihilism now redetermined as Seinsvergessenheit, not only signals an engagement with Nietzsche that will continue throughout the later 1930s, but also constitutes a countering of the charge of nihilism directed at Heidegger’s own thought in 1933–4. We have also seen that, for all the obvious philosophico-political differences between Adorno’s negative dialectics and Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, ‘nihilism’ enters Adorno’s own lexicon in a similar countering of the charge of nihilism, although in Adorno this countering redetermination and redeployment occurs not only on behalf of Adorno’s own work but also on behalf of that ‘radically darkened art’ which, he claims, reaches its pinnacle in the post-war plays and novels of Samuel Beckett. And the similarities between Adorno’s and Heidegger’s respective deployments of ‘nihilism’ do not end there; for, just as Heidegger locates the consummation of nihilism in Nietzsche, from whom he takes the term without undue concern for its Latinity (to which Blanchot takes such exception), so Adorno characterizes Heideggerian ontology as nihilism. In both Heidegger and Adorno, the countering redeployment of ‘nihilism’, and the accompanying privilege accorded to a certain form of the literary for what is taken to be its power of resistance to nihilism, is supposed to establish a radical and stable distinction between nihilism on the one hand, and non- or rather anti-nihilism on the other. In both cases, however, nihilism returns to haunt the very discourse that would establish that distinction. This haunting is not of a kind that would permit one simply to characterize either Heidegger’s or Adorno’s thought as itself nihilist. Rather, in its very uncanniness, nihilism becomes that 111

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which returns precisely through its being located in the other, be that other Nietzsche (as it is for Heidegger) or Heidegger (as it is for Adorno). To characterize the thought of any of these thinkers as nihilist – and there are plenty of examples of readings of this kind – is to fail to take account of this uncanniness. If the distinction between the nihilist and the non- or anti-nihilist becomes problematical in both Heidegger and Adorno, it is arguably all the more so when, as in the work of Blanchot, the attempt to master ‘nihilism’ takes the form of its outright dismissal – that is, its reduction to a ‘naïve calculation’ of the negative, from which, according to Blanchot, the negativity that operates in literature may be clearly distinguished. In many respects, Blanchot’s attempt to master nihilism, through a dismissal that takes the form of its radical limitation, anticipates the treatment of nihilism in the works of Jacques Derrida, and the consequences of this for deconstruction are considerable. Indeed, Derrida’s thinking of nihilism, and more precisely his repeated insistence upon a clear and unambiguous distinction between deconstruction and nihilism, marks the limit of deconstruction, locating it within the tradition from which it would take its distance. That the privileging of a certain form of the literary should also have its role to play here, as it does in Heidegger, Adorno, and Blanchot, is no mere coincidence.

Reading, misreading, not reading: deconstruction as nihilism Whenever the term ‘nihilism’ occurs in Derrida’s work, it does so as that for which deconstruction is above all not to be mistaken. Although Karen L. Carr claims that the deconstructive response to the charge of nihilism is ‘a kind of indifferent acceptance, as though, properly understood, nihilism is not a significant concern and should not be made out as such’ (Carr 1992: 105), Derrida’s various responses to the perceived charge of nihilism are in fact characterized by anything but indifference. Indeed, for Derrida, to see deconstruction as nihilism is the greatest of all possible misunderstandings, and one that requires unreserved denunciation. This is made clear in ‘Mnemosyne’, the first of three lectures delivered in March 1984 and later published under the title Memoires: For Paul de Man (1986), in which Derrida declares: ‘I especially wish to denounce [dénoncer] the sinister ineptitude of an accusation – that of “nihilism” – which so many major professors [“grands-professeurs”], following the example of minor journalists [médiocres journalistes], have often made against Paul de Man and his friends’ (Derrida 1989a: 21).

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When it comes to the accusation of nihilism being levelled at deconstruction, then, it would seem that the most proper rhetorical recourse is denunciation. That such an accusation is itself characterized as ‘sinister ineptitude’, that it would originate among minor journalists, a phenomenon of the press, and then spread to so-called major professors, who betray their very status as academics by allowing themselves to be tempted into making such an accusation – these claims are striking not least for how strongly they contrast with Derrida’s general tendency to complicate rather than to simplify, and in particular to call into question distinctions such as the one between major and minor. In short, when it comes to nihilism, it would appear that things are very simple indeed: on the one side, there would be deconstruction; on the other, nihilism – to see any relation between the two would be to exhibit the intellectual grasp of a minor journalist. Of course, Derrida counts himself to be among those friends of Paul de Man to whom he refers in Memoires, and he returns to the question of the accusation of nihilism directed at deconstruction more generally on two occasions in a long footnote to ‘Paul de Man’s War’ (1988), the essay prompted by the disclosure of de Man’s having published numerous articles in two Belgian newspapers, Le Soir and Het Vlaamsche Land, between 1940 and 1942, during the German occupation of Belgium and at a time when these publications were controlled by the occupying forces. In this footnote, Derrida asks: ‘Why do people pretend not to see that deconstruction is anything but a nihilism or a skepticism? Why can one still read this claim despite so many texts that explicitly, thematically, and for more than twenty years have been demonstrating the opposite?’ (Derrida 1989a: 259; Derrida’s emphasis). When he returns to this question later in the same footnote, however, Derrida moves beyond this strange defence of deconstruction against the charge of nihilism – in which he claims that the accusation of nihilism is itself a pretence – to locate that very charge within the discourse of both the Nazi occupiers and those who collaborated with them: the accusation of ‘nihilism’, often directed helter-skelter [à tort et à travers] against de Man or against deconstruction in general, not only testifies both to the non-reading [non-lecture] of texts and to a massive lack of sensitivity to the great question – still open and still redoubtable – of nihilism and of metaphysics. This accusation bespeaks either political amnesia or a lack of political culture. Those who toss around the word nihilism so gravely and so lightly should, however, be aware of what they’re doing: under the occupation, the

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‘propagators’ of dangerous ideas were often denounced by accusing them of ‘nihilism’, sometimes in violently antisemitic tracts, and always in the name of a new order, moral and right-thinking [. . .]. (Derrida 1989a: 261) For Derrida, then, not only is deconstruction the ‘opposite’ of nihilism, and not only is the question of ‘nihilism and metaphysics’ – which is the question addressed, above all, by Heidegger after Nietzsche – still ‘open’, but the accusation of nihilism is itself an act with a clear political history: it has its place within the rhetoric of the Far Right and of what in ‘Paul de Man’s War’ Derrida terms ‘the worst’ (le pire) (Derrida 1989a: 204). In an interview with Richard Kearney in the same year as his lectures on de Man were first delivered, Derrida responds no less unreservedly to Kearney’s observation that deconstruction has been read as a ‘strategy of nihilism’ by some commentators: ‘I totally refuse the label of nihilism which has been ascribed to me and my American colleagues. Deconstruction is not an enclosure in nothingness, but an openness towards the other’ (Derrida 1984: 124). As in Memoires, so here, the charge of nihilism is taken by Derrida as being directed not only against a way of thinking but also against the thinker – ad hominem – and more precisely against a group of ‘friends’ and ‘colleagues’. And, as in Memoires, so in the interview with Kearney, the countering of this charge takes the form of a radical – indeed, the most radical – distinction: a total refusal of any possible relation between deconstruction and nihilism. A few years later, in an interview published under the title ‘Heidegger, the Philosopher’s Hell’, in which he answers questions on his reading of Heidegger in Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (1987), Derrida anticipates his interviewer’s words when the latter refers to ‘those who reproach you for your work on the deconstruction of “humanism”, taxing you with . . . ’ as follows: ‘With nihilism, with anti-humanism. . . . You know all the slogans. I am trying, on the contrary, to define deconstruction as a thinking of affirmation’ (Derrida 1995b: 186). To claim that deconstruction is nihilism, then, is not only to misunderstand it, it is to rely upon the language of the slogan. But what, one might ask in the spirit of deconstruction itself, is a slogan? And would it really be possible to distinguish rigorously between slogans or labels (the term used of nihilism in Memoires) on the one hand, and a genuinely philosophical terminology on the other? That the mistaking of deconstruction for nihilism remains an abiding concern of Derrida’s is confirmed when, in an interview with Kristine Mckenna first published in November 2002, he is asked what

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he considers to be ‘the most widely held misconception’ about him and his work. His response both echoes and elaborates upon the one given to Kearney almost two decades earlier: That I’m a skeptical nihilist who doesn’t believe in anything, who thinks nothing has meaning, a text has no meaning. That’s stupid and utterly wrong, and only the people who haven’t read me say this. This misreading of my work began 35 years ago and it’s very difficult to destroy. [. . .] Anyone who reads my work with attention understands that I insist on affirmation and faith, and that I’m full of respect for the texts I read. (Derrida 2005a: 121–2) This particular response to the perceived accusation of nihilism is striking for at least three reasons. First, Derrida dates the misreading of his work as nihilist back thirty-five years – that is to say, to 1967, the year in which Speech and Phenomena, Of Grammatology, and Writing and Difference were first published in France.1 In other words, the misreading of deconstruction as nihilism would date back to the first deployment in book form of the term ‘deconstruction’ (translating and redetermining Heidegger’s term Abbau), as though nihilism were in some sense deconstruction’s shadow or most hostile other. Secondly, Derrida conflates this particular act of misreading with the act of non-reading (non-lecture). To misread Derrida as nihilist is the same as not reading him at all: ‘only the people who haven’t read me say this. This misreading . . .’. As we shall see, the difference between misreading and non-reading is not the only difference that Derrida will find it necessary to negate in the interests of deconstruction when it comes to countering the charge of nihilism. Thirdly, he makes it absolutely clear that deconstruction stands squarely opposed to nihilism. Indeed, the misreading/non-reading of deconstruction as nihilism would itself be the nihilistic gesture par excellence. It is precisely this nihilist misreading/non-reading that, according to Derrida, deconstruction must itself ‘destroy’ in an act of counter-violence, however difficult this destruction may prove to be. Derrida’s response to Mckenna makes it clear that deconstruction is anti-nihilist for three principal reasons: (1) because it is ultimately affirming rather than negating; (2) because it exhibits faith; and (3) because it is respectful. We shall have reason to return to each of these characteristics, since they are crucial to an understanding of Derrida’s own conception of nihilism, which is in fact rather different from the concept of nihilism as he defines it in his response to Mckenna. There, he is referring to what, following Derrida’s own terminology, might be described

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as the journalistic concept of nihilism, namely the belief that all texts and indeed existence itself are ‘meaningless’. What remains perhaps most striking in all of the above responses to the charge that deconstruction is nihilism is the absolute distinction upon which Derrida insists between the two. For, in accordance with a logic that runs throughout Derrida’s entire œuvre, a logic of what he terms ‘originary contamination’ (see, for instance, Derrida 2007: 29), one might reasonably have assumed that a deconstructive response to the charge of nihilism would have taken the form not of a denunciation or a total refusal to contemplate a possible relation between deconstruction and nihilism, but rather of an acknowledgement that deconstruction must necessarily run the risk of nihilism, that it cannot simply locate nihilism safely beyond its own borders, some isolatable other of which there is not the least trace within deconstruction.2 To give just one among many possible examples of Derrida’s insistence upon the risk that deconstruction must run: in ‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone’ (1996), he argues that deconstruction may be characterized as ‘messianic’ – that is, as a ‘messianicity without messianism’ – in its openness to alterity as the ‘coming of the other’, but that this necessarily entails an openness to the possibility of ‘radical evil’, the latter being defined as the reduction to nothing of the other: ‘[The messianic] would be the opening to the future or to the coming of the other as the advent of justice, but without horizon of expectation and without prophetic prefiguration. The coming of the other can only emerge as a singular event when no anticipation sees it coming, when the other and death – and radical evil – can come as a surprise at any moment’ (Derrida 2002a: 56: Derrida’s emphasis). Despite this insistence upon a necessary openness to radical evil, however, when it comes to ‘nihilism’ it is precisely the acknowledgement of such a risk that Derrida refuses to make. Deconstruction must, it seems, be kept safe and sound from any contamination by that which goes by the name – or, rather, the slogan or label – of ‘nihilism’. Furthermore, like Blanchot before him, Derrida seeks to disarm this particular other by mocking it: to see deconstruction as nihilism is to misread/not read his work – and that of his friends and colleagues – in the manner of a minor journalist; it is to betray one’s own ‘sinister ineptitude’; it is to comport oneself in the manner of the ideologues of the Far Right. The very unreservedness with which Derrida rejects any implication of deconstruction in nihilism indicates that what would go by the name of ‘nihilism’ constitutes a very particular threat to deconstruction – precisely because the accusation bespeaks a certain thoughtlessness, a certain misreading/non-reading.

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Not least because Derrida’s own use of the term is bound to an economy of charge and counter-charge that extends beyond his own work to the entire tradition that is the subject of the present book, before undertaking an analysis of his redetermination and redeployment of the concept of nihilism, the kind of threat that it would pose, why he should find it necessary to insist that there is nothing nihilist about deconstruction, and why to speak of deconstruction in relation to nihilism is to misread/not read deconstruction, it is first necessary to consider two of the principal forms taken by the charge of nihilism against deconstruction. Just as for Derrida, so for Gillian Rose in Dialectic of Nihilism: PostStructuralism and Law (1984), the question of deconstruction as nihilism has everything to do with misreading, although, according to Rose, all the misreading is Derrida’s. In a chapter entitled ‘Law and Writing’, Rose first charges Derrida with misreading both Rousseau and Lévi-Strauss in Of Grammatology, this misreading taking the form of a reduction of their thinking of law: ‘By construing and reconstructing Rousseau’s and LéviStrauss’s account of writing as the indicator of their theory of law Derrida reduces their thought to its utopian and anarchist residue’ (Rose 1984: 137). According to Rose, Derrida’s misreadings reach their most extreme form, however, when it comes to Hegel, although all his misreadings would share one essential trait: in each instance, Derrida suppresses or obscures something within the original that he then proceeds to claim for himself. In his reading of Hegel, for instance, ‘It is Derrida who makes all history into the history of philosophy by attributing an abstract identity to Hegel and reserving to himself that comprehension of identity and non-identity, “supplementarity” which he calls différance and says may be formalized’ (Rose 1984: 148). Furthermore, what Derrida takes from Hegel is then turned back against him: in arguing for the comprehensiveness of différance as that which ‘surpasses onto-theology or philosophy’, Derrida is merely ‘rehearsing Hegel’s own argument against Vorstellung, representation, and turning it against Hegel’s idea of philosophy’ (Rose 1984: 160). Rose’s aim here is not simply (although it certainly is in part) to criticize Derrida for having failed to acknowledge his philosophical debts – indeed, for having failed to admit that deconstruction is already contained by Hegel, and that the radicality that Derrida claims for deconstruction is nothing other than Hegelian radicality. For she also seeks to demonstrate that deconstruction is the very antithesis of what it declares itself to be: ‘In order to transform metaphysics into the question of writing Derrida reconstructs while claiming he is deconstructing and closes questions while claiming he is opening them’ (Rose 1984: 131). And this means that, while Derrida may repeat Hegel, and do so in order to

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turn Hegel back against himself, there remains a fundamental difference between Derrida and Hegel, a difference that is nothing other than the difference between nihilism and anti-nihilism. For Rose, as for Derrida, this distinction remains not simply tenable but essential. According to Rose, the nihilism of deconstruction would lie not only in its reductive misreadings, but above all in its closing down of the very question that it claims to open, namely the question of the law. Unlike Hegel, Derrida renders the law simply unknowable: Derrida’s ‘history of writing’ understands law only as dissemblance, not as celebration nor as contestation and hence not as semblance. His history of writing takes the metaphor of writing far more literally than those it indicts. It cannot think the history of writing for it makes its own writing the servant of signification as such: formal, static and ahistorical. [. . .] his reference to writing does not raise the question of the law – it buries it. (Rose 1984: 169–70) The nihilism of deconstruction would lie in its closing down the question of the law through a positing of différance as ‘the origin of law’ and writing as ‘prior to the law’ (Rose 1984: 171). That Rose also claims that Derrida ‘turns law and knowledge into writing’ (Rose 1984: 171) reveals, however, that the nihilism of deconstruction would in fact take two completely distinct forms: on the one hand, the subordination of law to writing, and, on the other hand, the identification of law and writing; and this division is also apparent in the argument that, on the one hand, Derrida repeats Hegel, taking from him what he will then claim as his own and proceed to use against Hegel, while, on the other hand, Hegel can be situated in a stable antithesis to Derrida: ‘Derrida legislates while Hegel seeks to recognize and cease philosophical legislation’ (Rose 1984: 170). Given this doubleness, both deconstruction and the Hegelian dialectic become, on the one hand, nihilist and, on the other hand, non-nihilist. But this, of course, is something that Rose cannot acknowledge, since it would immediately disrupt the stable opposition that she is intent upon establishing between Derrida and Hegel – which is to say, between nihilism and non-nihilism. For as long as that distinction is not problematized, any critique of deconstruction as nihilism will find itself repeating the very gestures it seeks to denounce. If we turn now to Conor Cunningham’s chapter on Derrida in his Genealogy of Nihilism (2002), we find the conviction of deconstruction as nihilism taking a rather different form, although from a position that has no less confidence in the tenability of a watertight distinction between

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nihilism and non-nihilism, and in the possibility of launching a critique of something identifiable as nihilism from safely beyond its borders. In the book as a whole, Cunningham undertakes a critique of what he sees as a long tradition of ‘meontological’ or ‘meontotheological’ thinking originating in Plotinus, and proposes a Trinitarian theology as the only feasible ‘overcoming of nihilism’ (Cunningham 2002: 163). Plotinus is the origin of nihilism as meontotheology because he (not Plato) is the first thinker to posit non-being (or the One beyond being) as the ground of all being: Meontology is evident in the work of Plotinus when he places the One beyond being, which means that being is grounded in non-being (meon). When Deleuze grounds thought in what he calls ‘nonthought’ he appears to place his philosophy within a meontotheological legacy. The same goes for Heidegger when he speaks of Being by speaking of das Nicht. This tradition does not, therefore, evoke the notion of the ultimate something employed by ontotheology. Instead, the ultimate nothing governs its logic. In contrast to ontotheology, questions are not asked by one final answer: the something. Rather, there is but one question asked an infinity of times by the nothing. (Cunningham 2002: xiii; Cunningham’s emphasis) In an argument that bears some resemblance to Giorgio Agamben’s (to which we shall turn in the next chapter), Cunningham claims that Derrida belongs to this meontotheological tradition because he too posits a ‘foundational nothing’ (Cunningham 2002: 162). In Derrida, this nothing is that which is beyond or outside the text (texte). As is often the case when Derrida is charged with nihilism, Cunningham’s reading is based not on the analysis of any specific work, but rather on what, for better or worse, has become perhaps Derrida’s most well-known assertion, namely that ‘There is nothing outside of the text’ (Derrida 1976: 158), which Cunningham takes to mean that beyond language there is only the nothing. In a twist that constitutes both the originality and the risk of his reading, Cunningham proceeds to argue that, for Derrida, not only is the nothing outside language, but it is also inside it, as that which language says: ‘language does not say something, but instead says nothing as something’ (Cunningham 2002: 156). It is this rendering of the nothing as something that would tie Derrida’s thinking to that of Plotinus, in both of which one finds what Cunningham terms the ‘realized logic of nihilism’. Just as Plotinus grounds being in the One beyond being, so Derrida ‘grounds the Text in the Nothing, which is said to reside outside

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it’ (Cunningham 2002: xii). As that which precedes both presence and absence, différance and the trace are instances of the ‘nothing as something’. The Derridean trace is essentially the Plotinian trace (ikhnos) of the One (as non-being). If Derrida’s thinking is dualistic in its founding distinction between the text (as language) and the nothing (as that which is outside language), this dualism is ultimately superseded by a Plotinian monism: language is itself nothing. It is for this reason that, in Derrida, ‘all difference is the same difference and for this reason that it is indifferent’ (Cunningham 2002: 162; Cunningham’s emphasis). It should be clear from the above summary of Cunningham’s argument that in order to make the case that deconstruction is nihilist (or meontotheological) in its positing of a foundational nothing, Cunningham has to take dubious advantage of the fact that Gayatri Spivak’s English translation of De la grammatologie has a substantivizing effect on the ‘nothing’ that the original French does not. The French text reads ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’, not ‘il n’y a que le rien hors du texte’ or even ‘il n’y a rien hors du texte’. Furthermore, Cunningham’s capitalization of the words ‘Text’ and ‘Nothing’ is a clear act of aggression not only against both the original French and the English translation, but also against Derrida’s justifications for the very absence of such capitalization. These, however, are far from being the only instances of hermeneutic violence in Cunningham’s reading of Derrida. Despite the latter’s repeated insistence that when he refers to text (texte) he does not mean language (langage), Cunningham immediately conflates the two, claiming that Derrida ‘argues that language cannot have an outside’ (Cunningham 2002: 153). Cunningham’s attempt to justify this move on the grounds that Derrida’s thinking of language is ‘post-linguistic’, and that by text he means language in a post-linguistic sense, is problematical, to say the least. More dubiously still, Cunningham fails to engage with Derrida’s thinking of the finite beyond the principle of identity, claiming that, for Derrida, ‘language is always itself, language is always language. Consequently all signification is inside. Only nothing is outside language’ (Cunningham 2002: 156; Cunningham’s emphasis). One would certainly look in vain for any such statement in Derrida, for whom, in accordance with the principles of originary contamination and autoimmunity, nothing is ever quite itself. Indeed, Derrida insists that it is precisely beyond language that would be located that ‘other’ towards which deconstruction directs all its attention, and which, as we shall see, would ultimately justify it on ethical grounds: Deconstruction is always deeply concerned with the ‘other’ of language. I never cease to be surprised by critics who see my work as a

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declaration that there is nothing beyond language, that we are imprisoned in language; it is, in fact, saying the exact opposite. The critique of logocentrism is above all else the search for the ‘other’ and the ‘other of language’. (Derrida 1984: 123) This is not to say, however, that Cunningham’s claim that deconstruction is the ‘realized logic of nihilism’ is simply an instance of non-reading (non-lecture). Rather, in an irony that is characteristic of the fate of the concept of nihilism, in redefining and redeploying this concept in the interests of a critique orientated towards the ‘overcoming of nihilism’, Cunningham’s ‘genealogy of nihilism’ inscribes itself within the very tradition to which it would consign deconstruction, as indeed would any attempt to critique deconstruction as nihilism. In fact, far from demonstrating that deconstruction is simply a new form of nihilism, an analysis of Derrida’s own redeployment of the concept, and his departure not only from what he takes to be the journalistic notion of nihilism (as the belief in meaninglessness or an ‘enclosure in nothingness’) but also from existing philosophical conceptions of nihilism (above all, Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s), reveals that, for all its concern with the uncanny (das Unheimliche), deconstruction finds itself haunted by nihilism precisely through what it takes to be the only genuine resistance to nihilism.

‘Rather than nothing’: deconstruction versus nihilism The nature of Derrida’s own redetermination of the concept of nihilism is indicated in his response to the question regarding misconceptions of deconstruction. As we have seen, in countering the charge that deconstruction is nihilism, Derrida claims that ‘Anyone who reads my work with attention understands that I insist on affirmation and faith, and that I’m full of respect for the texts I read’ (Derrida 2005a: 122), and that ‘Deconstruction is not an enclosure in nothingness, but an openness towards the other’ (Derrida 1984: 124). Breaking with Heidegger’s ontological determination of nihilism as the forgetting of Being, then, Derrida redetermines nihilism as the negation of, absence of faith in, and disrespect for ‘the other’. As that which works against nihilism thus conceived, deconstruction is ‘a positive response to an alterity which necessarily calls, summons or motivates it’ (Derrida 1984: 118; emphasis added); deconstruction affirms, has faith in, and exhibits ‘respect for the other’ in its absolute alterity (Derrida 2001: 63). Whereas nihilism would close down any space for the other, deconstruction works to keep open that space – the ‘future’ as the ‘to come’ (à venir) – from which the

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other would arrive in its ‘im-possibility’, which is to say beyond what Derrida sees as the classic metaphysical opposition between the possible and the impossible.3 If this deconstructive affirmation is closely akin to the Nietzschean Bejahung, a crucial difference lies in the fact that whereas Nietzsche calls for a countering of nihilism through an affirmation of the eternal recurrence of the same, Derrida calls for an affirmation of the singular coming of the other. As a practice of reading, this affirmation takes the form of a ‘countersigning’ of the text being read, a countersigning that does not seek to master the text, is not an attempt to exhaust it through the disclosure of its meaning or meanings. As Derrida puts it in an interview with Evelyne Grossman in 2003: ‘the duty of the reader– interpreter is to write while letting the other speak, or so as to let the other speak’ (Derrida 2005c: 166–7). Each and every one of Derrida’s own texts is to be read, then, as a singular, countersigning attempt to let the other speak. And, for Derrida, this imperative is both ethical and political in nature (see Derrida 2005c: 166). The negation of alterity; an absence of faith in the coming of the other; absolute disrespect for the other in its otherness – in ‘I Have a Taste for the Secret’ (2001), Derrida thinks these three aspects of nihilism together under the rubric of what he terms ‘bad violence’, which is to say a violence that is ‘impoverishing, repetitive, mechanical, that does not open the future, does not leave room for the other’, a violence that ‘homogenizes and effaces singularity’ (Derrida 2001: 92). It is just such a bad violence that Derrida seeks both to reveal and to challenge in every field, but above all in those of philosophy and politics. For Derrida, as for Adorno before him, nihilism as bad violence finds an extreme incarnation in Nazism, and while he refuses to endorse what he takes to be a far too simplifying reading of Heidegger’s thought as essentially or even predominantly National Socialist in nature, Derrida is nonetheless prepared in Of Spirit to see the ‘worst’ in Heidegger’s 1933 Rectoral Address, namely ‘the sanctioning of Nazism, and the gesture that is still metaphysical’ (Derrida 1989b: 40). In his reading of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ (1921), in Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’ (1994), Derrida finds in Benjamin’s concept of mythological violence (mythische Gewalt) another name for the bad violence of nihilism – ‘the bad violence of the law, that is, mythological violence’ (Derrida 2002a: 297; Derrida’s emphasis) – and proceeds to imagine a Benjaminian interpretation of Nazism in terms of this conception of violence. If Nazism may be identified as ‘the final achievement of the logic of mythological violence’, then this is because it seeks ‘to exclude the other witness, to destroy the witness of the other order, of a divine violence whose justice is irreducible to law, of

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a violence heterogeneous to the order of both law and right (be it that of human rights) or of the order of representation and of myth’ (Derrida 2002a: 295–6). Although the notion of a justice ( justice) beyond, and absolutely distinct from, all law (droit) is central to his own thinking of deconstruction, Derrida nonetheless distances himself here from the idea that divine violence (göttliche Gewalt) could be an adequate or ethically acceptable response to mythological violence, or that the justice beyond all law may be thought as divine violence in the manner that Benjamin conceives it: I do not know whether from this nameless thing that one calls the ‘final solution’ one can draw something that still deserves the name of a lesson [enseignement]. But if there is a lesson to be drawn [. . .], the lesson that we could draw today – and if we can do so then we must [et si nous le pouvons nous le devons] – is that we must think, know, represent for ourselves, formalize, judge the possible complicity among all these discourses and the worst (here the ‘final solution’). In my view, this defines a task and a responsibility the theme of which I have not been able to read in either Benjaminian ‘destruction’ or Heideggerian ‘Destruktion’. (Derrida 2002a: 298; Derrida’s emphasis) However, while insisting that deconstruction is to be distinguished from both Benjaminian and Heideggerian forms of Destruktion, Derrida certainly does not see deconstruction as purely non-violent in its response to the bad violence of nihilism. Indeed, as that which works against bad violence, deconstruction may be seen as good violence; that is, a violence which discloses difference within identity, alterity within the same, contamination within the ostensibly pure, and in so doing lets the other speak. This distinction between good and bad violence – or between violence and brutality (see Derrida 2001: 91) – is not merely one distinction among others; for, as Derrida acknowledges when he poses the question ‘Why deconstruct?’, without such a distinction deconstruction simply could not justify itself, becoming merely one operation among others. Just as Heidegger finds it necessary to appeal to the worth (Würde) of Being in order to justify his own thinking of Being, so Derrida finds it necessary to appeal to the value (valeur) of the other: I must have had occasion to say, for example, that it’s better that there be a future [avenir], and that I move in the direction of deconstruction because it is what comes [qui vient], and it’s better that there be a future, rather than nothing. For something to come there has to be a future, and thus if there is a categorical imperative, it consists in doing

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everything for the future to remain open. I am strongly tempted to say this, but then – in the name of what would the future be worth more than the past? More than repetition? Why would the event be preferable to the non-event? Here I might find something that resembles an ethical dimension, because the future is the opening in which the other happens [arrive], and it is the value of the other or of alterity that, ultimately, would be the justification. Ultimately, that is my way of interpreting the messianic. The other may come, or he may not. I don’t want to programme him, but rather to leave a place for him to come if he comes. It is the ethic of hospitality. (Derrida 2001: 82–3) Here, then, Derrida is led to think the ‘better’ that would justify deconstruction in ethical terms, with deconstruction itself being governed by an ethic of hospitality, a respectful openness towards the other in its otherness, a respect that would seek neither to integrate nor to exclude the other, but to let it speak – ‘rather than nothing’. Deconstruction, it seems, is no less governed by a new categorical imperative than is Adorno’s negative dialectics. However, on that occasion to which he refers in the above passage, when he claimed that ‘it’s better that there be a future, rather than nothing’ – namely, in a text entitled ‘Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and Other Small Seismisms’ (1990) – Derrida locates this ‘better’ as unambiguously prior to any ethics, claiming that ‘simply, it is better that something happen. That’s all: that something happen, that’s what is better, that’s all. But it is a breathtaking choice: it precedes all ethics, all politics, all aesthetics, all historical and social reality’ (Derrida 1990: 81). This latter position is certainly in line with the claim made in Of Grammatology that deconstruction must think a violence which not only precedes all ethics – in other words, a violence that could be termed neither good nor bad – but is itself the ‘nonethical opening’ of ethics: There is no ethics without the presence of the other but also, and consequently, without absence, dissimulation, detour, difference, writing. The arche-writing is the origin of morality as of immorality. The nonethical opening of ethics. A violent opening. As in the case of the vulgar concept of writing, the ethical instance of violence must be rigorously suspended in order to repeat the genealogy of morals. (Derrida 1976: 193–40; Derrida’s emphasis) For all his concern with establishing a distinction between deconstruction and Heideggerian Destruktion, by arguing that there can be a purely

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non-ethical opening of ethics Derrida echoes Heidegger’s claim in ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (1955) that the essence of technology is nothing technological (see Heidegger 1977: 4), a claim that Derrida explicitly challenges on more than one occasion. In fact, as the above quotations suggest, Derrida slips between ethicalizing and deethicalizing that violence which would open the future for the other ‘rather than nothing’, just as he repeatedly slips from a rhetoric of necessity to a rhetoric of obligation in his thinking of the ‘il faut’ that would govern deconstruction, such that deconstruction becomes that which is both unavoidable (it is always already at work) and that to which we should commit ourselves. Ultimately, the problem that Derrida faces here is that of deconstruction’s justification when it comes to the charge of nihilism. In responding to the question ‘Why deconstruct?’ – or even: why ‘rather than nothing’? – Derrida finds it necessary to appeal to a value that is indeconstructible. That, for Derrida, there is indeed such an indeconstructible is made clear in Force of Law, in which he argues that, unlike law, justice thought as that which ‘not only exceeds or contradicts law but also, perhaps, has no relation to law’ is ‘not deconstructible’ (n’est pas déconstructible), and that this indeconstructible justice is quite simply ‘the experience of absolute alterity [altérité absolue]’ (Derrida 2002a: 233, 243, 257). Justice thus conceived is, he asserts, ‘Invincible to all skepticism’ and proof that deconstruction – which ‘is justice’ – ‘would not at all correspond (though certain people have an interest in spreading this confusion) to a quasi-nihilistic abdication before the ethico-politicojuridicial question of justice’ (Derrida 2002a: 257, 243, 247; Derrida’s emphasis). In the face of the charge of nihilism, then, deconstruction as an ethic of hospitality may be justified only through an appeal to the indeconstructible value of the other, an other that comes from the future as that which is not merely other than nothing, but better than nothing. And if, at different moments in Derrida’s work, this ‘better’ is characterized, on the one hand, as ethical, and, on the other hand, as prior to the ethical, then this is because it is the site of a resistance of nihilism in which both the subjective and the objective genitive are operative. In ‘Heidegger, the Philosopher’s Hell’, Derrida explains that in the reading of Heidegger that he offers in Of Spirit he aims to trace the ‘limits of his [Heidegger’s] own deconstruction’ (Derrida 1995b: 187). In turn, the limits of Derridean deconstruction become apparent when, in attempting to justify deconstruction, Derrida finds it necessary to identify the value of the other as indeconstructible, and to impose the nothing as a limit on the other; for it would seem that the other in its

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indeconstructible value as that which remains to come cannot take the form of the nothing or the no other. This (non)-event of the other as nothing, as no other, or as no future (even beyond the thought of the future in its im-possibility), is that without which deconstruction cannot survive the charge of nihilism, if only as that against which deconstruction directs all its powers of resistance. Deconstruction may be said to be haunted, then, and not just de facto, by the bad violence of nihilism as what might be termed its other other, that without which it would lose all force and yet that against which it musters all its force. In Derrida’s thinking of the literary, and the privilege that he accords it, this haunting arguably reaches its most extreme form.

