Lebovic The Politics of Nihilism PDF

The Politics of Nihilism
About the Series
The Political Theory and Contemporary Philosophy series stages an

ongoing dialogue between contemporary European philosophy and political
theory. Following Hannah Arendts and Leo Strausss repeated insistence
on the qualitative distinction between political theory and political
philosophy, the series showcases the lessons each discipline can draw from
the other. One of the most significant outcomes of this dialogue is an
innovative integration of 1) the findings of twentieth- and twenty-first-
century phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, and
deconstruction (to name but a few salient currents) and 2) classical as well as
modern political concepts, such as sovereignty, polity, justice, constitution,
statehood, self-determination, etc.
In many instances, the volumes in the series both re-conceptualize age-old
political categories in light of contemporary philosophical theses and find
broader applications for the ostensibly non- or apolitical aspects of philosophical
inquiry. In all cases, political thought and philosophy are featured as equal
partners in an interdisciplinary conversation, the goal of which is to bring about
a greater understanding of todays rapidly changing political realities.
The series is edited by Michael Marder, Ikerbasque Research Professor

in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country,
Vitoria-Gasteiz.
Other volumes in the series include:
On Hegels Philosophy of Right by Martin Heidegger, translated by

Andrew J. Mitchell, edited by Peter Trawny, Maria Cavalcante Schubeck,
and Michael Marder
Deconstructing Zionism by Michael Marder and Gianni Vattimo
The Metaphysics of Terror by Rasmus Ugilt
Negative Revolution by Artemy Magun
Humanity at Risk by Daniel Innerarity and Javier Solana
The Voice of Conscience by Mika Ojakangas
Democracy of Knowledge by Daniel Innerarity
Politics of the One by Artemy Magun
The Politics of Nihilism
From the Nineteenth Century
to Contemporary Israel
Edited by
Roy Ben-Shai and Nitzan Lebovic
N E W YOR K LON DON N E W DE L H I SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
1385 Broadway 50 Bedford Square

New York London
NY 10018 WC1B 3DP
USA UK
www.bloomsbury.com
Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published 2014
Roy Ben-Shai, Nitzan Lebovic, and contributors, 2014
This book is based on the work of the research group Nihilism and the Limits of
Political Critique at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, under the directorship of
Dr Nitzan Lebovic.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or
retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or

refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be
accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The politics of nihilism : from the nineteenth century to contemporary Israel /
edited by Roy Ben-Shai and Nitzan Lebovic,
pages cm. (Political theory and contemporary philosophy)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-62356-256-4 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-62356-148-2 (paperback)
1. Nihilism (Philosophy) 2. Opposition (Political science) 3. Political cultureIsrael.
4. IsraelPolitics and government. I. Lebovic, Nitzan, 1970- , author, editor of compilation.
II. Ben-Shai, Roy, author, editor of compilation.
HX828.P655 2014
320.9569401dc23
2014011169
ISBN: HB: 978-1-6235-6256-4

PB: 978-1-6235-6148-2
ePub: 978-1-6235-6698-2
ePDF: 978-1-6235-6172-7
Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

Contents
Acknowledgmentsvi
Contributorsviii
Introduction1
1 Nihilism as Stasis: A Plea for a New Hermeneutics of Exposure
Nitzan Lebovic13
2 Less than Nihilism
Luca Di Blasi35
3 Doing Nothing or Nothing Doing?
Michael Gillespie51
4 A Concept of Nihilism for the Coming End of the World
Adi Ophir63
5 Nihilism, Revolt, and the Spectacle
Blent Diken79
6 The Epistemology of Nihilism in Otto Weiningers
Sex and Character
Bettina Bergo103
7 In Sickness and in Health: Nietzsche, Amry, and
the Moral Difference
Roy Ben-Shai125
8 Nihilism and Repetition: Dahlia Ravikovitchs
Reiterations as Critique
Liron Mor151
9 What is a Manifestly Illegal Order? Law and Politics
after Yoram Kaniuks Nevelot
Itamar Mann177
10 To Be at Home: Spaces of Citizenship in the Community
Settlements of the Galilee
Fatina Abreek-Zubeidat and Ronnen Ben-Arie205
Index227
Acknowledgments
Investigating the limits of critical thinking implies a set of highly debatable

often unansweredquestions. This volume of essays owes a great debt to those
who did not insist on receiving the answers before the questions were asked.
We owe much to the intellectual generosity, professionalism, and curiosity
of different people at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute who were willing to
accompany this open-ended search. First and foremost, our thanks goes
out to the director, Professor Gabriel Motzkin, who supported the research
and the group of scholars that convened in the institute for long discussions
every couple of weeks, for eighteen months, during the academic year
20092010. During the academic deliberations, Professor Motzkin insisted
on one criterion alone for the work and the continuous support, which was
to maintain the highest possible intellectual level. We wereand still are
grateful for this rare invitation to think beyond geographical boundaries,
without the interference of political considerations, and without any academic
or disciplinary limitations. The group was able to meet on a regular basis
thanks to the dedication of a few members of the institute: Zippi Hechts
warmth and care made the institute a second home; Shimon Alon, Tali Bieler,
and the always-smiling Limor Sagi assisted wherever they could and often
caught potential problems and fixed them even before we noticed them. It has
been a unique experience to work with this exceptional group of people. We
hope that this volume will prove daring enough and professional enough to
suit their high intellectual standard. We know we could not reward them in
any other, or better, way.
This volume of essays joins a special issue Nitzan Lebovic edited for
Rethinking History (forthcoming). If the special issue was edited with the idea
of a historical investigation in mind, this volume concentrates on the political
philosophy of nihilism. We were lucky enough to find in Michael Marder and his
colleagues at Bloomsbury Academic enthusiastic supporters of such explorations
of radical thinking.
Finally, this work owes much to the support of leading intellectuals and
activists, some of whom took part in the research group without contributing
Acknowledgments vii
articles. We would like to thank Salman Bashir, Eyal Bassan, Hillel Ben-Sasson,
Lin Chalozin-Dovrat, Udi Edelman, Adam Farkash, Boaz Hagin, Merav Mack,
Noam Yuran, Ohad Zehavi, and Naomi Zusman for their interest, participation,
and contribution during those eighteen months. It was a great pleasure to think
together with this wonderful group of scholars.
Contributors
Fatina Abreek-Zubiedat is an architect and co-owner of the Zubiedat

Architects and Urban Planners office. Currently, she is conducting a research on
the development of architectural culture beyond the Green LineArchitecture
of Negotiations, Israeli Construction beyond the Green Line, 19671982,
as part of her PhD studies at the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning
at the Technion, Israel. Her research interests are the history and criticism of
architecture in cross-cultural contexts within spaces that are different in their
essence and contradict each other politically.
Ronnen Ben-Arie is conducting his PhD at the Department of Government

and Political Theory at the Haifa University. In his dissertation, he explores
the spatial dimensions of the concepts of resistance in the political thought
of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. He studied architecture at the Bezalel
Academy and holds a masters degree in History and Philosophy of Science
and Ideas from Tel Aviv University. His research interests are the politics
of heterogeneous spaces in Israel-Palestine, and the political and ethical
implications of alternative professional spatial planning.
Roy Ben-Shai is a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow and visiting assistant professor

at Haverford College. He published articles in The European Legacy and Telos
and several book chapters. His dissertation, Moral Pathology, is a philosophical
study of Holocaust Survivor and essayist Jean Amry. It won the Hans Jonas
Memorial Award for best dissertation in philosophy at the New School for
Social Research and is currently being prepared for publication. His current
research is a historical study of shifting approaches to pathos and pathology in
the philosophical tradition.
Bettina G. Bergo is professor of philosophy (Universit de Montral).

She is the author of Levinas between Ethics and Politics and co-editor of five
collections, notably Levinas and Nietzsche: After the Death of a Certain God
(2008), Trauma: Reflections on Experience and Its Other (2009), Husserl at the
Limits of Phenomenology (2002), and Levinass Contribution to Contemporary
Contributors ix
Thought (double issue of the New School for Social Research Graduate Faculty
Philosophy Journal, 1999). She translated three works of Levinas, Of God Who
Comes to Mind (1998); God, Death and Time (2000); and On Escape (2003).
She also translated Marlne Zaraders The Unthought Debt: Heidegger and the
Hebraic Heritage (Stanford 2006), and co-translated the proceedings of the Paris
conference entitled Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida (Fordham 2007) and
Didier Francks Nietzsche and the Shadow of God (Northwestern, 2012), as well
as over twenty articles and chapters. Her manuscript The Missed Conversation:
Husserl, Freud, and Cognitive Science is under review. Her current monograph is
on the concept of anxiety in nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy and
psychoanalysis.
Luca Di Blasi, born 1967 in Lucerne (Switzerland), is University Lecturer in

Philosophy at the Universitt Bern. He has published widely on the topic of
philosophy of religion, including Der Geist in der Revolte: Der Gnostizismus und
seine Wiederkehr in der Postmoderne (Fink 2002) and Cybermystik, ed. (Fink
2006). His last publications include Wendy Brown/Rainer Forst: The Power of
Tolerance (a debate), co-edited with C.F.E. Holzhey (Columbia UP 2014);
Der weie Mann: Ein Anti-Manifest (transcript 2013), The Scandal of Self-
Contradiction: Pasolinis Multistable Geographies, Subjectivities, and Traditions,
co-edited with M. Gragnolati and C. F. E. Holzhey (Turia+Kant 2012). Di Blasi
is currently completing a new book on the decentering of the secular.
Blent Diken teaches social theory at Lancaster University, Department of

Sociology. His research fields are social philosophy, social theory, political and
economic theology, cinema, and urbanism. His most recent books are Nihilism
(2009) and Revolt Revolution, CritiqueThe Paradox of Society (2012). Currently
he is working on a project entitled God, Politics, EconomySocial Theory and the
Paradoxes of Religion.
Michael Allen Gillespie is professor of political science and philosophy at

Duke University. He works in political philosophy, with particular emphasis on
modern continental theory and the history of political philosophy. He is the
author of Hegel, Heidegger and the Ground of History, Nihilism before Nietzsche,
and The Theological Origins of Modernity. He is also co-editor of Nietzsches
New Seas: Explorations in Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Politics, Ratifying the
Constitution, and Homo Politicus, Homo Economicus. He has published articles
x Contributors
on Montaigne, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Existentialism, and various

topics in American political thought and public philosophy, as well as on the
relation of religion and politics.
Nitzan Lebovic is an assistant professor of history and the Apter Chair of

Holocaust Studies and Ethical Values at Lehigh University. Nitzan is the
author of The Philosophy of Life and Death: Ludwig Klages and the Rise of a
Nazi Biopolitics (Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History, Palgrave
Macmillan 2013), and Zionism and Melancholy: The Short Life of Israel Zarchi
(forthcoming). He co-edited Catastrophe: The History and Theory of an Operative
Concept (DeGruyter, 2014). Nitzan has edited special issues of the New German
Critique (Political Theology, 2008), Zmanim: A Historical Quarterly (Politics
and Power, 2008), and Rethinking History (Nihilism, forthcoming). Nitzan
published articles about German-Jewish History, Film, and Literature.
Itamar Mann studies national security law, immigration, and legal theory. His
dissertation explores the foundations of human rights through a history of
international legal responses to boat people since the mid-twentieth century.
In 20102011, Itamar was awarded Yale Law Schools Bernstein fellowship
for International Human Rights, and conducted field research in Greece
and Turkey. Before that, he practiced as a lawyer in Israel, and was active
particularly in cases concerning the rights of security prisoners, and those of
detained asylum seekers. Itamar holds an LLB from Tel Aviv University, where
he also studied philosophy, and an LLM from Yale Law School, where he is
completing his JSD.
Liron Mor is currently a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature and

an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Graduate Fellow at the Society for the
Humanities at Cornell University. Her dissertation draws on Hebrew and
Arabic literature in order to delineate poetic structures of conflictual meaning
as models for understanding political conflicts. Mor has published an article on
translation as a political concept (Mafteakh: Lexical Review of Political Thought
2, Winter 2011), as well as several translations of theoretical texts into Hebrew.
She holds an MA in Comparative Literature from Cornell University and a BA
in History from Tel Aviv University.
Contributors xi
Adi Ophir is director of the Lexicon for Political Theory project at the Minerva
Humanities Center and professor at the Cohn Institute for the History and
Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University. In 1990 he was the
founding editor of Theory and Criticism, the main Hebrew journal for critical
theory; since 2009 he is the editor of Mafteakh: Lexical Review for Political
Thought. Among his recent books are The Order of Evils (2005); The One State
Condition, co-authored with Ariella Azoulay (2012); and Divine Violence:
Two Essays on God and Disaster (2013). Ophir is also the editor, together with
Michal Givoni and Sari Hanafi, of The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Israeli Rule
in the Occupied Territories (2009).
Introduction
The critical attitude is not moral according to the rules whose limits that
very critical relation seeks to interrogate. But how else can critique do its
job without risking the denunciations of those who naturalize and render
hegemonic the very moral terms put into question by critique itself?
Butler 2002, 220
Nihilism comes from the Latin word nihil, meaning nothing or nothing at all.
The argument presented in this volume is that nihilism (literally, nothingism)
could function as a mirror image or a limit case to all forms of legitimate
critique in the public sphere. Nihilism marks the point where critique becomes
unacceptable, threatening, or simply illegitimate. This intrinsic attribute of
nihilism was expressed even by the earliest usage of the term and that expression
continues to this day. This book follows the theory and history of nihilism from
its first and general consideration in late eighteenth century philosophy, down
to its most recent and concrete manifestation as a form of radical critique in
contemporary Israel.
A short history of a limit-concept
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobia German theologian and stern critic of the

Enlightenmentintroduced the concept of nihilism into philosophical debate
in 1799, and a term of debate, or dispute, it remained ever since. In an open
letter to Johann Gottlieb Fichtea follower of Kant and one of the forerunners
of German IdealismJacobi evoked the concept in reproach against Fichtes
idealism, suggesting, as it were, that ideal-ism is nothing but a cover word for a
nihil-ism. This was a somewhat ironic response to Fichtes reciprocal critique of
Jacobis own position as chimerism, as if to state: you say that I offer chimeras,
well at least I offer something, for what you, my friend, are offering is nothing
at all. The term in that sense entered the conversation as a derogatory, as the
absolute negation by a critic of a position that amounts, in the critics view, to
absolutely nothing.
2 The Politics of Nihilism
Despite this unprivileged birth, the concept of nihilism not only managed
to survive in philosophical discourse but even to evolve and to thrive in
it, developing an interesting, if peculiar, life of its own. G. W. F. Hegel
perhaps the foremost proponent of German Idealismpicked up on Jacobis
provocation while characteristically turning it on its head: for Hegel, not only
was Jacobi himself a nihilist, but he was not nihilistic enough (for Hegels
position on the matter, see Chapter 2 of this volume). A few decades later,
Friedrich Nietzsche employed the term to designate the decadent trajectory
of Western philosophy and history as a whole. Yet, while critiquing this
trajectory, Nietzsche also characteristically gave it a positive or vindicating
spin: it is through a radicalization of its nihilism or consciously carrying it
to its extreme, Nietzsche proposed, that human history may redeem itself
or overcome its stultification (for more on Nietzsches nuanced approach to
nihilism, see Chapters 3, 5, and 8).
Nietzsches dual or complex vision of nihilism, as entailing both the poison
and the potential cure for it, was again evinced in the late 1930s by yet another
German philosopher, Martin Heidegger. Heidegger argued (by now not
surprisingly) that Nietzsches radicalization of nihilism was still not radical
enough. Counter-intuitively, Heidegger proposed that what nihilism meant was
a failure to take the nothing (nihil) seriously, that is to say, the exclusion of
the nothing from consideration or at least its reduction to a simple negation
of something rather than a phenomenon in its own right. According to
Heidegger, the history of Western metaphysics (now including Jacobi, Fichte,
Hegel, and Nietzsche), leading down from Plato and all the way to modern
empirical science, is the history of positivism, under whose auspices the demand
to take the nothing seriously sounds like a joke. Joke or no joke, for Heidegger,
attending to the nihil was nothing more and nothing less than what is called
thinking (for more on Heideggers stance, see Chapter 7). Nihilism is therefore
at once the ending and the beginning of thought.
Heideggers spin on Nietzsches spinas in a critique of critique (of
critique)is revelatory of the nature of the concept itself. By now, this
characterless or at least plastic concept has already developed a rather distinct
and recognizable character, as if independent of the individual philosophers
who vehemently deploy it in their mutual polemics. In 1969, Stanley Rosen
gave one more shot at it, arguing that both positivism and Heideggers anti-
positivism partake in the same phenomenon, namely, nihilism (how else?).
Rosen, however, asked to return to square one. Rather than celebrating or
Introduction 3
once again calling to radicalize this nihilismwhose increasing presence since

the nineteenth century he considered a crisis of reasonRosen wanted to
put an end to it, to defend reason and philosophy against the nihilism that
threatens to run them to the ground. (Interestingly enough, for Jacobi it was
faith rather than reason that was called upon to counter nihilism). However,
despite Rosens battle cry, Continental philosophy since the 1970s, under the
unabated influence of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, has continued and still
continues to flirt with and reinvent the concept of nihilism, indicating that it
has by no means said its last word. Indeed, it is perhaps time we realized that
this concept and its movement are as integral to our intellectual heritage as are
the concept and movement of the Enlightenment, whose illegitimate sibling
it seems to be. If this is so, then to better understand nihilismhow and what
it meansis to better understand ourselves: our past, our present, and perhaps
our future.
Nihilism, in any case, is pervasive in recent debates in political theory. In the
opening to their Commonwealth, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri declare that
a primary effect of globalization is the creation of a common worldthat has
no outside. Recognizing the radical commonality and immanence of this
globalizing world is, for Hardt and Negri, a specifically nihilist recognition,
in that it forces us to abandon all dreams of political purity and higher values
that would allow us to remain outside [of it] (Hardt and Negri 2009, vii). Slavoj
iek, in The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, criticizes Hardt and Negri for
their interpretation of globalization and the work relations it engenders, but
nonetheless reiterates their call to think about the present nihilistically, saying:
Only a new heresy can save what is worth saving in the European legacy
(iek 2012, xx). As heretic, nihilist thinking transgresses and offends the
limits of the state apparatus that controls our life, as well as every ideological
edifice [which can only be] the outcome of a hegemonic struggle to establish or
impose a chain of equivalences (iek 2012, 31).
On this book and its authors, and what brings them together
ieks use of the term nihilism hints at the feature of the concept that most
interests usboth editors and authors of the present volume. What from the
hegemonic perspective of sound common sense and good values may
be derided as nihilistic (i.e., destructive, irrational, annihilating, and self-
annihilating, indeed, heretic), from the perspective of the radical political critic
is a form of resistance and revolt, even an attempt to save something more
noble from our heritage and tradition. The nihilistic stance (or response, or
recognition), in that sense, involves two main gestures: first, it makes present a
limit to a certain ideology or form of thinking (the one that deems it nihilistic
in the first place), that is to say, in its provocation, it teases out the limit of this
ideologys tolerance and comprehension, beyond which it is unwilling (or is
unable) to listen, see, talk, or think. Second, the nihilist response places a dark
mirror before this ideology itself, showing it in a nihilistic (annihilating) light.
Indeed, if we look back at the brief historical survey we just laid down, we can
see that this polemical and mirroring aspect of the concept, being tossed from
side to side (and from negation to affirmation), has been there all along.
The significant contribution of this specific volume to the understanding
and discussions of nihilism is that, rather than developing a particular and
more or less monological understanding and employment of it (as promoted
in treatises on the subject by thinkers like Lwith (1995) and Rosen (1969) and
most recently Vattimo (2004)), be it negative or positive, this volume brings
into concert a heterogeneous polyphony of perspectives and interpretations:
historical, analytic, hermeneutic, and literary, yet always in orientation political.
These perspectives, moreover, are at times in discord (see, for example,
the conflicting approaches to Saint Paul in Chapters 4 and 5; the conflicting
approaches to Nietzsche in Chapters 3, 5, and 8, which endorse his view, and
Chapter 7, which critiques it; and even conflicting approaches to nihilism itself,
at times treated pejoratively, as in Chapter 9, and at times affirmatively, as in
Chapter 3). But whether they are in discord or in accord with each other, the
essays form a conversation: they are no more a random aggregate of reflections
on the subject than a monological treatise. Adhering to Hanna Arendts
understanding of political action as pluralistic, they act in concert, each at the
same time introducing something new (see Chapters 4 and 10 for discussions
on Arendts notion of pluralism and its relation to the problem of nihilism).
We believe, and hope to convey, that only such a pluralism of approaches
and voices is adequate to the study of a limit(ing)-concept (Grenzbegriff) such
as nihilism, a concept that has neither a stable meaning and identity (as self or
as other) nor an identifiable center. Like the community of those who have
nothing in commonto cite the title of a book by Alphonso Lingis (1994)this
community of authors shares nothing but a common interest in the potential
(or impotence, if needs be) of nihilism and its nihil to expose the limits of, and
Introduction 5
perhaps to think beyond, norms and conventions, traditions and narratives,

values and ideologies, policies and discourses, if only in order to enable the
separation of a critical competence from the forces of normalization and control.
It is not coincidental that recent biopolitical critics like Roberto Esposito have
turned the nihilist nothing-in-common of the community into a constructive
force: [T]he community is not proscribed, obscured, or veiled by the nothing:
it is constituted by it. (Esposito 2009, 41).
Thus, to Arendts emphasis on the pluralistic nature of the political as such,
we ought to add Jacques Rancires emphasis on dissensus. As Blent Diken puts
it in Chapter 5 of this volume, Since it only exists insofar as it disturbs the
consensus, which sustains the police order, politics is per definition dissensual.
It is an intervention into a given order of the sensible (citing Rancire 2010,
3637). Dissensus, however, is not the final goal, but a necessary step. The point
of politics, Rancire also tells us, is to construct different realities, different
forms of common-sensethat is to say, different spatiotemporal systems,
different communities of words and things, forms and meanings (Rancire
2010, 102). If this is the case, then nihilism, as we present it here, is absolutely
vital to contemporary political thought, and action.
The idea and framework for this topic and approach originated from two
years of work at the Jerusalem Van Leer Institute, where a small group of
researchers, women and men, Jews and Muslims, decided to examine the limits
of political critique within the framework of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and
the social oppression that accompanies the privatization of the public sphere.
This project was initially called The Concept of Nihilism and the Limits of
Political Critique. During the past two decades, Israeli democracy has failed to
form a committed and active opposition to the occupation of the Palestinians
and the oppressive market state. A recent social protest (the tent movement
in Tel Aviv in the summer of 2011) had to pretend, for that very reason, to be
a-political. The inherent crisis of Israeli democracy acted for this group at once
as a personal-political motivation and as a theoretical case in point, perhaps
even a paradigm of the present.
iek who, in characteristic irony, portrayed the neo-liberal world as one
in which people can imagine the end of the world but not the end of capitalism
(see iek 2008, 78 and Chapter 5 of this volume), grasped the pertinence of
the Israeli case as a paradigm for the contemporary paradox of democracy
and critique in general. The standard Zionist argument against critics of the
State of Israel, he wrote, is that, of course, like every other state, Israel can
and should be judged and eventually criticized, but that the critics misuse this
justified critique of Israeli policy for anti-Semitic purposes (iek 2012, 39).
This, like other cases of democratic censorship, is what iek calls the liberal
game of how much tolerance can we afford? (iek 2012, 4546).
The group of researchers who took part in the Concept of Nihilism
and the Limits of Political Critique project, as shown in this and in other
publications, made a conscious attempt to grasp the conditions of possibility
for a critical democratic discourse, in both the local and global, the national
and transnational, contexts of the contemporary (neo) liberal democracy.
An understanding shared by all participants is that, while labeling politics
under democratic and liberal banners, the actual operations of democratic
governments in the West are in fact diminishing the scope of relevant critique.
By implication, Western democracies are erasing those areas of critical discourse
and free speech that they are unable to control or contain. What nihilism showed
us, and we intend to show our readers, is that the limits of political critique
are dynamic, and that the kind of critique deemed illegitimate and nihilistic
becomes increasingly pertinent as the regime attempts to delegitimize critique
in general or suffocate it in heated but hollow disagreements whose parameters
have already been tacitly agreed upon in advance.
The structure and contents of this book
The book moves from a general discussion of nihilism as a condition for critical
thinking in modern times to its specific applications in contemporary politics,
considering, in the process, the prospect it opens up for a new vision of reality
beyond the coordinates of the neo-liberal state. Starting with the history of
nihilism in a political context, we move to different analytical and hermeneutical
readings of nihilism as an operative concept, and from there, to its application
on the ground. The order of the articles in this book is therefore a gradual
movement from the general to the specific, whileat the same timeopening
wider and wider the possibility of a new political theory of nihilism grounded
in forms of pluralism, radical politics, and self-critique. A reader of this volume,
we hope, will end up knowing more about nihilism and its history in the most
general sense, and also about its specific appearances in Israel/Palestine, and
by extension, its potential applications in contemporary politics and the public
sphere.
Introduction 7
The opening chapter, by Nitzan Lebovic, mirrors the structure of the book
as a whole. It begins with a broad historical perspective on the adventures of
nihilism and some of its more notable employments and ends with observing
the adventures and contrarian uses of the concept within Israeli discourse. In
the process, Lebovic underscores the role of nihilism as marking the limits
of legitimacy and the exposure of these limits as a particular kind of critical-
hermeneutic practice of prime political significance. Aiming to shed light on the
tenuous situation of Israeli democracy, and perhaps neo-liberal democracy more
generally, Lebovic draws the connection between nihilism and a much older,
yet similarly fluctuating, concept, namely, the Greek stasis, which may mean
both balance or equilibrium and distinction or dissent, both rest or stagnation
and destructive civil war. Nihilist critique, Lebovic proposes, offers not only a
self-distancing from any political transfixion, but also a way to overcome it by
making it implode.
Chapter 2 by Luca Di Blasi also gives us an insight into the history of nihilism,
specifically by exposing a continuity (or else a cycle or repetition) between
the earliest debates on the subject in the turn of the nineteenth century and
latest ones in the turn of the twenty-first. Di Blasi emphasizes the fact that the
struggle between philosophy and religion, reason and faith, was a pertinent
motif in Jacobis critique of Fichtes philosophy and in Hegels response to this
critique. A similar problematic, and similar dynamic, recurs two centuries later,
where debates around the concept of nihilism among thinkers like Vattimo,
Derrida, Habermas, and iek again revolve around the relation between
religion, science, secularism, and post-secularism. Beginning with Hegel, Di
Blasis chapter ends with a focus on iek as a neo-Hegelian showing how,
in attacking his contemporaries, iek mirrors and revives Hegels approach in
his critique of Jacobi and Fichte. Suggestively, iek informs us that now the
circle is closed and that to be a Hegelian today does not mean to assume the
superfluous burden of some metaphysical past, but to regain the ability to begin
from the beginning
Chapter 3 by Michael Gillespie offers a thorough introduction into the nuance
of Nietzsches thought on nihilism, arguably, the most extensive and influential
reflection on the concept and certainly the most recurrent in the remainder
of our volume. Gillespies chapter discusses Nietzsches inner classification of
the concept into different types of nihilism and culminates in an account of
Nietzsches Dionysian nihilism and the great politics to which it could (and
was meant to) give way. Dangerous though this Dionysian nihilism admittedly
is, Gillespie insists that it could never legitimately be practiced by a Hitler, a

Stalin, or a Pol Pot, all of whom were driven by the desire for revenge, but might
very well be the work of an Ataturk, Gandhi, or Mandela.
Chapter 4, by Adi Ophir, proposes an original interpretation of the concept,
following from and moving beyond one of Nietzsches core conceptions, as
the negation of the value of differences. Ophir underscores the possibility of
nihilism, or limited nihilism as he calls it, as a discursive act that must be
examined within the context of its time. Our time, however, is very possibly
the end of time, or the end of the world, Ophir proposes. Facing, alongside
and against the discursive nihilist, the end of the world rather than effacing it
compels, according to Ophir, an Arendtian reflection concerning the conditions
of having (and sharing) a world and making any sort of discursive claim,
nihilistic or not.
Chapter 5 by Blent Diken begins by analyzing the false alternative or
antinomy between radical and passive nihilism: between renouncing the
existing world in the name of an idea or renouncing an idea in the name of
the existing world, between values without facts or facts without values.
These are two sides of the same (nihilistic) coin, which unfortunately pervades
contemporary politics, allegedly torn between revisionist and conservative
tendencies. As a way out of this trapping, Diken elaborates on what he calls the
emancipatory logic and temporality of revolt, which renounces neither values
nor facts but only the semblance of a choice between them. The time of revolt,
which Diken, following the footsteps of Agamben in this regard, regards as a
non-theological messianism, is opposed to chronological time yet not external
to it (as in an after-life). Akin to Lebovics stasis (Chapter 1), it transforms
it from within, creating new values (and facts) in the process. Dikens essay
concludes by gesturing toward the political potentiality of a work of art as the
ultimate revolt, and the main antidote to the problem of nihilism.
The next two chapters, by Bettina Bergo and Roy Ben-Shai, address nihilism
through the controversial works of two radical Viennese-Jewish intellectuals at
different moments of the twentieth century, Otto Weininger and Jean Amry.
Bergo borrows from Walter Benjamin a distinction between epistemological
and methodological nihilism, the latter serving as a sort of immanent critique
of the former. Weiningers work, as Bergo shows, exemplifies both forms of
nihilism, in fact deteriorating from the latter to the former, thereby giving us
a chance to observe from up close, so to speak, some of the maladies of fin
de sicle Europe. Bergos provocative and innovative study also shows that, at
Introduction 9
its best, Weiningers methodological nihilism in fact runs far ahead of its time,
anticipating the distinction between sex and gender, while deconstructing
both rubrics of gender and race. Pushing male and female, anti-Semitic and
Jewish, stereotypes to their extreme, embodying them and typologizing them,
Weininger was able to explode the strict lines of division of his time. Bergos
conclusion is a radical point of departure for any future research on Weininger
and cultural anti-Semitism: Relying on the power of his nihilistic view, she
argues that Weiningers own anti-Semitism was an attempt to protect Jews from
worse forms of Jewish hatred than his own.
Roy Ben-Shais chapter begins by developing a notion of moral difference
out of the works of Heidegger and Nietzsche, that is, the difference between
moral values, which are determined, and the value of these values, which is
essentially indeterminate and questionable. Ben-Shai proposes to think of
nihilism, already in Nietzsches work, as the obliteration of the moral difference
or the reduction of the value of values to a givenbeyond all question
(Nietzsche). Although Nietzsches reflections on nihilism and moral values
lends itself to such a conclusion, there is nonetheless a significant tension in his
work, Ben-Shai argues, between the tacit commitment to maintaining a moral
difference and a sometimes dogmatic vitalism, namely, an unquestioning
affirmation of the value of life and power as a first given. It is against this
vitalism that Ben-Shai presents and analyzes the work of Holocaust survivor
and essayist Jean Amry, who rejected what he called the logic of life and
instead advocated a revolt against the will to power, a specifically moral power
to resist allegedly natural dictates. Turning Nietzsches view on its head, this
interpretation suggests that nihilism is not the negation of life, health, and the
future, as Nietzsche believed, but rather their unquestioning and homogenizing
affirmation.
Our collection concludes, and hopefully arrives at fruition, with three
specific analyses of nihilism in the context of Israeli and Palestinian politics.
Liron Mor and Itamar Manns chapters bring the praxis of nihilistic reading to
the crossroads of literature, law, and politics. Innovatively relying on Deleuzes
interpretation of Nietzsches eternal recurrence of the same, Mor analyzes a
poem by Dahlia Ravikovitch, one of Israels best known poets, following the
1989 trial of a group of soldiers who beat an innocent Palestinian to death and
injured his son. In her poem, Ravikovitch parodies the generic conventions
of Jewish lullabies, by juxtaposing them to the formal language of the courts
and to the violence of the army. Through a verse-by-verse reading, Mor shows
how while exposing the vacuity and dis-communication generated by the

rigid frames of legalist and nationalist discourses, Ravikovitchs practices of
juxtaposition, repetition, and citation also serve to open up an imaginative,
sympathetic space of community thinking and building beyond the borders of
national heritage and identity.
Itamar Manns chapter discusses the work of another of Israels leading
authors, Yoram Kaniuk, who wrote a novel grappling with the implications
of the 1958 trial of the soldiers responsible for the massacre in Kafr Qasim
two years earlier. Kaniuks novel, which has for its protagonists a group of
aging veterans who, having lost all sense of purpose and identity, set out on a
murderous rampage against liberal hipsters, deploys cultural clichs and tropes
used during the 1958 trial, while defamiliarizing and rendering them all but
uncanny. Mann shows that taking a nihilist stance to its utmost extreme was
Kaniuks way of grappling with the situation and preserving the memory and
details of the atrocities from a perspective that avoided the traps of both right-
wing and liberal self-righteousness. Both Manns and Mors chapters therefore
support Dikens claim (Chapter 5) about arts political potential to transcend the
dichotomous coordinates of party politics.
Fatina Abreek-Zubeidat and Ronnen Ben-Aries chapter was chosen to
conclude this book for two reasons. Not only does it bring the theoretical
discussion to its most specific, most contemporary apex, but it also functions
as a firsthand testimony to how nihilism can be employed for both coping and
rebelling. Relying on the authors own experience of appealing before Israels
Supreme Court concerning the right of the Zubeidat family to build their
home in an Israeli settlement in the Galilee, the two authors demonstrate the
relevance of a sophisticated reading of contemporary political theory to the
practical tactics of reform and revolt. By identifying the concept of home
as occupying the contours of the public sphere, Abreek-Zubeidat and Ben-
Arie use it to deconstruct the privatepublic opposition, and to show how
it is employed in the service of exclusion and oppression. Coming from
perspectives of architectural and legal theory, the two authors combine forces
to challenge the logic of an ethnocratic regime, which sustains itself through
the regularization and normalization of the nihilistic act of destruction,
dispossession and negation that it is founded upon. The struggle of the Zubeidat
family to build a home in a Jewish settlement can be seen as a nihilistic act that
is meant at once to disclose, and to estrange and undermine, a nihilistic politics
that refuses to admit to its own basic principles and their limitations.
Introduction 11
Bibliography
Butler, Judith. 2002. What is Critique? An Essay on Foucaults Virtue. In The Political,
edited by David Ingram, 212228. Malden: Blackwell Publishers.
Esposito, Roberto. 2009. Nihilism and Community. In The Italian Difference, edited by
Lorenzo Chisea and Alberto Toscano, 3753. Melbourne: re.press.
Hardt, Michael and Antoni Negri. 2009. Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Lingis, Alfonso. 1994. The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Lwith, Karl. 1995. Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Rancire, Jacques. 2010. Dissensus. New York: Continuum.
Rosen, Stanley. 1969. Nihilism. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Vattimo, Gianni. 2004. Nihilism and Emancipation: Ethics, Politics and Law, edited by
Santiago Zabala. New York: Columbia University Press.
iek, Slavoj. 2008. Violence. New York: Picador.
. 2012. The Year of Thinking Dangerously. London: Verso.
1
Nihilism as Stasis: A Plea for a New

Hermeneutics of Exposure1
Nitzan Lebovic
The Greek term stasis is usually understood as a time of faction or civil war,
revolution, civil discord, strife, sedition, oras it was understood in ancient
Greecethe destroyer of all things (Kalimtzis 2000, 3). In the medical world,
stasis is the state in which the normal flow of a body liquid stops (Merriam-
Webster Online). The implied violence of stasis is identified with the end
of normality, but also with the dynamics of conflict and struggle. It marks a
potential change, not death. The beginning of the end or the suspension of
bodily fluids implies the moment when death is first comprehended, when
nothingness materializes. The moment of total suspension, self-destruction, or
absolute critique is the nihil of existence, the root of nihilist thinking, the motor
of self-negation and radical critique. To put it succinctly, stasis and nihilism sing
the same song of temporality and destructive inclination that enchants the ship
of norms to its end. Nihilism and stasis share the same rebellious instinct against
structures, hierarchies and organizations, limitations and self-censorship. Their
critical position, as a Grenzbegriff, a lighthouse, helps the nihilist or suspender of
norms expose the preconditions of norms.
Both radical concepts require the examination of their own existing sense of
power, temporal order, and indexical grid. Both nihilism and stasis live at the edge
of legitimacy and can be used to mark the limit of the legitimate critical discourse.
They mark the end of the public sphere, even when hidden in the invisible pulsing
center of the body politic. Along those lines, the following chapter examines the
relation between nihilism and stasis to the limits of political critique in general,
and those adopted in the state of Israel, in particular.
1
This chapter owes much to the comments I received at the The Fracture of NothingThe Return
of Nihilism conference at the ICI in Berlin, May 34, 2013. More specifically, I am grateful to the
organizational skills of Luca Di Blasi and the introspective comments of Evelyn Annuss and Roy
Ben-Shai.
The temporality of nihilism/stasis
The physical and linear nature of spatial thinking makes temporality a better
conceptual framework for the discussion of stasis and nihilism than any spatial
or territorial terminology. This chapter reads nihilism as a form of stasis, that
is, frozen temporality or suspense. If stasis and nihilism mark a language of
refusal, resistance, negation, or not-I, as shown in Michael Gillespie and Adi
Ophirs chapters in this book, then it is a language that refuses to accept linearity
as a condition. It rejects the expectation to move from nonaction to action, or
from a dispersed to homogenous space. Both nihilism and stasis demonstrate
how action can be considered retroactively, not as a solution of sorts, but as a
reflection and delimitation of the states of nihilism or stasis themselves.
The affiliation of the two semantic fields of nihilism and stasis offers a new
focus on their temporal-political and spatial-social order. For centuries, the
goal of politics was seen as that of ending stasis and nihilism, but as such, the
presence of stasis and nihilism occupied the very heart of the political. As Eugene
Garver showed in his recent Aristotles Politics: Living Well and Living Together,
Aristotle claims that knowing the causes of faction (stasis) will tell us how to
resist them (Garver 2012, 133). For Aristotle, the drive toward a homogenous
and a democratic polis defined the essence of politics and philosophy. A close
reading of Aristotles Politics demonstrates that Aristotle identified stasis with
political partisanship and destabilizing constitutions and the authority of the
polis. And since we are considering what circumstances give rise to party
factions (staseis) and revolutions (metabolai) in constitutions, we must first
ascertain their origins and causes generally (Aristotle 1992, V.2.1302a1621).
In short, according to Garver, factions destroy states, the moving cause must
be in some way extrinsic to the ruling principle of the constitution (Garver
2012, 143).
Kostas Kalimtzis built upon Aristotle and other writings about stasis in his
Aristotle on Political Enmity and Disease and pointed out the close relation in
Plato and Aristotle between destabilization of the states sovereignty and organic
diseases of the body.
If the term stasis had simply referred to the outbreak of conflict, to what Hobbes
called [in his translation of Thucydides] sedition, or what the American
founding fathers called faction, then the rendering of the term would be
straightforward. Both of these Latin words emphasize the presence of
entrenched, intransigent parties ranged against each other in conflict; they
Nihilism as Stasis 15
connote a going apart (seditio) or a taking of sides (faction)[According

to the Greek philosophers] signs of stasis called for a philosophy of the soul
that could diagnose and correct the malaise in its nascent stageswhen one
comes to the sixth-century poetry of Solon,[stasis] is no longer figurative,
personified, or a quasimarginal visitation; it is an actual process of wasting away
from the injustice afflicting the city.
The simultaneous emphasis on universalization and individualization of

stasis was meant to bring it as closely as possible to what we identify as nihilism,
for, as a tradition leading from Demokritos to Solon via Plato, Aristotle, and
Sophocles described, Whatever the differences, not one of those thinkers
would have found any point of disagreement with Demokritos aphorism that
fratricidal stasis is an evil to each, for to both the victors and the vanquished the
destruction is the same (Kalimtzis 2000, 23).
Modern thinkers would not disagree. Stasis marks the horizon of the
demise of the old civilization and the end of philosophy, declared already
in the beginning of the nineteenth century by the Left Hegelian Bruno Bauer
and repeated in Karl Lwiths critique of Western philosophy. Both thinkers
characterized nihilisma century apart,as a major force in Western
philosophy and politics (Lwith 1995, 187). Their shared notion of demise,
adopted also by Heidegger and Jnger, Foucault, Deleuze, and most recently
Agamben, focused on different aspects of stasis that related to the temporality
of political crisis. In other words, recent political theory brought stasis back to
the forefront as a relevant concept, if one attempts to grasp the temporality of
an end. In the article Stasis: Beyond Political Theology, Dimitris Vardoulakis
quoted an ancient metaphorThe stasis of appreciation recalls Alcaeus boat
at a standstill from the stasis of the windsthat describes the meaningless or
the irrational function or the single word that incorporates the impossibility
to either conflate or separate the political from the theological. It necessitates
the work of interpretation in order to unwork meaning (Vardoulakis 2009).
Both the beginning and end of politics and philosophy seem to rise from the
dark depths of stasis. William Empson quotes this metaphor in his Seven Types
of Ambiguity as an illustration for the seventh and most ambiguous type, which
occurs when the two meanings of the wordare the two opposite meanings.
Such a contradiction, or the stasis of appreciation, Empson observes, may
be meaningless but it can never be blank (Empson 1966, 192193; See also
Vardoulakis 2009, 132). From the perspective of the present, one may add that the
two opposite meanings create a state of suspense that exposes the hermeneutic
power of blankness itself. In other words, one could relate to the discussion
of stasis in ancient philosophy as an attempt to overcome the state of political
paralysis. If in ancient times paralysis was seen in strife, in modernity paralysis
is often its opposite, that is, the attempt to avoid critique and conflict. As Giorgio
Agamben noted, the state of suspense is usually seen as a last and a militant
resort and yet activated all too often (Agamben 2005). The Israeli democracy
is a case in point. Slavoj iek describes this same temporality and blankness
when he writes about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; Perhaps the first move
towards a solution is therefore to recognize this radical stalemate; by definition,
neither side can win (iek 2002, 129). But the question, of which iek is
aware even without being an expert on Israeli politics, is not the conflict (as in
ancient times) as much as the politics and discourse that prolong it and extend
the stalemate while using it in order to silence critics of the regime. Tracing the
blank spot between two opposing poles means finding the moment of stasis/
nihilism, which is often located somewhere else than in the visible conflict.
What stasis and nihilism expose is temporal suspensea refusal to negotiate or
a calculated strategy of derailing peace talksas a tool of control and internal
as well as external politics. iek expresses this in philosophical terms when he
wonders, Is not this antagonism the one between what Nietzsche called passive
and active nihilism? (iek 2002, 44).
Below I will explain the link between nihilist thinking (the end of philosophy)
and the state of stasis (the ends of politics) as two radical moments of negation,
resistance, and destructionin other words, their shared semantic legacy. The
temporal order of both is a necessary starting point. According to Vardoulakis,
the ultimate state of stasis is also the paradigm of suicidal or active nihilism.
The concept of stasis evolved into its modernnihilisticshape from its earlier
form in Gregory of Nazianuss De Filio. It is mentioned again in Goethe and
Nietzsche before Carl Schmitt politicizes it in Politische Theologie II in 1969.
Schmitts reflection on this absolute negation serves as a moment of political
distillation. Schmitt quotes Gregory of Nazianus in order to stress enmity
as the pulsing motor of politics, in contrast to Eric Petersons stress on the
Catholic dogma of trinity and Hans Blumenbergs emphasis on secularization
and legitimacy. According to Schmitt, stasis and open enmity form a principle
of negative hermeneutics where the One is always in revolt against itself,
(Gregory) and where the contradictory meanings of stasis (serenity or standstill,
and rebelliousness or radical change) support the separation between a friend
and an enemy (Schmitt [1969] 1996, 9092). Building on Thomas Hobbess
theory of enmity (sedition), Schmitt argues that only the human can be an enemy
to itself, or as Vardoulakis puts it, Universal humanity requires a permanent
state of revolt, a perpetual stasis, for its self-definition. Such a humanized stasis
is nothing but a flawed attempt to decide upon the enemy. It is clear, then,
that stasis allows Schmitt to develop a typology of actionstasis propels a
political movement infected by self-destruction (Vardoulakis 2009). Stasis, in
other words, is the very temporality of modern nihilism, and simultaneously,
the junction between modern politics and theology, auctoritas and veritas, the
friend and the enemy, either for a constructive purposeas Hobbes and Schmitt
arguedor a destructive one, as Verdoulakis does. Stasis is where things begin
and where they end. It is the ultimate place of standstill, and simultaneously the
exact spot where revolution and unrest occur. It is the most telling concept of
political philosophy, when one thinks from the perspective of radical critique.
Stasis is the time of nihilistic thinking, where one grounds the negation of
everything, and the simultaneous overcoming of it.
If nihilism is a world whose core is stasis, then both stasis and nihilism are
calling for action. But not just that; in fact, both stasis and nihilismthe end
of homogeneity and conventioncall for a sudden burst of action, no matter
the cost. Both strive for a pure time of action for actions own sake. In short,
stasis and nihilism orient themselves toward the action of action, the negation
of negation, pure potentiality.
This interpretation of the stasis of nihilism or nihilism as stasis is not
unrelated to contemporary politics and its hermeneutics. Giorgio Agamben
diagnoses the current stalling of temporality in Western politics, but can imagine
only a metaphysical order, after the now-time has passed. The inactivity and
dsoevrement of the human and of the animal [are] the supreme and unsaveable
figure of life (Agamben 2004). By locating the core of all life in nonlinear
inactivity, Agambens hermeneutics recommend the pure potentiality of a
nonrealized action or a passive letting-be of life, a sense of being-there he
borrows from Heidegger. Thinking about the Endtime implies for Agamben
to risk ourselves in this emptiness: the suspension of the suspension, Shabbat
of both animal and man. This is the same threshold, or zone of indistinction
that characterizes for him the inherent paradox of the state of exception/
emergency (Agamben 2005, 23). In the exceptional situation the norm is
annulled (Agamben 2005, 34). Since the exception has turned out to be the
rule in politics, especially since September 11, 2001, the state of exception is
not defined as a fullness of powers, a pleromatic state of law, as in the dictatorial
model, but as a kenomatic state, an emptiness and standstill of the law

