VIII Being-Nothingness, Everything-Nothing, the Unworldly World

We live in a world of ruined concepts, used-up words, emptied conceptions of the world. We live in - and we build - agitated necropolises, we populate and mobilise deserts.

We live in a world where all mystical impulses are consolidated in Churches, all revolutionary movements in bureaucratic States, all researches of thought in sclerotic Universities, all the adventures of human existence in an autarchic and hypocritical Family.

When all that which bears the pompous name of social structure and institution, being however something much wider and deeper, when the forms of all that has been and is are dislocated, disintegrated and remain eroded, when religions and faiths, homelands and communities, states and par­ties, systems and ideologies, families and marriages evacuate their substance, like the lobster caught in the fisherman’s basket evacuates itself with the approach of the octopus, when schools and institutes construct without rest their new ruins... when all that is and is done finds itself stamped with the seal of unreality - without in any way becoming romantic or novelistic - and doesn’t cease being caught in the gears of representation; when nothing escapes the theatricality of moralising and moral habits ‘founded’ on custom­ary moral habit (and on some power even more secret), when everything succumbs to the will of positivity, in the very midst of the destruction and destructuring of the structures (the accords, today clearly discordant, having never been artificial constructions); when public services and official formal­ities cover up what, beneath their ashes, never stops brooding, then it only remains to continue the game - for those who cannot do otherwise, because there is nothing else to be or to do. Continuing, moving forwards: without excessive nervousness and without fatalism, continue to... by anticipating. And always starting again. Until the final and fatal flash - which will come much later than one thinks.

Nihilism kills religion; can the sacred and the divine survive and contrib­ute to the surpassing of nihilism? Nihilism kills poetry and art as poetry and art; can the word, the chant and the plasticity of phenomena continue to man­ifest themselves? Nihilism kills politics; does historical and formative destiny cease to govern humans? Nihilism kills philosophy; does thought also lose all its chances?

Allied with technique, generating it and generated by it, nihilism makes everything an affair of production and consumption, a technique of usury: religious technique, literary and artistic technique, political tech­nique, scientific and ideological technique, erotic technique.

Metaphysics itself opens the way to nihilism: on one side, being itself is excluded from existents and excludes existents; on the other side, being becomes an existent to thus annihilate itself.

For nihilism does not only accomplish the destruction of metaphysics and ethics; it accomplishes them, by accomplishing at once the aim and the lack of metaphysics. All that metaphysics aimed for in the distance - always in lack, since it underestimated concrete presences - nihilism wants to render effective in a process of constant actualisation. The supersensible and invisi­ble world finds itself reversed for the benefit of the sensible and visible world. All products and by-products of metaphysics, reason, liberty, happiness, progress, are generalised and socialised as a requirement, and emptied of all content other than the ideological and basely moralistic. All that is founda­tion, aim, sense, idea, is struck dead and no movement of secularisation can provoke the resurrection of the dead.

With ontology, with the distinction between being and nothingness which rivets them to each other, nihilism also explicitly begins: the dis­tinctions between physics and metaphysics, authentic and inauthentic, and many others, play its game.

The myth of the authentic was one of the masterpieces and major traps of metaphysics that engendered nihilism.

By losing all links with the nourishing roots, nihilism wants to be radical and radicalist.

The Cartesian ego of the cogito was surpassed and collectivised in the march of socialism. The humanism which underlies nihilism wants to consider the human as being its own root, its own foundation. Cut off from any soil and subsoil, evolving on a mechanised ground and under an empty sky, the human thus becomes a radically disoriented being. Does it aspire to its surpassing? The question of maintaining human life on the surface of the globe - a burning question today - remains an open question. Is there an essential truth in whose name we could decide?

In the democratic kingdom of nihilism, as aristocratic as it is plebeian, which, starting from the Occident, even though prefigured in the Orient, extends over the entire planet, every question asking why? provokes, in the generalised indifference, a double ‘response’: why not? And why not the inverse?

Nihilism does not only annihilate the sense of the being in becoming of the totality of the world, but, conjointly, all that is. It abolishes all distinc­tion between face and mask, smile and grimace, landscape and scaffolding, what is natural and what is artificial. In indifference, it suppresses differ­ences, moved by morose passions and setting them in motion.