Literature, or the ‘nothing-ing of nothing’ That the privilege Derrida accords to literature is owing to what he sees as its particular power of resistance to nihilism redetermined as bad violence is made clear in one of his own deployments of the term. In an interview with Derek Attridge in April 1989, later published under the title ‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’, Derrida argues that there is a ‘certain nihilism’ which has to be thought as divided, at once inside and outside metaphysics, and that the singularity of the works of Samuel Beckett lies precisely in the fact that in those works ‘these two possibilities are in the greatest possible proximity and competition’. Just as Adorno defends Beckett against Lukács’s claim that his works constitute a ‘fully standardized nihilism’ while also identifying a ‘nihilistic mysticism’ in Beckett, so Derrida sees Beckett’s works as both ‘nihilist’ and ‘not nihilist’. However, whereas Adorno argues that the apparent nihilism in Beckett counters the real nihilism at work in the administered world, Derrida locates the nihilism in Beckett at the thematic, ideological, or semantic level, with that which is ‘not nihilist’ lying in the ‘composition, the rhetoric, the construction and the rhythm of his works, even the ones that seem the most “decomposed”’. It is precisely this non-nihilist element that, according to Derrida, “‘remains” finally the most “interesting”, that’s the work, the signature, this remainder which remains when the thematics is exhausted’ (Derrida 1992: 61). In other words, the resistance to nihilism in Beckett’s œuvre is located in that which makes it literature, for which any content (not least ‘nihilism’) would be possible and, for that very reason, of no value in the determination of Beckett’s (or indeed any other writer’s) texts as literature. That Derrida takes a certain kind of literary practice to be a form of resistance to nihilism is also clear in an early essay on Artaud entitled

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‘The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation’ (1966). Here, Derrida distinguishes the Artaudian Theatre of Cruelty from the theatre of representation, the latter being a form of ‘theatrical nihilism’: All theater that privileges speech or rather the verb, all theater of words, even if this privilege becomes that of a speech which is self-destructive, which once more becomes gesture of hopeless reoccurrence, a negative relation of speech to itself, theatrical nihilism [nihilisme théâtral], what is still called the theater of the absurd. Such a theater would not only be consumed by speech, and would not destroy the functioning of the classical stage, but it would also not be, in the sense understood by Artaud (and doubtless by Nietzsche), an affirmation. (Derrida 1978: 243–4; Derrida’s emphasis) In Martin Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd (1962), Beckett is presented as the foremost figure in the theatre of the absurd, and, as the above comments on Artaud indicate, the nihilism in Beckett would lie precisely in those elements linking him to this particular theatrical movement, in which speech turns back upon itself self-destructively. What Beckett would share with Artaud, however, is a certain affirmation, which in Beckett lies in a composition or rhythm operating at a level before or beyond the semantic. The privilege that Derrida accords to the literary in its resistance to bad violence has to be understood, however, not as a purely intra-literary one; for that resistance is a resistance to the bad violence of metaphysics, as is made clear in Of Grammatology when Derrida claims that the ‘necessary decentering’ of logocentrism cannot be a philosophic or scientific act as such, since it is a question of dislocating, through access to another system linking speech and writing, the founding categories of language and the grammar of the epistémè. [. . .] It was normal that the breakthrough was more secure and more penetrating on the side of literature and poetic writing: normal also that it, like Nietzsche, at first destroyed and caused to vacillate the transcendental authority and dominant category of the epistémè: being. This is the meaning of the work of Fenellosa whose influence upon Ezra Pound and his poetics is well-known: this irreducibly graphic poetics was, with that of Mallarmé, the first break in the most entrenched Western tradition. (Derrida 1976: 92) The claim that it is to literature that one must turn for the first break with the bad violence of the Western tradition is reiterated on numerous

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occasions in Derrida’s later writings, and, in ‘Fichus’, the speech he delivered on being awarded the Adorno Prize in 2001, Derrida acknowledges that what he ‘shared most easily with Adorno, even took from him, as did other French philosophers – although again in different ways – is his interest in literature and in what, like the other arts, it can critically decenter in the field of university philosophy’ (Derrida 2005b: 180). Each of Derrida’s readings of literary texts is punctuated by the claim that philosophy cannot master the literary, a claim that is also made by Heidegger in his lectures on Hölderlin and by Adorno in Aesthetic Theory. To give just two examples: in Shibboleth: For Paul Celan (1986), Derrida asserts that ‘Perhaps philosophy, as such, and insofar as it makes use of the question “What is . . .?”, has nothing essential to say about what dates from Celan or about what Celan says or makes of the date – which might in turn say something to us, perhaps, about philosophy’ (Derrida 2005c: 14); and, in H. C. for Life, That Is to Say . . . (2000), he claims that the works of Hélène Cixous ‘call the best protected securities into question once and for all: genre, gender, filiation, proper noun, identity, cultural heritage, the distinction between faith and knowledge, between theory and practice, between philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literature, between historical memory and political urgency, etc.’ (Derrida 2006b: 138; Derrida’s emphasis). In order to understand how the literary might resist or counter bad violence, one has to follow Derrida’s deconstruction of the very category of literature. This deconstruction is undertaken relatively early, in the reading of Mallarmé in Dissemination (1972). We have seen that, in Of Grammatology, Derrida assigns to Mallarmé the honour of having accomplished the ‘first break in the most entrenched Western tradition’, and, as Timothy Clark observes, Mallarmé is not simply one writer among others for Derrida; indeed, ‘The name of Mallarmé serves to mark the emergence of literature in Derrida’s limited, specialised sense’ (Clark 1992: 17–18). As Clark goes on to point out, in taking Mallarmé as the decisive figure in the emergence of literature in a new sense, Derrida follows Blanchot, even if Derrida’s treatment of Mallarmé in Dissemination differs from Blanchot’s in the chapters on Mallarmé in The Space of Literature (1955) and The Book to Come (1959), above all in Derrida’s attention to the non-semantic elements in Mallarmé’s work. As we shall see in Chapter 8, Mallarmé is also accorded an inaugural role by Alain Badiou, although as part of an attempt to break completely with the Nietzschean– Heideggerian tradition to which Badiou sees both Blanchot and Derrida as belonging. The concept of literature that Derrida traces back to Mallarmé is one that makes it what, in his 1989 interview with Derek Attridge, he terms

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a ‘privileged guiding thread’ in the ‘modern period’ – a period the limits of which remain far from easy to determine. This privilege is located in literature’s ‘revealing power’, in its having the capacity to grant an insight into ‘writing in general’, which is to say into différance: it is quite possible that literary writing in the modern period is more than one example among others, rather a privileged guiding thread for access to the general structure of textuality [. . .]. What literature ‘does’ with language holds a revealing power which is certainly not unique, which it can share up to a point with law, for example with judicial language, but which in a given historical situation (precisely our own, and this is one more reason for feeling concerned, provoked, summoned by ‘the question of literature’) teaches us more, and even the ‘essential’, about writing in general, about the philosophical or scientific (for example linguistic) limits of the interpretation of writing. (Derrida 1992: 71–2) For Derrida, as for Blanchot before him, the break effected by Mallarmé occurs through literature turning back upon itself, through its ‘suspended relation to meaning and reference’ (Derrida 1992: 47; Derrida’s emphasis). Crucially, however, this suspension does not result in a pure, hermetically sealed self-referentiality. Rather, the singularity of the literary act lies in the fact that literature departs from its own essence, exceeds itself in the very act of turning back upon itself. Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’ (1919) is, for Derrida, a literary event in just this sense: [‘Before the Law’] points obliquely to literature, speaking of itself as a literary effect – and thereby exceeding the literature of which it speaks. But is it not necessary for all literature to exceed literature? What would be a literature that would be only what it is, literature? It would no longer be itself if it were itself. (Derrida 1992: 215) A similarly paradoxical claim is made of Cixous’s work: it is ‘literary through and through’ because it ‘goes beyond literature, just as it goes beyond autobiography’ (Derrida 2006b: 12). If literature is defined, however, as that which exceeds its own essence, truth, or being, then one can scarcely claim that it exists. As Derrida puts it in ‘The Double Session’ (in Dissemination): If this handbook of literature [Mallarmé’s Mimique] meant to say something, which we now have some reason to doubt, it would proclaim first of all that there is no – or hardly any, ever so little [à peine, si

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peu de] – literature; that in any event there is no essence of literature, no truth of literature, no literary-being or being-literary of literature. (Derrida 1981: 223; Derrida’s emphasis) That said, Derrida insists that there remains ‘something irreducible in poetic or literary experience’ (Derrida 1992: 50). Indeed, if ‘the existence of something like a literary reality in itself will always remain problematic’, this is because the ‘literary event is perhaps more of an event (because less natural) than any other’ (Derrida 1992: 73; Derrida’s emphasis). In Demeure (1998), in which he proposes a reading of Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death (1994), Derrida sets out to test this hypothesis that the literary event is more of an event than any other, or, as he puts it in Demeure, that ‘There is no essence or substance of literature: literature is not. It does not exist. It does not remain at home, abidingly [à demeure] in the identity of a nature or even of a historical being identical with itself’ (Derrida 2000: 28; Derrida’s emphasis). In Blanchot’s text, Derrida sees this not-remaining-at-home taking the form of an ‘undecidable’ relation between fiction and testimony. The singularity of the literary lies, however, not simply in its not remaining ‘at home, abidingly in the identity of a nature’, but also – and, indeed, above all – in its disclosing this departure from itself. While, according to Derrida, there is nothing that remains abidingly in the identity of a nature, since nothing escapes the play of différance, literature would differ from all other forms of non-abidance on account of its power (pouvoir) to reveal that it is not governed by the principle of identity. Not only does literature call the principle of identity into question, but it does so in a manner that, in the modern period, is more revealing than any such calling into question within other linguistic acts. A work by Cixous, for instance, ‘teaches us to worry about the essence of literature, of fiction, of the institution thus named and about everything one calls identity’ (Derrida 2006b: 38). It is precisely in its departing from its own essence that literature opens itself to the other, and ultimately it is on account of what he takes to be this self-revealing openness to the other that literature is privileged by Derrida. It is for this reason that literature becomes our greatest resource against that bad violence – or nihilism – which would reduce the other to nothing. This point becomes clear in Che cos’è la poesia? (1990), in which Derrida counters Heidegger’s conception of poetry as Dichtung by rethinking poetry – la poesia – as the ‘coming of (from) the other [venue de l’autre]’ (Derrida 1995b: 297). The poem is that which ‘I never sign(s) [. . .]. The other sign(s)’ (Un poème je ne le signe jamais. L’autre signe)

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(Derrida 1995b: 299). The poem is, then, that in which we experience the language of the other in its singularity; in relating back to itself, it departs from itself, opening the space of and for the future as that which is neither programmed nor anticipated: ‘it [the poem] never relates back to itself, it never moves by itself like those other machines, bringers of death [ces engins porteurs de mort]’ (Derrida 1995b: 291, 299). If the poem is radically opposed to the death-bringing violence of the machine – or nihilism as what Heidegger thinks as technology (Technik) – it is no less opposed to Heidegger’s conception of the work of art (Kunstwerk) as that which counters technology by ‘open[ing] up, in its own way, the being of beings’, or as the ‘setting-itself-to-work of truth’ (Heidegger 2002: 19). Indeed, one might even go so far as to say that, for Derrida, Heidegger’s conception of the work of art in The Origin of the Work of Art is itself aligned with the ‘bringers of death’. As hérisson or istrice (hedgehog), the poem takes its distance from the pure (rein), the proper (eigentlich), and the determination of truth as unconcealment (aletheia): ‘Most of all do not let the hérisson be led back into the circus or the menagerie of poiesis: nothing to be done (poiein), neither “pure poetry”, nor pure rhetoric, nor reine Sprache, nor “setting-forth-of-truthin-the-work”’ (Derrida 1995b: 297). For all his distancing of la poesia from Heideggerian Dichtung, however, it is nonetheless the case that Derrida remains very much aligned with Heidegger precisely in his thinking of the poem as that which stands against nihilism as the ‘bad violence’ of the death-bringing machine. That the literary is to be thought above all as that which resists such bad violence through its openness to the other is also the principle underlying Derrida’s readings of poems by Paul Celan. In an interview published under the title ‘Language is Never Owned’ (2000), in which he discusses these readings, Derrida claims that the specificity of the poetic act lies in its ‘resurrection’ of language beyond the various deaths to which language is subject, these deaths all being forms of what he thinks as bad violence: The experience of Nazism is a crime against the German language. What was said in German under Nazism is a death. There is another death in the mere banalization, the trivialization of language, for instance, the German language, no matter where, no matter when. And then there is another death, the death that comes over language because of what language is: repetition, lethargy, mechanization, and so forth. The poetic act therefore constitutes a sort of resurrection: the poet is someone who is permanently engaged with a dying language

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that he resuscitates, not by giving back to it a triumphant line, but by sometimes bringing it back, like a revenant or phantom. (Derrida 2005c: 106) In the same interview, however, Derrida also asserts that all language, not just the language of the poem, is always already a phantom: ‘Language, the word – in a way, the life of the word – is in essence spectral’ (Derrida 2005c: 103), this assertion repeating the claim made in Shibboleth that ‘All words, from their first emergence, partake of revenance. They will always be phantoms, and this law governs the relationship in them between body and soul’ (Derrida 2005c: 53; Derrida’s emphasis). But if this is the case, then the specific resurrection effected by the poem remains to be clarified – as, no doubt, does the difference between the various forms of death to which Derrida claims that language is subject. In Shibboleth, he locates the specificity of poetry or literature in an ‘intense familiarity with the ineluctable originarity of the specter’ (Derrida 2005c: 53). The nature of this familiarity is defined in the interview with Grossman through the claim that the ‘common, universal experience of language in general’ in its spectrality becomes ‘an experience as such and appears as such in poetry, literature, and art’. He then adds: I would give the name of poet to the one who experiences this most intimately, in the quick, the living flesh [à vif]. Whoever has an intimate, bodily experience of this spectral errancy, whoever surrenders to this truth of language, is a poet, whether he writes poetry or not. [. . .] I call ‘poet’ the one who gives way to events of writing that give this essence of language a new body and make it manifest in a work. [. . .] I believe that Celan, from this point of view, is an exemplary poet. (Derrida 2005c: 105–6; Derrida’s emphasis) Like the thinking of the literary in terms of a suspension of meaning and reference, this privileging of the poetic act as the most intimate experience of language in its spectrality remains a thinking of the literary in terms of its openness to alterity, for the phantom or spectre is precisely a figure of otherness, that which escapes metaphysical grasp, resisting determination as either present or absent, existent or inexistent. And, again, the privilege accorded to the literary here lies not simply in this openness but in a particular experience of it: an experience of spectrality as such. It is just such an openness to otherness that also lies at the heart of Derrida’s thinking of literature in terms of the secret. In an argument

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similar to the one regarding the spectral nature of language, and the intense experience of this spectrality that is specific to literature, Derrida claims that, while there is ‘in every poetic text, just as in every utterance, in every manifestation outside of literature, an inaccessible secret to which no proof will ever be adequate’ (Derrida 2005c: 164), the poetic or literary text accomplishes something in relation to the secret that other linguistic acts do not. In Shibboleth, for instance, he asserts that the poem unveils a secret only to confirm that there is something secret there, withdrawn, forever beyond the reach of hermeneutic exhaustion. A non-hermetic secret, it remains, and the date with it, heterogeneous to all interpretative totalization. Eradication of the hermeneutic principle. There is no one meaning, as soon as there is date and shibboleth, no longer a sole originary meaning. (Derrida 2005c: 26) Here, the eradication of the hermeneutic principle that occurs in the poem may be seen as an instance of what Derrida thinks as good violence, since it works against any interpretative totalization, any attempt to master the poem through the fixing of its meaning or meanings. In reading, one would experience this good violence at work in the poem. In his texts on Cixous, Derrida also emphasizes the particularity of the relation between literature and the secret. In Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius: The Secrets of the Archive (2003), for instance, he claims that Cixous/literature (la littérature) possesses ‘the infinite power to keep undecidable and thus forever sealed the secret of what it/she [elle] says, it, literature, or she, Cixous, or even that which it/she avows and which remains secret, even as in broad daylight she/it avows, unveils or claims to unveil it. The secret of literature is thus the secret itself’ (Derrida 2006a: 18). That this thinking of literature in terms of the secret remains a thinking of literature as that which exhibits the affirmation of, faith in, and respect for the other which would counter the bad violence of nihilism is made clear in the following remark in an interview published under the title ‘The Truth That Wounds’ (2003): ‘I can never be in the other’s place, the head of the other. I will never be equal to the secret of otherness. The secret is the very essence of otherness’ (Derrida 2005c: 165). This identification of the secret as the essence of otherness is repeated in Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius, when Derrida asserts that literature is ‘the absolute place of the secret [. . .] as experience of the law that comes from the other, of the law whose giver is none

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other than the coming of the other [la venue même de l’autre]’ (Derrida 2006a: 48). What connects Derrida’s thinking of the literary in terms of a suspension of meaning and reference, spectrality, and the secret, then, is that in each instance the literary is taken to constitute a form of violence that opens onto an otherness that is experienced as such, itself – that is, in its radical otherness. Just as, for Heidegger, Dichtung is the experience of Being in its withdrawal, so, for Derrida, literature is the experience of the other in its otherness. And, for both, this experience is the resistance of nihilism as a violence that, for Heidegger, would effect the reduction to nothing of Being, and, for Derrida, the reduction to nothing of the other. Furthermore, we have seen that, for Derrida, there is a limit to otherness: it cannot take the form of the nothing (it is always ‘rather than nothing’), no future, the non-event. In Derrida’s thinking of the literary as a privileged form of good violence, this same limitation is evidenced by his remarkable definition of the literary event as the ‘nothing-ing of nothing’ (Derrida 1992: 47). Literature in this new, deconstructive sense is, then, the negating of that nothing which is the hostile other of the other in its value. Derrida’s readings of Mallarmé, Kafka, Artaud, Genet, Joyce, Blanchot, Ponge, Celan, and Cixous are all orientated towards demonstrating that the literary event is precisely such a ‘nothing-ing of nothing’, a ‘nothing-ing’ that opens up a space for the other. In order to respect the other in its value, the literary event has to be a ‘nothing-ing’ violence that is directed at another, hostile other, namely the nothing. When it comes to the nothing, then, the distinction between the good violence that is literature (governed as it is by the principle ‘rather than nothing’) and the bad violence of nihilism no longer holds, since the ‘nothing-ing’ that would characterize literature is itself a violence directed at an other, albeit an other as no other. So it is that, prior to the very distinction between good and bad violence, which is to say prior to the distinction between literature and nihilism, one would have to think a ‘nothing-ing’ that could not be justified by any appeal to an indeconstructible, neither the worth of Being (as for Heidegger) nor the value of the other (as for Derrida). In Derrida’s own work, the call for the thinking of such a ‘nothing-ing’ may be seen not in his insistence in Of Grammatology upon a violence that precedes the ethical and is determinable as non-ethical, but rather in the conflict between what he terms the ‘nothing-ing of nothing’ (as the essence of the literary) and what might be termed a ‘nothing-ing’ of difference that would extend beyond the literary. It is to the manifestation of this other form of ‘nothing-ing’ that we may now turn.

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Ashes, or the ‘nothing-ing’ of difference The privilege that Derrida accords to the literary for its ‘nothing-ing of the nothing’ – which is to say for its anti-nihilism – no doubt aligns him with Heidegger, Adorno, and Blanchot. However, Derrida’s thinking of the literary is also marked by another violence, namely the ‘nothinging’ of difference. This particular ‘nothing-ing’ is apparent not least in the manner in which the literary is itself determined by Derrida as that which opens onto otherness. Not only is this claim made of each and every literary text to which he refers, but, as we have seen, there is also a tendency in the thinking of the literary as that which departs from its own essence not only to collapse the difference between the literary and all other linguistic acts, but also to collapse all differences. For in its departing from its own essence, in its being at odds with itself, in its not remaining abidingly within itself, literature would, of course, be like everything else, since, according to Derrida, nothing remains abidingly within itself, nothing is ever quite self-present or selfidentical, everything is subject to différance. If, on the one hand, he undoubtedly privileges the literary for its power to disclose this fact or to enable a more ‘intense familiarity’ with it, on the other hand he acknowledges that any such privileging of the literary would in itself contradict his own thesis that, strictly speaking, the literary ‘does not exist’. Arguably the most extreme instance of such a ‘nothing-ing’ of difference is to be found in Derrida’s thinking of that attempted reduction to nothing of the other that Adorno terms ‘Auschwitz’ and that Derrida, in both Glas (1974) and Cinders (1987), terms the ‘all-burning’ (brûletout), but which also goes by the name of ‘radical evil’ in his work. Derrida observes that what remains after this ‘all-burning’ is ashes (cendres). In Shibboleth, he defines ashes as the ‘remainder without remainder’ (Derrida 2005c: 41), as that ‘remaining of the remainder’ which ‘is not being-that-remains, if, at least, one understands by that being-thatsubsists’ (Derrida 2005c: 43). In the same text, ash is referred to, on the one hand, as ‘a kind of nothing’, and, on the other, as ‘almost nothing’ (Derrida 2005c: 20, 43). In ‘Poetics and the Politics of Witnessing’ (2004), ash is described as ‘the figure of annihilation without remainder, without memory, or without a readable or decipherable archive’ (Derrida 2005c: 68); later in the same text, however, we are told that ‘ashes never gather together their dissemination, and that is exactly what they consist in. They consist in not consisting, in losing all consistence. They have no more existence; they are deprived of any substance that gathers together

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and is identical to itself, deprived of any self-relation, any power, any ipseity’ (Derrida 2005c: 92). As both ‘a kind of nothing’ and ‘almost nothing’, as both ‘the figure of annihilation without remainder’ and a ‘remaining of the remainder’, ash has to do double duty in Derrida’s thinking of bad violence. It is both the figure for an absolute reduction to nothing, and the figure of that which remains beyond the most absolute negation (radical evil), as the very negation of all possible reduction to nothing. Furthermore, in being almost nothing, ash is like literature, the difference between the dissemination that would characterize literature and that which would characterize ash remaining highly problematical. Indeed, in its nonself-gathering, ash exhibits precisely what characterizes everything and anything for Derrida. In other words, for deconstruction, there can be nothing but ashes, nothing but what remains after the ‘all-burning’ – other than what discloses those ashes. What one finds, then, is that the deconstructive affirmation of the other – or the ‘nothing-ing of nothing’ – results in a ‘nothing-ing’ of difference. And what the ‘nothinging of nothing’ shares with the ‘nothing-ing’ of difference is that both remain unaccomplished. As both ‘a kind of nothing’ and ‘almost nothing’, ash is the figure for that incompletion. Ash, then, is the figure in which nihilism returns to haunt deconstruction, not as its truth – such that deconstruction would become, as Cunningham puts it, the ‘realized logic of nihilism’ – but rather as that without which there could be no justification for deconstruction, that without which deconstruction would remain just one manifestation of thought among so many others.

6 The Fracture: Giorgio Agamben

The negative foundation and its liquidation The principle according to which each major attempt to redeploy the concept of nihilism since Nietzsche entails a turning of that concept back against the very thinker or thinkers from whom it is inherited is arguably nowhere more evident than in the work of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Like Heidegger before him, Agamben identifies the entire Western philosophical, political, and aesthetic tradition as essentially (and indeed increasingly) nihilist. However, in what can now scarcely come as a surprise, given the series of deployments of the concept of nihilism that we have considered thus far, Agamben includes Heidegger, along with Nietzsche and Derrida, within the very nihilism that each of these thinkers undertakes both to diagnose and to delimit, surpass, or resist. As we shall see, Agamben’s attempt to include Heidegger within the history of nihilism (nichilismo), together with his repeated attempts to take a critical distance from deconstruction, prove particularly hazardous, and certainly lead one to question Agamben’s own claim that nihilism is not Nietzsche’s ‘uncanniest of all guests’ but rather that ‘ungrateful guest [. . .] with whom we are all too familiar today’ (Agamben 1999b: 259). In the case of Heidegger, the difficulty will lie not least in the fact that Agamben’s general conception of nihilism bears a particularly close resemblance to Heidegger’s own determination of nihilism as Seinsvergessenheit. For, according to Agamben, what renders Western metaphysics, politics, and aesthetics nihilist is their dismissal or forgetting of that ‘original fracture of presence’ (frattura originale della presenza) in which they are grounded and which means that ‘all that comes to presence comes there as to the place of a deferral and an exclusion, in the sense that its manifestation is simultaneously

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a concealment, and its being present, a lack [mancare]’ (Agamben 1993b: 136). What is required for a surpassing of nihilism thus understood is a questioning recollection of this original fracture in all its forms, and above all in the realm of language, since, according to Agamben, it is reflection on language (linguaggio) that ‘has always been par excellence the plane on which the experience of the original fracture is projected’, the interpretation upon which Western thought is founded being ‘crystallized in the notion of the sign as the expressive unity of the signifier and the signified’ (Agamben 1993b: 136). It is just such a questioning recollection of this original fracture that characterizes the entirety of Agamben’s own work in philosophy, politics, and aesthetics, and helps to explain his recurrent reliance upon the messianic elements in the thought of Walter Benjamin. As we shall see, however, if the gesture of turning the charge of nihilism back against the tradition from which the concept emerges, together with a project directed towards the surpassing of nihilism by means of the messianic, necessarily locates Agamben within the tradition that he would subject to critique, this enclosure is only reinforced by the fact that he also comes to privilege a certain form of the literary as pointing us in the direction of a genuine overcoming of nihilism. As for nihilism’s uncanny presence in Agamben’s thinking of this overcoming, this will take the form of a fracture that in its turn comes to determine Agamben’s own critique of nihilism, and that is arguably nothing less than the fracture of fractures within Western culture, namely that between the human and the animal. Agamben’s redetermination of Western metaphysics as nihilism is elaborated most explicitly in Language and Death: The Place of Negativity (1982), in which he aims to accomplish a critique of the entire Western metaphysical tradition, which is to say ‘the tradition of thought that conceives of the self-grounding of being as a negative foundation [fondamento negativo]’ (Agamben 1991: xiii, n. 1). That tradition is to be understood as a passage to the limit, which has now been accomplished through the arrival of metaphysics at its ‘final negative ground at the very heart of ethos, humanity’s proper dwelling place [dimora abituale dell’uomo]’. This final negative ground is, he claims, ‘nihilism, beyond which contemporary thought and praxis (or “politics”) have not yet ventured’ (Agamben 1991: xiii; Agamben’s emphasis). Through this redetermination of nihilism as ‘ungroundedness (or negative ground)’, Agamben aims to locate both Nietzsche and Heidegger within the history of nihilism. Like Nietzsche and Heidegger before him, however, Agamben’s critique of nihilism is undertaken in the interests of the step

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beyond – or, more precisely, the ‘step-backward-beyond’ ( passo-indietroal di là) – nihilism (Agamben 1993b: 156). For Agamben, this passo must be into an ethics that is ‘liberated from the informulability (or sigetics) to which Western metaphysics has condemned it’ (Agamben 1991: xiii; Agamben’s emphasis). As for the precise nature of that negative ground which is the unthought foundation of Western metaphysics, in Language and Death Agamben attempts to demonstrate that throughout the entire Western metaphysical tradition there operates a notion of Voice (Voce) as that which articulates, or constitutes the relation between, voice (voce) as ‘mere sound’ on the one hand, and meaning (significato) on the other. As the articulation that is both ‘no-longer (voice)’ and ‘not-yet (meaning)’, this Voice necessarily constitutes a negative dimension. It is ground, but in the sense that it goes to the ground and disappears in order for being and language to take place. According to a tradition that dominates all Western reflection on language from the ancient grammarians’ notion of gramma to the phoneme in modern phonology, that which articulates the human voice in language is a pure negativity. (Agamben 1991: 35; Agamben’s emphasis) This Voice is, then, neither sound nor meaning; it does not speak. Rather, it is the very ‘taking place of language’ (aver-luogo del linguaggio); and, as such, it is ‘the negative ground on which all ontology rests, the originary negativity [negatività originaria] sustaining every negation’ (Agamben 1991: 35–6; Agamben’s emphasis). In the earlier Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (1977), what in Language and Death is named ‘Voice’ is thought as the bar (or border) between signifier (s) and signified (S) in the Saussurean algorithm for the linguistic sign: s/S. If the Western metaphysical reflection on language has been dominated by the Aristotelian model of the sign, with its radical binary distinction between signifier and signified, a model that is simply repeated by Saussure, this reflection has, according to Agamben, constituted ‘nothing but the forgetting of the originary difference between signifier and signified [l’oblio della differenza originaria tra significante e significato]’ (Agamben 1993b: 137). In other words, what has hitherto remained unthought is the status of the bar (/) or border itself: ‘This barrier, without itself ever coming into language, dominates Western reflection on the sign, and its dismissal is the foundation for the primordial position of the signifier and signified that belongs in an

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essential way to metaphysics’ (Agamben 1993b: 139). Although Saussure argues in the Course in General Linguistics (1916) that the unity of signifier and signified in the linguistic sign constitutes the sole positive element in language (see Saussure 1983: 118), Agamben counters this with the claim that in fact the linguistic sign is ‘the site of absolute difference [differenza assoluta], where the metaphysical fracture [ frattura] of presence comes to light in the most blinding way’ (Agamben 1993b: 154). Any overcoming of nihilism – determined as the forgetting (oblio) of this fracture – will therefore entail an entirely ‘new model of signification’. It is in Stanzas that Agamben’s first major act of self-distantiation from deconstruction occurs precisely in relation to this thinking of the fracture of presence. According to Agamben, Derrida’s deconstruction of Saussurean linguistics in Of Grammatology (1967), and his positing of the trace, writing, or différance as that which precedes the distinction between signifier and signified, and is aporetically both the condition of possibility and the condition of impossibility of that distinction, remains within Western metaphysics in that it fails to constitute a thinking of the fracture that would make its overcoming possible. Deconstruction is nihilist precisely because ‘Placing writing and the trace in an initial position means putting the emphasis on this original experience [of the fracture of presence], but not transcending it’ (Agamben 1993b: 156). Deconstruction remains a ‘metaphysics of writing and of the signifier’, nothing but ‘the reverse face [fondamento negativo] of the metaphysics of the signified and the voice, and not, surely, its transcendence [superamento]’ (Agamben 1993b: 156). He continues: By restoring the originary character of the signifier, the grammatological project effects a salutary critique [critica] of the metaphysical inheritance that has crystallized in the notion of the sign, but this does not mean that it has really succeeded in accomplishing that ‘step-backward-beyond’ metaphysics – with greater prudence, the philosopher on whose thought that critique is based [i.e. Heidegger] hesitated to declare that step complete or even merely possible. (Agamben 1993b: 156) This critique of deconstruction as nihilism is repeated in Language and Death, in which Agamben claims that, although Derrida ‘believed he had opened a way to surpassing metaphysics’ through a grammatology, in fact ‘Metaphysics is always already grammatology, and this is fundamentology in the sense that the gramma (or the Voice) functions as the negative ontological foundation’ (Agamben 1991: 39; Agamben’s emphasis). From this,

