Term
Nihilism
used in 13 texts across the archive
“I want to suggest that the interaction between ostensive and imperative produces the possibility of something we might call “originary nihilism,” which is to say, a situation in which, due to colliding imperatives, or later imperatives that undermine the earlier ones, or subsidiary imperatives that don’t fit the central ones, there is no longer an “object” the parties involved can point to in order to verify compliance with the imperative.”
In use
“Nihilism is a mode of thinking that, since Nietzsche, we have been constrained to acknowledge as our own homegrown response to all transcendence, to all valuations. Nietzsche described it as the will to nothing as preferable to no will at all.”
“The nihilism of much modern art and modern thought is best understood as a protest bemoaning the absence of such a world.”
“Nihilism sets in once public battles seem to be about nothing—a combat with no real victor, because victories that are muddied, or dissipate, or are endlessly re-litigated , can no longer be appreciated as a contest.”
“Cynicism and nihilism can only be a local phenomenon indulged in by the privileged.”