The gloomy platitude, the greyness of mediocrity, vulgarity and banality, the reign of indifference and insignificance, the domination of the aver­age, the pressure of the norm, the scholarly buffoonery, the impotent flight into the powers of the ‘pseudo’-imaginary, the absence of all presence, are but the external signs, the thick envelope, the gross manifestations of the profound signification of annihilating nihilism.

The open totality tends more and more to reduce itself to the conquering totality of everyday life - empirical, if one wants, but abstract, monopolising, but ‘non-existent’.

Nowadays, when two forces are present and struggling, it is most often the most mediocre and flattest power that prevails on the official stage, accord­ing to the order of the times.

Anyone who tries to grasp nihilism religiously or theologically, philo­sophically or logically, scientifically, psychologically or medically, histori­cally or sociologically, literally or aesthetically, does not grasp it, but remains grasped by it. ‘Those who are most nihilistic, and in the stupidest possible manner, are those who do not recognise it and pretend to fight it, while failing to recognise their own face in its deforming mirror.’ Nihilism not only negates philosophy and logic, religion and God, nature and the human soul, history and society, poetry and art. Nihilism signifies, if it signifies any­thing: annihilation of the founding (and sacred?) sense, thanks to which all these powers can be and be deployed, fertilise and animate. Nihilism means: annihilation, without recourse, of being in becoming, of the open totality of what is, of the truth of temporal becoming. The sense of the total being in its becoming fades into nothingness.

One cannot want or hope to curb anything in its conquering march. Every conquering movement contains its own truth and the seeds of its surpassing and its death. Its quasi-total victory will initiate the process of its defeat. Nihilism can consequently only launch itself into a frantic race - an exhausting race. For the moment, it is only beginning to realise itself. Before being surpassed, nihilism (which comprehends us) awaits the hour of being comprehended.

It does not seem to be currently in the order of the disorder that the human and history are going to be totally annihilated in the nothingness that makes all kinds of being disappear.

Reader and interlocutor: it is me and you, us and you, who are caught up in all this supreme nihilistic mechanism. This ‘affair’ implicates the whole world. No one should imagine themselves being outside or above this machinery, for we have not even reached the summit: we are in and rather below its dreary truth. Indifference and insignificance are such that everyone confronts ‘all this’ as if this did not concern them or did not affect them mortally. ‘One’ always believes that only the others are touched. When it is a question of platitude, it is however all about you: it is yours, this dull annihilation of every spark of light, the triviality of your multicoloured intelligence, the vacuity of your activism. And if you are only conscious of what is going on, you are still not doing anything. Glasses never helped blind eyes to see. Let our ears hear this word, we that are ready to grasp rationally or intuitively, with our head or with our heart, to analyse and explain with the help of our instruments and our logical and philological, psychological and psychopathological, historical and sociological, artistic and aesthetic reasoning: ‘True life is absent.

We are not in the world. I go where it goes, it must be.’ Do you hear, believer or layperson, monsieur or comrade, teacher or pupil, reactionary or progressive, rebel or revolutionary? We are absent from the truth and the true life has left us without having ever existed. We are not in the world and the world is not. And each person goes where they must; by crawling, even when they leave for the dominion of the earth and when they ascend to assault the sky.

So long as ‘cursed’ thinkers, which the century cannot easily digest, do not emerge; as long as these cursed thinkers will not start to pursue the work of a mole; as long as the immense and profound opening, which comprises the plenary manifestation of nothingness, in which all things fuse, is not seen - we will remain on this side of nihilism. Rimbaud, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche dared to see; but we threw ourselves on them like hyenas on a corpse, or made them ideological spokespersons.

All this remains strange and estranging to professorial professors, jour­nalistic journalists and managing politicians, heroes tired - but nevertheless excited - by planetary nihilism. This is in order, since only a mediocre and average intelligence is required of them. A below-average clairvoy­ance would help more - them and the business of which they are the dull businessmen.

All or nothing is a naively totalitarian or abstractly nihilistic slogan.

Between something and nothing a difference does not always hide.

Saying without saying anything. Saying nothing. Saying the nothing. Saying something. Saying everything?