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it is clear that Agamben’s critique of deconstruction as nihilism is akin to Cunningham’s,1 and exhibits the same frailties. For, when it comes to the possibility of any surpassing of metaphysics, Derrida is arguably considerably more prudent than even the Heidegger of ‘On the Question of Being’ (1955), and certainly more cautious than Agamben is prepared to admit. Indeed, not only does Derrida’s distinction between the closure (clôture) and the end ( fin) of metaphysics disappear in Agamben’s critique of deconstruction as nihilism, but whereas for Derrida the step beyond metaphysics entails an interminable ‘solicitation’ of metaphysics, for Agamben the possibility of a radical renewal of both philosophy and politics beyond nihilism is repeatedly invoked as possible. What in his later works Agamben will think, via Benjamin, as the messianic beyond of nihilism remains unproblematically possible, and, as we shall see, it is upon the notion of a certain possibility – that is, a capability or power not to ( poter non) – that Agamben’s countering of nihilism will depend. For Agamben, then, far from effecting the step-back-beyond nihilism, deconstruction is in fact a manifestation of the most extreme nihilism, and it is precisely within such an extreme that we now find ourselves: ‘Today we live on that extreme fringe of metaphysics where it returns – as nihilism – to its own negative foundation (to its Ab-grund, its own ungroundedness)’ (Agamben 1991: 53; Agamben’s emphasis). Agamben’s gesture here is the familiar one, for it is both Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s, albeit that gesture now turned back against those from whom Agamben inherits it. Just as for Nietzsche and Heidegger, so for Agamben, we find ourselves at the consummation of nihilism – to which, in Agamben’s analysis, Heidegger also belongs, with Derridean deconstruction falling completely under the Heideggerian umbrella. The demand upon thought, the task of philosophy, is that finally, after so many failures – including both Heideggerian fundamental ontology and Derridean deconstruction – it should begin to think the genuine step beyond nihilism. While Heidegger takes himself to be doing just this through his recollective thinking (Andenken) of the ontological difference of Being (Sein) and being (Seiendes), Agamben attempts to demonstrate through an analysis of the role of mood (Stimmung) in Heidegger’s texts that the latter’s thinking of Being in fact constitutes the consummation of nihilism, as had Nietzsche’s for Heidegger: ‘The thought of Being is the thought of the Voice’ (Agamben 1991: 61), and the thought of the Voice is the thought of the negative foundation. Agamben’s repetition of Heidegger (against Heidegger) does not stop there, however; for while the former’s insistence that the overcoming of nihilism entails a turn towards ethics – whereas, as he makes clear in the Letter on Humanism

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(1947), Heidegger believes that ethics cannot be primordial – in Language and Death Agamben follows Heidegger in thinking nihilism as homelessness, and the overcoming of nihilism as a form of homecoming: a return to the ethos as ‘the proper dwelling of humanity’ (Agamben 1991: 53; Agamben’s emphasis). If the ‘ultimate task’ of philosophy is to think the Voice, this thinking must go beyond the metaphysical oppositions between ‘showing and telling, being and entity, word and thing’, and be, ‘in the words of Novalis, nostalgia (Heimweh); that is, the “desire to be at home everywhere”’ (Agamben 1991: 92). If the silent Voice is the mythogeme (mitologema) or mystical foundation (fondamento mistico) of Western culture in its entirety, a mythogeme that renders this culture nihilist by grounding it in the negative, then a genuine critique of that culture which aims to initiate the overcoming of nihilism cannot simply radicalize the negative. Such a radicalization would be no more than a ‘simple repetition’ of the ‘fundamental problem’ of the fracture (Agamben 1991: 85; Agamben’s emphasis), this being precisely the criticism that Agamben directs at deconstruction. Thus, in order to accomplish the overcoming of nihilism, it is necessary to find another, non-negative, foundation for thought. In Stanzas, Agamben proposes just such a non-negative foundation in the form of the fold (piega), as an alternative to the Aristotelian–Saussurean bar. In the fold, he proposes a new thinking of the border in terms not of polemos but of harmonia: The originary nucleus of signification is neither in the signifier nor in the signified, neither in writing nor in the voice, but in the fold of the presence on which they are established: the logos, which characterizes the human as zoon logon echon (living thing using language), is this fold that gathers and divides all things in the ‘putting together’ of presence [questa piega che raccoglie e divide ogni cosa nella ‘commessura’ della presenza]. (Agamben 1993b: 156) At the origin, then, there would be neither Heidegger’s ontological difference nor Derrida’s différance, but rather the harmonizing logos as the fold of presence. Only through a thinking of the logos as fold rather than difference does the step-back-beyond metaphysics – which is to say, the surpassing of nihilism – become possible (see Agamben 1993b: 157). In what will become a recurrent gesture in his work, Agamben on the one hand critiques Heidegger’s thought as nihilist and on the other hand finds within it one instance of a thinking that points beyond nihilism. It is no coincidence that this non-nihilist Heidegger should be the one

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who directs his attention to art, recognizing ‘a hint of this harmony in a painting by Cézanne in the possible rediscovered community of thought and poetry’ (Agamben 1993b: 157). While in Stanzas it is the logos thought as fold that constitutes the stepbackward-beyond nihilism, in Language and Death this step is located in a thinking of the relation of the human being to language as an ‘in-fantile dwelling [dimora infantile] (in-fantile, that is, without Voice or will, and yet ethical, habitual) in language’ (Agamben 1991: 92; Agamben’s emphasis). This notion of an entirely new relation to language will remain in place throughout Agamben’s later thinking of the political. What also becomes clear in Language and Death, however, is that any genuine surpassing of nihilism through the positing of a nonnegative foundation requires what Agamben terms a ‘liquidation’ of the negative foundation; that is, a bringing about of the ‘definitive death of the Voice’ (Agamben 1991: 95). In other words, what is required for thought’s liberation from nihilism is, paradoxically, a radical negation of the negative. The insistence upon such a negation remains operative throughout Agamben’s thinking of nihilism, not only in the field of metaphysics, but also in those of politics and aesthetics. Although he refers to it as a death, this liquidation is in fact a killing, since it is to be brought about through critique (critica). Furthermore, it must be definitive, leaving no remains from which nihilism might re-emerge. As for what this definitive death will achieve, it is nothing less than the disappearance of the ‘“essential relation” between language and death that dominates the history of metaphysics’ (Agamben 1991: 95). In other words, this liquidation is a killing that will liberate language from death as such, rendering language finally inhabitable as ethos. It will effect the passage beyond the nihilist economy of sacrifice: ‘A completed foundation of humanity in itself should [. . .] signify the definitive elimination [la definitiva eliminazione] of the sacrificial mythogeme and of the ideas of nature and culture, of the speakable and the unspeakable, which are grounded in it’ (Agamben 1991: 106; Agamben’s emphasis). Although Agamben does not address it, there is an obvious question that might be raised here concerning the status or nature of this re-founding liquidation of the negative. Does it belong to the nihilism that would determine everything in terms of the negative, or is it already non-nihilist? In fact, it is neither one nor the other, but rather the fracture between a nihilist and a non-nihilist negativity – this liquidation of the fracture is itself nothing other than the haunting return of that fracture. The absence of any reflection upon the status of this liquidation of the Voice as negative foundation is not merely a local problem, given

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that Agamben’s later works on the political take the form of an unremitting critique of sovereignty as the production of bare life (nuda vita) – that is, the production of a life that may be killed without this killing being judged as homicide. Everything will depend on the maintaining of the border between a liquidation of the negative foundation upon which, according to Agamben, any step-backward-beyond nihilism is predicated, and that violence against which his own later thinking of the political will most violently militate. Agamben’s awareness of the difficulties besetting this border are evident not least in his reliance upon the notion of a counter-nihilism; that is, a certain form of nihilism that would work against real nihilism.

The ‘imperfect nihilism’ of biopolitics from Aristotle to the camps Although he deploys the term nichilismo only occasionally, the concept of nihilism continues to play a central role when Agamben turns to the critique of political sovereignty and the concept of the nationstate, principally in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995), Remnants of Auschwitz (1998), and State of Exception (2003). We have seen that, according to Agamben, the nihilism of Western metaphysics lies in its being founded in an original fracture of presence on which it has failed to reflect critically and by which it therefore remains determined. Within the field of the political, it is again just such a fracture that is to be disclosed as the unthought foundation. Here, however, the fracture is between two concepts of life: zo¯e and bios. As Agamben observes in the opening pages of Homo Sacer, within Greek thought the former designates the life of all living beings, and the latter a way of life. In an analysis that finds its point of departure in Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ (1921), and in particular the latter’s notion of bare or mere life (bloßes Leben) as that over which mythic violence (mythische Gewalt) holds ‘bloody power’ (Benjamin 1996: 250),2 Agamben redetermines nihilism in the political sphere as biopolitics, which, he argues, is the essence of Western politics and which has now reached its most extreme form, threatening nothing less than ‘an unprecedented biopolitical catastrophe’ (Agamben 1998: 188). According to Agamben, Western politics, in both its democratic and its totalitarian forms, is biopolitics because it is founded upon the concept of bare life – or ‘pure zo¯e’ (Agamben 1998: 183) – as that which sovereign power paradoxically politicizes precisely by excluding it from the political. Thus, the ‘originary political act’ was not the Hobbesian

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‘mythologeme’ of the contract, but rather the ‘ban’ imposed on bare life (Agamben 1998: 109). As biopolitics, Western politics is founded, then, through an ‘originary exclusion’ of bare life from the political, with this very exclusion being itself a politicization of bare life – or homo sacer, as that life which, while it may not be sacrificed, may be killed without this killing being adjudged a homicide, or subject to the law (see Agamben 1998: 89). Now, according to Agamben, this ban on bare life is precisely that which ‘our age cannot master’, and which thus comes to be experienced as a ‘being in force without significance’ (Geltung ohne Bedeutung) (Agamben 1998: 51) – in other words, as nihilism. Drawing on Gershom Scholem’s remark to Walter Benjamin that the relation to the law in Kafka’s The Trial is the ‘Nothing of Revelation’ (Nichts der Offenbarung), which is to say that the revelation’ does not signify [bedeutet], yet still affirms itself by the fact that it is in force’ (Scholem quoted in Agamben 1998: 50–1), Agamben proceeds to argue that: Everywhere on earth men live today in the ban of a law and a tradition that are maintained solely as the ‘zero point’ of their own content, and that include men within them in the form of a pure relation of abandonment. All societies and all cultures today (it does not matter whether they are democratic or totalitarian, conservative or progressive) have entered into a legitimation crisis in which law (we mean by this term the entire text of tradition in its regulative form, whether the Jewish Torah or the Islamic Shariah, Christian dogma or the profane nomos) is in force as the pure ‘Nothing of Revelation’. But this is precisely the structure of the sovereign relation, and the nihilism in which we are living is, from this perspective, nothing other than the coming to light of this relation as such. (Agamben 1998: 51) Confronted with this ‘imperfect nihilism that would let the Nothing subsist indefinitely in the form of a being in force without significance’, Agamben notes that in his ‘Theological-Political Fragment’ (written in either 1920–1 or 1937–8) Benjamin proposes a counter-nihilism in the form of ‘a messianic nihilism that nullifies even the Nothing and lets no form of law remain in force beyond its own content’ (Agamben 1998: 53; cf. Benjamin 2002: 306). In ‘The Messiah and the Sovereign: The Problem of the Law in Walter Benjamin’ (1992), Agamben elaborates on this notion of a messianic nihilism as follows: If we accept the equivalence between messianism and nihilism of which both Benjamin and Scholem were firmly convinced, albeit in

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different ways, then we will have to distinguish two forms of messianism or nihilism [due forme di messianismo (o di nichilismo)]: a first form (which we may call imperfect nihilism) that nullifies [nullifica] the law but maintains the Nothing [nulla] in a perpetual and infinitely deferred state of validity, and a second form, a perfect nihilism that does not even let validity survive beyond its meaning but instead, as Benjamin writes of Kafka, ‘succeeds in finding redemption in the overturning of the Nothing’. (Agamben 1999b: 171)3 The endorsing theorization of such a messianic counter-nihilism – against what in Idea of Prose (1985) Agamben terms the ‘imperfect nihilism of our time’ (Agamben 1995: 91) – returns us to the question concerning the nature of that liquidation that he identifies as the necessary step in any liberation from the nihilism of Western thought as determined by the original fracture of presence. For the question that continues to haunt Agamben’s own discourse is whether the radical break with nihilism, be it in philosophy or politics, can be other than a counter-nihilism. It is precisely such an attempt to escape this reliance upon counter-nihilism that will determine the direction of Agamben’s later commentary on the letter of Saint Paul to the Romans in The Time That Remains (2000), and that leads to his theorization of a rendering inoperative (inoperoso) that would not be negative in nature. That Agamben’s thinking of the imperfect messianism/nihilism (messianismo/nichilismo imperfetto) of politics is closely akin to his thinking of the nihilism of metaphysics is apparent, then, first and foremost in his claim that this political nihilism is owing to an originary fracture in the concept of life (as both zo¯e and bios), a fracture by which both democracy and totalitarianism are determined and to which they constitute inadequate answers in that they fail to reflect upon and thereby to master this fracture: ‘In carrying out the metaphysical task that has led it more and more to assume the form of a biopolitics, Western politics has not succeeded in constructing the link between zo¯e and bios, between voice and language, that would have healed the fracture’ (Agamben 1998: 11). And yet, while consistently seeking to counter any radical distinction between totalitarianism and democracy as the two forms of Western biopolitics, Agamben nonetheless sees Nazism as the ‘first radically biopolitical state’ (Agamben 1998: 143), and thus as exemplary of that nihilism which would characterize Western politics and would reach its consummation in ‘our age’. Like modern democracy, Nazism is to be understood as a false (that is, nihilistic) solution to the fracture at the origin of the political: ‘Nazism darkly and futilely sought to

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liberate the political scene of the West from this intolerable shadow [the Jews as “bare life”] in order to produce the German Volk as the people that finally overcame the originary biopolitical fracture’ (Agamben 1998: 179). The irony here is that, far from overcoming that original fracture, Nazism reproduces it, making the entire German people an instance of bloßes Leben, ‘a sacred life consecrated to death’ (Agamben 1998: 180). In its Nazi incarnation, biopolitics as imperfect nihilism reveals itself as a thanatopolitics. If the first and foremost similarity between the nihilism of Western metaphysics and the nihilism of Western politics is their determination by an original fracture that both fail to address, another similarity is that both are thought teleologically by Agamben. While Western metaphysics and Western politics are nihilist from the outset, they both follow a course of exacerbation. Only in the twentieth century, with Nazism, does the first ‘radically biopolitical state’ emerge, and it is only in the modern period that there appears that most ‘exemplary space’ within which bare life is located, namely the concentration camp. Indeed, as the ‘hidden paradigm of the political space of modernity’, the camp is the ‘most absolute biopolitical space ever to have been realized, in which power confronts nothing but pure life, without any mediation’ (Agamben 1998: 123, 171). Thirdly, just as is the case in his thinking of Western metaphysics as nihilism, so in his thinking of Western politics, Agamben calls for a radical break; that is, a ‘completely new politics’ that will no longer be founded on the principle of sovereignty and that will finally heal the fracture between zo¯e and bios. However, just as in his thinking of philosophical nihilism, so in his thinking of political nihilism, Agamben argues that the ‘new’ requires a founding act of violence in its turn. This act of counter-nihilism takes the paradoxical form of a non-act. The ‘new politics’ that is to be founded upon the nihilation of all nihilist politics is one in which ‘bare life is no longer separated and excepted, either in the state order or in the figure of human rights’ (Agamben 1998: 134). This healing of the fracture is to be accomplished through a transformation of bare life into ‘the site for the constitution and installation of a form of life that is wholly exhausted in bare life and a bios that is only its own zo¯e’ (Agamben 1998: 188). Agamben’s notion of a ‘form of life’ is elaborated most fully in his 1993 essay ‘Form-of-Life’, where it is defined as ‘a life that can never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to isolate something such as naked life’ (Agamben 2000: 3–4). At the heart of this conception of a ‘form of life’ is the notion of potentiality (potenza), for a ‘form of life’ is a life that

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‘always retains the character of possibility’ (Agamben 2000: 4). It is in the concept of potentiality that Agamben proposes what he takes to be a completely non-nihilist form of the negative; that is, a form that goes beyond even Benjamin’s ‘perfect nihilism’ in that it frees messianism from any nihilist contamination. If the critique of that sovereignty which operates through a ban on bare life is already present in Schelling, Nietzsche, and Heidegger – and, above all, in Heidegger’s later thinking of Appropriation (Ereignis) (see Agamben 1998: 61) – it is no coincidence that Agamben should find the ‘strongest objection’ against the principle of sovereignty not in any philosophical text, but rather in a literary one: Herman Melville’s short story ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ (1853), which becomes no less of a touchstone for Agamben than it is for Derrida and Deleuze. It is in Bartleby’s refrain ‘I would prefer not to’ that, according to Agamben, we encounter that which ‘resists every possibility of deciding between potentiality and the potentiality not to’ (Agamben 1998: 48). ‘As a scribe who has stopped writing, Bartleby is the extreme figure of the Nothing from which all creation derives; and at the same time, he constitutes the most implacable vindication of this Nothing as pure, absolute potentiality’ (Agamben 1999b: 253–4). Crucially, however, this ‘extreme figure of the Nothing’ is not to be taken as nihilist: ‘nothing is farther from him than the heroic pathos of negation’ (Agamben 1999b: 256). Even if Bartleby fails to free himself completely from the aporia of sovereignty’s ban, it is in the notion of potentiality that Agamben finds an alternative to sovereignty, which is to say a radical alternative to political nihilism. The definitive break with the principle of sovereign power that has governed Western politics is to come through a return to what in Aristotle is termed dynamis, as distinct from energeia. As interpreted by Agamben, the essence of dynamis as potentiality lies not in the realization of the potential to do something, but rather in the potential that remains potential by being the potential not to (poter non). Sovereignty is nihilist precisely because it is the negation – the ‘taking away’ – of this potential not to (Agamben 1998: 46). Saving (non-nihilist) negativity is, then, the ‘potentiality not to (do or be)’. As Agamben puts it in ‘On Potentiality’ (1986), this potentiality is ‘not simply non-Being, simple privation, but rather the existence of non-Being, the presence of an absence; this is what we call a “faculty” or “power”’ (Agamben 1999b: 179). There is, however, also another negativity to be considered here, namely the negativity that is required if a ‘new and coherent ontology of potentiality’ is to come about, and this other negativity – which, for Agamben, takes the form of critique (critica) – is

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the one that negates any politics determined by the ban (Agamben 1998: 45, 59). Again, we are returned to the question of the status of this facilitating negation. It does not belong to potentiality as such, since it is that which makes possible the thinking of the potentiality ‘not to’. Is it, then, the very last act of sovereign violence, the act that would finally put an end to sovereignty? But then, how can one be sure that this act is not one more exacerbation of sovereign violence? How can one be sure that it is not in fact precisely the kind of exception that Agamben subjects to such unremitting critique? These questions certainly remain in play in Agamben’s elaboration of a messianic life beyond political nihilism in both The Coming Community (1990) and The Time That Remains (2000).

The ethics of potentiality, or the power ‘not to’ In The Coming Community, Agamben proposes a thinking of community beyond nihilism in the sense that this community would not be governed by the fracture between existence and essence, subject and object, universal and particular, necessity and contingency. Such a community would be constituted by ‘whatever’ (qualunque) singularities, irreducible to any identity. In The Time That Remains, this singularity is rethought as the messianic remnant (resto messianico), which is to say a people (popolo) that, unlike Heidegger’s Volk, ‘can never coincide with itself, as all or as part, that which infinitely remains or resists [infinitamente resto o resiste] in each division’ (Agamben 2005c: 57). The ‘whatever’ singularity is a potentiality precisely in its power ‘not to’; in other words, in its power over the negative: ‘The being that is properly whatever is able to not-be; it is capable of its own impotence’ (propriamente qualunque è l’essere che può non essere, può la propria impotenza) (Agamben 1993a: 35). And again, as Agamben puts it in the essay ‘On Potentiality’: ‘Beings [Il vivente] that exist in the mode of potentiality are capable of their own impotentiality [può la propria impotenza]’ (Agamben 1999b: 182). Now, even if this being able (potere) of one’s own impotentiality is, as Agamben insists, to be clearly distinguished from all willing (volere) (see Agamben 1999b: 254–5), it nonetheless remains a form of the possible in its unambiguous fracturing from the impossible. Impotence here, then, is not the radical impotence that Samuel Beckett seeks to explore in his works, since Beckettian impotence is precisely the loss of all being able, of all capability – even a capability for impotence.4 And neither is it Derrida’s deconstructive ‘impossible’ (see Derrida 2002b: 343–70).

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Even if the ‘whatever’ singularity is irreducible to the status of a subject or an identity, its potenza remains a kind of mastery – and, more precisely, a mastery of the negative. And if this mastery of the negative as the capability ‘not to’ is the only ‘ethical experience’ (Agamben 1993a: 44), then that is precisely because it would outwit nihilism. In contrast, while the form of the human that is now dominant – namely the petty bourgeoisie – may be ‘the form in which humanity has survived nihilism’ (Agamben 1993a: 63), that survival is anything but the genuine overcoming of nihilism that Agamben theorizes as the ‘whatever’ singularity or the remnant. Indeed, this spectral survival of nihilism is itself the most extreme form of nihilism: ‘the absurdity of individual existence, inherited from the subbase of nihilism, has become [. . .] so senseless that it has lost all pathos and been transformed, brought out into the open, into an everyday exhibition’ (Agamben 1993a: 64). In accordance with a logic that we have already seen at work in Nietzsche, Jünger, and Heidegger, however, this arrival at nihilism’s consummation is also an arrival at that border from which the thinking of the overcoming of nihilism becomes possible. For both Jünger and Heidegger, this possibility is captured by Hölderlin in the following lines in ‘Patmos’: ‘But where there is danger, grows/The saving power also’ (Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst/Das Rettende auch). This is precisely the logic that governs Agamben’s own argument when he claims that the possibility for the emergence of the ‘whatever’ singularity lies in the absolute nihilism of the petty bourgeoisie (piccola borghesia): the planetary petty bourgeoisie is probably the form in which humanity is moving toward its own destruction. But this also means that the petty bourgeoisie represents an opportunity unheard of in the history of humanity that it must at all costs not let slip away. Because if instead of continuing to search for a proper identity in the already improper and senseless form of individuality, humans were to succeed in belonging to this impropriety as such, in making of the proper being-thus not an identity and an individual property but a singularity without identity, a common and absolutely exposed singularity – if humans could, that is, not be-thus in this or that particular biography, but be only the thus [essere soltanto il così], their singular exteriority and their face, then they would for the first time enter into a community without presuppositions and without subjects, into a communication without the incommunicable. Selecting in the new planetary humanity those characteristics that allow for its survival, removing the thin diaphragm that separates

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bad mediatized advertising from the perfect exteriority that communicates only itself – this is the political task of our generation. (Agamben 1993a: 65; Agamben’s emphasis) As for the matter of which characteristics are to be selected, it should by now scarcely come as a surprise that they are essentially negative in nature. Indeed, it is through an absolute radicalization of the negative that the ‘whatever’ singularity may be brought about. Furthermore, this negativity is located within language. Drawing on Guy Debord’s analysis of contemporary society in Society of the Spectacle (1967), Agamben declares that the age of the spectacle is the ‘state of fully realized nihilism’ (Agamben 2000: 84–5), and proceeds to argue that this full realization of nihilism occurs when language ‘reveals the nothingness of things. There is nothing of God, of the world, or of the revealed in language’ (Agamben 1993a: 82). This thinking of nihilism as an ‘extreme nullifying unveiling’ echoes Heidegger not least in its insistence upon its being an ‘alienation from linguistic being, the uprooting of all peoples from their vital dwelling in language [lo sradicamento di ogni popolo della sua dimora vitale nella lingua]’ (Agamben 1993a: 83). The crucial difference between Agamben and Heidegger here, however, is that the former does not envisage an overcoming of nihilism through resacralization; rather, in an argument that (as we shall see in Chapter 8) is closely akin to Alain Badiou’s, he claims that the overcoming of nihilism is to be accomplished through an absolute profanation (profanazione), which in The Time That Remains is rethought by way of Benjamin as a messianic counter-nihilism. This profanation is a labour of the negative, albeit a messianic one. Only through the complete alienation of human beings from linguistic being, only through a passage to the limit, can language be returned to itself: the era in which we live is also that in which for the first time it is possible for humans to experience their own linguistic being – not this or that content of language, but language itself, not this or that true proposition, but the very fact that one speaks. Contemporary politics is this devastating experimentum linguae that all over the planet unhinges and empties traditions and beliefs, ideologies and religions, identities and communities. Only those who succeed in carrying it to completion – without allowing what reveals to remain veiled in the nothingness that reveals, but bringing language itself to language – will be the first citizens of a

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community with neither presuppositions nor a State, where the nullifying and determining power of what is common will be pacified [. . .]. (Agamben 1993a: 83; Agamben’s emphasis) In that the road to redemption (redenzione) lies in ‘the definitive profanity of the profane’ (la definitiva profanità del profano) (Agamben 1993a: 102), Agamben’s argument may be mapped onto Nietzsche’s distinction between active and passive nihilism, profanation being a form of active nihilism that works against all possible linguistic content – all tradition, belief, ideology, and identity – in the interests of a world that would lie safely beyond nihilism. Revisiting Nietzsche’s conception of the affirmation (Bejahung) at the heart of active nihilism, Agamben theorizes the step beyond the necessary negation of active nihilism to a community that is essentially affirmative. The very existence of language is ‘the yes said to the world so that it remains suspended over the nothingness of language’ (Agamben 1993a: 104), and, crucially, this affirmation is a ‘stronger possibility’ than any negative: ‘Language opens the possibility of not-being, but at the same time it also opens a stronger possibility [una possibilità più forte]: existence, that something is’ (Agamben 1993a: 105). It is precisely here, then, in this leap from the negative to the positive, from the negation of nihilism to the affirmation of that which would lie beyond it, that Agamben finds it necessary to abandon the very essence of potentiality, namely the power ‘not to’. For if the stronger possibility is existence (essere) rather than non-existence (non-essere), then that stronger possibility is ‘a potentiality to not not-be’ (un poter non nonessere) rather than the ‘potentiality to not-be’ (Agamben 1993a: 105). So it is that the very distinction between nihilism and its other has to be abandoned in the interests of a surpassing of nihilism, and the consequence of this abandonment is that we are suddenly left in no position to say whether the step beyond nihilism into the coming community of ‘whatever’ singularities is not in fact that catastrophic exacerbation of nihilism against which the entirety of Agamben’s own thinking of the political would militate. As though aware that his theorization of the break with nihilism remains problematical, Agamben revisits it in The Time That Remains via the concept of what in the letters of Saint Paul is termed katargein, which Agamben interprets as a rendering inoperative (inoperoso) that is to be clearly distinguished from any destruction or annihilation (see Agamben 2005c: 96). As such a rendering inoperative or no-longer-at-work (non-più-in-opera), messianic power is the restoration of that upon which it works (the law) to the state of potentiality (see Agamben 2005c: 98).

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However, as we have seen, it is precisely through his reliance on Benjamin’s ‘Theological-Political Fragment’ that Agamben reveals this messianic power to be nothing other than a counter-nihilism, which is to say an ethical negativity whose very ethicality has to be presupposed. Not the least of the ironies in Agamben’s thinking of the coming into being of a messianic community beyond nihilism is that the necessary (and absolute) violence upon which it is founded is in the interests of what might be termed a community of love. However, for all his critique of the subject/object model of love, this messianic love is repeatedly figured by Agamben as the love of a man for a woman, and thus remains tied to one of the unthought fractures that may be said to govern Agamben’s own thought: ‘Love does not allow for copulative predication, it never has a quality or an essence for its object. “I love beautiful-brunette-tender Mary”, not “I love Mary because she is beautiful, brunette, tender”, in the sense of her possessing such and such an attribute’ (Agamben 2005c: 128). Indeed, through The Time That Remains, the messianic is presented as a community of sons of precisely the kind upon which Derrida casts deconstructive suspicion in Politics of Friendship (1994). Defined in The Coming Community as ‘Seeing something simply in its being-thus [essere-così]’ (Agamben 1993a: 106), love finds its place being named in thirteenth-century Provençal poetry (see Agamben 1993a: 25). In order to grasp why Provençal poetry should be privileged in this way, how that poetry might fit within the history of art more generally, and what the relation between this poetry and nihilism might be, it is necessary to turn to Agamben’s two principal works on art and aesthetics, The Man Without Content (1970) and Stanzas (1977).