(Agamben 2005, 48). Following in the footsteps of Gershom Scholem, rather
than Walter Benjamin, Agamben realized that indeed it is the suspension of
law [that] freed a force or a mystical elementa sort of degree zero of the law
(Agamben 2005, 51). Here, passive nihilism meets with religious anarchism and
a contemporary resistance to globalization and the market state. Yet, imagining
this beginning of the end from the perspective of religious anarchism implies
also an ingrained limit, which is the actual end-of-the-end, the messianic
redemption of the world and of creation.
Examining the state of Israel from the perspective of nihilism and stasis
implies a similar awareness of the emptiness and standstill of the law, but
in a slightly different context. When the emptiness and standstill are used as
oppressive tools of occupation, letting be cannot be the solution, nor can any
messianic expectation, even if negative. Here, a nihilist plea for action equals
active nihilism, or the hermeneutics of exposure, that is, a plea to unwind
stasis. Only the total commitment to exposure, as promised by stasis, can
open the discourse of legitimate critique to a critical examination. As will be
shown below, nihilism and stasis draw the ambit of this discourse. Only they
can expose the assumptions concerning the social and political role of critique
as a discourse. Only those who speak the language of nihilism and stasis can
inquire about the usefulness and service of political critique to a system that
wishes to suppress critique, but also abuses it in order to justify its actions under
the banner of democracy.
The history of nihilism
The history of nihilism should be defined by its proximity to the state of stasis,
and the drive to overcome it by placing the immediate call for action before
any discussion of its origins or goals. A nihilist action can be destructive, and
worse, destructive without any obvious purpose. Its main and only purpose is
to overcome the black hole that is formed by stasis. In that sense the concept
of nihilism does not act as a positivist concept; it doesnt offer any constructive
hope, either in reality or in the political discourse it attacks.
Stemming from a nihilistic response to stasis, the nihilist is willing to risk
his or her own self for the sake of a supposedly meaningless action. When
we speak empire, the members of the French guerilla group Tarnac Nine argue
in the Linsurrection qui vient [The Coming Insurrection], We name the

mechanisms of power that preventively and surgically stifle any revolutionary
potential in a situation (Invisible Committee 2009, 13). From whatever
angle you approach it, the present offers no way out. The sphere of political
representation has come to a close (Invisible Committee 2009, 23). But stasis, or
the state of suspense, is also an opportunity for a nihilist action. What is called
catastrophe is no more than the forced suspension of this state, one of those
rare moments when we regain some sort of presence in the world (Invisible
Committee 2009, 81).
Two centuries of nihilism started with Friedrich Heinrich Jacobis attack on
Johann Gottlieb Fichtes neo-Kantianism, nihilism, Chimerism and supposed
atheistic Spinozism. For Jacobi, a critical examination of norms from a secular
perspective represented the undermining and destruction of divine authority
(Gillespie 1996, 65). A similar worry about the loss of all values and hierarchies
is apparent in G. W. F. Hegels (17701831) writings from the early 1800s. Of
all the problems Hegel faced in attempting to base metaphysics on the critique
of knowledge, the most serious was the challenge of nihilism according
to Frederick Beiser (Beiser 2005, 17). In 1802, Beiser writes, Hegel and
F. W. J. Schelling (17751854), influenced by Jacobi, pondered Fichtes dilemma
at the close of his 1794 Wissenschaftslehre (Beiser 2005, 175) leading to a
moral [rather] than a metaphysical refutation of nihilism (Beiser 2005, 191).
This refutation continued after Hegel with Left Hegelian critics who adopted
the tools of negative language and rebellious democracy, often in opposition
to Hegels own views. Left Hegelianism spread Fichtes speculative idealism
as a revolutionary and nihilist code to other parts of Europe. In 1836 Nikolai
Stankevich, a stubborn opponent of political despotism who was heavily
influenced by Left Hegelianism, interpreted nihilism and radical negation
according to Fichte as the ground of freedom and introduced Fichtes ideas
about negation to the father of anarchist philosophy, Mikhail Bakunin (1814
1876). According to Bakunin, Fichte was the true hero of our time (Gillespie
1996, 141). Left Hegelianism and the French utopianism of Charles Fourier,
Henri de Saint-Simon and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, opened the door for Russian
nihilism. The young Russian-French thinker Alexandre Kojve (19021968)
was aware of this radical tradition when he addressed Hegels Phenomenology of
Spirit in a series of seminars in the 1930s. Reading Hegel from the perspective
of post-Hegelians, he was convinced of a Hegelian end of history, absolute
negation, and a continuous state of conflict.
Karl Lwith (18971973), a radical German-Jewish thinker, saw nihilism

as an end-point on a critical axis that existed mostly, or only, in Europe. [If]
Europe had already advanced a critique of itself, one more radical and open,
more serious and penetrating, than the foreign critique, it was an utter self-
estrangement, a not-I that enabled it, since the West saw itself in the critical
mirror of Russia and China (Lwith 1995, 175). Even more specifically, as
it was put forth by Bauer, whom Lwith quotes and affirms, the demise of
the old civilization was placed in the context of the end of philosophy in
historical-political terms. Lwiths conclusion was that the German question
and Russian question are the only two living questions of the newer Europe
(Lwith 1995, 187). In The Intellectuals and the University, written in 1963, the
Swiss-born Jacob Taubes relied on these observations by Lwith in determining
that Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Karl Marx, the Left Hegelians, demanded
that philosophy now step out of itself and become worldly and revolutionary-
practical (Taubes 2009, 292). Yet, as Hegel had already shown, synthesis is
not stasis, and post-Hegelians should be careful not to confuse the Hegelian
negation, which leads to love, with the act of resistance that is risking the very
death of authority itself, spirit (Geist) and God included (Taubes 2009, 154).
For Nietzsche, who was thoroughly versed in the Spinoza debate of the older
generation and metaphysicians warnings against secular meaninglessness,
nihilism functioned as a system that turned against meaninglessness on the one
hand and moral value judgments on the other (Nietzsche 2003, 83). But the
observer cannot be separated from the method of observation; thus inevitably,
nihilism must turn against itself or the person practicing it. Translating
this to the process leading to the rise of the overman, nihilism became the
leading characteristic of the last man on his way to overcoming the self and
its moral-metaphysical limitations. The sight of man now makes us tired.
What is nihilism today if not that?We are tired of man (Nietzsche 1997,
25).2 A cultural exhaustion required a new dynamic that would force the self
to overcome its old tired self. Since Nietzsche, nihilism has turned out to be
even more dynamic than it had been before. Nietzsches transevaluation of
values demanded a nihilistic thinking that would require the rethinking of
thoughts own boundaries. Rethinking thought from the perspective of negation
transformed the enlightened skeptic into what Ivan Turgenev called in Fathers
and Sons (1862), one who does not bow to any authority, or a rebel against the
2
Der Anblick des Menschen macht nunmehr mdewas ist heute Nihilismus, wenn er nicht das
ist?Wir sind des Menschen mde (Nietzsche 1999, 278).
fathers, against the ancient notion of law, or, more recently, into a rebel against
Romanticism, aestheticism, metaphysics, and morals.
At the heart of that insurrection stood the resistance to temporality of
progression, essential to the development of politics since the ancient polis.
Nietzsches active nihilist was able to overcome the passive and the reactive
in order to destroy both in a short burst of the most decisivehigh violence
[Das Entscheidensteoberste Gewalt] that would bring the man of the future
[who] will redeem us, not just from the ideal held up till now, but also from
those things which had to arise from it, from the great nausea, the will to
nothingness, from nihilism, that stroke of midday and of great decision
(Nietzsche 1997, 67). Needless to say, this approach drew the attention of
both pragmatists and idealists. A key element of Nietzsches argument and
style is ambiguity, which often caused confusion between his pessimism and
nihilism, or between his positive characterization of nihilism and his call
to overcome nihilism. Alain Boyer wrote in Why We Are Not Nietzscheans,
As Heidegger pointed out, Nietzsches doctrine of truth never stops being
ambiguous. One cannot simultaneously speak and refuse every conception
of truth (Boyer 1997, 16). But isnt this ambiguity the mark of Nietzsches
nihilism, a concept Boyer ignored? Already in 1934 Lwith observed that,
Nietzsches philosophy is neither a coherently united system, nor a plurality
of unrelated fragments (Lwith [1934] 1956, 15). Lwith was among the first
to point out the relationship between Nietzsches doctrine of the overman, the
will to power, nihilism, and the paradigm of eternal recurrence. At the center
of Nietzsches thought, according to Lwith, stood his resistance to the liberal
and progressive temporal order. Overcoming nihilism through mans ability to
overcome his own self, Lwith wrote, is the condition for the confirmation of
the eternal recurrence. Nietzsches philosophy never leaves this principle. The
will to the superman, and to the eternal recurrence is for Nietzsche the last will
and his last thought, and his whole experiment is grounded systematically in
it3 (Lwith [1934] 1956, 59). Tying nihilism to the eternal recurrence enabled
Nietzsche a hermeneutic freedom, political through and through, because it
was explicitly oriented against the attempt of the political sovereign to control
it and limit it. In the words of Friedrich Balke, Nietzsche is undoubtedly the
3
Die berwindung des Nihilismus durch den sich selbst berwindenden Menschen ist die
Voraussetzung fr die Wahrsagung der ewigen Wiederkehr, und ber sie get Nietzsches Philosophie
im Prinzip nicht hinaus. Der Wille zum bermenschen und zur ewigen Wiederkehr ist Nietzsches
letzter Wille und sein letzter Gedanke, in dem sich das Ganze seines Experiments systematische
zusammenfast (Lwith [1934] 1956, 59).
philosopher of this modern man and his politics insofar as[he] conceptualizes
the content of good life as the result of processes that continually intervene
into the bare life and give it form (Balke 2003, 706). In short, in the eyes of
some theoreticians who adhere to the FoucaultAgamben critique of biopolitics,
Nietzsches work was the first critique of biopolitics. While helping to explain
Nietzsches revived popularity among theoreticians and filmmakers, these
critics have so far failed to recognize the importance of Nietzsches nihilism, and
of the eternal recurrence, to the biopolitical critique (see also del Caro 2004,
405417; Thurschwell 2003, 1204). Reconsidering nihilism as an expression of
stasis demonstrates its relevance for a biopolitical critique of our time.
If one translates this discussion to the political arena, behind Nietzsches
call to recognize the power of nihilist politics lay the simultaneous growth of
both liberalism and despotism in Bismarcks Germany, which represented for
Nietzsche nothing more than a politics of suspense. Nietzsche attacked the
politics of suspense through his hermeneutics of eternal recurrence, placing
a call for action at the center of grand politics. As Roland Duhamel wrote,
Nietzsches stress on action would lead to a circular notion of nihilism as an
occurrence [Geschehen], not a position [Zustand] (Duhamel 2006, 12). For
the next post-Nietzschean generation, the destructive power of nihilism was
recognized as a way out of the politics of suspense, no matter at what cost. As
Stefan Elbe said in his interpretation of Nietzschean nihilism, for Nietzsche the
advent of European nihilism was also a pathological, transitional state in the
history of Europe and the danger of all dangers (Elbe 2000, 48). A nihilist
call for destruction would bring down not only Prussian politics, but the whole
European monarchic system of patriarchic law that had been sustained since the
Roman Empire. According to the nihilists themselves, such tactics of destruction
would bring them very close to their enemies, those who serve, and identify
with, a destructive sovereign power.
According to Bauer and, following him, Lwith, in modern times it is the
engineer, rather than the educator, who is the the man to whom populations
confer their trust in their practical struggle with space and time[but] the
standing armies are their schools of philosophers (Lwith 1995, 188). The result,
according to Lwith: Almost everything on earth is determined by the most
common and evil forces, by the egoism of acquisitors and military despots
(Lwith 1995, 191).
It is no wonder that Foucault was drawn to Nietzschean and post-Nietzschean
exceptionalism. As Foucault wrote in Power/Knowledge, Nietzsche is the
philosopher of power; a philosopher who managed to think power without

having to confine himself within a political theory in order to do so (Foucault
1980, 53). The focus on power or mechanismsrather than on existing values or
institutionscreates a reverse temporal order in which the solution comes before
the problem is stated or defined, and where action for actions sake overcomes
the drive to telos or intentionality. Overcoming normative politics by an action
of meaningless destruction became the heart of the post-Nietzschean era.
Foucault brought this logic to its radical conclusion by perceiving the
regulatory mechanisms [which] must be established to establish an equilibrium,
maintain an average, establish a sort of homeostasis, and compensate for
variations within this general population and its aleatory field. In a word,
security mechanisms have to be installed around the random element inherent
in a population of living beings so as to optimize a state of life (Foucault 2003,
246). By separating Herkunft (source) from Urpsrung (origin) in Nietzsche,
Genealogy, History, Foucault demonstrated how such lifeand genealogy
can be identified back in a historical source without assuming an identity
between regulatory mechanism and progress. As Foucault and Agamben after
him illustrated, such mechanisms were deeply grounded in the ambiguity of
optimizing life, which justifies its legitimacy in terms of an assumed crisis or
state of exception.
One of the most interesting post-Nietzschean voices of the last generation
belongs to Gilles Deleuze. Deleuzes interpretation of nihilism in his early
Nietzsche and Philosophy (orig. 1962), especially the last chapter, became crucial
for todays radicals. Deleuze defined nihilism in the following way:
In the word nihilism, nihil does not signify non-being but primarily a value of
nil. Life takes on a value of nil insofar as it is denied and depreciated. Nihil
in nihilism means negation as quality of the will to power. Nihilism has a
second, more colloquial sense. It no longer signifies a will but rather a reaction.
The supersensible world and higher values are reacted against, their existence is
denied, they are refused all validitythis is no longer the devaluation of higher
values themselves. (Deleuze 1983, 147148)
As Deleuze pointed out, Nietzsches theory of nihilism for the first time
created a chance to look beyond metaphysics. The mechanism of doing so is
characterized by Deleuze as the temporalization of nihilism, that is, looking
at the past and the future through the prism of the last moment of nihilism
and the first moment of overcoming it, for nihilism is the a priori concept of
universal history (Deleuze 1983, 166). In the conclusion to his essay, Deleuze
notes that such a reading of Nietzsche brings the political, the philosophical,
and the aesthetic together. The enemy is closer to hand. Nietzsche is engaged
in a critique of all conceptions of affirmation which see it as a simple function, a
function of being or of what is. There is no difficulty in identifying Nietzsches
enemy; it is the dialectic which confuses affirmation with the truthfulness of
truth or the positivity of the real (Deleuze 1983, 183). Only thatplacing
nihilism as the condition of universal history,allows us to comprehend the
current implications of an existing, albeit unacknowledged, nihilism.
Nihilism and Zionism 101
This particular early twenty-first-century appearance of suspense, after 9/11

and the 2008 crisis of the market state, has a long history that should be
unpacked in relation to specific political structures. A new hermeneutics
of powerpushed to the foreground by a nihilistic critiqueenables us to
reexamine our own assumptions concerning politics, history, norms, and the
language that expresses them. In Hebrew and Zionism: A Discourse Analytic
Cultural Study (2001), historian of language Ron Kuzar examined the evolution
of different discursive systems in Israeli politics. Kuzars linguistic observations
stem from two primordial moments: the formation of much of the Hebrew
language by the great linguist reformer Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (18581922) and
the normalization of Hebrew during the 1950s, shortly after the establishment
of Israel. Ben-Yehuda was responsible almost single-handedly for the revival
and modernization of the Hebrew language during the early twentieth century.
Kuzar shows how this initial reform of the ancient language must be closely
connected with 1950s discussions about normalcy as a linguistic and political
characteristic. The political debate coalesced with the debate about the
normalcy of Hebrew (Kuzar 2001, 10). In fact, Kuzar argued, The resolution
of the political and linguistic debates remain closely interrelated (Kuzar
2001, 11). At the heart of the discussion stands the concept of normalcy and
its tight relationship to its supposed rival, the abnormal or exceptional, the
nihilist, who attempts to step out of the normalabnormal dichotomy. In short,
the transformation of Hebrew from its preliminary, wild moment of birth to
normalization reflects the shift from an unacceptable to its domestication.
The nihilist questions the legitimacy of both.
In spite of the normalabnormal opposition, the story of Hebrew is tightly

connected to the concept of nihilism from its conceptual and historical roots.
Tracing the origins of Hebrew revivalism in the early twentieth century, Kuzar
relates Ben-Yehudas work on Modern Hebrew to his interest in Russian
revolutionaries and nihilism, and specifically to his interest in Alexander Herzen,
Ivan Turgenev, and Peter Kropotkin. However, as Kuzar observes,
Nihilism, [back] then, was not a well-defined dogma, but rather a field with
different sitesthe shared part is often described as the nihilist ethos, a new
code of behavior, inaugurated in the 1860s, and lasting well into the later phases
of the revolutionary movements. This new revolutionary ethos introduced into
its discourse the term self-realization and acting here and now combined,
crystallized as an agentive subject position, a deep personal commitment to carry
through ones beliefs, rather than be an armchair revolutionary. (Kuzar 2001, 54)
The nineteenth-century nihilist ethos found its form in the excitable and
stormy temperament of Ben-Yehuda, that found [a] discursive outlet (Kuzar
2001, 111). But how successful was the domestication of the language? Tracing
the process of normalization and domestication during the 1950s, Gershom
Scholem warned of the explosive potential embedded at the core of this highly
charged language. Any attempt to ignore it, he warned, would only end in a
disaster (Biale 1982, 210). According to his view, grounded in the history of
religion, one has to examine things from the perspective of anarchism and
nihilism in order to move back into a conscious ethicalpolitical position. In
more specific terms, normalization is a different name for realization of a
retroactiveanachronistichistory.
In the context of the normalization of the 1950s1960s, the construction
of national ideology, and increasing reliance on the trauma of the Holocaust,
a new nihilist discourse was formed at the heart of Modern Hebrew. At this
point, nihilism was tightly interwoven with the dialectical structure of the state:
Without ever admitting it, the normative discourse was grounding its sense of
right and legitimacy on the basis of what it negated, that is, the exilic life of Jews
and the catastrophe that ended it.
Following the Israeli case enables us an innovative look at the heart of
nihilism in the early twenty-first century. This is a form of active nihilism that
is used for affirmative purposes. If during the ancient times, as we have seen in
the beginning of this chapter, stasis marked the temporality of a crisis or the
end of politics, something the polis should overcome. In the early 2000s stasis
has turned into an active state-sponsored action. Let me explain: The political
philosopher Adi Ophir published a series of articles that recommended moving

past the metaphysics of the Holocaust as an anchor for collective identity. A
religious consciousness built around the Holocaust may become the central
aspect of a new religion, one that has at its core a story of revelation (Ophir 2003,
195). After his sharp critique of what he calls a new religion of the Holocaust,
Ophir explains that sacralizing victimhood might end with a new and empty
sense of identity (Ophir 2003, 199). Only a nihilistic perspective could reveal the
outcome of the new religion and its empty identity: in a recent book about the
history of the occupation in Palestine as a system of governmentality, Azoulay
and Ophir analyzed the mechanism of an ingrained discourse of victimhood
meant to legitimize the practical tools of destruction, evacuation, and occupation
of the land. Ongoing destruction helps present the Palestinians as foreigners
on their land, a minority in the Jewish homeland, temporary stateless refugees
(Azoulay and Ophir 2013, 218). In short, Ophirfollowing on Foucault and
Agambens critique of normsrecognized the very language of exceptionality:
The Israeli state uses the Jewish past to justify the normalization of sovereignty,
by appealing to the unchanging structure of victimhood. It justifies, on this
basis, the prolonged state of emergency in which the state of Israel has been
since 1948. From that angle, only the nihilistic perspective could expose the
crude justification of norms and militant behavior. But the story of nihilism
does not end here.
The theorist of political architecture, Eyal Weitzman, demonstrated
recently how nihilistic methods, some of them adopted from poststructuralist
philosophy, apply to policymaking and to military operations in the West
Bank. Army strategists in the IDF used Foucauldian and Deleuzian categories
to reconfigure a new and updated army tactics in the twenty-first century. In
an interview he gave to Weitzman, an IDF general, Shimon Naveh, explained
that his colleagues refer to him as Foucault on Steroids and that Deleuze and
Foucault were his models of operation. Navehs reading of the relation between
military and guerrilla action has produced such headlines as [Deleuzes]
Difference and Repetition or striated space borrowed from Deleuze and
Guattaris A Thousand Plateaus (Weitzman 2006, 11).
If Ophir and Weitmans interpretation is correct, then one needs to
reconsider not only where the critical discourse is suppressed in Israel, a favorite
preoccupation of left-wing liberals and NGOs, but also where it is used in order
to justify anti-humanitarian measures. Examining critique and exceptionalism
via nihilism and stasis, or the temporal order of both, is a good starting point.
Looking at nihilism from the perspective of stasis is due to distance it from

nineteenth-century dialectics and metaphysics.
Weitzman starts doing exactly that when he turns back to Bauer and
Lwiths characterization of modern society as an apparatus working in a
united mechanistic space and grounded in the temporality of repetitive stasis.
If for Bauer and Lwith the key person in modern nihilist society is the
civil engineer, for Weitzman, in Israel, it is the military engineer. Weitzman
identified the nihilistic tactics of the occupation in the West Bank as coded
under technology instead of occupationallow[ing] for the transformation
of warfare from conflicts based on maneuvers to conflicts based on standoff
capacity, precise fire and the deadly effects of invisible forces without the need
to resort to occupation and with minimum friction with the enemy and the
civilian population (Weitzman 2009, 552).
This discussion of nihilistic character, ethos, or discursive outlet might
sound abstract. However, for Israelis and Palestinians there is nothing abstract
about it. It is easy to demonstrate the importance of this concept in everyday life
and everyday communication. In the next section I will bring this philosophical
argument down to earth and point out where and how this discourse is used
and abused in everyday life.
Nihilism and Zionism 102
Recent developments in Israel suggest an inescapable and vital view of

nihilism, publicly identified with post-Zionist critique, left-wing activity,
public critique of Israeli policy, and often with Tel Aviv, the most secular
and liberal city in Israel. Scholars researching the counter-history of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict were often tagged as nihilists (Sharan 2003, 34;
for a critical perspective, see Silberstein 2008, 4). During the 1990s, the term
nihilist trickled down into everyday language and was openly discussed and
radicalized in newspapers and popular literature. For example, a December
15, 2006, column on Israels Ynet website by Gadi Tauba popular author and
journalistnoted that settlers in the West Bank were shocked to hear that
the left acts out of moral sense of mission, a strange idea. The left, Tel Aviv,
post-Zionism, drugs, New Age, nihilism, individualism, the new literature,
newness and consumption, signify just one thing: moral bankruptcy. They
have an image of a club in Tel Aviv, populated by tattooed women and men
with earrings, which wins all arguments; it isthe nihilists Sodom at best.
It is the same liberal-minded Taub who, in a scholarly article, described the
radical left as nihilistic and anarchistic showing that where the radical left
stands, he agrees with the settlers (Taub 2003, 3). The category of nihilism,
in other words, can be useful in order to expose the limits of the legitimate
liberal critique.
In recent decades different voices from the right-wing settlement movement
have discussed the left in annihilatory terms, a discourse that has been
accepted and popularized by large segments of the Israeli public and media
and, more recently, by the government itself. This characterization has become
a common clich in the popular political discourse in Israel. Op-eds in the daily
newspapers often identify the exclusion of the left with a right-leaning popular
will. For example, Hanah Eisenman, a settler from Hebron, wrote in an op-ed
on the website of the Maariv newspaper titled The Voice of the People, that
she had found what the Left wants: turning Gush Katif to a monument like Yad
Vashem. Eisenmans equation of progressive critique and the Nazi annihilation
of the Jews grounds the analogy in the legacy of nihilism. Such accusations have
been made in Israeli history against both left and right. But Eisenmans insistence
that she speaks from the heart of the consensus is new. In the op-ed, Eisenman
argued that even moderate or centrist leftists say the Left is characterized by
qualities such as variety of opinions, nihilism, escapism, rejection of order and
structure, being difficult to accommodatein short, similar to anarchists who
define honesty and authenticity in cooperation with the enemy who stands upon
them to annihilate them (Eisenman 2005).
Since 2006 such views have been translated to policymaking and adopted
by Netanyahus government. Indeed, the liberal Labor Party did not oppose
these efforts to exclude radical elements. The Israeli government recently
passed a series of laws making critical activity such as supporting an economic
or cultural ban on the settlements or the occupation practically illegal.
According to the new lawThe Law to Prevent Damage to Israel by Ban
(in short: The Ban Law, approved July 11, 2011)even an expression of
sympathy with the ban or its supporters might lead to prosecution. The law
was initiated and promoted by a centrist coalition of Labor and Likkud party
members. A startling example of the new policy is the decision to interrogate
left-wing and human rights organizations for supposedly receiving funding
from terrorist organizations (Lis 2011; Ynet 2011). The legalization of
reactionary ideas is not surprising, if one takes into account howsince the
second intifada in 2000such rhetoric has been supported by a large range
of voices, from the radical right to the moderate left, and from the margins of
society to the elite. Shlomo Avineri, usually identified with the liberal left in
Israel, has become an adamant critic of those he identifies with post-Zionism,
nihilism, and the absolute negation of the legitimacy of Israel to existthose
who strive to uproot [Zionism]. For Avineri, a respectable political scientist,
post-Zionism equals nihilism due to intellectual dishonesty and the attempt
to present this [post-Zionist critique] as a new phenomenon. He claims it is
grounded in a traditional anti-Zionist rhetoric by communists and the [old
socialist] Bundists (Avienri, 2007). Avineri is not alone in his observations.
It is no coincidence that during the past few years the same critic of post-
Zionism unleashed a series of newspaper articles criticizing, on the one
hand, the policymaking of Netanyahus government, but also, at the same
time, criticizing supporters of the BDS (boycotts, divestment, and sanctions)
movement. Again, the concept of nihilism is useful here in order to expose the
code of legitimacy among political centrists, whether from the center-left or
the center-right of the political map.
An alternative to the centrist conventions should be mentioned here: some
critics of current Israeli policy have accepted the label of nihilism and tried
to work from within it. Avi Primo, a well-known Israeli journalist, concluded
a December 2000 op-ed with the words, Once you are done accusing me of
self-hatred, elitism, leftism, anti-Semitism, nihilism and the rest, please take a
look in the mirror: Is anything wrong with our collective behavior? (Primo
2000). Reuven Miran, a novelist and a critic for the Haaretz newspaper, wrote in
a review of the radical journal Mitaam that it was expressing the potential for a
radical discourse and endorsed a pro-nihilist approach (Miran 2005). Indeed, as
Empson argued, where two contradictory meanings of a word such as nihilism
empty it of meaning, only a blank space and repetitive temporality are left. Then
again, as indicators of a failure in the public sphere, such moments of blankness
should be grasped as a dark mirror, one that reflects the absence of light or the
warning signals flickering from the edges of the public sphere.
Conclusion
Nihilism is commonly defined as a philosophy of negation, rejection, or denial

of some or all aspects of thought or life (Crosby 1998). It has been interpreted
since its early days as a radical negation of all forms of authoritybe it Gods,
a human sovereigns, or that of moral values. More specifically, the concept of
nihilism has emphasized the connection between authority and interpretative

competence, political sovereignty, and a hermeneutic knack. The Latin nihil, or
nothing, was identified during the late Middle Ages with a heretic annihilation,
that is, with the sovereign strategy (in this case by the church) of incriminating
a rival theological interpreter in order to gain legitimacy and extinguish any
threat (Ritter, Grnder, Gabriel, 1984, 846). The evolution of the concept
of nihilism up until today demonstrates how it is situated at the crowded
crossroads between nothingness, the undermining of authority, the Not-I, the
inherent ambivalence of meaning, the suspension of time, the death of God,
and the end of metaphysics. Constructs such as the end of time, the end of a
historical era, and the deathliteral or metaphoricalof a sovereign that leaves
only a shade of legitimate power, all lead to a sense of profound stasis. But the
revival of nihilism in our time points toward the attempt to overcome a political
frozen time by striving for a substantial destructive act. This motivation is what
I called in the title of this chapter the hermeneutics of exposure. Those using
nihilism in order to expose the limits of critique and the forces of exclusion build
consciously on the stasis of the period and have no problem accelerating its end,
by radicalizing it. An excellent demonstration of such nihilistic tendencies can
be found in the 2009 manifest Linsurrection qui vient, which argues that the
era of states, nations and republics is coming to an end and theres nothing
more to say, everything has to be destroyed (Invisible Committee 2009, 87).
Only a general plea for the destruction of norms and conventions, I believe, can
show where the power of the state truly lies. In contrast to what the political
rhetoric lets us believe, it does not lie in the hands of a certain coalition, but
in the hands of centrists from both coalition and opposition who cooperate
in order to preserve their control of the dialectics of power. What concerns
the author of this particular chapter is the thin line that marks the separation
between legitimate and illegitimate critique, between centrists and radicals. The
democracy to come, I would like to argue, cannot and should not make such
differentiations. This is not a redemptive call for a superman, but rather a plea
for a better mapping of our analytical borders.
Bibliography
Agamben, Giorgio. 2004. The Open. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

. 2005. The State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Aristotle. 1992. Politics. New York: Penguin.
Avineri, Shlomo. 2007. The Lie of Post-Zionism. Haaretz, April 7. http://www.haaretz.

co.il/opinions/1.1422688.
Azoulay, Ariella and Adi Ophir. 2013. The One-State Condition. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Balke, Friedrich. 2003. From a Biopolitical Point of View: Nietzsches Philosophy of
Crime. Cardozo Law Review 24(2): 705722.
Beiser, Frederick. 2005. Hegel. New York: Routledge.
Biale, David. 1982. Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Boyer, Alain. 1997. Hierarchy and Truth. In Why We Are Not Nietzscheans, edited by
Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, 120. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Crosby, Donald A. 1998. Nihilism. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 7,
edited by Edward Craig, 15. London: Routledge.
Del Caro, Adrian. 2004. Grounding the Nietzsche Rhetoric of Earth. New York: Walter de
Gruyter.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1983. Nietzsche and Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press.
Duhamel, Roland. 2006. Die Decke auf den Kopf. Wrzburg: Knigshausen &
Neumann.
Eisenman, Hanah. 2005. On Hypocrisy and Hatred of Israel. NRG, March 28.
http://www.nrg.co.il/online/1/ART/889/060.html. Accessed March 11, 2013.
Elbe, Stefan. 2000. European Nihilism and Annihilation in the Twentieth Century.
Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 1(3): 4372.
Empson, William. 1966. Seven Types of Ambiguity. New York: New Directions.
Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings,
19721977, edited by Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books.
. 2003. Society Must Be Defended. New York: Picador.
. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Garver, Eugene. 2012. Aristotles Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gillespie, Michael Allen. 1996. Nihilism before Nietzsche. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Invisible Committee. 2009. The Coming Insurrection. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Kalimtzis, Kostas. 2000. Aristotle on Political Enmity and Disease. Albany: State
University of New York Press.
Kuzar, Ron. 2001. Hebrew and Zionism. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Lis, Jonathan. 2011. Knesset Votes to Probe Israeli Groups Accused of Delegitimizing
IDF. Haaretz, January 5. http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/knesset-votes-to-
probe-israeli-groups-accused-of-delegitimizing-idf-1.335390. Accessed March 11,
2013.
Lwith, Karl. (1934) 1956. Nietzsches Philosophie der Ewigen Widerkehr des Gleiche.
Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer.
. 1995. Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Miran, Reuven. 2005. Haaretz, February 16.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1997. On the Genealogy of Morality. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge
University Press.
. 1999a. Jenseits von Gut und Bse, Zur Geneaologie der Moral. Kritische
Studienausgabe. Munich: De Gruyter.
. 1999b. Zur Genealogie der Moral, in Kritische Studienausgave, edited by
Giorgio Colliand Mazino Montinari. Munich: de Gruyter.
. 2003. Notebook 2, Autumn 1885Autumn 1886. In Writings from the Late
Notebooks, edited by Kate Struge, 66101. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University
Press.
Ophir, Adi. 2003. On Sanctifying the Holocaust: An Anti-Theological Treatise.
In Impossible Images: Contemporary Art after the Holocaust, edited by Shelly
Hornstein, Laura Levitt and Laurence J. Silberstein, 195206. New York:
New York University Press.
Primo, Avi. 2000. Ynet, December 3.
Ritter, Joachim, Kalfreid Grnder, and Gottfried Gabriel (eds). 1984. Nihilismus.
In Historische Wrterbuch der Philosophie, Vol. 6. 846854. Basel and Stuttgart:
Schwabe Verlag.
Schmitt, Carl. (1969) 1996. Politische Theologie II. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot.
Sharan, Shlomo. 2003. Israel and the Post-Zionists. Brighton, UK: Sussex University
Press.
Silberstein, Laurence. 2008. Postzionism: A Reader. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press.
Taub, Gadi. 2003. The American Sixties in Israel: From Rebellion to Conformism.
Iyunim BiTkumat Israel 13(1): 128.
. 2006. The Last Zionist Fort? Ynet, December 15. http://www.ynet.co.il/
articles/0,7340,L-3340161,00.html. Accessed March 11, 2013.
. 2011. MKs Hold Stormy Debate Over Leftist Probe. Ynet, January 2.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4022354,00.html.
Taubes, Jacob. 1987. Ad Carl Schmitt: Gegenstrebige Fgung. Berlin: Merver Verlag.
. 2009. Occidental Eschatology. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Thurschwell, Adam. 2003. Specters of Nietzsche: Potential Futures for the
Concept of the Political in Agamben and Derrida. Cardozo Law Review 24(3):
11931260.
Vardoulakis, Dimitris. 2009. Stasis: Beyond Political Theology? Cultural Critique
73(1): 125147.
Weitzman, Eyal. 2006. Walking through Walls: Soldiers as Architects in the Israeli-
Palestinian Conflict. Radical Philosophy 136: 822.
. 2009. Thanato-Tactics. In The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli

Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, edited by Adi Ophir, Michael Givoni
and Sari Hanafi, 543573. New York: Zone Books.
iek, Slavoj. 2002. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Verso.
Online articles
Merriam-Webster OnLine, s.v. Stasis, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/

stasis. Accessed November 4, 2013.
Ynet, 2011. http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4022354,00.html. Accessed
March 11, 2013.
2
Less than Nihilism

Luca Di Blasi
Introduction
We are witnessing a steady loss of legitimacy of the Western, capitalist, democratic

system. After the financial crisis revealed the calamities of capitalism and the
impotence or corruption of democratic institutions, the recent disclosure of
the immense dimensions of surveillance gave us an idea of rapidly growing
possibilities of mass control and manipulation, of the erosion of privacy, and of
limits to effectively control secret services. The exploitation of nature is growing
steadily and unstoppably, as well as the imbalance of property distribution. At the
same time, no realistic alternatives to democracy and capitalism have come into
view. In this situation, optimism appears to be deceptive, or even cruel, as Lauren
Berlant called it (Berlant 2011). There is a shared sense of an exhausted future.
One could identify two basic ways to react to a fundamental loss of confidence
in the future: the first might be called religious, that is, escaping the destiny of this
world by trusting a meta-historical principle; the other anarchic, that is, rejecting
any attempt to formulate alternatives for a better future. And indeed, it is difficult
to overlook the current significance of both: of a growing importance of religion
in the last two decades on the one side, and of an anarchic, undialectical negation,
an anti-teleological stance, in contemporary continental philosophy on the other.
The two possibilities, however, can merge, as Nietzsche suggested when
he related Christianity to anarchism, and as we can see nowadays in some
manifestations of the so-called Islamic fundamentalism, insofar as both
exhibit a certain form of nihilism.1 This means that the apparently dated,
dulled by overexposure (Brassier 2007, x) notion of nihilism is becoming
increasingly topical.
1
The political and the religious aspects of the notion of nihilism also intersect on a theoretical
level. Regarding contemporary Italian philosophy, Lorenzo Chiesa and Alberto Toscano speak of
the increasing significance of Christian and Catholic thematics where ontological and political
nihilism often seem indiscernible (Chiesa and Toscano 2009, 5).
In this chapter I focus on nihilism as a connection of anarchic and religious

impulses, and, more specifically, in Slavoj iek and what I would like to call
his less than nihilism. I will first broach the subject by the connection between
nihilism and the concepts of faith and knowledge as they were discussed at
the beginning of the nineteenth century, especially in Hegels response to F.
H. Jacobi. Second, I will turn toward the renewed discussions about faith and
knowledge over the last two decades and indicate the relevant role that nihilism
(either implicitly or explicitly) plays there as well. Finally, I will interpret the
peculiar fact that ieks philosophy seems to be equally popular among people
of fundamentally different political convictions, as a consequence of his capacity
to merge religious and anarchist ideas in a way that responds perfectly to the
current crisis of confidence in the future.
Faith, knowledge, and nihilism around 1800
The beginning of the philosophical use of the term nihilism has been very
thoroughly investigated (e.g., Mller-Lauter 1975, 1984; Pggeler 1970). One of
the first philosophers to use the term, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, deployed it
to criticize transcendental philosophy and particularly Johann Gottlieb Fichte
(Jacobi 2004). The critique of Fichte radicalized an earlier critique launched
by Jacobi against Spinozism. According to Jacobi, the deterministic worldview
promoted by Spinozism resulted in the elimination of all values, including those
of freedom, love, and beauty, and was therefore inherently nihilistic. Fichtes
philosophy went even further, reaching the point of complete nihilism, where
the I had finally destroyed even the thing-in-itself, transforming everything
into a mere non-I (Jacobi 2004).
Jacobi did not criticize Spinoza or Fichte for being bad philosopherson
the contrary, they brought philosophy to its inevitable consequences. What was
at stake here, in other words, was not only Spinoza or transcendental idealism,
but the destiny of philosophy as such. By revealing that nihilism is the inevitable
destiny of philosophy, Jacobi wanted to demonstrate the necessity of belief.2
In his text Faith and Knowledge, published in 1802, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel reacted to Jacobi with a maneuver typical of modern philosophy: he turned
Jacobis position on its head. What Jacobi understood as the last consequence of
2
Jacobis notion of glauben includes, nota bene, not only the religious faith but also a meaning of to
hold as true (See Jacobi 1787, iv).
Less than Nihilism 37
philosophynihilismwas presented by Hegel as its very first step: The first

step in philosophy is to recognize the absolute nothing (Hegel 1977a, 169) of any
finitude made absolute. Earlier, he argued against Jacobi:
[] it is only possible to put trust in the Ideas when [empirical] [] reality has
been brought to nothing; it is quite impossible to put trust in the Ideas as long as
the dogmatism of absolute finitude and subjectivity is maintained, a dogmatism
that puts the eternal verities in bodies and other matters of fact. (Hegel 1977a,
139ff)
Hegel agreed with Jacobi that Fichtes destruction of Kants thing-in-

itself (the nothingness of the spectral thing-in-itself [Hegel 1969, 47]) was
consistent. In contrast to Jacobi, however, he understood the apparent triumph
of the subject in annihilating the world as a (potential) turning pointmarking
the possibility of overcoming the subject, or more precisely, of desubjectivating
logical categories. The problem with Fichte, according to Hegel, was not that
he went too far but that even he did not go far enough with his annihilating
procedure. By maintaining a subjective approach, he was still too positive.3
Similarly, Jacobis position remains for Hegel too subjective, since the faith he
espouses is no longer naive and truly devoid of subjectivism and rationalism, but
is already elevated by self-reflection to the place of subjectivism and rationalism
in the very movement of opposing them and justifying itself through this
opposition.
When it is introduced into philosophy [] faith completely loses this pure
naivet [authors note: Hegel uses the term Unbefangenheit, which is more
positive than Naivitt] [] faith itself is affected by the occurrence of this
opposition to reection and subjectivity. Since it now acquires this negation as
part of its meaning, faith preserves reection on the nullification of reection;
it preserves the subjective consciousness of the nullification of subjectivity.
Subjectivity has thus saved itself in its own nullification. (Hegel 1977a, 141)
Furthermore, it is precisely the timid, fearful, and incomplete standpoint

(Hegel 1969, 51) with respect to nihilism that leads to what Hegel described,
invoking Jacobi, as blind hatred of the nullification of temporality, along with
the holy zeal for the good cause of matters of fact [wirkliche Dinge] (Hegel
1977a, 140). In other words, subjectivity preserves itself in its will to nullify
nullification, in its annihilating gesture against nihilism.
3
Aber die subjektive Haltung dieses Versuchs lie ihn nicht zur Vollendung kommen (Hegel 1969,
41).
Hegels diligence in finding ever new ways to discover and castigate a

sophisticated subjectivism behind its own apparent nullification makes very clear
that the persistence of subjectivism was his main target:4 he spoke of a pollution
of faith and a hallowing of subjectivity, of an eternally returning introspective
concern for the subject (Hegel 1977a, 143), an extreme meticulousness,
nostalgic egoism and ethical sickliness, inner idolatry (Hegel 1977a, 146);
and finally even used terms like the torment of eternal self-contemplation,
accusing those immersed in such torment of engaging in spiritual debauch
with themselves (Hegel 1977a, 147).
This subjective nihilism can be overcome not by denial or negation, but
rather when it is understood as only one moment of true philosophy, namely, as
the negative side of the absolute.
Infinity is the pure nullification of the antithesis or of finitude; but it is at the
same time also the spring of eternal movement, the spring of that finitude which
is infinite, because it eternally nullifies itself. Out of this nothing and pure night
of infinity, as out of the secret abyss that is its birthplace, the truth lifts itself
upward. (Hegel 1977a, 190)
The pure concept of infinity as the abyss of nothingness in which all being is
engulfed, Hegel continued, must signify the infinite grief [of the finite] purely
as a moment of the supreme Idea, and no more than a moment. Formerly, the
infinite grief only existed historically in the formative process of culture. It
existed as the feeling that God Himself is dead, upon which the religion of more
recent times rests (Hegel 1977a, 190). Here, Hegel used the famous expression
of the speculative Good Friday.
A few years later, Hegel still described the confrontation with the negative
in terms of conversion: This tarrying with the negative is the magical power
that converts it into being (Hegel 1977b, 19).5 But while tarrying with the
negative could easily be read as a heroic gesture, it should more accurately
be read as the defeat or destruction of the heroic subject. It is not the master
with his heroism in the face of death, but rather the slave (Knecht) who
actually tarries with the negative. The master, instead, in preserving his honor,
does not experience annihilation, and preserves a remnant of subjectivity
4
Regarding Hegels critique of romantic irony for its excess of subjectivism, see, for example, Mascat
2013, 23045. Frederick Beiser (2002) has read German Idealism in general as a struggle against
subjectivism.
5
In the (first) preface of the Science of Logic, something similar reappears in the formulation of the
stay in the nothing (Hegel 1969, 28).
(Hegel 1977b, 111119; Kobe 2005, 127). Hegels tarrying with the negative is
thus opposed not only to Jacobis subjectivity, which persists in the mode of self-
negation, but also to the heroic facingor even acceptanceof negativity
in the German Nihilism6 of the so-called Conservative Revolutionary
movement (Konservative Revolution). The Romantic nihilism at the turn of
the nineteenth century and the heroic nihilism following 1918 can therefore be
understood as two different forms of subjectivism, which are equally directly
opposed to Hegels philosophy.
Jacobi and Hegel, to conclude, agreed that there was a problem, a tendency
in modern philosophy toward a nullifying subjectivism or subjective nihilism,
but they completely disagreed as to where the problem lay and how to resolve
it. While for Jacobi, the final revelation of nihilism as the telos of philosophy
opened the possibility or even necessity of accepting belief (and providing a
stable ground for religion), Hegel believed in an immanent solution and appeared
in this specific sense to be progressive. The problem could only be resolved by
pushing the underlying logic even further. Only by doing so would it become
clear that the problem did not concern the tendency itself, but the fact that this
tendency (or logic) was not fully developed. What first appeared as dangerous
or destructive would reveal itself as necessary, even as progress, as soon as we
are prepared to take the final step rather than avoid it. And, as we will see, this is
exactly the strategy that Slavoj iek used two centuries after Jacobi and Hegel,
when criticizing some of the major representatives of critical thinking, such as
Gianni Vattimo, Jacques Derrida, and Jrgen Habermas.
Faith, knowledge, and nihilism around 2000
Earlier than most other leftist philosophers, Gianni Vattimo brought the topic
of Christianity into philosophy,7 and the title of his book from 1996, Credere
di credere, was an implicit reference to the debate between Jacobi and Hegel.
Credere di credere could be translated literally as believing to believe. By
6
Regarding the notion of German Nihilism and its relation to the so-called Conservative
Revolutionary movement, see Strauss 1999.
7
For conservative philosophers, Christianity has never stopped being a relevant topic. Ren Girard
seems here particularly interesting. While Jacobis early critique of the nihilist disappearance of the
object is based on a philosophy of consciousness and subjectivity, Girards mimetic theory provides
an interesting possibility for reformulating a critique of nihilism on the basis of inter-subjectivity
(see Di Blasi forthcoming).
weakening the high notion of belief (faith) through reference to the low
notion of belief (guessing), this title indicates a distancing from Hegel, who
criticized Jacobi precisely for having consciously confused faith and belief and
thereby devalued a high notion of faith (Hegel 1977a, 124ff). But Vattimo also
distanced himself from Jacobi, offering a very different conception of belief, as
the consequence of a long process of a nihilist weakening of all convictions,
including religious ones.
The title Credere di credere was therefore deeply programmatic. Vattimo
was interested in interpreting the weakening of faith as a positive kenotic and
nihilist tendency of Christianity. Nietzsche was right, according to Vattimo:
Christianity resulted in the weakening of all our convictionsin nihilism.
But Nietzsche was not correct in blaming Christianity for that. In achieving
this nihilist condition, Christianity overcame the violence of monotheism and
metaphysics.
A few years later, Vattimo and Jacques Derrida published a volume on religion,
and for his contribution, Derrida chose Hegels title Faith and Knowledge
(Derrida 2002), thereby suggesting a parallel with the older text. Similarly to
Vattimo and Jacobi, Derrida introduced his text with reflections on the term
belief :
We believe we can pretend to believefiduciary actthat we share in some pre-

understanding. We act as though we had some common sense of what religion
means through the languages that we believe (how much belief already, to this
moment, to this very day!) we know how to speak. We believe in the minimal
trustworthiness of this word. (Derrida 2002, 44)
Derrida thereby accepted, like Jacobi, the importance of belief. And similarly
to Vattimo, he also related it to a specific traditionthe Christian one. At the
same time, however, this tradition appears here in a much more problematic
light than in Vattimo. It is closely connected to the history of a violent
abstraction and nihilist uprooting. Following Nietzsche and Heidegger,
Derrida connected Christianity implicitly to nihilism or to what he called the
evil of abstraction, the dislocation, expropriation, delocalization, deracination,
disidiomatization and dispossession [] that the teletechno-scientific machine
does not fail to produce (Derrida 2002, 43, 81). Christianity and the tele-
techno-scientific machine are related in that both are based on belief or faith,
which he connected to the notion of credit: We speak of trust and of credit
or of trustworthiness in order to underscore that this elementary act of faith
also underlies the essentially economic and capitalistic rationality of the tele-
technoscientific (Derrida 2002, 43, 81).
Christian belief and credit stand, according to Derrida, at the core of Western
globalization or globalatinization, as Derrida put it in order to underline its
Latin, and thereby Catholic, aspect (Derrida 2002, 50, 52).8 And in destroying
all particularities, this uprooting of globalization appears as radical evil:
I understand Judaism as the possibility of giving the Bible a context, of keeping
this book readable, says Levinas. Does not the globalization of demographic
reality and calculation render the probability of such a context weaker than
ever and as threatening for survival as the worst, the radical evil of the final
solution? (Derrida 2002, 91)9
The other source of religion, other than faith, is the sacred, which Derrida
related to Islam. Reacting against the uprooting tendency of faith, the sacred
tends to revere soundness, health, family, and tradition, and can all too easily
give way to sacrificial (but one might also say anarchist or active nihilist) self-
destruction and violence.
We can detect here a specificity of the relation between belief and nihilism.
Both notions are here constantly shifting between a positive and a negative
meaning. The same belief that Jacobi considered as a way out of the nihilism
inherent to philosophy, appeared for Hegel as a (bad) attempt on the part of
reason to escape reflection and retreat into a sort of fundamentalism. The same
weak belief that appeared in Vattimo as result of a (good) nihilism, and as the best
way to overcome the violence of a metaphysical conviction and fundamentalist
faith, was depicted by Derrida as a (negative) uprooting, a nihilist process,
which is closely connected to the Christian and Western tradition and incites
rather than overcomes a violent and nihilist fundamentalist identitarian
counterreaction.
There is, according to Derrida, a third possibility, in which both sources of
religion come together: the experience of witnessing situates a convergence of
these two sources: the unscathed (the safe, the sacred or the saintly) and the
fiduciary (trustworthiness, fidelity, credit, belief or faith, good faith implied
in the worst bad faith) (Derrida 2002, 98). Derrida related this third form to
witnessing, a term that recalls the witnesses of the Holocaust (see Weber 1994,
79ff) and to Judaism. This third possibility appears as a potential mediator in an
8
Structurally, the term globalatinization is a variation of his notion of Western phonocentrism (see
Derrida 1997; Di Blasi 2007).
9
See also Di Blasi (2013).
escalating conflict between a Christian/Western world and an Islamic world. The

place where the contradiction between two nihilismsWestern abstraction and
violent counterreactionscan be overcome is thereby not a neutral, universal
philosophical or speculative standpoint beyond religion, but is related to one
(religious) tradition and experience: the Jewish one.
In his influential acceptance speech on the occasion of the presentation of
the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (also entitled Faith and Knowledge
and held in October 2001) Habermas introduced his notion of the postsecular.
In this speech, we are confronted with a very similar structure. Here as well, we
have an escalating dialectic between a nihilism inherent in Western science and
technology, and, as a counterreaction to it, another nihilism related to Islam
and religion, which appeared most drastically in the blind fundamentalist
attack by suicidal murderers in 9/11, an event that Habermas mentioned at
the very beginning of his speech (Habermas 2003, 101127). Here as well,
we find the acceptance of the importance of religious resources of meaning
(Habermas 2003, 109). Acknowledging the continuous importance of religion
is what distinguishes, for Habermas, between the secular and the postsecular.
But contrary to Derrida, it is still secular reasonthat is, an (allegedly10) meta-
religious principlethat is understood as the mediator between the growing
biotechnological possibilities and a growing fundamentalism or violent return
of religion.
Although skeptical toward modern sciences, Habermas, following Kant,
accepted what one might call a methodological nihilism of science (concerning
moral, aesthetical, or religious values) as inherent to theoretical reason as
such. He contended, however, that we must limit the realm of this science and
complement it with other forms of rationality. In consequence, we do not have
to eliminate or replace either religions or theoretical thought. We can adhere to
a religion-friendly understanding of secularization, one that tries constantly to
translate religious intuition in a rational language appropriate to our time.
Habermas therefore not only tried to reaffirm the secular against both
a biotechnological and fundamentalist nihilism, but he also tried to confirm
a specific anti-nihilist understanding of history. With a religion-friendly
understanding of the process of secularization, he confirmed a fundamental
geschichtsphilosophische basis for his thought: the assumption that we are
living in a context of ongoing secularization (Habermas 2003, 104)an
10
Wendy Brown (2012) has summarized some major arguments against the assumed neutrality of
secularization.
understanding that was put into question by the reappearance of religion. In

this context, Habermas contrasted between Kant and a (could we say Jewish?)
promise of salvaging the future, on the one hand, and an overpowering reason
in Hegel and senseless repetition in Nietzsche on the other:
Hegel makes death by crucixion as suffered by the Son of God the center of
a way of thinking that seeks to incorporate the positive form of Christianity.
Thus, religious contents are saved in terms of philosophical concepts. But
Hegel sacrices together with sacred history [Heilsgeschichte] the promise of
a salvaging future in exchange for a world process revolving in itself. Teleology
is nally bent back into a circle. Hegels students and followers break with the
fatalism of this dreary prospect of an eternal recurrence of the same. (Habermas
2003, 112)
Beyond or beneath the dangerous escalation that occurs in both knowledge

and faith and the two related nihilisms, a third nihilism becomes visible
in this passage, namely, the denial of linear historical progression and of a
redemptive-historical dimension. In attacking this third form of nihilism, the
basic coordinates of Habermass Geschichtsphilosophie become most visible:
he declares himself in favor of the teleological understanding of history in
Kant and in Hegels (leftist) followers, and against a nihilistic, cyclical process
allegedly promoted by Hegel and Nietzsche. It is precisely this kind of nihilistic
cyclical process, however, that Slavoj iek has been arguing for and developing
over the last twenty-five years.
Less than Christian nihilism
Very early, before Habermas popularized this term in 2001, iek not only
dismissed the notion of the postsecular as post-secular crap, but he also used
this notion as a way of associating Habermas with two other influential positions
of continental philosophypostmodernism (Vattimo) and poststructuralism
(Derrida)in order to reject them all sans phrase. iek positioned himself as
Neo-Hegelian, reframing our contemporary situation in accordance with the
one that prevailed two centuries ago.
The terms of ieks rejection of postsecularism can be best gleaned through
his critique of John D. Caputos so-called weak theology. For Caputo, God
is weakened and reduced to a trace, or a trace of a trace, and faith is reduced
to a weak faith. Caputos God is the subject of an endless agony and endless
disappearance, a fading. This idea recalls the endlessness of the secularization
process as understood by Vattimo and Habermas, as well as motifs fashioned by
Derrida. What iek criticizes is the idea of an excess of linear time, an endless
time, with the impossibility or incapacity of it coming to an endthe incapacity,
for example, to accept the death of God. In the way that iek understands
it, postsecularity sounds very much like the timid, fearful, incomplete
standpoint attributed by Hegel to transcendental philosophy and subjective
idealism.
One can deepen ieks demarcation of the postsecular by relating it to his
distinction between desire and drive. Desire consists in the longing for the
lost incestuous object in which all differences and tensions disappear and an
originary peace is regained. This notion recalls what Nietzsche called passive
nihilism and Freud referred to as Nirwanaprinzip. These dispositions bespeak
a stubborn relation to loss, a fear of losing the loss, whereby we stand to lose
the object for good. Following iek, the postsecular appears precisely as that:
namely, the fear not of losing God, but of losing the lost God.
In his film Hiroshima mon amour, Alain Resnais reflected on the double
bind of the lover: her longing for the dead lover and the fear of relinquishing
this longing, of betraying him by forgetting him, of killing him a second time.
The lover is bound to the lost object through her fear of the second death.
Considered in this manner, the postsecular cannot only appear as a desire that
revives religion; it also appears as an attempt to avoid the second death of God
by postponing or deferring it into the future.
iek, instead, clearly advocates atheism. While he sometimes sympathizes
with mystical attempts to inscribe the lack to the absolute itselfGod is then
preserved, not as omnipotent but as himself lacking and therefore as dependent
as the human beinghe always supports the notion of the death of the
omnipotent God.
The insistence on the death of God, however, also means that it is important
to iek to connect atheism to its specific preconditions: a specific history of
God, related to Judaism and particularly to Christianity, which includes the
moment of his death. An atheism that does not relate to the death of God
actually leads to the deification of something else (the human being, the process
of history, etc.).
The emancipatory potential, which the death of God opens up, becomes
especially apparent, according to iek, in the crucifixion of Christ. This violent
death, which was accompanied by a collapse of the symbolic universe of Jesus

disciples, was followed by a resurrection in the form of a Holy Spirit, a faith
that had lost any transcendent and metaphysical foundation and was now based
solely on the community of believers. In more philosophical terms, one might
speak here of a new beginning that became possible in the moment when a
world, a totality, seemed exhausted.11
The circle is closed, we have reached the end, the immanent possibilities
are exhausted, and, at this same point, everything is open. This is why to be
a Hegelian today does not mean to assume the superfluous burden of some
metaphysical past, but to regain the ability to begin from the beginning (iek
2012, 393)
This new beginning enabled by the accomplishment and collapse of a totality

contradicts the Habermasian understanding of Hegels philosophy as dreary
prospect of an eternal recurrence of the same and recalls instead Alain Badious
decidedly anti-nihilist philosophy and his notions of the (collective) subject
and of fidelity to a (revolutionary) event. Already in 2003, iek connected the
Holy Spirit to the subject of Badiou: Holy Spirit designates a new collective
held together () by delity to a Cause (iek 2003, 130).
In a direct comparison with Badiou, however, the nihilist aspect of ieks
philosophy becomes evident as well. The community of believers envisioned
by him oscillates between faith or fidelity and a second death, the loss or even
betrayal of faith. In every heroic narrative of recuperation, iek writes,
there is a moment of loss or betrayal which enables the later redemption
(iek 2012, 349).
Instead of Badious long-term fidelity to an event, and instead of the
seriousness, the suffering, the patience and the labor of the negative (Hegel
1977b, 10) advocated by Hegel against romantic irony and frivolity, we have
here a frenetic acceleration of collapse and new beginnings.12 Because of
its relation to Christianity, one might be tempted to call ieks accelerated
repetition between collapse and resurrection, and between fidelity and betrayal,
a Christian nihilism in both meanings of the phrase: a nihilism that depends
on Christianity and the transformation of Christianity into nihilism.
11
In his contribution for this volume, Adi Ophir suggests another interesting way to give to nihilism
a positive meaning, or, more precisely, to react in a responsible manner to the possibility of a total
annihilation.
12
Bruno Boostels argued that by giving priority to the act as a negative gesture of radical, self-
relating negativity, as death drive in actu, iek would devalue in advance every positive project of
imposing a new Order, delity to any positive political Cause (See iek 2006, 64).
But this conclusion is not yet satisfying, since it does not do justice to ieks
revolutionary striving to regain the ability to begin from the beginning. We
have to go a step further here and we could best achieve that if we first take a
step backwards. While iek, as we saw, relates the postsecular to desire and to
its specific temporality of deferring the loss of the loss (the second death), his
entire philosophy can be said to circle around his notion of the drive and its own
specific temporality of endless repetition:
The elementary matrix of drive is not that of transcending all particular objects
toward the Void of the Thing (which is then accessible only in its metonymic
stand-in), but that of our libido getting stuck onto a particular object,
condemned to circulate around it forever. [] We become humans when we
get caught into a closed, self-propelling loop of repeating the same gesture and
nding satisfaction in it. (iek 2006, 62ff)
ieks affirmation of the death drive not only endorses Nietzsches eternal
return of the same but it endorses it in the way by which it was negatively and
critically understood by Heidegger. The notion of eternal recurrence, described
as in alle Ewigkeit hinaus, unersttlich da capo rufen (Nietzsche 1999, 75, for
all eternity insatiably calling out da capo), was conceived by Nietzsche as the
possibility of overcoming (both passive and active) nihilism (see Gillespie 1995,
221ff). Heidegger, describing the essence of modern technique as permanent
rotating recurrence of the same (das Wesen der modernen Technik [],
das heit: die stndig rotierende Wiederkehr des Gleichen [Heidegger 1954,
S112]), cleverly and maliciously transformed what Nietzsche had understood
as a possibility for overcoming nihilism into the purest form of Western nihilism.
Now, in embracing this self-propelling loop of repeating the same gesture and
nding satisfaction, iek reaffirms precisely this nihilistic connotation that
Heidegger attributed to the eternal recurrence.
But at the same time, and this is crucial, iek transforms it into something
that overcomesor betterundermines nihilism, namely, the death drive, a
quasi-vital, quasi-mechanical eternal movement activated by a less than nothing.
Here is the formula at its most elementary: moving is the striving to reach the
void, namely, things move, there is something instead of nothing, not because
reality is in excess in comparison with mere nothing, but because reality is less
than nothing. (iek 2012, 4)
Here again, we can try to better understand iek by comparison with Badiou,
specifically, ieks obscure less than nothing with Badious transparent notion
of subtraction. Starting from the importance of negation for the production

of something new, the French philosopher distinguishes between a negative
part of negation (the destruction or disintegration of the existing order or
totality) and an affirmative part of negation, which he calls subtraction and
defines as the possibility of something which exists absolutely, apart from that
which exists under the laws of what negation negates (Badiou 2012, 270). This
subtraction is within the horizon of negation, but it exists independently of the
purely negative part of negation. It exists apart from destruction. For example,
Arnold Schnbergs new musical axioms are in no way deducible from the
destruction of the tonal system and exist independently from this negative part
of negation (Badiou 2012, 269ff).
iek also aims at an affirmative part of negation that persists behind its
destructive side and his term less than also suggests a subtraction, even
though in a completely different, neither rational nor mathematical, and hence
obscure, way. Rather than the nihilist striving for nothing, understood as striving
for (self-)extinction, the death drive for iek is the disturbance of any void, as
the insistence of a pre-ontological X on account of which it moves. According
to him, the ultimate ontological choice is thus not the choice between nothing
and something, but between nothing (extinction) and less than nothing (eppur
si muove) (iek 2012, 954).
This is why his philosophy is not easy to grasp in terms of nihilism: Be it against
Buddhism, the postsecular, the Nirvana principle or desireiek is constantly
advocating the importance of a lack even inside nothing, a disturbance, an
irrational or non-mathematical subtraction, a less than nothing that prevents
us from obtaining an ultimate peace. Therefore, his philosophy is neither
nihilism nor against nihilism, but rather less than nihilism. Or, to come back to
our earlier formula: It is not Christianity, not nihilism, not a Christian nihilism,
but a less than Christian nihilism.
In light of this it might be clearer why iek may be one of the most popular
contemporary philosophers, appealing to people not only of fundamentally
different political convictions, but of different religious (or irreligious) beliefs as
well. With his dissociation from the postsecular, he satisfies leftist progressive
atheists, while by relating atheism to the death of God and crucifixion, he
satisfies Christian believers. At a deeper level, iek manages to connect a
diffused despair in the face of an exhausted future with the possibility of a new
beginning, the resurrection of a Holy (revolutionary) Spirit, and to undermine
nihilism not by something positive, but on the contrary by a void, a disturbance,
a less than nothing. The cost of his operation, however, is the constant risk of an
oxymoronic fusion or confusion of the opposites: fidelity and betrayal, activism
and defeatism, leftist Christianity and nihilism.
Bibliography
Badiou, Alain. 2012. Destruction, Negation, Subtraction. In The Scandal of Self-