Nihilism is the cradle and the tomb of all totalitarianisms.

Nihilism exists only in relation to what it nihilates. All this criticises, denies, rejects, annihilates, takes place on a basis provided by what is criti­cised, denied, rejected, annihilated.

Can we sometimes be, do and suffer, as if nothing happened?

The architectonics of nihilism let us see all that is made as a concreting of the void.

The play of nihilism, and not only nihilism, flanks all that is with an anti: it opens the era of anti-language, anti-thought, anti-theory, anti-god, anti-nature, anti-hero, anti-fate, anti-poetry, anti-novel, anti-painting, etc., etc.

Is there a lucidity that kills? How can a demystified life continue to unfold? Can individual humans and historical societies exist without illusions? Would there be insupportable and untenable - because too strong - thoughts or too dangerous experiences? How to illuminate without burning everything?

The unworldly world is someone sick who is doing well.

Great is the temptation of the void. Mounting the nothingness, riding the void, is imposed as a task, intoxicating in all sobriety, makes us accomplish leaps and conquests, leads us to the threshold of an experience on which we play games where nothing happens, or something happens, in the passage from all to nothing, and from nothing to things.

Nihilism realises the prediction of Pauline preaching: there will be nei­ther freemen nor slaves, neither man nor woman, neither Jew nor Christian.

Nihilism as such preaches neither life nor death: it annihilates the one and the other, and could teach us to live before dying, without reason, since there are no reasons that make us find life bearable or unbearable.

How the hell did nihilism enter into the becoming-thought of the world - becoming-world of thought, that is to say, at once in our individual and his­torical experience as well as our sensibility, at all levels, in our imagination and our representations, our hearts and our guts, our consciousness and our unconsciousness, our reflection and our thought? Through what opening and under what cover? Can we speak of it otherwise than by ellipses, of what manifests itself in its apparitions, and what it shows in eclipses? Did the ancient Orient already know it? But how did it name it and how could we say what might already be a call? What did Hinduism and Buddhism, Taoism and Zen know about its secrets? And other even more ancient intuitions?

The Presocratic and pre-philosophical sophist Gorgias, by dissoci­ating the Parmenidean being-thought identity, declares: ‘Nothing is; even if it is, it is incomprehensible for the human;... and even if it is comprehensible, it is nevertheless incommunicable and inexplicable to our fellows.’ Protagoras had already opened the way with his overwhelming and double words, by reversing the truth into error, and, inversely, from the point of view of ‘man is the measure of all things’, of each human, for which all that appears and disappears from the limited and mortal human. The human of Protagoras and the nothing of Gorgias remain, however, enigmatic. Do they inaugurate ‘humanism’ and ‘nihilism’? The Greek man lived in the opening of the ‘indissociable’ physis-logos ensemble inhabited by the gods, even when it was constituted as the negator of what encom­passed it. It did not hope for anything fantastic, it did not fear anything beyond measure. On the basis of the Greeks, the question is posed: do being and nothingness exist only for us human beings, annihilating beings, anni­hilated beings? From the outset, the thought (skepsis), despite and because of the onto-theo-logical systematics that combat it, rubs against the (bor­dered) abyss of scepticism. Philosophy constituting itself from Plato will give up to Hegel answers to the question of the being of the world by call­ing it Idea, God, Nature, Human, Society, thus eluding both the problem of ‘being’ and the question of nothingness.