Modern art: the ‘self-annihilating nothing’ In Language and Death, Agamben finds the domain beyond nihilism, the ‘country without pain’ that is the true ethos of humanity, being named in a poem by Paul Klee (see Agamben 1991: 96–7). This leads to the question of whether Agamben’s language without Voice, a language that is not grounded in any meaning and that is not linked to death, is in fact the language of poetry, or at least of a certain kind of poetry. In short, the question becomes whether poetry has a decisive role to play in the experience of the being of language as such – in the ‘bringing language itself to language’, as Agamben puts it in The Coming Community. It is not in Heidegger’s conception of Dichtung but rather in Benjamin’s conception of pure language (reine Sprache) in his 1923 essay ‘The Task of the Translator’ that Agamben finds just such a model of a language that

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would not be determined by the fracture between signifier and signified. With this pure language, which is to say language viewed from the perspective of messianic redemption, we escape ‘the incurable division between the thing to be transmitted and the act of transmission, names and discourse’ (Agamben 1999b: 60). Certainly, Benjamin’s essay, which relies on the model of literary translation and ends with an analysis of Hölderlin’s late translation of Sophocles, might be taken to suggest that this pure language is to be sought above all in the literary. However, that in fact there is no such privilege to be accorded to art or to the literary might well be the conclusion drawn by readers of Agamben’s radical critique of aesthetics in his first book, The Man Without Content (1970), in which he argues that the essence of art and the essence of nihilism coincide in the modern era. Like Heidegger before him, Agamben claims that the essence of art can never be grasped by aesthetics; that is to say, art thought ‘starting from the α´ισθησις of the spectator’. Indeed, just as Western metaphysics originates in the original fracture of presence and Western politics originates in the fracture between zo¯e and bios, so Western aesthetics originates in the fracture (frattura) between taste and genius, between the artist and the spectator, between artistic creation and aesthetic judgement (see Agamben 1999a: 36). If this fracture ‘traverses the entire history of aesthetics’ (Agamben 1999a: 12), it finds its first full expression in Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew (first published posthumously, in German, in 1805). Any discourse on art that is governed by this fracture is quite simply ‘unable to think of art according to its proper stature, and so long as man is prisoner of an aesthetic perspective, the essence of art remains closed to him’ (Agamben 1999a: 102). According to Agamben – and here the debt to Heidegger is evident – that essence lies in art thought not as mimesis but, more originarily, as what the Greeks term poiesis, which is to say ‘the ability to pro-duce, to bring a thing from nonbeing into being’. It is this power that makes art that which is the ‘most uncanny’ (più inquietante) (Agamben 1999a: 4). Thought in its essence – that is, beyond the fracture of aesthetics – art is ‘the shared space in which all men, artists and non-artists, come together in living unity’ (Agamben 1999a: 36). However, the destiny (destino) of art has taken the form of the fracturing of this original unity, a fracturing that leaves ‘on the one side the aesthetic judgment and on the other artistic subjectivity without content, the pure creative principle’ (Agamben 1999a: 37). If art is to return to its ‘proper stature’, this fracture has to be overcome, and, as in his later thinking of both metaphysics and politics, Agamben claims that the decisive step in this overcoming is an act of radical negation, namely

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the destruction (distruzione) of aesthetics (see Agamben 1999a: 6). It is just such a destruction that he sets out to accomplish in The Man Without Content. Above all, what this destruction requires is a thinking of art that is freed from the concept of will. Indeed, according to Agamben – and here, too, the debt to Heidegger is clear – all previous attempts to free art from aesthetics have failed precisely because they have taken art to be the product of the will. This tendency is already to be found in Novalis, and reaches its culmination in Nietzsche, for whom art is one form of will to power: ‘all attempts to transcend aesthetics and to give a new status to artistic pro-duction have started from the blurring of the distinction between poiesis and praxis, that is, from the interpretation of art as a mode of praxis and of praxis as the expression of a will as a creative force’ (Agamben 1999a: 71). For Agamben, it is neither Nietzsche nor Heidegger but Hegel who offers the greatest insight into the destiny of art. That destiny is revealed in Hegel’s critique of the German Romantic ironists – and, in particular, Friedrich Schlegel – in the first part of the Aesthetics (1835). Here, Hegel presents the artist–ironist as what Agamben terms the ‘man without content’ (uomo senza contenuto). In the modern era, art becomes a negativity turned back upon itself. The essence of the ironical attitude lies, according to Hegel, not merely in ‘the self-destruction of the noble, great, and excellent’, but in ‘showing forth what has worth and dignity for mankind as null in its self-destruction [ein Nichtiges, ein sichVernichtendes]’ (Hegel 1975: 67), or, as the phrase ‘ein Nichtiges, ein sich-Vernichtendes’ is translated in Agamben’s text: ‘un autoannientantesi nulla’ (a self-annihilating nothing). Taking this interpretation of modern art as his point of departure, Agamben proceeds to argue that art as a self-annihilating nothing is to be thought under the sign of nihilism, a term that does not occur in Hegel’s text: art is the annihilating entity [l’Annientante] that traverses all its contents without ever being able to attain a positive work, because it cannot identify with any content. And since art has become the pure potentiality of negation [la pura potenza della negazione], nihilism reigns in its essence. The kinship between art and nihilism, then, attains an inexpressibly deeper zone than that in which aestheticist and decadent poetics move. [. . .] The essence of nihilism coincides with the essence of art at the extreme point of its destiny insofar as, in both, being destines itself to man in the form of Nothingness [Nulla]. And as long as nihilism secretly governs the course of Western history, art will not come out of its interminable twilight. (Agamben 1999a: 57–8)

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If art is once again to perform that unifying role which, according to Agamben, it performed at the outset in Greek culture, it has to be thought beyond its current status as ‘a nihilistic power’ (una potenza nihilistica) (Agamben 1999a: 102). The privilege accorded to art lies, then, precisely in its relation to nihilism, for Agamben does not see the nihilism that prevails in art, and that reaches its most extreme form in the ‘ready-made’ and in pop art (see Agamben 1999a: 64), as just one form of nihilism among others: the ‘problem of the work of art and of its destiny in our time is not simply a problem among the others that trouble our culture’ (Agamben 1999a: 111). Whereas Hegel dismissively refers to that ‘so-called “irony”’ that was ‘invented’ by Schlegel and about which others have continued to ‘babble’ (schwatzen), Agamben privileges art as a self-annihilating nothing precisely because it grants us the possibility of experiencing the essence of nihilism as that which ‘secretly governs the course of Western history’. Art’s privilege is located, then, in its power to disclose the nihilism of Western culture as such: ‘it is in the experience of art that man becomes conscious, in the most radical way, of the event in which Hegel had already seen the most essential trait of unhappy consciousness, the event announced by Nietzsche’s madman: “God is dead”’ (Agamben 1999a: 57). But art’s privilege is far from being limited to this revelation of nihilism. For, in accordance with a Nietzschean logic to which Agamben turns in the chapter entitled ‘Poiesis and Praxis’, art as that in which the essence of nihilism holds sway is also that in which the surpassing of nihilism may be accomplished. In short, for all his critique of a thinking of art in terms of will, Agamben subscribes unreservedly here to Nietzsche’s claim in The Birth of Tragedy that art is ‘the highest task and the truly metaphysical activity of man’, and certainly not to be seen within the parameters of what is now called ‘culture’: the gift [dono] of art is the most original gift, because it is the gift of the original site of man [il dono dello stesso sito originale dell’uomo]. The work of art is neither a cultural ‘value’ [‘valore’] nor a privileged object for the α´ισθησις of the spectators, nor the absolute creative power of the formal principle; instead it situates itself in a more essential dimension, because it allows man to attain his original status in history and time in his encounter with it. (Agamben 1999a: 101) Furthermore, Nietzsche’s claim that the realization of the most extreme nihilism is precisely the moment at which a radical break with nihilism

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becomes possible – a claim that, as we have seen, governs Agamben’s thinking in The Coming Community – is already present two decades earlier in The Man Without Content. At the moment when the essence of art and the essence of nihilism coincide, art can transform ‘man’s inability to exit his historical status, perennially suspended in the inter-world between old and new, past and future, into the very space in which he can take the original measure of his dwelling in the present and recover each time the meaning of his action’ (Agamben 1999a: 114). In short, the logic governing Agamben’s thinking of the break with nihilism in art is the same as that governing his thinking of the break with nihilism in politics. Although modern art is under the sign of an ever more extreme nihilism, this does not mean that art as such offers no resistance nihilism prior to the coincidence of the essence of art with the essence of nihilism. We have seen that, following Hegel’s claim in the Aesthetics that art ‘points beyond itself’ (quoted in Agamben 1999a: 53), Agamben finds in art as the self-annihilating nothing that consummation of nihilism that does indeed point beyond itself, although in a manner rather different from that envisaged by Hegel, since it points to a beyond that is also a before: a return of art to its original unifying role, the role it performed before that fracture which determined its essence as on a collision course with the essence of nihilism. There are, however, also instances of art that, according to Agamben, are to be privileged above all others. In the modern period, Robert Walser and Kafka are singled out, the latter for having described the particularity of the modern, in which the state of exception becomes the rule, and the private and public become indiscernible from each other (see, for instance, Agamben 2000: 122). It is, however, at the origin of modern European poetry, in the works of the thirteenth-century Provençal poets (and especially Cavalcanti), that Agamben finds an art that may be said not simply to disclose but to escape nihilism, and to do so in a manner that shows the way for any politics. According to Agamben, in Provençal poetry ‘the experience of the event of language’ or the ‘advent of the poetic word’ is an ‘amorous experience’ (Agamben 1991: 68). Certainly, this experience includes ‘a negativity that the most radical troubadours – following contemporary theological speculations on the concept of the nihil – did not hesitate to conceive of in terms of nothingness’ (Agamben 1991: 69). Thus, that negative foundation which determines Western culture as nihilist would appear to be precisely the foundation upon which these poets’ experience of poetic language is based (see Agamben 1991: 74). The apparent

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commonality of poetry and philosophy in this respect is, however, not the whole story. For, according to Agamben, it is possible to identify a surpassing of the original fracture that determines Western culture in the art of these Provençal poets, an art that has to be understood in terms of a pneumatic-phantasmatic theory in which the love object is a phantasm (fantasma) and the poetry addressed to this phantasm is ‘the dictation of inspiring love’ (Agamben 1993b: 128). Unlike the Aristotelian–Saussurean linguistic sign, the poetic sign (segno poetico) that is produced here is not governed by the fracture, and thus escapes nihilism: the poetic sign, as it arises from the spirit of the heart [spiriti del cuore], can immediately adhere both to the dictation of the ‘spiritual motion’ that is love, and to its object, the phantasm impressed in the phantastic spirits [il fantasma impresso negli spiriti fantastici]. In this way, the poets freed themselves from the ‘primordial positing of the signified and the signifier as two orders distinguished and separated by a barrier resisting signification’, which, in its fidelity to the original metaphysical positing of the word as ‘signifying sound’, governs every Western conception of the sign. The pneumatic link, uniting phantasm, word, and desire, opens a space in which the poetic sign appears as the sole enclosure [unico asilo] offered to the fulfillment of love and erotic desire in their roles as the foundations and meaning of poetry [. . .] . (Agamben 1993b: 128) Provençal poetry, then, becomes the place in which there occurs a poetic healing (conciliazione) of the fracture at the origin of Western metaphysics (see Agamben 1993b: 129). This event is absolutely singular, coming as it does at the birth of modern European poetry and also constituting the sole occasion on which modern Western culture is not governed by the fracture of presence and thus not located under the sign of nihilism: in the poetry of (in)spiring love [. . .] desire, supported by a conception that constitutes the sole coherent attempt in Western thought to overcome the metaphysical fracture of presence [il solo tentativo coerente del pensiero occidentale per superare la frattura metafisica della presenza], celebrates, for perhaps the last time in the history of Western poetry, its joyful and inexhaustible ‘spiritual union’ with its own object of love, with that ‘joy that never ends’. This remains the always vital and luminous project against which our poetic culture will have to measure

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itself, if and when it succeeds in stepping backward and beyond itself toward its own origin. (Agamben 1993b: 130) Viewed from the perspective of Agamben’s later work, this poetry may be described as messianic (messianico). However, in an irony that returns us to a thinking of the uncanniness of nihilism, this privileging of Provençal poetry emerges from a body of work in which the other major literary touchstone is Kafka, in whom Agamben finds the most precise revelation of the nihilism that prevails in ‘our age’. That irony lies in the fact that it is to Kafka that one may turn for a literary exploration of the question of animality, and in particular the fracture between the human and the animal that is arguably the metaphysical fracture par excellence, and the one that, together with the determination of the messianic community as fraternal, remains operative in Agamben’s own thinking of the ‘stepbackward-beyond’ nihilism.

The fracture of the human/animal We have seen that, according to Agamben, Western culture is nihilist in its essence – and indeed ever more nihilist – because it fails to think the ‘original fracture’ lying at the origin of Western metaphysics, politics, and aesthetics, and of which the most essential manifestation occurs within language; that is, as the bar or border between signifier and signified. Within the discourse of Western metaphysics, however, to speak of language is also always to speak of the difference between the human and the animal – with the human being precisely that living being which, according to Aristotle, is distinguished by its possession of language: zoon logon echon. That this human/animal fracture is in fact more originary than any other, that it is upon this fracture that Western metaphysics is founded, is Derrida’s argument in the texts collected in the posthumously published volume The Animal That Therefore I Am (2005), and, if one accepts this argument, then for all its insistence on a bringing to light of, and a thinking beyond, the fractures that would determine Western culture as nihilist, Agamben’s thought remains largely dependent upon a fracture that it fails to think. To give just a few among many possible examples: in Infancy and History (1978), in an apparently radical rethinking of the human/animal distinction and in particular of Aristotle’s determination of the human as the animal possessing language, Agamben claims that ‘Animals are not in fact denied language’. However, this very assigning of language

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to the non-human animal is in fact part of an argument that reaffirms the human/animal fracture: It is not language in general that marks out the human from other living beings [. . .] but the split between language and speech, between semiotic and semantic (in Benveniste’s sense), between sign system and discourse. Animals are not in fact denied language; on the contrary, they are always and totally language. [. . .] Animals do not enter language, they are already inside it. Man, instead, by having an infancy, by preceding speech, splits this single language and, in order to speak, has to consume himself as the subject of language – he has to say I. (Agamben 2007a: 59). In Idea of Prose (1985), Agamben adopts a Heideggerian position when he asserts that ‘animals do not know appearances. Only man is concerned with images as images; only man knows appearance as appearance’ (Agamben 1995: 127). A year later, in ‘On Potentiality’ (1986), the concept of potentiality (potenza) – which lies at the heart of Agamben’s theorization of the step-backward-beyond nihilism – is thought on the basis of the human/animal fracture: ‘human beings [l’uomo], insofar as they know and produce, are those beings who, more than any other, exist in the mode of potentiality. [. . .] Other living beings [Gli altri viventi] are capable only of their specific potentiality; they can only do this or that. But human beings are the animals who are capable of their own impotentiality [l’uomo è l’animale che può la propria impotenza]’ (Agamben 1999b: 182; Agamben’s emphasis).5 And again, at the end of ‘The Passion of Facticity’ (1988), one reads: ‘Human beings do not originally dwell in the proper; yet they do not (according to the facile suggestion of contemporary nihilism [secondo la troppo facile suggestione del nichilismo contemporaneo]) inhabit the improper and the ungrounded. Rather, human beings are those who fall properly in love with the improper, who – unique among living beings [unico tra i vivente] – are capable of their own incapacity [può la sua impotenza]’ (Agamben 1999b: 204; Agamben’s emphasis). This radical fracture is then reiterated in The Coming Community (1990), where it grounds Agamben’s thinking of the ‘whatever’ singularity: ‘human beings – as beings of power who can do or not do, succeed or fail, lose themselves or find themselves – are the only beings for whom happiness is always at stake in their living, the only beings whose life is irremediably and painfully assigned to happiness’ (Agamben 2000: 4). In other words, according to Agamben, no other ‘form of life’ could find or lose itself; for no other ‘form of life’ is happiness at stake.

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In the same work, we find the following radical distinction between the human and the animal world, which reworks Heidegger’s distinction of the human Dasein from the animal in terms of the latter’s exclusion from the experience of the ‘as such’: Thus [Così]. The meaning of this little word is the most difficult to grasp. ‘Hence things stand thus.’ But would we say of an animal [animale] that its world is thus-and-thus? Even if we could exactly describe the animal’s world, representing it as the animal sees it [. . .] , certainly that world would still not contain the thus; it would not be thus for the animal: it would not be irreparable. (Agamben 1993a: 93; Agamben’s emphasis) Five years later, the entire argument of Homo Sacer is grounded in the assumption that the bare life which is both produced and destroyed by sovereign power is always human life. In the face of this, one might ask whether a thinking of the extermination of the Jews ‘like lice’ – to which Agamben himself refers, arguing that the phrase ‘like lice’ makes it clear that this extermination is not sacrificial – does not lead one towards a thinking of other exterminations in which the object of this particular liquidation is what one would no doubt too hastily term ‘the animal’. As though coming, albeit very late in the day, to the realization that the inheritance of the human/animal fracture has compromised the entirety of his critique of nihilism conceived precisely as the unthought determination by the original metaphysical fracture, Agamben confronts the issue directly in The Open: Man and Animal (2002). Here, he seeks to identify the working of what he terms the ‘anthropological machine’ that has produced the human/animal distinction within the human throughout the history of Western metaphysics. In this analysis, it is Heidegger who constitutes the last major philosopher whose thought is governed by this machine, in his attempt to distinguish in his 1929 lecture course on The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics between the stone as worldless (weltlos), the animal as poor in world (weltarm), and man as world-forming (weltbildend). As Agamben puts it, Heidegger was ‘the last to believe (at least up to a certain point, and not without doubts and contradictions) that the anthropological machine, which each time decides upon and recomposes the conflict between man and animal, between the open and the not-open, could still produce history and destiny for a people’ (Agamben 2004: 75). The ‘task’ of thought now is to stop this machine, or more precisely to render it inoperative (inoperoso), and in so doing ‘to show the central emptiness, the hiatus that – within

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man – separates man and animal, and to risk ourselves in this emptiness: the suspension of the suspension, Shabbat of both animal and man’ (Agamben 2004: 92). Such a rendering inoperative of the anthropological machine would open onto a messianic world of the kind that Agamben finds depicted in a late painting by Titian entitled Nymph and Shepherd (in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). According to Agamben, this work presents us with the image of ‘a new and more blessed life, one that is neither animal nor human’ (Agamben 2004: 87). The community of lovers in this painting represents ‘a human nature rendered perfectly inoperative – the inactivity [inoperosità] and désœuvrement of the human and of the animal as the supreme and unsavable figure of life’ (Agamben 2004: 87). Despite this vision of living beings (viventi) sitting together at the ‘messianic banquet of the righteous’ (Agamben 2004: 92), however, at no point does Agamben concern himself with the question of the concept of the animal (animale) in its identifiability, its univocity, and its coherence, and this neglect is only compounded by his absolute resistance to an undoing of the no less problematical distinction between living and non-living being – as though we had at our disposal a sufficient concept of the living (vivente) and indeed of life (vita) more generally. Beyond its return in the form of the human/animal, the fracturing that is the essence of nihilism as Agamben determines it comes to operate within his own thought more generally as the fracture between one kind of nihilism and another; that is, between what, by way of Benjamin, he thinks as imperfect nihilism and messianic nihilism. This terminology, in which one is supposed to understand that messianic nihilism is not really nihilism at all, arguably disguises the heart of the problem in Agamben’s critique of Western culture, namely that this critique and the concepts it wields, not least the concepts of potentiality and rendering inoperative, inhabit a zone between one nihilism and another, the place of a violence that can be neither nihilist nor non-nihilist, and that the very notion of surpassing nihilism requires a determination of nihilism that is itself haunted by the very thing from which it would free us. For as long as that is the case, the fracturing will no doubt continue. Healed in one place, it will re-emerge in another – precisely on account of that healing.

7 Distortions, or Nihilism Against Itself: Gianni Vattimo

We have seen that, from Heidegger to Agamben, the history of the concept of nihilism takes the form of a series of counter-turns, each redeployment of this concept countering one or more of its prior determinations. These counter-turns include, but are far from being restricted to, Heidegger’s against Nietzsche, Adorno’s against Heidegger, and Agamben’s against the entire sequence from Nietzsche to Derrida. Arguably the most paradoxical turn of all, however, is the one that takes the form of an explicit revalorization of nihilism, or the redetermination of nihilism itself as that which offers the only genuine resistance to nihilism. We have already encountered such a turning of nihilism back against itself in both Adorno and Agamben. In Negative Dialectics (1966), for instance, Adorno argues that, far from simply attacking nihilism, we should acknowledge that we can never be sufficiently nihilist: ‘A thinking man’s true answer to the question of whether he is a nihilist would probably be “Not enough” – out of callousness, perhaps, because of insufficient sympathy with anything that suffers’ (Adorno 1973: 380). That said, Adorno retains the distinction between an apparent nihilism – above all, the negativity characterizing the œuvre of Samuel Beckett, which, he argues, is not nihilist, since through the maintenance of a slightest difference within the negative it points towards a non-nihilist reconciliation (Versöhnung) – and a real nihilism, namely that of the administered world, governed as it is by the principle of identity. Drawing on Benjamin’s conception of a messianic nihilism, Agamben too theorizes a nihilism that would counter the ‘imperfect nihilism of our time’; that is, the nihilism of a ‘being in force without significance’ of the law (Agamben 1998: 53). In this case, however, the nihilism of the messianic is theorized as a necessary step towards a coming community that would be located beyond nihilism. 163

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In fact, this turning of nihilism back against itself, and the production of what might be termed a counter-nihilism, is already present in Nietzsche, in his distinction between active and reactive (or passive) nihilism, and it is this distinction that continues to govern not only Agamben’s thinking of a messianic nihilism but all the various other post-war attempts to theorize a counter-nihilism. As we shall see in this chapter, in the work of three ostensibly very different theorists of such a counter-nihilism – Paul de Man, Jean Baudrillard, and above all Gianni Vattimo – not only does the Nietzschean distinction between an active and a reactive nihilism continue to operate, but in each case this counter-nihilism takes the form of a retheorized aesthetic. Indeed, what may broadly be termed the postmodern is arguably nothing other than that epoch in which, paradoxically, such a retheorized aesthetic is determined as that counter-nihilism which constitutes the only genuine form of resistance to nihilism. Everything will depend here on the maintenance of a distinction between these two forms of nihilism, which is to say a border within the same. The maintenance of that border will, however, require certain distortions, and it is in these distortions that the uncanniness of nihilism will come to manifest itself.

Nihilism as literature: Paul de Man Although the term ‘nihilism’ is deployed only rarely by Paul de Man, it is nonetheless possible to see his work from at least as early as the mid1950s as an unremitting defence of a certain romanticism (and, above all, Rousseau and Hölderlin) not only against the charge of nihilism, but also as the only genuine resistance to nihilism. In the review-essay ‘The Literature of Nihilism’ (1966), for instance, de Man charges Erich Heller with ‘distortion’ in his treatment of romantic neo-Hellenism in the collection The Artist’s Journey into the Interior and Other Essays (1965). According to de Man, this distortion lies in Heller’s claim that ‘the romantic attitude toward Greece is one of nostalgic envy’, whereas in fact ‘most romantics quickly moved beyond this mood of regret and, in the most deeply Hellenic of them all, Hölderlin, it never appeared in this form. [. . .] The neo-Hellenic theme is for the romantics a special version of the theme of mutability and contingency, not the description of an actual state of being that could be brought back if we only had the strength to do so’ (de Man 1989: 169). Far from being ‘nihilistic’ on account of the ‘negative components’ that are indisputably to be found within it,

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the ‘romantic mind’ is actually anti-nihilistic precisely because of these components: In any interpretation of romanticism, the question of motive is of determining importance: the presence of negative components in the romantic mind becomes indeed a sign of weakness if they are the compensatory fantasies of an overreaching spirit. If, on the other hand, they result from a genuine experience of reality, then we can only praise these writers and thinkers for having come closer to showing us our condition as it really is. The project of moving beyond romanticism will then take on a very different meaning from the one suggested in [Heller’s] essays. (de Man 1989: 169) If romanticism may be described as a ‘literature of nihilism’, then this is on the condition that one bears in mind that ‘A literature of nihilism is not necessarily nihilistic’ (de Man 1989: 164). Furthermore, any ‘project of moving beyond romanticism’, and not just Heller’s, is precisely what de Man’s own later critical endeavours will militate against, since it is in a certain romanticism that he will locate the most effective forces for the resistance of a nihilism that in ‘The Literature of Nihilism’ is determined not only as a misleading positivity but also as a negativity that is not grounded in a ‘genuine experience of reality’. De Man’s defence of Hölderlin against the charge of nihilism is not to be confused, however, with Heidegger’s. Indeed, in the essay ‘Heidegger’s Exegeses of Hölderlin (1955), de Man repeats Adorno’s gesture of defending Hölderlin against his own philosophical champion. Again, it is for de Man a matter of distortion. Against Heidegger’s claim that Hölderlin ‘founds the immediate presence of Being by naming it’ and thus counters a nihilism determined as the forgetting of Being, de Man asserts that Hölderlin ‘says the exact opposite of what Heidegger makes him say’ (de Man 1983: 252–5; de Man’s emphasis). For while he is ‘right’ to see in the poem ‘As on a Holiday . . .’ (1800) a ‘statement of the relation of poet to Being’, Heidegger ‘begins to distort the meaning when he continues by showing the poet as naming the presence of the present’ (de Man 1983: 256–7; emphasis added). According to de Man, it is this particular distortion that lies at the heart of Heidegger’s elucidations (Erläuterungen) of Hölderlin. As for a non-distorting reading of Hölderlin, this would have to lead to the recognition that the poet states the impossibility of establishing Being in its presence through the poetic word, ‘for as soon as the word is uttered, it destroys the immediate and discovers that instead of stating Being, it can only state mediation’ (de Man 1983: 259).

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In short, Hölderlin’s poem discloses that all experience of Being is necessarily mediated through language, and that language is both the promise and the denial of Being in its presence. In an aporia that will become de Man’s abiding concern, language is both the way and that which blocks the way to Being as presence, and, according to de Man, this aporia finds its fullest articulation in Hölderlin’s poetry of the period 1801–5. Crucially, however, de Man does not consider Hölderlin’s poetry to be simply the experience of this aporia; rather, that poetry is also a knowledge of it, albeit a knowledge that remains in a certain sense unusable. Of ‘As on a Holiday . . .’, for instance, de Man concludes that it ‘suggests a conception of the poetic as an essentially open and free act, a pure intention, a mediated and conscious prayer that achieves self-consciousness in its failure; in short, a conception diametrically opposed to Heidegger’s’ (de Man 1983: 263). In his counter-Heideggerian reading of Hölderlin, then, de Man presents Hölderlin as the poet not of reconciliation but of ‘necessary separation’ (de Man 1983: 264). And yet, while he reiterates that his own reading of Hölderlin is the opposite of Heidegger’s distorting reading, and while he implicitly redetermines nihilism not as the forgetting of Being but as the forgetting of difference, mediation, or necessary separation, de Man nonetheless remains absolutely true to the most fundamental element in Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin, namely the privilege that is to be accorded to Hölderlin’s poetry for its power of resistance to nihilism. The privilege that de Man accords to the literary – and, above all, to Rousseau and Hölderlin – is based upon a certain negativity that is to be distinguished from anything ‘nihilistic’. Although, as de Man himself will later observe, the argument of ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’ (1969) remains tied to a thinking of difference in terms of subject and object, self and non-self, mind and world (or nature), the analysis of the distinctions between symbol, allegory, and irony in romanticism and its inheritors in this essay is of major importance within de Man’s œuvre not least because it begins to resituate the notion of a non-nihilistic negativity within the language of literature rather than within either the mind of the poet or the content of the poetry itself. According to de Man, the difference between symbol and allegory lies in the fact that the former is governed by a false (or what he will later term ‘ideological’) principle of identity, whereas allegory is governed by a principle of irreconcilable difference – and, crucially, the ‘painful knowledge’ of this difference: Whereas symbol postulates the possibility of an identity of identification, allegory designates primarily a distance in relation to its own

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origin, and, renouncing the nostalgia and the desire to coincide, it establishes its language in the void of temporal difference. In so doing, it prevents the self from an illusory identification with the non-self, which is now fully, though painfully, recognized as non-self. It is this painful knowledge that we perceive at the moments when early romantic literature finds its true voice. (de Man 1983: 207) This recognition of irreducible difference between self and non-self, mind and world, which will later become that between language and world, constitutes a ‘negative self-knowledge’ (de Man 1983: 208). The place in which this negative self-knowledge finds expression, although not as the theme or matter of the work, is literature. This negative selfknowledge of difference stands in strict opposition to the ‘tenacious self-mystification’ that insists upon the possibility of an identification between self and non-self, or, in de Man’s later work – commencing with Allegories of Reading (1979) – between language and world. Thus, if we return to de Man’s counter-Heideggerian reading of Hölderlin, we can say that Heidegger’s Hölderlin is a symbolical poet – and this despite Heidegger’s own insistence in each of his lecture courses on Hölderlin between 1934 and 1942 that Hölderlin’s poetry is not to be read symbolically – whereas de Man’s Hölderlin is allegorical. At this point, de Man is extremely close to Adorno, who, as noted in Chapter 3, is in turn indebted to Walter Benjamin’s reading of Hölderlin as the poet of demythologization (Entmythologisierung). As for the distinction between allegory and irony upon which de Man focuses in the final section of ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’, this might at first appear to take us beyond Hölderlin, for while in both allegory and irony ‘the sign points to something that differs from its literal meaning and has for its function the thematization of difference’ (de Man 1983: 209), de Man observes that irony appears to be ‘conspicuously absent’ from the work of the major romantic writers – Rousseau, Wordsworth, and Hölderlin – coming to dominance only later in the nineteenth century, in Kierkegaard, Hoffmann, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Nietzsche. Taking Baudelaire’s essay ‘On the Essence of Laughter’ (1855) as his point of departure for an analysis of irony – an analysis to which he will return in ‘The Concept of Irony’ (1977) – de Man argues that, just as allegory states the irreducibility of difference between self and non-self, so irony ‘splits the subject into an empirical self that exists in a state of inauthenticity and a self that exists only in the form of a language that asserts the knowledge of this inauthenticity. This does not, however, make it into an authentic language, for to know inauthenticity is not the same

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as to be authentic’ (de Man 1983: 214). Once again, then, we find the thought of a knowledge of difference that remains negative because it can never become authentic, the epistemological remaining at odds with the ontological. As the experience of a negativity that is non-dialectical in that it cannot produce an identity beyond difference – as it does in the Hegelian dialectic – irony is the experience of madness: ‘absolute irony is the consciousness of madness, itself the end of all consciousness; it is a consciousness of a non-consciousness, a reflection on madness from the inside of madness’ (de Man 1983: 216). And, according to de Man, there is no escape from this madness other than through an abandonment of the negative knowledge of difference; in other words, the only alternative to this madness is nihilism. Just as Blanchot argues (against Novalis) in The Space of Literature (1955) that when we dream that we are dreaming we are in fact further from waking than ever (see Blanchot 1982: 267), so de Man argues in ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’ that, far from being a ‘return to the world’ from language, the ‘irony of irony’ states ‘the continued impossibility of reconciling the world of fiction with the actual world’; in short, irony is ‘an endless process that leads to no synthesis’, no reconciliation of what is now to be thought as the irreducible division of language and world (de Man 1983: 218, 220). While the structure of allegory and irony may differ markedly, the former being successive and the latter synchronic, what they share – and this, significantly, given his insistence upon difference, is ultimately more important to de Man than the difference between them – is their power of demystification. Through their insistence upon irreducible difference, these two modes constitute the ‘demystification of an organic world postulated in a symbolic mode of analogical correspondences or in a mimetic mode of representation in which fiction and reality coincide’ (de Man 1983: 222). True nihilism, as opposed to the negative knowledge that is to be found in a literature of allegory or irony, is precisely the mystificatory statement of such a correspondence between fiction and reality. Again, however, despite his insistence upon the radical priority of difference, de Man asserts that the negative knowledge to be found in both allegory and irony is ‘essentially the same’ (de Man 1983: 226). As knowledge, they must remain negative in that they are ‘fully de-mystified when they remain within the realm of their respective languages but are totally vulnerable to renewed blindness as soon as they leave it for the empirical world’ (de Man 1983: 226). That, for de Man, it is in literature that this negative knowledge resides, and that literature is therefore the sole resistance to a nihilism

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determined as the denial or forgetting of difference, a mystificatory or ideological conception of the relation between language and world, is reiterated in essay after essay, but is nowhere more clearly expressed than in ‘The Resistance to Theory’ (1982), in which he offers the closest thing to a summary overview of his conception of literature and the reason for its being privileged above all other modes of utterance in relation to nihilism. The general argument of this essay is as follows: All linguistic utterance is unreliable owing to the ‘autonomous potential of language’, its ‘considerable freedom from referential restraint’, which ‘makes it epistemologically highly suspect and volatile, since its use can no longer be said to be determined by considerations of truth and falsehood, good and evil, beauty and ugliness, or pleasure and pain’ (de Man 1986: 10). While this autonomous potential is common to all language, however, it is in literature that a ‘negative knowledge about the reliability of linguistic utterance is made available’ (de Man 1986: 10). In other words, only through literature does it become possible to grasp the rhetoricity of language as such. This knowledge remains negative, however, because it can found no reliable metalanguage that would be freed from, and in a position to master, the rhetoricity of language. Reiterating the argument made in both ‘Heidegger’s Exegeses of Hölderlin’ and ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’, de Man claims that this knowledge retains its status as knowledge only if it remains within the realm of the literary, only as long as it is not applied as knowledge within other discourses – not least the discourse of politics, where it would immediately become ideology. It is in the discussion following one of his final texts, the 1983 lecture ‘Conclusions’, on Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’ (1923), that de Man finally comes to identify this negative knowledge, this demystificatory power of literature, as itself a kind of saving nihilism, which is to say a nihilism that would counter nihilism determined as the denial or forgetting of difference. In this lecture, de Man argues that Benjamin’s conception of translation, which is elaborated by way of Hölderlin, is itself a theory of the literary that anticipates his own. The general thrust of de Man’s argument, which I have elsewhere sought both to analyse and to situate in relation to an ethics of alterity that de Man shares with both Blanchot and Derrida, and that determines his reading of Benjamin (see Weller 2006: 33–56), is that the latter thinks translation as desacralization, decanonization, and disarticulation, and thus precisely as what de Man takes to be literature. What literature thus conceived achieves is negative, but savingly so. And it is here, in his thinking of literature in terms of a saving negativity, that de Man turns

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in the discussion following his lecture to the concept of nihilism, and more precisely to a revalorized nihilism, which, like Agamben, he takes from Benjamin’s ‘Theological-Political Fragment’ and which he relates back to Nietzsche. According to Benjamin, the task of world politics is to accomplish the total passing away (totale Vergängnis) of nature, since only through this negation may the redemptive consummation of history be achieved. The method of this negating politics is nihilism (Nihilismus) (see Benjamin 2002: 306). De Man glosses Benjamin’s point as follows: One could say, with all kinds of precautions, and in the right company, and with all kinds of reservations, that – and I think that’s a very small company – that Benjamin’s concept of history is nihilistic. Which would have to be understood as a very positive statement about it. In the same way that in Nietzsche nihilism is a necessary stage, and is accounted for in those terms. Understand by nihilism a certain kind of critical awareness which will not allow you to make certain affirmative statements when those affirmative statements go against the way things are. (de Man 1986: 103–4) Nihilism as ‘a certain kind of critical awareness’, an awareness located in literature, works against another nihilism which would negate the rhetoricity of language, negate difference, seeking security in a knowledge of the world that would make use of language as a tool that it wrongly assumes it can both master and ultimately discard. Literature, as de Man conceives it, then, is the home of negative knowledge, a saving nihilism, but a nihilism that, paradoxically, saves us from the myth of salvation. This counter-nihilism protects us from those ‘affirmative statements’ that go against ‘the way things are’. Such affirmative statements would, for all their affirmativeness, ultimately be nihilist distortions in that they would deny the real nature of the relation (or, more precisely, the non-relation) between language and world. So it is that despite his deconstructive readings of Nietzsche in Allegories of Reading (1979), and despite his claim in ‘The Rhetoric of Blindness’ (1971) that Derrida’s reading of Rousseau in Of Grammatology (1967) is distorting in its failure to acknowledge that Rousseau’s texts are already self-deconstructive in a manner that Nietzsche’s are not, de Man’s privileging of literature as a kind of counter-nihilism may be mapped onto, and indeed derives from, Nietzsche’s distinction between two fundamental kinds of nihilism: active and reactive, the former latter serving to undo that which prevents any surpassing of nihilism. And, for de

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Man, this distinction is founded upon another, namely that between the distortive and the non-distortive, the latter being located precisely in a negative knowledge that finds its home in literature. A similar reliance upon the distinction between two basic forms of nihilism, with one been taken to counter the other, underlies Jean Baudrillard’s thinking of nihilism.

