Conclusion: Nihilism at the Door

Abstract

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 subject-tive 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.