For the Judaeo-Christian conception, as everyone knows, the world is created ex nihilo by God. Being is drawn from nothingness. For Augustine, the world, though created by God, the eternal spirit, is, too, unworldly because of the time of sin. For Thomas Aquinas, what is created, the totality of beings, remains open and closed: open, because created by God, closed, because it emerged from nothingness. Creation is thus equivocal: being and nothingness affect it. The dualism of Platonic origin is further deepened: suprasensible being is separated from the nihilating sensible despite all the participations. The human finds itself quite ‘annulled’, and although God has become man for man to become God, the double reality - suprasensible, divine, spiritual, eternal and sensible, natural, material, temporal - marches towards nullification with faith, hope and certainty to future salvation. The true summum ens, God - and all that he sets in motion - is both true and absurd. Thus, when the supramundane reality of God withdraws, the mun­dane reality of the created will also withdraw. There will be neither being nor nothing. Everything will deploy itself in this intermediate realm of equivocation, ambivalence, ambiguity, duplicity, complicity. Christianity realises Judaism and prolongs Platonism and Aristotelianism. (Platonist) Augustinianism and (Aristotelian) Thomism, nominalism and realism lead to so-called secular modernity that cannot unlink from Christianity and completes it. Nothing is true, and everything equally is. Behold the terrain of nihilism. No mundanity could be established after the withdrawal of divinity. There is no more salvation. Certitude and doubt send the one back to the other. The human becomes lonely, isolated. Persona est ultima solitudo, Duns Scotus had already said. Everything now happens, as if subjectivity was the last word. The person, the me, the own, the self, will find itself mortally linked to private property, exploitation, subjugation, dereliction, atomisation.

For Descartes, only (?) the subject, the ego, the res cogitans, is the meas­ure of Being. Veracity is however guaranteed by God. But the nothing derives from the res. Through the accusative. The ego exists, because it thinks: it thinks itself and thinks all that is, namely, what it is and what it is not. The human subject thus remains in emptiness. The human becomes more and more lonely, as an individual and as a mass. Doubt takes hold of everything, to the extent that truth becomes the certainty of subjectivity grasping objectivity. With truth posited as the contrary of error, one recoils with fear from both truth and error. Heirs to Christianity, with its negation of error and its negation of thoughtful search in the name of certainty-faith, the moderns want to seat the subject and its existence on the worm-eaten throne of thought - or experience. Is subjectivity - and its socialisation - the last word? To be or not to be? This is the ontological and anthropological question which poses itself to modernity, in making it cling to existence, advancing backwards and fleeing forwards. The human being can no longer comprehend itself as englobed by the One-All, Physis-Logos, or by God; it can no longer comprehend itself as a divine creature or a being-there; it seeks to be founder and imperialist and becomes vacillating and problem­atic. It wants to fly, but crawls more often than walks. It seeks a foundation, incapable of giving it up or surpassing it. The world sometimes appears to it like a rigged game, a trap; but it launches into the adventure aiming at tech­nical domination: mastery over - and possession of - nature (itself already dead before the gods and God died). The subject ‘possessing’ only its own being as a foundation - grasped by its self-consciousness - loses all founda­tion and loses itself. It is broken by its own freedom, which assails it and from which it recoils, having over-dimensionalised it.

It is in the horizon of German idealism and romanticism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the problem of nihilism emerges, passing next through the intermediary of the Left Hegelians, into Russia - in the nineteenth century - before being formulated by Nietzsche at the end of the nineteenth century.

With Kant, the transcendental ego becomes the foundation of all that is, truth and error existing only in judgement, that is to say, in the relation of the object to the understanding of the subject, this relation remaining all the same without any other foundation than the idealist. The accord between being and knowing - the world and the human - remains problematic and not elucidated. By examining the amphibology of the concepts of reflection, in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant gives us a brief, schematic and fourfold definition of nothing: 1. The nothing is an ‘empty concept without object’ (ens rationis), which, like noumena, does not refer to experience; it is a Gedankending, it does not imply any possibility. 2. The nothing is an ‘object empty of a concept’ (nihil privativum), it manifests the lack of an object, like shadow, cold. 3. The nothing is an ‘empty intuition without object’ (ens imaginarium), as, for example, pure space and pure time, which are some­thing, forms, but not objects. 4. The nothing is an ‘empty object without concept’ (nihil negativum); the object of a concept, which contradicts itself, is nothing, because the concept is nothing; it is an Unding, it contradicts possibility. Nothings 1 and 4 are empty concepts; 2 and 3 are empty data. Negation, without a reality corresponding to it, is not an object for a subject. Here, in Kant’s grandiose onto-logical system - an ingenious, speculatively schizophrenic construction between paranoia and catatonia - is the place, or rather the non-place, assigned to nothing. But perhaps it is the mad who see everything mad - or too orderly.