Nihilism as theoretical violence: Jean Baudrillard At first glance, de Man and Baudrillard might seem to be diametrically opposed to each other in their thinking of nihilism. First, while de Man finds a saving counter-nihilism in literature, Jean Baudrillard appears to find it in theory. Secondly, in his essay ‘On Nihilism’, in Simulacra and Simulation (1981), Baudrillard identifies the first ‘great manifestation’ of nihilism as romanticism, which is to say precisely where de Man locates the only genuine resistance to nihilism. For Baudrillard, romanticism is nihilism in that it constitutes a ‘destruction of the order of appearances’ (Baudrillard 1994: 159). In an argument that echoes Max Weber’s theory of Entzauberung, Baudrillard sees this destruction as the radical ‘disenchantment of the world’, and its abandonment to ‘the violence of interpretation and of history’ (Baudrillard 1994: 160). This first manifestation of nihilism is followed in the twentieth century – for reasons that Baudrillard does not identify – by a second manifestation, this time as the ‘destruction of the order of meaning’, a destruction that Baudrillard finds in Surrealism, dada, and the absurd. If the first manifestation of nihilism is aesthetic, the second is political, historical, and metaphysical, even if its forms are themselves still essentially aesthetic (see Baudrillard 1994: 160). Beyond these two manifestations, however, Baudrillard argues that we have now entered a radically new phase in the history of nihilism, and one that can no longer be understood under the Nietzschean rubric of either decadence or the death of God. This third manifestation is nihilism as transparency (transparence) – or, more precisely, as false or simulated transparency – and it is ‘in some sense more radical, more crucial than in its prior and historical forms, because this transparency, this irresolution is indissolubly that of the system, and that of all the theory that still pretends to analyze it’ (Baudrillard 1994: 159). Far from being a weakening of nihilism, this third manifestation is in fact its consummation, since nihilism now dominates the entire field of both theory and praxis, including any discourse that would seek to accomplish its diagnosis and its overcoming. Nothing, it seems, could be further from Ernst Jünger’s

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optimism in ‘Across the Line’ (1950) regarding the possibility of a step beyond nihilism in the post-war world. If contemporary nihilism cannot be understood in Nietzschean terms – that is, as the death of God and the devaluation that this death both constitutes and entails – neither can it be comprehended by the Heideggerian determination of nihilism as the forgetting or oblivion of Being. And neither is it reification, or even the determination of the essence of Being as non-being. Rather, as ‘simulated transparency’, nihilism is the rendering hyperreal of all beings in the sense that everything is now a pure simulacrum (simulacre), which is to say a copy without original, a depthlessness that, paradoxically, cannot even be conceptualized as a pure surface. If, as Baudrillard insists, this third manifestation of nihilism is not apocalyptic, it nonetheless remains utterly negating. The system to which everything now belongs is one that ‘annihilates us’ (Baudrillard 1994: 160). Neither strictly aesthetic nor political, contemporary nihilism’s mode of manifestation is mediatic. As mediatic, contemporary nihilism is characterized above all by its radical paradoxicality. Its very mode of appearance is disappearance, and our relation to this appearance as disappearance is fascination, which is itself ‘a nihilistic passion par excellence’ (Baudrillard 1994: 160). That which disappears in this consummation of nihilism as the all-embracing system, that which is annihilated by it, is the real, meaning, the stage, history, the social, and the individual. Indeed, so all-consuming is this contemporary nihilism that the very concept of nihilism itself must also disappear – this being the ultimate paradox of contemporary nihilism, that it is nihilism as the negation of nihilism: ‘in fact, nihilism is impossible, because it is still a desperate but determined theory, an imaginary of the end, a weltanschauung of catastrophe’ (Baudrillard 1994: 161). In short, the consummation of nihilism is the nihilation of its own concept: To tell the truth, it is no longer so much a question of nihilism: in disappearance, in the desertlike, aleatory, and indifferent form, there is no longer even pathos, the pathetic of nihilism – that mystical energy that is still the force of nihilism, of radicality, mythic denial, dramatic anticipation. It is no longer even disenchantment, with the seductive and nostalgic, itself enchanted, tonality of disenchantment. It is simply disappearance. (Baudrillard 1994: 162) Now, if the entire system is nihilist through and through, and if ‘Everywhere, always, the system is too strong: hegemonic’ (Baudrillard 1994: 163), it would seem that the very possibility of critique and of any step

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beyond nihilism as disappearance and the reign of the simulacrum is irremediably lost. Indeed, as we have seen, Baudrillard insists that the attempt to analyse this nihilism is itself nihilist. Faced with the impossibility of any outside from which a critique of nihilism might be launched, he argues that the only hope must lie in turning nihilism back against itself from within. It is in this spirit that he declares: ‘I am a nihilist’ (Baudrillard 1994: 160). Far from being a capitulation to the system, this declaration is the statement of a counter-nihilism. Unlike Adorno, however, with whose concept of the administered world his own concept of the system is closely akin. Baudrillard does not appeal to any kind of aesthetic practice for an instance of counter-nihilism. Rather, the nihilism that would counter nihilism, from within that system which is the very nihilation of the possibility of any outside, is a kind of terrorism, and more precisely a theoretical terrorism: ‘Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left to us’ (Baudrillard 1994: 163). For this theoretical violence directed against the nihilism of the system, Baudrillard reserves Nietzsche’s term ‘active nihilism’. Even this active nihilism of the theoretical terrorist is unable, however, to overcome the nihilism against which it is directed, for the power of the system is simply too great. According to Baudrillard, this power takes the form of a ‘generalized process of indifferentiation’ (Baudrillard 1994: 161), which is to say the dissolution, as distinct from the resolution, of all antagonisms. Indifferentiation is the very essence of the mediatic: the nihilism of the system is the rendering indifferent of real horror; the suffering that is presented on the television screen is annihilated by its very presentation – an argument that is striking not least for its formalism, and for its inversion of Benjamin’s celebration of cinema as a revolutionary medium in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ (1936). In a final turn of the screw, subjected to indifferentiation, the active nihilism of the theoretical terrorist becomes ‘the involuntary accomplice of the whole system, not politically, but in the accelerated form of indifference that it contributes to imposing’ (Baudrillard 1994: 163). It would appear, then, that there can be no possible resistance to the nihilism of the system, since the counter-nihilism of theoretical violence is not only nullified by, but actually ends up working for, the very nihilism it would counter. And yet, Baudrillard’s own analysis – his own, let it be said, rather conventional and episodic history of nihilism – remains. By being ‘obsessed’ by disappearance (Baudrillard 1994: 162), by registering this disappearance as disappearance, Baudrillard’s own discourse presents itself as a resistance of nihilism

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in which the objective genitive continues to be privileged over the subjective. In other words, through his very articulation of the contemporary in terms of nihilism, and even – following Nietzsche as read by Blanchot in The Infinite Conversation (1969) – through his insistence upon the final truth of nihilism as its impossibility, Baudrillard situates himself in a relation to the nihilism he would denounce that is never simply a relation of pure indifference. Indeed, his own rhetoric is, in its very denial of the apocalyptic that would characterize the rhetoric of nihilism, itself apocalyptic, since the history of nihilism that it produces is a passage to the limit that is the consummation of nihilism as the system. Furthermore, that Baudrillard’s analysis of nihilism, and of an other nihilism that would turn against the nihilism of the system, remains one in which the aesthetic is privileged, despite his apparent advocacy of theoretical violence, becomes evident at the end of the essay ‘On Nihilism’, when he revisits the first two modes of nihilism: that is, the aesthetic and the political. Claiming that while nihilism as the ‘destruction of the order of meaning’ is indeed possible, and has in fact been accomplished, nihilism as the ‘destruction of the order of appearances’ – that is, the first, aesthetic, manifestation of nihilism, which goes by the name of romanticism – does not in fact do away with appearances at all. Indeed, while there is ‘no more hope for meaning’, while meaning has been subjected to absolute annihilation, the same cannot be said for appearances, for ‘that on which [meaning] has imposed its ephemeral reign, what it hoped to liquidate in order to impose the reign of the Enlightenment, that is, appearances, they, are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism of meaning or of non-meaning itself’ (Baudrillard 1994: 164). So, while the absolute nihilation of meaning is possible, that of appearances is not. What this means is that appearances possess a resistance to annihilation that is unique. The uniqueness of Baudrillard’s own intervention in the history of the deployment of the concept of nihilism would lie, then, in his opposing theoretical to aesthetic nihilism, and in his privileging of the latter as that which annihilates the very difference between the two. If he remains tied to the Nietzschean tradition that conceives the task of thought to be the resistance of nihilism, Baudrillard appears to depart from that tradition in his characterization of the nihilism to be resisted as itself aesthetic in nature, in the sense that it is the absolute dominance of appearances that can be determined as neither meaningful nor meaningless. And yet, in his claim that appearances remain in a certain sense indestructible, Baudrillard continues to privilege a certain form of the aesthetic as a resistance of nihilism. In this, his conception

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of counter-nihilism bears more than a passing resemblance to that of Gianni Vattimo.

Nihilism as aesthetic consciousness: Gianni Vattimo According to Karen Carr, the recent anti-foundationalist ‘banalization’ of nihilism, in which nihilism is no longer considered in Niezschean terms as a phase that is both a threat and a promise, but as a permanent condition that is itself liberating, is typified by the neo-pragmatism of Richard Rorty. Contrasting Rorty’s ‘aesthetic response’ to nihilism with Karl Barth’s ‘religious response’, she claims that the former constitutes a ‘calm acceptance’ of alethiological nihilism, an acknowledgement that there can be no ‘transcendental, trans-cultural, or trans-historical access to truth or meaning’ (Carr 1992: 192, 6). Rorty, however, does not deploy the concept of nihilism to characterize his own approach. For an anti-foundationalism that does attempt to make what both Heidegger and Adorno term philosophical use (philosophische Verwendung) of the concept of nihilism, one has to turn to the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo. Although not mentioned by Carr, it is Vattimo who, in a series of works including The Adventure of Difference (1980), The End of Modernity (1985), and, most recently, the essays collected in the volume Nihilism and Emancipation (2003), has produced arguably the most fully developed revalorization of nihilism in the post-war period, a revalorization that takes a certain nihilism to be ‘our (only) chance’ (la nostra (unica) chance) (Vattimo 1988: 23). While explicitly deriving his own conception of nihilism from both Nietzsche and Heidegger, Vattimo does so through what he sees as a reading against the letter of their texts – in other words, a kind of distortion, albeit a justified one. This is particularly evident in his interpretation of Heidegger, whom he takes to be, like Nietzsche, an essentially postmodern thinker. At its most general, nihilism as Vattimo conceives it is the negation of all metaphysical ground or foundation. This, he argues, is what Nietzsche means when, in the penultimate section of The Gay Science (1882), he announces the death of God. While the foundation that nihilism negates may take many forms – including God, truth, reality, reason, fact, and objectivity – the master term for the foundation that is negated by nihilism is Being (essere), and it is here that Heidegger’s determination of nihilism as the forgetting, abandonment, or default of Being comes into play. For Vattimo, Nietzsche is the first postmodern thinker in that he inaugurates that epoch in the history of Being

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wherein Being itself is submitted to nihilism as a weakening (indebolimento). According to Vattimo, a similar weak ontology (ontologia debole) finds expression in Heidegger. In neither Nietzsche nor Heidegger, however, is this nihilistic weakening of Being as ground an accomplished reduction to nothing or annihilation. Such a reduction would be another kind of nihilism; that is, a reactive or bad nihilism, from which Vattimo wishes to distance the active nihilism that he will champion. As he puts it in the essay ‘Doing the Law Justice’ (1998), nihilism ‘remains ensnared in metaphysics as long as it conceives of itself, even only implicitly, as the discovery that there, where we thought there was Being, there is in reality nothing [c’è, in realtà, il nulla]’ (Vattimo 2004: 146; Vattimo’s emphasis). Vattimo’s revalorization of nihilism is achieved principally, then, through a return to Nietzsche’s distinction between active and reactive nihilism. Active nihilism is to be thought as hermeneutics, postmodernity, post-foundationalism, the post-metaphysical, weak ontology, or what – taking the term from Heidegger – Vattimo describes as Verwindung. As Vattimo observes, this term is used only rarely by Heidegger.1 In each case, however, it serves as an alternative to, and is to be carefully distinguished from, Überwindung (overcoming). As Vattimo puts it in The End of Modernity: Verwindung indicates something analogous to Überwindung, or overcoming [superamento o oltrepassamento], but is distinctly different from the latter both because it has none of the characteristics of a dialectical Aufhebung and because it contains no sense of a ‘leaving-behind’ [‘lasciarsi alle spalle’] of a past that no longer has anything to say to us. (Vattimo 1988: 164) As a kind of ‘improper’ Überwindung, Verwindung is the weakening (indebolimento) rather than the absolute negation of Being. On the one hand, it signifies convalescence, healing, resignation, ironic acceptance, incorporation; on the other hand, it signifies distortion (distorsione) – although, tellingly, Vattimo identifies this latter meaning as ‘rather marginal’ (abbastanza marginale) (Vattimo 1988: 171–2). Whereas Überwindung is modern and metaphysical, Verwindung is postmodern and post-metaphysical in its avoidance of the mystifying belief that one can escape metaphysics simply by stepping outside it. Thus, the Verwindung of all metaphysical foundation does not entail the positing of nothingness (nulla) as a new ground.

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As active nihilism, Verwindung is a counter-nihilism in that it directs its negativity against the foundation-positing reactive nihilism of metaphysics. Diametrically opposed to active nihilism, reactive nihilism is the refusal to accept the absence of any ground, the refusal to accept Nietzsche’s assertion (itself an interpretation) that there are no facts, only interpretations (see, for instance, Nietzsche 1968: 267; 1999: xii. 315). Reactive nihilism ‘refuses to admit that neither objective meanings and values nor given structures of Being exist’ (Vattimo 2006: 135; Vattimo’s emphasis). Above all, this form of nihilism avoids what Vattimo, after Nietzsche, describes as the ‘creative task’ of producing ‘new values and new structures of meaning, new interpretations’ (Vattimo 2006: 135). If that against which active nihilism directs itself is reactive nihilism, however, this does not mean that these two basic forms of nihilism can be thought apart from each other. Indeed, active nihilism cannot ever free itself entirely from reactive nihilism, since, were it to do so, it would immediately fall back into the naïvety of metaphysics. This logic has considerable consequences for Vattimo’s thinking of historicity or what (adopting the term from Heidegger) he takes to be the Ge-Schick of Being. According to Vattimo, Heidegger’s post-Being and Time thinking of Being in terms of Ereignis (variously translated as ‘event’, ‘appropriation’, and ‘enowning’) makes of Being not a ground or foundation but that which is to be grasped in its historicity, or more precisely in its Ge-Schick (destiny or dispatching). The history of Being is, then, the history of its dispatchings, with each of these dispatchings constituting an epoch. As Vattimo puts it: ‘there is no Grund or ultimate truth; there are only historically destined or historically dispatched overtures from a Selbst or Same, which gives itself to us only in and through these overtures’ (Vattimo 1988: 175). Active nihilism is not, however, simply the thinking of this historicity of Being but also part of it, since active nihilism is itself that epoch in the history of Being in which the latter is submitted to an ‘indefinite process of reduction, diminution, weakening’ (Vattimo 1998: 93). In an irony of which Vattimo cannot be said to take account, however, his own (quasi-Heideggerian) thinking of the historicity of Being leads him to theorize an epoch of Being – that is, the epoch of active nihilism from within which he himself writes – as the end of history, the end of the Ge-Schick of Being, since there can be nothing beyond it, all beyond here being nothing other than a return to the reactive nihilism of metaphysics, from which active nihilism is endlessly engaged in freeing itself. With the thinking of Being in its historicity, then, we find ourselves caught in the interminability of active

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nihilism. In short, we are now living the paradoxical endless end of history: Nihilism, if it should (and can) not be understood as the discovery that instead of Being there is nothing, can only think itself as the history (endless [senza fine] – without conclusion in a state in which in place of Being there is nothing [c’è il nulla]) in which Being, asymptotically, consumes itself, dissolves, grows weak [si consuma, si dissolve, si indebolisce]. (Vattimo 2004: 146; Vattimo’s emphasis) Although Vattimo makes no reference to Samuel Beckett in this thinking of the endless end of reactive nihilism, it is precisely such an asymptotic movement that commentators have found in, for instance, Endgame (1957), and which, as we have seen in Chapter 3, Adorno thinks as an irreducible difference (Differenz) within the negative. Now, according to Vattimo, it is necessary not only to think Being in its historicity, but also to recognize that there is a logic to that history: ‘it is because the apertures of truth, the epochs of Being, come to an end and are followed by others, like the generations of mortals, that Being is sending, Ge-Schick, a history of interpretations that link up one to another like calls and responses and do not just pile up in a purely arbitrary and incomprehensible disorder’ (Vattimo 2006: 206). For all his rejection of the modern, Enlightenment conception of history as a progress towards an ever better future, then, there remains an unambiguously ameliorative progressivism in Vattimo’s thinking of history as active nihilism. Indeed, the history of Being becomes a process of increasing ethicalization, since with the emergence of active nihilism and its endless movement towards an overcoming of reactive nihilism there is ever less violence and thus ever greater justice ( giustizia). Thus, while he may claim that this process is endless, it nonetheless remains closely akin to the kind of perfectibilism characteristic of Enlightenment thought, or to what Vattimo himself describes as the metaphysical philosophy of history ‘that dominates the Enlightenment and grounds its faith in the widening cone of light cast by reason’ (Vattimo 2004: 153). And indeed the very contradictions besetting the Enlightenment thinking of history return to haunt Vattimo’s own thinking of the Ge-Schick of Being. For instance, if each epoch of Being is finite, if each comes to an end, the epoch of active nihilism is radically distinct from all others not only in its being more just – because less violent, less reactively nihilist – than any epoch before it, but also in its very interminability – its being strictly senza fine.

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It is not simply from what he characterizes as Enlightenment thinking, however, that Vattimo finds it impossible to clearly distinguish his thinking of active nihilism. For a similar complication arises in his attempt to establish his distance from Derridean deconstruction in his thinking of active nihilism as Verwindung and the history of Being as Ge-Schick. If he risks collapsing his own thinking of the historicity of Being back into an Enlightenment thinking of history as a linear progress towards an ever more just, or ever less violent, society, this is not least because, like Heidegger before him, Vattimo wishes to distinguish active nihilism both from an ahistoricist thinking of Being and from a thinking of Being that would find no principle governing its unfolding other than that of pure chance. For Vattimo, the history of Being as Ge-Schick is not arbitrary; it is ‘different from that of a simple coup de dès’ (Vattimo 2006: 207). This allusion to Mallarmé is itself far from coincidental, since it refers us to what Vattimo takes to be the essential aestheticism of deconstruction. According to Vattimo, the principal failing of both Richard Rorty’s neopragmatism and Derridean deconstruction is that neither takes account of the logic governing the Ge-Schick of Being. As Vattimo sees it, deconstruction simply abandons logic for the aesthetic. This is apparent, he argues, not least in the rhetoric of deconstruction. On the one hand, Vattimo describes Derrida as ‘a thinker for whom I have the greatest admiration and devotion and to whom I feel very close’ (Vattimo 2004: 24). And Derridean deconstruction would certainly appear to be much closer to Vattimo’s conception of active nihilism than would the nihilism of Deleuze, which Vattimo judges to be too negative, ‘a nihilism that has no hope of constructing anything historically and no prospect of becoming a “state”’ (Vattimo 2006: 201). For all his declared sense of affinity with Derrida, however, Vattimo nonetheless claims in the essay ‘Philosophy and the Decline of the West’ (1998) that deconstruction is to be critiqued because it produces ‘philosophy as poetic discourse rather than as rational argumentation’. What is meant by ‘poetic’ here is clarified as follows: Derrida’s discourse is poetic [poetico], in my opinion, not because it is expressed in poetry, novels, or stories, but because, in defiance of what seems to be an essential prerequisite of philosophy, he refuses programmatically to begin with any ‘introduction’ whatsoever. Derrida never explains his reason for choosing the themes he takes up; he offers the most brilliant meditations on terms and concepts that are loaded with philosophical history, which he reconstructs in an illuminating manner, yet without ever theorizing the ‘logical’ necessity

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[la necessità ‘logica’] of taking up those topics in particular. (Vattimo 2004: 24) Later in the same essay, Vattimo goes on to claim that both deconstruction and neo-pragmatism reduce philosophy and rationality to a ‘pure esthetic game’ (puro gioco estetistico) (Vattimo 2004: 29). This, then, is the heart of Vattimo’s critique of deconstruction: it fails to justify its points of departure, or its ground, and this signals a more general failure: the abandonment of rationality for the aesthetic. In short, in its radical anti-foundationalism, deconstruction sides with art against philosophy in an act of unambiguous anti-Platonism. As we have seen in Chapter 5, Derrida does indeed privilege the literary as a site of resistance to nihilism (determined by Derrida as the reduction to nothing of the other) in what he terms the ‘modern period’. However, simply to reduce deconstruction itself to the poetic, and to argue that deconstruction reduces philosophy to a ‘pure esthetic game’ by abandoning logic, is surely to distort the very complexity of the relation between deconstruction, nihilism, and the aesthetic. Furthermore, it is precisely to what he takes to be the unfoundedness of the deconstructive procedure that Vattimo objects, even though his own active nihilism is itself identified as a Verwindung of all foundation. All hinges here upon the difference between one mode of nihilistic distortion and another. That with which Vattimo charges deconstruction, then, is an aesthetically distortive nihilism, or a reactive nihilism for which the ground is an abyss above which there would occur a pure aesthetic play. There is an irony in this charge, however, and it is an irony through which the very uncanniness of nihilism manifests itself in Vattimo’s own distortive championing of active nihilism as the Verwindung of metaphysics. That irony lies in the fact that, while on the one hand he finds it necessary to critique deconstruction for reducing philosophy to a ‘pure esthetic game’, on the other hand Vattimo argues that the active nihilism for which he is calling, and which he would distinguish from deconstruction, is itself essentially aesthetic in nature. Indeed, one may go still further and observe that what Vattimo’s active nihilism shares most closely with deconstruction is precisely an ethico-aesthetics in which the locus of all value is the altogether other (tout autre), as Derrida terms it in The Gift of Death (1992). Beyond simply distinguishing non-evaluatively between active and reactive nihilism, from the outset Vattimo insists upon the ethical imperative that would both justify and commit us to active nihilism. In Nihilism and Emancipation, for instance, he claims that active nihilism

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works against the nihilism of metaphysics as ‘will to power, violence, the destruction of liberty’ (Vattimo 2004: 11). But, one might ask, how can this justification of active nihilism be achieved if that nihilism is itself the dissolution of all ground? To what specific values might one appeal if all values are hermeneutically produced? As we have seen, Heidegger at this point appeals to the worth (Würde) as distinct from the value (Wert) of Being. In Vattimo, it is at this point that we find ourselves carried back into an ethico-aesthetics of alterity. The ethics of active nihilism is, he claims, an ‘ethics of the other, or the others’ (etica dell’altro, o degli altri), not an ‘ethics of the Other’ (etica dell’Altro) (Vattimo 2004: 64). The new value of values, replacing the value of truth, is openness to the other/others (altro, altri); that is, charity (caritas) (Vattimo 2004: 35). Like Derrida’s deconstructive ethic of hospitality, Vattimo’s nihilist ethics of finitude (etica della finitezza) will retain ‘some aspects of Kantianism (especially the formulation of the categorical imperative in terms of respect for the other . . .)’ (Vattimo 2004: 46). Furthermore, as for Derrida, so for Vattimo, there remains a fundamental distinction between good and bad violence. We have seen that, in Derrida, this is the distinction between that deconstructive violence which opens a future ‘to come’ (à venir) for the altogether other, and another (nihilist) violence that would reduce the other to nothing by closing down all possibility of a future that is not fully programmed and that for this reason is no future at all. For Vattimo, the distinction is between the violence of active nihilism and the violence of reactive nihilism. Just as Derrida claims in Force of Law (1994) that deconstruction is itself justice, so Vattimo claims in Nihilism and Emancipation that active nihilism is justice (giustizia); that is, justice as the ‘progressive reduction of the original violence of the law’ (riduzione progressiva della violenza originaria del diritto) (Vattimo 2004: 150). Indeed, it turns out – no doubt to the relief of those who associate nihilism with violence against all state apparatuses and all law – that active nihilism is squarely on the side of liberalism and democracy: ‘a weak ontology, or better an ontology of the weakening of Being [indebolimento dell’essere], supplies philosophical reasons [ragioni filosofiche] for preferring a liberal, tolerant, and democratic society rather than an authoritarian and totalitarian one’ (Vattimo 2004: 19). If these reasons are philosophical, they cannot be metaphysical – and yet they have to remain reasonable; the coincidence of active nihilism, liberalism, and democracy cannot be a matter of pure chance. If the ethics of active nihilism as Verwindung is closely akin to the ethics of deconstruction, the same can also be said for the nature of its appeal to a certain form of the aesthetic. To grasp the aesthetics of

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active nihilism as Vattimo theorizes it, one has to return to Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy (1872) and, in particular, to the attack on the figure of Socrates in that work. On the one hand, Vattimo’s entire theory of active nihilism is founded upon a watertight distinction between fact and interpretation, metaphysics and hermeneutics. Thus the Socratic value of values, self-knowledge (‘know thyself’), cannot be the founding value for active nihilism. On the other hand, active nihilism is distinguished from the reactive nihilism of metaphysics precisely in its knowing that what it produces are not facts but interpretations – or epistemically justified distortions: the interpretations proper to active nihilism are explicitly aware of their own hermeneutic nature and purely on that account correspond to a more adventurous, richer, more open form of life. In the way of life of the herd, in reactive nihilism, no interpretation has the courage to present itself as an interpretation, as someone’s interpretation; it must always appear to be objective truth. (Vattimo 2006: 136) Vattimo is the first to acknowledge, however, that this appeal to the value of self-knowledge is problematical, to say the least, for any theorization of active nihilism as the undoing of metaphysics. So it is that he finds it necessary to follow Nietzsche in relying ultimately not on the Socratic value of self-knowledge but rather on the value of the aesthetic in his justification of the distortion that is active nihilism: if we seek a model for the active nihilist we find Nietzsche directing us to the artist, who is thought of essentially as tragic and Dionysian, but in a sense that recalls Schopenhauer and his ascetic interpretation of Kantian aesthetic disinterestedness. The possibility of an active nihilism is the capacity, to which the artist bears witness, to transcend the instinct of self-preservation and achieve a condition of moderation that also forms the basis of the heedless, disinterested hubris that is essential for the experimental capacity of the Übermensch. (Vattimo 2006: 140) If the active nihilist is an artist, then this is because the world that this form of nihilism produces is itself nothing other than a work of art: ‘Once denied any faith in the Grund and in the course of events as a development toward an ultimate point, the world appears as a work of art which makes itself: “ein sich selbst gebärendes Kunstwerk”, an expression that Nietzsche takes from F. W. Schlegel’ (Vattimo 1988: 96). As though

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forgetting his own critique of deconstruction as the reduction of philosophy to a ‘pure esthetic game’, Vattimo proceeds to describe the active nihilism that he is championing as itself a form of ‘“aesthetic consciousness”’ (‘coscienza estetica’), which ‘may be recuperated as an experience of truth precisely insofar as this experience is substantially nihilistic’ (Vattimo 1988: 114–15). Like Nietzsche’s Übermensch, Vattimo’s active nihilist ‘is able to look at many cultures with a gaze more esthetic than “objective” or truth seeking’ (Vattimo 2004: 55). Vattimo goes on to claim that: the salvation of our postmodern civilization can only be an esthetic salvation [salvezza estetica]. [. . .] the reconciliation of peace and liberty in the postmodern or late-modern world will be attained only on condition that esthetics prevails over objective truth. The variety of lifestyles and the diversity of ethical codes will be able to coexist without bloody clashes only if they are considered as, precisely, styles within an art collection – and for that matter within a museum. (Vattimo 2004: 56–8) From a statement such as this, it is clear that Vattimo does not accept Walter Benjamin’s claim at the end of ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ that our choice lies between the aestheticization of politics (Fascism) and the politicization of the aesthetic (Socialism) (see Benjamin 2002: 122). Rather, for Vattimo, active nihilism involves ‘a general aestheticization of existence’ (una generale estetizzazione dell’esistenza) (Vattimo 1988: 52). Certainly, this general aestheticization is to be distinguished from what Vattimo sees as the metaphysical conception of the aesthetic that finds its final expression in Adorno’s negative aesthetics. Adorno’s conception of art remains metaphysical in its constituting both a critique of the world as it is (the wholly administered world) and the promise (albeit a broken one) of a better world, a world of reconciliation, no longer governed by the principle of identity. According to Vattimo, Adorno’s negative aesthetics remains an instance of reactive nihilism in that it follows both Ernst Bloch’s and Herbert Marcuse’s conception of the authentic work of art – for Adorno, this is, as we have seen, above all the works of Beckett – as ‘a truly prophetic and utopian figuration of an alternative world or of a harmonized existence’; ‘the inaugurality of poetry and art is always conceived in terms of “founding” [“fondare”], that is to say, of figuring possible historical worlds which offer an alternative to the existing

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world’ (Vattimo 1988: 67; Vattimo’s emphasis). In Adorno, this would be a world governed by a principle of reconciliation (Versöhnung). In contrast, the general aestheticization of active nihilism founds nothing, discloses no truth, is not, as art is for Gadamer, an experience of the truth (see Vattimo 1988: 123). Instead, the general aestheticization theorized by Vattimo makes possible the experience of truth as an event, ‘as the ever new and different determination of regulative structures of experience’ (Vattimo 1988: 75). The truth of active nihilism as aesthetic consciousness is truth ‘stripped of the authoritarian traits of metaphysical evidence’ (Vattimo 1988: 76). As for de Man, so for Vattimo, this truth is ‘essentially rhetorical’ in nature (Vattimo 1988: 135). It is not disclosed by, or experienced in, the aesthetic but produced by it. And it is precisely to the truth produced by the aesthetic that we have an ethical obligation. That truth is the value of the other in its otherness. Now, faced with this claim that active nihilism as a counter-nihilism must take the form of ‘aesthetic consciousness’ for ethical reasons – that is, in order to justify itself – one might think that it is simply a matter of exposing a contradiction by pointing out that, on the one hand, Vattimo critiques deconstruction for playing a ‘pure esthetic game’ while, on the other hand, he identifies active nihilism as itself a form of ‘aesthetic consciousness’. That contradiction is certainly present in Vattimo’s thought, but it points us in the direction of a logic of the uncanny, and more precisely that logic of nihilism as what Nietzsche terms the ‘uncanniest of all guests’. In attempting to deploy the concept of active nihilism, Vattimo finds himself caught up in a history that he fails to master, not least because that history – the history of the very relation between literature, philosophy, and nihilism – is one to which his own thinking belongs, and from which any departure would require an excavation of the concept of nihilism that includes Nietzsche rather than basing itself upon him, and that would have to write into itself a distortion that is not recuperable within the concept of Verwindung but that constitutes the border of that concept. To return to Vattimo’s own point of departure – Nietzsche’s claim that there are no facts, only interpretations – this claim, even if it is taken to be an interpretation, cannot be just one interpretation among others. Rather, if active nihilism as Verwindung is to be justified, it is of course the one interpretation that must be privileged above all other possible interpretations, since it founds the non-foundational. But, again, we have certainly not exhausted the thinking of the history of nihilism by pointing to a contradiction or a paradoxicality that lies at the heart of Vattimo’s thinking of active nihilism as a counter-nihilism.