Contradiction Pasolinis Multistable Subjectivities, Geographies, and Traditions, edited
by Luca Di Blasi, Manuele Gragnolati and Christoph Holzhey, 269277. Wien,
Berlin: Turia+Kant.
Beiser, Frederick. 2002. German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 17811801.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Brassier, Ray. 2007. Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Brown, Wendy. 2012. Civilizational Delusions: Secularism, Tolerance, Equality.
Theory & Event 15(2).
Chiesa, Lorenzo and Alberto Toscano (eds). 2009. The Italian Difference: Between
Nihilism and Biopolitics. Melbourne: re.press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1997. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
. 2002. Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of Religion and the Limits
of Reason Alone. In Acts of Religion, edited by Gil Anidjar, 40101. New York,
London: Routledge.
Di Blasi, Luca. 2007. Grammatheologie. Eine kultur- und medientheoretische Lektre.
Deutsche Zeitschrift fr Philosophie 55: 717733.
. 2013. Circumcisions. Jacques Derrida and the Tensions between Particularism
and Universalism. Verifiche. Rivista di scienze umane XLII(13): 931.
. Forthcoming. Beyond Mimetic Desire. In Mimesis, Desire, and the Novel: Ren
Girard and Literary Criticism, edited by Pierpaolo Antonello and Heather Webb.
Michigan: Michigan State University Press.
Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Esposito, Roberto. 2009. Community and Nihilism. Cosmos and History: The Journal
of Natural and Social Philosophy 5(1): 2436.
Chicago Press.
Habermas, Jrgen. 2003. The Future of Human Nature. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.
Hegel, G. W. F. 1969. The Science of Logic. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press
International.
. 1977a. Faith and Knowledge, edited by Walter Cerf and Henry Silton Harris.
New York: State University of New York.
. 1977b. The Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by Arnold V. Miller. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1954. Was heisst Denken? (GA 8), edited by Paola-Ludovika
Coriando. Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann.
Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich. 1787. David Hume ber den Glauben oder Idealismus und
Realismus: Ein Gesprch. Breslau: G. Loewe.
. 2004. Schriften zum transzendentalen Idealismus (Werke 2,1), edited by Walter
Jaeschke and Irmgard-Maria Piske. Hamburg: Felix Meiner.
Kobe, Zdravko. 2005. Die Auferstehung des Begriffs aus dem Geiste des Nihilismus
oder Hegels spekulativer Karfreitag. Filozofski vestnih XXVI: 113128.
Mascat, Jamila M. H. 2013. When Negativity Becomes Vanity: Hegels Critique of
Romantic Irony. Stasis I: 230245.
Mller-Lauter, Wolfgang. 1975. Nihilismus als Konsequenz des Idealismus:
F. H. Jacobis Kritik an der Transzendentalphilosophie und ihre
philosophiegeschichtlichen Folgen. In Denken im Schatten des Nihilismus, edited by
Alexander Schwan, 113163. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
. 1984. Nihilismus. In Historisches Wrterbuch der Philosophie, edited by
Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Grnder, 846853. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1999. Jenseits von Gut und Bse (Kritische Studienausgabe 5),
edited by Massimo Montinari and Giorgio Colli. Mnchen: dtv.
Pggeler, Otto. 1970. Hegel und die Anfnge der Nihilismus-Diskussion.
Man & World 3: 163199.
Strauss, Leo. 1999. German Nihilism. Interpretation 26: 355378.
Vattimo, Gianni. 2003. Nichilismo ed emancipazione: Etica, politica e diritto. Milano:
Garzanti.
Weber, Elisabeth (ed.). 1994. Jdisches Denken in Frankreich. Frankfurt a. M. Jdischer
Verlag.
iek, Slavoj. 2003. The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
. 2006. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
. 2012. Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism.
London: Verso.
3
Doing Nothing or Nothing Doing?

Michael Gillespie
Nihilismcan be a symptom of increasing strength or of increasing weakness.

Friedrich Nietzsche
And now which is which?

Lewis Carrol
Something must be done. How many times have we heard this or something
like it? It has almost become a mantra, uttered by people of all political stripes
and in all walks of life. And yet whenever it is uttered or thought, it is almost
invariably a justification for inaction, a sop we use to excuse our anomie. The
phrase reflects a concealed despair that arises out of a sense of powerlessness and
the belief that there is nothing we can do. It is thus not the assertion of an active
will but the plea of a paralysis that wishes someone would make things different
than they are. The appropriate response is, of course, Well, do something, but
one almost never hears this because everyone knows the answer would be What
can I do? Nothing I can do will make a difference. As a result we end up doing
nothing.
There are many reasons for our inaction. Our world has become so
complicated and interrelated that getting anything significant done requires the
coordinated efforts of thousands of actors who are pulled in different directions
by conflicting personal motives, economic interests, and political imperatives.
In satisfying individual desires, we rely almost exclusively on the market, which
allocates goods in efficient ways, but when it comes to collective action our
very freedom often gets in the way of consensus. In an effort to remedy these
coordination problems we generally turn to bureaucracy, but do we control our
bureaucracies? They repeatedly seem to take on a life and direction of their own
often at odds with our intentions. As Arendt pointed out, bureaucracy thus often
seems to mean government by nobody, in which no one is ultimately responsible
with the buck passing continually from one hand to another (Arendt 1970, 38,
8183). Here, she shares the opinion of her teacher Heidegger who argued that
in the modern age humans are increasingly directed by the very technologies
they imagine make them masters of nature (Heidegger 1992, 311341). Under
these circumstances, he believes there is no practical solution to our problem,
and we can only wait for a god to save us. Viewed from this perspective, Max
Webers pessimistic remark that politics is the strong and slow boring of hard
boards, seems ridiculously optimistic (Weber 1946, 128). Is it any wonder that
nothing seems to get done?
At times though things reach a boiling point where inaction is no longer
acceptable. People become so hopping mad that they shake off their ennui and
plunge into vigorous and often violent action. There may be nothing positive
they can do, but they need to do something, to lash out, to strike a blow against
the system, to avenge injustice. The sense of powerlessness that characterizes
the anomie of modern life is transformed into an irrepressible rage that wants
only to hurt or destroy. This anger is no longer satisfied with the thought that
something must be done and says, Nothing doing! I will no longer abide by
your rules or live in a world that is so intolerable, so unjust, so repressive, or so
inimical to human well-being. To hell with it all!
This attitude is a form of rebellion. Faced with a system of rules so rigid,
arbitrary, and impossible to change, we come to believe, as Camus pointed out,
that we have only two possibilities, murder or suicide.1 We cannot live without
killing and if we cannot kill those who are the source of our suffering, we must
die. Not surprisingly, these two possibilities are often combined in the suicide
terrorist. He may give some reason for his action but he is driven by rage and
a desire for revenge. This longing to do violence was already evident in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in such literary works as Conrads
Heart of Darkness, Londons Call of the Wild, and Andr Malrauxs Mans Fate
as well as in the political tracts of Sorel, Martinetti, Gorky, and Lunacharsky.
And of course it became a horrifying reality in the wars, revolutions, and
concentration camps of the twentieth century.
I describe these two attitudes not to promote despair or provoke violence,
but to make visible the character and consequences of the dominant forms of
nihilism in the present, and to ask whether nihilism might not play a more
positive role in our future.
1
The former is the subject of The Rebel, the latter of The Myth of Sisyphus.
Doing Nothing or Nothing Doing? 53
The term nihilism was first used in the late eighteenth century by two
largely unknown German scholars to criticize Kants transcendental idealism,
but it was Friedrich Jacobi who gave the term its definitive early meaning
when he characterized the absolute egoism of Gottlieb Fichte as nihilism
(Jacobi 18121825, 3: 44; see also Gillespie 1995, 65). His usage largely shaped
the understanding of the concept for almost a century. If the I is absolute, as
Fichte suggested, then, Jacobi argued, God is irrelevant to human life, and every
decision is guided only by individual inclination. This absolute or Promethean
egoism, which posits the perfect freedom of the I, is thus nihilism.
Fichtes successors and Hegel in particular sought to defend the idealist
position against this charge, arguing that what seemed to Jacobi to be the
caprice of the individual will was in fact guided by a dialectical rationality that
was invisible to the ego itself in its historical unfolding. This hidden reason,
however, became visible at the end of the process when humanitys historical
tasks had been completed and humanity itself had become one with the
absolute in and through science. The cunning of reason in this sense replaces
divine will in the guidance of human development. History may seem to be a
slaughtering bench in which all forms of existence are continually and arbitrarily
negated, but the process of negation is in fact a process of development that
brings humanity to its greatest possible perfection. History in this sense is not
a meaningless series of negations but a rational dialectical process that ends
with the reconciliation of individual and collective freedom in the context of
the rational state. This optimistic notion of historical change was later picked
up by the Left Hegelians and then by Marx and Engels although in their case
the rational end of historical development was projected into the future and
thus became an object of political striving. Negation in their view was specific
and limited, aiming at a particular goal, the destruction of capitalism, and the
worldwide triumph of communism.
For others, however, there were growing doubts that the order of historical
development was rational or progressive. The slaughtering bench of world
history that Hegel had imagined could be justified through a theodicy of spirit
began to seem a utopian dream especially after the failure of the revolutions of
1848 that demonstrated even to the most ardent Hegelians that reason did not
rule the world and that the rational was not actual nor the actual rational. The
most immediate and obvious response to this notion was the rise to prominence
of Schopenhauerian pessimism. Schopenhauer imagined that the world
was directed not by reason but by a malicious demonic will that determined
all natural and human motion. This deeply pessimistic vision led him to the
remarkable conclusion that active negation is impossible since it is always only
an expression of the world-dominating will. Individual freedom in this sense
is an illusion and human beings at their best can thus only practice a kind of
Buddhistic denial of the will to life. This means not merely doing nothing but
wanting nothing to do with this malicious will or with life itself. Resignation in
this sense is the attempt to negate absolutely, to come to dwell in the nothingness
that is beyond the will, in a Nirvana of non-striving.
This Schopenhauerian pessimism served as the model for what Nietzsche
called passive nihilism (Gillespie 1999, 153154). The term nihilism, which is
often thought to have been the beginning of Nietzsches thought, actually first
appears in his notes only in 1880 and in his published work only in 1886. While
his use of the term is quite late, the problem that it refers to had preoccupied
him since his youth when he became deeply concerned about the decline of
German culture. His understanding of the nature of the problem took on a
more specific form as a result of his discovery of Schopenhauer in 1865, and
crystallized for him in the context of his growing friendship with Wagner that
was rooted in their mutual fascination with Schopenhauer. During the period
of their friendship, Nietzsche was deeply concerned with what he then called
the problem of European pessimism and sought to show that it had also been
a problem for the classical Greeks. In his view it was a problem that they had
overcome with their art, and thus by analogy a problem that Germany too might
overcome through the power of music.
Greek pessimism in his view was bound up with the phenomenon of the
Dionysian. He describes this phenomenon in a number of different ways in the
Birth of Tragedy. Perhaps the most trenchant is put into the mouth of Silenus,
the companion of Dionysus, who tells Midas that the best thing for a man is
not to be born, not to be, to be nothing, and if already born, to die as soon as
possible (Nietzsche 1967, 42). He also identifies this attitude with the despair
that immobilizes Shakespeares Hamlet when he recognizes that something is
rotten not merely in the state of Denmark but in existence as such (Nietzsche
1967, 60). In Nietzsches early thought, such pessimism is in fact the inevitable
result of the recognition of the truth. The Greeks, however, did not succumb
in the face of this abyss but struggled against it, converting it through their art
into something life-affirming.
Socrates, Plato, and Christianity in Nietzsches view changed all this. Unable
to master the suffering of this life, they sought a means to endure it by imagining
another life beyond this one in which all of their suffering would be avenged
and in which they would live without pain or despair. This solution, however,
was at best only a stopgap and became untenable as a result of the death of the
Christian God who became unbelievable in the light of modern science. The
death of God, which Nietzsche characterized as the greatest of all events, brought
humanity again face to face with the most debilitating pessimism, or what in the
later 1880s Nietzsche began to call nihilism. In the absence of God, the world
seemed to have no purpose, meaning, or goal. His early hopes for an aesthetic
solution on the basis of Wagners music also seemed increasingly untenable to
him, and he became convinced that the continuation of this nihilism would lead
to mass suicide. The phenomenon of Russian nihilism, however, convinced him
that there was at least one other possibility (Kuhn 1984, 262263).
The Russian nihilist movement began with a Fichtian hope that a heroic
human freedom could transform the world from an authoritarian cage into
a playground for human creativity. In contrast to the Hegelians, the Russian
nihilists did not believe that mans freedom was subject to a dialectical necessity
but was capable of absolute negation and something like creatio ex nihilo. It was
thus not necessary to traverse all of the dialectical steps to reach a predetermined
end. According to the nihilist Dobrolyubov, a titanic act of human freedom
could change the world in a single night (Valentinov 1969, 209210). Where
this would take humanity, however, was less clear. Indeed, in the nihilists view
what this new world would be like could not be known in advance since it would
only be possible to imagine these new possibilities once humanity was freed
from the blinders of existing social norms and institutions. The important thing
in the present was thus not imagining this new world but destroying the old
one. Their initial efforts to do away with the regime, however, were thwarted
by the authoritarian power of the state, which led them into a continually
escalating campaign of violence and terror ending in the anarchistic nihilism
and terrorism of Bakunin and Nechayev. It was this desire to destroy at all costs
that so impressed Nietzsche and that gave rise in his thought to the idea of active
nihilism.
He explains this notion in the Genealogy of Morals with his famous remark
that the will would rather will nothingness than not will (Nietzsche 1967b,
163). What he means by this is that if the will discovers it lives in a world
with no purposes, goals, or meaning, it will become destructive rather than
do nothing. Or to put the matter in other words, in order to will the will will
choose active nihilism over passive nihilism. Despite its obvious drawbacks,
Nietzsche considered such active nihilism fundamentally superior to passive

nihilism, for while it was more destructive, it was also more energetic and thus
more life enhancing. In order to understand why he believed this to be the case,
however, we need to examine more carefully what Nietzsche took to be the state
of modern man.
At the beginning of his magnum opus, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche
suggests that the death of God has left man mired in one or the other of these
two forms of nihilism. He argues, however, that both are ultimately untenable as
ways of life, ending as they do in either suicide or murder. Humanity was once
able to live on the basis of the false belief that there was a God in heaven who
established purposes and goals for them and thus gave meaning to their lives.
Now that that God is dead, such a life is impossible. We are thus thrown into
nihilism. However, both active and passive nihilism are dead ends. Nietzsche
saw two other possibilities for contemporary man: he could become either the
last man or the superman. The last man, according to Nietzsche, is the man who
is moved and dominated by his momentary desires, homo economicus, the pure
utilitarian consumer who recognizes nothing higher than his own pleasures
(Nietzsche 1954, 129131). In his later thought Nietzsche characterizes this
position as incomplete nihilism (Gillespie 1995, 153154). It is a form of life with
which we are all intimately familiar. Nietzsche recognized how attractive this
possibility is to most men, but his goal was to convince at least some that they
should choose the other path and strive for the superhuman. This alternative he
later called radical or Dionysian nihilism. To understand what he means by this,
however, we need to examine the role that the idea of the eternal recurrence of
the same plays in his late thought.
The death of God seemed to Nietzsche to leave the humanity in a world
without meaning. This lack of order and purpose gave birth to pessimism
and passive nihilism. Schopenhauer, however, suggested that the problem was
deeper than this, since from his point of view there was nothing we could do
to change our condition. We always seem to be stuck in the temporal unfolding
of things and thus constantly determined by the dead hand of the past or what
Zarathustra calls the it was. The misery and despair we experience in the present
are connected to this sense of powerlessness. Because we cannot free ourselves
from the past, we seek to avenge ourselves in the present by punishing those
we believe to be responsible for our suffering (Nietzsche 1954, 249254). Our
ontological condition thus produces what Nietzsche calls the spirit of revenge. It
is this spirit that he believes lies at the heart of active nihilism. The key problem
for humanity posed by nihilism is thus how to escape from the spirit of revenge.
The doctrine of the eternal recurrence offers an answer to this question and thus
makes possible a form of innocent willing that is truly creative.
The only way in which we can be free from antecedent causality is if we
are able to will our own destiny, or at least are able to act as if we willed it.
In Nietzsches view this is only possible if we can will backwards, that is, will
everything that has been. Or to put it another way, our freedom and innocence
depend upon accepting and affirming everything as if we had willed it. This
task in Nietzsches view can only be accomplished by willing the doctrine of
the eternal recurrence of the same, the doctrine that everything that has been
and that will be is simply a gigantic causal whole that repeats itself eternally.
Thus, when I will forward, I also will the past since they are connected in a
cycle that eternally recurs. In Nietzsches view the acceptance of the doctrine
of the eternal recurrencewhether true or notis the crucial psychological
move that enables human beings to overcome both the despair of passive
nihilism and the rage of active nihilism. It produces amor fati, love of fate.
To affirm this doctrine is to affirm the whole as our end or purpose. This
affirmation gives meaning to life, and redeems all of the past by transforming
it into a product of our will. Willing the eternal recurrence thus frees us from
the spirit of revenge.
Some have dismissed this doctrine as relatively unimportant in Nietzsches
thought, but all of the biographical evidence suggests that he considered it his
deepest, most difficult, and most dangerous thought (Janz 1978, 2: 197, 280, 291,
322). He considered it dangerous for humanity because he believed it would act
as a hammer that would free the superman from the rock of humanity but that
would also crush uncountably many ordinary people in the process. However,
the thought is not just dangerous to the many but also to the person who thinks
it because of the titanic demands it imposes on him. To draw a comparison,
Goethes Faust agrees to forfeit his soul if he ever experiences a moment that
he wants to last for all eternity, that is, a moment of perfection that can justify
everything else that has ever been. For Nietzsche such a perfect moment could
never redeem the past because all of those other imperfect moments would still
lie abysmally beside it. What one must affirm and really will is not just the most
beautiful or most wonderful moment but every moment and particularly the
most abysmal moments not just as necessary for something else but as truly
loveable in themselves. Hegels slaughtering bench of world history in other
words cannot be justified by a theodicy in which reason triumphs in the end.
What one must affirm and actually will is the slaughter itself, all of the horror
in which the most beautiful human beings, the most magnificent creations
are overthrown and destroyed by what is most vile and disgusting. One must
affirm Iagos destruction of Othello, and every other instance in which the
noble is destroyed by the base, the innocent by the wicked. Dostoevskys Ivan
Karamazov asserted that in order to overcome nihilism it would be necessary
to affirm the torture and murder of innocent children (Dostoevsky 1996, 245
255). In contrast to Nietzsche, however, he was unwilling to say yes to such
things. No perfect moment, he suggests, can ever redeem such crimes. They are
simply intolerable. He thus says that he gives back his ticket, or in other words,
says to God that he will not ride on this train or play in this game. Nietzsche, by
contrast, insists that in order to affirm at all, we must will everything that has
been or will be no matter how horrible or disgusting. Such a task in Nietzsches
view will destroy most men and can only be accomplished if one overcomes all
pity. This in his view is the path to the superhuman. There is something steely
cold and horrifying in the thought, but if one can will this doctrine, one can free
oneself from the desire for revenge, thus cease to be reactive and become truly
active and creative, driven by the love of what might be rather than the hatred
of what was. This too for Nietzsche is a form of nihilism since it recognizes the
death of God and all absolutes, recognizes that there no longer is an absolute,
unitary good but only a variety of humanly created goods and forms of life.
But it is a positive form of nihilism that leaves behind the absolute negation
of Schopenhauerian pessimism and the raging destructiveness of Russian
nihilism, putting in their place a new hope for rising above the intransigence
and anger of the present.
I want to suggest that this notion of nihilism may provide a model for
action today. It is nihilistic in that it accepts the fact that there is no God, no
highest good, and no moral absolutes to guide our actions. Such a position is
often characterized as anti-foundationalism or relativism but the approach that
generally goes by this name typically fails to grasp the depth and seriousness
that Nietzsche brings to the question. To take just one example, Richard Rorty
suggests that life under these circumstances is not tragic but ironic, a kind of play
(Rorty 1989). From Nietzsches point of view such a position is not representative
of the Dionysian nihilist but of the last man. It seeks not to harness but to release
the terrible tension that is essential to all creativity and to promote an Im okay,
youre okay attitude toward life. It thus teaches us to be satisfied with the present
rather than imagining a different future.
As Charles Taylor and others have pointed out, such a position fails to take
seriously the importance of a profound dedication to a conception of the good
for human thriving (Taylor 1989, 352). Or to put the matter differently, it
imagines that any conception of the good, however trivial or mundane, can
serve as the basis for a human life. Nietzsche was well acquainted with such a
view from his careful and comprehensive reading of John Stuart Mill, but he was
convinced that such a view lacked the spiritual depth that is essential to human
excellence. Living as Rorty would have us live, would leave us, as T. S. Eliot put
it, hollow men, that is, comfortable with what Nietzsche calls implicit nihilism.
For Nietzsche it is crucial to recognize the tragic heart of existence, the
Dionysian depths, and to have no doubts about their abysmal character. The
world in its unfolding makes no sense. There is no reason in history. Everything
is tied up with everything else, and we can thus say yes to everything or to
nothing at all. If we accept this idea, we recognize how fruitless it is to wallow
in our powerlessness or to cast blame on those who came before us or live
around us. Instead we realize that the only question is where we go from here.
We recognize that what we take to be good is not absolute but also that it is the
only means by which we can give shape to our lives and civilization. Such a
view inevitably draws on traditions and aspects of the existing order, but they
are merely the raw material out of which a new way of life is formed and do not
determine our present or future. We stand in the midst of the nothing, literally
nowhere, and give ourselves our own directions, making our own whence and
wither.
Dionysian nihilism thus forms the basis for what Nietzsche calls great
politics. Ordinary politics as Aristotle recognized is factional. For him that
meant factions based on differences in wealth. We would also add race, ethnicity,
tribe, religion, gender, sexual orientation, etc. as sources of division. Politics
reflects these factional struggles and is concerned with parceling out benefits
and burdens to different groups, and establishing rules of the game in the forms
of rights, practices, and/or laws. Solutions to factional strife generally reach an
equilibrium that over time becomes increasingly difficult to change. Politics can
break out of this equilibrium only by establishing a new goal that generates new
common purposes that inspire individuals and groups to think of themselves in
new ways. This is the goal of Nietzsches Dionysian superman, to be a creator of
new values that inspire a people to form around a goal and to set a new direction.
At the core of Nietzsches Dionysian nihilism is thus the idea of a revaluation
of all values, of the creation of a new way of life based on a vision of the good that
can inspire action and lift us above both the do-nothingness of passive nihilism
and the nothing-doingness of active nihilism. It aims not at improving or
controlling markets and bureaucracies (that is, at establishing what Machiavelli
called new modes and orders) but at convincing us to admire and pursue
different things, and thus to turn our politics toward different ends.
Nietzsche recognized that such a transformation was likely also to require
the use of force and violence against those in the old order who struggle to hold
onto their power. He knew this would be dangerous. He suggested, however,
that the violence employed in the pursuit of these new goals would not be the
result of hatred or a desire for revenge. It would thus not be limitless or excessive.
Nietzsches great politics thus could never legitimately be practiced by a Hitler, a
Stalin, or a Pol Pot, all of whom were driven by the desire for revenge, but might
very well be the work of an Ataturk, Gandhi, or Mandela. Nietzsches analysis
of nihilism thus helps us to distinguish between those who look to the future
with innocent eyes and those still motivated by the spirit of revenge. Of course,
this does not mean that we will always judge correctly. Indeed, it is essential to
recognize that the desire for revenge remains powerful in us as well unless and
until we grasp our finitude in the unfolding of time, and accept the responsibility
this entails.
A passage from Nietzsches Zarathustra encapsulates this point:
O my brothers, your nobility should not look backward but ahead! Exiles shall
you be from all father- and forefather-lands! Your childrens land shall you
lovethe undiscovered land in the most distant sea. For that I bid your sails
search and search. In your children you shall make up for being the children of
your fathers: thus shall you redeem all that is past. (Nietzsche 1954, 315316)
Bibliography
Arendt, Hannah. 1970. On Violence. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. 1996. The Brothers Karamazov. NewYork: Modern Library.
Chicago Press.
. 1999. Nietzsche and the Anthropology of Nihilism. Nietzsche Studien
28: 141155.
Heidegger, Martin. 1992. Basic Writings. New York: Harper Collins.
Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich. 18121825. Werke, 3 vols. Leipzig: Fleischer.
Janz, Curt Paul. 1978. Nietzsche. Biographie, 3 vols. Munich: Hanser.

Kuhn, Elisabeth. 1984. Nietzsches Quelle des Nihilismus-Begriffs. Nietzsche Studien
13:253278.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1954. The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Penguin.
. 1967a. The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. New York: Random House.
. 1967b. The Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. New York: Random House.
Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, Irony, Solidarity. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge
University Press.
Taylor, Charles. 1989. The Sources of the Self. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University
Press.
Valentinov, Nikolai. 1969. The Early Years of Lenin, translated by Rolf Theen. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Weber, Max. 1946. Essays in Sociology, edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills.
New York: Oxford University Press.
4
A Concept of Nihilism for the

Coming End of the World
Adi Ophir
Against all odds I am trying to present here a coherent concept of nihilism. The
phenomena to which this concept refers are limited to one sphere: the sphere of
discourse. Nihilism as a category describing a psychological type or of a whole
epoch will not be considered. I am not trying to be faithful or even fair to the rich
research in intellectual history and to the many different ways in which the
term nihilism has been used since its introduction by Jacobi at the turn of the
nineteenth century, including its projections on earlier philosophical positions
identified as nihilistic avant la lettre. I will use this history only as a resource of
nihilistic discursive acts that exemplify various moments or possibilities that are
logically contained in the concept itself. Each of these examples may also be a test
case for evaluating the productivity of the concept, its utility as a tool of thought
that helps us reframe and revise our understanding of specific phenomena
associated with nihilism, juxtapose and compare them, make distinctions and
draw parallels among them. In other words, I will not be interested in the shifting
meaning of the term but rather with a spectrum of possibilities within which
such shifts may still be considered as moments or aspects of one, single concept.
Nihilism, then, is a discursive act, sometimes merely a gesture, a mode of
discursive performance, and always only one moment within a wider discursive
context. As such, it is a specific form of negation. I take my first clue from one
line in Nietzsche. Drawing a sketch for his study of European Nihilism, at
the very beginning of the first section of notes collected in The Will to Power,
Nietzsche defines nihilism parenthetically as the radical repudiation of value,
meaning, and desirability (Nietzsche 1968, 7). The definition does not do
justice to Nietzsches own account of nihilism because its scope is larger than
what would occupy him in the rest of that text. It does cover but fails to specify
two important moments in Nietzsches writing on nihilism: his use of the term
as an epochal concept (what I relate is the history of the next two centuries
Nietzsche 1968, 7) and the inner dialectic of the development of nihilism that
he describes (what does nihilism means? That the highest values devaluate
themselves Nietzsche 1968, 9). It is precisely because this initial definition is
more colloquial, free of the specific way Nietzsche uses the term in his writings,
having a broader scope and more mundane tone, that I would like to use it here
as my point of departure. If one bears in mind that the radicalism of the radical
repudiation is a matter of context and positioning, the door is open for a certain
de-dramatization and trivialization of the concept. It is this trajectory of
de-dramatization that I would like to follow here, up to a certain point.
Nietzsches first definition is cumbersome. The desirability of an object is an
expression of a value or meaning assigned to it, and therefore the three terms
in Nietzsches definition may be reduced to two. Furthermore, meaning in this
context should be understood not as a linguistic function but as meaning for
someone, and in this sense it is synonymous with value (e.g., Nietzsche 1968,
11: the idea of valuelessness, meaninglessness); in any case, for the nihilistic
act to have any effect, both meaning and value have to be repudiated. Hence,
for our purposes, it would be enough to speak about the radical repudiation of
values. The repudiation is radical if the negation does not refer to this or that
object but to the very source of values. But do values have a source? Do they
have one source, a single root, and the radical repudiation is necessarily the
uprooting or this root? The dramatization of the nihilistic act is directly linked to
this metaphysics of origin, which Nietzsche reinstates while trying to overcome
it. Instead of a single source that accounts for a plurality of values, I would like
to understand radical repudiation of values as an act of negation that refers to
a whole realm in which all values undergo devaluation.
Finally, to complete this modification of the initial Nietzschean definition,
let us take another clue from Nietzsche, who said that the creation of values
is based on the creation of distances (Nietzsche 2002, 257), and speak about
the value of differences only, not of entities like objects, places, deeds, or
people. When values are ascribed to the latter, it is always an expression of a
distance that separates them from other entities of their kind, or a difference
that distinguishes them. The repudiation at stake is therefore not of this
or that value or set of values but of the possibility of evaluating differences
within a given realm. Hence I propose to reformulate the initial definition thus:
nihilism is the negation of the value (or meaning, significance, validity or truth)
of differences within a given realm. Note, however, that the nihilistic negation
Nihilism for the Coming End of the World 65
does not destroy objects or people or institutions, obliterate their differences,

or liberate one of their yoke; it only annuls the value of these differences or
revokes their validity.1 The problem is never with the value of a specific entity or
difference, but with the very possibility of assigning values to differences within
a closed realm. No authority can function without being able to assign value to
differences, hence the close affinity between nihilism and anarchism. But the
two are not identical and the indifference to authority is only one effect or one
type of the more general repudiation of values.
In order to be nihilistic, according to this definition, it is not enough to
negate (ignore or deny) the value of a specific difference, for example, between
voting to this or that party, or taking this or that route, or adopting this or that
way of living. One becomes nihilistic by denying the value of a whole spectrum
of differences within a given realm or a given world, for example, all political
parties, all routes in the region, or all modes of living, thus denying the difference
between voting and not-voting, between moving and not-moving, living or not-
living. However, the discursive act that affects an entire realm is performed with
respect to a distinct position from which the realm may be grasped as a whole.
The nihilistic act implies closure: one must have in mind the entire political
spectrum in a given country, or even all political systems in which voting is
an option to assert ones indifference to voting; it may be the case that there
is no difference between moving and not moving within a certain region and
yet there is a value to the difference between staying and not staying in that
region; in order to become indifferent to life itself, one must have in mind all
possible forms of living, at least all those which one may strive to assume. There
may always be a point beyond which the nihilist hesitates, because a certain
value, small perhaps but greater than zero appears. The nihilist discursive act
tacitly implies or explicitly refers to a whole realm whose boundaries are more
or less recognizable. This holds even when the realm to which the nihilistic
negation applies encompasses the world in its entirety. For a nihilist discursive
act to become possible, the nihilist must imagine himself outside the realm in
which the value of differences comes to nihil. Let me call this special standpoint
of the nihilist a transcendent position. Transcendence refers here to the
realm in question. When the realm in question is the world, or life, or being,
transcendence assumes its traditional metaphysical meaning. But the logic of
transcendence and closure is the same for partial realms as well.
1
Deleuze says something similar in his chapter on Nietzsches nihilism: In the word nihilism, nihil
does not signify non-being but primarily a value of nil (Deleuze 1983, 147).
By transcendent position I mean the position in relation to which all the

differences in the affected realm are stripped of their value. For the Preacher
in Ecclesiast, it is death. Or perhaps it is the position of the wise king over
Israel in Jerusalem, who has come to understand that in the face of death
all is vanity and vexation of spirit (Ecc. 1:2, 9), and even his own Highness,
his greatness in wisdom and power, can produce no valuable difference (Ecc.
1:1217). In the world of Brothers Karamazov, this position is occupied by
Ivan who follows the logic of his atheism to its final conclusion and stands
at the empty place of God. In Kafkas Trial, the position from which no
legal difference can be stabilized and all such differences lose their value
and significance is not that of Ka, entangled as he is in the web of law, but
rather of the narrator who can freely move in and out of the realm of law
(or of Kas world, if we read the law as a metonym for Kas world as a whole).
This position, which actually merges with that of the reader, is achieved
through the suspension of the advent of sense and reason, the deferment of
the responses to all the queries, perplexities, and puzzlements that unfold
throughout the novel.
In all three examples, the transcendent position is empty, a vanishing point of
reference that once used to serve as the basis of all values and now can maintain
its very distinction only through the memory of a loss. The nihilist effect is the
result of that loss. However, the opposite case is also possible: the emergence
of a new transcendent position that introduces a new constitutive difference,
and delineates a realm within which the value of differences is annulled. This
is precisely what happens with the appearance of the word of the Cross in
Pauls Epistles. From the point of view of the Cross, its messianic promise and
pressing time, the earthly world of human affairs becomes that realm in which
established differences and distinctions lose their valuethere is no longer Jew
or Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male or female; for you are all
one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28). Paul actually applies to the human world
what the prophets before him applied to the realm of deities and their worship.
When the prophets demanded to worship one invisible God and abandon all
other forms of rites, they annihilated the value of differences among the various
gods of other peoples and the many ways to worship them. These gods who
became idols could still maintain some of their poweras it was the case even
for Paul (I Corinthians 10:1921), but the value of the differences among them
has been totally revoked. In a similar but more explicit and pronounced fashion,
Paul revokes the differences among all social states and classes: let those who
have wives live as though they have none [hos me]; and those who mourn as if
they were not mourning (I Corinthians 7:2931).
The nihilistic gesture recurred in Paul in other contexts. In fact, it was
encapsulated in the very address to the gentiles: I am speaking to you Gentiles
(Romans 11:13). The term gentiles marks in Paul, explicitly and systematically,
the negation of differences among the particular ethne (people, e.g., Egyptians,
Greeks) (Rosen Zvi and Ophir, forthcoming). When viewed from the position
of the coming Messiah, the term ethne has lost its ethnic connotation, which
is the precise meaning derived from the value of differences among different
ethnic groups. The differences among gentiles come to nothing, the nothingness
of their non-Jewishness. The same gesture that separates gentiles from Jews
annihilates all differences among particular gentiles with respect to Jesus
Messiah.
Paul may have exercised nihilist acts more often and more emphatically than
others but for the purpose of my analysis here he is but another example. My
point here is to show that the nihilistic act and attitude do not have to wait for
the death of God to be revealed as such, and as the example of the gentile shows,
that they may be applied to different realms, even in the context of Christianity,
at the very moment of its birth. In fact, once understood as discursive operation,
nihilism may be dissociated from the history of any particular religion.2
Abstracted from this privileged historical context, the special relation between
atheismconsidered as a late phase within the history of monotheismand
nihilism appears as contingent and may assume many forms or no form at all.
Nihilism is certainly helpful for characterizing and explaining certain moments
within the histories of religious and metaphysical systems but is not restricted
to these histories. One has to be neither an ardent believer nor an atheist to
practice nihilism. The dissociation between nihilism on the one hand and
atheism and religious faith on the other is the result of the fact that while the
nihilist discursive act is always articulated with respect to a close realm and a
transcendent position, the closed realm does not have to be the totality of the
entire world, only the totality of a world, and this transcendence need not be that
of a God or of his death.
Conceived as discursive act, which involves both a gesture and a position,
a nihilistic moment is actually implied in every claim about equality among
2
In fact, Nietzsche, who is perhaps more responsible than any other thinker for the close link between
nihilism and Christianity, proposes the best example for such dissociation when he speaks of
Christianity and Buddhism as two nihilistic religions (e.g., Nietzsche 2005, 20).
members of a set. For the diabetic person any kind of food that contains sugar
is equally forbidden and all differences of taste, ingredients, and calories among
these food items lose their value. At the theatre entrance all ticket holders are
equally accepted and no difference among them counts. At an even more basic
and trivial level, the equality of many different signifiers of the same signified
(the letter a for example), implies indifference to all differences of shape and
colors among them, and this indifference is condition for the very possibility of
any semiotic system. Accepting this trivialization of the nihilist moment, one
may imagine a continuum between the most common, most restricted nihilistic
gesture involved in any claim for equality (including the equality of the same
signifier), and the most extensive and rare, in fact an epochal, event that takes
place with the advent of a new transcendent position: Gods revelation, his
concealment, or his death.
Somewhat less dramatic and radical, but of exactly the same structure is the
revolutionary omentto the extent that revolutions are conceived as ruptures
and associated with new beginnings. The revolutionary is the one from whose
vantage point most differences among parties and positions within the existing
political order come to nothing and the possibility of a new order is explicitly
opened. The most recent examples could be witnessed in the spring and
summer of 2011 when demonstrators and activists filled the streets of Cairo,
New York, Athens, Madrid, or Tel Aviv. The people who camped in public
spaces for weeks and months, with no end in sight, without stating any end
that could have been translated into the language of political negotiation, and
who refused to play according to the rules of ordinary politics or associate with
any of the existing parties or establish one of their ownthese people acted
as nihilists. They were nihilists with regard to the existing political system and
revolutionaries to the extent that they imagined a break with the present order,
with or without presenting explicitly an alternative one. At the same time, they
also exemplified clearly the difference between these two moments, the nihilist
and the revolutionary, which are easily confused. The nihilist moment turns into
a revolutionary one only when the position from which differences are annulled
or rebuked is capable of establishing itself as a new source of value and a new
basis of valuation. If this shift happened in the occupy movement, it was short
lived, local, and fragmentary. While the revolutionary moment was fragmentary
and ephemeral, in many places the nihilist moment has been carried back into
and preserved within the public and private spaces to which most demonstrators
have withdrawn since that summer.
Somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between the most banal and the
most dramatic nihilist moments stands the modern liberal state itself with its
principle and institution of universal citizenship. The citizens formal equality
before the law means revoking the value of all differences of origin and status,
culture and nature among a group of governed people. However, the realm
regarding which the nihilistic act applies is therefore that of those who take
part in the body politic and enjoy the protection of the ruling power. In the
modern state at least, not all those governed by the same ruling power are
included in the group of equals; the difference between (those governed as)
citizens and (those governed as) non-citizens is one of the most basic features
of the modern state. The boundary line may be a result of the constitutive
violence that initiated the law or of sovereign act through which citizenship
is granted or denied by making an exception. The transcendent position with
respect to which the value of differences is revoked lies not with the law, be
it natural or positive law, but with the sovereign position, fragmented and
momentary as it may be.3 The sovereign is the one who, through successful
acts of initiating or suspending the law, can grant and deny citizenship, and
by this very act is also the one who declares himself, at least for that very
moment of the sovereign act, to be outside the law. He or she is a citizen with
rights and authority that equal those of no other. His or her authority is self-
constituting, that is, rests on nothing besides the moment of the initiation or
exception. Hence the liberal state is nihilistic in a double sense: in revoking all
differences among its citizens and in having nothing besides its own sovereign
act on which to establish the constitutive difference between citizens and non-
citizens. This is precisely the kind of liberal state Israel has always refused
to become. By insisting on the value of differences among particular groups
within the governed populationnot only between citizens and non-citizens
but also, or first and foremost, between Jewish and non-Jewish citizens, and
also between orthodox and non-orthodox Jews, Jewish settlers living in the
West Bank and all other Israeli JewsIsrael has long undermined the nihilist
condition of a liberal system of government.4
3
One should not assume the existence of a stable position from which the sovereign acts, but only
moments in which one or several actors, who cannot be designated in advance, position themselves
in a sovereign position by effectively initiating the law or declaring its exception. For the initiating
or suspending act to be effective, it must be felicitous, that is, solicit acceptance or acquiescence not
only from its direct addresses but also from many of those who could challenge it.
4
Consciously, I have omitted the distinction between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews, because it has no
legal expression (and is therefore most difficult to acknowledge). All other differences are legally and
constitutionally grounded.
The formal, discursive conception of nihilism proposed here and the

continuum among kinds of nihilism that it allows helps us free nihilism from
the primacy of the theological (religious or anti-religious) while drawing
attention to certain structural similarities between various contexts in which
nihilistic acts are performed, including the theological and the political.
However, this wide spectrum of possible nihilist acts calls for further formal
distinctions. The first distinction I would like to propose is that between limited
and unlimited nihilism. The limited nihilist stops at the limit of the realm her
nihilistic performance circumscribes, for here appears a difference that really
makes a difference for her, for example, between citizens and non-citizens,
between the brothers in faith and the infidels, or between lovers of truth and
those indulging in illusions.
Unlimited nihilism, on the other hand, cannot afford to ascribe value to any
difference and seeks to be applied to the whole world as well as to itself. For
this nihilism, no division within the world can assume any value, not even the
division between self and world or between the one who has become aware
of the fact that nothing makes a difference and those who are still steeped in
illusions about the worth of something. For the unlimited nihilist, the nihilistic
performance, the claim and the gesture that announce it, makes no difference.
To advocate nihilism is worth as much as not to advocate it, or to advocate an
opposite view. This is not an easy position to maintain. Even the Preacher in
the Ecclesiast who went all the way to deny the value of the difference between
wisdom and folly, between knowing and not knowing the vanity of all things,
introduces a difference that makes a difference, the difference of suffering. [5]
And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived
that this also is vexation of spirit [] . For in much wisdom is much grief:
and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow (Ecc. 1:1619). And soon
after, the text finds a true relief from the anxiety of vanity in God.
The unlimited nihilist who gives no value to any difference, no matter
how real and valuable differences seem to others, is caught in a performative
contradiction; the very performance of the nihilistic act presupposes the value
of the difference between proclaiming and not proclaiming the nihilistic
message, and by implication, the difference between the pragmatic and
semantic planes of discourse. Even Bartleby, the scrivener, who would prefer
not to do anything, had a preference for which he eventually gave his life.
Thus, unlikely as it may seem at first sight, unlimited nihilism is inconsistent,
while only limited nihilism could be consistent, because only limited nihilism
respects the condition of closure, which is necessary for the nihilist act. Without
giving value to the boundary of the enclosed realm, the nihilist operation could
not take place with respect to that realm. Accepting the necessity of closure
has far-reaching consequences because it precludes in advance the possibility
of appearance or encounter with a difference that would make a valuable
difference. Insisting on the impossibility of closure in any given domain is the
best argument against nihilism. At the extreme, such a position borders on
messianism. Following Derrida, we may call messianic the belief that history
is not a closed system in which all differences of justice and injustice comes
to nothing, and that a moment in which such a difference would be inscribed
into the human world is possible. We may call messianism the belief that such
a moment can already be grasped in a way that allows one to view history in its
totality and provide a transcending point on the basis of which one may claim
that the value of all differences within history come to nothing (Derrida 1994,
65 ff, 1998).5
Let me present my second distinction through another modification of a
certain moment in Nietzsches analysis of nihilism. In his schematic exposition
of nihilism in Nietzsche, Deleuze reduces the many forms of nihilism to be
found in Nietzsche to two types. The first type, negative nihilism, is the
depreciation of life, the negation of this world in the name of superior (or
transcendent) values. The second, reactive nihilism, is the dialectical negation
and radicalization of the first type. Now God is thought to be dead and with it
the whole supersensible world of highest values is denied while life is still
and ever more depreciated. Life continues in a world without values, stripped
of meaning and purpose, sliding even further toward its nothingness (Deleuze
1983, 147148). For Nietzsche, who considers nihilism as an effect of different
states and forms of a degenerated will to power, negative nihilism is the effect
of a will to deny, to annihilate life, while reactive nihilism is not a will to
nothingness but ultimately a negation of all will (Deleuze 1983, 147148).
5
There are many modern thinkers who may exemplify this conception of Messianism, but in
Derridas context the most important is Levinas, for whom there can be no moral difference without
the eschatological vision" [that] breaks with the totality of wars and empires. Without the absolute
exteriority of the infinitely other the totality of being comes down to an endless series of violent
acts in which everything rest on war and all empires, in fact all human institutions are the same.
Consider this passage from the opening of Totality and Infinity:
War is not only one of the ordealsthe greatest of which morality lives; it renders morality
derisorybeing reveals itself as war to philosophical thoughtevery war employs arms that
turn against those who wield them. It establishes an order from which no one can keep his
distance; nothing henceforth is exterior. War does not manifest exteriority and the other as
other; it destroys the identity of the same. (Levinas 1969, 2123)
If we bracket this last claim about the origin of the nihilist act, which is also
the basis for origin of the dialectic of nihilism, we are left with one realm
that of this life and this worldand two transcendent positions from which
nihilism is applied to that realm. In the former case, which Nietzsche calls
negative and I would like to call simply straightforward nihilism, the value
of all differences in a certain realm comes to nothing through a relation to
some transcendent entity. The moment of revoking the value of differences
rests on a stable groundGod, the Messiah, the law or the sovereign, a clear
and distinct idea, or even an end that sanctifies all means and annihilates the
moral differences among them. In the latter case, which Nietzsche calls reactive
and I would like to call inverted nihilism, values are assigned to differences, but
this very act of differentiation is found to rest on nothing. Once the vanity or
vacuity of their ground is demonstrated, these values are revoked or annulled.
It matters little for the critic that the nihilistic moment is denied or repressed
by the believer who is now accused of being a nihilist. Nihilism in this case is
not necessarily a matter of taking a conscious position, for one may be totally
unaware of it; it is rather a matter of ontology: the presence of nothingness at
the heart of a certain realm of being that affects its inner differentiation. The
assumption here is that the groundlessness of the ground annuls the value of
differences. The nihilist discursive act, in this case, is not performed by the
one accused of nihilism but by the one who reveals the truth of the formers
position. Much of the modern discussion of nihilism, from Jacobi through
Nietzsche and Heidegger to Vattimo and Connor seems to fall under this
category, but now it should be clear that this tradition of thought is far from
exhausting the possibilities of the concept.6
I believe that the two distinctions just presented may serve us to map the
terrain where the term nihilism has been an acceptable currency, reconstruct
its changing discursive formations, and reveal some unexpected links and
affinities within it. But in the context of the present discussion I would like
to use the last two distinctions for constructing a thought experiment that
would hopefully serve three objectives: it would demonstrate the usefulness
of the above distinctions; it would introduce a new dramatic element to the
discussion of nihilism, but this time without involving God or His death; and
it would finally, albeit briefly, put my analysis in contact with some pertinent
6
Cunnigham provides the most impressive analysis and exposition of inverted nihilism in which
nothing becomes something (Cunningham 2002), but he ignores the possibility of straightforward
nihilism.
political questions. I would like to introduce a case of nihilism that applies to

