Distortions, or Nihilism Against Itself: Gianni Vattimo

Abstract

We have seen that, from Heidegger to Agamben, the history of the concept of nihilism takes the form of a series of counter-turns, each redeployment of this concept countering one or more of its prior determinations. These counter-turns include, but are far from being restricted to, Heidegger’s against Nietzsche, Adorno’s against Heidegger, and Agamben’s against the entire sequence from Nietzsche to Derrida. Arguably the most paradoxical turn of all, however, is the one that takes the form of an explicit revalorization of nihilism, or the redetermination of nihilism itself as that which offers the only genuine resistance to nihilism. We have already encountered such a turning of nihilism back against itself in both Adorno and Agamben. In Negative Dialectics (1966), for instance, Adorno argues that, far from simply attacking nihilism, we should acknowledge that we can never be sufficiently nihilist: ‘A thinking man’s true answer to the question of whether he is a nihilist would probably be “Not enough” — out of callousness, perhaps, because of insufficient sympathy with anything that suffers’ (Adorno 1973: 380).