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What remains to be thought beyond any such contradiction, paradoxicality, or (in Derrida’s case) aporia is the recurrence of an ethico-aesthetics in which the categorical imperative will be openness to alterity. This imperative underlies the thought of both Derrida and Vattimo, and is certainly located much deeper than any Auseinandersetzung between them. In Vattimo, that ethico-aesthetics is articulated as the endless struggle between active and reactive nihilism as two forms of distortion, and yet the very articulation of that struggle requires that deconstruction be figured as a form of reactive nihilism. For all his declared sense of affinity with Derrida, deconstruction becomes that hostile other which Vattimo’s active nihilism requires if it is to constitute itself as an openness to alterity. That this other is not in fact an other in the sense that Vattimo takes it to be is the distortion upon which his own conception of liberating distortion depends. Through his critique of deconstruction as a form of reactive nihilism, Vattimo works against the very distinction between active and reactive nihilism upon which his entire theory of counternihilism depends. This distortion of the border goes beyond Vattimo’s own insistence that ‘active nihilism is always passive and reactive too’ (Vattimo 2006: 140), for it constitutes an indifferentiation of the kind to which Baudrillard refers in his essay ‘On Nihilism’. Through this indifferentiation, active nihilism finds itself returning as reactive nihilism in a distortion that is not necessarily either liberating, rational, or ethical in the sense that these terms have within Vattimo’s own discourse. It is, rather, the manner in which a nihilism beyond the distinction between the active and the reactive comes to haunt Vattimo’s own deployment of the concept.

8 The Denial of (Greek) Thought: Alain Badiou

The ‘least-worst signifier’ For a number of seemingly very cogent reasons, one might have assumed that an analysis of that philosophical and literary-theoretical tradition in which a variously defined literature is privileged above all other modes of discourse for what is taken to be its powers of resistance to a variously defined nihilism would not include Alain Badiou other than as the most patent of counter-examples; that is to say, as a philosopher whose entire project may be summed up as the attempt to break completely with, and indeed to refute, the philosophical tradition stemming from Nietzsche and passing by way of Heidegger, Blanchot, Derrida, and Deleuze, among others. As Badiou observes in Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (1997), this Nietzschean tradition relies upon the notion of ‘Platonism’, against which it directs all its force, the ‘crucial point’ of intersection between Deleuze and Heidegger being their ‘ineluctable devaluation of Plato – which both get from Nietzsche’ (Badiou 1999a: 101). At the heart of this Platonism would lie the radical distinction between logos and mythos, or between philosophy and what will come to be thought as literature, and the absolute privilege accorded to the former over the latter. It is on the impossibility of any such watertight distinction between philosophy and literature that this Nietzschean tradition repeatedly insists, and, as we have seen, it does so precisely in the interests of a resistance to nihilism. According to Badiou, the refutation of this entire Nietzschean (or anti-Platonic) tradition is necessary precisely because the concept of Platonism upon which that tradition relies is in fact ‘the great fallacious construction of modernity and postmodernity alike’ (Badiou 1999a: 102). Deploying – without naming his source for – one of the key terms to have emerged from within the tradition that he is challenging, 186

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Badiou calls for the ‘deconstruction’ of the concept of Platonism (Badiou 1999a: 101). By deconstruction, however, Badiou means neither a Heideggerian Abbau nor a Derridean operation of reversal and displacement, but rather the exposure of this ‘construction’ in its falsity. For Badiou, the deconstruction of the concept of Platonism is the necessary first step in a ‘return to Plato’ that would not only reinstate a clear theoretical distinction between philosophy and literature, but also limit the privilege accorded to the latter. Indeed, Badiou’s proposed mathematical ontology, as elaborated in Being and Event (1988), would free philosophy from what he takes to be its epochal suturing to the poem (poème). According to Badiou, this suture finds its first full expression in Nietzsche and its culmination in Heidegger as the relation between thinking (Denken) and poeticizing (Dichten), and constitutes what in his Manifesto for Philosophy (1989) he terms the ‘age of the poets’. As Badiou sees it, the first of the poets to which philosophy has been sutured is Friedrich Hölderlin and the last Paul Celan, in whose works – and, above all, in the poem ‘Todtnauberg’, in Lichtzwang (1970) – one finds the dismissal of philosophy (that is, of Heidegger) by poetry. With its desuturing from the poem, philosophy would once again be governed by the concept, its labour that of conceptualization, its task the construction of a space for those truths that are produced by the four truth-processes (processus de vérité) or conditions of philosophy, namely science, politics, love, and art. For all his commitment to a return to Plato and a freeing of philosophy from its suturing to the literary in the form of the poem, however, Badiou nonetheless continues to share with the philosophical tradition from which he would break a reliance upon the concept of nihilism, which he in his turn finds it necessary both to redetermine and to redeploy as what in the Manifesto he terms a ‘least-worst signifier’ (signifiant bouchetrou) (Badiou 1999b: 58). That he attempts to redetermine nihilism in a non-Nietzschean manner is certainly not enough to ensure an effective break with the philosophical (or, as he sees it, anti-philosophical or sophistic) tradition that he aims to submit to refuting critique. For, as we have seen throughout this book, it is precisely such an attempt to think nihilism beyond Nietzsche, and even to redetermine the concept of nihilism against Nietzsche, that characterizes each and every major intervention in the field, from Heidegger’s to Agamben’s. Furthermore, if Badiou seeks to limit, without simply negating, the privilege accorded to the literary, this privilege will remain tied in Badiou’s own work to the thinking of a necessary resistance to nihilism. Indeed, with Badiou – and for reasons that have everything to do with the radicality of the

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break with the Nietzschean tradition upon the necessity of which he insists – philosophy comes once again to be determined in its entirety as anti-nihilism. Thus, one finds Badiou repeating the Nietzschean gesture, albeit as that gesture’s inversion or mirror-image. That a certain form of the literary will have no small part to play in this economy of inverting repetition is again far from coincidental. As we saw in the Introduction, the philosophical position taken by the pre-Socratics (or sophists, as Badiou terms them, after Plato) Kallikles and Thrasymachus is, according to John Burnet, an ethical nihilism, as distinct from the cosmological nihilism of Gorgias (see Burnet 1914: 121–2). This ethical nihilism takes both justice (dik¯e) and right (dikaiosun¯e) to be based on nothing but political power: it is always the stronger party that determines both what is just and what is right in any given situation. Badiou trumps this notion of ethical nihilism in Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (1993), in which he argues that in the ‘contemporary world’ ethics as such is a ‘figure of nihilism’ (Badiou 2001: 30). For all its apparent radicality, however, this argument in fact repeats that of Nietzsche, who in On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) argues that the moral (as distinct from the aesthetic) interpretation of phenomena is nihilist. That his own conception of nihilism is derived from Nietzsche is acknowledged quite explicitly by Badiou: ‘Nietzsche demonstrated very neatly that humanity prefers to will nothingness rather than to will nothing at all. I will reserve the name nihilism for this will to nothingness, which is like a kind of understudy [doublure] of blind necessity’ (Badiou 2001: 30). This doubling of Nietzsche is considerably complicated, however, by the fact that, like Heidegger, Badiou takes Nietzsche’s own thought to be the incarnation of nihilism in the modern era, for reasons to which we shall turn shortly. Everything will depend here on whether Badiou can appropriate the concept of nihilism from Nietzsche in order to turn it back against him, without Badiou’s own thought finding itself subjected to that uncanniness of nihilism upon which Nietzsche remarks early in the course of his own deployment of the term. For Badiou, then, far from ethics being opposed to nihilism – as one might have assumed – ethics is itself nihilism. But what possible justification could there be for such a claim? The answer to this question carries us to the heart of Badiou’s philosophical project. Noting that the ‘recourse’ to ethics is ‘the major “philosophical” tendency of the day’ (Badiou 2001: 2–3), Badiou goes on to assert that ‘Our contemporary moment is defined by an immense “return to Kant” ’ – that is, to ‘the idea that there exist formally representable imperative demands that are to be subjected neither to empirical considerations nor to the examination

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of situations’ (Badiou 2001: 8). Together with this return to Kant, however, the contemporary thinking of ethics is also shaped by a more recent philosophical presence, that of Emmanuel Levinas, from whom comes the most fully elaborated form of an ethics of alterity, which is to say an ethics founded upon the notion of the value of the (absolutely) other in its otherness, and governed by the imperative to respect this other, to take responsibility for it to the point of taking responsibility even for its death. According to Badiou, this recourse to ethics in both its Kantian and its Levinasian forms is ‘a genuine nihilism, a threatening denial of thought as such’ (Badiou 2001: 2–3), by which he means that any attempt to produce an ethics is necessarily anti-philosophical, since it must appeal to that which cannot be conceptualized and must be founded upon a negation of the very singularity of those particular ‘situations’ in which any genuinely ethical action might take place (Badiou 2001: 3). Arguably, it is the Levinasian ethics of alterity that has exerted the most influence on the contemporary philosophical and literary-theoretical field, not least through Derrida’s later work on an ethic of hospitality. As we have seen in Chapter 5, while Derrida insists as early as Of Grammatology (1967) upon a violence that would precede the ethical, he nonetheless comes to justify deconstruction ethically through a distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ violence, the former being a deconstructive violence and the latter a ‘nihilist’ violence that is directed against the other in its otherness, and that aims at the reduction to nothing of all difference and thus at a closing down of the future as the ‘to come’ (à venir) from which the unprogrammable other would arrive. For Badiou, however, it is not in any such ‘bad’ violence directed against the other that nihilism is located, but rather in the very ethics of alterity itself. Identifying Levinas’s counter-Heideggerian notion of ethics as ‘first philosophy’ as essentially ‘non-Greek’, Badiou observes that the ethics of alterity ‘proposes a radical, primary opening to the Other conceived as ontologically anterior to the construction of identity’ (Badiou 2001: 19). Ethics thus conceived is, he maintains, religious rather than philosophical, since, as ‘the new name of thought’, it is thought that has ‘thrown off its “logical” chains (the principle of identity) in favour of its prophetic submission to the Law of founding alterity’ (Badiou 2001: 20). This founding alterity is a non-conceptualizable ‘Altogether-Other’ (tout-autre) (cf. Derrida 1995: 82), which, according to Badiou, is ‘quite obviously the ethical name for God’ (Badiou 2001: 22), a claim that is considerably easier to justify in the case of Levinas than it is in that of Derrida. If, on the one hand, the ethics of alterity constitutes an opening onto such an Altogether-Other, on the other hand it depends upon a negation of philosophy as such: ‘this is

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philosophy (in the Greek sense of the word) annulled [annulée] by theology, itself no longer a theology (the terminology is still too Greek, and presumes proximity to the divine via the identity and predicates of God) but, precisely, an ethics’ (Badiou 2001: 23; Badiou’s emphasis). Thus, for Badiou, the contemporary ‘figure’ of nihilism is ethics as anti-philosophy or religion. One might say, then, that Badiou’s conception of nihilism is not just non-Greek but anti-Greek thought, and more precisely Semitic anti-thought as religion. According to Badiou, it is against ethics as nihilism that philosophy must struggle; indeed, philosophy’s task is quite simply to refute (réfuter) nihilism in all its forms or figures. A first sally in this labour of refutation is to point to the obvious contradiction at the heart of the ethics of alterity, namely that there is one difference that this ethics cannot tolerate: ‘there can be no respect for those whose difference consists precisely in not respecting differences’ (Badiou 2001: 24). Of course, if, as Badiou claims, this ethics of alterity ‘throws off its “logical” chains’, it need not take the charge of inconsistency or even of contradiction very seriously. So it is that Badiou has to resort to a considerably more ambitious strategy to refute ethics as nihilism, namely the claim that such an ethics is founded upon a complete misconception of being as such. Badiou’s critique of ethics as nihilism commences with the countering of this misconception, on the basis of the fundamental axiom of his own thought, namely that ‘There is no God. Which also means: the One [l’Un] is not. The multiple “without-one” [Le multiple “sans un”] – every multiple being in its turn nothing other than a multiple of multiples – is the law of being. The only stopping point is the void’ (Badiou 2001: 25). This means that ‘Infinite alterity is quite simply what there is [ce qu’il y a]’ (Badiou 2001: 25; Badiou’s emphasis). Ethics as nihilism, then, is a denial of the true nature of being as multiple – and here, although he does not remark upon the fact, Badiou finds himself again repeating an adversary, since he produces a variation on Heidegger’s determination of nihilism as the forgetting of being (Seinsvergessenheit). Given his identification of ethics as the contemporary figure of nihilism, and of philosophy’s task as the refutation of this nihilism, one might assume that Badiou will simply abandon the possibility of the ethical altogether. This, however, is precisely what he does not do. Instead, he proposes an ethic of truths (éthique des vérités). If being is an ‘infinite multiplicity of differences’, truths (which are themselves always multiple, there being no one Truth that would correspond to being is its oneness) are precisely ‘indifferent to differences’, this very indifference being ‘something we have always known, even if sophists of every age

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have always attempted to obscure its certainty: a truth is the same for all’ (Badiou 2001: 27; Badiou’s emphasis). So it is that, far from being incompatible, the multiple and the universal come together: there are truths, but each of these truths is the same for all. As for an ethics, ‘The only genuine ethics is of truths in the plural. [. . .] Ethics does not exist. There is only the ethic-of (of politics, of love, of science, of art)’ (Badiou 2001: 28; Badiou’s emphasis). These four truth-processes – politics, love, science, and art – are the procedures through which truths are produced, and are thus the four conditions of philosophy, which itself does not produce any truths, but rather constructs and maintains a ‘space of thought in which the different subjective types, expressed by the singular truths of its time, coexist. But this coexistence is not a unification – that is why it is impossible to speak of one Ethics’ (Badiou 2001: 28; Badiou’s emphasis). The two principal theorizations of ethics to which Badiou refers – the Kantian and the Levinasian – produce what Kant terms a ‘categorical imperative’, forms of which are also to be found, as we have seen, in Adorno, Derrida, Agamben, and Vattimo. For Kant, in the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785), there can be only one categorical imperative and it is: ‘Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law’ (Kant 1991: 84). For Levinas, it is that one must take responsibility for the other (see Levinas 1998), and indeed, in his late work, for the death of the other (see, for instance, Levinas 1985: 118–19). According to Badiou, both of these imperatives are nihilist in that they negate the particular situations in which ethical decisions are taken. This does not mean, however, that his own proposed ethic of truths lacks any such imperative, or indeed that this imperative is not single in number and does not claim universality; in fact, the imperative of this ethic of truths is no less categorical and no less universal than those proposed by Kant and Levinas. The imperative in question is: ‘Keep going!’ (Continuer!) (Badiou 2001: 52), and, as Badiou acknowledges, it is derived from the Lacanian imperative not to give up on one’s desire (ne pas céder sur son désir) (see Lacan 1992: 311–25; quoted in Badiou 2001: 47). By the imperative ‘Keep going!’, Badiou means that the ethical as he determines it lies not in any relation to others, and not in any appeal to human rights, but rather in a fidelity to truth-processes as the sole Good (Bien). In order to grasp what it might mean to be faithful to a truth-process, it is first necessary to outline what Badiou means by truth, since it is neither adequation (the correspondence of thought and being) nor a Heideggerian aletheia (truth as unconcealment). Instead, each truth that

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is produced by the four truth-processes is to be understood as a hole (trouée) punched in established or instituted knowledges (savoirs institués) (see Badiou 2001: 43). These truths possess ‘incalculable novelty’, and as such they cannot but encounter resistance from the forces of conservatism that would preserve those instituted knowledges: ‘Precisely because a truth, in its invention, is the only thing that is for all, so it can actually be achieved only against dominant opinions, since these always work for the benefit of some rather than all’ (Badiou 2001: 32: Badiou’s emphasis). Every truth ‘deposes constituted knowledges, and thus opposes opinions. For what we call opinions are representations without truth, the anarchic debris of circulating knowledge’ (Badiou 2001: 50; Badiou’s emphasis). As for opinion, it is ‘the primary material of all communication’, and is ‘beneath the true and the false, precisely because its sole office is to be communicable. What arises from a truthprocess, by contrast, cannot be communicated [ne se communique pas]’ (Badiou 2001: 51; Badiou’s emphasis). Governed by the imperative ‘Keep going!’, then, the ethical is a resistance to the ‘permanent temptation’ of giving up on truths in their very antagonism to constituted knowledges, ‘of returning to the mere belonging to the “ordinary” situation, of erasing the effects of the not-known [de raturer les effets de l’insu]’ (Badiou 2001: 48). It is an unrelenting affirmation of truths in the face of those forces of conservatism that would negate the not-known (insu), the absolutely new, the incommunicable and unnamed, and the singular. Since these forces of conservatism are the forces of nihilism, the aim of which is to negate truths, the resistance of the temptation to give in to these forces is the ethical resistance to nihilism as such: It is only by declaring that we want what conservatism decrees to be impossible, and by affirming truths against the desire for nothingness [le désir de néant], that we tear ourselves away from nihilism [qu’on s’arrache au nihilisme]. The possibility of the impossible, which is exposed by every loving encounter, every scientific re-foundation, every artistic invention and every sequence of emancipatory politics, is the sole principle – against the ethics of living-well whose real content is the deciding of death – of an ethic of truths. (Badiou 2001: 38–9) That said, the forces of nihilism against which the ethic of truths takes its tireless stand are not merely some absolute other in relation to the truths that they would negate. Rather, the truths themselves make possible the

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very Evil (Mal) that the ethic of truths must resist. For while every new truth punches a hole in instituted knowledges, these truths are also ‘the sole known source of new knowledges’ (Badiou 2001: 70). Crucially, however, while the relation between truth and knowledge is not some simple, static binary opposition, the same cannot be said for the relation between the ethical and the nihilist, since the ethical affirmation of truths does not itself produce nihilism; rather it holds to the truths precisely in their radical singularity, their novelty, and their incommunicability – that is, for as long as they are not reduced to knowledge, for as long as they are not the very matter of nihilism. As for the precise nature of the relation between truths and nihilism, the Evil against which the ethical is pitted takes three forms: terror (or the simulacrum), betrayal, and disaster. It is these three forms of Evil (that is, of nihilism) that ‘an ethic of truths – as opposed to the impotent morality of human rights – tries to ward off, in the singularity of its reliance on a truth in progress’ (Badiou 2001: 71). Under its one ethical imperative, ‘Keep going!’, the ethic of truths combines ‘resources of discernment (do not fall for simulacra), of courage (do not give up), and of moderation (do not get carried away to the extremes of Totality)’ (Badiou 2001: 91). Badiou defines these three forms of Evil in relation to the truths that they threaten as follows: ‘the simulacrum (to be the terrorizing follower of a false event); betrayal (to give up on a truth in the name of one’s interest); the forcing of the unnameable, or disaster (to believe in the total power of a truth)’ (Badiou 2001: 91; Badiou’s emphasis). Nazism, the very consummation of nihilism for Adorno, is for Badiou an instance of Evil (nihilism) as terror or simulacrum: ‘Nazism isolated and carried to its ultimate conclusion the nihilist core of the “ethical” disposition once it has at its disposal the political means to be something other than prattle’ (Badiou 2001: 36). But, for Badiou, as for Adorno before him, nihilism does not always take such obvious forms. Indeed, Badiou claims (and we shall have reason to return to this claim) that ‘every definition of Man based on happiness is nihilist’ (Badiou 2001: 37); and, among the things that Nazism shares with liberal democracy, not the least is the notion of the good life or of living well. Furthermore, contemporary ethics (that is, the ethics of human rights) is grounded in a conception of man as victim, as a vulnerable being requiring protection. For Badiou, however, man is to be characterized by his powers of resistance, by ‘his stubborn determination to remain what he is – that is to say, precisely something other than a victim, other than a being-for-death, and thus: something other than a mortal being’ (Badiou 2001: 11–12; Badiou’s emphasis).

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In this countering of Heidegger’s determination of the human Dasein as mortal, Badiou substitutes courage (courage) for Heidegger’s resoluteness (Entschlossenheit), and it is precisely such courage that he will find in a certain version of the literary, namely the later works of Samuel Beckett, to Badiou’s reading of which we shall return once we have charted his redetermination of nihilism beyond its identification with ethics. For, more generally, nihilism comes to serve Badiou as the name for that which in every epoch constitutes an ‘obscure desire for catastrophe’, a desire that he takes to be articulated with a conservatism that, as we have seen, is to be understood as the resistance to the absolute singularity of truths: ‘Every age – and in the end, none is worth more than any other – has its own figure of nihilism. The names change, but always under these names (“ethics”, for example) we find the articulation of conservative propaganda with an obscure desire for catastrophe’ (Badiou 2001: 38). What this claim leaves us to contemplate is the possibility – unremarked upon by Badiou himself – that in itself a desire for catastrophe is not necessarily nihilist, that it only becomes so when articulated with a conservatism that is truth-resistant. Might it not be possible to imagine a truth whose singularity would lie precisely in its being catastrophic, not for established or instituted knowledges, but for the very conception of being as multiple? Were this the case, then the distinction between the ethical (in Badiou’s sense) and the nihilism against which it is pitted in endless struggle would itself be threatened, and by a force that would no longer be determinable as nihilism in Badiou’s sense of the term. If Badiou identifies ethics as the contemporary figure of nihilism, it is nonetheless the case that, more generally, just as for Nietzsche nihilism is Platonism, so for Badiou nihilism is anti-Platonism, by which he means any form of thought that denies the possibility, not of Truth, but of truths and of the event (événement) that is their arrival. As the anti-Platonist par excellence, Badiou’s Nietzsche is (as Nietzsche himself claimed) the ‘perfect nihilist’, with those who belong to the Nietzschean tradition (not least Heidegger and Deleuze) repeating this nihilism in their very attempts to counter it. In short, philosophy as Badiou conceives it is antinihilism, and it is for this reason that philosophy cannot do without the concept of nihilism. As Badiou makes clear, ‘genuine philosophy’ needs the ‘sophists’ – that is, the forces of nihilism that claim that ‘the access to being and truth is impossible’ (Badiou 1999b: 56), and that in the twentieth century finds its two philosophical culminations in Heidegger and Wittgenstein, who are also the two principal manifestations of ‘modern nihilism’ according to another defender of Plato, Stanley Rosen (see

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Rosen 1969). That said, under this general definition of nihilism as the denial of the possibility of truths, nihilism is determined in a number of more specific ways in Badiou’s work, and these considerably complicate his own relation to the tradition that he would refute as nihilist. While, in Ethics, ethics as such is identified as nihilism, in his more recent work, The Century (2005), Badiou deploys the term ‘nihilism’ repeatedly and rather differently, this deployment being justified on the grounds that, under the anti-Platonic shadow of Nietzsche, the twentieth century conceived of itself both as ‘nihilism’ and as ‘Dionysian affirmation’ (Badiou 2007: 31). If the relation between nihilism and an affirmation that would constitute the overcoming of nihilism is in Nietzsche a non-dialectical one, it remains something more than a pure non-relation. In a gesture that indicates just how tied he remains to the tradition he would refute, Badiou finds it necessary at this point to invoke Deleuze in order to characterize the strange relation between nihilism and that which would effect its overcoming: The century is haunted by a non-dialectical relation between necessity and will. This is manifest in Nietzsche, who in this regard is a prophet of the century. Nietzsche carries out an extremely detailed diagnosis of nihilism, devoted to the genealogy of negative affects (guilt, ressentiment, and so on). But at the same time he voices the voluntaristic certainty of a Great Noon, a certainty bearing no relation to the domination of nihilism, whether as its result or as its dialectical sublation. No theory of negativity can guarantee this passage, and Deleuze is completely right to name this relation which is not a relation a ‘disjunctive synthesis’. (Badiou 2007: 31) Badiou also follows Nietzsche, and echoes both Agamben and Vattimo, in distinguishing between two basic kinds of nihilism: active and reactive (or passive). Active (or ‘terroristic’) nihilism takes destruction to be a necessary purification, and is governed by a ‘passion for the real’ that is characteristic of the twentieth century and that dominates its art: ‘The century experienced itself as artistic negativity’ (Badiou 2007: 55). Not the least notable aspect of Badiou’s analysis is the claim that this art of active nihilism finds its first and determining form in Mallarmé, who will be the touchstone for Badiou’s own conception of art, and who, as we have seen, also marks the commencement of literature in the sense that term has for both Blanchot and Derrida. Reactive nihilism, on the other hand, is ‘a consent to the nothing’ (Badiou 2007: 64; Badiou’s emphasis) and arises with the end of that era (the ‘century’) whose

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essence would lie in active nihilism, which is now taken to be ‘completely obsolete’: Every reasonable activity is limited and limiting, hemmed in by the burdens of reality. The best one can do is to avoid evil and to do this the shortest path is to avoid any contact with the real. Eventually, one meets up once again with the nothing, the nothing-real [le rien-de-réel], and in this sense one is still within nihilism. But since the element of terrorism, the desire to purify the real, has been suppressed, nihilism is deactivated. It has become passive, or reactive, nihilism – that is, a nihilism hostile to every action as well as every thought. (Badiou 2007: 64–5) The history of the century may be charted very simply, then, as the passage from active to reactive nihilism. Faced as we are with this lapse into reactive nihilism, Badiou argues not for a return to active nihilism, but rather for the taking of the ‘subtractive path’, by which he means a form of negativity that would be entirely distinct from both active and reactive nihilism. To engage in subtraction is: to exhibit as a real point, not the destruction of reality, but minimal difference. To purify reality, not in order to annihilate it at its surface, but to subtract it from its apparent unity so as to detect within it the minuscule difference, the vanishing term that constitutes it. What takes place barely differs from the place where it takes place. It is in this ‘barely’ [‘à peine’], in this immanent exception, that all the affect lies. (Badiou 2007: 65) We shall have reason to return to the notion of subtraction as a non-nihilist form of negativity when considering Badiou’s readings of Mallarmé and Beckett. Before doing so, however, it is first necessary to assess Badiou’s other major attempt to deploy the concept of nihilism, which occurs in his earlier Manifesto for Philosophy (1989), in a chapter entitled ‘Nihilism?’. Here, nihilism is determined as the undoing of all bonds, an undoing that finds its origins in the realm of economics: As for ‘nihilism’, we shall acknowledge that our epoch bears witness to it precisely in the way that by nihilism we understand the rupture of the traditional figure of the bond, un-binding [déliaison] as a form of being of all that pretends to be of the bond. Our time indubitably sustains itself with a kind of generalized atomism because no symbolic

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sanction of the bond is capable of resisting the abstract potency of Capital. (Badiou 1999b: 55; Badiou’s emphasis) The determination of capitalism as nihilism is something that, as we saw in Chapter 3, is already at work in Heidegger’s 1935 lecture course, Introduction to Metaphysics. However, it is precisely Heidegger’s interpretation of nihilism as desacralization – as itself an effect of capitalism in so far as the latter fails to constitute a genuine confrontation with modern technology as Enframing (Ge-Stell) – that Badiou also aims to refute. For all their differences, in this respect Badiou’s approach is akin to Agamben’s, given the latter’s counter-Heideggerian advocacy of profanation (profanazione). Reversing Heidegger’s Hölderlin-inspired conception of nihilism as desacralization (or the withdrawal of the gods), from which only the gods’ return can save us, Badiou argues that desacralization is precisely that which works against nihilism. So it is that capitalism cannot be determined as nihilism – or, rather, its desacralizing effects are not nihilist: Capital is the general dissolvent of sacralizing representations, which postulate the existence of intrinsic and essential relations (between man and nature, men, groups and the Polis, mortal and eternal life, etc.). It is altogether typical that the denunciation of ‘technological nihilism’ is always correlated to the nostalgia of such relations. The disappearance of the sacred is a recurrent theme with Heidegger himself, and the prediction of its return is identified with the theme, borrowed from Hölderlin, of the ‘return of the Gods’. If one takes ‘nihilism’ to mean desacralization, Capital, whose planetary reign is beyond any doubt – ‘technology’ and ‘Capital’ being only paired off in an historic sequence but not in the concept – is certainly the only nihilistic potency [puissance nihiliste] of which men have succeeded in being the inventors as well as the prey. Yet, for Marx, and for us, desacralization is not in the least nihilistic, insofar as ‘nihilism’ must signify that which declares that the access to being and truth is impossible. On the contrary, desacralization is a necessary condition for the disclosing of such an approach to thought. (Badiou 1999b: 56; Badiou’s emphasis) Badiou then proceeds to counter Heidegger by claiming that in fact ‘Our epoch is neither technical (for it is so with mediocrity) nor nihilistic (for it is the first one that the destitution of sacred bonds lays open to the genericity of the true’ (Badiou 1999b: 57). It is here that one can begin

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to detect the strange status of the concept of nihilism within Badiou’s thought. On the one hand, he would leave this concept behind, not least because it is tied to Nietzsche and thus to the father of modern ‘sophism’. To offer a diagnosis of ‘our epoch’ in terms of nihilism is unavoidably to become enmeshed in that Nietzschean–Heideggerian mode of ‘nonGreek’ analysis (hermeneutics) which is precisely the one from which Badiou would free philosophy. So it is that Badiou will claim that ‘our epoch’ is in fact not in the least ‘nihilistic’. On the other hand, he finds it necessary both to redetermine and to redeploy the concept of nihilism in order to theorize his own ‘return to Plato’; that is, the re-establishing of philosophy as (Greek) philosophy rather than as ( Jewish) religion or ‘ethical ideology’. And this redetermination and redeployment continues right up to his most recent work. Caught between abandoning and retaining the concept of nihilism, Badiou strikes a compromise in the Manifesto, identifying nihilism as ‘a least-worst signifier’, an unhappy necessity in the labour of reconstituting philosophy as philosophy and overcoming nihilism as that denial of (Greek) thought which occurs through the suturing of philosophy to the poem. It is no mere coincidence that this ‘least-worst signifier’ will be of particular importance when it comes to the question of what desacralization will mean for philosophy; that is, the anti-Heideggerian gesture par excellence of negating the link between philosophy and the poem. For it is the undoing – or de-suturation (dé-suturation) – of this relation that constitutes the foundational act for the philosophy that Badiou would have us embrace. It is to this act of foundational negation – which is carried out in order to save philosophy from nihilism – that we may now turn.