Fichte, the post-Kantian, published in 1794 his Theory of Science. He puts the self face to face with the non-self and contributes to opening the field to modern nihilism. F. H. Jacobi often speaks of nothing in 1781 and 1792, and in his letter to Fichte, in 1799, he criticises idealism as nihilism.

The nihilist theme also appears in romantic writers. Tieck, in William Lovell (1794), writes: ‘Beings are because we thought them’ and his hero passes from idealism to amoralism. Jean Paul, in his Vorschule der Aesthetik (1804), criticises the ‘poetic nihilism’ of Fichtean inspiration where the self ‘annihilates the world and the universe only to empty a play space for noth­ingness’. This expedition against the nihilist game targets Novalis, supposed to have privileged self-knowledge at the expense of the knowledge of the world. Individualism, nihilism and play end up in nothingness, because they are founded on nothing, according to the criticism of those who are fasci­nated by what they criticise - whether they recognise it or not.

It is in the novel of an unknown author, The Nightwatches of Bonaventura (1805), where nihilism shows itself clearly enough. ‘The human is worthless, that is why I am crossing it off ’, ‘Everything is nothing’, we can read.

Are romantic humours and humour, irony, detachment and nihilism inti­mately linked? Is nihilism also something like a disappointed idealism?

With Hegel appears the elaboration and ‘surpassing’ of the unhappy consciousness which recognises ‘the death of the divine man’ and which suffers from the fact that ‘God himself is dead’. The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) criticises this consciousness sunken into the depths of the night of the self = self which neither distinguishes nor knows anything beyond itself. Hegel denounces the spirit of the general confusion of the reversed world as well as the cultural-spiritual attitude, and, by fluidifying con­cepts, through the suppression of abstract being and nothingness, both in becoming and in recovering all in mediated reconciliation, he closes a very large - Graeco-Christian - chapter, although leaving the door wide open. He introduces the historicism which will succeed him and which will strike out the spirit.

The three great anti-Hegelians, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, will go to war against total spirit and absolute knowledge - by nihilating them.

Kierkegaard speaks and lives an ‘ironic life’. It is a romantic and aesthetic experience of isolated existence. Irony suppresses everything, it is a nothing­ness, something infinite, negative, ungraspable. Irony is the negative liberty of anxious and fearful subjectivity. It is a kind of conscious madness. In opposition to it and to the temptation of the seducer, the individual as exist­ence can pass from the aesthetic and ethical stage to the religious stage - to God. But always as individual and paradoxical existence.

Marx demands and advocates a suppression, a chain- and mass-nihilation of all the alienations which annihilate the human: the production of life as done until now, private property and the division of labour, separate eco­nomic life, the difference between manual labour and intellectual labour, between town and country; he demands and advocates the suppression of classes, state and politics, traditional sexuality and family, religion, art, phi­losophy and ideology. Is there nothing left? There remains the reprise, the repetition, since ‘the suppression of self-alienation follows the same path as self-alienation’, as it is written in Political Economy and Philosophy. Does not the surpassing risk ending up at the same nothingness?

Russian nihilism is affiliated with Left Hegelianism. Turgenev, in his novel Fathers and Sons (1862), lets the young physician Basarov, nat­uralist, scientist and atheist, speak. He popularises the term ‘nihilism’ that Nietzsche will take up again. This nihilism denies all traditional and hierarchical values. There was also the nihilist movement of Russian revolutionaries. Depending on the case, the word was given a positive or negative sense. Dostoevsky treats the nihilists with a strange, superior humour in The Possessed. If God does not exist, all is permitted - this is the lesson of The Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov - and this all leads to nothing.

It is only with Nietzsche that nihilism begins to show its face and its masks. For him, the term is and remains ambiguous, two-way, polyvalent, amphibological and brutal at once. Nihilism is the devaluation, the ideal­istic nihilation operated by the will to power, as the will of the negation of life, in the name of superior values, as well as the devaluation, the nihila- tion operated by the same will to power, of superior values themselves. If life thus finds itself devoid of sense and aim, the will to power must set it back in motion. The will to power can deny both life and values; it must deploy itself as such, although it is also ‘nothing’. The will of nothingness and the nothingness of will curiously combine. Being ‘is’ and becomes becoming, it equals non-being, and one rather wants the nothing than the absence of the will. Nihilism is inherent in human history from the begin­ning; it culminates in a certain Hinduism, in Buddhism and in a certain Taoism, in Greek idealism, Judaism, Christianity, free thought, democracy, socialism. It leads to the reign of the last humans. More than a pathological state, it is the normal state of humanity and becomes more and more so. As nihilism of weakness, it can also be nihilism of strength; incomplete, it can become complete and ‘achieve’ itself. It grasps the devaluation of all values; pessimism prefigures it.

