The Fracture: Giorgio Agamben

Abstract

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).