the world as a whole and is nevertheless a case of limited nihilism; it is also
a case of inverted nihilism that is nevertheless conscious, and even though it
relates to the whole world, it should not necessarily lead to resignation and
inaction.
Imagine there is no God, there is no heaven too. Imagine that this God is
not dead or absent but that simply and radically he is no longer part of our
imagination and that all the memories of his figure and its many deeds are no
more than fossils testifying on the cultures that worshiped him. Imagine that
this forgetfulness of the possibility of a God does not give rise to a sense of
loneliness, for everybody knows that we are not alone in this world but rather
share it with others, human and non-humans, animals, plants, and viruses, and
even some half-animated machines. In this world we share numerous artifacts,
which other men and women have made, together with the images, stories, and
theories they have construed. This world is also populated with an abundance of
stuff, people, animals, artifacts, and signs of which we know nothing and which
no story, theory, map, or picture of ours can exhaust, and we are fully aware of
this. Now imagine that this world, in which we dwell and which we share, will
soon come to an end. This end will be complete, no one would be saved. This end
is imminent; there is no God to save us and there is nothing we can do about it.
We know that the end is imminent because we trust our scientists, historians,
and sociologists, who tell us about rapid, accelerated climate changes and their
effect on the environment, about the negligence and carelessness with which
governments and corporations deal with environmental risks and how they tend
to exacerbate them, and about the destructive forces humans have accumulated
and the meager means they have employed in order to check and control the
use of these forces. Imagine that for all these reasons it becomes clear that soon,
say within a few months, the end would come and there is nothing we can do to
avert or postpone this fate.
Once the imminent end of the world is realized, all differences among human
actions, modes of conduct, governmental policies, plans, and dreams lose their
value and significance. Some people may still believe that the question of how
to die (alone and together) is no less importantand now in fact much more
importantthan the question of how to live, and that there are moral and ethical
differences among different ways of dying. There are at least just and unjust ways
to distribute the suffering and agony of the last months. But these differences
too would soon come to nothing; there would be no witness to recall and tell
about them, nobody would ever care that and how we are dying, together with
the entirety of our civilizations. Some people would insist that it still matters
how to die, alone and together, and that the difference between the present of
those still living and the future of total destruction makes all the difference in the
world, the very difference created by the existence of the world, even if this is a
difference that would last for a few months only. But this insistence would only
affect the scope of the nihilistic act without being able to avoid its far-reaching
consequences. The realm affected by the nihilist act would include everything
related to the ongoing business of the living, the sustaining of institutions, labor
and commerce, the arts and the sciences, in short everything except for the
preparations for the coming end. The imminent end of the world thus appears as
a transcendent point for a limited and consistent nihilism.
If the end of the world is imminent, nothing really matters, except perhaps
for the just distribution of suffering in the time that remains. It would soon
become clear that all we have and do is in vain. This clarity itself, or any attempt
to pronounce and announce it, would make no difference either; it is also part of
the vanity, which can now be anticipated and demonstrated. And yet we have just
announced it. And we did it on the basis of a clear difference between knowledge
and superstition. If the end of the world is a meaningful idea, it is only because
we are convinced that unlike the alarmist apocalyptic prophecies of previous
generations, ours are based on reliable sources of knowledge and valid methods
of analysis and are therefore trustworthy. But conviction is not enough; our
desperate nihilism needs absolute certainty. The nihilism just described can be
justified only as long as one assumes a full closure of the world that precludes any
possibility of unexpected events capable of averting or significantly postponing
its coming doom. The nihilist act and position collapse precisely when one
realizes the impossibility of this certainty and of the closure on which it rests.
The conditions described in this thought experiment are not far from the
preset predicament of the human species and its world. Or rather, how fair they
are is an open question, part of the uncertainty that allowsor rather forces
us to use the end of the world as a transcendent point without succumbing to
nihilistic conclusions. The state of our knowledge is such that we cannot be sure
about the imminent end of the worldor a world that enables the continuation
of our civilization at leastbut we cannot rule it out either. It may be more
comfortable, perhaps more comforting to say the inverse: even if we cant trust our
sciences, we cant rule out the bad news brought to us by the priests and prophets
of knowledge. We are unable to estimate how plausible their predictions are, but
we can understand that the imminent end of the world is a real possibility whose
probability is yet unknown. Hence some human actions make all the difference
in the world. They make a difference because they may be those that determine
the very existence of the world we share. The same goes for every human
institution, every social movement, and every theory. What matters is how each
one of these may contribute to the end of the worldor to its sustainability. All
other aspects of our vita activa would come to nothing. The end of the world has
become a new transcendent position from which the values of many differences
are annulled, while a new set of valuable differences is introduced at the same
time. These new values are made of nothingor rather of the conjunction of
two forms of nothingness: the end of the world and the groundlessness of our
reason and knowledge. But the nothingness of the transcendent point is not
revealed through loss of faith or awakening of rational consciousness. It is even
not postulated as such. All one needs is to use the limited knowledge we have
and assert its possibility, a possibility that cannot be denied any longer. And it is
this possibility of radical annihilation that makes a difference.
What difference it makes is never clear enough. From the point of view of
what must be done to avert or postpone the end of the world, the value of all
the rest may be partly or entirely revoked, but since we cannot be certain about
what must be done, the imperative to save the world, like anything else within
the world, must be negotiated and cannot be assumed as a transcendent law.
Only the possibility is transcendent and given as such and it calls us for action,
but it never tells us what should be done or not be done. This remains part of the
immanent, never-ending business of living together, of thinking, talking, and
acting together.
The possibility of the end of the world reveals a choice and a responsibility:
we, that is, those of us who prefer to share this world rather than perish with it,
are responsible in various ways and to various degrees for the very distinction
and distancebetween this world and its end. Before the appearance of the
end of the world as a real possibility, this choice was not ours for there were
not two options to choose from. Even the responsibility was not ours, because
without the relevant knowledge and without a God to fear and worship, we
could not have imagined that our actions could endanger the world as a whole.
But now, when the possibility of the end has been acknowledged, choosing
the world over its end has become the ground for the possibility of any other
choice and being responsible for the world has become the condition for any
other form of responsibility. The choice may still be that of isolated individual
but the responsibility is shared by many, if not by all, at least all those who
are always already responsible for each other, regardless of their choice. The
values of the differences among multiple ways of assuming responsibility for
this difference cannot be determined, let alone revoked from any single position
transcendent to this world; rather, they are up for grab, objects of contest,
struggle, and competition among all those who share this world together. The
nihilist, that is, the one who insists on revoking the values of all differences
among various courses of actions and modes of life, has excluded himself from
the web of relations among those who have affirmed their world-sharing and
their responsibility for the world they share.
We do not have to place ourselves at the very edge of being in order to
understand this. Although the thought experiment presented here is far from
being a mere fiction, the end of the world does not have to be interpreted as
a cataclysmic event involving the destructive forces of a thoroughly socialized
nature and a naturalized humanity. It may also beand it has often already
becomethe result of political powers that destroy what Hannah Arendt
called the public realm and the space of appearance, which are the life blood
of human artifice. By emptying the public realm of free speech and action,
these political powers turned the world from a human artifice into a heap
of unrelated things, within which human affairs become as floating, as futile
and vain as the wandering of nomad tribes (Arendt 1958, 204). For Arendt,
it is neither the death of God nor the physical end of the world, but rather the
loss of trust in the world, or of the capability to have a world, that gives rise to
the nihilistic moment. It is this loss and not the emergence or disappearance
of a transcendent point of reference that revokes the values of differences. The
expectation that value would be based on some transcendent ground instead
of being created, assigned, and reevaluated in an endless process of conflict,
contest, and negotiation among multiple men and women is futile. It is nothing
but an expression of giving up the shared world in which values are created
and assigned. Her reference for such nihilism is the Melancholy wisdom of
Ecclesiastes. Quoting its first lines, she adds:
[That this melancholy] does not necessarily arise from specifically religious
experience; but it is certainly unavoidable wherever trust in the world as a place
fit for human appearance, for action and speech, is gone. Without action to bring
into the play of the world the new beginning of which each man is capable by
virtue of being born, there is no new thing under the sun. Without speech to
materialize and memorialize, however tentatively, the new things that appear
and shine forth, there is no remembrance; without the enduring permanence

of human artefact, there cannot be any remembrance of things that are to
come. (Arendt 1958, 204)
Ultimately, nihilism is not the result of the fact that values have no transcendent,
solid ground, but of the fact that the space in which men and women can come
together and freely compete and negotiate over their differences has been
destroyed and therefore absolute closure and the exclusion of the unexpected
can be imagined, imposed, and trusted.7 Whatever threatens this space must
be opposed and rejected, removed or avoided. From within the depth of his
performative contradiction, the nihilist may insist on claiming that there is no
value in having a world that allows the creation of values (and meaning, and
sense, and truth), that nothing distinguishes this world from its absence. Arendt
would respond by telling him what are the conditions of having a world in which
his claim may be heard, make sense, and be remembered.
Bibliography
Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Cunningham, Conor. 2002. Genealogy of Nihilism. London: Routledge.
Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, &
the New International. London: Routledge.
. 1998. Faith and Knowledge: Two Sources of Religion at the Limits of
Reason Alone. In Religion, edited by Gianni Vattimo and Jacques Derrida, 178.
Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1968. The Will to Power. NewYork: Vintage Books.
. 2002. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Cambridge,
MA: Cambridge University Press.
. 2005. The Antichrist, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings.
Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Ophir, Adi and Ishay Rosen Zvi. Forthcoming. Paul and the Invention of the Goy.
Jewish Quarterly Review.
7
Speaking of citizens and refugees in the modern state, Arendt famously formulated the minimal
condition of human political existence as the right to have rights. In a similar vein, we may speak
about the rejection of consistent nihilismthe value of being able to create and assign valuesas
the minimal condition for having and sharing a human world.
5
Nihilism, Revolt, and the Spectacle

Blent Diken
Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never
will. But if I know not even the tail of this whale, how understand his head?
Much more, how comprehend his face, when face he has none? Thou shalt
see my back parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall not be seen. But
I cannot make out his back parts; and hint what he will about his face, I say
again he has no face.
Melville 1998, 339
This is how Melvilles narrator, Ishmael, describes the impossibility of

describing Moby Dick. The inhuman whale, in all its indifference, is a monster,
a Leviathan, which stands for the heartless voids and immensities of the
universe. Thus it is sublimated as an unspeaking, silent God with no face, with
no promise of meaning, as an already dead God, which therefore cannot be
killed (Melville 1998, 175, 310). And in as much as Ishmael cannot describe
Moby Dick, Ahab, chasing with curses a Jobs whale round the world (Melville
1998, 167), cannot kill it.
As such, Melvilles Moby Dick is a metaphor for an absurdity grounded in the
perception of an immanent world that does not possess a transcendent meaning
or generate values by itself. The first task of thinking and action in the face of
such absurdity is to affirm its existence, rather than denying it. Or, in Nietzsches
words, what is necessary is to accept existence as it is, without meaning or aim
(Nietzsche 1967, 3536). To think or to act otherwise amounts to nihilism, that
is, an inability to accept the world as it is, resenting the fact that the world is
devoid of a goal, unity, or meaning. To be able to endure the meaninglessness
and the chaos of the world, the nihilist tries to endow it with meaning, imposing
an illusionary totality upon it (Nietzsche 1967, 12; see also Lebovics chapter in
this volume on the origins of nihilism). Hence, for Nietzsche, nihilism is, in its
origin, the invention of monotheistic religions, the invention of a transcendent
God, in order to escape into a supra-sensory realm beyond earthly life, a realm
that promises consolation for the inherent absurdity of the world. As against this
nihilism, one must insist on immanence: ours is a world without an external
cause or a final purpose, a world of becoming (see Nietzsche 1967, 3536). This
does not mean, however, that one should resign to the absurd. Then, how can one
negate the absurd without becoming a nihilist? Revolt, at a first approximation,
is the answer to this question.
Radical and passive
A concept grounded in the problem of nihilism, revolt is a leap into flight out
of the absurd (Camus 1953, 270). In this sense revolt is productive; it produces
value. But it is also destructive for what is at stake here is of a pragmatic
nature, the principle according to which values are produced. Therefore, every
revolt inevitably involves a practical destruction, the annihilation of existing
nihilistic dogmas.
To be sure, this rebellious, destructive no is partly a rational gesture (see
Marcuse 1955, 26). However, reason is not the last word on revolt. Revolt is also
a question of will and drive, an act that does not justify itself through reason.
Revolt has its own (virtual) sense; it has no other (actual) reasons. In this sense,
the will to negate is only one side of revolt. Its other side is affirmation. Each
dramatization, each repetition of revolt produces a difference, a creative excess,
that is, new values, which is also a Dionysian transmutation of pain into joy,
of hatred into love (Deleuze 1983, 173). Yet, if revolt ceases to involve such
an affirmative moment, the tension between the virtual potentialities and the
actual reality can only be resolved into an abstract nothingness. Hence the test
of revolt: the transformation of will into creativity. Then, the will is not the last
word on revolt either:
To redeem the past and to transform every It was into an I wanted it thus!
that alone I call redemption! Willthat is what the liberator and bringer of joy
is called: thus I have taught you, my friends! But now learn this as well: The will
itself is still a prisoner. Willing liberates: but what is it that fastens and fetters
even the liberator? It was: that is what the wills teeth-gnashing and most lonely
affliction is called. Powerless against that which has been done, the will is an
Nihilism, Revolt, and the Spectacle 81
angry spectator of all things past. The will cannot will backwards; that it cannot
break time and times desirethat is the wills most lonely affliction. (Nietzsche
1961, 161)
Insofar as revolt is redemption from absurdity, it cannot be based only on
will. In case of such an attempt, there are two dangers that lie in wait for the
prisoner. First, the will can release itself in a foolish way, through nihilistic
revenge, which is nothing other than the wills antipathy towards time: one
concludes that, since one cannot undo the past, everything deserves to pass
away (Nietzsche 1961, 162). Ahab, for instance, in his delirious revolt against
Moby Dick, is devastated by his own hatred. He is prepared, for hates sake, to
risk everything, including his crew and his ship, to spit his last breath at the
whale (Melville 1998, 507). But his passion for revenge destroys Ahab himself
before Moby Dick. What is at issue here is the ambivalence of event: one can
burn with fire as well as leap with it (Melville 1998, 450). Give not thyself up,
then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee (Melville 1998, 380).
But there is a second, equally sinister danger: realizing that no deed can
be undone, the will pacifies itself; willing becomes not-willing (Nietzsche 1961,
162). This is the case with Ishmael. If Ahab is a woe that is madness, Ishmael is
the wisdom that is a woe (Melville 1998, 380; see also Friedman 1963, 451). If
Ahab is ready to sacrifice actual existence for the sake of touching the void, the
virtual, Ishmael is willing to sacrifice the virtual to be able to open up a space
for himself in the actual. He perceives that his own individuality is merged in
a joint stock company on the ship, in society, and, on this basis, he can develop
a critique of Ahabs spiteful destructiveness (Melville 1998, 287). Yet Ishmael,
the only member of the crew who is saved and thus returns to the land, does
not offer an alternative point of view to Ahab nor succeed in the quest for truth
where Ahab fails (Friedman 1963, 91). For Ishmael, like Nietzsches last man,
time is an empty movement just as life is a pointless process, a burning ship,
moving toward an ultimate catastrophe (Friedman 1963, 86; Melville 1998, 378).
And this lack of perspective is also a lack of will. After all, interpretation, the
ability to construct a perspective, new values, requires a subject, a personality,
that can actively evaluate the world. Yet, in modernity God is dead, and action
has become impossible. In an indifferent, absurd world, in which he no longer
can believe, Ishmael turns into an alienated, passive spectator:
The link between man and the world is broken. Henceforth, this link must
become an object of beliefOnly belief in the world can reconnect man to
what he sees and hears. (Deleuze 1989, 171172)
The problem of revolt against nihilism is to reestablish this link. If this link
is to be reestablished through the reaffirmation of this world, of belief in it,
Ishmael is not able to make this leap of faith. Hence, just as Ahab devalues the
actual world, Ishmael devalues values as such. Ahabs leap leads him to self-
destruction, Ishmaels inability to risk such a leap condemns him to passivity:
radical nihilism versus passive nihilism, two inappropriate answers to the
question of nihilism, two unsuccessful attempts at revolt.
If, in its origin, nihilism is a will to escape from the immanent chaos to
a transcendent, illusory world, with modernity, or, with the death of God,
this originary nihilism divides itself into two: radical and passive nihilism. The
first insists on transcendence by taking the negation of this world to its logical
extreme, the annihilation of the actual; the second, becoming content with
the actual world, gives up its virtual dimension. There is therefore a strange
symmetry between the two nihilisms, between (Ahabs) willing nothingness
and (Ishmaels) annihilation of will. Two opposite tendencies juxtaposed to each
other in the same social space, paradoxically united in disjunction, disjointed in
union. Thus Nietzsches definition of a nihilist reads like this: A nihilist is a man
who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought
to be that it does not exist (Nietzsche 1967, 318). If existing values are devalued
while, at the same time, this world is preserved, we encounter passive nihilism,
or, a world without values (Deleuze 1983, 148). If, on the other hand, despite
realizing that ones supreme values are not realizable, one still desperately clings
to them, we confront radical nihilism: values without a world.
Has been, to come
Revolt, then, must break this deadlock between radical and passive nihilism, and
it can do so only on the basis of affirmation. What is crucial is the passage from
the will to affirmation, the central concern of Nietzsches doctrine of eternal
return: to propose fidelity to immanence as the source of all values, remaining
true to the earth (Nietzsche 1961, 42). It is only by saying yes to all that has
been and to everything to come that immanence can be affirmed absolutely.
A spirit thus emancipated stands in the midst of the universe with a joyful and
trustful fatalism, in the faith that only what is separate and individual may be
rejected, that in the totality everything is redeemed and affirmedhe no longer
denies. (Nietzsche 1969, 103)
As such, the temporality of the eternal return promises a redemption, which

is very different from redemption in its Christian version. This cosmology goes
against the monotheistic thesis that time had a beginning and will have an end,
that the world was created and will be annihilated on the Judgment Day. In
contrast, Zarathustra preaches a world that is in becoming, a world one should
return to in order to overcome nihilism (Hass 1982, 224). In the doctrine of
eternal return, there is no conclusion to historical time. The temporality of
eternal return is fundamentally opposed to the understanding of time as a linear
flow, of history as continuous progress. Indeed, for Nietzsche, nihilism itself
signifies a regress rather than progress, a situation in which reactive (passive)
forces triumph over the active ones (see Nietzsche 1967, 55).
If it is the same world, the world of difference and becoming, that eternally
repeats itself and gives birth to nonlinear change, what matters in such a world is
trying to seize each moment, to be fully present in it, that is, to repeat. Repetition,
the event, requires both a forgetting of the past, a disconnection from the given,
and simultaneously a belief in a connection to what is to come. Thus Nietzsche
describes the eternal return as a gateway that connects two opposing paths,
two eternities: the past and the future, what has been and what is to come
(Nietzsche 1961, 178). The gateway is of course the present moment. Eternal
return is about following the two paths further and further, until they cease to
be in opposition, until the present appears like a straight line, limitless in either
direction (Deleuze 1990, 165). Through this movement, the future ceases to be
something that can be achieved by going forward in chronological time. Rather,
one moves into the future by retracing, reinterpreting the past with a view to
raising it to a higher level, through the deconstruction and reappropriation of
the past (see Rosen 1995, 188).
Life becomes meaningful only through repetition. The ability to repeat is
to mark life with the sign of eternity. Was that life? Well then! Once more!
(Nietzsche 1961, 178). In this sense the creation of value in an immanent,
meaningless world is a matter of choice, of affirmation, without any objective
ground. Nevertheless, it is possible to live in a world without values, as the
last man does, and be content with it. The life of the last man is in fact a life
as it is, a life without the possibility of change or a life of an eternal chain of
absurdities (Hass 1982, 216). His is a world in which everything is repeated
as bare repetition, without difference or consequence: bare repetition as a
curse, a sign of resignation vis--vis the absurd (Nietzsche 1967, 38; see also
Ophir and Ben-Shais chapters in this volume). Repetition as eternal return,
in contrast, aims at overcoming such bare repetition. It is what enables an

antinihilist revolt that promises new values.
Cheerful separation
As is well known, Benjamin depicts history as a pile of pseudo-events, the

indistinct flow of chronological, empty time as a catastrophe. Hence his
modernity is a mobile hell, the ideal of which is bare repetition. In turn, only
redemption can fill time by linking the present to the whole of the past
(Benjamin 1999, 245). Redemption, revolution, is a leap into the past, an act of
tearing the past from its context, destroying it, in order to return it, transfigured,
to its origin (Agamben 1999, 152; Benjamin 1999, 253255). Thus, if history
repeats itself as farce, if in pseudo-history the tragic reappears as comedy, this is
not necessarily a reason for melancholic detachment but rather an occasion for
a joyful separationhistory has this course so that humanity should part with
its past cheerfully (Marx 1975, 179; see also Agamben 1999, 154). Happiness
is a cheerful separation from pseudo-history, from bare repetition.
In this context, Benjamin draws a sharp distinction between the empty time
of chronology and the time of the event. The time of revolution is the messianic
time. But he insists that there is no direct path from theology to the political
(Benjamin 1979b, 155). Nothing actual can relate to the virtual by itself and the
actual cannot be constituted on the idea of the virtual. This, however, does not
mean that there is no mediation between the two. Kairos is what mediates the
two domains. The moment when the actual world touches the virtual domain,
when they interlock, is the kairos (Taubes 2009, 68).
As such, kairos, the time of revolution, is opposed to chronological time.
But it is not external to it. Rather, it is an operational time internal to
chronology, transforming it from within (Agamben 2005a, 68). As the temporal
dimension of the event, kairos signifies the timing of actualization, that is, the
recognition, articulation, and the decision to seize the moment. It is the moment
of opportunity, which can be grasped by a strategic decision, by an untimely
intervention, on the basis of reading the symptoms, signs, available in a given
situation; acting into time to change the course of time (Dillon 2008, 13; see
also Lebovics chapter in this volume).
But why, in the first place, is it necessary to seize the moment? It is necessary
because there is a promise involved in kairos: the promise of the new. Significantly,
however, this promissory aspect of kairos is not necessarily messianic in a

religious sense; kairos is not the Messiah (see Dillon 2008, 14). Messianism is
not necessarily a religious experience. What is irreducible in this messianism
without religion is an experience of the emancipatory promise (Derrida
1994, 74). This promise is an absolutely undetermined messianic hope, that
is, its content is not, in contrast to religion, determined. In this respect there
is a crucial difference between religious repetition and the repetition specific
to nonreligious messianism. In religious repetition, a pre-established identity
(e.g., the child of Abraham, the resurrected body, the recovered self) returns
and does so once and for all; in the eternal return, in contrast, what returns
returns for an infinite number of times, without bringing back any readymade
identity, without restoring the self, the world, and God (see Deleuze 1990,
301). The alterity of that which returns in nonreligious messianism cannot
be foreseen; what is to come, the future, remains unpredictable, that is, new.
The Last Judgment will not occur. Instead, the messianic return demands
a messianic opening to what is coming, that is, to the event that cannot be
awaited as such, or recognized in advance (Derrida 1994, 81). Nonreligious
messianism is a call, a promise of the new independent of the monotheistic
religions, for it holds to the antinihilist belief that faith without religion is
possible (Derrida 2004).
The double of kairos
Can power seize or capture kairos, too? This is what Benjamin suggests by
juxtaposing two versions of the state of exception: the actual state of exception
in which we live and a real one, which can redeem us from the first (Benjamin
1999, 248). There is, in other words, a homology between kairos (as the time of
the eventof revolt) and the state of exception (see Agamben 2005b, 2).
The reoccurrence of nature within society, the state of exception, is the
necessary background for political theology. And crucially in this respect,
the three characteristics that the law displays in the state of exceptionthe
disappearance of the insideoutside divide, the unobservability of the law, and
its unformulabilityappear in the kairological deactivation of the law, too.
Pauls messianism is a case in point. Here, the messianic figure of the law, the
law of faith, which can be rendered as justice without law, also suspends the
law through deactivation, while this deactivation does not eliminate the law,
reducing it to nothing, but preserves it, opening up a space of indeterminacy

between the inside and the outside (Agamben 2005a, 100). The consequence of
this is the unobservability of the law, which finds its expression in the radical
shortening of Mosess commandment (Do not desire the woman, the house, the
slave, the muleof thy neighbor) by Paul as Do not desire (Agamben 2005a,
108). Since this is not really a commandment, what follows is the Kafkaesque
impossibility of observing or formulating a clear prohibition; instead, the law
is only the knowledge of guilt (Agamben 2005a, 108). And significantly, such
unobservability can only be restored by faith. Thus Paul divides the law into two,
into a this-worldly law of sin on the one hand and a law of faith on the other, thus
rendering it inoperative and unobservablehe can then fulfill and recapitulate
the law in the figure of love (Agamben 2005a, 108).
Following this, the political task is not to restore the link between exception
and the law, reaffirming the primacy of the law, for instance by trying to bring
the state of exception back to the domain of the law. The state of exception is
not an accidental addition to the workings of power but its central aspect, its
fundamental secret. What is necessary is to bring to light this secret, to illuminate
the tension between life and the law (Agamben 2005b, 8687).
Regarding this tension, the contrast between Schmitt and Benjamin is
illuminating. Benjamin divides the concept of exception into two by juxtaposing
to Schmitts exception another, an exception to exception itself, or, a real
exception. Whereas Schmitt wants to legitimize state power, or counterrevolution
in general, Benjamin criticizes it. Schmitts thought is katechontic, conservative;
Benjamins eschatological, revolutionary. Whereas in Schmitt exception is the
political kernel of the law, it becomes revolutionary or divine violence in
Benjamin.
If mythic violence is law-making, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former
sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythical violence brings
at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens,
the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood.
(Benjamin 1979a, 150151)
Like Gods judgment, revolutionary violence strikes the privileged without

warning, annihilates without threat, but, in annihilation, also expiates the
guilt of bare life, purifying the guilty (not of guilt but) of law as such: mythical
violence is bloody power over mere life for its own sake, divine violence is pure
power over all life for the sake of the living (Benjamin 1979a, 150151). But
what is the precise meaning of guilt here?
Nihilism as government
Just as sovereignty, governmentality too is rooted in theology. Significantly in

this respect, through Christian theology (at the end of the classical civilization),
the Greek term oikonomia has moved into the theological field, signifying
a divine design, the divine plan of salvation (Agamben 2011, 20). As such,
oikonomia is the theological answer to the question of what is to be done in
a world ontologically created by God and must be redeemed by the religious
praxis of a separate person, the Son. This is also to say that the economy, praxis,
has no foundation in ontology (Agamben 2011, 65). However, praxis (the Son)
must be related to ontology (God). God and his government of the world must
be brought together. Hence the significance of the concept of free will, which,
Nietzsche insisted, was fabricated by monotheistic religions to make humanity
accountable to a transcendent God (Nietzsche 1969, 53). Through this concept,
which is in agreement with the theological oikonomia (Agamben 2011, 56),
the Christian monotheism seeks to overcome the Gnostic split between two
Gods, and to unite Gods creation and government of the world. In this sense,
insofar as it sought to reconcile a transcendent God, which is inoperative in
relation to the existing world, and a savior/redeemer as the ruler of the world,
Christian theology is not only political but also economic-managerial from
the start (Agamben 2011, 66). The apolitical paradigm of governmentality has
political consequences.
Crucially, this relation between ontology and praxis, sovereignty and
governmentality does not constitute a dialectic that results in a synthesis. Rather,
it constitutes a bipolar machine, whose unity always runs the risk of collapsing
and must be acquired again at each turn (Agamben 2011, 62). Or, a disjunctive
synthesis, in which the two poles can neither be united nor fully separated. The
King/God reigns but does not administer, a task beyond his dignity. At the same
time, however, his power cannot be separated from him. That is, the two poles
are not completely unrelated either; they operate together, within the same
functional system (Agamben 2011, 79).
Here we also arrive at the point at which political and economic theology
intersect: glory. Power needs the spectacle. Acclamations, protocols, ceremonies,
exclamations of praise, often accompanied by ritually repeated bodily gestures,
are indispensable to power because they form a public opinion and express
consensus (Agamben 2011, 169170). In its Judaic origin, glory signifies the
manifestation, becoming visible of God as a consuming (thus blinding) fire. In
this sense it is an objective aspect of the divine. At the same time, however,
it has a subjective dimension: the glorification of this divine reality by Gods
subjects, by human praxis. In this sense, glorification stems from the glory
that, in truth, it founds (Agamben 2011, 199). Glory, the spectacle, is what
establishes the link between the Kingdom and oikonomia, between sovereignty
and governmentality. Thus it does not disappear with increasing modernization;
rather, it shifts to the domain of public opinion, or consensus, as the modern
way of acclamation: Contemporary democracy is a democracy that is entirely
founded upon glory, that is, on the efficacy of acclamation, multiplied and
disseminated by the media beyond all imagination (Agamben 2011, 256). Ours
is a democracy of the spectacle.
Let us open a parenthesis regarding the spectacle here. If the originary,
religious nihilism, which, according to Nietzsche, negates this world by
juxtaposing it to a heavenly, true one, and tries to justify its illusions as reason,
truth, supreme values, this is also to say that nihilism is a philosophy of illusion
(Hass 1982, 16). As is well known, for Marx, too, religion consists in illusion; it
is the illusory sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve
round himself (Marx 1957, 42). Religion has always been instrumental for
humans to articulate real social and political distress, but even when it expresses
a reality in this way, religion is the opium of the people (Marx 1957, 42). Thus
only lack of illusions in the head of workers could correspond to their lack of
property (Engels 1957, 270). Significantly, however, despite its genealogical tie
with monotheistic religions, nihilism cannot be reduced to them. Illusion does
not disappear with modernity or secularization; the end of religious nihilism
is not, automatically, the end of nihilism. Indeed, this primordial link between
nihilism and illusion remains a constant today. In Debords society of spectacle,
for instance, the spectacle signifies the manifestation of the commodity form,
the material construction of the religious illusion (Debord 1983, 20). Yet, while
for Debord capitalism is the engine of the spectacle, with Agamben (2011) one
can claim that the originary link is not only between capitalism and the spectacle
but rather, and more generally, between political theology and oikonomia,
and thus between their secularized forms, that is, between sovereignty and
governmentality.
Then, insofar as contemporary liberal democracy designates consensus
politics, it is worth recalling that what is glorified in a neoliberal world in
which people can imagine the end of the world but not that of capitalism (see
iek 2009, 78) is first and foremost capitalism itself. In this regard, it might
be illuminating to rethink to the relationship between religion and capitalism.

After all, theology persists as an active force in modern economy. Capitalism
and Christianity are structurally linked together. Weber (2003) discusses the
relation between Christianity and capitalism in two directions: on the one hand,
the protestant ethic was a cause, a precondition for the development of capitalist
economy and culture; on the other, the Protestant Christianity itself was a result
of capitalism. The question is though whether a third sphere articulates their
relation (see Hamacher 2002, 86). That third sphere is debt, or, guilt. Hence
Benjamin insists that capitalism is a religion, a cult religion that does not expiate
but produces guilt.
An enormous feeling of guilt not itself knowing how to repent, grasps at the
cult, not in order to repent for this guilt, but to make it universal, to hammer it
to consciousness and finally and above all to include God himself in this guilt, in
order to finally interest him in repentance. (Benjamin 1996, 259)
How is God himself included in guilt? How is debt turned against the
creditor himself? Indeed, the stroke of genius on the part of Christianity is
precisely the invention of a God that sacrifices himself for the guilt of humans,
a God that pays himself off: the creditor sacrificing himself for his debtor, out
of love (are we supposed to believe this?) out of love for his debtor (Nietzsche
1969, 72)!
Just as the religious economy presupposes a guilty god, capitalism as religion
(Benjamin 1996) presupposes a god in debt. It is through the mechanism of debt
(credit) that value begets surplus value, a process that resembles a gods genesis
out of something that is not, a gods self-generation out of nothing (Hamacher
2002, 92). Thus, in Marx, the law of value functions as an abstract law that
governs the relations of equivalence among commodities, as a transcendent
moment within the immanent relations of equivalence. Money is therefore
the god among commodities (Marx 1993, 221). The paradox here consists in
the movement through which the abstract value becomes totally value-free,
or, valueless: abstract capital that seeks out further capital accumulation
whenever, wherever, regardless of whatever. Ultimately, therefore, the concept
of value can say nothing on value, or rather, nothing other than surplus value. In
this sense, the capitalist concept of value is nihilistic. The world of capitalism is
essentially a world without value. However, this cynicism must not be mistaken
as the absence of a religious dimension in capitalism. It is coupled with the cult,
with a strange piety, which functions like a spiritualized Urstaat, enabling the
illusion that all production in a capitalist society emanates from God-capital

(Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 225). Capitalism posits an infinite debt to capital,
which is the fetish object, the body without organs of the capitalist society.
Just as the sovereign miracle in political theology, capital is that which performs
miracles in economic theology.
Indeed, this strange piety also constitutes an eschatology in the sense that
capital is always also an anticipation of an imagined future (Goodchild 2005,
143). Capital is always something to come, the promise of a future-return in
the form of profit. And insofar as the promise or the future is linked to credit
(credos), one can say that capitalism (does not only level but also) creates beliefs
and desires. In this respect capital reveals itself as the truth of oikonomia rather
than a deviation from it. Credit, debt to the future, thus appears as kairos, that
which mediates ontology and praxis.
Religion, says Feuerbach, takes over the best qualities of humans and
allocates them to God, affirming in God what is negated in man (Feuerbach
1989, 27). Hence the paradox of religious alienation: the more God is valued,
the more human life is devalued. Marx repeats the same logic in 1844
Manuscripts, where he depicts capital as a source of economic alienation: the
more wealth the workers produce in capitalism, the poorer they become (Marx
2007, 119). But where does this process originate? The original accumulation,
which is not the result of capitalist production but rather the starting point of
all accumulation processes, was called by Adam Smith previous accumulation.
Marx says that primitive accumulation plays approximately the same role in
political economy as original sin does in theology (Marx 1976, 363). In this
fictional phase (reminiscent of the state of nature in political theology), we
are told, while the diligent and intelligent accumulated wealth, the lazy rascals
were condemned to poverty, a situation in which they have nothing to sell
except their own skins (Marx 1976, 363). As such, the starting-point of capital
is divorcing the producer from the means of production, his expropriation
from the soil. Just as religion captures what is profane and sacralizes it through
glorification, capitalism captures the commons and commodifies them through
the spectacle.
Just as religion demands the infinite increase (subjective glorification as
infinite guilt) of what cannot be increased (objective glory of God), capitalism
demands infinite accumulation (subjective glorification of capital) of what
is beyond human agency (objective glory of abstract capital). In both cases
glorification iswhat produces glory (Agamben 2011, 216, 227). And in
both cases the paradox is a cover for the fact that the center of the machine
is empty. Similarly, in both cases what is at stake is human life, which is
inoperative, that is, without purpose (Agamben 2011, 245246). Its essence
is non-utilitarian play. The human is the Sabbatical animal par excellence
(Agamben 2011, 246). What religion does is to capture this inoperativity and
inscribe it in a religious sphere by sacralizing it, only to ration it, to partially
return it in the form of the sabbath, a situation in which all work, all
economy, ceases to exist and everything falls back upon inoperativity, which
eschatology waits for. What capitalism does is to capture the multitudes
inoperativity, its freedom, and inscribe it in a utilitarian sphere, only to
partially return it as permitted freedom, as holiday, which is the main promise
of work in capitalism. A post-political promise, in which work (hell) is
replaced by play (paradise).
The ass festival
Toward the end of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, we meet some of Zarathustras

guests who all think they have unlearned from Zarathustra the religious
sentiment, the despair that follows from feeling weak in this world and prompts
humans to imagine a transcendent heaven in which pain and antagonism
no longer exist. Thus, they are in the carnival mood. Yet, Nietzsche makes it
clear that killing God is not enough to get rid of him. A materialist, hedonist
world is prone to new, this-worldly illusions, even new gods and idols. At
one point in the carnival, therefore, the noise abruptly stops and, precisely
when they think they have overcome it, the crowd falls back upon a religious
mood. They have all become pious again, they are praying, they are mad!
(Nietzsche 1961, 321). But what they worship is a this-worldly God: an ass.
They explain that the ass carries their burden, he is patient, and never says
No, indeed he never speaks, and so on. Better to worship God in this shape
than in no shape at all (Nietzsche 1961, 322). In Zarathustra, it is the ugliest
man, the passive nihilist, who has murdered God and delivers the tribute to
the ass that has created the world after his own image, that is, as stupid as
possible (Nietzsche 1961, 322). In the contemporary liberal democracy, too,
providence takes its cue from men: the ass is embodied in utilitarianism, and
the desire for change, for transfiguration, has disappeared into the cry of the
ass. Ours is a society that plays one side of the bipolar machine against the
other, pushing to an extreme the administrative logic of economic theology, to

a point of eliminating the transcendent God/Kingdom. In this sense:
Modernity, removing God from the world, has not only failed to leave theology
behind, but in some ways has done nothing other than to lead the project of
the providential oikonomia to completion. (Agamben 2011, 287)
Crucially in this respect, as it generates consensus, the spectacle also

functions as the katechon, as that which keeps the event at bay by delaying the
catastrophe. After all, the straightforward aspect of all counterrevolutionary
thought is its definition of the existing world as an invariant and its direct
opposition to ideas that promise another world. But in a second, more sinister and
more interesting sense, the katechon signifies the revision, internal perversion
of, rather than opposition to, eschatological ideas. It designates not merely an
external force but a strategic field of formation in which the struggle revolves
around appropriating, accommodating, and revising ideas and principles. In
this second sense, the possibility of counterrevolution exists within revolution.
Thus, in the context of oikonomia, the economy of mystery (the economy of
the event) constantly risks becoming revised into the mystery of economy. While
economy originally, in Paul for instance, signifies the necessary administration
of activities in the service of realizing Gods will, in the Trinitarian theology
economy itself tends to become mysterious. That is, economy coincides with
governmentality, thus reconciling a transcendent God with the administration
of this world (Agamben 2011, 3839, 5051). In this essentially revisionist
process, the actual (economy) tends to take place of the virtual (mystery). And
in the horizon of permanent economy pragmatism dominates and utopian
politics is suspended.
Let us, to exemplify, turn to contemporary post-politics. As a political way
of emptying out the political, post-politics is a particular form of politics in
which already recognized groups negotiate interests without challenging the
hegemonic relations. Thus consensus is the essence of post-politics, provided
that consensus is not thought of only as the avoidance of conflict. At a deeper
level, it is an agreement regarding the terms of disagreement (see Rancire
2010, 144). That is, consensus allows one to have different opinions, to disagree,
criticize, but only in a given framework of sensibility, which is effectively
justified each time such permitted critique takes place. Ultimately, therefore,
post-politics designates a society that cannot imagine radical events; a society,
in which the political loses its constitutive (virtual) dimension and is reduced
to (actual) governmentality. But this is not the whole story. Despite its negation
of the political, of antagonistic politics, post-politics is not unrelated to it. So,
we are witnessing in post-politics also the revival of sovereignty as a radical,
ultrapolitical version of the disavowal of the political by depoliticizing conflicts
via direct militarization of politics and sublimation of order as an absolute
value in the Schmittian sense (see iek 1999). When politics is foreclosed, bare
life becomes the main object of politics. Sovereign violence and post-politics
are thus complementary ideological operations (iek 2008, 34). This uneasy
relationship is mediated around an obligatory point of passage: a domesticated,
trivialized version of messianism.
According to the apocalyptic tradition, worldly powers cannot become
holy, for the holy is, precisely, the measure of the God to come (Taubes
2009, 194). In this radical sense, the idea of messianic apocalypse cannot
be really assimilated by sovereignty. Thus it is revised and transformed. A
double movement is visible in this context: while it sacralizes power through
political theology, modernity also secularizes eschatology, excluding it by
accommodating it (Bradley and Fletcher 2010, 2). This tamed, decaf version of
eschatological apocalypse, fit for a passive nihilist society, is also the blind spot
of contemporary liberal democracy. Consider Fukuyamas neo-evangelistic
good news that the end of history has arrived, that all regimes in the world,
including dictatorships, now evolve toward liberal democracy (Fukuyama
1992, xiixiii, 212). On the one hand, this thesis sacralizes a particular, actual
expression of temporal power, the market, turning it into the telos of history
(Bradley and Fletcher 2010, 2). But on the other hand, this divinized liberal
democracy is distinguished from its empirical manifestations, arguing that it
is a trans-historical, that is, an infinite, virtual idea that cannot be reduced to
its actual, finite manifestations or delegitimized by use of empirical evidence
(see Fukuyama 1992, 139; see also Derrida 1994, 86). As such, the eschatology-
light does not really exclude the dialectic between the actual and the virtual/
transcendent. Rather, it flattens it so that the idea loses its power of destroying
and transvaluating what exists, becoming instead the potentiality of an already
sacralized liberal democracy.
A similar flattening is visible in contemporary social theory. Consider, for
instance, the actor-network theory as domesticated version of poststructuralism.
The actor-network theory, one of the most popular contemporary theories,
insists that action must be understood in terms of mediation in a continuous
network of associations (Latour 1996a, 237). Society consists only of networks:
there is nothing but networks (Latour 1996b, 370). The social is a flatland,
which is only made of lines (Latour 2005, 172). Therefore, at first sight the
actor-network theory sounds close to Deleuze, who also insists that lines are
basic component of things and events (Deleuze 1995, 33). But whereas Latours
lines are only actual, actualized virtualities (Latour 2005, 59), for Deleuze
there are always two kinds of lines, actual and virtual, which constantly interact
to produce virtualizations of the actual as well as actualized virtualities, without
the virtual becoming fully actualized.
To be fair, Latour has a concept that is similar to the virtual: plasma,
which signifies the necessary but incomplete and open-ended background,
the outside, for every networking activity (Deleuze 2005, 242243). As that
which is not yet measured, not yet socializedor subjectified (Deleuze 2005,
244), plasma cannot be captured by concepts of actuality. Thus the concept in
a way affirms the significance of the virtual, or, testifies to the fact that there
is more to the world than networks. Crucially, however, this concept is not
really operationalized and thus remains a residual category, a kind of ersatz
virtuality. In this specific sense, Latours ontology is a revisionist ontology, the
formula of which could be: Deleuze minus the virtual. Unsurprisingly, therefore,
Latour insists on economy: There is no other world [] there is no longer any
particular mystery (Latour 2010, 35, 97). Indeed, we have never been modern
for we have ignored the spectacle, the factish point of passage between fiction
and reality. We have ignored the spectacle because we have misunderstood the
second commandment, the ban on images:
God did not ask us not to make images (what else do we have to produce
objectivity, to generate piety?) but he told us not to freeze-frame, that is, not to
isolate an image out of the flows that only provide them with their realtheir
constantly re-realized, re-representedmeaning. (Latour 2010, 123)
Interestingly, this defense of the image (and thus the spectacle) brings
to mind the Byzantine defenses of the icon. Nikephoros, for instance, argues
against the iconoclasts, who refer to the second commandment, by claiming
that it is because Jews are by nature idolators that they were ordered not to
make graven images (quoted in Mondzain 2005, 109). In the same way, Latour
seeks to turn the iconoclasts weapon against himself. Consequently, the ban on
images is referred to those who cannot distinguish the icon (which represents
the divine without emptying it out in the actual image) and idol (which replaces
the divine by freeze-framing).
It is as if, since economy is focused on the incarnation of visibilities (e.g.,

actualization of the virtual), which is indispensable to the administration
of the temporal reality, the economic model tends to prioritize actualization.
As a consequence, while the mystery moves from the side of the virtual/
transcendent to the actual/temporal, the role of virtualization, of counter-
actualization, is evacuated. Following this, the virtual appears to be exhausted
once the act of actualization has taken place, and the dialectic of the actual and
the virtual is blurred.
Kairos and counter-actualization
An actual event takes two forms. First, the actor actualizes the event by seizing
the moment, by saying here, the moment has come (Deleuze 1990, 151). There
is, however, another aspect of the event, which goes beyond actualization. The
actor, too, is transformed in the process. As a result of acting, he deviates from
himself, his actual identity, through a process of counter-actualization (see
Deleuze 1990, 151). The physical actualization of the event in the state of affairs
is doubled by the actor through a counter-actualization. And it is precisely
through the latter, through a metamorphosis, a transmutation, that the actor
becomes the actor of ones own events (Deleuze 1990, 150). One must be
transformed, become intoxicated by the moment while one seeks to seize it.
One must become worthy of the event (Deleuze 1990, 148). In this way, the
two sides of the event, together, give us a full definition of ethics: not to be
unworthy of what happens to us (Deleuze 1990, 149). In this sense kairos is an
act that forms ones ethos, an ethical act: being in the moment, one is formed
by the moment. Which is also to say that the decision-making at work in kairos
is not merely a strategic, rational act; while one seizes the moment, one must
also be seized by the moment. Confronted with the potentiality of the event,
the promise of the new, one must be able to affirm this potentiality. To use
Nietzsches phrase, you become what you are in kairos. Therefore, the problem
of kairos is never merely an administrative problem. Kairos requires fidelity
too; it demands an appropriate response from the subject that is constituted
in the very moment of response. Thus what is really at stake in kairos is to
interweave seizing with being seized, strategic timing of the event with
fidelity to the event for without such fidelity the very opening of the world
itself is endangered (Dillon 2008, 1314).
Following this, politics does not need to choose between seizing the moment
(economy) and intoxication, being seized by the moment (pure politics). What
if, indeed, this is a false dichotomy, thereby a false choice, and therefore a trap for
true politics? What if, in other words, the relationship between utopianism and
strategic calculation, for instance, does not necessarily point toward a split,
an antinomy, but rather to an aporia intrinsic to the temporality of the event,
kairos?
Both sides of the kairosstrategy and intoxication, calculus and conviction,
knowledge and faithare necessary. Strategy without intoxication (passive
nihilism) is as useless as intoxication without strategy (radical nihilism). This
is the fundamental problem with conservative and revisionist theories of
revolution: they can think of this aporia only in terms of antinomy. Weber,
for instance, approaches the split between strategy and intoxication as an
antinomy, as a contradiction between the ethic of conviction and the
ethic of responsibility. Thus, he claims, confronted with the inherent ethical
irrationality of the world (Weber 1958, 125), all political action has to make a
choice between two opposed maxims: it can either justify itself with reference
to an ethic of ultimate ends, to an absolute ethic that does not ask questions
regarding consequencesfor example, the dogmatic Christian act does rightly
and leaves the results with the Lordor, assuming the burden of decision-
making, follows the maxim of an ethic of responsibility, in which case, one has
to give an account of foreseeable results of ones actions (Weber 1958, 120). This
is, as Weber formulates it, also a choice between saying my kingdom is not of
this world and adaptation to the sociological reality of modernity, in which
case all talk of revolution is farce, every thought of abolishing the domination
of man by man by any kind of socialist social system or the most elaborated
form of democracy a utopia (quoted in Callinicos 2007, 22). Webers choice
is thus ultimately between two renunciations, between renouncing the existing
world in the name of an idea or renouncing an idea in the name of the existing
world, between values without facts or facts without values, or, between
radical nihilism and passive nihilism. Whenever the gap between strategy and
intoxication is seen as an antinomy rather than aporia, this choice appears as
blackmail: either, or.
Precisely, therefore, it is necessary to insist on aporia rather than antinomy
(Derrida 1993, 16). On the one hand, an engagement with the actual, a strategic
calculus, is necessary. On the other hand, however, intoxication is equally
indispensable for if you lose faith there is no point in engaging in radical politics.
Both sides of kairos are vital and thus what matters is to keep them in relation.
And since this relation cannot be a dialectical relation, since a synthesis is
impossible or will result in antinomy, the relationship must be thought of as a
disjunctive synthesis.
But, it is not enough, either, to say that this aporia must be maintained, for it
will result in the infinite deferral of actualization. Therefore, finally, the aporia
must be overcome in praxis, in actual repetition of the idea. In Nietzsche, the
figure of overcoming is the eternal return, the only way to get out of the deadlock
of radical and passive nihilism, which necessarily involves a self-overcoming, the
perishing of the nihilist. In Marx, communism is what overcomes the vicious
circle of revolution and counterrevolution, a process, which, again, abolishes
the subject (the proletariat). Crucially, in both perspectives, what are overcome
are false antagonisms and thus false choices. The false antagonisms, in this sense,
provide the space for repetition: the false choice between radical and passive
nihilism exists so that the nihilist can perish, overcome himself; farce is there so
that one can cheerfully destroy it. This is why radical politics always starts with
questioning the consensus in a given social space. Free thinking always involves
going beyond given questions.
Conclusion: Art instead of Gods art
If the history of nihilism is the history of the illusion, it seems today that we have
gone through the full circle of nihilism, at the end of which the illusion of the
real world has disappeared:
we have abolished the real world: what world is left? the apparent world
perhaps?But no! with the real world we have also abolished the apparent
world! Mid-day; moment of the shortest shadow; end of the longest error; zenith
of mankind(Nietzsche 1969, 41)
In other words, overcoming the metaphysical juxtaposition of this world to

the real world, is not enough. The moment of the shortest shadow is a world
without value and meaning, a life without a virtual dimension. Which is why, for
Nietzsche, the artistic will to illusion is more profound, more divine, than the
will to truth. It is the only activity that can replace oikonomia, Gods art (see
Mondzain 2005, 13, 115; see also Mor and Manns chapters in this volume). After
all, illusions (fictions) are necessary to live. Illusion is not merely an irreality or
nonreality; rather, as in il-ludere in Latin, it is a play upon, a challenge to actual

reality (Baudrillard 1993b, 140). Only, illusions must not, as nihilism does, be
treated as abstract truths. There is nothing behind the spectacle. The spectacle
is the nihilist veil that hides the nothing behind power. This is why the empty
throne is the symbol of glory.
The apparatus of glory finds its perfect cipher in the majesty of the empty throne.
Its purpose is to capture within the governmental machine that unthinkable
inoperativitymaking it its internal motorthat constitutes the ultimate mystery
of divinity. (Agamben 2011, 245)
The spectacle does not only mask a reality but also an absence. Indeed, the
secret of power, the spectacle of glory, can only be understood when focus is
shifted from the dissimulation of something (e.g., through fictionalizing
reality) to the dissimulation of an absence (Baudrillard 1994, 6). It is literally
hiding a nothing that the spectacle creates nihilistic illusions. The spectacle
exists in order to hide the fact that it is contemporary society, all real world,
that is a spectacle (comp. Baudrillard 1994, 12).
This duality in the spectacle also mirrors the inherently paradoxical nature
of all politics. Politics is always a politics of risk; any political intervention can
end badly. If politics did not have such a paradoxical dimension, it would turn
into an economy, a technique, a recipe book for the good society. It would
have been reducible to a routine procedure that merely consists of a struggle
within an already established political space. But the political is also that which
reconfigures the political space and constitutes a new political scene. Which
is why the spectator, too, is a paradoxical figureboth a passive receptacle of
illusions and a potentially emancipated spectator who views actively and
creatively, transforming and interpreting what s/he sees, feels, and understands,
disturbing the given distribution of the sensible:
The point is not to counter-pose reality to its appearances. It is to construct
different realities, different forms of common-sensethat is to say, different
spatiotemporal systems, different communities of words and things, forms and
meanings. (Rancire 2009, 102)
Since it only exists insofar as it disturbs the consensus, which sustains the
police order, politics is per definition dissensual (Rancire 2010, 3637). It is
an intervention into a given order of the sensible. This is why Marx starts his
critique of political economy by demonstrating that it is obsessed with one
sense of equality, the question of distribution in a given world, and juxtaposes to
this sense another sense, equality as an egalitarian maxim. Thus the difference
between interpreting and changing the world is ultimately grounded in the
difference between the two senses (see Marx 1998, 569). By the same token, the
creation of sense, art, is the ultimate revolt, the main antidote to the problem of
nihilism (Nietzsche 1967, 452).
Bibliography
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

. 1999. Potentialities. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
. 2000. Means Without End. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
. 2005a. The Time That Remains. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
. 2005b. The State of Exception. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
. 2011. The Kingdom and the Glory. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Baudrillard, Jean. 1993. Baudrillard Live. Selected Interviews. London: Routledge.
. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
Benjamin, Walter. 1996. Capitalism as Religion. In Selected Writings. Vol. 1, 1913
1926, edited by M. Bullock and M. W. Jennings, 288291. Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press.
. 1979a. Divine Violence. In One-Way Street, edited by A. Chadhuri and
J.A. Underwood, 132154. London: Verso.
. 1979b. Theologico-Political Fragment. In One-Way Street, edited by
A. Chadhuri and J.A. Underwood, 155156. London: Verso.
. 1999. Illuminations. London: Pimlico.
Bradley, Arthur and Paul Fletcher. 2010. The Politics to Come: A History of Futurity.
In The Politics to Come, edited by A. Bradley and P. Fletcher, 112. New York:
Continuum.
Callinicos, Alex. 2007. Leninism in the Twenty-first Century? Lenin, Weber, and the
Politics of Responsibility. In Lenin Reloaded, edited by S. Budgen, S. Kouvelakis and
S. iek, 1841. Durham: Duke University Press.
Camus, Albert. 1953. The Rebel. London: Penguin.
Debord, Guy. 1983. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black & Red.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari 1983. Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
. 1989. Cinema 2. The Time-Image. London: The Athlone Press.
. 1990. Logic of Sense. New York: Columbia University Press.
. 1994. Specters of Marx. London: Routledge.
. 1995. Negotiations. New York: Columbia University Press.
. 2004. For A Justice to Come. interview by Lieven De Cauter. http://archive.

indymedia.be/news/2004/04/83123.html.
Derrida, Jacques. 1993. Aporias. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
. 1994. Specters of Marx, London: Routledge.
. 2004. For A Justice To Come, Lieven De Cauters interview with Derrida,
available at http://archive.indymedia.be/news/2004/04/83123.html.
Dillon, Michael. 2008. Lethal Freedom: Divine Violence and the Machiavellian
Moment. Theory and Event 11(2): 122. http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/
theory_and_event/v011/11.2.dillon.html.
Engels, F. 1957. Juristic Socialism, In On Religion, edited by K. Marx and F. Engels,
pp 267270. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.
Feuerbach, L. 1989. The Essence of Christianity. New York: Prometheus.
Friedman, Maurice. 1963. Problematic Rebel. New York: Random House.
Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: The Free
Press.
Godchild, P. 2005. Capital and Kingdom: An Eschatological Ontology, In Theology and
the Political, edited by C. Davis, S. iek and J. Milbank.Durham: Duke University
Press.
Hamacher, W. 2002. Guilt History. Benjamins Sketch Capitalism as Religion,
Diacritics 32(34): 81106.
Hass, Jrgen. 1982. Illusionens filosofi. Copenhagen: Nyt Nordisk Forlag.
Latour, Bruno. 1996a. On Interobjectivity. Mind, Culture & Activity 3(4): 228245.
. 1996b. On Actor-Network Theory. Soziale Welt 47: 369381.
. 2005. Reassembling the Social. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
. 2010. On the Cult of Factish Gods. London: Duke University Press.
Marcuse, Herbert. 1955. Reason and Revolution. London: Routledge.
Marx, Karl. 1957. Contribution to the Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right.
Introduction. In K. Marx and F. Engels, pp 4158.On Religion, Moscow: Foreign
Languages Publishing House.
. 1993. Grundrisse. London: Penguin.
. 1975. Contribution to the Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Law, Introduction.
In the Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Vol. 3, edited by
L. Goldman and V. Pospelova, 175187. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
. 1976. Capital, Vol. 1. London: Penguin.
. 1998. Thesis on Feuerbach. In The German Ideology, edited by Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels, 568571. New York: Prometheus Books.
. 2007. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. New York: Dover.
Melville, Herman. 1998. Moby Dick. Oxford: Oxford Worlds Classics.
Mondzain, Marie-Jos. 2005. Image, Icon, Economy. Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1961. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. London: Penguin.
. 1967. The Will to Power. New York: Vintage.

