The history of nihilism and the limits of political critique

Abstract

Nihilism is commonly defined as ‘a philosophy of negation, rejection, or denial of some or all aspects of thought or life’ [Craig, Edward, ed. 1998. “Nihilism.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge]. It has been interpreted since its early days as a radical negation of all forms of authority – whether that authority be God, a human sovereign, or moral values. More specifically, the concept of nihilism has emphasized the connection between authority and interpretative competence, political sovereignty, and a hermeneutic knack. My article attempts to introduce both the history of the concept and its current theoretical implications. While introducing the key motives of nihilism – investigated in a research group under my guidance at the Jerusalem Van Leer Institute during 2010 and part of 2011 – I hope to clarify what made this concept so relevant for a younger generation of critics and scholars. As demonstrated in this article, the history of the concept has been traditionally marking the limits of legitimate critique, i.e., signifying the borders of the political discourse and marking those ‘outsiders’ of it, dissenters or those creating a supposed threat over the key assumptions of political norms. In short, nihilism is where any discussion about ‘the limits of political critique’ should begin. My article demonstrates – extending simultaneously from the broader historical perspective and the narrower reality in Israel – that nihilism is closely related to the temporality of stasis (political paralysis or a body suspending its own functions), on the one hand, and to the attempt to open a new hermeneutics of active and effective critique, from the outside of the political normative language, on the other.