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What's become of nihilism today? Almost every recent text on the subject is very quickly forced to acknowledge its apparent degradation. Karen Carr, for instance, announces that "Nietzsche's "uncanniest of all guests", the bane of the nineteenth century, is becoming an unremarkable, even banal, feature of modern life … as its crisis value diminishes, as it becomes accepted with an indifferent shrug, … [Nihilism] devolves into its antithesis: a dogmatic absolutism" (Carr 1992, 10). On Carr's account, something unexpected has obviously occurred, a "devolution". Yet if — as Keith Ansell Pearson puts it — "today it remains as necessary as ever to think through the problem of nihilism and perform Nietzsche's demand for a revaluation of all our values' (Ansell Pearson 1994, 8), then how does this devolution vitiate the forcefulness of the term? For, as the very same texts point out, nihilism is not yet a word that can simply be dispensed with, for nothing else seems quite as appropriate for any possible global critique of contemporary capital, modern technology, Western democratic ideology, nuclear proliferation, ecological mismanagement, global administrative politics, mass-media hyperbole, and so on (see Eden 1983; Gare 1993; Agamben 1991; Darby et al. 1989; Critchley 1997).

DOI: 10.1057/9780230597761_2

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