. 1969. Twilight of Idols. London: Penguin.
. 1996. On the Genealogy of Morals. London: Oxford University Press.
Rancire, J. 2009. The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso.
. 2010. Dissensus. New York: Continuum.
Rosen, Stanley. 1995. The Mask of Enlightenment. London: Cambridge University Press.
Schmitt, Carl. 1985. Political Theology. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Taubes, Jacob. 2009. Occidental Eschatology. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Weber, Max. 1958. Politics as Vocation. In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology,
edited by H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills, 77128. New York: Oxford University Press.
. 2003. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Dover.
iek, Slavoj. 1999. The Ticklish Subject. London: Verso.
. 2008. Violence. London: Profile Book.
. 2009. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. London: Verso.
6
The Epistemology of Nihilism in Otto

Weiningers Sex and Character1
Bettina Bergo
Es ist unmoralisch, ein menschliches Wesen zur Wirkung einer Ursache zu

machen, es als Bedingtes hervorzubringen, wie das mit der Elternschaft gegeben
ist; und der Mensch ist im tiefsten Grunde nur deshalb unfrei determiniert
neben seiner Freiheitweil her auf diese unsittliche Wiese entstanden ist. Da
die Menschheit ewig bestehe, das ist gar kein Interesse der Vernunft; wer die
Menschheit verewigen will, der will ein Problem und eine Schuld verewigen,
das einzige Problem, die einzige Schuld, die es gibt. Das Ziel ist ja gerade die
Gottheit, und Aufhren der Menschheit in der Gottheit; das Ziel ist die reine
Scheidung zwischen Gut und Bse, zwischen Etwas und nichts.
Weininger 1921, 4582
Weiningers investigation of fundamental principles
This essay examines a work that has been called the foremost manifesto of
Viennese expressionism, Otto Weiningers Sex and Character (Geschlecht und
Charakter: Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung, 1903) using a distinction, suggested by
Walter Benjamins work, between epistemological and methodological nihilism.
1
A version of this chapter was published in Price and Johnson (2013).
2
It is immoral to turn a human being into the effect of a cause, to produce a conditioned
human being, as does parenthood, and the ultimate source of the bondage and determinacy
which accompany the freedom and spontaneity of a human being is the fact that he has
been created in such an immoral fashion. Reason has no interest whatsoever in the eternal
continuation of humankind. Whoever wants to perpetuate humankind wants to perpetuate a
problem and a guilt, indeed the only problem and the only guilt that there are, for the aim is
the deity and the ending of humankind in the deity, a pure separation between good and evil,
between something and nothing. (Weininger 2005, 311312)
Simply put, epistemological nihilism states that there is no fundamental

meaning to existence, whether human or cosmic. This kind of nihilism arises, for
example, out of the vicious circularity generated when philosophies of history
or of mind open to utopia, which then serves to legitimate the philosophy
itself. It is this kind of phenomenon that Walter Benjamin intended, it seems
to me, when he argued for (restricted) methodological nihilism, or the vigilant
critique of utopian practices and institutions coupled with the full awareness
of mortality, ours and that of institutions. What Benjamin understood, in his
Theologisch-politisches Fragment, is that nihilism is not simply something we
can overcomewhether through a restoration of metaphysics or through
revolutionbut rather something to be taken up as a practice (Benjamin 2002,
306). It is only in practice that nihilisms relationship to values can be concretely
evinced and the two above-mentioned domains (epistemological nihilism and
nihilism as critique) held in a tensed rapprochement.3
My argument here will be that Otto Weiningers Sex and Character begins
from a restricted methodological nihilism (First Part: Sexual Diversity) only
to slide into a full-blown epistemological nihilism (Second or Main Part: The
Sexual Types).
The work and life of Weininger, in all its pathos and perplexity, illustrates an
argumentative drift, from practical nihilism as critique of the dominant values
of the Belle poque toward epistemological nihilism as mans overcoming of
his bodily nature and ultimately, union with divinity. Driven by a boundless
intellectual curiosity, Weininger set out to explain the wealth and diversity of
human characters (in his day, differential psychology) while also uncovering
the forces underlying sexuation, erotic attraction, and the perceptual
dimensions of anti-Semitism. From scholarship in the Classics, Weininger
moved into biology at the University of Vienna, and ultimately into idealist
philosophy and Nietzsches thought. His doctoral thesis, Eros und Psyche, was a
study on the fundamental sexual hybridism of all living beings and the impact of
this on human characters. He submitted the thesis to an ambivalent jury. Once
defended, he set to work on an expanded version consisting of two unequal
parts: the scientific discussion of the chemical components of masculinity and
3
Benjamin phrased this as the imperative to strive for such a passing away as can be found in
the movement of life and death typical to nature. For him, this would be the task for a world
politics, cognizant of human finitude and the fragility of all institutions and practices created by
human beings. Anti-messianic, anti-eschatological, Benjamins Fragment mobilizes nihilism to
hold open both conceptions of a good life and a desirable society, without assuring them or merging
the theological and the political that are found together in epistemological nihilism.
Otto Weiningers Sex and Character 105
femininity, characterology, and algorithms for sexual attraction. Part I closed

with a discussion of the woman question and examined prospects for female
emancipation. Elements from sexologist Magnus Hirschfelds research into
sexual indeterminacy (sexuelle Zwischenstufen) and Uranians, or a third
sex supported his principal argument that every de facto human being was
physiologically a combination of maleness and femaleness. Part II exploded into
a philosophical discussion of ideal types, Die sexuellen Typen he called Mann
and Weib as opposed to de facto Man and Frau. This part proceeded on the
formal definition of the two limit types: it opened onto masculine and feminine
essences, consciousness, and finally talents and Genialitt. It extended
theoretical discussion of the types into ethics, social teleology or social entelechy,
and the essence of the feminine and its meaning in the universe (Chapter XII,
Das Wesen des Weibes und sein Sinn im Universum). Chapter XIII was devoted
to Das Judentum (Jewry), and struggled against more metaphysical forms of
anti-Semitism such as supercessionism. The ultimate chapter developed the
equation Problem des Juden = Problem des Weibes = Problem der Sklaverei.
At the core of this dilemma was the ultimate status of femininity: how
to comprehend it, how to determine it? Ifwithin the logic of ideal types
activity, reality, substance, could be symbolized as one or unity, then passivity,
unreality, and absence should be formalized as zero. Between one and zero
lay the spectrum of sexuation in living beings. Yet the zero that abbreviated
the ideal type that was femininity also entailed an indeterminate activity
that Weininger characterized as Kuppelei, coupling or bonding (the English
translation renders the derogatory connotation with the term matchmaking).
In order to understand the purpose of Woman we must start with a very old and
well-known phenomenon, which has never been seriously considered, let alone
properly recognized. It is none other than the phenomenon of matchmaking,
which can lead us to the deepest, most important, insight into the nature of Woman.
(Weininger 2005, 231)4
In short, the nothing was active; it nothinged. It was active essentially as

correlational, thanks to the presence and influence on it of the all or masculine
ideal type. Replaying a conundrum that a philosopher like Georges Canguilhem
would observe about attempts to define the pathological against a single
4
Um hinter diesen Sinn zu kommen, mu von einem Phnomen ausgegangen werden, das, so alt
und so bekannt es ist, noch nirgends und niemals einer ernsteren Beachtung oder gar Wrdigung
wert befunden wurde. Es ist kein anderes als das Phnomen der Kuppelei, welches zum tiefsten, zum
eigentlichen Einblick in die Natur des Weibes zu fhren vermag (Weininger 1921, 337).
standard of normality, Weininger thereby found himself caught in the paradox

of a feminine ideal type defined on the basis of the masculineand yet
somehow necessarily implicated in bringing human beings together erotically.5
The problem was significant because the feminine ideal type was present by
degrees in all living things and went some way toward defining what Weininger
understood as the difference between Aryan and Jewish men.
First, however, I will explain exactly what I mean by Judaism. I do not mean
either a race or a nation, and even less a legally recognized religious faith. Judaism
must be regarded as a cast of mind, a psychic constitution, which is a possibility
for all human beings and which has only found its most magnificent realization in
historical Judaism. (Weininger 2005, 274)6
Despite the apparently positive appraisal of Judaism, the putative cast of

mind was negative: any group possessed of a high percentage of femininity
qualified thus as lacking in spiriteven the most masculine Jew has a
Platonic methexis [participation] in Women (Weininger 2005, 276). It thus
redounded to beings of high masculine content to develop their potentiality
for genius, above all in terms of moral self-awareness. The moral agent was
able to bridge the distinction between nature and freedom by incarnating
the moral law in himself. The clearest way, Weininger argued, to bring this
about had to pass through a focus on the relationship that offered the greatest
danger of instrumentalization of another human being. Not unpresciently,
Weininger identified this relation as sexuality. In order that a human being
realize its (masculine) potentialthat is, its creative ability to self-overcome
it should abide by the moral law within, avoiding, amongst other things, the
instrumentalization of women as sexual beings. However, as it was the male
gaze that constituted woman as a distinctly feminine entity (the feminine being
in itself nothing, mere Kuppelei), avoiding sexual contact also implied the
dissolution of the category of woman (Weib). Now, the disappearance of woman
as ideal type (and implicitly as gender) promised their true emancipation
as de facto women, hopefully allowing women to realize that percentage of
5
As Canguilhem put it in his landmark Le normal et le pathologique: The concept of norm is an
original concept that cannot be reduced, in physiology or elsewhere, to a concept objectively
determinable by scientific methods. Thus strictly speaking there is no biological science of the normal.
There is a science of biological situations and conditions called normal. This science is physiology
(Canguilhem 1966, 204; my translation).
6
Zuvor jedoch will ich genau angeben, in welchem Sinne ich vom Judentum rede. Es handelt sich
mir nicht um eine Rasse und nicht um ein Volk, noch weniger freilich um ein gesetzlich anerkanntes
Bekenntnis. Man darf das Judentum nur fr eine Geistesrichtung, fr eine psychische Konstitution
halten, welche fr alle Menschen eine Mglichkeit bildet, und im historischen Judentum blo die
grandioseste Verwirklichung gefunden hat (Weininger 1921, 402). Henceforth, only the English
translation will be used.
their creative potential coming from the male principle in them. If the human
species was thereby condemned to disappearing, perhaps the price was not as
great as it seemed, as part of humanity would have realized Nietzschean self-
overcoming via the enactment of the Kantian moral law extended to sexuality.
Human kind would gradually merge into a Schellingian divinity, in which
Schellings principle of inertia or Weiningers nothing (das Weibliche) would be
absorbed into pure light.
It should be emphasized that a nihilistic epistemology may not acknowledge
its commitment to nothing, much less its inability to exit the circle of
dismantling and rebuilding its logical phantasms. I will attempt to show how
Weininger moved from a positivistic vision of critical openness to sexual
hybridity, toward a stultifying cosmological ethic. Indeed, Sex and Character
went initially unnoticed until his suicide in the same year (1903) aroused such
a stir that the volume sold off the shelves, going through over twenty editions
and influencing authors as far flung as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Kraus,
D. H. Lawrence and James Joyceto mention but a few. Weininger became a
sort of canary in the coal mine that was an epoch of anxiety before emergent
feminism, homosexual movements, socialism, and literary mysticism. The
question is why he slid irresistibly from critique and science into epistemological
nihilism. I hope to illustrate this in the narrative that follows.
Weininger started from the hypothesis that all living beings were composed
of elements of masculinity and those of femininityat the cellular level
(arrhenoplasm and thelyplasm). He hoped to explain human nature starting,
this way, from embodiment. In so doing he believed he held a key to understanding
eros itself, as attraction and the possibility of love. Influenced by the elaborate
research and the emancipators zeal of sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, Weininger
turned to science to explain racial differences in light of his paradigm of dynamic
intersexuation. His project could not have come at a better time. Sexology was a
burgeoning field thanks to the works of Richard Krafft-Ebing, Georg Groddeck,
Paul Julius Mbius, and indirectly Emil Kraepelin and Eugen Bleulernot to
mention Freud and Breuer. The binarism of masculine and feminine appeared
to be opening to the possibility of a third sex, homosexual men, and the
German-language movement for the Schutz des Mutterrechts (protection
of motherhood) inaugurated an early feminism (Rosa Mayreder). Explaining
anti-Semitism in light of the effeminacy of Jewish men certainly displaced
focus from the theological claim against Jews as the murderers of God toward a
socio-biological misfortune devoid of any particular danger. Finally, proposing
a synthesis of Nietzsche and Kant, such that self-overcoming passed through
self-perfection and the free election never to treat women as sexual instruments,
rejoined the ascetic creativity of (a notably Viennese) expressionism. These
were the objectives of Weiningers study.
Weininger did not so much write a philosophy as a hybrid study that began
by exploring the embryology and sexology of his day. As I indicated, the second
part of the work brought philosophical reflection to bear on the meaning of the
ideal types of masculinity, femininity, and the genius. One might qualify Sex and
Character as a middlebrow essay, whose principal challenge was to develop
categories able to bridge the ideal and the practical levels, to give European
humanity the conceptual wherewithal by which to live an ethical life as sexually
intermediate beings.
Prior to publishing his thesis, Weininger was very active in the intellectual
life of Vienna. Like Freud and many Viennese intellectuals at the turn of the
century, he attended the Philosophical Society of the University of Vienna,
many of whose discussions concerned the initially disturbing movements
around womens emancipation, and Uranians. These questions must be
considered in light of the larger context that combined German-language
socialism, syndicalism, and the chilling mood promoted by the popular anti-
Semitic mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger (18441910; Mayor from 1897 to 1910).
It is difficult to calculate the symbolic impact, especially in the discussions of the
Philosophical Society, of the rise of the Jewish population of Vienna between
1860 and 1910, where numbers went from 6000 to 175,000, a thirty-fold
increase in two generations (Lindemann 2000, 57).7 It is not false, though it is
easy to say that, at the turn of the century during the Belle poque, philosophers
found themselves singularly inept at dealing with the reverberations of
what could only have been conceived as new vectors of conflict and change:
females, polychromatic colonized peoples, Western and Eastern Jewsbut
also, embryology and genetics.8 That is, genetics, but without a genetic code.
7
Albert S. Lindemann recalls that
from the mid-eighteenth century until the eve of the Holocaust, the Jewish population of Europe
increased faster than that of the non-Jewish population. There was also a more rapid move of
Jews than non-Jews into urban areas, especially capital cities, another kind of significant rise
in status. Per capita income rose more rapidly among JewsThe percentage of Jews who were
among the very wealthiest citizens of Europes nation states shot up by the end of the century,
as did the number of Jews who won Nobel prizes after 1905. (Lindemann 2000, 53ff)
8
We need to think only of telegony and neoteny: the disconcerting stain of the quagga or zebra on
the mare, who was then crossed with an Arabian stallion only to produce a striped hybrid in her
second issue. For neoteny, consider literature on the African child, observed as an infant possessed
of greater motor and cognitive abilities than the European child, only to be declared apt to develop
up to adolescence and then to stop.
Zuchtung or breeding was a matter of debate at the turn of the century. The
sexuate indeterminacy of the embryo until ten weeks spawned debates about
an originary femininity in all beings versus a revolution of the masculine in
that transformative event we today call hormonal activation (thanks to Paul
Mbius. Cf. Schiller 1982, 4965). I have not even touched on the anxiety of
cultural degeneration and civilizational decadencecalling, half-consciously,
for the salvation from without that Benjamin so sharply criticized. How then to
calculate the effect of all this on philosophynotably, those philosophies that
worked at the middlebrow level, integrating popular science into questions of
ethics and politics?
The Belle poque canary
Two events contributed to an idealistic turn in Weiningers thought, away

from the empiricism in which he was immersed and educated. Around 1901,
Weiningers encounter with German philosophy, notably the works of Kant,
Schelling, and Nietzsche, led him to revise his voluminous, scientific thesis Eros
und Psyche, producing instead a 600-page manuscript that he submitted to his
crestfallen directors Jodl and Mllner for the doctorate. The final, published
work, Geschlecht und Charakter was hardly shorter, coming in at 461 pages.
As I indicated, the shorter version proved to be a two-part exercise. It evinced
the uneasy coexistence of scientific research into sexuation (before modern
synthesis genetics were framed in the late 1930s) and a hybrid of conceptions
about the genius, Nietzschean self-overcoming, and Kants Kingdom of ends. The
latter, Weininger framed in terms of the second formulation of Kants categorical
imperative: always treat humanity, whether in yourself or another person, as an
end and not merely as a means.
This philosophical aggregate was unstable. In Weiningers case, it was
vitalism and Kantianism that ultimately triumphed, and he came to regard
his early scientific research as shallow. Correlatively, his increasingly unstable
personality accounts for the Nietzsche-like eruptions in his book, which argues
at length about the feminine, but also tries to undercut the anti-Semitism of his
time. Two things must be kept in mind. First, Weininger was himself Jewish. His
goal was to argue, circularly, that anti-Semitism was rooted in ressentiment and
that anti-Semites often evinced characteristics more Judaic than many Jews in
Vienna at the time; moreover, Jews were not to be blamed for eliminating God,
the Aryan dislike of Jews was due to the greater effeminacy of the former. To
be sure, his view reflected stereotypes around Jews from reactions to the Ostjde
to assimilationist bromides such as we even find in the remarkable director of
Die Fackel, Karl Kraus, who would later defend Weiningers work.
For all that, my concern is with nihilism as epistemology, and we see a
restricted methodological nihilism, akin to Benjamins critique, at work in
Weiningers initial deconstruction of sexual identity, which is the thematic that
structures Sex and Character Part I. Weininger was among the first to develop a
dialectics of sex versus gender, and to a lesser degree biology versus culture. He
would argue that every living being was a mixture of masculine and feminine
characteristics, and therefore one became a man or a woman through a process
of cultural institution. Radicalizing Schopenhauer, he deconstructed sexuality
into three dimensions of embodied sexuate intermediacies, social construction,
and idealization.9 Like Nietzsche and his multiple forces or intelligences in
bodies, Weininger argued that there is nothing that allows us to speak of a purely
masculine genotype, much less a feminine one. Prior to any understanding
of genes, hormones or their action, Weininger distilled from the zoological
and embryological literature of his time what had to be the most plausible
hypothesis: the occurrence of intermediate sexual forms is determined by the
different degrees of original sexual characteristics, in conjunction with the inner
secretions (which probably vary in quality and quantity in each individual)
(Weininger 2005, 25). Underlying the debates about sexuation were two
questions: First, how and why does life diversify as it grows? Second, how are
individuals to be thought in relation to species and sexuation? Rejecting two
popular hypotheses about sexual difference, that it was a matter strictly of forms
or that sex concerned only particular sites in an otherwise neutral human body,
Weininger adopted a cellular theory in which, it is possible to imagine an infinite
number of different sexual characteristics of every single cell (Weininger 2005,
17). We should keep in mind that Nietzsche glimpsed at least one of the terrible
questions underlying this investigation: Why is it, or what is it, that causes a
9
Luft writes, in Otto Weiningers Vision of Gender and Modern Culture in EIV: Weiningers
achievement was to separate discourse about gender from literal assumptions about individual
men and womenWhat makes his argument interesting is his attempt to deconstruct his cultures
understanding of gender and to develop a methodology that distinguishes male and female types
from individual men and women. He is careful to observe that Weininger nevertheless seems
to assume [at times] that a man can become 100 percent male, although a woman cannot [be
100 percent female, lest she be basically nothing] (Luft 2003, 54, 57). In addition, while a man can
be close to female, Weininger will write, the woman can never become a male (Weininger 2005,
241; cited by Luft 2003, 63). This is largely because, like a host of others, Weininger begins from the
assumption that the male is largely the human norm (cf. Luft 2003, 61).
cell to start to divide? (Nietzsche 1988, 106107). What forces transform the
nucleus into two nuclei? What is active, what is passive?
It is important to note that Weiningers attempt at philosophical systematicity
patently fails. However, it fails in one significant sense: Weininger cannot
reconcile the transcendental with the empirical; his nihilism as critical
method slides directly into a nihilism as epistemology. His thought reflects the
exacerbation of the critique of decadence arguing in favor of the self-overcoming
of man, even at the cost of the gradual disappearance of the species. However,
the path it takes to that end is not necessarily stranger than other philosophies
that themselves evinced an unendliche Mangel an Sein [unending falling short
of being], as Manfred Frank said of Schelling (Frank 1975). Weininger writes:
We may thus arrive at the following notion, which is hypothetical from the point
of view of formal logic, but which is raised almost to the level of certainty by
thefacts: every cell of the organism (as we will provisionally say) has acertain
sexual emphasis [bestimmte sexuelle Betonung]. According to our principle of the
generality of intermediate sexual forms we add that this sexual character can be
of different degrees.
Theassumption of different degrees in the development of the sexual
characteristics would make it easyto incorporate into our system pseudo-
hermaphroditism and even genuine hermaphroditism (the occurrence of
which among many animals has been established, albeit not with certainty
among humans). Ifas all empirical facts seem to dictate, the principle of
innumerable transitional forms of sexuality between M and W is extended to all
cells of the organism, [then] the difficulty that troubled Steenstrup is removed
[how bisexuality would be distributed] and bisexuality [or bisexuation] no
longer runs counter to nature. Based on this principle, it is possible to imagine
an infinite number of different sexual characteristics of every single cell, from total
masculinity through all intermediate forms down to its complete absencetotal
femininity. (Weininger 2005, 17)
While that does not mean that gonads are equivalent to kidneys, much less to
brains, Weininger hastens to add:
The gonad is the organ in which the sexual characteristics of the individual
appear most visible and in whose elementary morphological units they can most
readily be demonstrated. (Weininger 2005, 19)10
10
The citation continues: However, we must also assume that the genus-specific, species-specific,
and family-specific qualities of an organism are represented most completely in the gonads (See
Weininger 2005, 19).
Following a current respected in biology but largely unknown to philosophy,

Weininger writes:
Naegeli, de Vries, Oskar Hertwig, et al. developed thetheorythat every
cell of a multicellular organism carries in it all the qualities of the species and in
the gonads these are only concentrated in a particularly marked formas will
perhaps appear to all researchers one day [since]every living being comes into
existence through thedivision of one single cell. (Weininger 2005, 1920)11
The idea of life originating from a single cell with forces in it may have led
Weininger to Schelling and his notion of a living Basis (Schelling 1986, 30).
Before the hypothesis of a kind of fundamental living matter, a base material that
nineteenth-century science called the idioplasm, the question of what fuels
initial differentiation suggested the necessity of a binarity of forces so that there
be something like activity and passivity, something like emergence and inertia
of which all the vitalists and Lebensphilosophe had spoken. Weininger proposes
his solution.
we too can, and must, create the concepts of arrhenoplasm and thelyplasm
as the two modifications in which any idioplasm can appear in sexually
differentiated beings, bearing in mind that these concepts [arrhenoplasm and
thelyplasm]again stand for ideal cases, or boundaries, between which empirical
reality resides. Thus the protoplasm which exists in reality increasingly departs
from the ideal arrhenoplasm and, passing through a (real or imaginary) point
of indifference (true hermaphroditism), turns into a protoplasm which is closer
to thelyplasm [a feminized idioplasm] and from which it isdistinguished by a
small differential. (Weininger 2005, 20)
This was Weiningers response to debates about the emergence of sexuate

characteristics in embryology. In order for the multiple degrees of sexuation at
the cellular level to be meaningful, two ideal boundaries had to be established,
for the sake of heuristics. These ideal boundaries would form the center of the
investigation in the second half of the book, An Investigation of Fundamental
Principlesthe moment at which Weiningers critical nihilism slides into
epistemological nihilism.
Working with a polarity of ideal masculine and ideal feminine, which
phenomenalize as emphases [Betonungen] in bodies, Weininger inserted
11
Note, however, that this was not August Weismanns theory, which argued that sex cells are specific
and localized, not found throughout the body. Weismanns germ plasma theory was developed
before 1900.
his schema into a German-Darwinian (Wilhelm Roux and Ernst Haeckel)

framework: the Betonungen had to serve an evolutionary purpose. For him, this
purpose was the facilitation of sexual attraction and reproduction. Influenced
by his classical education, Weininger started from the Aristophanic thesis
of the divided, one-time complete being in search of its complement. He
thus proposed that the quantity of masculine influence in a given being was
proportionate first to the quantity of feminine influence, and could be expressed
as a ratio, like 61:39 in a given individual. Further, this person, most likely a
male, would be attractive to another person, no matter what their socialized
gender was, provided they had something close to the inverse proportion of
emphasis, say 61 percent femininity to 39 percent masculinity. For this, he
developed the algorithm of maximal sexual affinity, factoring in two other
elements: the analytical function of the time individuals are able to act upon
each other (Weininger 2005, 35), and a constant, supposed to represent what
we know, scientifically, about sexuality now, versus what we should know in the
decades to come.
I want to emphasize that Weininger is here separating sexual expression
from sexual attraction, but also sexual attraction from sexuation per se, that is,
sex from gender. In terms largely untouched by philosophers up until then, we
might say that Weininger was attempting to approach the question of identity
in an a priori sense that simultaneously took account of sexuation even as it
dissolved the social criteria with which his society had defined sexuality. He
pursued this down to the movement of animals and sex cells.
Wilhelm Pfeffer called these movements [of sex cells like spermatozoids]
chemotactic and coined the term chemotropism for all these phenomena. There
seem to be many indications that among animals the attraction exercised by the
female when perceived by the malethrough the sense organsisanalogous
to chemotactical attraction. (Weininger 2005, 37)
Weininger cited other research of his time and recalled Goethes chemical
novel, Elective Affinities, as a prescient literary speculation on forces at work
in sexual attraction. From there, he dealt with education and socialization,
feminine men and masculine women (Weininger 2005, 50ff.). Above all, he was
looking to combine what he called a differential psychology with biological
concepts; notably the principle of correlation phenomena and the concept of
function (Weininger 2005, 5456). The correlation principle argued that organs
in a body were mutually adapted to each other, facilitating nutrition, safety,
and competitiveness. Weininger extended it to a range of physical preferences

between individuals. He did so using an evolutionary notion of function in light
of species.
So much for the scientific beginnings of Sex and Character. Its ambition was
to emancipate men and women from the straightjacket of essentialist sexuate
types; it was also hoped that anti-Semites might realize the groundlessness of
their ressentiment against somewhat effeminate beings.
From the empirical to the ideal types:

Mann und Frau to Mann und Weib
We are perhaps more sophisticated today than the morphologists, social

theorists, and physiognomists of the Belle poque. Nevertheless, the question
of the relationship between acculturation and biology, or discursive practices,
cultural objects, and bodily drives, remains. Indeed, it turns on the nihilistic social
imaginary underlying and conditioning the turn-of-the-century embryology
not to mention the logics of life that philosophers like Schelling had contributed
to German language physics and biology.12 Above all, Weiningers sexuate
Betonungen depended on the limit conditions, which he calls heuristic,
the ideal types that make up Part II. The ideal types required a philosophical
elaboration in order to be grounded principially. The second half of the book
effectuated the passage from the scientific literature, a popularized empiricism,
to a synchretic idealism whose concepts would promptly show their uncanny
superannuation. Underlying this was Weiningers Kantian-Schellingian vision: a
world in which no one treated another in the worst instrumental sense possible,
that is, sexually. And this alone permitted man to rise in purity toward unity
with the godhead (Schellings vision).
What is stranger than the science Weininger attempted to popularize was
his conviction of the necessity of a meta-biology, grounded transcendentally.
There, his fear of effeminacy and nihilism cashed itself out in static a priori
categories. As indicated, the ideal symbolization for masculinity was presence,
action, energeia, plenitude, or simply the number 1. As ideal type, the feminine
was passivity, inaction, dunamis, absence, or the cipher 0. Bon gr mal gr,
12
Schelling was the editor of the Zeitschrift fr spekulative Physik at the time he published the
Philosophical Inquiries, 1809.
Weiningers own anti-Semitism was an attempt to protect Jews from worse

forms of Jewish hatred than his own: what made the Jew dislikable was the
surprising quantity of femininity he possessed. In classic colonialist language,
Jews, like women, like Africans, were imitative unoriginal creatures, incapable
of creation or innovation. Caught in service to the species, all these groups
consisted of herd animals rather than true individuals. I would like to make
you laugh with citations from Weininger to this effect, but as I said, he is a
canary in the coalmine called nihilism: he stated what philosophers discussed
in euphemisms and code, but did not generally publish. The conundrum was
how to think sociopolitical upheavals with the inherited categories.
Interesting here is that the great stigma in all these cases is the lack, or
abyssal inertia, that characterizes Weiblichkeit (femininity) as a component in
women or men. That lack means that femininity and even Jewishness become
analogous, once again, to a principle that can be found in Schellings writing,
namely, the principle of darkness or ground that is the inertial prime matter in
all things, including God. In 1809, Schelling argued:
All birth is birth out of darkness into lightWe recognizethat the concept
of becoming is the only one adequate to the nature of things. But the process of
their becoming cannot be in God, viewed absolutely, since they are distinct from
him toto genere. To be separate from God, [things] would have to carry on this
becoming on a basis different from him. But since there is nothing outside God,
this contradiction can only be solved by things having their basis in that within
God which is not God himself, i.e. in that which is the basis of his existence.
(Schelling 1986, 33)
Lacking all definition, the femininelike the dark Basis in God and
natureis boundariless, yet paradoxically serves as quanta of exchange.
Matchmaking [Kuppelei] is a blurring of boundaries, argued Weininger,
and the Jew is the blurrer of boundaries katexokhen. He is the opposite pole
of [the] aristocratism [of individuation]. The principle of any aristocratism is
the strictest observation of all boundaries between human beings, but the Jew
[just like the female] is the born communist and always wants community
(Weininger 2005, 281).
While we might find this qualification complimentary, an enduring
philosophical difficulty is evinced. Slavoj iek finds in Weininger the
precursor to Lacans the woman does not exist, and by extension the
anticipation of our own recognition of the profound void at the heart of what
we call subjectivity (iek 2005, 137164, esp. 145).13 It remains that we have
here a nihil that is active. It is active as Erosjust as Schellings Basis was
active as longing or Sehnsucht. All of these terms express the search for
ways to conceptualize movement and affect between beings. That is why
matchmaking is a genteel translation of the derogatory Kuppelei.14 But
that Kuppelei, that cipher, could be dissociated from the unifying force of Eros
is doubtful. It is unclear how a cipherhow the transcendental feminine
can match-make but not cause movement or consolidation. All of this, of
course, revolves around the epistemology of nihilism and Weiningers painful
search for ways beyond it.
Weiningers solution to the difficulty at the ideal level could only be ratified
by the empirical fact that all beings are composed of masculine and feminine
forces at the cellular level. But the empirical solution of intersexuation
ran aground the self-destruction of its definitional limits and, notably, the
active nothingness that was ideal femininity. This underscores the reciprocal
dependence in Weininger of the empirical and transcendental levels, as well as
their impossible coexistence.
The Nietzschean dimension of the work concerns self-overcoming: every
man must overcome the nothingness in him, but the only ones who can truly do
this are those qualified as geniuses. A Romantic theme, the genius recalls the
saint in Nietzsches writings like Human, All too Human (1878). The genius in
Weininger was the bridgebetween the empirical mischling and the overman.
The genius was also the true moralist and authentic monad.15 The geniuss
connection with the universe is his Kantian-Nietzschean capacity to find and
bestow meaning, to approach the sublime in his own figure. Consequently
he evaluates everything, said Weininger, both within and outside him
according to this idea [of intrinsic unity]; and for that reasoneverything in
13
Note, however, that whereas, in her inexistence, her nothingness, Weiningers Weib or ideal type
of the female is something generated by masculine desire, and is wholly subjected to the phallus
(Weiningers words), iek defends Lacan, arguing that for the latter, the exact opposite is true:
the pre-symbolic eternally Feminine is a retroactive patriarchal fantasythat is, it is the Exception
which grounds the reign of the Phallus. It is thus the very lack of any exception to the Phallus that
renders the feminine libidinal economy inconsistent, hysterical, and thereby undermines the reign
of the Phallus (iek 2005, 151). The outcome is largely the same, as the argument has a circularity
to it; the principal difference is that for Weininger, it is actual men who must turn away from sexual
engagement with women, if de facto womenas mixtures of masculinity and femininity are to
come into their own as human beings.
14
The Grimm Dictionary points out that Kuppelei is close to Koppelei, as doppel to dupple and
comes from the Latin Copula.
15
A human being may be called a genius if he lives in a conscious connection with the whole universe.
Thus genius alone is the really divine element in humans (Weininger 2005, 149).
his view, rather than being a function of time, represents one great and eternal
idea (Weininger 2005, 148).
From the genius too flows the moral law; it is not the affair of formal, practical
reason alone.
[Ordinary human beings] may relate to the sun or the moon, but they certainly
lack the starry heavens and the moral law. The moral law comes from the
human soul, which holds all totality, and which can contemplate everything
because it is everything. The starry heavens and the moral law, they too are
basically one and the same thing. The universalism of the categorical imperative
is the universalism of the universe, the infinity of the universe is only a symbol
of the infinity of the moral will. (Weininger 2005, 150)
Here, Weininger attempts to open a path to the bermensch precisely by a

return to the pre-critical Kants sublime, embodied by great men, or the genius.
Only the man of genius is a complete human being. What is contained in every
individual as a possibility of being humanin the Kantian sense, as dunamei, is
alive and fully developed as energeia in the geniusHe is himself the quiescence
of all laws and therefore free. (Weininger 2005, 151)
Consistent with the practical task of the book, which changed as Weininger
studied Nietzsche and Idealism, the highest human destiny had to permit the
authentic embodiment of its ideal. If recourse to the genius is Romantic, it
remains that the bridge beyond man could only be unity with the divine.
For such a self-overcoming, man had to overcome two things: first, his action
had to be based not on an ethics of compassion, but on one of respect. As
was first articulated by Kant, the only being in the world that we respect is
the human (Weininger 2005, 154155). But how to respect the non-genius;
how to respect other human beings, say women, or Jews? The first [way is]
by ignoring themthe second, by taking notice of themand the third,
trying to recognize them. Only by being interested in them, thinking of
themtrying to understand them as themselvescan one honor ones
fellow-humans (Weininger 2005, 155). This first overcoming required a
Nietzschean forgetfulness as well. More specifically, man had to overcome
his bisexuate nature. This meant that he had to overcome eros or Kuppelei in
himself. Such overcoming was crucial from the moral perspective too, because
it was ultimately mans desire that constituted woman as a gender (not as a sex).
Man makes women by desiring them, in the way that Schellings self-will
is aroused in order that love find a material basis or resistance through which
to realize itself (Weininger 2005, 219ff).16 This material is mans own fleshor
the femininejust as, in Schellings beginning, it was the Basis, the almost-
nothing out of which God crystallized as the One. But Weininger continued
to argue, in Kantian terms, that the instrumentalization of a being with more
femininity than masculinity in it, was morally reprehensible to human
destiny (Weininger 2005, 224225). Nothing impeded our reunification with
the deity more effectively than the instrumentalization of another human;
notably but not exclusively, erotic instrumentalization.
Thus sexual intercourse in any case contradicts the idea of humanity; not
because asceticism is a duty, butbecause in sexual intercourse Woman
wants to become an object, a thing, and Man really does her the favor of
regarding her as a thing and not as a living human being with internal psychic
processes. That is why Man despises Woman as soon as he has possessed her,
and Woman feels that she is now despised, even though two minutes earlier
she was idealized. The only thing that a human being can respect in a human
being is the idea, the idea of humanity. The contempt for Woman (and for
Man himself)is the surest indication that the idea has been violated.
And anybody who cannot understand what is meant by this Kantian idea of
humanity might at least consider that the women concerned are his sisters,
his mother, his female relatives: it is for our own sake that Woman should
berespected as a human being and not degraded, as she always is through
sexuality. (Weininger 2005, 312)
I hope that this quote (and the underlying science, at this time more
footling than sheer pseudoscience) shows why this book was so confusing yet
so seductive to a host of German and English intellectuals from Wittgenstein
to Karl Kraus, to Schoenberg, to Hermann Broch,17 Elias Cannetti, Thomas
Bernhard, James Joyce, and Heinrich Bll.18 Between 1903, the year Weininger
committed suicide following his conversion to Protestantism, and 1947, Sex and
Character went through twenty-eight editions and was translated into many
languages. Wittgenstein called it a great error. Molly Bloom was said to be, in
16
We might also understand this as being close to Lacans notion that women are in a sense socially
constructed to incarnate or to be the phallus rather than to have the phallus.
17
Hermann Broch, author of The Death of Virgil, wrote, Weininger, the most fervent moralist since
Kant, placed himself completely on the ground of this ethic, but he succumbed to the terrible
nothingness it contains when he sought to transform it into a dogma (Broch 1977, 248, cited by Le
Rider 1982, 229).
18
For a discussion of some of Weiningers influences, see Harrowitz and Hyams 1995; Le Rider 1982;
Sengoopta 2000; and Toews 2003, 301ff.
Joyces Ulysses, modeled after Weiningers Woman. But then the Belle poque
knew so much worse.19
My argument concerns the attempt of middlebrow philosophy, in the era of
the demise of Idealism, to come to terms with biology and the sociopolitical
mutations of the time. With the separation of psychology, psychiatry, and
philosophy, thinking faced what could be called a problem of concepts or
categories. A philosophy like Weiningers, which began as a critique and a
subtle understanding of finitude, veered into what I have called a nihilistic
epistemology. Middlebrow philosophy proved inadequate to explanation without
normalization, and an ethical-theological vision of redemption in nothingness.
Many who were still impressed with the older philosophy could not separate
Idealism, Romanticism, and the Lebensphilosophie inaugurated in part by
Schelling. And it is not without interest to note that the ultimate, contradictory
conclusion of Sex and Character follows closely the structure of Schellings
Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom.
Please recall that in Schelling, the Absolute must be considered alive, lest
it drift into the formalism he suspected of Hegel. Like all life, the Absolute or
universe gives birth to itself, thanks to the coexistence of two principles that
were interdependent but did not interact directly with each other. In the place
of Hegels dialectic, Schelling brought Lebensphilosophie into the Absolute itself.
Weininger would resort to this exceptional logic to situate his Nietzschean-
Kantian self-overcoming within a cosmological framework. The ultimate
outcome of this process for Schelling had to be the triumph of the light or the
form-giving dimension of the Absolutefor Weininger, it was the Masculine.
With that end, the inertial Basis, which was present at the beginning as almost
nothing, would gradually be eliminatedlike das Weib in Weininger.
The divergent principles would never be fully reconciled, but the unmoving,
19
In the same year, in 1903, Georg Groddeck (18661934), who gave Freud his concept of the Es,
thanks to Nietzsche, authored an idiosyncratic prose poem entitled, A Problem of Woman, in which
he rhapsodized:
The three branches of the future stand before us: beauty, clarity, childhood. What a plenitude
of divinity resides in woman! Ever since the culture of man, at its apogee, was broken, with
the fall of Athens, the world has lived from the beauty of woman in search of manwoman
must presume and cultivate free beauty, that beauty which is its own end and fulfillment. The
cult of the goddess of a hundred breasts, the cult of Mary, shall then be a harmonious reality.
(Groddeck 1979)
At the antipode of this rhapsodic imitation of Zarathustra stood the neurologist, Paul Julius Mbius
(18531907), arguing for the physiologischen Schwachsinn des Weibes, or physiological feeble-
mindedness of females. This was the title of a pamphlet that went through nine printings by 1908.
Mbius knew of Weininger, appreciated him, but felt eclipsed by Weiningers success.
amorphous Basis had to be left far behind or simply disappear into pure light.
In so doing, the attraction the Basis exerted on the One or the light, like an
originary gravity, would be annulled.20 Schelling urges,
For, as in the beginning of creation, which was nothing other than the birth of
light, the dark principle had to be there as its Basis, so that light could be raised
out of it (as the actual out of the merely potential); so there must be another basis
for the birth of spirit [in humans], and hence a second principle of darkness [the
unconscious source of human evil], which must be as much higher than [the
status of the basis] as the spirit [or divine love in humans] is higher than light [in
nature]. This principle is precisely the spirit of evil which has been awakened in
creation through the arousing of the dark natural Basisthat is the disunion of
light and darknessto which the spirit of love is now opposed as a higher ideal,
[just] as before[,] light was opposed to the unruly movement of nature in its
beginnings. (Schelling 1986, 5253, 85)
Conclusion
The reader who began Weiningers book likely thought that Weininger was
working out a law bringing bodies and personalities together, even as he argued
that there was no simple norm for empirical males or females. Yet, not even
half-way through the work, one notes the change in tone and ends. In their
ideal forms, Man and Woman, Mann und Weib, are aligned with Schellings two
principles in the Absolute, the Basis and the One. Consistent with Schellings
logic, the unfolding and destiny of these two forms are related but different.
Like Schellings Basis, Weiningers ideal Nothing exerts an arousing force on
the One, which in turn creates empirical femininity through its emergent,
masculine desire. In Weininger, the One and the Zero of ideal masculinity
and femininity are directed to follow the course of Schellings two principles,
proceeding toward the entelechy of union-in-divinity. Weiningers peculiar
reading of Kants Kingdom of Ends provides the practical itinerary toward
union with the godhead. Reinterpreting Kant, such that One and Zero might
no longer instrumentalize each other by coupling, Weininger aligns Kant with
the return Schelling described of the two principles to their ultimate situation,
20
For since this Being (Wesen) of primal nature is nothing else than the eternal basis of God, it must
contain within itself, locked away, Gods essence, as a light of lifebut longing or desire, roused
now by the understanding, strives to preserve this light of lifewithin [the basis], and to close up
in itself so that they always remain [together in the] ground (Schelling 1986, 36, 361).
where the force of love has sublimated the Basis in pure spirit, thereby making
the Basis obsolete as a pseudo-force and pseudo-presence. For Weininger, that
would be the ideal destiny of the type Woman, of das Weib.
If the repetition of historic tragedy looks like farce, then Weininger was farce
and suffering, but he was not alone as playwright of nihilism. The consequences
of his philosophical nostalgia and the patent superannuation of idealistic
concepts had consequences for the decades that followed.21
The Weininger effect was a powerful, intellectual fashion, which endured
for more than a generation. It should be emphasized that, in the Belle poque,
opposition to capitalist expansion and concentration took the form of
sometimes shocking critiques of Liberalism, but also of ethnic and economic
chaos (see Rider 1990, 103108). Karl Kraus, the influential editor of the review
Die Fackel (18991934), had some sympathy for social democracy. But he was
deeply influenced by a comparably powerful aristocratic elitism. Kraus defended
Weininger after his suicide and his influential journal appeared up to the famous
issue of 1934 entitled Warum die Fackel nicht erscheintWhy the Fackel is
No Longer Published.
It bears repeating that the constitution of social and political identity
proceeds thanks to the proliferating imageries that help constitute what
Cornelius Castoriadis called social imaginaries (Castoriadis 1997, 1986,
318). But these images could not take hold, obtain legitimacy, much less
engage debateincluding, among intellectualsif it were not for the ability of
certain concepts to survive their depletion of content and recombine with other
concepts, a process intrinsic to the expansion of nihilism. The unfolding of these
combinations is not tidy, but in nineteenth-century society, it followed certain
patterns: the ability for alterity to be aligned with potentiality, effeminacy, or
degeneracy;22 the ability for alterity to assimilate to hypertrophism, whether that
of masculinity in the case of colonized peoples, or of intellect, in the case of
Jews. Once displaced, both masculinity and femininity permitted combinations
21
George Mosse has studied how synchretic architecture contributed to the nationalization of the
masses, but also large popular movements (see Mosse 1999, 183197, 1975, 2138, 207216).
22
Thus, sex, health, and sanitation, motifs Foucault develops in a number of works. Note, moreover,
that in 1892, Max Nordaufamous as a journalist and physician, responsible for coining the term
Muskeljudentum [muscular Jewry] as antidote for the widespread conception of Jews as effeminate
and therefore, degeneratepublished his masterwork, Degeneration, a term he borrowed from the
French psychiatrist, B. A. Morel, who studied human deviations from a physiological standpoint.
Nordau was well known and his work an immediate success. He represents the heritage of a
materialism gone awry; one of a host of critics of nineteenth-century culture, comprising Christian
and Jewish intellectuals, Nordau preceded Weininger by a decade and anticipated his themes of
genius, anti-feminism, sexual morality, and a certain Kantianism (see Nordau 1993).
with infantilism, whether corporeal (written indelibly into African bodies, as

neoteny), or political (inscribed on the Jewish body, as ineptitude for military
service). When correlated with idealist logics, these categories took on a semi-
conscious affective charge, influencing the use and value of concepts like identity,
unity, plurality, difference. Here is where the epistemology of nihilism shows
itself most clearly. In the case of Weininger, but also in that of Schopenhauer
and other post- or para-Kantians, categories were often animated by the drive to
reconcile a root of pure reason with freedom and the practical good. This is why
Benjamin insisted that nihilism, understood as a method, must never let go of
finitude and can only proceed as unremitting critique. There is not enough space
here to pursue the two levels I am describing: ongoing popular and middle-brow
categorical combinations, which supplement or promote ideology, and some
higher level encounters between these categories and philosophy (at least those
in the Belle poque).
Karl Kraus had no idea that National Socialists would co-opt the discourse
of his satirical review, Die Fackel. When this happened he protested in disgust,
insisting that his was always a defense of nature and spirit against the destructive
powers of a deviated intelligence and a badly mastered technology (Le Rider
1990, 132, 148).23 And yet, even in binaries such as nature and spirit, we hear,
still echoing, strains of idealist and vitalist thought, in service to a nihilism Kraus
could not have failed to recognize. The conundrum, for us, concerns perceiving
the mutations of the serious into the farcical, before what looks like farce to
some, is appropriated to nihilistic ends.
Bibliography
Benjamin, Walter. 2002. Selected Writings, Volume 3 1935-1938, translated by Edmund

