Modernism and Nihilism (review)

The “Modernism and . . .” series is an interesting project that already proposes such enticing titles as “Modernism and Mediterraneanism,” “Modernism and Anarchism,” “Modernism, Exile and Utopia,” and “Modernism and Japanese Culture.” The series seeks to publish “groundbreaking specialist monographs” that “explore the relationship between a particular topic in modern history and ‘modernism,’” the aim being to challenge conventional notions of modernist art and aesthetics. Given this exciting remit for the series as a whole, Shane Weller’s contribution could have started out in a bolder fashion instead of opening with a rather dry account of various definitions of nihilism mostly derived from Roger Griffin. Given that the question of energetics—i.e. whether nihilism leads to an “increased power of the spirit” or whether it constitutes a “decline and recession of the power of the spirit”—was of central importance for Nietzsche, I suggest that style is no minor issue when writing on this topic.¹

The pace of the book as a whole is further frustrated with overly long and therefore under-structured sentences such as the following:

Furthermore, like the philosophical deployment of the concept of nihilism, the interpretation of aesthetic modernism as either the counterforce to, or the incarnation of, nihilism cuts across political borders in ways suggesting that, where the question of nihilism arises, it is always a matter of borders, limits, and extremes, both the threat and the promise of that which inhabits the liminal space between the known and the unknown.

(77)

The following is another example of a sentence which, due to its depleted sense of energy, strikes me as being at odds with at least the topic of “active nihilism”:

As regards the latter, Kafka occupies a central position because he is arguably, as Griffin puts it, “the archetypal literary modernist” (375), his importance in the present context owing to his oeuvre’s having been the one around which debates concerning the relation between nihilism and the aesthetic have tended to centre.

(12)

Such heavy sentences tend to ground the trope of “haunting” in which Weller wishes to float the “uncannniest of all guests” that is nihilism. In this instance they also detract from his (and Heller’s) analysis of Kafka as an author who eludes any definitive placing by his “hover[ing]” in a liminal space of “conclusive inconclusiveness” (119, 133).

An additional weakness of the book is its tendency to present and analyze primary texts in a somewhat hesitant and distant manner, using secondary writings instead of exposing the reader to a fuller experience of the primal ideas. An instance of this missed occasion to immerse the reader more deeply in the material itself might be the following sentence:

However, while Cioran may follow Nietzsche in rejecting the key terms of the Enlightenment (above all, the power of reason and the concept of progress), and if the emphasis falls, as the titles of his works indicate[,] upon despair, decay, mortality, finitude, and the nothing, Susan Sontag is no doubt right to insist that what distinguishes Cioran’s thought from Nietzsche’s is anything akin to the latter’s “heroic effort to surmount nihilism.”

(70)

However, despite these presentational weaknesses, the book is useful as a reminder of the sheer variety of thinkers who have contributed to the very idea of “nihilism.” Indeed, Weller evokes Cloots, Jacobi, Bakunin, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Jünger, Benn, Dada (especially Hugo Ball), Kafka, Celan, Cioran, Beckett, Camus, Blanchot, Adorno, Derrida, Agamben, Baudrillard, Vattimo. . .

Perhaps the most sustained analyses are those pertaining to Jünger’s conception of the worker as the embodiment of radically “new forms of power” and to Heidegger’s advocacy of Dichtung as a form of resistance in the face of technologized modernity. However, it is not entirely clear what conclusions are drawn from these discussions. Weller’s main overall argument appears to be the following: nihilism is inextricably bound up with the political. The political seems to be understood by Weller in terms of a line dividing the “Left” and the “Right” which is then...