Nihilism signifies: exhaustion of the senses and sense, absence of an answer to the question: why? Everything empties itself: vital impulses as well as ideas and ideals of metaphysics, of religion, of morality. Everything is missed and masked, seen through perspectives; all is duplicated and seen in broken mirrors. Everything becomes false. Truth is only a form of error. The will to truth seems to be a weapon of humanity, which turns against it. God is dead, and the human subject is only a fiction, a plurality. Humans aspire to the domination of the earth, but the last human has not yet succeeded the human who wants to perish to prepare the post-human figure, rising and declining, of the ‘overhuman’. This would accept the eternal return of the same, the innocence of becoming and experiencing in its praxis the world as play. For the moment, we live in intermediate times, not yet delivered from the spirit of revenge that wants to stop time and make it turn backwards, through which we fail its rotation. Thus spoke Nietzsche.

It is with the two faces of the same complex - bourgeois idealism­romanticism-individualism-revolution, and socialist materialism­positivism-collectivism-revolution - as well as with the theoretical and practical actions and reactions that they provoked (Anglo-Saxon logical positivism, fascism and National Socialism included) that nihilism pro­files itself. Nihilism, tradition and revolution join hands and fight each other. European nihilism tends to become planetary. But the hour for the encounter of occidental and worldwide nihilism with oriental and Asian (Buddhist and Zen) nihilism has not yet sounded. Planetary nihilism remains incomplete and unachieved.

The ego, the I, the self, the subject, the individual, the collectivity or the society of individuals, posed as the fundamental position, wish to annihilate all that is opposed, and equally annihilate themselves. For the moment, we are at a turning point. Making of all that is and becomes, and of ourselves, an experiment and an experimentation, where are we going? Ist nicht letzten Endes der tiefste Grund jedes Seienden zugrunde zu gehen? [Is not the ultimate reason for every being to perish?]

We must first call nihilism what names itself thus. Then, and even more originally, one must grasp as nihilism all that deploys itself as such.

Is nihilism fundamentally a phenomenon of consciousness? The nihilist consciousness does not however see the existing difference between the nothingness that nihilates and makes everything negation, nothingness linked to being, and the nothing that is nothing. Negation derives from the productive nothingness; it does not found nothingness.

Is it useful to say that all the persons, all the thinkers, poets and writers, all the social forces, all the historical movements that appeal to nihilism or appeal against it, are only signs?

Nihilism says the death of physis: ‘The great Pan is dead’ (Pascal). It says the death of God (Nietzsche). It says the end of the Human (Rimbaud, Nietzsche). Nihilism says the death of the central Greek intuition (physis-logos), Christian (god-human), modern (human-subject). It says the death of cosmology, theology, anthropology.

The subject erupts. Does it march towards its destruction? Its dissolution? Another solution? The logos, the violence of the Occident, trembles lightly on its bases. Motor - almost - of human history, nihilism deepens further with metaphysics. Dualism is the river bed. Idealism and romanticism and anti-metaphysics carry it with them. The most discernible figureheads are pushed towards the untenable, search for a way out in suicide or mad­ness (Kleist, Holderlin, Nietzsche, Van Gogh) or abandonment in flight (Rimbaud). Others double their flat life through the search for sensations and consume literature that commits to nothing. The ‘true absent life’ becomes book and commentaries, and clutters the libraries. Opponents and deviants constitute diverse folklores. Advanced industrial society, by entering the phase of opulence, although the majority of the inhabitants of the planet have not yet left pre-industrial scarcity, captures everything, bears contes­tation and revolt and should soon subsidise and organise them according to a plan. The global society of producer-consumers produces, reproduces, consumes and consummates everything, as if it were nothing. It articu­lates itself from the family, through the diverse institutions of civil society, to the state, tomorrow worldwide. It englobes everything. The Christian- bourgeois-socialist lifestyle does not yet seem to be shaken by a crisis. No different ethics, no other lifestyle, manifests itself. Sometimes, however, certain suspicions traverse us.