Jephcott, Howard Eiland, and others. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael
W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Broch, Hermann. 1977. Philosophische Schriften I. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.
23
He did so notably in Die Fackel, Nos. 890905, July 1934, pp. 101ff. What has been called Krauss
jdischer Selbsthass is addressed by Adornos insight (echoed by Sander Gilman), to the effect that
one attempts to extirpate from oneself and project onto various others, human or not, that with
which one is most profoundly at odds. To this end, the uncanny quality of nineteenth-century
categories took its sharpest relief in the multiple pretenses at unifying empirical science with post-
idealistic philosophy, toward moral ends. I thank Oona Eisenstadt for the reference to Adorno. There
is little doubt that Kraus believed in a Germany that was unified, open to assimilation, democratic,
and anti-capitalist (although he too could speak the language of the anti-Semites and Judenfeinde)
(see Le Rider 1990, 103153; 1993).
Canguilhem, Georges. 1963. Le normal et le pathologique. Paris: Presses universitaires

de France.
Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1986. Les carrefours du labyrinthe. Paris: Le Seuil.
. 1997. World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the
Imagination, edited by David Ames Curtis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Darwin, Charles. 1998. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. New York,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Frank, Manfred. 1975. Der unendliche Mangel an Sein : Schellings Hegelkritik und die
Anfnge der Marxschen Dialektik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Groddeck, Georg. 1979. Un problme de femme. Paris: ditions Mazarine.
Harrowitz, Nancy A. and Barbara Hyams (eds). 1995. Jews and Gender: Responses to
Otto Weininger. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1984. Nietzsche. New York: Harper & Row.
Latraverse, Franois and Walter Moser (eds). 1988. Vienne au tournant du sicle. La
Salle, QC: ditions Hurtubise.
Le Rider, Jacques. 1982. Le Cas Otto Weininger: Racines de lantifminisme et de
lantismitisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
. 1990. Modernit viennoise et crises de lidentit. Paris. Presses Universitaires de
France.
. 1993. Modernity and Crises of Identity. Culture and Society in Fin-de-sicle
Vienna. New York: Continuum Publishing.
Lindemann, Albert S. 2000. Anti-Semitism before the Holocaust. Essex, UK: Pearson
Education Limited.
Luft, David S. 2003. Eros and Inwardness in Vienna: Weininger, Musil, Doderer. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Micale, Mark S. (ed.). 2003. The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology, and the
Cultural Arts in Europe and America, 18801940. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.
Mosse, George L. 1975. The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and
Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich.
New York: Howard Fertig.
. 1999. The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism. New York:
Howard Fertig.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967. Genealogy of Morals, translated by Walter Kaufmann.
New York: Vintage Books.
. 1988. Kritische Studienausgabe, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari.
Berlin: de Gruyter.
Nordau, Max. 1993. Degeneration. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Price, Daniel and Ryan Johnson. (eds) 2013. The Movement of Nothingness: Trust in the
Emptiness of Time. Aurora, CO: The Davies Group Publishers.
Schelling, Friedrich W. J. 1986. Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human

Freedom. La Salle, IL: Open Court.
Schiller, Francis. 1982. A Mbius Strip: Fin de Sicle Neuropsychiatry and Paul Mbius.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1968. The World as Will and Representation, Vol. II Supplements
to the First Book, Supplements to the Fourth Book. New York: Dover Press.
Sengoopta, Chandak. 2000. Otto Weininger: Sex, Science, and Self in Imperial Vienna.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Toews, John. 2003. Refashioning the Masculine Subject in Early Modernism, in Mark
S. Micale, ed. The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in
Europe and America 18801940. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Weininger, Otto. 1921. Geschlecht und Charakter: Eine principielle Untersuchung
22nd Edition. Vienna and Leipzig: Wilhelm Braumller.
. 2005. Sex and Character: An Investigation of Fundamental Principles, translated
by Ladislaus Lb. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
iek, Slavoj. 2005. The Metastases of Enjoyment. New York: Verso Press.
7
In Sickness and in Health: Nietzsche, Amry,

and the Moral Difference1
Roy Ben-Shai
In the long run, youve got to live, people say, excusing every miserable thing
they have initiated. But do you have to live? Do you always have to be there
just because you were there once? In the moment before the leap, suicides tear
to pieces a prescription of nature.
Amry 1999, 13
[One] might ask, as a physician: How did such a malady attack that finest
product of antiquity, Plato? Had the wicked Socrates really corrupted him?
Was Socrates after all the corrupter of youths, and deserved his hemlock?
(Nietzsche 1979, x). Thus spoke Nietzsche, as a physician, in Beyond Good
and Evil. I do not know if Socrates really corrupted Plato, still less if he deserved
his hemlock, but I do have some idea about the meaning of this charge by the
Athenian justice. This charge has much to do with causing malady in the
social body, whose strongest, most vital organ is its youth. No proof of this
crime needed to be brought before the court, for Socrates generously supplied
it himself in his defense speech, which was more indicting than anything the
prosecution could have possibly said. Socrates confessed before the court that he
believed the unexamined life was not worth living, far inferior to death, which
is at least less noisy and tiresome. To anyone with ears to hear, this statement
intimated the following: life is not a good in and of itself. The mere fact that
one happens to exist justifies neither this existence nor its continuance. One
best scratch ones head, every now and then, and think up a more compelling
1
My warmest thanks go to Vernica Zebada Yez for her generous, thoughtful, and patient support
throughout the writing process. I would also like to thank Michelle Nordmark for invaluable help in
editing this chapter.
excuse. In communicating this horrifying thought, which he himself seems to

have found rather amusing, and establishing beyond a shadow of a doubt that
he is, in fact, the nihilist the court suspected him to be, Socrates did, however,
achieve a small triumph. He used the court of justice to make a statement about
justice that we are not always capable of hearing, even today, when we read his
speech as it is retold by Plato. Socrates made it clear to his judges that he did not
think that justice has the same role as medicine does, and that a judge should
not ask questions as a physician. In other words, it is no more the job of justice
to maintain the preservation and health of a community (or individual) than
it is to administer poison. It is not the job of justice to ensure that the youth
continue to live and to think as the old did, even if one knows pretty well that
this kind of continuity is essential to the preservation of the Athenian form of
life, including its Gods and its conception of justice. With that, the cheerfully
suicidal Socrates placed himself as judge of justice, the judge of his judges, in
a way that only a person who is willing to stake his life, and life as such, could.
It was precisely the kind of show of impiety that they did not want their youth
exposed to any longer.
This chapter will deal with the relation between justice, or morality, and
life. Does justice serve life? Does life serve justice? Under what conditions,
and according to what standard, can we judge our own system of justice, our
own moral convictions, and our own existence? I will begin the chapter by
introducing a notion of the moral difference, which I hope could be instructive
in answering these questions. The moral difference, as implied, though not
explicated as such, in Nietzsches philosophy, is the difference between values
and their value. The existence of such a difference is a necessary condition for
the possibility of questioning and modifying our values. If values determine
their own value, that is to say, if they have intrinsic value, then they are beyond
question and judgment. I will show that the condition in which values come
to determine our judgment and will, rather than the other way around, is a
major part of what nihilism, at least in its negative, decadent sense, meant for
Nietzsche.
In the first section of the chapter, I will explain the notion of the moral
difference by drawing a parallel between Nietzsches moral philosophy and
Heideggers ontology, and between their respective understandings of nihilism.
In the second section, I will offer a perspective on, or bring out an aspect of,
Nietzsches work: his manner and method of posing questions as a physician,
that is to say, examining the health-value and life-value of moral values. I will take
Nietzsche, Amry, and the Moral Difference 127
an issue with this approach, by way of an immanent critique or deconstruction,

proposing that Nietzsches valorization of life, health, and future threatens the
radicalism and integrity of his critique of morality; to wit, it threatens to collapse
the moral difference that it is meant to sustain.
The concluding section will engage the work of Holocaust survivor and
essayist Jean Amry in a polemic against Nietzsche. Arguing against the
intrinsic value of life, health, and future was as consistent a motif in Amrys
work as the converse was in Nietzsches, starting with Amrys influential book
of essays on the Holocaust in which he launched an apology for ressentiment
against Nietzsches condemnation of it. Amrys rejection of the logic of life,
as he called it, was epitomized in one of his last books of essays, on the subject
of suicide (from which the epigraph to this chapter is taken), and in his actual
suicide committed two years after its publication. The suicidal manner, if we
may call it that, of Amrys work and life, seems to fit perfectly into Nietzsches
understanding of nihilism as a will to nothing and aversion to life. As I have
tried to intimate in my opening remarks about Socrates, I am not sure that
such judgment is warranted. I am not sure that a persons aversion to, or love
for, life has anything to do with morality or, for that matter, with the quality
and value of his thought. Moreover, I will make the case that we can see in
Amrys rejection of the intrinsic value of life, health, and future an attempt to
turn Nietzsches understanding of nihilism on its head. Nihilism, I will suggest,
may have more to do with having, and maintaining, trust in the world, and with
an unquestioning valorization of life and health, than it does with being sick,
weak, or suicidal. Beyond this polemic against Nietzsche, I will use Amrys
insights to reconfigure the meaning of the moral difference, arguing that the
importance of the moral difference is not to enable epochal revolutions in morals
(what Nietzsche termed revaluation or transvaluation), which tend to lose their
revolutionary force soon after they occur, but to spur a more continuous (or
rather discontinuous, youth-corrupting and community rupturing) attitude
of mistrust and moral revolt.
The being of beings and the value of values
Heidegger was fond of saying that every philosopher has a word, a key term
or phrase that defines his thought and the thought of his time. Arguably,
Heideggers own phrase was the ontico-ontological difference, namely, the
difference between beings (which are plural and determinate) and the being
of beings (which is singular and indeterminate). As he pronounced it in the
introduction to Being and Time: The being of beings is not itself a being.2
This phrase suggests a very particular understanding of the logic of
differentiation and of the meaning of difference. Very often this word is used
to describe a relation between two things, as in X is different than Y. But to
say that the being of beings is not a being does not only mean that the being
of beings is different from (all) beings, but also that it is not something other.
The being of beings is the transcendence pure and simple (Heidegger 1962,
62). Transcendence pure and simple, like difference pure and simple, is the
transcendence (or difference) itself rather than that which is transcendent or
different (e.g., God, the Other, and so forth). The ontological difference must
therefore be a difference internal to or underlying being: the self-differentiation
and self-transcendence of being as such.
Heideggers emphasis on the ontological difference was intended as an
antidote to nihilism, understood as the metaphysical, the scientific, and the
technological drive to determine the meaning of being once and for all, that
is to say, to define being in a-temporal terms, as fully present and given. The
self-differentiation of being means that being is undefinable; it is destabilizing
(ek-static), and temporal through and through. According to Heidegger, the
endeavor, spurred by anxiety in the face of finitude, to arrest and tame the
self-differentiation which is being can only amount to a resolute effacement of
being itself and the truth of being. The nihil is the veil that conceals the truth
of the Being of beings (Heidegger 1982, 11). It is precisely due to our hectic
endeavor to know and master being that we end up, paradoxically, floundering
in nothingness (Heidegger 1991, 208).
Let us now draw attention to Nietzsches thought. In the Preface to On
the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche writes that the books task was not only
to inquire into the origin of morality but, more importantly, into the value of
morality (Nietzsche 1989, 19). He wished to voice a new demand: we need a
critique of moral values, the value of these values must first be called in question
(Nietzsche 1989, 20). It is not accidental that the phrase the value of values
(der Werth dieser Werthe) shares the structure of Heideggers expression the
being of beings. Indeed, as I see it, Nietzsches critique of morality is essentially
a matter of differentiating between given moral values (which are plural and
2
Das Sein des Seienden ist nicht selbst ein Seiendes (Heidegger 1962, 26, where Seienden is translated
as entities).
determinate) and the value of values (which is singular and indeterminate).

I call this differentiation the moral difference. By drawing a parallel between
the ontological difference and the moral difference Im suggesting that in both
cases the difference is not between two separate things. The moral difference is
therefore not between two systems of values; rather, it conveys the idea that the
value of values is not another value.
The moral difference is associated for Nietzsche with a logic of origination
genealogy. A genealogical approach to morality suggests that values are
created (the historical and organic products of a process of valuation), finite
(susceptible to de-valuation), and indeterminate (subject to re-valuation).3
For Nietzsche, this means that values are themselves living things that can
grow, change, die, create, and destroy. While the devaluation and usurpation
of values by new valuations is a natural process, vital for maintaining the
integrity of morals, nihilism is a devaluation, or rather decay, of values of an
entirely different order. Here, values are detached from life and from the soil of
history, not in the natural sense of perishing, but on the contrary, in gaining
the unnatural or metaphysical capacity to outlive their death (and life), to
linger on as ghosts and empty shells. This process involves the concealment of
the origin of values and forestalls the activity of revaluation. It is sustained by
a false and unthinking sense of conviction, where values are either regarded as
eternal and universal or reduced to the impersonal, objective, level of facts:
One has [come to take] the value of these values, Nietzsche writes, as given,
as factual, as beyond all question; one has hitherto never doubted or hesitated
in the slightest degree (Nietzsche 1980, 20).
When moral judgment, if we can use this term at all, becomes mechanistic
and unreflective, a matter of blindly following and obeying existing codes,
personalities lose their distinction and vitality as well. When values live on as
ghosts and empty shells, so do persons, for the generation and differentiation
of personality types, perspectives, and sensibilities is dependent on the process
of valuation. The concealment of the origin of values, which means nothing
but their loss of value, is therefore a homogenizing process. We can sense the
connection between homogenization and the decay of value when Nietzsche
writes, decrying the state of morals in Europe, that when the herding-animal
alone attains to honors, and dispenses honors, equality of right can too readily
be transformed into equality in wrong (Nietzsche 1997, 84).
3
This trilogy (valuation, devaluation, revaluation) has a parallel in Heideggers propriation,
expropriation, and appropriation.
As is the case with the over-determination of being for Heidegger, the over-
determination of morality amounts to the effacement of moralityits source and
its reference pointso that, paradoxically, with all our good efforts to attain and
secure justice and rights, we end up floundering in valuelessness, in nihilism.
It is easy to see that Nietzsches demand that we distance ourselves from our
values by questioning their value and origin, thus already replanting them in life,
history, and human interest, is akin to the Heideggerian venture to withdraw
from our immersion in beings so that the question of being, and with it a fresh,
original eye and ear for beings, could be rekindled.
The parallel between the two thinkers, however, and Nietzsches obvious
influence on Heidegger, only stretch thus far. At the end of the day, Heidegger
not only considered Nietzsches philosophy a part of the essential history of
metaphysics, namely, the drive to determine being in terms of presence, but
as its very consummation. The central claim in this critique of, or distancing
from, Nietzsche, which Heidegger developed during the late thirties, was that
Nietzsche determined the meaning of being as the will to power, thus reducing
thinking to the business of evaluation. Nihilism for Heidegger did not mean the
loss or decay of value but precisely the all-consuming concern with power, the
desire to dominate being. Nietzsches evaluative thinking and his conception
of nihilism in terms of value, as well as his approach to the problem of nihilism
as a negation that [could] be set to right at once by an energetic affirmation
(i.e., by revaluation) was therefore nihilistic in and of itself (Heidegger 1982,
2122).4 Heideggers own antidote to the nihilistic logic of domination was to
turn to and demand a thinking of being which, rather than aiming to grasp,
define, classify, utilize, or valuate being, lets being be, and lets it be different.
It should be born in mind that these assessments by Heidegger were
probably made less with an eye to Nietzsches own work than with an eye to
the surveillance of Heideggers lectures on Nietzsche by Nazi party agents.5 In
4
Hannah Arendt took this to be the very essence of the so-called turn (Kehre) in Heideggers thought.
It is tempting, she argued, to locate the precise moment of the turn in the transition from Volume
I to Volume II of his book on Nietzsche. To put it bluntly, she says, the first volume explicates
Nietzsche by going along with him, while the second is written in a subdued but unmistakable
polemical tone. The timing of this change of mood, in the late 1930s, seems evident to her: what
the [turn] originally turns against, she explains, is primarily the will-to-power. In Heideggers
understanding, the will to rule and dominate is a kind of original sin, of which he found himself
guilty when he tried to come to terms with his brief past in the Nazi movement (Arendt 1978, 173).
5
As far as I can tell, Nazi brutality never offended Heideggers moral sensibilities nearly as much as
the idea that his thinking could be supervised by people who have neither the concern nor the
capacity for original thought had injured his pride. It offended the honor of the one thing he truly
valued, namely, the freedom of thought. For the claim that his lectures were under surveillance, see
Pattison (2000, 106).
addition, it could be argued that the category of the will to power was not as
important to Nietzsches work as a whole as it was for the prevalent, ideological,
interpretations of his work during the Nazi era, and that Heideggers lectures
on Nietzsches nihilism were at least in part a response to them.6 Be that as it
may, Heideggers critique could easily be reversed on Nietzschean grounds, for
Nietzsche might have argued that Heideggers resolution to let being be is
precisely the expression of the will to rid oneself of the responsibility: to get
around the will, the willing of a goal, the risk of positing a goal (Nietzsche
1968, 1617).
I will therefore set Heideggers critique aside, and try to show in the following
section that, even if we do not overstate the importance of the will to power
in Nietzsches work, nevertheless his naturalism, vitalism, and valorization of
life suggest an overdetermination of the value of values. My concern, in other
words, is not that the moral difference constitutes a reduction of the ontological
difference and therefore an effacement of being, but rather that Nietzsches
overdetermination of value jeopardizes the integrity of the moral difference
itself, and amounts to an effacement of value. As such, it could result in the same
kind of valuelessness that Nietzsche wished to counteract.
The value of health and the horizon of life
Despite Nietzsches determination to question the value of values, one looks

in vain for any attempt in his work to question the value of life, health, and
the futurethree terms that, as will be seen, are intrinsically interrelated in
his thought. Indeed, any attempt to question their value, let alone to deny it,
would already be judged in their light and diagnosed as a sickness, if not as some
form of hypocrisy or self-deception. Although there are no fixed coordinates to
sickness and health, and what appears in a certain context or perspective as a
sickness could be seen as healthy from another, and vice versa, it is still the case
that Nietzsche as a rule values the conditions under which life is enhanced and
derides those that diminish it. In his critique of morality he very often dons the
hat, and employs the terminology, of a philosophical physician.
This approach is clearly exhibited in the early essay, On the Advantage and
Disadvantage of History for Life that opens with a quote from Goethe: I hate
6
Anyone with ears to hear heard in these lectures a confrontation with National Socialism
(Heideggers statement, cited in Wollin 1993, 101).
everything which merely instructs me without increasing or directly quickening

my activity (Nietzsche 1980, 7). This statement explicates the goal of Nietzsches
investigation, namely, to find out how, and to what extent, history is advantageous
for life. The proposition that the natural relationto historyis only in the
service of future and the present, not to weaken the present, not to uproot a
future strong with life, is attributed by him the same characteristics we reserve
to axioms: this proposition, he states, is simple, as truth [itself] is simple, and
immediately convinces even him who has not first been given a historical proof
(Nietzsche 1980, 23).
Life, and in particular the future, which is regarded as the orientation of a
healthy life and its enhancement, are therefore set as the standard by which to
judge the value of historynot just particular events but history as such, the
recollection and the preservation of the past. Nietzsche does not mince words
in this regard: Only so far as history serves life will we serve it (Nietzsche
1980, 23). We must constantly learn to improve our ability to do history for the
sake of life (Nietzsche 1980, 14).
This prescription is intended to remedy what Nietzsche diagnoses as a
consuming historical fever from which we should all at least come to realize
that we suffer (Nietzsche 1979, 8). The symptomatic expression of this historical
fever is the indifferent and undiscriminating study of history for historys sake,
a quest after knowledge for knowledges sake. Against this, Nietzsche contends
that it is a general law that every living thing can become healthy, strong and
fruitful only within a horizon; if it is incapable of drawing a horizon around
itselfit will wither away feebly or overhastily to its early demise (Nietzsche
1980, 10). The horizon is a matter of selective apprehension, that is, it
marks not only the orientation forward (toward the future) and the open-
endedness and expanses of the field of vision, but its boundedness as well. In
that sense, Nietzsches horizon anticipates Heideggers notion of the region
of unconcealementthe idea that the other side of knowledge and truth (of
disclosure) is an active ignorance and hiding (i.e., closure)except that Nietzsche
sees in this closure an essentially positive and life-preserving phenomenon. The
capacity to draw a horizon around itself is the capacity to discern between
what should be preserved and what should be forgotten, what should be turned
toward and what should be turned away from and left behind. Above all, it is
an orientation and sense of direction and is futural at that.
The task, therefore, is to study history on the horizon of the future, not out
of sheer learned curiosity, but as a resource, a potentiality, for furthering life
and movement. The importance, for understanding Nietzsches project, of these

early remarks about the study of history and its horizon, is that they seem to
serve as a blueprint to his later genealogical work. It is precisely genealogys
task, as Nietzsche practices it, to draw a horizon around history, not simply
to understand the past but to imbue it with life, in the service of the present
and the future, of quickening historys power of activity and lightening its step
rather than burdening, slowing, and pulling it backwards like an overweight.
It is because it draws its coordinates and motivation from the present and its
maladies that genealogy is essentially polemic. Like the essay on history, it
means to act against the age and so have an effect on the age to the advantage, it
is to be hoped, of a coming age (Nietzsche 1980, 8, italics mine).
Observing the therapeutic ethos of Nietzsches thought can help to
understand why his work, as it matured, became increasingly invested in the
problem of morality. Why did the concern with life and health lead Nietzsche
into the domain of moral philosophy? For one thing, distinguishing between
what should be remembered and what should be forgotten is itself the work of
valuation, which is always a matter of distinction and discrimination: telling the
high from the low, the valuable, conducive, advantageous, from the invaluable,
useless, or damaging. But there is, I propose, a more specific reason for the
concern with morality, which could perhaps be better understood if we compare
the work of drawing a horizon to that of digestion.
The function of the digestive system is to draw the line between inside and
outside, what is internalized and what is externalizedit sorts out what is
advantageous for the body and for life and what is not. Not only our memory,
but our experience in general, can be said to be digestive in the sense that we
tend to take in or preserve what can be converted into energy and discard what is
useless as waste or as insignificant. Consider, then, that moral values, convictions,
and sensibilities are the digestive organs of spirit. Like valves, they determine
what we are capable and what we are incapable of taking in (stomaching) and
conversely, of letting out and letting go of. The task of cultivating a horizon
in fact, the task of self-differentiation and orientation, of making up a self as a
project, of becoming who one isnecessarily calls upon an assessment of how
well these values function.
Employing health as a standard for judgment equips us, at least in principle,
with an affective barometer: to be healthy, powerful, and more alive should
feel better than being sick and weak. The plot thickens, however, when we
realize that moral values have the power to take over and displace this natural
barometer, as one comes, for example, to feel bad or guilty precisely because one
feels good. This is no ordinary sickness, for it not only jeopardizes the capacity to
heal and overcome but the desire to do so. As a consequence, a diseased morality
is neither felt nor diagnosed as a disease at all, but on the contrary, it propagates
itself as the standard for health and judgment. Paradoxically, it destroys the
natural barometer, obscures the power of judgment and knowledge of the good,
all the while masquerading as this very knowledge. While immanently growing
as a living, natural process morality can therefore end up asserting itself above
life and nature.
This is the antinomy, as Nietzsche declares in one of the aphorisms compiled
in The Will to Power: Insofar as we believe in morality we pass sentence on
existence (Nietzsche 1968, 10). Later he clarifies this thought: Moral value
judgments are ways of passing sentence, negations; morality is a way of turning
ones back on the will to existence (Nietzsche 1968, 11).
The task of On the Genealogy of Morals (which could equally have been titled
On the Advantage and Disadvantage of Morality for Life) is to bring moral values
before the court of life, to summon morality to the physicians office for periodical
examination, asking whether our moral values and sense of justice are a sign of
distress, of impoverishment, of the degeneration of life? Or is there revealed in
them, on the contrary, the plentitude, force, and will of life, its courage, certainty,
future? (Nietzsche 1989, 17). At the physicians office, however, it can no longer
be justice that sits in judgment, but life alone, that dark, driving, insatiably self-
desiring power (Nietzsche 1980, 23). Already made in the essay on history,
this last statement invokes the moral difference: the difference between justice
and the justness of justice, between justice and judgment. Nietzsche makes it
implicit that justice cannot set the standard for judging its own justness, for that
would be the epitome of injustice. The problem, however, is that this statement
also determines what kind of force should sit in judgment, as well as what the
parameters for making judgment should be. This is not unlike dropping a heavy
stone on ones foot as a solution to a troublesome toothache.
It should, in any case, be clear from this analysis that morality is not in and of
itself a disease; on the contrary, if there is anything more self-destructive than
a malfunctioning morality, it is the obliteration of morality and valuation as
such. Morality, on this view, is precisely the system that preserves and fortifies
the human organism, its horizon, and its limits.
The way that morality can successfully serve life is memorably captured in
Nietzsches analyses of the slave revolution in morality, namely, the overtaking
of the Roman world by Christianity. Nothing short of a moral revolution, a

revolution in values, could have brought about such a victorious transformation.
Since the slaves did not have the physical means or power to rebel against their
masters, a new mode of valuation endowed the condition of slavery itself with
value: If God, the very symbol of omnipotence, chose to incarnate in the life of
slavery, powerlessness, and suffering, then this life is no longer experienced as
failure and degradation, but as a mark of glory and a promise of redemption.
Consequently, the self-understanding and self-esteem of slaves is no longer
bound up with the deeds and decrees of their worldly oppressors (for whom,
with their infidelity and ignorance, they can at most feel sorry), but is defined
solely in terms of their spiritual relation to the transcendent God. This means
that they are no longer slaves to anyone but Him, who loves them. When it
is not praised as Gods self-deferral and self-sacrifice, corporal suffering is
perceived as a categorical (though temporary) punishment for an original
sin, for the sinfulness of the flesh and lustful desire. Furthermore, it is not the
believer who is punished but the flesh, to which he is no longer subordinate
or reducible. Since the spirit itself, the true self of the believer, sanctions and
justifies this punishment, it is not experienced as imposed from without but as
willed, as self-punishment, as a means to purify and strengthen the autonomy
of spirit and the power of faith, bringing one that much closer to redemption.
Triumph and meaning thus attach to the pain, the more so the greater and more
meaningless it is. Suffering becomes a source of power and a promise of a future.
And thus, long before their physical unchaining and the lifting of the sword, the
slaves have been emancipated.
Insofar as the historical creation and promotion of the Christian value system
allowed its followers to turn reality on its head, to produce overwhelming power
and liberation out of an equally overwhelming powerlessness and despondence,
and ultimately, to make rulers out of slaves, this revolt remains a prime
manifestation of the capacity for self-overcoming by means of a revaluation of
values. As Nietzsche puts it, Christianity prevented man from despising himself
as man, from taking sides against life; from despairing of knowledge: it was a
means of preservation (Nietzsche 1968, 10).
But the cure became a particularly powerful poisonand the task of
Nietzsches genealogy is to underscore both these aspects, the healing and
the injurious. The denouncement of flesh and desire and the devaluation of
worldly existence were preservative and life-enhancing as long as the flesh
was synonymous with pain, desire was only on the side of the oppressors, and
the dynamics of worldly existence were disabling and degrading. But the goal
to which this denouncement was the means was, on Nietzsches analysis, to
overcome these conditions along with the need to valorize them. The problem
is that, since this operation involved the portrayal of values as purely spiritual
and transcendent and hence supra-historical and universal, they ended up
systematically diminishing the resources needed for their own overturning,
losing their original power to emancipate, revolutionize, and shape a future. Since
self-overcomingthe destruction of old forms of life and the creation of new
onesis utterly essential to life, growth, and evolution, destroying the resources,
and suppressing the impetus, to achieve it can only be suicidal in the long run.
At this point, one of the most important terms in Nietzsches vocabulary
needs to be introduced: Ressentiment was his name for the life and fate-hating
ethos that ensued in the aftermath of the slave revolt in morality. Like every
phenomenon in Nietzsche, this one too is attributed progressive (conducive,
healthy) and redemptive aspects as well. In this context, however, I will focus
solely on the negative aspects, which, as conveyed both in the letter and the tone
of Nietzsches text, are the more essential in this case.
The spirit of ressentiment is primarily characterized by two negative and
weakening emotions, namely, envy and pity. The former marks hostility toward
privilege, distinction, and strength, while the latter marks identification with
weakness and the underprivileged. What stems from the combination of these
destructive emotions is an essentially leveling and herding ideology, according
to which all individuals must equally be slaves to social justice and answerable to
impersonal, disinterested or unselfish, transcendental or universal rules.
To Nietzsche, this implies the killing of some of lifes noblest traits: the instinct
of freedom and creativity, the taste for polemics, self-distinction, and self-
overcoming. This leveling conspiracy is responsible for many of the maladies
of the age: the cult of justice as fairness, the distinction-abolishing politics
of liberal democracy, free market, socialism, and communism, as well as the
spread of scientism, positivism, and historicism, with their ethos of neutrality
and factual objectivity and the indiscriminating pursuit of knowledge for
knowledges sakethe consuming historical fever mentioned above.7 Their
dangerous motto is fiat veritas pereat vita (Nietzsche 1980, 23: let there be truth,
and may life perish!).
7
All I wish to draw attention to, Nietzsche writes in On the Genealogy of Morals, is that it is the
spirit of ressentiment itself out of which this new nuance of scientific fairness (for the benefit of
hatred, envy, jealousy, mistrust, rancor, and revenge) proceeds (Nietzsche 1989, 74).
But the essence of ressentiment most truly comes to bear in its inverted
relation to time. Joining forces with guilt, its internalized twin, it worships
and obsesses over the past while turning ones back to the future. Ressentiment
in that sense is nothing if not a severe case of indigestion: the inability and
dispositional reluctance to forget, to turn away, and move on. In stark contrast to
the life-affirming, future-oriented activity of drawing a horizon around oneself
promoted by Nietzsche, the spirit of ressentiment is devoted to seeking out
injustices to condemn and to abhor and, far from working to heal the wounds
of history, it aggravates them, ruminates over them until they turn poisonous
and yield a veritable disdain for life. This sensibility destroys any positive and
constructive indicator of what benefits life and future. It is therefore either a
paradigmatic case of, or a general name for, moral sickness.
Before proceeding to a different, counter-polemical view on the meaning
of ressentiment, a few words to conclude this section. I have suggested that
Nietzsches own philosophy has a horizon, a commitment, a goal, and therefore a
unity of project, as he himself would demand that any life, person, or philosophy
should have. I also suggested that there is a conflict between Nietzsches resolve
to question the value of values, and his reduction of the value of values to the
value of life. It may be argued, against this line of critique, that Nietzsche posited
the value of life and health in response to his own sickliness and suffering, or, as
he often stated himself, that it was a defiant reaction against the nihilistic No-
saying spirit of the age as he perceived it. Such approach would suggest that
his affirmation of, and preoccupation with, life is more of a polemical device,
relative to historical circumstances, than it is a value in and of itself. If it is true
that life is not of intrinsic value for Nietzsche (or conversely, that this term is as
indeterminate as Heideggers being is), then perhaps the gesture of appealing to
it, as one does to a supreme court of appeals, is not as problematic as I propose.
Yet there is sufficient evidence to suggest that this is not quite, and certainly not
always, the case. Life is often attributed physiological or biological determinants
by Nietzsche and is often enough presented as a meta-standard, so that even if
other values that appear to be beyond the vitalistic logic of preservation and
enhancement (including transcendental ones) are sanctioned, they are sanctioned
in view of their life-value or health-value, and insofar as they further the future.
If Nietzsche taught us that moral thinking is a questioning of values rather
than questioning in light of values, it is well within the spirit of his work to call
his own values to question. This requires shifting the ground, or horizon, of
discussion.
Mistrusting trust
As argued, ressentiment symbolizes in Nietzsches work a paradigm case, or

general name, for moral sickness. In an essay titled Resentments, Jean Amry
sets out, in an explicit polemic against Nietzsche, to philosophically defend
ressentiment as the emotional source of every genuine morality. He goes so far
as to present his own view as a slave morality (a morality for losers), and
himself as a reactionary in the exact sense of the word (Amry 1980, 81, italics
mine). It is my claim that in these proclamations, as in his entire work, Amry
shows himself to be a Nietzschean in the only way one could be Nietzschean,
namely, by turning against Nietzsche with the same polemical rebelliousness
that characterizes Nietzsches own work.8
If the constellation of terms that defines the horizon of Nietzsches thought
are life, health, and future, the ones that define Amrys are incurable injury
(or an unclosable wound), mistrust (or revolt), and ressentiment (or a twisted
time-sense). Before bringing the two horizons into direct confrontation, I will
first sketch the concrete background and formal structure of Amrys.
The incurable injury as the origin of morality, and the injurious

efforts to close it off
In 1976, more than thirty years after his liberation from Auschwitz, Amry writes,
What happened, happened. But that it happened cannot be so easily accepted.
I rebel: against my past, against history, and against a present that places the
incomprehensible in the cold storage of history and thus falsifies it in a revolting
way. Nothing has healed. (Amry 1980, xi)
We should note that Amrys ressentiment, indeed reactionary in the exact

sense of the word, is not, as it was for Nietzsche, a spirit or a mentality,
8
Jean Amry was born as Hans Mayer to a half-Jewish, Austrian family in 1912. During World War II,
while working for the Resistance in Belgium, he was apprehended by the Gestapo and subsequently
tortured and interned in Auschwitz. After the war he returned to Belgium, changed his name to Jean
Amry, and worked as a freelance journalist. In 1965 he delivered a series of lectures on German
public radio. These lectures contained phenomenological reflections on his experiences of torture,
the concentration camp, and their aftermath. They were compiled in a book titled Jenseits von Schuld
und Shne (Beyond Guilt and Atonement), translated into English as At the Minds Limits. The radio
talks and the book won him almost instant fame and critical acclaim in Germany and in his native
Austria and proved formative for the postwar generation. He continued delivering radio talks and
writing essays until his death in 1978, by suicide.
that is to say, a psychic and subjective disposition. It is, rather, an imposition: a

reaction to a happening that is revolting. In other words, it does not stem from
some conscious or unconscious interiority, some unhappy consciousness
that categorically refuses to let go. At the same time, it is not turned inwards,
but on the contrary, is directed outwards, against the age as Nietzsche might
say. I preserved my resentments, Amry states, And since I neither can
nor want to get rid of them, I must live with them and am obliged to clarify
them for those against whom they are directed (Amry 1980, 67, italics mine).
Ressentiment is therefore relational from top to bottom: it is a reaction-to (a
particular past and present) and is directed-toward and -against (a particular
society and generation).
In order to understand this sense of ressentiment, something must
therefore be said about the revolting happenings that engender it and about
the ethos that it turns against. Surprisingly enough, what initially spurs
ressentiment for Amry is not the past but the present. It only surfaced for
him, he tells us, twenty years after the war, during the generational transition
of the 1960s, when he began to feel the wheel of time at work, as society
and public opinion, suddenly taking a keen and sentimental interest in past
victims and their welfare, began pressing for reconciliation, reassuring them
that no one bears a grudge anymore, that they are welcome and respected
as any other human being. For the victim, however, the call to rejoin this
happy family of humans, this fictional We, is more revolting than it is
appeasing. Alienated, mistrusting, the victim cannot join in the unisonous
peace chorus all around him, which cheerfully proposes: not backward let us
look but forward, to a better, common future! (Amry 1980, 68). He cannot
help but see, peering through the conciliatory wave, the same conformist and
quietist indifference of the society that only yesterday joined ranks around,
or at least submissively complied with, the goal of expelling him and other
vermin of his sort.
The order of things is therefore reversed. It is not that the reconciliation
efforts react to the victims resentments (or, for that matter, the past itself),
but the other way around: reconciliation is inertly prompted by the passage of
time and the rejuvenation of society, of its morale and its economy, and this
process is hindered by the presence of those whose existence tells another
story. Transitional justice, as the business of rehabilitating and reintegrating
past victims, is in that sense a matter of healing (or concealing) wounds and
scars in the social body and conscience in the service of life, health, and future.9
However, as far as those victims are concerned for whom nothing has healed
or could be healed, this movement only exacerbates the injury and further
opens the wound rather than healing it. Bearing in mind Foucaults suggestion
that Peace [could be seen as] a form of war, and the state a means of waging it
(Foucault 1984, 65), we may even consider the well-meaning attitude of society
toward its past victims not only as self-serving and self-interested but as a form
of symbolic violence. It is to this violence that ressentiment reacts.
As we can see, much depends on the claim that certain violations and injuries
resist and defy the process of healing and comprehension, even recollection (the
German word for which is Erinnerung, interiorization). Had it not been the case
that the injury itself is somehow irredeemable, the victims resistance to healing
would have been rightly considered a subjective-psychological disposition and
stubbornness, and perhaps a misdirected modality of desire or the will to power.
But what kind of injury could be regarded as incurable, irredeemable?
For Amry, its paradigmatic case is torture. He makes the case, which
I can only summarize here, that the apotheosis of Nazi persecution was the
perverted relational dynamic of torture for tortures sake. It was an inversion
of the social principle, wherein Mitmenschlichkeit (human being-with) turned
into Gegenmenschlichkeit (anti-humanity).10 Insofar as the social principle
can be inverted and has been inverted, the result is a loss of trust in the world
(Weltvertrauen).11 This loss of trust, I will soon explain, is the irredeemable and
decisive aspect of the wound of torture.
Trust in the world as a veiling, and the moral truth

Trust in the world includes all sorts of things: the irrational and logically
unjustifiable belief in absolute causality perhaps, or the likewise blind belief in
the validity of the inductive inference. But more importantthe certainty that
by reason of some written or unwritten social contracts the other person will
spare me. (Amry 1980, 28)
It so turns out that the confidence that the other person would spare me
was as logically unjustifiable and blind as the belief in causal necessity and
9
At the limit, we could say that the business of transitional justice is to eliminate victimhood and
celebrate survival.
10
In Nazism, as he puts it, the rule of the antiman is expressly established as a principleIt hated
the word humanity like the pious man hates sin (Amry 1980, 31).
11
Vertrauen can mean anything from trust to faith to confidence to reliance to credit.
the validity of induction were (both of which, as Hume taught us, relied on
the presupposition, which experience could not possibly verify, that nature
must be consistent and coherent).12 If this confidence was not justified then,
then it is certainly not justified now. Little about our history, and nothing
about the manifest stupidity and occasional meanness of many of our leaders,
policemen, and intelligence officers, and many of our fellows, supports this
trust. In this sense, we could propose that trust in others is not something
learned or acquired as much as it is a function, a necessary postulate for leading
a relatively healthy and functioning existence.
The problem is that (if you are willing to entertain this line of thought a
bit longer), self-preservation is not the only role that this kind of existential
trust plays. Trust in the world is an essentially self-validating mechanism.
One does not wait passively to see whether or not trust is justified. Much
like Nietzsches notion of drawing a horizon around oneself, trust in this
sense is a mental armor and a proactive (if often unconscious) organizer
and sorter of information. This means that, whatever violates or undermines
the validity of trust needs to be overlooked, invalidated, or explained away.
If that is the case, then trust in the world stifles rebellion just as it stifles
the possibility of undergoing or recognizing a crisis. It will no more yield
to experiential or historical learning than transcendental or ontological
structures would.
In addition, trusting means that trust is a non-issue, taken for granted. To
truly trust another is not so much to believe that the other would not betray
me, but rather, not to be preoccupied or perturbed by the prospect of betrayal at
all, let alone be anxious or sickened by it. It is therefore one of those modalities
of experience (such as being at home) that, as soon as they become conscious or
aware, problematized in experience, they are already undermined or modified,
if not completely destroyed. This is akin to that famous saying that if the deer
became aware of how fast it was running it would immediately stumble and fall.
Real trust is blind to itself by essence, whence its fortitude and efficiency, no
more visible than the limits of the field of vision. It is the Mayan Veil that hides
nothingnessits own groundlessness and the fundamentally insecure nature of
the sense of security and confidence it forges.
12
One might also wonder whether philosophers who do not share the belief in the consistency
and coherence of nature and history, but would rather see it as a willful discursive postulate, yet
nonetheless tread the streets with confident step, do not have trust in the world. This trust is felt in
the legs and in the bowels, not in the mind, and the legs and the bowels should bear the effects of
its undermining.
If we combine these features of trust it should follow that its loss is as

irrevocable as the loss of naivety is, or, differently put, that rehabilitating trust
makes as much sense as rehabilitating naivety. While a physical and mental
injury can perhaps be cured, the loss of trust alters ones relation to the world,
including ones own body and psyche and, as we will soon see, time.
To argue that succumbing to torture has the capacity to modify ontological
and transcendental structures implies that these structures are violable, and
that the confidence in the capacity to postulate them is underwritten and
conditioned by trust. We might even suggest that their postulation is
prompted by the need to maintain and secure trust. The ontological envelope
tacitly reassures us that something like torture cannot be perceived or imagined
(or would certainly be irrelevant to fundamental thinking).
The violability of trust does not simply imply the structural groundlessness
of existence and vulnerability to death (which are non-relational), nor can
it be reduced to the constitutive relationality of existence and dependency
upon the other (which remain unchanged regardless of whether the social
principle is upheld or inverted). It is, rather, vulnerability to dehumanization.
Dehumanization is the truly nihilistic abyss of meaninglessness and
reasonlessness of the sadistic brutality of torture or rape, the specific kind
of sustained and predetermined crueltycruelty as a project, as a norm, as
a commitmentthat apparently only the rational animal is quite capable of.
Any attempt to explicate the meaning of torture or rape, if on psychosexual,
sociological, or political grounds, is an attempt to explain their meaninglessness
away, distorting the inhumane and unintelligible with a humane and intelligent
perspective. As such, this attempt acts in the service of trust in the world and
already attests to its existence.
This, then, is the antinomy: either the antiman exists or it doesnt. While this
antinomy may be undecidable or insoluble, taking it seriously might already
provoke a good measure of mistrust by the person who thinks it or at least
uncomfortable self-awareness in the acts and postulations of thought.
For Amry, this discomfort is well called for, since, however ironically, trust
is the thing to fear, to mistrust. The more trust is culturally or philosophically
consolidated, the more easily it can be turned around and against itself. For
the same trust that allowed Amry to focus his energies on his continued
existence before his experience of torture, also permitted (in fact, beckoned)
the decisive majority of his fellowmen to stand by while others were being
tortured, failing, perhaps, to register the world-shattering implications of the
violation to which they bore witness. Trust is therefore untrustworthy, and the
realization of this untrustworthiness is, according to Amry, the moral truth
of this event:
Only I possessed, and still possess the moral truth of the blows that even today
roar in my skull, and for that reason I am more entitled to judge, not only
more than the culprit but also more than societywhich thinks only about its
continued existence. (Amry 1980, 6970)
While the physical torture is over and past, the moral truth of it is not.
Perpetually haunted by it, incapable and unwilling to trust, and to tolerate
blindness in others, the victim remains nailed onto the cross of his ruined past
(Amry 1980, 68).13 Whoever was tortured, stays tortured, Amry writes, and
adds that the permanence of torture gives the one who underwent it the right
to speculative flights, which need not be lofty ones and still may claim a certain
validity (Amry 1980, 34).
Time, twisted and straight

The injury is therefore incurable, trust will not be regained. The contrast
between this incurability or moral truth, and societys industrious efforts
to cure and deny it; between the unpassing of this event and the pressure of
new generations to let the past pass (already assuming this to be possible
and desirable), results in a particularly painful and contradictory condition
for the victim. The victim is pulled at once in two opposite directions: forced
to survive, survival becomes increasingly impossible. The more the society
and world that sustain him move and press onward, the more he is pulled
backwards, thrown behind. It is not only symbolic that this experience of time
is a form of torture; that the wheel of time becomes a breaking wheel. When
Amry states that he must clarify the meaning ressentiment to those against
whom it is directed, it is certainly in part this predicament that he wishes to
clarify, especially to those who are anxious to help the victim to move on with
life, perhaps not fully realizing the true motivations or the consequences of
their endeavor.
13
The barely disguised reference to Christian mythology in this phrase is not meant to invoke an
analogy but to emphasize a difference: insofar as Jesus was resurrected, he was not nailed to the cross
of his ruined past. On the contrary, his essence as savior and redeemer was to demonstrate that the
Via Dolorosa and the cross are not the end of the story: There is a future salvation, a repair.
Amry calls this conflicted experience of time a twisted (ver-rckt) time

sense.14 To explain this notion and what I think it does, I must first offer a
general point for reflection about time. Time itself is a contradiction, if rarely
experienced as such. It is at once poison and cure, arrest and liberation. On the
one hand, as the common sayings have it, time heals all wound, and this too
shall pass. This natural attitude was given ontological credence by Heidegger,
who adequately showed that time is the condition of our transcendence, and
therefore our freedom. As temporal beings, aware of their temporality, we are
never at one with ourselves, always outside of ourselves in the world and ahead
of ourselves toward future and death. For that reason, neither we nor our world
are ever reducible to the present and presence, and nothing that happens to us
is ever final, fixed, or irreversible, a mere fact. On the other hand, time is
the condition of our helplessness and vulnerability. With respect to time we are
at base patients and not agents. Time as a happening, as the place-holder to all
that happens to us, beyond what we can anticipate, understand, hold, recollect,
or control; that which can never be stopped, upheld, contained, or mediated. It
is in time and by time that we get injured, ill, and grow old. With respect to all
finite beings, by their essence as finite, time is degeneration, the impossibility,
in the final count, of absolution, redemption, or cure. In this (irreducible)
respect, time is not what Kant called inner sense and certainly not a form
of intuition. We do not age, nor does our skin become yellow, in inner sense.
Time is both degeneration and regeneration, dispossession and control,
anxiety and trust, poison and cure. With this contradiction in mind, we can
appreciate the fact that the twisted time-sense of ressentiment is not a simple
inversion. It is not, in other words, a turning backwards rather than forwards,
concern with the past instead of the future. It is rather a time-sense that holds
(or rather, is held by) this contradiction. If ressentiment emphasizes time as the
irreducible condition of our violability, it is only in the motion of countering,
reacting, and revolting against, a tradition and esprit that emphasizes time as
the condition of transcendence, freedom, and salvation.
The twisted time-sense in Amrys exposition stands against the natural
consciousness of time. The term natural is not to be taken as implying a
14
Ver-rckt colloquially connotes crazy or mad. By separating it into its components, Amry seems
to call to mind a visceral resonance both in the sign and in what it signifies. It could perhaps be read
as turned-behind-the-back. The English translation, disorder, does not quite capture this visceral
aspect. Twist, the term I am using, is, as Amry notes elsewhere, the original meaning of torquere,
or torture, and it also conveys more strongly the sort of psychopathological connotation that his
ver-rckt provokes, and at the same time challenges.
universal law but a habitual attitude, which became a part of [or engrained
in] the social representation of reality (Amry 1980, 72, translation slightly
modified). In describing the characteristics of this natural organization of time,
Amry invokes the language of the physician, proposing that it is rooted in the
physiological process of wound-healing (Amry 1980, 72). With a nod to what
we have seen is a core postulate of Nietzsches ethics and approach to history, he
adds: What will be tomorrow is more valuable than what was yesterday. That
is how the natural feeling for time will have it (Amry 1980, 76, italics mine).
Amrys position concurs with Nietzsches in the sense that both see the
natural orientation of time as the work of valuation, which is in turn viewed as a
matter of healing and health. There are, however, two main points of contention
in the way by which they understand the natural.
First, there is a substantive shift from the agentive paradigm that can be
discerned in Nietzsche, typical of modern thought and especially of nineteenth-
century vitalism, to a pathological (passive) paradigm.15 Where the former talks
of desire, drive, force, the latter stresses the existence of wounds and injuries that
are inflicted and undergone. The organization of time, life, and reality in that
sense is more reactive than proactivea helpless fleeing from passivity rather than
a positive drive toward self-preservation and self-determination. When viewed
through the lens of the pathological paradigm, the agentive paradigm itself (the
postulation of conscious or unconscious primordial drives) can be said to be
rooted in the physiological process of wound-healing, as part of a preventative
or immunizing modality of healing. Such preventative measure, however, is as
ideological and fictional as is the idea of an original sin, which, as suggested,
was erected to justify and vindicate a suffering that is fundamentally unjust and
meaningless. If life is prefigured as an agent, a self-desiring force as Nietzsche
called it, then passivity is prefigured as a derivative, somehow inessential to life
as such, at most its product or side-effect. In that sense, the designation of life
as force, desire, or will (and along with it the self-understanding of thinking as
a force, desire, or will), already works to circumscribe passivity. To minimize
passivity and accident, or vulnerability and exposure to them, is to fortify
trust in the world, since an impassive being cannot be injured. Implied here
is a modified understanding of what metaphysics is about and how Nietzsche
might still be regarded a metaphysicist: the metaphysical, like the proactive,
is invulnerable. The fantasy of invulnerability animates Nietzsches categorical
15
We could say that Amrys thought was exhibiting, in 1965, what since the 1990s has been termed
an affective turn.
Yes-saying and love of fate no less than it does categorical No-saying. In short,
under this paradigm shift the origin of valuation and of moral values is not the
will but the need to close off, or conceal, an open, unclosable wound, while moral
values are not the condition for the possibility of power but for the concealment
of powerlessness.
Second, and alongside this implicit paradigm shift, there is a difference in the
understanding of the future and its role. While Nietzsche often makes it sound
as if the future is a given value and the ultimate test for the health-value of values,
the sense we get from Amry is that valuation manufactures the future, or that
future is a value-concept. Like metaphysical or transcendental constructions, it
is a mode of transcendence. If, however, we follow the footsteps of Nietzsches
own critique of metaphysics, we must wonder whether the investment of value
in this kind of transcendence is not already an anticipation of valuelessness, the
decay of values and their detachment from their origin in history and life.
Be it as it may, for ressentiment, this kind of transcendence is foreclosed. Its
twisted time sense blocks the exit to thefuture (Amry 1980, 76, italics
mine). Interestingly, in the very same statement Amry contends that the future
is the genuine human dimension. We are led to believe that being denied exit to
the human dimension is precisely where the moral significance of ressentiment
lies, implying not only that morality and humanity are not intrinsically
correlated as they are traditionally made out to be, but that they are somehow
mutually exclusive. This idea is not entirely new. Henri Bergson gestured toward
it when he argued that Philosophy should be an effort to go beyond the human
state (Bergson 1992, 193), and Nietzsche himself seemed to believe so too, as
suggested by his appeal to an over-man, a self-overcoming of humanity. If,
however, the future is the genuine human dimension as Amry contends, it
becomes doubtful whether the overman, whom Nietzsche never fails to portray
as a man of the future, is anything but an idealized and wishful portrayal of
the human as such. This would make the overman less an overcoming than a
resurrection (and reification) of the same.
To conclude, ressentiment radicalizes rather than destroys the moral
difference asserted by Nietzsches thought, in that its alienated, exiled gaze casts
the future, along with life and health, and the genuinely human, into the side
of moral values, and into question. As Amry notes: Indeed: its a rather cheap
truth to say that our condition [Befinden] generally gets noticed only when
we are out of condition [Misbefinden] (Amry 1994, 34). This is perhaps the
reason for which it is so difficult for us, men of knowledge, to know ourselves.
Morality, between conformity and revolt

