Abstract
‘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’ (p. 54). Thus Heidegger, whose observation (made in the late 1930s) provides a context in which to read this book, the first in what promises to be an excellent series edited by Roger Griffin. His distinction between programmatic and epiphanic modernism, proposed in Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (2007), offers an initial point of orientation for Shane Weller’s discussion of modernism and nihilism. Yet there is, Weller maintains, ‘no nihilism as such’ (pp. 9, 10): rather, ‘there are only specific deployments of the term, each of which has to be considered … in its discursive context’, be it aesthetic, political or philosophical (pp. 10, 14).
Tracing its political origins to a short text in 1793 by J.-B. du Val-de-Grâce (aka Anacharsis Cloots), and its philosophical derivation from an open letter of 1799 sent by F. H. Jacobi to Fichte, Weller follows J.-B.-L. Crevier (1766) in deriving the term ‘nihilism’ from a twelfth-century Scholastic debate around the heretical proposition (attributed to Peter Lombard, and sometimes called ‘nihilianism’) that Christ, in his human nature, was ‘nothing’ (pp. 18−19). But the deployment of the term then soon became a literary one, used by Victor Hugo, Turgenev and Dostoevsky, after which it was to make − via Prosper Mérimée and Paul Bourget − a huge impact on Nietzsche. In his notebook for 1885−6, he declared that nihilism was ‘standing at the door’, and he famously asked: ‘Whence comes to us this uncanniest of all guests?’ (p. 34), yet Nietzsche’s use of the term was, as Weller rightly emphasizes, complex: sometimes presented as commencing with Plato or with Christianity, sometimes as commencing in the nineteenth century, sometimes as still to come, and sometimes as already surpassed (by Nietzsche himself) (pp. 32−4). For Weller, this very complexity renders nihilism ‘uncanny’ (unheimlich), as does Nietzsche’s distinction between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ nihilism (pp. 34−5).
The ‘long shadow’ subsequently cast by Nietzschean nihilism falls over a number of major thinkers, including Oswald Spengler, Ernst Jünger and Martin Heidegger (whose thought is anticipated, at least in part, by such ‘conservative revolutionaries’ as Paul Lagarde and Julius Langbehn (p. 53)). Whereas, for Heidegger, National Socialism was a response to nihilism, for Adorno (as for Alfred Weber, Hermann Rauschning or Leo Strauss) it was a supreme form of nihilism, leading to Auschwitz − and beyond, to ‘the whole world of torture which has continued to exist’, as he put it in 1965 (see p. 62). Among the theorists of nihilism in France, Albert Camus, Maurice Blanchot and the mercurial Emil Cioran gesture towards an attitude of resistance-through-endurance, of which aesthetic modernism − from Baudelaire and Flaubert, through the avant-garde in general and Dada (Hugo Ball, Marcel Duchamp) in particular, to the ‘high’ modernism of Kafka (as well as D. H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis) and the ‘late’ modernism of Samuel Beckett and Paul Celan − is, in varying ways and different degrees, an eloquent expression.
Do these modernist writers or later postmodernist thinkers (Derrida, Giorgio Agamben or Gianni Vattimo) prove that, as Camus observed in L’Homme révolté (1951), ‘the metaphysics of the worst’ has chosen ‘the literature of damnation, from which we have not yet found the exit’? Within this short, dense, but extremely lucid book, Weller covers a huge amount of ground: inevitably, his argument prompts a number of thoughts. Etymologically, ‘nihilism’ derives from nihil, but there are many ways of regarding the void: is it necessarily a bad thing? What of those intellectuals who staunchly resisted nihilism, such as Bergson in Les Deux Sources de la morale and de la religion (1932): how do they fit into this account? Finally, nihilism ‘haunts’ aesthetic modernism and aesthetic postmodernism alike (p. 164), but is not this insistence that nihilism (as a concept) only be approached ‘within the context of specific discourses’ (p. 10) itself a form of nihilism; indeed, one of its most prevalent forms? After all, despite the eminent clarity with which he presents them, surely not all the issues Weller discusses can be collapsed into a ‘discourse’, specific or otherwise. (Or as Hugo Ball neatly put it: ‘Dionysius the Areopagite is the refutation of Nietzsche in advance’ (p. 101).) Ultimately, there is too much at stake to contemplate with equanimity the erosion of the distinction between nihilism and (some of) its ‘others’, ‘non-nihilism’ and ‘anti-nihilism’ (p. 165), especially at a time when the recently launched ‘movement for positive social change’, Action for Happiness, makes one suspect that Heidegger may have been right.