In praise of ‘courage’, or the ethicalization of literature Despite his repeated insistence that philosophy must break radically with narrative, Badiou nonetheless finds himself telling his readers a story, and not just one story among others, but the story of literature – or of what (following Heidegger) he terms the ‘poem’ – and its relation to philosophy in ‘our epoch’. A model of coherence and, like all stories, also a story about the nature of story-telling, it reads as follows: Faced with a desacralization in no small part owing to the conjunction of economic and technological forces, philosophy is left with two paths open to it. On the one hand, it can courageously embrace this desacralization, accepting both the liberty and the power ( puissance) that such desacralization makes possible (see Badiou 1999b: 59). On the other hand, it can flee this desacralization, opting (one can reasonably assume) for enslavement and

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weakness. According to Badiou, the anti-Platonic tradition that he identifies as nihilist, and that commences with Nietzsche and culminates in Heidegger, takes this second course, and it does so through a suturing of philosophy to the poem: What culminates with Heidegger is the anti-positivist and antiMarxist effort to put philosophy in the hands of the poem. The way he proposes is not that of philosophy, in his eyes realized within technology. It is the one foreshadowed by Nietzsche, and indeed by Bergson, extended in Germany by the philosophic cult of poets, in France by the fetishism of literature (Blanchot, Derrida, Deleuze as well . . .), which delegates the living flesh of thought [le vif de la pensée] to its artistic condition. (Badiou 1999b: 66–7) The nihilist tradition outlined by Badiou runs, then, from Nietzsche via Heidegger to Deleuze, for each of whom philosophy ‘is given in fusion with its indiscernible companion, art’ (Badiou 1999a: 91). And yet, ironically, from the outset this nihilist tradition, which commences in Germany and, in the post-war era, spreads to France, where it becomes the obviously more debased ‘fetishism of literature’, takes its suturing to art to be the only manner in which nihilism may be resisted: ‘It is in fact clear [. . .] that between Nietzsche and Heidegger, art, whose heart is the poem, made a return, through an anti-Platonic retroaction, in the operators by which philosophy designated our time as that of a forgetful nihilism’ (Badiou 1999b: 43). Nihilism countered by nihilism, and thus the malady being exacerbated by what is taken to be the cure: it is from this enslaving economy that Badiou would save philosophy. And yet, in order to do so, he will (as we have seen) find it necessary to deploy the concept of nihilism in his turn, which is to say the very concept that, through the publication of The Will to Power, came to be viewed as the key concept of Nietzsche’s later thought, and that Heidegger in his turn sought to redetermine against Nietzsche through an inflation even greater than that to which Nietzsche had submitted it. Not the least problematical aspect to Badiou’s theorization of the ‘age of the poets’ – that is, the epoch in which philosophy finds it necessary to suture itself to literature in order to counter nihilism – is the determination of its borders. Badiou claims that this epoch ‘opens up just after Hegel, a period in which philosophy is most often sutured either to the scientific condition or the political one’, and when ‘poetry assumed certain of philosophy’s functions’ (Badiou 1999b: 69). The first of the seven major poets to be privileged by this newly sutured philosophy is

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Friedrich Hölderlin. And yet, Hölderlin proves to be both the first and not quite the first, since he is in fact the ‘prophet and anticipating vigil’ of the other six: Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Trakl, Pessoa, Mandelstam, and Celan (see Badiou 1999b: 71). And this calculation of the ‘age of the poets’ will be no less complicated at its end than at its origin, for just as Hölderlin is both the first and not quite the first, so Celan is both the last and not quite the last, since there is one other writer on whom Badiou finds it necessary to comment, namely Samuel Beckett, in whom he finds an exemplary confirmation of his conception of an ethic of truths, but who is not listed among the poets who constitute the age of the poets. If the calculation of the number of poets who fall properly within this ‘age’ poses considerable problems, so does the question of the time to which the label ‘just after Hegel’ might refer. In fact, in the story Badiou recounts of the suture – a story that it would not be difficult to show is itself an instance of the suture – that moment ‘just after Hegel’ is in fact Nietzsche, the ‘great “inventor” of contemporary anti-Platonism, at the dawn of the suture of philosophy to the poem’ (Badiou 1999b: 99). This identification of Nietzsche as the true commencement of the ‘age of the poets’ appears unambiguous in a way that the identification of the first of the poets does not – as long, that is, as one refrains from asking the question: But which Nietzsche? Certainly, Badiou’s declarations on the origin of the suture for philosophy exhibit a confidence less evident in his numbering of the poets: ‘An anti-Platonist till the end, Nietzsche subjects the matheme to the plight Plato reserves for the poem, that is a suspect weakness, a disease of thought, a “masquerade” ’ (Badiou 1999b: 100); ‘since Nietzsche, all philosophers claim to be poets, they all envy poets, they are all wishful poets, as we see with Heidegger, but also with Derrida or Lacoue-Labarthe’ (Badiou 1999b: 70) – as though a list that named Heidegger, Derrida, and Lacoue-Labarthe were sufficient to support a claim made about ‘all philosophers’. And, of course, with this identification of Nietzsche as the inaugural figure in the suturing of philosophy to the poem, the thinking of the ‘age of the poets’ cannot but be the thinking of nihilism. As for the other philosophers named here as the ‘all’, Heidegger’s suturing of philosophy to poetry (Dichtung) – and, above all, to Hölderlin – is necessary because the ‘poetic word’ makes ‘holes in the fabric of oblivion. It has detained – preserved – not Being itself, whose historical destiny reaches completion in the distress of our time, but the question of Being. Poets have been the shepherds, the vigils of this question which the reign of technology renders universally unpronounceable’ (Badiou 1999b: 50; Badiou’s emphasis). The suturing of philosophy to literature by Derrida

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is not analysed in any detail by Badiou, but is dismissed simply as a ‘fetishism of literature’ that is derivatively Heideggerian. This neglect is significant, however, not only because it completely elides Derrida’s own attempts to think the literary in a non-Heideggerian manner, not least in ‘Che cos’è la poesia?’ (1990), but also because it permits Badiou to avoid engaging with the complications that arise as soon as one attempts to redeploy the concept of nihilism against the very tradition from which that concept is being appropriated. Badiou’s challenge to this entire tradition takes the form of a call for the complete desuturing of philosophy from literature, a desuturing the necessity of which lies in its possibility – the fact that such a desuturing can now take place means that it should now take place, the possible and the necessary being thought together here, as they are by Agamben, this being a (and arguably even the) crucial point in Badiou’s own treatment of the question of value – the possible as the object of an ethical imperative: ‘I put forth that it is possible today, and therefore required, to break all these contracts. The gesture I propose is purely and simply that of philosophy, of de-suturation. It so happens that the main stake, the supreme difficulty, is to de-suture philosophy from its poetic condition’ (Badiou 1999b: 67). But why, one might ask, should this desuturing of philosophy from literature be the ‘supreme difficulty’? Is it merely because it is the suturing that happens for various identifiable reasons to characterize philosophy in ‘our epoch’? Or is it because there is something about this particular relation that sets it apart from those between philosophy and science, philosophy and politics, and philosophy and love, and that renders it the culmination of philosophy’s sequence of suturations? As for what we might term the possibility-as-necessity of this desuturing of philosophy from the poem, it lies in the fact that the ‘age of the poets’ is now ‘completed’ (Badiou 1999b: 71). More precisely, this desuturing can take place because the ‘essential disorientation of our epoch’, which was at stake in the poem, can now be ‘conceptualized’ (Badiou 1999b: 74; Badiou’s emphasis). Indeed, the poem as such may now be conceptualized, and it is just such a conceptualization that Badiou sets himself the task of performing in his readings of the poets who constitute his canon. As he makes clear in Handbook of Inaesthetics (1998), this labour of conceptualization entails a rethinking of aesthetics as inaesthetics (inesthétique), by which he means ‘a relation of philosophy to art that, maintaining that art is itself a producer of truths, makes no claim to turn art into an object for philosophy. Against aesthetic speculation, inaesthetics describes the strictly intraphilosophical effects produced by the independent existence of some works of art’ (Badiou 2005: epigraph).

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And yet, if art, ‘as a singular regime of thought, is irreducible to philosophy’ (Badiou 2005: 9), it will nonetheless be subject to an analysis that remains philosophical, as is clear from Badiou’s various readings of the poets. After Hölderlin, whose status in Badiou’s canon of the poets is, as we have seen, a particularly strange one – that of a prefiguring border – it is Stéphane Mallarmé who enjoys the privilege of being the first true poet of the age of the fourth and final suture. That Mallarmé’s status is also problematical, however, is clear from the fact that, while on the one hand Badiou would free philosophy from the poem, on the other hand he can declare himself to be ‘Mallarméan’ (Badiou 1999a: 89). Is this turning the philosopher into a poet, or the poet into a philosopher, or is it in fact doing both at the same time? Certainly, as he puts it in the essay ‘Mallarmé’s Method: Subtraction and Isolation’, in Conditions (1992), Badiou’s Mallarmé will be ‘emblematic of the relation between philosophy and poetry’ (Badiou 1992: 108, n. 16; my translation). But that emblematization will lie in the fact that, as a poet whose work is precisely not mimetic, Mallarmé escapes the Platonic ban on the poets (see Badiou 1992: 153). In other words, Mallarmé is a (and arguably the) philosopher’s poet, and thus the appropriation of this poet by the ‘sophists’ – above all, by Blanchot and Derrida, since Heidegger makes no mention of him – is all the more dangerous. Rather than engaging with either Blanchot’s or Derrida’s readings of Mallarmé, however, Badiou takes issue with Lacoue-Labarthe’s in Musica Ficta (1991). In ‘Philosophy of the Faun’, the final essay in Handbook of Inaesthetics, Badiou argues that the ‘program’ of Mallarmé’s ‘Afternoon of a Faun’ is an ethic of truths. Of the opening line of the published version of Mallarmé’s text – ‘These nymphs, I wish to perpetuate them’ (Ces nymphes, je les veux perpétuer) – Badiou comments: ‘this line presents the general program of the poem: To sustain a subject through fidelity to the name of a vanished and undecidable event’ (Badiou 2005: 126). This fidelity is precisely the form taken by the ethical, although the ethicality lies, according to Badiou, not in the poet Mallarmé himself, but rather in, and indeed as, the poem. In short, the poem is ethicality in action. Similarly, in Fernando Pessoa, another writer to be counted in the ‘age of the poets’, Badiou again finds both an ‘imperative’ and a countering of the ‘nihilist’ call for the ‘overturning of Platonism’. But in Pessoa this countering is not Platonic; rather, it ‘inaugurates a path that manages to be neither Platonic nor anti-Platonic. Pessoa poetically defines a site for thinking that is truly subtracted from the unanimous slogan of the overturning of Platonism’ (Badiou 2005: 38; Badiou’s emphasis). Just like Hölderlin

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for Heidegger, then, so Pessoa for Badiou surpasses nihilism because he escapes the logic of reversal or overturning. The key difference lies, however, in the fact that Badiou’s Pessoa is freed from any resacralization. The imperative to be found in Pessoa is one ‘to which we do not as yet know how to submit ourselves’, namely to pursue a path that is ‘affirmative’ of a world from which the gods have withdrawn, but with no promise of return: ‘to follow the path that sets out, between Plato and the anti-Plato, in the interval that the poet has opened up for us, a veritable philosophy of the multiple, of the void, of the infinite. A philosophy that will affirmatively do justice to this world that the gods have forever abandoned’ (Badiou 2005: 45). Pessoa’s poetry is, then, accorded an absolute privilege, and arguably one even greater that than accorded to Mallarmé: it articulates an imperative that will save us not only from nihilism defined (in Heideggerian–Hölderlian terms) as the desacralizing withdrawal of the gods, but also from that nihilism which would find in poetry the promise of the gods’ return; that is, the nihilism of resacralization. That Badiou’s advocating of an affirmation of godless being as the surpassing of nihilism brings him into closer proximity to Nietzsche (‘the anti-Plato’) than he is prepared to acknowledge should not come as a surprise, if only because refutation proves to be a particular mode of remaining with rather than a definitive departing from. This proximity to Nietzsche is also apparent in ‘God Is Dead’, the prologue to Badiou’s Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology (1998), and a counter-essay to Heidegger’s ‘Nietzsche’s Word: “God Is Dead” ’ (1943). Here, Badiou argues that the name ‘God’ in Nietzsche’s declaration of nihilism should be understood in three ways: first, as the God of religion, who can indeed ‘die’ historically; secondly, as the God of metaphysics as onto-theology, who requires the kind of deconstruction (Abbau) to which Heidegger submits it; and, thirdly, the ‘God of the poets’. This God cannot be described as either living or dead, and cannot be subjected to Heideggerian deconstruction. It is to Hölderlin that one must turn for the poetic expression of this God, namely that he has ‘withdrawn’, and with this withdrawal the world has been left in a state of disenchantment (désenchantement). The ‘aporia’ in Heidegger’s own philosophy – that he can deconstruct metaphysics as onto-theology and yet declare towards the end of his life, in what Lacoue-Labarthe describes as his ‘testamentary statement, his last word’ (Lacoue-Labarthe 2007: 92), that ‘Only a god can save us now’ (Nur ein Gott kann uns noch retten) (Heidegger 2003b: 38; translation modified) – may be understood only if one recognizes that this saving God is for Heidegger the ‘God of the poets’. And it is on this point that Badiou makes one of the crucial distinctions between his

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own ontology and Heidegger’s. For Badiou, the task of a poetry desuturing itself from philosophy is to have done with the promise of this God’s return: ‘Today the poem’s imperative is to conquer its own atheism. From within, it destroys the powers of natural language, nostalgic phraseology, posturing of the promise, or prophetic destination to the Open’ (Badiou 2006b: 29). This, Badiou argues, is the ‘becoming prose of the poem’, which Lacoue-Labarthe traces back to Walter Benjamin’s analysis in The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism (1920) of Fichte’s declaration that ‘The Idea of poetry is prose’ (quoted in Lacoue-Labarthe 2007: 79; cf. Benjamin 1996: 173). Poetry, then, has a task (tâche), and that task is an act of liberating destruction: a destruction of all nostalgia for the ‘God of the poets’, a destruction of the promise of that God’s return, and a destruction of any ‘prophetic destination’ for being. What is the status of these three destructions? Can they be said to be uncontaminated by nihilism, given that for Nietzsche the killing of God is the work of active nihilism? Or might it be that in fact the task of poetry, no less than the task of philosophy, as Badiou determines it, remains within the ambit of nihilism even as an ethic that would resist nihilism? Certainly, Badiou himself wishes to avoid this contamination. What in The Century he labels ‘genuine’ art is determined as art that resists nihilism through its constituting an ethicality that is irreducible to ethics: ‘No genuine artist [. . .] can be reduced to collective impasses, even when he or she publicly partakes in their utterances. The artist’s work outlines an intermediary path between romanticism and nihilism, reinventing each and every time – even if rarely in an explicit manner – an original ideal of the real-infinite’ (Badiou 2007: 155). The threat of a co-implication of the ethic of truths and nihilism remains, however, not least in Badiou’s reading of Paul Celan, the last of the writers to belong to the ‘age of the poets’. Here, we find what might appear to be a countering of the absolute privilege accorded to literature in Badiou’s reading of Pessoa, who stands at the centre of Badiou’s canon. For, according to Badiou, in Celan it is poetry’s complete disentanglement from philosophy that is enacted – and this takes place at the ultimate edge (bord ultime) of the ‘age of the poets’, on that most crucial of borders: In the order of the poem, the event is Paul Celan’s work, in and of itself as well as through what it holds from the entire Age of Poets at its ultimate edge. It is symptomatic that it is in reference to Celan’s poems that ventures of thinking as diverse as those of Derrida’s, Gadamer’s

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or Lacoue-Labarthe’s pronounce the ineluctable suture of philosophy to its poetic condition. The sense I grant to these poems (but already, in a certain way, to those of Pessoa and Mandelstam) is exactly the inverse. In them I read, as poetically stated, the avowal that poetry no longer suffices to itself; that it requests to be relieved of the burden of the suture; that it hopes for a philosophy relieved of the crushing authority of the poem. (Badiou 1999b: 86; Badiou’s emphasis) Badiou’s Celan breaks with the ‘philosophical fetishism of the poem’, the ‘most profound sense of his poetic work’ being ‘to deliver us from this fetishism, to free the poem from its speculative parasites, to restore it to the fraternity of its time, where it will thereafter have to dwell side by side in thought with the matheme, love and political invention’ (Badiou 1999b: 87). With Celan, then, the absolute privilege accorded to the poem is itself withdrawn – not by philosophy, but by the poem. It is, however, the poem’s dwelling side by side with the other three truth-processes that Badiou himself counters in his commentaries on Samuel Beckett, a writer who is not numbered among those who constitute the ‘age of the poets’ and who is not known principally as a poet in the strict sense, and yet who repeats the role of Hölderlin as a writer who appears both to belong and not quite to belong to the ‘age of the poets’. If Hölderlin is the vigil, then Beckett might be said to be the wake of that age. Here, the proximity of Badiou’s reading of Beckett to Adorno’s – to which, signally, he does not refer – is striking, to say the least.

Literature and the spectre of happiness Badiou’s three major texts on Beckett are the essay ‘The Writing of the Generic’, in the collection Conditions (1992); the short monograph Beckett: Tireless Desire (1995); and the chapter ‘Being, Existence, Thought: Prose and Concept’, in the Handbook of Inaesthetics (1998), this last piece being for the most part a reading of one of Beckett’s final prose works, Worstward Ho (1983), which remained untranslated into French by Beckett, leaving Badiou to rely upon a translation by Edith Fournier. In each of these texts, Badiou declares repeatedly – as though it could not be said frequently enough – that his reading of Beckett counters in the most unambiguous fashion the false conception of Beckett’s œuvre as essentially nihilist, a reading by which Badiou confesses to having been seduced in his youth (that is, in the mid-1950s, when Beckett first came to prominence in France after the publication of Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable between 1951 and 1953, and the staging of Waiting for

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Godot in 1953. As Badiou puts it: ‘the (ultimately inconsistent) alliance between nihilism and the imperative of language, between vital existentialism and the metaphysics of the word, between Sartre and Blanchot, rather suited the young cretin that I was at the time’ (Badiou 2003b: 39). With such naïvety now safely behind him, the mature Badiou can identify his task as the saving of Beckett from the nihilist reading: ‘We must repudiate those interpretations of Beckett that are filtered through the “nihilistic” worldliness of the metaphysical tramp’ (Badiou 2003b: 4); ‘Beckett will never be a nihilist’, for his texts never come to the ‘realisation’ that ‘there is nothing’ (Badiou 2003b: 15). Just as Derrida dismisses nihilism as a ‘slogan’ or ‘label’ when directed at deconstruction, so Badiou sees the ‘nihilist’ Beckett as a ‘stereotype’, a ‘caricature’, quite simply a gross falsification: ‘It is utterly wrong to maintain, as much critical opinion would have it, that his work drove itself ever deeper into “despair”, “nihilism”, or the defeat of meaning’ (Badiou 2003b: 15). The ‘thesis “nothing is, nothing is valuable” is both false and oppressive’ (Badiou 2003b: 38). And yet, as I have sought to demonstrate elsewhere (see Weller 2005, passim), and as we have seen in Chapter 3 above, ‘critical opinion’ – or, more precisely, the critical opinion of the philosophers, including both Adorno and Deleuze, is precisely the opposite of what Badiou here claims it to be. Far from considering Beckett’s works to be the expression of nihilism, they repeatedly identify it as resistant to nihilism. This is not to say that Beckett’s works were never taken to be nihilist – indeed, this is a term that is deployed by, among others, Maurice Nadeau in his reviews of Beckett’s first works published in French (see Nadeau in Graver and Federman 1979: 79). It is to observe, however, that, far from offering a clear counter-reading of Beckett, Badiou’s ‘repudiation’ of the nihilist conception of his œuvre is precisely what aligns him most closely with the very ‘sophistic’ or ‘anti-philosophical’ tradition that he aims to refute. As for the nature of this counter-reading of Beckett which is not quite the counter-reading that it takes itself to be, Badiou claims that all that is required in order to save Beckett from the nihilist stereotype is ‘at last to take Beckett at his word [au pied de sa lettre]’ (Badiou 2003b: 40), as though taking Beckett at his word were not precisely what each and every reading might well have taken itself to be, and as though taking any writer au pied de sa lettre would not first require the elaboration of an entire theory of reading. When we turn to the specifics of Badiou’s counter-reading, we find that it repeats what might be termed the ethicalization of his œuvre, and that it does so in two ways that coincide with those projected by the ‘sophistic’ reading. First, Beckett’s is a subtractive art: ‘Beckett speaks to

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us of something far more thought out than [the] two-bit, dinner-party vision of despair. Beckett – who is very close to Pascal in this respect – aims at subtracting the figure of humanity from everything that distracts it, so as to examine the intimate articulation of its functions’ (Badiou 2003b: 4; Badiou’s emphasis). Now, it is precisely upon Beckett’s art of subtraction – as distinct from abstraction – that Adorno insists in his 1961 essay on Endgame, this distinction between a subtractive and an abstracting art in fact coming, as we now know, from Beckett himself in conversation with Adorno (see Adorno 1994: 23). As for the functions of humanity that Beckett would examine through such a subtraction, these are the Platonic ones of Movement, Rest, the Same, the Other, and Logos. Of these, the one that relates most directly to the question of the ethical is that of the Other, and it is also the one that will prove the crux of Badiou’s reading. The question of ‘the existence of the Two, or of the virtuality of the Other’ is ‘the question that ultimately ties together [noue terminalement] all of Beckett’s work. Is an effective Two possible, a Two that would be in excess of solipsism? We might say that this is the question of love’ (Badiou 2003b: 5). On the basis of the distinction between a ‘programme of the One – obstinate trajectory or interminable soliloquy’ and the ‘pregnant theme of the Two, which opens out onto infinity’ (Badiou 2003b: 17), Badiou divides Beckett’s œuvre neatly into two parts, the border being located between two novels, The Unnamable (1953) and How It Is (1961), with Beckett in the latter finally moving beyond the ‘programme of the One’ that governs the Trilogy. Echoing Beckett himself (in a 1956 interview with Israel Shenker), Badiou claims that The Unnamable ‘was really an impasse, one that would take him ten years to get out of’ (Badiou 2003b: 39).1 In fact, then, the exemplary nature of Beckett’s œuvre lies not simply in its resistance to nihilism or its standing always already beyond nihilism, but in its enactment of the escape from nihilism that Badiou would have philosophy itself achieve: Little by little – and not without hesitations and regrets – the work of Beckett will open itself up to chance, to accidents, to sudden modifications of the given, and thereby to the idea of happiness. [. . .] This is why I am entirely opposed to the widely held view according to which Beckett moved towards a nihilistic destitution, towards a radical opacity of significations. (Badiou 2003b: 55) It is with the notion of the ‘pregnant theme of the Two’ in the later works that Badiou echoes not only Adorno’s notion of reconciliation

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(Versöhnung), or the non-hostile relation of the non-identical, but also that very ethics of alterity which, as we have seen, he determines as nihilism: ‘In no way does love turn a pre-existing Two into a One: this is the romantic version of love that Beckett never ceases to deride. Love is never either fusion or effusion. Rather, it is the often painstaking condition required for the Two to exist as the Two’ (Badiou 2003b: 28). The Two of love is ‘the passage [passe] from the One of solipsism to the infinite multiplicity of the world’ (Badiou 2003b: 31). Again, the singularity of Beckett’s œuvre lies in the fact that it accomplishes this passage, this crossing of the border from nihilism to that which lies beyond it. At its most general, Badiou’s reading of Beckett is ethicalizing in that it finds the works being governed by the imperative of the ethic of truths: ‘Keep going!’. The Beckett who emerges from this anti-nihilist reading is a writer whose works carry ‘a lesson in measure, exactitude and courage’ (Badiou 2003b: 40). Beckett’s art of subtraction becomes one that is essentially affirmative in nature. Just as Evil is secondary to Good (see Badiou 2001: 60), so negation is secondary to affirmation, a claim that echoes the ‘sophists’ Blanchot and Derrida: ‘all of Beckett’s genius tends towards affirmation’ (Badiou 2003b: 41). The late prose work Worstward Ho is governed above all by the ‘imperative of saying’ and the resistance of the ‘shameful temptation [. . .] to have done with the “on”, no longer to suffer the intolerable prescription of ill saying’ (Badiou 2005: 101). This ‘holding to the worstward ho demands courage’ (Badiou 2005: 106). And this, for Badiou, is the ‘courage of holding to any procedure of truth’ (Badiou 2005: 106). In short, Beckett’s œuvre is the ethic of truths actualized as prose. The notion of courage is, however, one that is written into Beckett’s works in a manner that does not necessarily coincide perfectly with Badiou’s, and that might even be taken to suggest that where Badiou finds courage, Beckett finds the strength of what Burnet (whom Beckett read in the early 1930s) terms ‘ethical nihilism’. The novella ‘The End’ (1946), for instance, comes to its own highly paradoxical end with the words ‘without the courage to end or the strength to go on’ (sans le courage de finir ni la force de continuer) (Beckett 1995: 99). This is not to say that Beckett’s œuvre – or even a part of it – is in fact nihilist. Rather, it is to suggest that Badiou’s saving, anti-nihilist reading leaves out – or, more precisely, negates, in the interests of an ethic – the manner in which nihilism haunts Beckett’s œuvre as an uncanny guest. We are left, then, to consider the nature or status of the negation that Badiou has to perform in order to produce a Beckett whose œuvre is exemplary (arguably beyond all others for Badiou) because it enacts

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the overcoming of nihilism, opening itself up ‘to chance, to accidents, to sudden modifications of the given, and thereby to the idea of happiness’, beyond all its ‘hesitations and regrets’. It would no doubt be possible to argue that the attraction of Beckett for Badiou lies precisely in that haunting of nihilism that is also, as we have seen, such a striking characteristic of Badiou’s own work. The Beckett that Badiou produces through taking him au pied de sa lettre is a writer whose works accomplish the step beyond nihilism, the step towards happiness (bonheur), and this reading is itself one manifestation of that haunting; for, as we have seen, it is Badiou himself who claims that ‘every definition of Man based on happiness is nihilist’ (toute définition de l’Homme à partir du bonheur est nihiliste) (Badiou 2001: 37). If Beckett not only shows the way for philosophy to escape nihilism, but enacts the passage beyond nihilism, then he stands for Badiou, as he does for Adorno, as the name for literature as the absolutely privileged form of resistance to nihilism. That such a resistance to nihilism may well be a resistance of nihilism in which both the subjective and the objective genitive are operative is something that Badiou prefers, for obvious reasons, to avoid. My argument here is not intended, however, as a refutation or repudiation of Badiou. The reasons for this may be elucidated by a brief consideration of Lacoue-Labarthe’s countering of Badiou in Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry (2002). At the heart of Lacoue-Labarthe’s counterargument is the claim that Badiou is under a misapprehension when he claims that ‘just after Hegel’ philosophy came to suture itself to the poem. Yes, there was indeed a suturing of philosophy, but this suturing was not to poetry or literature, but rather to myth (mythos). The ‘absolutizing of poetry’ by philosophy ‘was based on philosophy’s relation not to poetry itself, if such a thing can be isolated, but to the supposed provenance of poetry or to its native element – its origin and its essence, which is to say, myth [. . .] , with all the religious, sacred, and sacralizing – but also very broadly “political” – connotations that this word implies’ (Lacoue-Labarthe 2007: 21). More precisely, what Badiou ‘misapprehends’ is that Heidegger’s Hölderlin is not Hölderlin au pied de sa lettre, or at least not all of Hölderlin, and that there is a fundamental distinction between Hölderlin and Schelling of which Badiou takes no account. As Lacoue-Labarthe reminds us, it is Schelling (not Hölderlin) who, at the end of the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), dreams of philosophy’s return to poetry as myth – as a ‘new mythology’ that will be ‘the creation, not of some individual author, but of a new race, personifying, as it were, one single poet’ (Schelling 1978: 232–3; quoted in Lacoue-Labarthe 2007: 29). The connection between this dream of

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a ‘new mythology’ and the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930) is one that Lacoue-Labarthe invites us to consider. Unlike Badiou – who, as we have seen, encounters considerable difficulties when it comes to demarcating the borders of the ‘age of the poets’ – Lacoue-Labarthe traces the suturing of philosophy to myth beyond Nietzsche to the ‘primal scene’ of romanticism: ‘it was in Romanticism – let us use this term as shorthand for everything that happened in Jena in the last decade of the eighteenth century – that the properly modern destination of Dichtung was invented (along with our concept of literature, which henceforth included poetry)’ (Lacoue-Labarthe 2007: 27). According to Lacoue-Labarthe, Wagner is the ‘culmination’ of romanticism as determined by Schelling; but we have then to consider the ‘exception’ – Hölderlin (Lacoue-Labarthe 2007: 30–1). For LacoueLabarthe’s Hölderlin, who is derived via Walter Benjamin rather than via Heidegger, is no Schelling and no prefigurer of Wagner; he does not incarnate the romantic project of a new mythology. Instead, his is an art of what Adorno (after Benjamin) terms ‘demythologization’ (Entmythologisierung) (Adorno 1992: 143; cf. Benjamin 1996: 24). Although there is undoubtedly a mythologizing side to Hölderlin, there is also that in his works which ‘ultimately forbids every form of Schwärmerei (out of fidelity to Kant), every poetic project founded exclusively in effusion, and every mythologization that would lead to the project of an immanent fashioning of a community’ (Lacoue-Labarthe 2007: 30). Whereas romanticism’s ‘monstrous fulfillment’ is a ‘national-aestheticism’ that finds its theorization both in the Nazi ideologues (Baeumler, Rosenberg, Krieck, et al.) and, albeit rather differently, in Heidegger (Lacoue-Labarthe 2007: 32–3), Hölderlin’s poetry of 1801–5, including his translations of Sophocles, is the counter-force to this. Thus, Lacoue-Labarthe’s countering of Badiou returns us directly to the notion of a certain kind of literary practice – what Benjamin identifies as Hölderlin’s demythologizing sobriety (Nüchternheit) – that would be the privileged form of resistance to nihilism redetermined as mythologization – a definition that is also operative in Agamben under the name ‘mythologeme’ (mitologema). Lacoue-Labarthe’s defence of literature, in the form of a certain (Benjaminian) Hölderlin, against Badiou, who himself privileges literature as the resistance to nihilism (in Beckett), returns us to that more general privileging of a variously defined literary as resistant to a variously defined nihilism which has been the subject of analysis throughout this book. And with this, far from standing opposed to Badiou, Lacoue-Labarthe joins ranks with him.

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The highly problematical status of the borders upon which both Badiou and Lacoue-Labarthe insist should hardly come as a surprise, given the strange logic that appears to be at work whenever the attempt is made to theorize the literary as the privileged form of resistance to nihilism, irrespective of whether that privilege is seen to date from Hölderlin or from Nietzsche. Of course, while the term ‘nihilism’ may enter the philosophical stage with Jacobi’s ‘Open Letter’ to Fichte in 1799, it is with Nietzsche that its deployment across the entire field of thought – and not least the thought of literature – commences. That the attempt to master this ‘uncanniest of all guests’ should result in a process of indifferentiation of the kind that we have found in Badiou’s attempt to refute the entire Nietzschean tradition, suggests that this uncanniness remains very much to be thought, and that this thinking would have to take a form other than any of those in which ‘nihilism’ is deployed as a concept in the interests of either happiness or truth.