There are two traditional ways to conceive the relation between morality and
nature: monistic and dualistic. The former sees morality as subordinate to
natural desire, and the latter sees morality (along with human rationality and the
divine) as independent from, transcendent/transcendental to, and higher than
nature, enabling to guide natural desire and keep it in check. My interpretation
of Amry is espousing an alternative perspective, whereby the moral is neither
subordinate to nature nor is it higher or independent from it. Rather, it is a
disordering of and revolt against nature. Morality is, in that sense, nothing but
a (moral) difference; it is not another sphere, elsewhere, but a dissociation and
dislocation (Verrenkung), a crisis and revolt.
The moral power to resist, states Amry, contains the protest, the revolt
against reality (Amry 1980, 72). As already seen in Nietzsche, the moral
difference stands at once against the reification of values and the homogenization
of perspectives and personalities. In Amry too, it is what distinguishes between
the herding moralization of the individual who incorporates himself morally
into society and dissolves in its consensus, and the person who perceives
himself to be morally unique, remaining true to his experience and fate.
Whoever submerges his individuality in society and is able to comprehend

himself only as a function of the socialreally does forgiveHis time-sense
is not dis-orderedit has not moved out of the biological and social sphere
into the moral sphere. As a de-individualized, interchangeable part of the social
mechanism he lives with it consentingly. (Amry 1980, 71)
Consider how different this version of slave morality and ressentiment is

from the phenomenon Nietzsche critiques, in which the good man is aligned
with the comfortable, the reconciled, the vain, the sentimental, the weary
(Nietzsche 1989, 95). Whereas for Nietzsche ressentiment is, so to speak, the
sentimental cementing of the herd and of the mob, Amrys ressentiment
beckons us to consider that it is rather the affirmation of life, health, and future
that performs this function, and performs it well.
Nietzsche exposed an important truth about the value of ordinary values and
its relation to healing, but, at least to some extent, he ended up reinforcing and
conforming to the same natural, healing mechanism he diagnosed. His work
often implies that, in the end, all of usanimals, humans, gods, and supermen
alikeare but slaves to life and fate; some, like slaves, carry their crosses
begrudgingly, while others, like dunces, rejoice. Is this an alternative at all?
***
As cited in the first section, Heidegger argued that the nihil is the veil that
conceals the truth of the Being of beings (Heidegger 1982, 11). Trust, I propose,
is the veil that hides the truth of the value of valuesthe moral truth. The origin
of the value of valuesthe wound and the vulnerabilityis closed off and
concealed by the generic and undiscriminating prescription that wounds can
and should be healed and that the past should be attended to in the service of
life and future. Values then become empty shells and golden calves. We become
too busy defending human rights to be bothered by humans (or each other); we
commit violence for the sake of maintaining peace, ignore the others autonomy
in the name of promoting freedom; injure by aggressively and intrusively healing;
alienate and instill resentments in the guise of reconciliation.
With characteristic irony and resignation, Amry reassures us toward the
end of his essay on resentments that we need not worry. Slave morality is a
morality for losers, and the natural consciousness of time and its trust in
the world will prevail over ressentiment, or at least successfully suppress it
(Amry 1980, 81). The future is stronger and healthier than the past, as the
young are stronger and healthier than the old, and the strong are healthier than
the weak. All this is simple, to recall Nietzsches words, as truth is simple,
and immediately convinces even him who has not first been given a historical
proof (Nietzsche 1980, 23). Perhaps due to this simplicity, the words of the
philosophical physician are bound to be more pacifying for the public, for the
present, and for the coming age than those of the patient that he cannot cure.
Afterword: Amry and the State of Israel
The Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel is called Yom Hashoah Ve-hagvurah,

meaning, The day of the Holocaust and Heroism. Gvurah, the Hebrew word
for heroism, is etymologically related both to overcoming and overpowering
(Ligvor) and to masculinity (Gavriut). As the name suggests, this day places
equal weight on the commemoration of annihilation and victimization as it
does on the incidents of uprising and revolt by Jews against their perpetrators.
This coupling of Holocaust and Heroism, however, seems to extend beyond the
historic context of World War II, in which actual displays of heroism were all but
apparently swallowed up by the devastating force of victimization. The heroic
side of the equation belongs more to the aftermath of the Holocaust and the
founding of the State of Israel, as meant, in its very existence, to make amends
to counter humiliation and attempt at annihilation with a more noble, powerful,
self-defending, and self-reliant character. As the Hebrew poet Jabotinski
famously wrote:
Through blood and sweat, there will arise in us a race

Proud, and generous, and merciless.
Since Amrys book takes up victimhood itselfwithout venue for positive

redemptionas its focus, there should be little wonder that this book, originally
published in German in 1966, was translated into Hebrew only in 2001, despite
the fact that it is one of the canonical texts of Holocaust Studies and that it had
long since been translated into English and French. It would not be far-fetched
to propose that, prior to the last decade, such an approach to victimhood would
have had little audience in a country that cannot commemorate, let alone
reflect, on the Shoah without its adjacent moment of Heroism, and whose self-
identification consists in the trajectory of a victim-turned-hero and a manly
self-overcoming above the abysses of past and pending victimization.
The mindless self-righteousness by which what is overwhelming and
shameful is transformed into a cultural trope, a flag, and a slogan and by which
sadness and resentments blend into a celebration of life, health, and vigor; the
employment of morality in the service of power and justification of violence, can
easily make one develop a deep suspicion of, if not aversion to, the very notion
of morality. The importance of Amrys work in the Israeli context is that it
gives voice to the feelings of shame, pain, fear, and deep-seated resentment, and
yet halts their utilization as fuel to mobilize parades and just wars, and the
promotion of hollow and undiscriminating solidarity, an entirely unjustified
trust in ourselves. The moral difference, in that sense, is a ridge between morality
and the celebration of power. Maintaining this ridge, keeping the wound open
and attending to it as such, allows for once the question to be asked rather than
decided upon in advance: what is morality? Is there something like a moral
truth outside the activities of self-righteous moralization, identity formation,
and theory-building; outside the concern for and discourse about survival
and future? What precepts would remain to guide us if we dared to cast our
continued existence, as we are, into question? If we dared to pass, and tolerate,

judgment about it?
In 1966, the first generational transition since the end of World War II,
Amrys book was designed for and addressed to the German public, in
particular young intellectuals who had to assess their relation to their homeland
and the past. Perhaps the fact that in 2001 this book was finally translated into
Hebrew signifies the readiness of a new generation of Israelis to make the same
kind of assessment, to be corrupted as the youth of Athens were once corrupted
by a nihilistic Socrates. Many intellectuals on the left are urging us today to move
on, to stop being the victims, so that we can finally have a future. I beg to
differ; it is like dropping a stone on ones foot to heal a toothache. Rather than
calling to overcome our self-identification as victims, which was never genuine
(or wholehearted) in the first place, I would sooner call the Israeli youth to
overcome the poisonous myth of manly and heroic invulnerability.
Bibliography
Amry, Jean. 1980. At the Minds Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and
its Realities. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
. 1994. On Aging. Revolt and Resignation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
. 1999. On Suicide. A Discourse on Voluntary Death. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Arendt, Hannah. 1978. The Life of Mind. ThinkingWilling. New York: Harvest.
Bergson, Henri. 1992. The Creative Mind. New York: Carol Publishing Group.
Foucault, Michel. 1984. Truth and Power. In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul
Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books.
Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. New York: Harper&Row.
. 1982. Nietzsche, Vol. IV: Nihilism. San Francisco: Harper & Row Publishers.
. 1991. Nietzsche, Vol. II: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same. New York:
HarperCollins.
. 1993. Basic Writings. San Francisco: Harper Collins.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1968. The Will to Power. New York: Vintage Books.
. 1979. Beyond Good and Evil. New York: Dover Publications.
. 1980. On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life. New York: Vintage
Books.
. 1989. Geneaology of Morals. New York: Vintage Books.
Pattison, George. 2000. The Later Heidegger. New York: Routledge.
Wollin, Richard (ed.). 1993. The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader. Boston: MIT
Press.
8
Nihilism and Repetition: Dahlia Ravikovitchs

Reiterations as Critique
Liron Mor
As if Friedrich Nietzsches famous announcement of the death of God was

not dramatic enough, Gilles Deleuze dramatizes it further, employing it to
outline a typology of nihilisms based on the various potential meanings of
this statement. The first form of nihilism he introduces, the negative nihilism
of the death of the Judeo-Christian-Pauline God, manifests itself in the will to
nothingnessan ascetic rejection of this world, whereby life takes on the value
of nil and all trust is vested in higher ideals as grounding all knowledge and
values. To it belongs what Nietzsche terms slave morality, the blind obedience
to transcendent laws and norms regardless of their content, assigning blames
and punishments in order to view oneself as good. The second form, the
reactive nihilism of the European higher man, who killed God only to put
himself in His place, constitutes a reaction to this devaluation of life by
annulling higher values themselves. It may therefore be seen as characterizing
a critical modern perception of the law: Unlike the Law of ancient philosophy
or the Judeo-Christian Law, which were considered to be grounded in some
ideal Good, our modern laws are nothing but manifestations of the current
state of power struggles and the good is simply determined by the legal.1 Thus,
upon realizing that even when taking the place of God he remains a slave
living a depreciated life and following empty conventionsman has no one to
blame but himself. We then end up with the passive nihilism of Buddhism, or
of the death of Christ as Buddhathe last mans preference of nothingness of
1
Deleuze elaborates on this modern perception of the law, and on true repetition as set against the
law, in his Difference and Repetition and Coldness and Cruelty (Deleuze 1994; 1991, especially
8190).
the will over a will to nothingness, his noble acceptance of the destruction of
the self itself, of the end of man.2
However, beyond this supposedly linear progression toward absolute
annihilation, and at the height of nihilismprecisely at the point where it
overcomes itselfwe find Nietzsches hypothesis of the eternal recurrence
of the same as another type of nihilism. In the eternal recurrence Deleuze
recognizes the radical, active nihilism of the superhuman consciousness,
the active willing of mans own destructionin no way an effort to put an
end to ones life, but rather joyfully accepting the death of God and actively
killing what is man in us. Turning the eternal recurrence into the repetition
of difference, Deleuze characterizes it as a selectionaffirmative, active,
creativewhose ultimate end is the most radical form of critique, a critique
beyond critique, the transformation of all known values; not a change in
values but a change in the very element from which the value of values is
derived (Deleuze 2002, 171175).
Focusing on Israeli poet Dahlia Ravikovitchs (19362005) poem A
Lullaby Translated from the Yiddish3written in 1989, in response to the
exoneration of IDF (Israel Defense Forces) soldiers accused of beating a
Palestinian civilian to deaththis chapter explores the first three types of
nihilism, demonstrating how Ravikovitch exposes the nihilist nature of laws
and norms in Israeli society. It further examines whether certain practices of
reiteration that the poet utilizes may be seen as instances of the final, active
type of nihilism, and whether this should be perceived as the culmination
of nihilism or as its very dissolution, a different form of political critique.
Analyzing Ravikovitchs practices of reiteration, I show how it is precisely by
pushing nihilism to its extreme formsutilizing the nil itself and the active
selective repetition of the eternal recurrencethat Ravikovitch suggests
a radical form of critique against the nihilist implications of the Israeli
occupation of Palestine.
There are two by-products to this endeavor. Concretizing the fictional
concept of the eternal return through reiterative literary devicesnamely,
allusions and quotations of a certain kindmay aid us in illuminating the
idea of the eternal recurrence itself, which is considered impossible to grasp
since its active nihilism is allegedly predicated on the destruction of the very
2
For Deleuzes typology of Nietzsches nihilisms as dramatized by the death of God, see Deleuze
(2002, 152156).
3
Hebrew, Shir eres meturgam mi-Yiddish (Ravikovitch 2010, 334335).
Dahlia Ravikovitchs Reiterations as Critique 153
subject who thinks, or rather experiences, it.4 Second, the various types of
nihilism surveyed above constitute not only types of interpretations and
evaluations of the world, but also types of interpretations and evaluations
of the self in its relation to othersranging from a self that is completely
dependent on a transcendental master to a superconsciousness that goes
beyond itself so as to connect with the world, with others. I therefore argue
that this active, critical nihilism is bound up with a necessarily different
relation to others.
Indeed, the relation of Ravikovitchs poetry to Palestinian suffering is quite
unique in the sphere of Hebrew poetry. Her own generation of poets, the so-
called Statehood Generation (1950s1970s),5 tended to shun overtly political
issues in favor of mundane and personal experiences, a move commonly
viewed as a rebellion against the previous generationthe Palmach Generation.
This previous generation consisted mainly of poets who participated in the
establishment of the state of Israel and generally prided themselves on the
nationalist character of their work.6 While Ravikovitchs political poetry is not
satisfied with this self-obsessed enclosed subject and therefore clearly differs
from the poetry of her own generation, it nonetheless avoids merely returning
to the methods of the Palmach Generation. Those nationalist poets, even
when attempting to step outside of themselves in writing about the Palestinian
disaster of 1948 (the Nakba), tended to view it through the lens of the Jewish
Holocaust, enslaving the former to latter, rendering the Holocaust the cause and
justification for the Nakba and whitewashing its crimes.7 Between a complete
disengagement from the other, left in its radical alterity and rendered fully
inaccessible, and its absolute subsumption under ones own languagewhich
leaves nothing of the others alterity in place, thereby missing it altogether
Ravikovitchs political poetry suggests a third, more ethical, alternative. It
is through her use of poetic reiterations, as I will demonstrate bellow, that
4
This heuristic analogy between eternal recurrence and poetic reiterations seems quite sensible taking
into account their similarities: citation, either by quoting or alluding, like eternal recurrence, seems
to be self-annihilating and, like eternal recurrence, is in fact selective, emphasizing difference
fragmenting texts, we select elements to be repeated and thus affirmed, and interpreting them
creatively we are able to reinvent the rules of the game, the criteria for judging.
5
Among the prominent poets of the Statehood Generation are Yehuda Amichay, David Avidan, Yona
Wallach, Meir Wieseltier, Natan Zach, and others.
6
Central to this generation of poets were Natan Alterman, Avraham Shlonsky, Amir Gilboa and
Haim Gouri, among others. For a discussion of the history of poetry in Israel as a generational
struggle, or an Oedipal rebellion against the father, and Ravikovitchs place within it see (Gluzman
2010, 173174).
7
As Hannan Hever demonstrates in his introduction to the collection Al Tagidu be-Gat (Hever 2010,
955).
Ravikovitch articulates a certain relation to the other that is based on fiction

and thus avoids both representing the other and disengaging from her, and
which I here term sympathy.8
Like many of Ravikovitchs political poems, A Lullaby Translated from
the Yiddish directly addresses the issue of the nihilism of the law and
ethical judgment by presenting a certain case for us to evaluate, as though
constructingor rather, reconstructinga trial of sorts.9 Written in 1989 in
the wake of a military trial known as the Givati Case, this poem not only stages
a trial but also refers to a recent one. The case revolved around an incident
that occurred on August 22, 1988, during the First Palestinian Intifada, at the
Jabalya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, when four Givati Brigade IDF soldiers
fatally beat a father and his teenage son during the apprehension of the son,
allegedly involved in stone-throwing. The father and son were then detained
and brought to the military post, where later that night the father, Hani al-
Shami, died of his wounds. The four soldiers were prosecuted for manslaughter
in a Military Court, claiming in their defense to have been merely following
orders.10 When a later beating at the military post by other, supposedly unknown,
IDF soldiers came to be regarded as the more direct cause of al-Shamis death,
the military judges acquitted the defendants of manslaughter, finding them
guilty of brutality alone and never prosecuting the soldiers involved in the later
beating.11 Evidently, the nature of the law here is such that it is only interested
in the question is this the case?that is, whether or not this case falls under
the category of the offense, here translated into the question is it or is it not a
8
I use the term sympathy here, rather than other similar expressionssuch as empathy, for example
for three main reasons. First, its etymology suggests participating in the pain of others, feeling
with them (from Greek sympatheia: syn- together and pathos- feeling), and it therefore more
adequately signifies Ravikovitchs specific relation to others, which will be discussed below. Second,
the concept of sympathy has a long, rich history in political thought, especially in the thought of
the eighteenth century, when central figures such as Adam Smith, David Hume, and Edmund Burke
were discussing its power as an aesthetic, ethical, and political emotion, capable of tying society
together. Finally, the word is already in use in the pejorative term Palestinian sympathizer, serving
to denote precisely those who maintain an empathic and supportive relation to Palestinians.
9
On the proliferation of trials in Ravikovitchs writing and their staging as a site of strife between
conflicting interpretations, see Szobel (2013, especially 4348).
10
These ordersstipulating that during apprehension, suspects of disturbance of peace should be
beaten to the point of broken limbs, regardless of whether or not they resist arrestwere indeed,
as a defense witnesses pointed out, congruent with the spirit of the phrase coined by the Israeli
Minister of Defense at the time, Yitzhak Rabin, famously calling upon the IDF to break their arms
and legs (see in the ruling itself, Kassim 1989, 196. For discussions of Rabins deplorable statement,
see Gordon 2008, 157; Grossman 2003, 10).
11
Everyone involved in this casedefendants, investigators, and witnesses who allegedly saw the
beating at the postclaimed no knowledge (or recollection) of the identity of any of those who took
part in this fatal beating (Kassim 1989, 190191).
case of manslaughter? The work of judgment here is merely concerned with

subsuming this particular case under a universal category and hence shows no
interest in the questions of who actually committed the offense, why, and how,
just as it shows no interest in the question of its actual ethics. In Nietzsche and
Deleuzes terms, it is the negative nihilism of delegating all moral criteria to the
law, exempting oneself of genuine evaluation. However, Ravikovitchs poem
asking rather which is the case, of what type it is12contests this nihilistic
dimension of the law through its reiterations and offers a different perspective
for interpreting and evaluating the case, one founded on sympathy.
Interestingly, this poem is the only one in Ravikovitchs Complete Poems
(Kol ha-shirim) that is itself repeated, being published in two versionsan
earlier one, bearing the full title A Lullaby Translated from the Yiddish, and
a later one, simply titled A Lullaby (Shireres), as though no longer in need
to be as obvious about its origin or about the very fact of being a reiteration.
This self-attested repetition is, however, the very reason I chose to focus
here on the earlier version. Additionally, and unlike the later version, this
version incorporates quotations of testimonies from the judicial decision
in this case, quotations that constitute the first form of poetic reiteration
discussed here.
The second form of poetic reiteration employed by Ravikovitch, a certain
kind of allusion, is implied by the title, which proclaims the poem itself to be a
repetitionnot an exact rendering but rather a slightly altered one, a translation.
What is supposedly translated here is a Yiddish lullaby. It is not, however, any
particular lullaby, but rather an archetype of this Eastern European Jewish genre,
which was traditionally combined with the genre of lamentation song and used
12
Against what he calls the judgment of Godthat is, Kantian determinative judgment or
transcendental judgmentwhich is merely interested in the Socratic question what is x?, or is
this x?, and is therefore only concerned with subsuming particular objects or cases under universal
categories and rulesDeleuze sets up a notion of Nietzschean immanent evaluation based rather
on the question which is the case?, of which type it is? (Deleuze 2002, 20, 7679; Kant 1996,
A132/B172). It may be tempting to perceive the alternative form of evaluation that I am about to
present here in terms of Kantian reflective judgment, especially in its aesthetic forms, for reflective
judgment is indeed concerned with the particular and employs the imagination in order to generate
a universal rule (or a principle, a category, or a concept) in order to account for it (Kant 1987,
1820). However, by way of anticipation of my argument in Section II, I would like to stress that the
idea of a generalizable type as a mode of evaluation has nothing to do with creating a universal; its
generalization is always local and limited and in no way assumes universality. While the evaluation
of a type may in fact rely on similarities and differences in relation to precedents, for example (and
as such is related to the legal tradition of the common law, as opposed to the codified civil law), it
is closer to a search of a certain concrete episteme of a particular era in a particular placeor, in
Deleuzes words, a type is a reality which is simultaneously biological, psychical, historical, social
and political (Deleuze 2002, 115).
to grieve and protest persecution and devastation (Kronfeld 2010, 527528). The
translation process here refers primarily to the importation of the form of the
Yiddish lullaby into the Israeli-Palestinian reality, so as to lament and oppose
the persecution of Palestinians by IDF soldiers. In order to do so, however,
Ravikovitch must evacuate the Yiddish lullaby of its Jewish protagonists, at
least partially, actively introducing some nil into it, in order to allow others
to temporarily and simultaneously take a place in it.13 This is achieved already
through the ambiguity concerning the target language of this translation. On
the surface, the poem seems to translate the language and cultural heritage of
Yiddish into those of Modern Hebrew, the language in which it is in fact written.
However, the poem may also be understood as a translation from Yiddish
culture to the Arabic experience of a Gaza refugee camp, even if it was never
written in either of these languages. This ambiguity, attained by hollowing out
Ravikovitchs own heritage as she repeats it, is central to the political effect of the
poem, for it manifests the active nihilism Deleuze finds in Nietzsche, which may
serve to combat the nihilism of the law.
The poem consists of three lullaby stanzas, separated by two blocks of

quotations from the judges decision in this case. Since Ravikovitchs critique
of nihilism is largely found in the middle part of the poem, I will introduce the
first stanza briefly and circle back to it later.
Mama and Grandma shall sing,

shining-white mothers of yours.
The wing of Mamas shawl
is touching the covers almost.
Mama and Grandma shall sing
an ancient and mournful tune;14
13
This gesture, which becomes even more explicit in the final stanza, suggests a transgression of a tacit
command that is increasingly upheld in Israelnever to compare any calamity to the Holocaust
or to any other anti-Semitic persecutions (which are the main concern in Yiddish lamentation
lullabies) (on this command, see Ophir 2001, 1221). Most recently, a bill was introduced in the
Israeli parliament, legally banning the use of Holocaust symbols and vocabulary when not in
reference to the Holocaust itself, thus limiting any such comparisons and identifications.
14
The translation is mine. It is, however, in dialogue with Bloch and Kronfelds translation of the
later version of the poem, titled Lullaby, which appeared in the most recent English collection of
Ravikovitchs poems (Ravikovitch 2009, 219220).
These first few lines already contain Ravikovitchs poetic justice in a nutshell.
They fashion the classic setting of a lullabythe physical intimacy of mothers
tending over the bed of a sleeping, or about to be sleeping, childand situate
Ravikovitchs trial within it, as a song, a poetic search for justice, addressed to
a half-anesthetized, largely disinterested puerile audience. As we will see, these
verses, like the title, produce an ambiguity as to the mothers identity by hollowing
out the form of the Yiddish lullaby, opening their figures up to be occupied by
Palestinians as well, thereby involving the readers in an active interpretation.
Finally, they intimate a certain repetition by referencing a generational cycle
and indicate that any judgment is suspended, is only to-come, by staging the
entire scene in the future tense, as though this song, the alternative trial, is not
the one we are reading but is rather yet to be sung.
Additionally, these opening lines position the reader as the addressee of the
poemthe child who is being put to sleep. In line with the ambiguity discussed
above, the readers are put either in the position of a young Israeli child, about
to hear the story of the Givati Case and hopefully grow up to be critical of the
situation it discloses, or in the place of a Palestinian child, perhaps the very
Palestinian child who was the victim of the Givati soldiers.15 Thus, we are made
to take the place of both an Israeli and a Palestinian child, both a victim and
a future judge of this case, and therefore evaluate this case by imaginatively
experiencing the situation of the victim rather than merely assessing it as a
removed object.
Captured thus by the singing mothers, put in the place of the passive listening
child, the reader is now presented with a certain scene from the case, which is
about to be repeated three times throughout the poem:
in the dark cordon in Jabalya

set down, clasped in each other,
a broken father, spitting langue-blood,
and his fifteen-year-old son.
This scene, of the shattered father and son being held by each other,16 portrays
a specific moment in the chain of events, after they had already been beaten at
their home, detained, and brought to the post, where they experienced further
violence. The posture depicted recalls the iconography of a Piet, the scene of
15
In her reading of the later version of the poem, Dana Ulmert suggests another possibilitythat the
lullaby is addressed to a different son of al-Shami, a brother of the one involved in this affair (Ulmert
2010, 438).
16
This reciprocity is further emphasized in the Hebrew original (auzim ze ba-ze).
the lamenting Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Christ,17 and mirrors the
singing mothers in their intimate scene over the childs bed. I will return to this
posture and the associations it raises shortly.
Ravikovitch then interrupts the form of the lullaby in order to introduce the
first quotation from the judicial decisionan excerpt of a witness testimony
which repeats the very scene that was just portrayed by the poet, yet in a language
aspiring to the objectivity of legal discourse:
The first witness who referred to the assault on the deceased at the post was
Second-Lieutenant Zaken, ShimonAt the beginning of his testimony the
witness notes that he remembers the incidentThe deceased was wearing a white
galabiyya stained with bloodThe witness noted that at the time the deceased
and his son were leaning against the wall, shoulder to shoulderSecond-
Lieutenant Zaken notes that at that time he threatened the deceased and told
him to shut his mouth.
Notice Ravikovitchs omissions, her emptying out of the legal text as her
efforts are primarily focused on extrapolating this specific scene of Piet. The
first ellipsis indicates the omission of some concrete details about the witness,
such as his identification number and position, while the second marks the
omission of the context of the incident, during which the deceased and his son
arrived at the post and were leaning on the western wall of the [soldiers] rooms
(Kassim 1989, 198). The third ellipsis stands for the omission of the witness
reported account of his attempt to converse with al-Shami: He tried to speak
with the deceased, asked his name and address, but only heard him groaning I
want to die.18 Just as Ravikovitch dismisses the supposedly concrete details of
the witness identity and of the context of the event, so too she rejects Second-
Lieutenant Zakens account, reported by the judges, of al-Shamis words on this
occasion, despite their dramatic effect. Repeating al-Shamis refusal to give his
formal details to Zakan, Ravikovitch refuses to put words in his mouth that are
three times removed from their source. She does not allege to know what al-
Shami said or felt under the circumstances; she merely focuses on the bodily
aspects of the scene, now corroborated by the quotation from the decision
the father and son leaning toward each other in a kind of mutual Piet while
blood is oozing out of the fathers mouth.
17
In the later version of the poem, this image of the mournful mother is further echoed in mentioning
Rachel weeping for her children, as a kind of Jewish version of the Mournful Virgin (for the
poem, see Ravikovitch 2010, 241; 2009, 219).
18
For the full testimony, see Kassim (1989, 198).
Why does Ravikovitch omit these concrete details, emptying out and
fragmenting the quotation from the testimony? Why does she repeat the same
scene instead of adding new ones? Why does she focus most of her efforts on
these bodies, their posture, and their suffering? It is only in the next stanza, which
reintroduces the form of the lullaby, that we learn against what Ravikovitch is
struggling and by what means.
Moving in his sleep, the child,

shaking his innocent head.
Four angels from the throne of glory
flapping their wings above him.
Suddenly trembling seized him
and his mouth dried up like straw.
It is only a nightmare you witnessed,
a dream and not reality.
Back to sleep, my dear, apple of my eye,
nothing has happened yet.
The child is suddenly awakened by a horrific dream, which is described as the

most astonishing religious revelation. Echoing a long tradition of lamentation,
the stanza mentions the throne of glory from the Book of Jeremiah (Jer. 17:12,
NIV) and the four angels of the throne, alluding to a mystical revelation in the
Book of Ezekiel, when the workings of heaven are revealed to the prophet in
the form of a throne engulfed by four heavenly hybrid creatures (Ezek. 1:26).
This description therefore refers us to the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel,
both of whom forebode the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple due to
the Israelites sins.19 With this allusion in mind, the childs revelation seems like
one of reproach, foretelling the punishment and destruction of those who had
transgressed Gods laws by their murderous act, a punishment that is still to
come, for, as the wording of the poem has it, nothing has happened yet.
With these allusions in mind, this revelation seems to follow the logic of
negative nihilism, the resignation to transcendent laws and ethical codes while
neglecting life in this world, the implications of violence on living bodies,
19
Moreover, since this revelation leads the child to be seized by trembling (Hebrew, raada aaza bo),
it also alludes to a verse in the Book of Isaiah, which depicts the fear and trembling that seize sinners
upon Gods destructive journey to exalt His glory: The sinners in Zion are terrified; trembling grips
[seizes, aaza] the godless: Who of us can dwell with the consuming fire? (Isa. 33:14). The answer
to this question is clarified in the next verse: only the righteous will survive.
and the duty to perform ethical interpretations and evaluations of ones own.
However, since these references appear in the poem immediately after the
presentation of the brutalized father and son, they may also be perceived as
ironically characterizing the brutal, senseless orders that the Givati soldiers
allegedly receivedto break the limbs of disturbers of peace whether or not
they resist arrestas following the tautological logic of negative nihilism: That
is, as acceptable, even good, simply because they came from above. Within this
logic, the soldiers obedience was good (regardless of the brutality inflicted)
on the condition that this was indeed the order given, for the order itself must
have been good. Hence, the judges obsessive attempts throughout most of the
trial to determine whether those were in fact the ordersso as to determine the
culpability of the soldiersbecome a grotesque embodiment of this nightmarish
tautological logic.
However, the nightmare can also be understood as the terror produced
precisely by the fact that nothing has happened yet, that no punishment had come
upon the transgressorsfor the brutal soldiers were acquitted of manslaughter
and the murderers were never prosecuted. As such, the terror pertains to both
Israeli and Palestinian children, now taught by their mothers that any hope of
punishment for the attackers is merely a dream and not a reality. These allusions
thus question the authority of the law in its purest formthe Godly law, the
transcendent, universal law that is one with the infinite Wisdom and Goodness
of the Absolute Himselffor it does not correlate to its consequences. At the
very least, these allusions establish that any such system of Godly judgment,
in which there is perfect correlation between the moral good, the law, and
its consequences, belongs in dreams and is no longer part of this world. This
perspective embodies the turn toward reactive nihilismannihilating all higher
values just to be left with the horror of no values in this worldwhich then
culminates in the passive nihilism of sleep.
This turn from negative to reactive nihilisma very subtle turn, for, as
Deleuze points out, the two are rather interdependent and consist of the same
type of depreciated life (Deleuze 2002, 2529)was itself played out during
this specific trial, when, in a highly unorthodox step, the brutality itself and the
legitimacy of the orders came to be examined. Once the causal link between the
beating at the house and al-Shamis death had been loosened, the military judges
could not but acquit the defendants of manslaughter, in line with the yes or no
logic of legal judgment. Yet, in this case, whose uniqueness is emphasized over
and over again throughout their decision,20 the judges exceptionally found the
defendants guilty of brutality, ruling that they should have refused the order to
beat non-resisting suspects, for the order was itself manifestly illegal (Kassim
1989, 236).
As explained, and complicated, by Itamar Mann in his contribution to this
volume, a manifestly illegal order is a specific legal category within the Israeli
military codex referring to an order that is so patently illegal and immoral that
soldiers ought to disobey it (as opposed to a merely illegal order, which soldiers
are in fact required to obey).21 By taking an apparently legislative, sovereign
stance, putting themselves in some external meta-position and rendering this
specific order exceptionally illegal, the judges did not reestablish some higher
principle of moral good beyond the law or the order. Rather, by this exception,
they fundamentally legalized and sanctioned all other immoral and illegal
ordersincluding the ones that were given in the military post and might have
led, according to the ruling itself, to al-Shamis death. The laws self-correction
in the form of the manifestly illegal order does not solve the problem of its
nihilism, but rather leads to that nihilism of a second orderreactive nihilism.
II
The way Ravikovitch relates to this case, however, is in every way opposed to
this logic of the judgment by law. In her poetic reworking of this legal affair,
she does not ask herself whether or not this is the case, whether or not the four
Givati soldiers directly caused al-Shamis death, whether or not those were the
orders, or whether or not they were legal. This dichotomous logic is of little help
to her. Furthermore, Ravikovitch is not interested in what actions exactly took
place and in what words were allegedly uttered. Rather, she is concerned with
the questions which is the case? of what type is it? and with the very bodies
of the victims themselves, presenting them to us as almost-physical evidence.
This is one form of Ravikovitchs political reiteration, the form of a quotation,
with which this section is concerned.
20
See, for example, Kassim (1989, 186188).
21
This legal term was first introduced by Judge Binyamin Levi in his decision in the affair of the
Kafr Qasim massacre in 1957 (Parush 1990). As Leora Bilsky showed, Levi was a central figure in
the Holocaust trials of the 1950s and the 1960s and an advocate of harsh punishments to Jewish
collaborators with the Nazis (Bilsky 2001).
Quotations, as a collection of examples, are the exact opposite of the

horizontal, universal, and abstract law that is grounded only in itself. They
are always particular, concrete cases, which, by the very act of repetition, are
imbedded in a vertical tradition, thereby calling for an evaluation according to
their similarities and differences in relation to their precedents and according
to the criteria they themselves suggest. This evaluation is never a sentencing; its
verdict is forever differed, for the body of text is still addressed to anyone who
positions herself as its reader. As particular examples, quotations do not attempt
to represent anything; they certainly do not seek to abstract any universal
logic pertaining to each and every case. Rather, they merely present, physically
importing a body of text and positing it before us.
Let us examine these notions in Ravikovitchs second quotation from the
Judgment:
Another witness, Corporal Teperberg, Haimnoticed the deceased, who was

walking bending forward and was set down next to the wall. He was leaning
against the wall and putting his head on his sons shoulder. At that time, blood
was oozing from his mouth.
Why does Ravikovitch repeat the same exact scene for the third time, again
emptying out the testimony of any concrete or new details? She omits all
these details that may have been relevant to the questions posed by the judges
because she is concerned with something else entirelynamely, the body and its
suffering posture. This selective quotation, eliminating everything but the body,
is a desperate attempt to relate to an other as he is, without any representation
that would impose her own language on himwithout putting words in his
mouth, thoughts in his head, or feelings in his gestures. As a literary excursion,
having no real access to the bodies of these others, this attempt is of course
destined to fail; however, this does not prevent Ravikovitch from asymptotically
aspiring to articulate nothing more than these bodies, thereby testifying to the
preposterousness of the legal systems pretense to know these others and this
event inside and out and give a conclusive verdict on the matter.
Ravikovitchs practice of quotation emphasizes the inanity of this pretense
further: first, because it showcases the discrepancies between the different
witnesses accounts (and between those and her own), thus demonstrating the
impossibility of knowing anything beyond the mere fact of the suffering body;
second, because her practice of quotation itself repeats the same gesture as the
attempt to present the body in itself, without representation: instead of reporting
the event of the trial, instead of criticizing its proceedings and this aspiration for
objective knowledgefor critique is still within the realm of representation
Ravikovitch merely brings parts of it into her text. It is a nearly physical
importation of fragments of the Judgment into her poem in an attempt to avoid
any representation whatsoever. This attempt, again, remains merely asymptotic,
for any selection must in fact involve some interpretation. However, since the
selection of the parts of text is primarily focused on descriptions of suffering
bodies, both form and content here unite in accentuating a certain surplus of the
body, particularly the suffering body, over the logic of the law.
Ravikovitchs selections therefore force us to look at this specific case, at
this specific body brought before us, leaving behind the legal yes/no questions
and their universalist disjunctive logic. We are no longer required to judge
whether or not this is the case the law stipulates, but rather, asking which is
the case, of which type it is, we must actively invent a rule, a logic, that may
account for this case, that may allow us to evaluate it. But what is the type that
Ravikovitch finds in this case as a rule for interpreting and evaluating it? It is
none other than the type of the Piet, which she discerns in the posture of the
bodies themselves. Emphasizing this typeby repeating the same bodily scene
three times and mirroring it in constructing the entire poem as a lullaby
Ravikovitch suggests that we evaluate the case according to its posture and the
traditional iconographies it recalls. This Piet scene may be seen not only as
forging a link between the beaten son in Jabalya and the dozing-off child in
the poem (and between the dying father and the child who is falling asleep)
thus further strengthening the ambivalent positioning of the readerbut also
as bringing into consideration the often-neglected perspective of women and
mothers. Many scholars have claimed that Ravikovitch makes ample use of her
perspective as a woman to undermine the national narrative and transgress
national boundaries by sympathizing with other private women.22 However,
Ravikovitch goes here beyond any personal identificationas a woman, as a
mother, or as an orphan who lost her father as a child. By the redoubling of the
22
The imagining of the suffering of other women and mothers through her own experience as a woman
and a mother seems to characterize much of Ravikovitchs poetry, especially in her book Mother with
a Child. (Hebrew, Ima im yeled) In her poem A Mother Walks Around (Hebrew, Ima mithalekhet),
for example, Ravikovitch is striving to imagine the suffering that a pregnant Palestinian woman
whose fetus was killed by the IDF might experience in giving birth to a dead child and living the
rest of her life in his absence. Throughout her poetic attempt to understand, Ravikovitch maintains
the future tense and the counterfactual formthat is, narrating the events that will not happen, but
could have happened, had this child been born. (For the poem, see Ravikovitch 2010, 234, 2009,
214215.) For discussions of the place of motherhood and femininity in Ravikovitchs poetry, see
Kronfeld (2010); Szobel (2013); Tzamir (2010); Ulmert (2010).
mothers in the father and son, Ravikovitch imports this scene of pity, of pain for
the suffering of others, along with the lullaby scene, into her reconstituted court,
thus taking the case out of the male environment of the military post or the
courtroom, placing it in relation to other historical sufferings, and introducing
a new logic for its evaluation: the logic of a sympathetic relation, of pity, that is
inherent in the lullaby itselffor ultimately, a lullaby is nothing other than a
parent fictionally attempting to relate, from within their own monologue, to an
other that is physically present yet verbally inaccessible. In other words, unlike
other scholars, I do not believe that Ravikovitch simply uses her femininity
or motherhood in order to relate to other women or mothers, thus accepting
given gender divides. Rather, while recognizing that she indeed has nothing
at her disposal other than these constructions, she pokes holes in them and
imaginatively uses them to relate to those who are not necessarily women or
mothers. She uses the position in which she is already imbedded and repeats it
differently precisely in order to relate to those who do not immediately belong to
the same category, thereby challenging the category itself. As we will see in the
next section, Ravikovitch makes similar use of the category of her Jewishness.
This processinventing new rules according to the case itself, while insisting
on its differenceis, according to Deleuze, characteristic of the active selection
of the eternal recurrence. Yes, there are many cases like this one, and they repeat
time and again. But instead of judging them according to a pre-given law, we
may choose to evaluate each of them creatively according to the criteria it
suggestsin this case, following the logic of the Piet and the lullaby. Deleuze
uses Nietzsches metaphor of the dice-throw to clarify this aspect of eternal
recurrence. We may cast the dice over and over again, waiting for the winning
combination according to the rules of the game, the one that will allow us to roll
again. Or we can reinvent the rules of the game each time the dice fall back on
the table, affirming the result by creatively extrapolating a rule out of it in order
to win and bring back the dice throw (Deleuze 2002, 2529). The bad player
counts on the return of the combination by the repetition of throws; the good
player obtains the repetition of the dice-throw in the fatally rolled number. This
is Deleuzes definition of the repetition of difference: Unlike the repetition of the
same, the repetition interpreted and evaluated according to a preexisting rule,
it is a repetition that creatively selects, reads the difference in each return, and
invents rules to account for and evaluate it.
Moreover, according to Deleuze, the repetition of difference, the eternal
return, also eliminates from returning all reactive forces, negating negation itself,
its ressentiment and will to nothingness, thus bringing about a transmutation of

values (Deleuze 2002, 6871). For Ravikovitch, this means that her repetition
of the same scene eliminates everything that has to do with preexisting laws
and their logicthe concrete details of the witnesses, the militaristic context,
the descriptions of the orders and the beatings, all presented in the ruling in
order to answer the question is this the case? Rather than judging the case
by these preconceived universal rules, she invents a new, temporary one,
immanently evaluating the case according to what she creatively selects in its
returning, according to the type she both recognizes and constructs. It is thus
that quotation can approximate the active, selective, and creative selection of the
eternal recurrence.
III
Let us now return to the first stanza and to that second form of nihilistic
reiteration that Ravikovitch implementsthe ambiguity produced by her
practice of allusions, by introducing a certain absence into the reiteration of
her own tradition. While the shawl (Hebrew, mipaat), for example, worn by
the singing mother in the opening stanza, seems at first as a specifically Jewish
attribute, the word mipaat in no way signifies Jewish head covers alone
and may in fact refer to any kind of head covers, including Muslim ones (or
even to other forms of fabrics worn or held by the mother). Similarly, while
the characterization of the mothers as shining white mothers, as pure and
holy mothers, is a convention of the Yiddish lullaby (Kronfeld 2010, 522), the
redoubling of the mother in the figure of the grandmother does not belong to
these conventions and therefore opens them up to other connotations: Since
in the following four verses we learn of the violent incident at Jabalya, one of
the ways to make sense of this redoubling is to understand the two mothers as
singing each to her own sonthat is, the Palestinian child from Jabalya, the
mothers son, and his (dead) father, the grandmothers son. Thus, the holy
mothers convention of the Yiddish lullaby, just like the mipaat, is opened up
to being potentially occupied by Palestinians as well.
This enlisting of Jewish symbols and conventions and their opening up to be
occupied, at least partially and potentially, by others, culminate in the sixth line,
when we learn that the song to be sung, presenting the Givati case, is an ancient
and mournful tune (Hebrew, zemeratik e-nugeh). This phrase is not merely an
ironic comment about the affair, portraying it as the regretful repeated behavior
of IDF soldiers; it also merges together, and thus hollows out, two canonical
Hebrew poems, Mournful Song (Zemer nugeh), written by Rael Bluwstein
in the 1920s, and Ancient Tune (Nigun atik), written by Natan Alterman in
the 1950s. While these poems, which were set to music and are therefore widely
known in Israel, seem so particularly Israeli, their contents, as unrequited love
songs, aspire to the universality of human experience. However, this attempt
at universalitycomposing melancholy love songs whose story is as ancient as
time, only purely in Hebrewis itself part and parcel of the national enterprise,
for it positions Hebrew poetry as one national corpus amongst all others and
situates Israel itselfwhose canon, too, now consists of ancient mournful
tunes and is thus itself as ancient as timeas one nation amongst all others.23
Ravikovitchs placing of these poems in the mouths of the two lamenting mothers
not only hollows out the canon of Hebrew poetry to make room in it for the
mournful and long-familiar tune of soldiers brutality toward Palestinians, but
also redeems these poems of their universalist aspirations, tying them back up
to their locality, and precisely thereby exposing their nationalist ambition and
transgressing their national boundaries. After all, the ancient and mournful
tune that the mothers are about to sing is the very story of the violent murder
in Jabalya.
This tactic of repeating her own tradition while hollowing it out, just like her
critique of the political situation and its discourse, is recurrent in Ravikovitchs
poetry. Of special importance here is her known poem Hovering at a Low
Altitude (1982). Ravikovitch opens this poem, which then proceeds to depict
the rape and murder of a young Palestinian girl, by declaring, I am not here
(Ani lo kan). While it appears at first as an absolute negation of the self or
as a form of nihilist escapism, this nonsensical formulaI am not here
encapsulates in fact the logic of Ravikovitchs self-evacuating practice of
reiteration as a struggle against ethical nihilism. It is at once an ironic rendering
of an escapist spirit and an emblem of the practice of sharing our here with
other bodies and voices by removing some of the self.24 The I that suspends
itself from here makes room for others to appear; however, since by indexing
a here with its finger the I cannot be fully absent, Ravikovitchs formula
marks this active partial removal of the self as a political act and suggests that
23
Tsamir makes similar claims in relation to the Statehood Generation in Hebrew poetry (Tzamir
2006).
24
On the status of the self in Hovering at a Low Altitude (Hebrew, Reifa be-gova namukh), compare:
Kronfeld (2010); Ulmert (2010).
she relates to others and their suffering precisely through the here of her I.
In A Lullaby Translated from the Yiddishlike in many other political poems
in Ravikovitchs Mother with a Child and True Love25the I am Not Here
formula is consistently utilized, as Jewish identity, tradition, and experience do
not merely serve as an alternative to those of Zionism, but also as an arsenal of
cultural and historical experiences, as that here that helps her get closer to,
and sympathize with, others. Ravikovitch seems to understand the suffering of
Palestinians not by separating herself from the Jewish collective and its history
(including the occupation of Palestine itself), but rather by making this history
all the more present: she recruits her heritage to the fullest degree in order to
allow her I not to be here, in order to create some empty space for the other
to appear.
This poetic practice of hollowing out the self is congruent with the
affirmative forgetting that Deleuze discovers in Nietzsche. According to
Nietzsche, memory is the festering wound (Nietzsche 2000a, 6) of the
base manit is the ressentiment and the spirit of revenge of the nihilist who
ceaselessly blames and accuses, who knows all too well how to not forget
(Nietzsche 2000b, 1, 10), and never acts on her painful emotions. The noble,
active, and creative, on the other hand, know how to actively forget (Deleuze
2002, 116). It is only in active forgetting that one can truly love ones enemy
(Nietzsche 2000b, 1, 10). Overcoming a nihilistic attitude requires this active
selection, deciding which burdens we can let go of, what memories we can
eliminate from future returns. Klossowski, even more so than Deleuze, makes
this forgetting [coincide] with the revelation of the [Eternal] Return, since in it
I learn that I was other than I am now for having forgotten this truth, and thus
that I have become another by learning it (Klossowski 1997, 57). This active
selective annihilation of the selfliterally, an active nihilismis the second
sense of radical nihilism, as an overcoming of nihilism by pushing it to its limits
and as a new form of critique, which is found in Ravikovitchs reiterations.
While this practice recognizes a basic similarity between the self and the
other, thus relating to her through speculating upon ones own experience,
Ravikovitchs sympathetic relation does not consume this other for it assumes
and marks differences through the nil, without describing that different being.
25
This is most readily apparent in a section in True Love (Ahava amitit) titled Issues in Contemporary
Judaism (Sugiyot be-Yahadut bat-zemanenu), which, as its name clearly suggests, contemporizes
issues traditionally regarded as Jewish, rendering them relevant to the recent political situation in
IsraelPalestine, often by opening them up to being occupied by Palestinians as well (Ravikovitch
2010, 199208; 2009, 189198).
The Palestinian mothers putting the child to sleep in this poem are in no way
equated with Jewish mothers in Yiddish lullabiessuch a repetition of the same
would merely trivialize their pain by universalizing it, turning all suffering into
one and the same suffering.26 Similarly, had Ravikovitch attempted to speak for
them or give them a concrete form from within her own language, she would
have simply erased their alterity and specificity. Instead, it is her own heritage
that she repeats but with a differenceselectively, with gaps, according to the
logic of the I am not hereso that the differences of this specific case may
shine forth. Whatever interpretation is produced in this gap constantly attests
to the fact that it is merely fictional and could have been produced differently.
This is accomplished not only through the ambiguity surrounding the mothers
identities, but also by the narration of the scene in the future tensesuggesting
that the events may unfold otherwiseand by the use of qualifiers, such as
the almost describing the encounter between the shawl and the covers as a
metonymy for the encounter between mother and son.27
The labeling of this lullaby as a translation seems less arbitrary considering
that this hollowing out and making room appears to be the very definition of
translation. Walter Benjamins seminal essay The Task of the Translator, for
example, emphasizes precisely this gap, which is produced, according to him,
by any translation: Whereas content and language form a certain unity in the
original, like a fruit and its skin, the language of the translation envelops its
content like a royal robe with ample folds [] and thus remains unsuited to
its content, overpowering and alien (Benjamin 2004, 258). The very process
of translation therefore necessarily creates a gap between the language of the
translation and its content, between the reiteration and its supposed origin.
The repetition of the textual heritage of the self with a difference, the repetition
of the form of the Yiddish lullaby in Modern Hebrew in relation to Palestinian
suffering, thus necessarily introduces this overpowering and alien gap.
26
This form of relating to Palestinian suffering, equating it with historical Jewish suffering, is prevalent
in Hebrew poetryor, at least among those few Israeli poets who attempted to fathom Palestinian
pain (see, e.g., Hever 2010).
27
This signaling of the fictionality of her account and the fact that it could have been produced
differently is most prominently achieved in Ravikovitchs poetry by her characterization through
counterfactuals, which serves her to tacitly present an alternative story to the one she is engaged in
telling and to fictionally speculate about others without imposing her interpretation upon them as a
truth claim. See, for example, Hovering at a Low Altitude, where she relates to a young Palestinian
girl by listing the things she is not and the things she has not done, and the aforementioned A
Mother Walks Around, in which Ravikovitch narrates the events that a dead Palestinian baby
and his mother will not experience, but could have potentially experienced, were it to be born
(Ravikovitch 2010, 179, 234; 2009, 174, 214).
Maurice Blanchot takes this gaping a step further, claiming that this
spacing of the text, infusing it with the privilege of ambiguity and instability,
is the very definition of a good translation, for when a translation is successful,
it not only brings with it a feeling of a light space between the words and
what they aim at, as in Benjamins metaphor, but also makes these meanings
oscillate mysteriously between many forms whose perfect suitability is
not enough to restrain them (Blanchot 1995, 180). By creating gaps, good
translations evoke all the other possible translations for the text before us,
hence [involving] us in restoring to them in silence all that the passage from
one language to another has made them lose, and all that no language would
ever have allowed them to express (Blanchot 1995, 189). Blanchot therefore
considers a good translation to be the quintessential literary act: by gaping, it
opens up a sea of potential meanings, thus involving us in active reading and
interpretation, while indicating that any interpretation, including that of the
translator herself, is merely experimental and temporary and could have been
otherwise.28 This is, I argue, precisely what Ravikovitch achieves in this poem,
which thus justifies its title to the last degree.
IV
Mama and grandma are singing a song