Everyone seeks to satisfy their needs, to enjoy, to be recognised (recogni­tion is always a bit sour), to be free - without knowing why. But the satis­faction of inextinguishable desires is intimately linked to halting and death, to the return to a previous state. Hegel and Freud showed this. Death escapes the struggle for recognition or, rather, takes hold of it. The finitude of the human being ‘and’ the finitude of Being are not recognised. All sense is lack­ing, and one searches for what could make sense. From the moment where sense becomes something attributable, it has already left us. So we live, love and die halfway, in this interregnum of ambiguity and ambivalence, where all sense, although absent, is double, triple and sparkling.

The civilisation of emptiness, of nothingness, as it is even called journal­istically, is in full swing and wants to fill the void, more human, terrestrial and stellar than celestial. Filling and using up all that is and is done, based on profit, and in search for a vague alterity, are going well. Radical and totalitar­ian democracy levels all and flattens it in growing indifference. All compre­hends itself, is comprehended, integrated, taken over, flattened. Indifference nevertheless hides its play, behind which there is ‘nothing’.

Nihilism nihilates Being, makes being become nothing. Nihilism nihi- lates Nothingness (because it leaves the nihil unthought), makes nothing­ness nothing. Nothingising both being and nothingness, nihilism nihilates itself. Nihilism nihilates us. We nihilate it. It nihilates itself. More than sur­passing it - as pious vows and fashionable slogans demand - it is about seeing how it is defeated not by us or by something else, but by itself. Nihilism nihi- lates everything and annihilates itself. Behold a new discovery. To make what appear? Being-nothingness, the circle of becoming, the everything-nothing, in its post-natural, post-divine, post-human play? Nihilism also annihilates in a way all that preceded it, and all that will follow it. Nothing is, everything is, nothing is true, nothing is false, henceforth, since and for a long time, if not since and forever.

Perhaps there is no more there is, and there is not. Would there be no more being, nor non-being?

Even if nothing happens, be attentive to the nothing that happens, in happening.

In any case, don’t panic. Nature (dead) lets itself be explored, exploited and visited, by science, technique, industry, tourism and naturism taking charge of it. God (dead) restores himself and is taken over by ecumenism, churches and parallel mystics. The subject (broken) progresses, socialises itself, and we remedy its psycho-somatic, historical-social and ideological-cultural suf­ferings with all sorts of remedies. The ridiculous does not kill. It is part of life. The finitude of the being of the world and of the human being - who have a unique and common centre - continues to unfold. The living-dead are waiting for the rising of a new star. The rotary motion pursues itself. How does it continue to unfold? Through us humans or through what follows its course? Towards where? For what?

That whatever happens rather than nothing, that dangers and risks are annihilating and annihilated, is one of the tonalities of nihilism - a movement of general protest and generalised acceptance.

The almost total - because there is not and cannot be a totally total - refusal of the existing and dominant world, the dominant mode of being of the world, the annihilating refusal of all the mechanisms, organ­isms and organisations of integration into the existing world, remains full of inconsequence and incoherence, proves capable of contain­ing the seeds of a creative negativity, to reach a coherence in the the­oretical critique and the formulation of practical propositions (an elaborate contestation), returns to the play of an existing and dominant world.

The question itself and what it announces can only be annihilated. So nihilate these cantilevered words about a certain lifestyle, in search of a perhaps invisible star. Annihilate them! That is to say, criticise them, discuss them right and wrong.

All nihilism - like all movement - is inconsequential. Even if it goes as far as to the suppression of life, it shows that it has not gone beyond illusions and disillusions, hope and hopelessness, it clings to life and/or at death, demystifies some of the terms in the name or under the pressure of the other, unable to live and accept life-and-death, in playing this vivifying and dying play.

Nihilism annihilates both answers and questions. Does it overcome even the difference?

All nihilism is necessarily incomplete: it leaves its own basis and something of the other almost intact.