Conclusion: Nihilism at the Door In the foregoing analyses, a series of deployments of the concept of nihilism since Nietzsche has been found to take the form of redeterminations in which not only is the charge of nihilism turned back against one or more of its previous determinations, not only is the literary, in one form or another, accorded a privilege for what is taken to be its power of resistance to nihilism, but each redeployment remains haunted by a nihilism of which it fails to take account. The economy of this haunting is a resistance of nihilism in which both the objective and the subjective genitive are operative, and in which a certain indifferentiation is at work. So it is that we are returned to our point of departure: Nietzsche’s declaration in his 1885–6 notebook that ‘Nihilism stands at the door’, and his concomitant question: ‘whence comes to us this uncanniest of all guests?’, a question in which the determination of the meaning not only of the terms ‘uncanny’ and ‘guest’, but also of the ‘us’, has its place in each of the redeployments of nihilism that has been considered here. What may be said to be in question in each of these terms – ‘uncanniness’, the ‘guest’, and the ‘us’ – is the limit, border, or frontier: that which would separate the home (Heim, Heimat) or homely (heimisch, heimlich) from that which lies beyond it, be it the non-homely, the unhomely (unheimisch, unheimlich), or the foreign (das Fremde); that which would distinguish the guest from the host (this distinction being, of course, particularly fraught in the French hôte); and that which would distinguish a certain ‘us’ from a certain ‘them’. As regards the ‘uncanny’ here, we have seen that while Heidegger devotes considerable attention to the meaning of das Unheimliche in his remarks (against Hölderlin) on the translation of to deinon in Sophocles’ Antigone, and does so as part of his own redetermination of nihilism as homelessness (Heimatlosigkeit), he makes no mention of what is undoubtedly the most well-known discourse on the uncanny, namely Freud’s 1919 essay. In this essay, Freud theorizes das Unheimliche as that which is already inside the house of the mind, that which is not in fact foreign at all but rather the most homely, its apparent foreignness being the result of an alienation (Entfremdung) effected through repression: For this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien [nichts Neues oder Fremdes], but something which is familiar and old-established 212

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in the mind and which has become alienated [entfremdet] from it only through the process of repression. This reference to the factor of repression enables us, furthermore, to understand Schelling’s definition of the uncanny as something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light. (Freud 1955: 241) While psychoanalysis belongs for Heidegger to the very nihilism – as Seinsvergessenheit – against which his own thinking of Being, and his turn to Dichtung, most obviously militates, he nonetheless shares with Freud an understanding of das Unheimliche as that which is not really foreign at all. As he puts it in his response to Jünger, ‘On the Question of Being’ (1955), nihilism is the uncanniest of guests precisely because ‘it has long since been roaming around invisibly inside the house [im Haus]’. If Heidegger thinks the overcoming of nihilism in terms of a becoming homely (Heimischwerden) which finds its own home in the Dichtung of Hölderlin, Derrida locates the resistance to nihilism as ‘bad violence’ in an openness to the absolutely other (tout autre) in its otherness, a foreignness that never returns one to the proper, the property, or propriety of one’s one, in accordance with an ethic of hospitality that is unconditional – if im-possibly so. Similarly, in The Coming Community (1990), in which the concept of nihilism is deployed on more than one occasion, Agamben claims that the ‘whatever’ (qualunque) as singularity is the ‘the event of the outside’ (l’evento di un fuori) (Agamben 1993a: 67; Agamben’s emphasis), and that this outside (fuori) is to be understood as an ‘at the door’ (alle porte) or ‘at the threshold’ (alla soglia) (Agamben 1993a: 68). The being ‘at the door’ (alle porte, vor der Thür) of nihilism which is the manner in which it haunts the various deployments of it analysed in the present book is not, however, the event of the outside in either Derrida’s or Agamben’s sense, any more than it is the event of the inside. Rather, if each of the deployments of the concept of nihilism analysed here may be said to remain haunted by nihilism, not only when the explicit aim is to expel it or to prevent its entry but also when the aim is to appropriate it, to make it serve the interests of critique as active nihilism, messianic nihilism (Benjamin, Agamben, or de Man), or Verwindung (Vattimo), this guest is never quite the same – no doubt because it is never anything in itself. In a recurring scene of charge and counter-charge, the appropriative deployment of nihilism results in a kind of ex-appropriation that takes the form of a haunting in which the guest in question is located neither inside nor outside the house, but rather at the door, on the threshold, at the border or limit (Grenze),

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neither foreign nor domestic, such that one is never quite in a position to determine the discourse that it haunts as itself nihilist or non-nihilist, and one is never approaching nihilism either from within or beyond its borders. It is for this reason that none of the analyses in the present book should be mistaken for critiques that would expose a particular deployment of nihilism, and the concomitant privileging of a certain form of the literary, as nihilist. To put the matter as clearly as possible: my argument is not that fundamental ontology, for instance, is nihilist (as Adorno claims), or that deconstruction is nihilist (as Agamben claims), or that an entire tradition of thought from Nietzsche to Derrida and Deleuze is nihilist (as Badiou claims). But neither should my analyses be taken as defences of any of the deployments of nihilism as non- or antinihilist, or as an attempt akin to Vattimo’s or Slocombe’s to revalorize nihilism as ‘our (only) chance’, that alone which can save us from the perceived terrors of fundamentalism or foundationalism, be those terrors philosophical, political, or religious in nature. Rather, I have sought to explore some – but certainly not all – of the ways in which nihilism may be said to haunt its own deployments, and thereby to place them in question – above all as regards their own justifications. This haunting takes the form of what might be termed an indifferentiation of both the foreign and the familiar. In its Unheimlichkeit – thought as indifferentiation – nihilism becomes that guest which renders problematical the determination of the very border that is its only place – be that border philosophical, political, ethical, or aesthetic. The implications of this are considerable. To give just one example – but certainly not the least significant: there are grounds for arguing that if the various deployments of the concept of nihilism in relation to a privileging of the literary commence at a certain moment, and above all in a certain location at what Heidegger takes to be the centre (Mitte) of Europe, then this has everything to do with the particularity of German history and the German relation to the Greek and the Roman. While he rarely addresses the question of nihilism explicitly – even though he does on occasion deploy this concept in his turn against, for instance, the ‘weak ontology’ of Gianni Vattimo, Lacoue-Labarthe’s analysis of the Heideggerian appropriation of Hölderlin would certainly support such an argument. And yet, as we have seen, the deployment of the concept of nihilism, and the privilege accorded to the literary for its power of resistance to it, is far from being contained or determined by anything that one might identify as das Deutsche, in which, of course, the term Nihilismus arrives as a Latinate guest. And, indeed, when LacoueLabarthe deploys the concept of nihilism, he does so in a manner that

Conclusion: Nihilism at the Door

215

inscribes him (as it inscribes Derrida) within the tradition from which he would take his critical distance. Rather than either joining or refuting this tradition (as Badiou attempts to do), I have sought in this book to analyse its strange logic and to suggest that if, in its Unheimlichkeit as indifferentiation, nihilism both occupies and works against the determination of borders that are at once philosophical, political, ethical, and aesthetic, then not the least among the borders that it renders problematical is the one that would establish the limits of its residency and the time and place of its departure.

Notes

Introduction: What’s in a Name? 1. Unless otherwise stated, the date given in parentheses after the title of all works in the present book is the date of those works’ publication in their original language of composition; it is for this reason that these dates do not always correspond with those given in references and in the bibliography, where the date supplied is that of the edition cited in the text. 2. As Vladimir Biaggi notes (see Biaggi 1998: 23), the term ‘nihilist’ (nihiliste) predates Jacobi, since it first appears in Jean-Baptiste Crevier’s Histoire de l’université de Paris, depuis son origine jusqu’en l’année 1600 (1761) as a label for those heretics who reduce Jesus’s human nature to nothing (see Crevier 1761: 205–6). 3. More recently, Vladimir Biaggi has described Gorgias’ lost treatise as a ‘veritable manifesto of ontological nihilism’ (Biaggi 1998: 20; my translation). 4. The notebook in question is identified as Notebook 2 (autumn 1885–autumn 1886) in the critical edition of Nietzsche’s works edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Although I rely for the most part on the translations by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale in The Will to Power (New York: Vintage, 1968), the primary source for all notebook material referred to in the present book is the Colli and Montinari edition of Nietzsche’s Nachgelassene Fragmente. For all quotations from Nietzsche’s notebooks, I have therefore supplied references to both Nietzsche 1968 and Nietzsche 1999, and have followed the dating in the latter. 5. Slocombe does not consider the publication history of The Will to Power – and, above all, the fact that it is a highly selective compilation of notes and fragments. Rather, he treats this text – which he describes as having been ‘written between 1883 and 1888’ – as the work through which Nietzsche ‘brought nihilism back into Western culture’ (Slocombe 2006: 15). While this claim may be historically justified insofar as The Will to Power was indeed generally treated as Nietzsche’s magnum opus until its status was called into question by Colli and Montinari in the 1960s, it nonetheless fails to take account of the complex history of the term ‘nihilism’ within Nietzsche’s own writings. 6. Only two years after Jacobi’s use of the term Nihilismus, Louis-Sébastien Mercier records the following definition of the nihiliste or rienniste in his Néologie ou vocabulaire des mots nouveaux (1801): ‘One who believes in nothing, who interests himself in nothing’ (Mercier 1801: 285; my translation; quoted in Goudsblom 1980: 3). 7. On Lewis’s redetermination of nihilism as the politicization of art, see Weller 2007. As we shall see in Chapter 2, Heidegger too comes to think nihilism as the political (das Politische). 216

Notes

1

217

Absolute Devaluation: Friedrich Nietzsche

1. Nietzsche appropriated the term from a variety of sources. According to Elisabeth Kuhn, the first of these were the French translations of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons and Virgin Soil, together with Prosper Merimée’s published remarks on these texts (see Kuhn 1984: 262–3), and then Paul Bourget’s Essais de psychologie contemporaine (first published in 1883 and reprinted in 1885), in which the term nihilisme is deployed repeatedly to characterize an entire movement in French literature from Baudelaire to Flaubert and Maupassant, a movement characterized above all by its ‘pessimism’, its ‘misanthropy’, and its ‘world-weariness’ (Bourget 1912: xxii; my translation). 2. As mentioned in the Introduction, although I rely for the most part on the translations by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale in The Will to Power (New York: Vintage, 1968), the primary source for all notebook material referred to in the present book is the Colli and Montinari edition of Nietzsche’s Nachgelassene Fragmente. 3. See Nietzsche 1989: 19, 44, 92, 96, 122, 149, 157, 162. 4. See Nietzsche 2005: 256. 5. See Nietzsche 2005: 160, 202, 207, 223. 6. See Nietzsche 2005: 6, 7, 9, 10, 16, 62. 7. See Nietzsche 2005: 101, 108, 109. 8. See Nietzsche 1999: xii. 122, 129, 211, 350–1, 468, 476, 571. 9. That the primordial pleasure (Urlust) is in fact strictly Apollinian here is obscured by the punctuation in Kaufmann’s translation.

2

Homelessness: Martin Heidegger

1. As Pöggeler observes, these remarks on Mussolini and Hitler were not included by Heidegger in the text when it was published in 1971. This omission is itself a trace of the political. 2. ‘The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him – you and I. All of us are his murderers”’ (Nietzsche 1974: 181; Nietzsche’s emphasis). 3. All translations from Jünger’s text in the present volume are my own. 4. All translations from Heidegger’s 1941–2 lectures on Hölderlin’s ‘Remembrance’ are my own. 5. All translations from Heidegger’s 1934–5 lectures on Hölderlin’s ‘Germania’ and ‘The Rhine’ are my own. 6. The one deployment of the term occurs in the 1941–2 lecture course on ‘Remembrance’, in which Heidegger refers to ‘helpless nihilism’ (hilfloser Nihilismus) in the thinking of destiny (Heidegger 1982a: 90). 7. Heidegger does mention Heinse, although very much in passing, in ‘The Poem’, a lecture delivered in Amriswil in August 1968.

3

Fatal Positivities: Theodor Adorno

1. Although this work was first published in 1954, Adorno observes in the preface that it was drafted in 1934–7.

218 Notes 2. As noted in Chapter 1, Nietzsche’s original source for the term is now generally thought to have been the French translations of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons and Virgin Soil, and Prosper Merimée’s published remarks on these texts (see Kuhn 1984: 262–3). 3. See, for instance, Nadeau’s March 1952 review in Mercure de France of the original French edition of Malone Dies (1951), in which he claims that Beckett’s novel goes beyond Molloy in being a work in which ‘Nothing is certain apart from that inaccessible reality which the narrator’s voice alone ultimately expresses. However metaphysics here is very concrete and explosive, even merry. It proclaims the nothingness of life, the nothingness of man; it moves in an absolute nihilism’ (Nadeau in Graver and Federman 1979: 78). 4. Lukács’s Wider den missverstandenen Realismus (literally: Against Misunderstood Realism) was published in Great Britain under the title The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (London: Merlin, 1962) and in the United States under the title Realism in Our Time: Literature and the Class Struggle (New York: Harper & Row, 1964). 5. There are striking similarities between Adorno’s conception of art as a form of negative knowledge and de Man’s notion of the literary. These similarities have been remarked upon by Terry Eagleton (see Eagleton 1990: ch. 13), and I return to them in Chapter 7. 6. The precise dating of Adorno’s first encounter with Beckett’s work remains in question. Tiedemann argues that it must have been in the early 1950s, with either Molloy (1951) or Waiting for Godot (1952) being the first text that he read (see Tiedemann 1994: 22). Undoubtedly, however, the two works that count most for Adorno are The Unnamable (1953) and Endgame (1957). 7. Although Adorno argues here that art constitutes a protest against reification as it has ‘developed since the beginning of the modern era’, in ‘Theories on the Origin of Art’ he makes the very different claim that reification is already being countered by art when the latter first emerges in prehistoric times: ‘It is perhaps not irrelevant that the oldest cave paintings, whose naturalism is always so readily affirmed, demonstrated the greatest fidelity to the portrayal of movement, as if they already aspired to what Valéry ultimately demanded: the painstaking imitation of the indeterminate, of what has not been nailed down. If so, the impulse of these paintings was not naturalistic imitation but, rather, from the beginning a protest against reification’ (Adorno 1997: 326–7). 8. In English editions of Adorno’s works, Versöhnung is translated as both ‘reconciliation’ and ‘reconcilement’. 9. Written in 1914–15, this essay was published posthumously in a two-volume edition of Benjamin’s Schriften (1955) co-edited by Adorno. 10. Adorno’s privileging of Beckett over Celan is arguably countered by Beckett himself, who is reported as having said ‘Celan me dépasse’ (Beckett quoted in Bernold 1992: 58, n. 15), a remark that may be translated either as ‘Celan goes beyond me’ or as ‘Celan is beyond me’ in the sense that Beckett finds him impossible to understand. 11. Adorno devoted an essay to Endgame (‘Trying to Understand Endgame’, 1961), and planned to write an essay on The Unnamable, as the final essay for a projected fourth volume of the Notes to Literature. The marginalia in Adorno’s

Notes

219

copy of the 1959 German translation of Beckett’s novel, plus the substantial notes at the front of that copy, have been published in Adorno 1994: 60–72. 12. The editors of Benjamin’s Selected Writings date this text to ‘either 1920–1921 or 1937–1938’ (Benjamin 2002: 306). 13. Benjamin’s theorization of a ‘messianic’ counter-nihilism also has its place in the deployment of the concept of nihilism by both Agamben and de Man, to which I turn in Chapters 6 and 7 respectively. 14. Adorno’s notes in his copy of the German translation of The Unnamable are reproduced in Rolf Tiedemann, ‘“Gegen den Trug der Frage nach dem Sinn”. Eine Dokumentation zu Adornos Beckett-Lectüre’, in Adorno 1994: 60–73. The English translation of the passages cited here is taken from Adorno 2000: 186, n. 15.

4

The Naïve Calculation of the Negative: Maurice Blanchot

1. Paul de Man, ‘La Circularité de l’interprétation dans l’œuvre critique de Maurice Blanchot’, Critique, 229 (June 1966), 547–60; translated as ‘Impersonality in the Criticism of Maurice Blanchot’, in de Man 1983: 60–78. 2. These include Collin 1971, Laporte and Noël 1973, Clark 1992 and 2005, Bruns 1997, Critchley 1997, Hill 1997, Derrida 2000 and 2003, and Hill et al. 2005. The one major exception to this neglect of Blanchot’s thinking of nihilism in its relation to literature occurs in Hill 2001: 236–55, to which I return later in this chapter. 3. Similarly, for the ‘B’ of Beckett’s dialogue on the painter Tal Coat, the artist has ‘nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express’ (Beckett 1965: 103). 4. ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ was first published in Critique, 20 ( January 1948), 30–47. 5. In a note to ‘Literature and the Right to Death’, Blanchot refers the reader to Levinas’s thinking of the ‘il y a’ in Existence and Existents, which Blanchot describes as the ‘anonymous and impersonal flow of being that precedes all being, being that is already present in the heart of disappearance, that in the depth of annihilation still returns to being, being as the fatality of being, nothingness as existence: when there is nothing, il y a being’ (Blanchot 1995: 332, n.; cf. Levinas 2001: 51–60). 6. It is upon this ‘outside’ that Foucault focuses in his essay ‘The Thought from Outside’, published in the 1966 issue of Critique devoted to Blanchot. 7. Indeed, by referring here to Nietzsche’s ‘system of thought’, Blanchot is going against Nietzsche’s own view of his philosophical procedure, an entry in his July–August 1888 notebook reading: ‘I distrust all systematizers [Systematikern] and avoid them. The will to system is, at least for us thinkers, something that compromises, a form of immorality’ (Nietzsche 1999: xiii. 533; my translation). 8. The three sections of ‘Reflections on Nihilism’ were originally published as follows: ‘Nietzsche, Today’, La Nouvelle Revue française, 68 (August 1958), 284–95; ‘Crossing the Line’, La Nouvelle Revue française, 69 (September 1958), 468–79; and ‘Nietzsche and Fragmentary Writing’, La Nouvelle Revue française,

220 Notes 168 (December 1966), 967–83, and La Nouvelle Revue française, 169 ( January 1967), 19–32. The four parts of ‘Reflections on Hell’ were originally published as follows: ‘Reflections on Hell’, La Nouvelle Revue française, 16 (April 1954), 677–86; ‘Reflections on Nihilism’, La Nouvelle Revue française, 17 (May 1954), 850–9; ‘You Can Kill That Man’, La Nouvelle Revue française, 18 (June 1954), 1059–69; and ‘Orpheus, Don Juan, Tristan’, La Nouvelle Revue française, 15 (March 1954), 492–501. ‘Literature One More Time’ was originally published in La Nouvelle Revue française, 120 (December 1962), 1055–61, and La Nouvelle Revue française, 121 (January 1963), 102–7.

5

Bad Violence: Jacques Derrida

1. Derrida’s long introduction to, and translation of, Husserl’s Origin of Geometry was first published in 1962, but it was only in 1967 that deconstruction came to the attention of a wider audience as a result of the three books published by Derrida in that year. 2. Similarly, while J. Hillis Miller claims that there is an ‘uncanny inherence’ of nihilism within metaphysics, and of metaphysics within nihilism (Hillis Miller 1979: 231), he does not consider the possible inherence of nihilism within deconstruction. 3. On the distinction between ‘impossibility’ and ‘im-possibility’, see Derrida 2002b: 361.

6

The Fracture: Giorgio Agamben

1. See Chapter 5 above. 2. In English translations of Benjamin, bloßes Leben is sometimes rendered as ‘mere life’; Agamben refers to nuda vita, which is generally translated into English as either ‘bare life’ or ‘naked life’. 3. In the original Italian, Agamben refers here not to imperefect and perfect nihilism, but rather to imperfect and perfect messianism (messianismo imperfetto, messianismo perfetto) (see Agamben 2005a: 266). 4. In an interview with Israel Shenker in 1956, Beckett contrasts his own work with that of Joyce as follows: ‘The kind of work I do is one in which I’m not master of my material. The more Joyce knew the more he could. He’s tending toward omniscience and omnipotence as an artist. I’m working with impotence, ignorance’ (Beckett in Graver and Federman 1979: 148). 5. The published English translation omits Agamben’s claim that other – that is, non-human – living being (gli altri vivente) are capable only of that behaviour (comportamento) which is ‘inscribed in their biological vocation’ (iscritto nella loro vocazione biologica) (Agamben 2005a: 282; my translation).

7

Distortions, or Nihilism Against Itself: Gianni Vattimo

1. Texts in which Heidegger deploys the term Verwindung include ‘The Word of Nietzsche: “God Is Dead”’ (1943); ‘Overcoming Metaphysics’ (notes from 1936–46); and ‘The Principle of Identity’, in Identity and Difference (1957).

Notes

8

221

The Denial of (Greek Thought): Alain Badiou

1. In the 1956 interview with Shenker, Beckett says that in The Unnamable ‘there’s complete disintegration. No “I”, no “have”, no “being”. No nominative, no accusative, no verb. There’s no way to go on’. He then observes that Texts for Nothing ‘was an attempt to get out of the attitude of disintegration, but it failed’ (Beckett in Graver and Federman 1979: 148).

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Index Adorno, Theodor W., 1–2, 9, 53, 61, 63–85, 96, 101–2, 105, 111–12, 122, 124, 126, 128, 135, 163, 165, 173, 175, 178, 183–4, 191, 193, 205–7, 209, 214 Aeschylus, 23 Agamben, Giorgio, 119, 137–64, 170, 187, 191, 195, 197, 210, 213–14 alterity, 2, 7, 50, 54–5, 79, 86, 101, 116, 120–6, 130–5, 180–1, 184–5, 189–90, 207–8, 213 anarchism, 14, 117 animality, 138, 159–62 Aristotle, 5, 65, 70, 75, 139, 142, 148, 158–9 Artaud, Antonin, 126–7, 134 atheism, 7, 37, 71 Attridge, Derek, 126, 128 Auschwitz, 63–9, 72–3, 75, 81–2, 135

Bloch, Ernst, 183 Böhlendorff, Casimir Ulrich, 51 Bourget, Paul, 30 Brecht, Bertolt, 74–5 Brod, Max, 70 Buddhism, 13, 19, 22 Burnet, John, 2–3, 188, 208 Carr, Karen L., 10, 112, 175 Cavalcanti, Guido, 157 Celan, Paul, 81, 128, 131–2, 134, 187, 200, 204–5 Cézanne, Paul, 143 Christianity, 9, 12–14, 16, 18–19, 22, 26, 29–30, 33, 43, 57, 68 Cixous, Hélène, 128–30, 133–4 Clark, Timothy, 99, 128 Crosby, Donald A., 10 Cunningham, Conor, 3–4, 7, 62, 118–21, 141 dada, 171 ‘death of God’, 3, 16, 18, 36, 156, 171–2, 175, 203–4 Debord, Guy, 151 decadence, 13–14, 16, 30 Deleuze, Gilles, 4, 15–16, 21, 34, 119, 148, 179, 186, 195, 199, 206, 214 de Man, Paul, 25, 52–3, 58, 61, 86, 99, 112–14, 164–71, 184, 214 demythologization, 78–80, 167, 210 Derrida, Jacques, 4, 57, 86–7, 91, 98–9, 111–37, 140–2, 148–9, 153, 159, 163, 169–70, 179–81, 185–7, 189, 191, 195, 199–202, 204, 206, 208, 213–15 Descartes, René, 3, 43, 55 Dichtung, 41, 48–62, 76–81, 100–1, 130–1, 134, 153, 200, 210, 213 Diderot, Denis, 154 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 46 Duthuit, Georges, 87

Badiou, Alain, 9, 128, 151, 186–211, 214–15 Baeumler, Alfred, 35, 210 Balzac, Honoré de, 88 Barth, Karl, 175 Baudelaire, Charles, 167 Baudrillard, Jean, 164, 171–5 Beckett, Samuel, ix, 70–1, 74, 77, 81–5, 87, 96, 111, 126–7, 149, 163, 178, 183, 196, 200, 205–10 Benjamin, Walter, 70, 75, 77–82, 122–3, 138, 141, 144–6, 148, 151, 153–4, 162–3, 167, 169–70, 173, 183, 204, 210, 214 Benveniste, Emile, 160 Bergson, Henri, 199 biopolitics, 144–9 Bizet, Georges, 30 Blanchot, Maurice, 34, 86–112, 116, 128–30, 134–5, 168–9, 174, 186, 195, 199, 202, 206, 208 230

Index Enlightenment, 6, 99, 174, 178–9 Epicurus, 14 Esslin, Martin, 127 eternal recurrence, 11–12, 20–1, 102, 104–5, 122 ethics, ix, 7, 10, 19, 86, 120, 122, 124–5, 134–5, 139, 141–2, 153, 178, 180–1, 184–5, 188–95, 201, 204, 206–8 evil, 116, 135–6, 193, 208 faith, 2, 7, 115–16, 121 Faulkner, William, 70 Fenellosa, Ernest, 127 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 1–2, 3, 11, 80, 204 Flaubert, Gustave, 30 Foucault, Michel, 86 Fournier, Edith, 205 Freud, Sigmund, 213 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 184, 204 Genet, Jean, 134 Germanness (das Deutsche), 8, 40, 48–9, 52, 57–8, 78, 215 Gillespie, Michael Allen, 3–4, 7, 11, 20, 23–4, 27 Glicksberg, Charles I., 10 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 30 Gorgias, 2–3, 83, 188 Grossman, Evelyne, 122, 132 Hamsun, Knut, 50 Hegel, G. W. F., 5, 8, 67, 73, 75, 87, 89–93, 95, 97–9, 104, 110, 117–18, 155–7, 168, 199–200, 209 Heidegger, Martin, 1, 3–4, 5–8, 11, 15–16, 29, 35–64, 69–70, 72, 75–82, 86, 94, 98–102, 104–6, 108, 111–12, 114–15, 119, 121–5, 128, 130–1, 134–5, 137–8, 140–3, 148–51, 153–5, 160–1, 163, 165–7, 169, 172, 175–7, 181, 186–91, 194, 197–204, 209–10, 212–15 Heine, Heinrich, 76 Heinse, Wilhelm, 60 Heller, Erich, 164

231

Heraclitus, 52, 58 Hill, Leslie, 86 Hitler, Adolf, 41 Hobbes, Thomas, 144–5 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 167 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 1, 48, 51–62, 76–81, 91, 99–101, 128, 150, 154, 164–7, 169, 187, 197, 200, 202–3, 205, 209–13, 215 Homer, 33, 50 Husserl, Edmund, 63 Hyppolite, Jean, 93 Ionesco, Eugene, 70 Jacobi, Friedrich, 1–2, 7, 68, 211 Joyce, James, 70, 134 Jünger, Ernst, 46–7, 52, 94, 106, 150, 171–2, 213 justice, 3, 116, 123, 125, 178–9, 181, 188 Kafka, Franz, 70–1, 77, 82–3, 92, 94–8, 129, 134, 145–6, 157, 159 Kallikles, 83, 188 Kant, Immanuel, 66, 75, 101, 181–2, 188–9, 191, 210 Kearney, Richard, 114–15 Kierkegaard, Søren, 70, 167 Klee, Paul, 153 Kojève, Alexandre, 90, 93, 104, 109 Krieck, Ernst, 36, 46, 210 Lacan, Jacques, 191 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 51, 54, 77–8, 80, 200, 202–3, 205, 209–11, 215 Latinity, 8 Levi, Primo, 66–7 Levin, David, 6 Levinas, Emmanuel, 86, 91, 93–4, 189, 191 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 117 Lewis, Wyndham, 9 Löwith, Karl, 5, 98 Lukács, Georg, 70–2, 78, 81–2, 84, 126

232 Index Mallarmé, Stéphane, 90–1, 95–6, 98–9, 127–30, 134, 167, 179, 195–6, 200, 202–3 Mandelstam, Osip, 200, 205 Marcuse, Herbert, 183 Marx, Karl, 41, 197, 199 Mckenna, Kristine, 114–15 Melville, Herman, 148 meontology, 4, 119–20 Mussolini, Benito, 41 Nadeau, Maurice, 70, 206 National Socialism, 35–8, 40–1, 46, 52, 63–5, 113, 122, 131, 146–7, 193, 210 Nietzsche, Friedrich, ix, 1–38, 41–4, 46–8, 52, 58, 61, 63, 68–9, 70, 75, 82, 98, 100, 102–6, 111–12, 114, 121–2, 127–8, 137–8, 141, 148, 150, 152, 155–6, 163–4, 167, 170–2, 174–7, 182, 184, 186–8, 194–5, 198–200, 203–4, 210–12, 214 nihilism active, 6–7, 14, 18–23, 32, 152, 164, 170, 173, 176–85, 195–6, 204, 214 aesthetic, 171, 174–5, 179–80, 182–4, 195 alethiological, 10, 175 ambiguity of, 20, 33–4 Americanism as, 55–6, 58, 62 anti-, ix, 22, 31, 33, 111–12, 115, 118, 135, 165, 194, 208, 214 art and, ix, 21–34, 47, 81–5, 153–9, 174–5 atheism and, 7, 37 Auschwitz and, 63–9, 72 axiological, 10 biopolitics as, 144–9 capitalism and, 71, 197 Christianity as, 9, 12–14, 16, 18–19, 22, 26, 29–30, 33, 43, 57, 68 consummation of, 3, 5, 20, 33, 38, 41, 43, 45, 58, 63, 85, 102, 111, 141, 146, 150, 156–7, 171–2, 174, 193 cosmological, 3, 10, 83, 188 counter-, 144–7, 151, 153, 163–85, 199

critique of, 5–8, 10, 21, 143, 161, 172–3, 214 deconstruction as, 9, 112–21, 140–2, 179–80, 185, 214 devaluation and, 15–34, 37–9 , 41–4, 46, 70, 172 diagnosis of, 4, 18, 47, 195 Dichtung and, 49–62, 153 epistemological, 10 ethical, 3, 7, 10, 83, 153, 188–90, 208 European, 1, 11–16, 20, 29, 43, 58 existential, 10, 70, 82 explicit, ix, 4, 8 genealogy of, 2, 4, 8, 121 historical, 6–7, 171 history of, 11–22, 43, 52, 138, 171, 173–4, 177–8 idealism as, 1, 9, 14 imperfect, 145–6, 162–3 Jacobi on, 1–2 Jünger on, 46–7 literature and (see also art and, Dichtung and), ix, 8–9, 63, 100–3, 111, 126–36, 166, 186–8, 198–212, 215 literature of, 10, 164–5 logic of, 4, 5–6, 16, 178–9, 184 love and, 79, 153, 158–9 mediatic, 172–3 messianic, 82, 145, 162–4, 214 metaphysical, 10, 37, 138–44, 146–7, 171, 181 modernist, 6–7, 70–1 moral, 10 neo-pragmatism as, 175, 180 ontological, 10 overcoming of, 3, 5, 10, 13, 18–19, 21–2, 33, 37, 39–40, 42–3, 45–8, 52–3, 56, 58, 69, 99, 104, 106, 121, 138–44, 151, 156–7, 159–60, 162, 172–3, 176, 178, 195, 203, 207–9 passive (see also reactive), 6, 14, 18–20, 22–3, 32, 152, 164, 185, 195 perfect, 14–15, 21, 34, 148, 194 political, 10, 13, 144–9, 171, 174 postmodern, 6–7

Index positivism as, 9 practical, 12, 14 reactive (see also passive), 18, 164, 170, 176–8, 180–3, 185, 195–6 realism as, 9 religion and (see also Christianity as), 13–14, 16, 18, 190 resistance of, 10, 34, 125, 173–4, 209, 212–15 resistance to, ix, 8–10, 32, 63, 77, 100–1, 108, 111, 121, 126–7, 131–4, 157, 163–4, 166, 168–9, 174, 180, 186–7, 192, 204, 206–7, 209–13, 215 revalorization of, 6, 8, 10, 69, 163–85, 214 science as, 9, 31–3 semantic, 10 technology and, 39–40, 47, 64, 131 theatrical, 127 theological, 10 theoretical, 14, 174 uncanniness of, ix, 4–10, 12, 15, 34, 48, 53, 57, 61–2, 85, 111–12, 121, 138, 159, 164, 180, 184, 188, 208–9, 211–15 Verwindung of, 47, 52, 176–7, 179–80, 184, 214 nominalism, 3–4 Novalis, 142, 155, 168 Pascal, Blaise, 207 pessimism, 15, 17, 20, 82 Pessoa, Fernando, 200, 202–5 Pindar, 50 Plato, 2–3, 5, 14–15, 21, 27, 33, 43, 58, 65, 186–7, 194–5, 198–9, 202–3, 207 Platonism, 5–6, 9, 16, 180, 186–7, 194, 200, 202 Plotinus, 4, 119–20 Pöggeler, Otto, 1 Ponge, Francis, 134 Poulet, Georges, 95 Pound, Ezra, 127 Pyrrho, 14

233

Rosenberg, Alfred, 210 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 52, 56, 94–5, 97–8 Rimbaud, Arthur, 200 Rorty, Richard, 175, 179 Rose, Gillian, 117–18 Rosen, Stanley, 5–7, 9, 194 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 117, 164, 167, 170 Saint Paul, 146, 152 Sappho, 50 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 70, 74–5, 206 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 139–40, 142, 158 scepticism, 92–3, 104, 109–10, 113, 115, 125 Schelling, F. W. J., 41, 148, 209–10, 213 Schlageter, Albert Leo, 40 Schlegel, Friedrich, 155–6, 182 Scholem, Gershom, 145 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 3, 19, 22, 26, 31 science, 2, 13, 18, 28, 31–2, 37 Shenker, Israel, 207 Slocombe, Will, 2, 3, 6–7, 10, 21, 214 Socialism, 19 Socrates, 21, 27–8, 182 Sophocles, 23, 50–2, 58–9, 80, 154, 210, 212 Spivak, Gayatri, 120 Stendhal, 74 Surrealism, 171 Thrasymachus, 3, 83, 188 Titian, 162 Trakl, Georg, 52, 56–8, 200 transcendental idealism, 1–2 uncanny (Unheimlichkeit), ix, 4–10, 12, 15, 34, 48, 53, 57, 61–2, 85, 111–12, 121, 138, 159, 164, 180, 184, 188, 208–9, 211–15 Vattimo, Gianni, 6–7, 47, 69, 164, 175–85, 191, 195, 214–15

234 Index Verwindung, 47, 52, 176–7, 179–80, 184, 214 Wagner, Richard, 19, 22, 27, 30, 210 Walser, Robert, 157

Weber, Max, 171 Windelband, Wilhelm, 3 Wissenschaft, 2, 13, 18, 28, 31–2, 37 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 5, 194 Wordsworth, William, 167