Literature, Philosophy, Nihilism
Also by Shane Weller BECKETT, LITERATURE, AND THE ETHICS OF ALTERITY A TASTE FOR THE NEGATIVE: Beckett and Nihilism
Literature, Philosophy, Nihilism The Uncanniest of Guests Shane Weller
Shane Weller 2008 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2008 978-0-230-55154-1 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-36244-8 ISBN 978-0-230-58352-8 (ebook) DOI 10.1057/9780230583528 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Weller, Shane. Literature, philosophy, nihilism: the uncanniest of guests/shane Weller. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Nihilism (Philosophy) History. 2. Literatures Philosophy History. I. Title. b828.3 W435 2008 149.8 dc22 2008016425 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08
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Contents Preface ix Introduction: What s in a Name? 1 1 Absolute Devaluation: Friedrich Nietzsche 11 The time of nihilism 11 Art, or the superior counterforce 21 The transfiguration of nihilism 27 The aesthetic/ascetic turntable 31 2 Homelessness: Martin Heidegger 35 Real nihilism : Germany, 1933 5 35 From forgetting to radical killing 41 Abandonment and default 44 Total demobilization 46 Poetry and the becoming homely of a people 49 Who are you? the question of the poet s friend 58 3 Fatal Positivities: Theodor Adorno 63 Life after Auschwitz, or the blasphemy of affirmation 63 Art: the ever broken promise of happiness 72 The protocol sentence : Hölderlin and the birth of modern literature 78 The difference within the negative: Adorno s Beckett 81 4 The Naïve Calculation of the Negative: Maurice Blanchot 86 The anguished writer, the nihilist, and the question of positive values 86 Literature, scepticism, nihilism: Blanchot after Kojève 89 Ambiguities and the limits of the negative 94 The vermin of nihilism : literature and inexistence 103 Retreating before the uncanniest of guests 109 vii
viii Contents 5 Bad Violence: Jacques Derrida 111 Reading, misreading, not reading: deconstruction as nihilism 112 Rather than nothing : deconstruction versus nihilism 121 Literature, or the nothing-ing of nothing 126 Ashes, or the nothing-ing of difference 135 6 The Fracture: Giorgio Agamben 137 The negative foundation and its liquidation 137 The imperfect nihilism of biopolitics from Aristotle to the camps 144 The ethics of potentiality, or the power not to 149 Modern art: the self-annihilating nothing 153 The fracture of the human/animal 159 7 Distortions, or Nihilism Against Itself: Gianni Vattimo 163 Nihilism as literature: Paul de Man 164 Nihilism as theoretical violence: Jean Baudrillard 171 Nihilism as aesthetic consciousness: Gianni Vattimo 175 8 The Denial of (Greek) Thought: Alain Badiou 186 The least-worst signifier 186 In praise of courage, or the ethicalization of literature 198 Literature and the spectre of happiness 205 Conclusion: Nihilism at the Door 212 Notes 216 Bibliography 222 Index 230
Preface In the course of my research for a book published in 2005 on the ways in which Samuel Beckett has been read since the 1950s as a writer whose work is essentially anti-nihilist in nature, I came to recognize the need for a study of a much more general phenomenon in the modern theorization of the literary, namely the repeated attempt to determine both the nature and the value of art and, more precisely, of a variously defined literature in terms of its powers of resistance to a variously defined but always explicitly named nihilism. The present book is an attempt to trace that tradition back to its principal point of origin in Nietzsche s later thought, and to chart the fate of the concept of nihilism in the work of a series of European philosophers and literary theorists who have drawn on Nietzsche s thinking of the relation between art and nihilism, in each instance redetermining both of those concepts but nonetheless remaining within the Nietzschean frame that binds them to what might be termed the ethico-aesthetic discourse of modernity. In selecting the figures to whom chapters are devoted in this book, I have certainly not sought to cover ever manifestation of the phenomenon under consideration there are, to be sure, many other theorists of the literary who would warrant analysis under the same rubric. Rather, I have sought to focus on key figures, by which I mean those thinkers whose deployment of the concept of nihilism in relation to the literary marks a distinctly new phase in the interpretation of the concept of nihilism and a corresponding new privileging of the literary. Thus, what most obviously ties these various figures together, across borders that are both linguistic and political, and beyond the many antagonisms between them, is their attempt to deploy the concept of nihilism in their thinking of the literary and both to define and to justify literature as the privileged form of resistance to nihilism; above all, however, they are bound together by the manner in which the uncanniness of nihilism, upon which Nietzsche himself was the first to remark, manifests itself in their attempted deployments as a certain conceptual haunting which, for reasons that should become clearer in the course of this book, does not permit us in our turn to determine these deployments as themselves either isolated instances of nihilism or part of a more general nihilist tradition. Indeed, if there is a lesson to be drawn from the analyses offered in this book, then it is that any redetermining deployment of the concept of nihilism, any engagement in the scene of charge and counter-charge that constitutes the history of that deployment, cannot avoid this haunting and this would be the case not least for the critical discourse on that haunting. ix
x Preface *** Earlier, and considerably shorter, versions of Chapters 4 and 5 were first in the journal Forum for Modern Language Studies and in Simon Morgan Wortham and Allison Weiner (eds), Encountering Derrida: Legacies and Futures of Deconstruction (New York and London: Continuum, 2007) respectively. I wish to thank the publishers for permission to reproduce that material here. I would also like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to the School of European Culture and Languages at the University of Kent for supporting my application for research leave in the autumn of 2007, and to Paula Kennedy at Palgrave Macmillan for her commitment to the project and for all her assistance in bringing about its publication.