As for that which concerns the links between nihilism, neutrality, nullity and indifference, we are still too candid.

The death of grand ideals and grand encompassings can infuse a final and new vigour to what remains - indifference.

Through the nothingness of nihilism the world does not cease to unfold itself.

After one or more things have reached zero point or degree, what happens? How do they restart and start over?

We all want to go further. But where to go? Having gone far, do we need to go backwards or can we go beyond?

The play of being-nothingness, everything-nothing, the world-unworld, teaches us that becoming is also a return and that in the course of the play of our itinerancy we go, productively and destructively, from reiteration to reiteration.

Since nihilism nihilates both the question and the answers, ‘the’ question was, is and will be without ‘actuality’. Nihilism only makes it more inactual. The question is even crossed out. So that it will arise again, in a ‘different’ way? Let us contribute to this working approach. Being and nothingness are and are not identical and/or different. Each is the face and the mask of the other. It is bizarre, though, to talk about it so brutally. All that is emerges from being-nothingness and runs aground there, without this being­nothingness being a foundation. There neither exists nor does not exist being and nothingness. The being in becoming of the totality of the world is the question that nullifies the ‘rest’ and that the rest nullifies differentially and with indifference. The opening of being-nothingness, everything-nothing, world-unworld, ‘is’ that of errant time, errancy not being the reverse of truth. The work-play of the thinker is blessed and cursed. May they be condemned more, for ‘some time’, through the curse cast upon them, so that blessed bittersweet fruits may appear. It is in this that the work of planetary thought consists, thought more rigorously - historically and systematically - than it seems, a ventilated and flexible thinking.

Nihilism can also open us to the suppression of suppression that is not necessarily a synthesis.

It is not only nor principally that which flashes up in broad daylight that forces recognition, jumps into the eyes. It is not only, nor decisively, that which imposes itself on vision and life that reigns masterfully, seems invin­cible. Established religions, installed deities, wealthy though worm-eaten States, aesthetic, ideological and familial systems gaining membership, are not the only or the supreme reality. For centuries, thought has prostrated itself before what triumphs. What succeeds and wins provokes respect and even acceptance. The underground seems blocked and the distant horizon only serves as a simple decoration. All of the world flatly crawls - or rebels flatly - to not affront what founds and shakes the world, thus forgetting the ancient and future utterance according to which ‘all that crawls is governed by blows’.

Does the fire that Heraclitus calls logos, thinking and poetic word-and- thought, lightning governing the totality, and play, still keep from us its light and burns? For the moment, let us not forget that the fire also (and especially?) is lit in the night, to tear its veil.

Will the angels of destruction cover the ‘indestructible’ with their wings? And will we make anew - but in a strictly unheard-of way - a fire of every wood?

Under the total desert of planetary nihilism the subterranean river rum­bles or stays silent. This underground flow does not want to, and cannot, submerge the globe.

Even in the void, beings and things keep their weight. Symmetrically, overactivity hides and denotes a void.

Whoever is more than the living dead, one condemned to life, glimpsing the enigma of nihilism, could also glimpse a shooting star, and acquiesce.

The most extreme hopelessness is carried by the most unshakeable of hopes.

What can the expectation of future rebirth signify?

Since the human is anxious for - and about - nothing, could they not also be content - about nothing?

If we say yes to everything, does not everything become dull to the point of becoming nothing? Yet doesn’t the affirmation of everything also contain in germ the surpassing of negating nihilism?

There are some who do not agree: however ‘something’ is finishing, ‘some­thing’ is running its course.

What remains: the peaceful effort to situate oneself in the absence of nature, the tension of thought putting all into question, the wait for a friendly dialogue, the fidelity to what does not let itself be forgotten, the encounter in the erotic break, the grasping of certain instants, the conquest of what conceals itself, the lucid contribution to the battles of the political avant-garde. Thus remains: the nostalgia for cosmic nature and the waiting for a future nature, the joy and sorrow of thought, the hope of a dialogue in friendship, the constancy in inconstancy, the invasive strangeness of love, the availability regarding what can make us tremble, the pursuit of what escapes, the disenchanted participation in political movements that will never fully realise what they say they do.

What is stronger than nihilism? The game of the world.