so that you sleep without harm, tender child,
holy mothers are watching over you.
Here, a twig from above you fell as well.29
28
At the same time, the questions of translation also epitomize the quandary of relating to the other.
The incessant negotiations between an impossible absolute faithfulness to the original and an
equally impossible absolute freedom from it are ever-present in theories of translation throughout
history. The entire question of translation lies between the extremes of absolute untranslatability
the impossibility of accessing the other for it is so foreign that it cannot be translatedand radical
translatability, the complete reduction of others to the language of the self due to the absence of
any markers indicating a shared meaning beyond what I imagine in my own language. Translations
are precisely the texts whose manner of relating to the other lies in-between those impossible
extremes. The fact that translations do exist, however, constantly undermines this assumed
impasse and attests to the fact that some relation to others is always already in place, therefore the
question should rather be how does this relation operate. For a historical survey of the negotiations
between faithfulness and freedom in translation, see, for example, Bassnett (2002); Bassnett and
Lefevere (1998).
29
In the Hebrewhine gam zalzal mealekha tsanamealekha might signify both (from) above
you and from amongst your leafs. I chose to focus on the first meaning since it echoes the mothers
protection from above, as well as that of the angels, thus relating to Ravikovitchs struggle against
transcendental judgment.
Thus begins the final stanza. The ironic, even sarcastic, tone that runs like a
red thread through the poem, condemning the nihilistic attitude of those who
sleep during such injustices, culminates here, with the holy mothers of the
Yiddish lullaby alleging to sing a song that is keeping the child from harm: As
a Palestinian, the child is already brutally harmed, and as an Israeli, being thus
kept from harm in his bed, he needs no protection and stands in stark contrast
to the injured Palestinian child, his utter passivity thereby disparaged.
This passive will to perish, this nothingness of the will, is further implied
by the allusion to the title of one of the most famous poems by Chaim Nahman
Bialik, Israels national poet, A Twig Fell (Tsana lo zalzal). This late poem by
Bialik laments the perishing of his life, and creative force, through an extended
metaphor comparing human life to the journey of a twig throughout the cycle
of natural seasons; come spring, however, the subject of this poem will no
longer flourish again, like a twig no longer organically connected to a tree. The
opening verse of this poem, which lends it its name, encapsulates much of its
significance: A twig fell upon a fence and slumbered.30 It is this slumber on
the fence that leads to the subjects demise, for had the twig fallen on either side
of the fence, upon fertile groundthat is, had the narrator taken any action
instead of merely sleeping or sitting on the fencethen it might have not ended
up barren, thrown out of the cycle of life. Linking passivity and sleep with death,
the twig thus joins the four angels from the throne in foreboding destruction
and in calling upon the sleeping children of Israel and Palestine to awaken, to
transform their passivity into action.
The sense of a cyclical return introduced by this allusion is reinforced in the
next verses:
And you shall grow up and become a man,

and the anguish of Jabalya you shall never forget
from 48 to 67, from 67 to 88,
the anguish of Jabalya you shall never forget,
and the Village of Beita and the village of Hawara
and Sajaiyya and the village of Silfit.
While any judgment is suspended, this suspension is complemented by a

plea to never forget, thus guaranteeing that this suspension is not an absence
of awareness (but, perhaps, an awareness of a certain absence). With this plea
30
Hebrew, tsana lo zalzal al gader a-yanom
to never forget Ravikovitch again enlists her own cultural heritage, explicitly
hollowing it out in order to allow room for relating to others. In this case, she
reappropriates two Holocaust commemoration practices: first, the practice of
listing names of towns where suffering was endured, here replacing East European
names with Palestinian ones; second, the command to never forget, here
translated from its established collective form of Holocaust commemoration in
Israel, we shall not forget (lo nishka), into the second-person imperative, you
shall not forget (lo tishka). Ravikovitch says nothing here about Palestinians
or for them; she merely introduces difference into her own culture. Through the
selective appropriation of these practices she takes this struggle against injustice
out of the national realm and makes it the concern of anyone who positions
herself as the addressee of this poem, anyone who sympathizes, thus paving the
way to imagining a broader civil society.
Furthermore, these commemoration practices are clearly used here to observe
Palestinian suffering. This is done, however, merely by citing towns names,
without attempting to represent Palestinian suffering in Ravikovitchs own
words and without unifying it, without speaking about the Palestinian suffering.
The repetition of names of concrete places is redoubled in the repetition of
years marking specific events in time (the Nakba of 1948, the occupation of
1967, and the incident at Jabalya during the First Intifada in 1988), which in
the Hebrew original is intensified through the alliteration of the sound a, a
cry of pain and anguish, concluding the names of the Hebrew years and the
command to never forget (mi-tasha le-tashka, mi-tashka le-tashma, / et
tsaar Jibaliyya lo tishka). Here, Ravikovitch joins together the two methods
she has been employing so far: the allusions to Jewish history, which is being
partially hollowed out, and the citing of suffering of Palestinian towns, using
proper nameswhich, like quotations, are the closest thing to concrete bodies
and their singularity. These methods allow Ravikovitch and her reader the
option of relating to this suffering through their own experiences, while not
losing sight of concrete places, events, and people, and while maintaining the
awareness that this relation is fictional.
The catalogue of places and dates creates a certain kind of metonymic
generalization. As opposed to the exceptionalist logic of the judges in the case
mentioned above, the repetitive allusions to Palestinian pain in other places
and times suggest that the Givati affair was not unique but rather one among
many other cases of senseless orders and acts of brutality. The repetition here is
clearly not of the kind of the eternal recurrence, but rather a nihilistic repetition
of the same. What is repeated is a nihilistic type of orders, norms, and legal
proceedings and their acceptance in Israeli society. In Ravikovitchs critical
presentation of this vicious cycle, however, the different cases are not equated
they maintain their proper names, their singularity. Unlike the judgment by law,
or other acts of judgment that place particulars under a universal (rule, concept,
or category), this kind of typical generalization generates a community through
difference. It is a matter of a different relation between the one and the many,
which implies the possibility of a different kind of community.31
The conclusion of the lullaby brings the critical effect to its most radical peak:
And all their blood shall be on our heads,

demand it from us,
nice child.
The blood on our heads alludes to the biblical story of Rahab. Rahab is
known as the prostitute who hid the Israelite spiessent by Joshua to explore
the land of Canaan before its occupationfrom their enemies. In return, she
obtains immunity, assuring that she and her family will not be harmed during
the coming occupation as long as they remain within her clearly marked house.
As the biblical text expresses it, if they leave the house, their bloodshed will be
on their heads; if they do not, any bloodshed will be on our heads (Jos 2:19).
Indeed, the promise is kept and Rahab and her family are saved, while the rest
31
Interestingly, Ravikovitch seems to oppose this use of particular cases to make more general claims
about the situation. In her poem, Marina adadwhere she narrates a counterfactual, the events
that could have happened were the news reporters to enter the right door and visit the recently
deceased Marina adad (a name suggestive of a Christian Palestinian)Ravikovitch writes,
All the makings were there: bereavement, sorrow,
the mother a single parent, the state of the nation as metonymy
for the fate of the individual (especially vice versa) []
She was one of a kind,
call it the luck of a goy that she alone
was not exploited
to diagnose the state of the nation
and forecast the inescapable reifications.
(Translated by Bloch and Kronfeld. See Ravikovitch 2009, 259260)
It seems as though, despite terming it a metonymy, it is rather the form of synecdoche that
Ravikovitch rejects, for it is the exploitation of the individual Marina adad to represent the
whole, the entire nation, which disconcerts her. The practice of reiterating the names of years and
towns does not fall under the same category for it does not universalize the Givati Case or efface
all differences between different calamities, even within Palestinian history itself. It is clearly not
standing for the whole nation, clearly not a synecdoche, but rather a metonymy, an open and limited
generalization of sorts, indicating that this singular case shares features in common with a few other
particular cases to which it is adjacent.
of the population of Jericho is massacred (Jos 6:1617). The blood that shall
be on our heads in the poem is therefore the bloodshed of the exceptionally
sacred, those who were not supposed to be harmed during the occupation.
However, unlike the occupation of the land in the days of Joshua, the modern
occupation of Palestine spares no one and makes no differentiations between
the inhabitants according to their different conducts, hence all their blood
shall be on our heads. Simultaneously, this blood on our heads is the very
mark of the rare exception to the violence of occupation, that single instance
when the order to commit a massacre will not be legal. It is thus an emblem of
the manifestly illegal order and a sign that even this exceptionalist logic does
not absolve of responsibility for suffering but rather intensifies the sense of
nihilism.
Finally, the call on the child and the reader to demand this blood from the
collective is a twofold call. On the one hand, it is a call for a retrial, for a new
and completely different evaluation of this case. This reevaluation, however, is
suspended, still to-come, for an alternative trial never materializes in the poem
itself. It remains a potential prospect, in some future time when the addressee
of this poem, the child or the reader, has grown to reevaluate the situation and
oppose its logic. The suspended temporality of this trialobviously preferable
to the decisive rulings of the soldiers and the judgesresists the laws demand
that we subsume the case under a category, for the most important part is yet
to happen. Rather, it implores us to experience the case at hand and come up
with a general rule, basing our creative evaluation on the criteria dictated by
the case and its precedents, so that we conduct ourselves ethically. On the other
hand, Ravikovitchs poem pleads for the (self) destruction of the collective in
its militant and nihilistic forma destruction that is the very turning point
between passive and active nihilism. While Ravikovitch herself may be unable
to take this active supracritical position, she has already paved the way for her
reader, urging her to take this step.
Ravikovitchs quotations, almost physical fragments of a foreign text, are
not turned into an exotic artifact judged under our preconceived criteria but
rather present us with a selective hint, a physical fragment, of a larger entity,
with which we can relate by the literary practice of sympathya speculative
and temporary identification with the other performed in the gaps left by the
selections. A similar sympathetic evaluation is offered by Ravikovitchs use
of allusions, these hollowed-out repetitions of the self. As such, Ravikovitchs
poetic justice, these evaluative trials-by-reiteration, constitutes a radical form
of critique precisely by not criticizing in the prevalent sense of the wordfor

these reiterations merely present the case anew. According to Deleuze, true
critique is not criticismnegative, reactive, representativebut a political
experienceaffirmative, active, creative, transgressing the law and pushing
its limits. As such, it has a double function: exposing the law as empty and,
subsequently, reinstituting the very movement it is attempting to prohibitin
our case, the movement toward others. In this way, critique and affirmation
are bound together, for this critique is at the same time creative, substituting
the principle of difference and selection for the principles of universalism or
resemblance. This figure of reiteration is a repetition geared toward the future,
toward difference. It is the eternal return as Deleuze perceives it in his reading
of Nietzsche, the repetition of that which differs from itself, whose ultimate goal
is the radical transformation of values. Finally, it suggests not only a certain
interpersonal ethical relation, but also the possibility of a different political
collective as metonymicthat is, brought together by shared analogical
concerns, that are not necessarily the same but are still perceived, from within
each particular experience, as relatable.
Bibliography
Bassnett, Susan. 2002. Translation Studies. New York: Routledge.

, and Andr Lefevere (eds). 1998. Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary
Translation. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Benjamin, Walter. 2004. The Task of the Translator. In Walter Benjamin: Selected
Writings Vol. I, edited by Michael William Jennings and Marcus Paul Bullock,
253264. Cambridge, MA: Belknap.
Bilsky, Leora. 2001. Judging Evil in the Trial of Kastnesr. Law and History Review
19(1): 117160.
Blanchot, Maurice. 1995. Translated From In The Work of Fire, edited by Charlotte
Mandell, 176190. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1991. Coldness and Cruelty. In Masochism, edited by Jean McNeil,
9138. New York: Zone Books.
. 1994. Difference and Repetition, translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia
University Press.
. 2002. Nietzsche and Philosophy, translated by Hugh Tomlinson. London and
New York: Continuum.
Gluzman, Michael. 2010. ha-Kina ha-oletzet: al shne shirim shel Daliyah Raviovitch
al Yona olakh. In Kitme or: asmishim shenot bioret u-mear al yetsiratah
shel Daliyah Raviovits, edited by Hamutal Tzamir and Tamar Hess, 173182. Bene
Bera: ha-ibutz ha-meuad.
Gordon, Neve. 2008. Israels Occupation. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Grossman, David. 2003. ha-Maet kederekh ayyim: Maamariym, 19932003. Tel Aviv:
ha-ibuts ha-meuad.
Hever, Hannan (ed.). 2010. Al tagidu be-Gat: Ha-nakbah ha-Palesinit ba-shirah ha-Ivrit,
19481958: Asupat shirim. Tel Aviv: Sedek; Parhesyah; Zokhrot.
Kant, Immanuel. 1987. Critique of Judgment, translated by Werner S. Pluhar.
Indianapolis: Hackett.
. 1996. Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis:
Hackett.
Kassim, Anis F. 1989. The Order to Beat Palestinians: Justice la Israel. Palestine
Yearbook of International Law 5: 184241.
Klossowski, Pierre. 1997. Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, translated by Daniel
W. Smith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kronfeld, Chana. 2010. Shira poliit ke-omanut lashon be-yetsiratah shel Daliyah
Raviovitch. In Kitme or: asmishim shenot bioret u-mear al yetsiratah shel
Daliyah Raviovits, edited by Hamutal Tzamir and Tamar Hess, 514543, Bene
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. 2000a. Ecce Homo. In Basic Writings of Nietzsche,
translated and edited by Walter Kaufmann, 655800. New York: Modern Library.
. 2000b. On the Genealogy of Morals. In Basic Writings of Nietzsche, translated
and edited by Walter Kaufmann, 437600. New York: Modern Library.
Ophir, Adi. 2001. Avodat ha-hoeh: Masot al tarbut Yisreelit ba-zeman ha-zeh. Tel Aviv:
ha-ibuts ha-meuad.
Parush, Adi. 1990. Psa ha-din be-parashat Kefar asem: Mivan ha-degel ha-shaor
veha-musag shel Peuda bilti-uit baalil. Iyune mishpa 15(2): 245272.
Ravikovitch, Dalia. 2009. Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of
Dahlia Ravikovitch, edited by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld. New York:
W. W. Norton & Company.
Ravikovitch, Dahlia. 2010. Kol ha-shirim, edited by Giddo Ticotsky and Uzi Shavit.
Tel Aviv: ha-ibuts ha-meuad.
Szobel, Ilana. 2013. A Poetics of Trauma: The Work of Dahlia Ravikovitch. Waltham,
MA: Brandeis University Press.
Tzamir, Hamutal. 2006. be-Shem ha-nof: Leumiyut, migdar e-subyeiviyut ba-shirah
ha-Yisreelit bi-shenot ha-amishim eha-shishim. Yerushalayim: Keter; Merkaz
ha-sharim, ha-merkaz le-eer ha-sifrut eha-tarbut ha-yehudit eha-Yisreelit,
Universitat Ben-Gurion ba-Negev.
. 2010. ha-Tsofa le-vet Yisrael mibi-fenim: Daliyah Raviovitch, ha-shira ha-

leumit-Yisraelit, e ha-migdar shel ha-yetsugiyut. In Kitme or: asmishim shenot
bioret u-mear al yetsiratah shel Daliyah Raviovits, edited by Hamutal Tzamir
and Tamar Hess, 416443. Bene Bera: ha-ibutz ha-meuad
Ulmert, Dana. 2010. Ani lo kan: Ha-emda ha-poliit eha-Iyumal ha-zehut be-shirat
Daliyah Raviovitch. In Kitme or: asmishim shenot bioret u-mear al yetsiratah
shel Daliyah Raviovits, edited by Hamutal Tzamir and Tamar Hess, 416443. Bene
9
What is a Manifestly Illegal Order? Law and

Politics after Yoram Kaniuks Nevelot1
Itamar Mann
We knew about wars from the side of a firearm, not from the side of the pretty
sons of bitches who filled our windows, who laughed, who thought old age is a
disease and who say that all we did in war wasnt worth what one F-15 does.
We were the elders of the rough blow, we cut Arabs balls, made no big deal of
heroic songs.
Kaniuk 2006, 108
This essay proposes a typology of three formations of the political imagination,

which have had the tendency, in the postCold War period, to devolve into
three kinds of nihilism: sovereignty, cosmopolitanism, and the rule of law. Each
of them is regarded as nihilism for different reasons, which will hopefully
become clear as the argument unfolds. I conclude by somewhat tentatively
proposing an alternative to these nihilisms, under the title of judgment.
Needless to say, there is nothing new in exercising judgment. The particular
political and cultural conditions in which judgment now occurs will be the
object of the discussion below.
To concretize and contextualize these themes, the essay relies on three texts:
first, a piece of fiction, the novella Nevelot (Caracasses) by the late Israeli author
Yoram Kaniuk (Kaniuk 2006).2 The story will lead directly into the second text,
Military Prosecutor v. Malinki, which is a famous opinion of an Israeli military
1
Thanks to Roy Ben-Shai, Kenneth Mann, Liron Mor, Kiel Brennan-Marquez, Nitzan Lebovic, Oded
Naaman, and the members of the Van Leer Workshop on nihilism for their invaluable comments.
2
Yoram Kaniuk died June 8, 2013. He was a great writer. As the book covers of his English translations
obstinately testified, The New York Times once called him one of the most innovative, brilliant
novelists in the Western World. But as Nicole Krauss describes, he died feeling underappreciated.
I would like to dedicate this essay to his memory. For background on Kaniuk and his death, see
Kershner (2013, A25); Krauss (2013).
court.3 In 1958, the court held that soldiers who followed an order to kill unarmed
Israeli citizens were criminally responsible, as the order was manifestly illegal.
This doctrine proved influential both in Israeli domestic law and in international
criminal law in the second half of the twentieth century.4
The question of what a manifestly illegal order is, as opposed to a simply
illegal one, has long been contested.5 Yet surprisingly, it has so far only been
partially understood, and arguably has never been compellingly resolved, with
the important exception of Hannah Arendts commentary about it in her essay
Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship.6 This essay is the third text I will
engage.
What is the relationship between these three seemingly very different
sources? And how does either of them shed light on the theme of this volume,
namely, the current political dead end in the west in general, and the Israeli
political stasis in particular?7 The brief intervention in an age-old debate on how
the manifestly illegal clause in Malinki should be understood will hopefully
suggest an answer to these questions. To do that, it will be necessary to make
some observations on the most fundamental question in the philosophy of law,
namely, what is law?8
Sovereignty
If we are to believe Yoram Kaniuks sinisterly amusing description in Nevelot,

contemporary sovereignty has devolved into a kind of nihilism.
3
Military Prosecutor vs. Major Malinki and Others, Military Court case no. 3/57 (henceforth,
Malinki); see also military appeals court case Ofer v. Military Prosecutor, Appeal no. 279283/38,
upholding the district court opinion (Justice Moshe Landau wrote that it is the duty of every soldier
to examine the orders that are given to him under the standard of his own conscience.)
4
In the context of International Criminal Law, see Dinstein (2012); Osiel (1999, 77); In the context of
Israeli law, see, for example, Parush (1990, 245272).
5
Sanford Levinson therefore remarks, in the context of a discussion of torture, that Those of us who
discuss torture, cruel, inhuman, or degrading activities, and highly coercive interrogations must
climb down into the muck and confront the facts on the ground, rather than merely doing what
we do best, which is to proffer (and take refuge in) place-holding abstraction. See Levinson (2005,
251252).
6
Arendt (2005, 17); Osiel (1999, 71) (mentioning that the precise scope of this special subset of
crimesnot simply illegal, but manifestly sohas been carefully explored in neither judicial
opinions nor the scholarly literature built upon them).
7
Nitzan Lebovics chapter in this volume.
8
Doing so will hopefully be a small contribution to that part of the interdisciplinary field of law
and literature concerned with literatures guidance in this philosophical question. In his history
of interdisciplinary approaches to law, Richard Posner comments in passing that this is a question
that has little practical significance if, indeed, it is a meaningful question at all. One of the things I
hope to accomplish is to show that this question has an extremely weighty practical significance, in
a limited but important subset of cases. See Posner (1987, 765).
What is a Manifestly Illegal Order? 179
Several of the Jewish paramilitaries that fought in Israels war of independence

are at the center of this novella, recently rendered by Israels Channel 2 into
a TV series.9 As former members of the Palmach, the protagonists of Nevelot
used to be among the most venerated icons of Israels founding generation.10
They are symbols of sovereignty, or perhaps of a particular moment in the
history of sovereignty, which we have long left behind. The tale takes place in
Tel Aviv in the 1990s, when their glory has diminished, along with the youthful
adventurism that had once fired up their escapades.
In their mid-seventies or early eighties, these former freedom fighters describe
themselves as pathetic and unappealing. Some have grown fat. Others have become
disabled, or are otherwise falling apart. But what marks them as paradigmatic
manifestations of nihilism is not the stench of old age. It is the considerable
violence they still wield, both arbitrary and cruel. As the author tells us, one day
they sit in their regular caf and resolve to carry out a systematic campaign of
murder (Kaniuk 2006, 52). The previously glorified fighters will use the skills
they acquired to deliberately take the lives of innocent, unarmed, civilians. Their
motivationsat least at first blushare revenge, as well as the sheer fun of it.
Though himself a former fighter in the Palmach, Kaniuk never had
compunctions describing the violence such paramilitaries had engaged in
during Israels founding. Indeed, his entire oeuvre is filled with descriptions
of the violence inflicted on Palestinian combatants and civilians alike, often
appallingly visceral, always chillingly candid (see esp. Kaniuk 2012). This, to be
sure, is not to say that Kaniuk is a critic of such violence. As he often said in his
interviews and articles, the 1948 war was a war of survival: it was either killing
or being killed. Any discussion of the laws of war in this carnage would either
be hopelessly nave, or simply hypocritical. Neither of the adversaries respected
a principle of distinction between civilians or combatants. No such principle is
applicable.
The environment Kaniuk describes is one of an existential division between
friends and enemies. It is a world in which Carl Schmitts views of the political
provide the most accurate account of public life.11 In this account, much
9
Nevelot (Hot 2010). The ingenious cast features Yossi Pollak, an aging theater actor politically
associated with the left, co-starring with Yehoram Gaon, a nationalist pop star who made his name
in the 1960s.
10
The Palmach was an elite combat force of the Haganah, the underground army of the Jewish
community during the British Mandate period in Palestine. It was established in 1941, and with
the creation of Israels army, it was disbanded. Members of the Palmach formed the backbone of the
Israel Defense Forces high command for many years.
11
Schmitt famously argued that The specific political distinction to which political actions and
motivations can be reduced is that between friend and enemy (Schmitt 1996, 26).
discussed in recent years, politics does not rest on normsneither natural nor
positive. Politics is war by other means, and war rests on decisions, not reducible
to the application of normative rules or principles.12 The Jewish paramilitaries at
the center of Neveolt accordingly track Schmitts complementary conception of
the Partisan.13 The Partisan, he writes, has turned away from the conventional
enmity of the contained war and given himself up to an otherthe realenmity
that rises through terror and counter-terror, up to annihilation.14
The Jewish paramilitaries too have given themselves to terror and
counterterror.15 But even more explicitly than in other works by Kaniuk, the
violence in Nevelot is not the constitutive violence of the partisan, which
Schmitt conveys as deeply rooted in community.16 In Nevelot, the victims are
not enemies, Palestinians or other, imagined or real. They are, rather, fellow
members of the same body politic. They are Israeli citizens, and the reason for
which they deserve to die is that they are young. Could a sociopathic war against
the young signify the real enmity, in Schmitts words?
Each night the band of veterans will roam the bustling streets of Tel Aviv.
Each night they will find a young man or woman in one of the intimate
alleyways, and take them away. In a memorable scene from the TV version, a
young couple makes out on a city beach. The heavy-set Yossi Polak sees them
caressing in the soft light of the distant promenade. When he approaches,
the surprised young man addresses him with the mixture of politeness and
patronism often awarded old men boarding an overcrowded bus. But Pollak
is there to kill, and he does that with his bare hands. The terrorized woman
screams her head off. Instead of the existential claim of killing ones enemy
in order to survive, the 1990s version of the assassination operations is about
the old doing away with the new. Its hard to imagine what kind of community
can emerge from this pattern of violence.17 Rather than enacting a model of
12
War, the readiness of combatants to die, the physical killing of human beings who belong on
the side of the enemyall this has no normative meaning, but an existential meaning only,
particularly in a real combat situation with a real enemy. There exists no rational purpose, no
norm no matter how true, no program no matter how exemplary, no social ideal no matter
how beautiful, no legitimacy nor legality which could justify men in killing each other for this
reason. (Schmitt 1996, 49)
13
Kaniuk (2006), 84, 104.
14
Schmitt (2007), 7.
15
The veterans fully embrace the label terror as an accurate description of particular Jewish
paramilitary actions (Kaniuk 2006, 127).
16
The population is your greatest friend is how the Manual for Low-Intensity War for Everyone puts
it (Schmitt 2007, 18).
17
One might speculate of a state for the moribund, perhaps a suitable foundation for many European
democracies, burdened by late capitalisms characteristic aging demographic. For a more graphic
example see Ulrich Siedl, Dog Days (Allegro Film, 2001).
contemporary political violence, the protagonists of Nevelot seem to employ

violence that is bifurcated from any recognizable form of politics.
The Hebrew word Nevelot literally means carcasses. It is associated in
Jewish law with unsavory meat, unworthy of eating. In this context, the
word has an ambiguous meaning that reveals some of the novellas irony. In
somewhat outdated colloquial language, Nevelot is used as an insultthink of
something like ass holes.18 Looking out the caf window, the veterans watch
young Israelis passing by, flaunting their toned, flexible bodies, showing off
their tight behinds. The veterans become unbearably envious. Scoundrels,
they call themNevelot! They are angry to see the joie de vivre that had
once been theirs, now dripping like sweat from the bodies of others. And the
word Nevelot later becomes the codename for the nighttime assassination
operations. Once they begin to implement their plan, they start talking about
going out on a Nevelot, or doing more [or less] of the Nevelot. The word
becomes synonymous with a killing spree against the youthful. But the second
referent of the novellas title is not the victims, but the murderous veterans
themselves. In this context, Nevelot should be understood in its literal
meaning, as carcasses, or corpses. The suggestion is that, while apparently
alive, these veterans are already dead. It is this limbo between life and death that
spells out the basic premise of the first type of nihilism I would like to propose
here: sovereignty corresponds to the literary figure of the undead.19
The undead, explains Wikipedia (our best guide on such matters), is a
being in mythology, legend or fiction that is deceased yet behaves as if alive.
A common example is a corpse re-animated by supernatural forces []
Undead may be incorporeal like ghosts, or corporeal like ghouls, vampires
and zombies.20 Some of the most celebrated figures in literary history fall into
this category. A familiar example is Marry Shelleys Frankenstein (1818)
not to mention the abundant zombies of more contemporary literature and
film. While the novella does not explicitly say that the Palmach veterans are
ghosts or zombies, on this interpretation it should be read within this literary
tradition. Rather than renewing the old assassination operations once directed
at enemies, these fighters are contagiously spreading the disease of death from
18
I would like to thank Kenneth Mann for proposing this translation.
19
Joel Trachtman has written that the notion of a fixed, complete, and unassailable sovereignty is a
zombie that haunts and perturbs our discourse [] we should drive a stake through its heart by
shunning its use in rational discourse (Trachtman 1998, 564).
20
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undead, accessed October 9, 2013.
21
Compare with Tamari (2010).
within.21 The bite of this reading is of course that these deaths furnish a political
allegory. If partisans represent the political founding of a new community, the
novella is about a community that is haunted by its own founding. In doing so,
it illustrates the destructive role that sovereignty may have today. The concept
of sovereignty, according to this position, no longer has the authority it used
to have upon us. This authority may have once endowed meaning to political
action, even when action shed blood.22 As Schmitt explains, politics acquired
a theological role, as the death of members of ones polity was understood as
sacrifice (see also Kantorowicz 1957, 268). Alas, Schmitts political theology
has undergone a thorough disenchantment. Both meaning and sacrifice are
no longer available to the members of the polity. And without this theological
imagination, dying for sovereignty appears as a criminal act of murder.23
Unlike the undead in the Wikipedia definition, in our story the undead are
not re-animated by supernatural forces, but by the remains of sovereignty.24
Sovereignty, in this context, is defined by three constitutive aspects: the first is
the normative demand for collective self-government, which in international
law is sometimes labeled self-determination; the second is the Weberian idea
that sovereignty has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence; and the
third is the legal positivist idea that sovereignty generates the ultimate source
of legal authority, or the grundnorm, as Hans Kelsen put it. Think of these
pillars of sovereignty as forming a dilapidated, haunted house. This house
was once home for a family that we know is ours but whose members we can
no longer recognize. In these conditions, being killed for sovereignty cannot
offer redemption. Redemption gives way to the ressentiment of the old against
the new.25 Sovereign violence is not deployed as part of a story about self-
government or the well-being of the governed. And sovereigntys monopoly
on the legitimate use of violence falls apart; hence, the ghostly reappearance
of the pre-independence paramilitaries.26 Indeed, for the protagonists of
22
See, generally, Kahn (2010).
23
Schmitt will not allow for this: The intensely political character of the partisan is crucial since
he has to be distinguished from the common thief and criminal, whose motives aim at private
enrichment (Schmitt 2007, 10). Compare with Kahn (2010), characterizing going to battle without
such an imagination as being tortured.
24
The idea of remains comes from Santner (2011).
25
One of the contexts in which the experience of ressentiment comes up in Friedrich Nietzsches work
is the invocation of a monumental past as a weapon against the present (see Shapiro 1989, 9).
26
A fruitful line of interpretation, which is not the one I will be pursuing below, is that the assassination
of the young in this novella refers back to anti-Semitic blood libels according to which Jews would
kill non-Jewish children (in order to drink their blood). According to this reading, contemporary
Israeli youth are construed as non-Jewish while the revolutionary founders are the only Jews still
around (see Dundes 1991).
Nevelot, it is as if shedding blood can somehow rekindle a political imagination

that is no longer available.27
This sovereign nihilism may be considered within the historical context
in which Kaniuk is writingthat of Israel in the 1990s. The novella came out
in 1997, against the backdrop of a surge of terrorist attacks at the centers of
Israeli cities. Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa, were all attacked repeatedly. Kaniuk
makes this backdrop relevant: responding to the assassinations, the terrified
Israeli public points its fingers at the Palestinian neighbors.28 On a different
level, the novella rings true to the Israeli intellectual context of the time. The
1990s were a moment of unprecedented questioning among Jewish-Israeli
revisionist scholars, who began to reconsider the most basic tenets of Zionism.29
Though sometimes referred to as the New Historians, their cultural influence
far surpassed the study of history alone and was part of a larger post-Zionist
cultural orientation. Thus, the two aspects of sovereign nihilism became
salient: on the one hand, the nationalist project seemed to cost the lives of a
growing number of unarmed civilians. On the other, the political imagination
that endowed these deaths with meaning gradually eroded, collapsing into
pastiche.30
Be this domestic interpretation attractive as it may, its underlying premises
are generalizable. Rather than being exceptional, the Israeli context is pregnant
with insights of interest to political theorists conceptualizing sovereignty in
many other contexts. It recalls the way that Achille Mbembe has conceptualized
sovereignty in the African postcolony in terms of necropolitics. For
Mbembe, sovereignty creates death-worlds, which are new and unique forms
of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life
conferring upon them the status of the living dead (Mbembe 2003, 40, italics
in the original). Another perspective, which I would like to expand upon, is
the violence that remains key to American sovereignty. This is the violence that
27
The screams of the terrorized woman lying alone on the sand testify that state violence hasnt lost its
capacity to induce fear. But unlike the Hobbesian sovereign, who governs by fear while promising
protection, here no such promise is offered, let alone fulfilled.
28
The fact that it is the past haunting them and not their declared enemies, perhaps suggests a reason
why the conflict with the enemies has proven so intractable (Kaniuk 2006, 124).
29
For a survey of this debate, see Kimmerling (1998). For a critique of the movement, see Masalha
(2011).
30
One of the Oxford English Dictionary definitions: Pastiche (n.) is A work, esp. of literature,
created in the style of someone or something else; a work that humorously exaggerates or parodies a
particular style. In this case, Im referring to the protagonists reenactment of constitutive violence,
while not constituting community, resulting in mere imitation. One might also regard this violence
as the simulacra of sovereignty, in the sense of being a representation that no longer has an
original (see Baudrillard 1995).
Simon Critchley, writing about the Bush administration, has labeled crypto-
Schmittian (Critchley 2007). As Paul Kahn explained, American liberalisms
emphasis on the social contract seldom accounts for this violence (Kahn 2004).
But violence pervades American sovereignty, running through the porous
theaters of the protracted war on terror. It thus continues to preoccupy the
popular political imagination.31 The way Nevelot illuminates the disintegration
of national identity in the postCold War moment will help us make sense of
this violence too.
Like Schmitt, for Kahn the most revealing aspect of sovereign violence is
its capacity to enable sacrifice. A sacrificed soldier has died for the sake of her
polity, and her death is sanctified for the community for which she died. The
same supposedly holds true for a citizen who had fallen victim to a terrorist
attack. This populist aspect of sovereignty may currently be under considerable
strain. In recent years, writes Mateo Taussig-Rubbo, the complete giving of
the selfor its taking by the governmentthat had come to characterize total
war of the twentieth century, is absent (Taussig-Rubbo 2008, 83). As Taussig-
Rubbo explains, this partial disappearance of the citizen-soldier is tied to the rise
of consumer-citizenship.
The wasted lives of the young in Nevelot might therefore stand for the
victims of political violence once sacrifice is no longer possible.32 The violence
the novella depicts is not that of the twentieth-century war, in which the death
of a citizen-soldier reaffirms the collective ties of identity.33 Think rather of the
creation of an environment in the United States in which so many schoolyard
shootings became possible since the late 1990s. These killings had become the
terrifying mirror-image of Kaniuks fictional story: instead of the old killing
the new, here kids machine-gun their peers and elders. The United States
government is at least partially responsible for this deeply violent environment,
whatever ones answer to the constitutional questions about gun control may
31
On the role of the political imagination, see, especially, Kahn (2013).
32
It is therefore tempting to think of the novella as a particularly macabre illustration of what Giorgio
Agamben described as the transformation of the citizen into homo sacer: a person that can be killed
but cannot be sacrificed. Two important qualifications to this proposal are necessary at this point.
In Agambens analysis, sovereignty continues to loom large, even when citizens become dispensable.
But the return to the Partisan in Nevelot largely suggests the dissolution of sovereignty. Agamben
conceptualizes the homo sacer as a person that cannot be sacrificed, and whose killing cannot be
regarded as murder. But Nevelot suggests a kind of deadly equilibrium, whereby the end of sacrifice
leaves murder behind. For more on this, see below in the section titled the rule of law.
33
An appropriate example from the United States might be the arbitrary violence of the kind that
took place at the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. As author David Eggers described
poignantly in his novel Zeitoun, in this context unchecked violence was unleashed against the states
own citizens (Eggers 2010. See also Pikington 2010).
be. The violence in such examples is flagrantly senseless, and principally mute.
It does not add up to any revelation of meaning, and it cannot be encoded in
the cathartic language of sacrifice.
In the final paragraph of his Sacred Violence (2008), Kahn contends that
terrorism and the violent US response to itthat of torturehave proven that
sovereignty has all but died. As with the death of God, he writes, were the
sovereign to die neither man nor world would be the same. Whether we will get
to such a point remains an open question, for the world-threatening character of
the political is hardly over. The terrorist with weapons of mass destruction may
very well put an end to our dream of a global political community of human
rights (Kahn 2008, 178).
Reading this paragraph, it may seem like there are only two options:
either sovereignty dies, ushering in a cosmopolitan world of human rights; or
sovereignty remains alive, in which case the conjunction of political violence
and political meaning continues to thrive. Kaniuks novella, however, suggests
a far darker world, in which the binary opposition has no purchase. Nevelot
describes a brand of post-sovereign violence in which violence and politics are
bifurcated.34 It is post-sovereign precisely because it fails to produce meaning.
While reenacting constitutive violence,35 this violence turns against members of
the polity. Although sovereignty is undead, we have hardly witnessed the rise of
a world of cosmopolitan human rights.
Cosmopolitanism
The nihilism of undead sovereignty is not the only kind of nihilism we find
in Kaniuks text. Reaching only slightly deeper into the motivations of the
elderly assassins, there is something else going on, apart from envy and
revenge.
The victims of the Nevelot attacks are punished for the corruption they
introduce into Israeli society. Often in foul language, the founders-assassins
criticize this generation for adopting the most familiar characteristics of a
consumerist society. They are nihilist in a more pedestrian sense: nothing
really interests them other than buying another pair of shoes or visiting the
newly opened mall. They are completely pleasure-driven, and have no interest
34
For an explanation of this condition in a different context, see Mann (2013).
35
Or in the case of Zeitoun, the Schmittian distinction between friend and enemy.
in combat or in the defense of their own people. If that is not enough, they
move freely on the face of the planet, untethered to any particular territory
by anything other than the ties of convenience. They do not speak Hebrew,
but an English-Hebrew that comes out of the televisions ass.36 Thus, while
the older generation often expresses envy for the younger generations flagrant
sexuality, it rejects this generation for being part of a global lumpenproletariat
of shoppers. The only thing that members of this generation share with each
other is a capitalist set of nonvalues. But consumerism is not the only aspect
of the opposition between the old and the new. Another example is the
new generations sexuality, contrasted with the more modest love the elders
remember from their own youth.37 The opposition between the old and the
new can helpfully be organized as shown in Table 9.1.
As Table 9.1 illustrates, 1990s nihilism is not simply criticized for its capitalist
or hedonistic orientation. The critical boxes are the three on the far right.
Table 9.1 From 1940s Sovereignty to 1990s Cosmopolitanism
1940s Politics War Sacrifice Love Covertness Local Past Decision Violence
1990s Capital Market Pleasure Sexuality Exhibitionism Global Present Nature Human
Rights
In our protagonists minds, the most outrageous aspect of the young

generations worldview is their constant appeal to human rights. While they
focus their energies exclusively on the accumulation of wealth, their words
express an apparent fidelity to universal values. These universal values in turn
allow the young to criticize the constitutive violence against the Palestinian
population that lived in Palestine on the eve of the founding of Israel. This
criticism against Israel, however, has no corresponding action. While judging
expropriation unjust, this new generation is shirking from responsibility, and
risking literally nothing. They are perfectly content to reap the fruit of the
constitutive violence they criticize. One of the veterans explains succinctly one
of the reasons this bothers him:
Kaniuk (2006), 133.

36
Interestingly, this is not monogamous love. The group of veterans reminisces on how they all loved
37
the same woman. This woman was a holocaust survivor that arrived to Palestine on an immigrant
boat and was completely dehumanized by what she had undergone. She was beautiful. Though she
slept with all of them, it is unclear if she ever loved them back. Kaniuk explains that she loved them
as a family, and strongly suggests that she was a rape victim during the holocaust (Kaniuk 2006,
123).
We saw how those who avoided the draft in the war of independence became
rich, and those who fought ate shit. The fighters who came back could be counted
on the fingers of one hand, and those who did nothing, hundreds, thousands,
they received whatever they wanted: abandoned property, houses, film theatres
in Jaffa, in Ramleh, Lod, neighborhoods in Haifa.
The abandoned property in this paragraph refers to the Israeli nomenclature

for the Palestinian property belonging to refugees who fled or were deported
during the 1948 war. Under an Israeli statue titled The Abandoned Properties
Law1951, this property was transferred to the Israeli government, and then
put on the market or otherwise given over to the private possession of third
partiesvirtually always Jews (see Forman and Kedar 2004). Having pointed
out this unfairness in the distribution of booty, the speaker proceeds to stress
the magnitude of the plunder. Some of the places he mentions are relatively
expensive neighborhoods in Tel Aviv, where the so-called Israeli left is
overwhelmingly concentrated: Abandoned property is what all of Afeka is, half
of Haifa, all of Acre, all of Ramat Aviv, Ramat Aviv Gimmel, Shikun Tsameret in
Tel Aviv which was Jamussin, all of the land of Abu Kishek which is today Ramat
Hasharon, they got everything through their connections for a few pennies. For
this reason, the young and liberal generation of the 1990s is labeled nihilist. And
for this reason their nihilist adversaries from the founding generation decide:
they must die.
A fascinating paragraph leads us to the second text I would like to
explore. One of the veteran-assassins makes reference to a legal doctrine
according to which soldiers have a duty to disobey a manifestly illegal order.
The rule, considered one of the cornerstones of international criminal law, was
spelled out by a military court when Israeli soldiers that participated in the Kafr
Qasim massacre (1956) were indicted for murder. The soldiers had opened
fire on unarmed Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel on their way back from a
days work, killing forty-nine.38 These inhabitants of Kafr Qasim, a village that
was under Israeli control since 1948, didnt know of a closure that prohibited
them from being outdoors after dark. In Military Prosecutor v. Malinki (1958),
Justice Binyamin Halevi found that the fact the soldiers obeyed orders could
not excuse them from criminal responsibility. The soldiers should have known
the command was illegal. A Black flag hangs over such a command, Halevi
enunciated.39 According to one prominent interpretation, this black flag
38
For historical background, see Orbach (2013).
39
On the trial, see Orbach (2013, 496).
clause refers to natural law: when an order violates natural law, the soldier
receiving the order must refrain from acting upon it (see Osiel 1998, 939, 1008,
and the citations thereof). This arguably came to be the standard reading of
the judicial text, and it is this reading that I will reject, attempting to outline an
alternative one.
When one of the veteran-assassins casually mentions Halevis opinion forty
years later, it becomes clear he is extremely unhappy about it. He believes this
apparent vindication of human rights was, in fact, the moment in which Israel
fell into what might be labeled cosmopolitan nihilism. It is here, in other words,
that we find the early roots of the political corruption of liberal young Israelis:
those who happily condemn the injustice of the 1948 displacement while living
on the most expensive of expropriated land.
And then they made a military with a manifestly legal order,40 continues the
veteran-assassin.41 But the rule justice Halevi articulated, he says, did not exist
in the most decisive of wars, that of the founding. One of the lawless battles the
speaker reminisces about took place along the road leading from the coast to
Jerusalem, in a place called Bab-al-Wad: Did we have manifestly in Bab Al-
Wad? With manifestly we wouldnt have a state. And then came the Nevelot and
was very successful without the manifestly. Cause we were the military of the
good old days.42 (Kaniuk 2006, 109).
The conjunction of consumerism and human rights is the principal marker of
the second nihilism we find in Nevelot. Embodying it is a Jewish Israeli citizen,
who lives on land that will fetch a fortune on the boiling real estate market, while
condemning the sins that established his title. As one of the veterans says: my
stupid children want peace now and to suck up to Arabs. To open their legs to
them. They just want a jeep and a Honda and I dont know what, and the Arabs
will kick their asses.43 Long before the 1990s, this coupling was one of Schmitts
favorite objects of criticism:
To demand seriously of human beings that they kill others and be prepared
to die themselves so that trade and industry may flourish for the survivors or
that the purchasing power of grandchildren may grow is sinister and crazy. It
40
Kaniuk humorously replaces manifestly illegal with manifestly legal, in order to demonstrate the
speakers lack of sophistication in this legal matter; and perhaps also to suggest that, from the point
of view of the partisan, there is no real difference between the two.
41
Interestingly, this moment coincides with the consolidation of the Jewish paramilitary groups into a
standing Israeli army.
42
Driving from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, one can still see the historical vehicles parked where they
remained in this battle, a monument freezing this historic moment.
43
Or literally translated, turn them into burgers (Kaniuk 2006, 78).
is a manifest fraud to condemn war as homicide and then demand of men that
they wage war, kill and be killed, so that there will never be war again. (Schmitt
1996, 48)
But this conjunction also provides the outline for a critique of the Israeli
liberal left.44 Read in the context of the 1990s, it seems to capture the underlying
problems of the peace process. A liberal camp enthusiastically supported
withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza (territory enjoys no particular
sanctity for cosmopolitan nihilists). These people expected, however, that such
withdrawal would be achievable with no significant political transformation. The
premise was that it would finalize the division between Jewish and Palestinian
populations. Most importantly, it would allow the economic miracle of Israel
to remain unshaken. Thus, it aimed to reify a particular moment in the present
while rejecting the values that ghosts of the past imposed.45
As in the case of sovereign nihilism, cosmopolitan nihilism too demands
a reading that extends beyond the Israeli context.46 It is beyond the scope of
this essay to fully explore why, in one compelling reading, consumer culture
(or the preference for neoliberal markets) and human rights (in the natural
rights vein) are two sides of the same coin. Suffice it to stress, with the admitted
risk of oversimplification, that both came to rely on an account of human
nature. Economic doctrine held that human rationality is consumer rationality,
fashioned as a quest for preferred goods and services for the cheapest possible
price. When human rights embraced natural rights theory as its foundation, it
embraced a rather similar understanding of human nature, and heldin John
Finniss formulationthat there is a set of basic practical principles which
indicate the basic forms of human flourishing as goods to be pursued or realized,
[] and which are in one way or another used by everyone who considers what
to do, however unsound his conclusions (Finnis 1980). In relying on nature,
44
The label left is mostly associated with a commitment to egalitarian principles requiring robust
governmental regulation of markets. In the context of Israel in the 1990s, left referred to those in
favor of a territorial compromise with the Palestinians, even if they were vehement supporters of the
free market.
45
This solution has so far proven unattainable, precisely because it fails to address the values that
many in Israel-Palestine are still willing to die for. The question of if there is an alternative political
vision that succeeds in challenging such valuesopening the way for a futureremains hopelessly
unanswered.
46
Simon Critchleys idea of the passive nihilist is related to cosmopolitan nihilism. Rather than
acting in the world and trying to transform it, writes Critchley, the passive nihilist simply
focuses on himself and his particular pleasures and projects for perfecting himself, whether
through discovering the inner child, manipulating pyramids, writing pessimistic-sounding
literary essays, taking up yoga, birdwatching or botany, as was the case with the aged Rousseau
(Critchley 2007, 45).
both positions were unanimous in limiting the scope of the human capacity to
politically reinvent our collective futuresand ourselves. In both accounts no
room remains for the decision, so central not only for political theologians like
Schmitt or Kahn, but also for a classical popular democratic sovereignty theorist
like Jean-Jacques Rousseau.47
The analysis David Grewal provides in his Network Power (2009) is helpful in
this broader critique of cosmopolitan nihilism. In his critique of globalization,
Grewal specifically takes issue with transnational social movements, which,
starting from the 1990s, aimed to act beyond the pale of sovereign political
institutions. These coalitions of the willing, he explains, ended up pooling
divergent issues like the plight of Darfur, environmental disasters, and consumer
protection, into one undistinguishable mass (Grewal 2009, 190). Citizens of the
world were presumably free to participate in varying forms of activism, which
created the illusion of a vibrant global civil society. The problem with this
voluntarism, however, was that no authority had the duty to respond to their
demands, or even to address them. Sovereignty, Grewal contends, remains the
only arena in which political demands are articulated within an institutional
setting that can grant remedies. A necessary aspect of such remedies is allocating
costs, and violence, in a way that allows citizens to collectively self-govern. For
Grewal, a return to sovereignty is expected to lift us from the fallen state of
cosmopolitan nihilism.
If sovereignty is undead, however, does it still remain a viable option? That
is a question the next section will address, through a slightly closer look at
Malinki.
The rule of law
Kaniuk portrays sovereign and cosmopolitan nihilism as two intractable aspects

of politics in the postCold War moment. Following Simon Critchley, one might
think of them as two kinds of political disappointment.48 It is not only that
politics holds a promise of a meaningful life and is unable to fulfill that promise.
The disappointment stems from the fact that no such promise is even made.
47
For a concise elaboration of the possible inconsistencies between capitalism and democracy, see Fiss
(1992, 908, 911920).
48
Critchley (2007, 1) (opening his book with the assertion that philosophy begins with
disappointment).
Clearly, Kaniuks foremost alliance is with the Palmach veterans, fashioned

as his own alter egos.49 Their rejection of cosmopolitan nihilism is a comical
overstatement of Kaniuks own position with respect to the post-Zionist
culture he witnessed around him. With the Nevelot operations reenacting the
paramilitary operations at the founding, history repeats itself simultaneously
as tragedy and farce. But sovereign nihilism is not a viable alternative to
cosmopolitan nihilism. The disappointment in question is characterized by
the experience of both options lacking or failing to appropriately address a
violently unjust world (Critchley 2007, 3).
The mobility of humans and capital within the cosmopolitan context has
rendered sovereignty defunct. But rather than being a solution, human rights
become part of the problem. As one commentator aptly put it, Because they
promise everything to everyone, they can end up meaning anything to anyone
(Moyn 2010). In the natural law tradition, human rights are bifurcated from
both an institutional setting in which they can be enforced and from a popular
will, which could grant them legitimacy. Sovereignty and human rights are set in
opposition to one another, but are united by being equally hopeless.
In what remains of this essay, I would like to take this dichotomy
between the two nihilisms as an invitation to rethink justice in political
terms. What can Nevelot, and the historical resources it invokes, contribute
to reconsidering the possibility of justice? The first option to consider has
already been alluded to above. Might the opposing principles be united in
one synthesis, in which universal natural rights are enforced by a measure
of sovereign violence? This is a concise formulation of what is sometimes
referred to as the rule of law.50
The paramilitary veterans in Nevelot refer back to Malinki but dont seem
to remember the details. Instead of talking about a manifestly illegal order,
as Justice Halevi did, they confuse the language and talk about a manifestly
legal one. This confusion is all but arbitrary. It captures a normative universe
49
As Nicole Krauss explains, Kaniuk thought of himself as undead.
He used to say that in 1941, he was killed by the Einsatzgruppen in Ternopil, Ukraine, even
though he was eleven at the time, and busy eating sour cream on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel
Aviv. When he was seventeen, he volunteered for the Palmach, the strike force of the Haganah,
fought bloody battles for Israels independence in the Judean hills, was shot in the leg, and died
in the arms of a nun who quoted the second century rabbi Ben-Azzai in Germanic Hebrew.
Later he moved to New York, was treated for his wounds in Mount Sinai Hospital, befriended
Charlie Parker, kissed Billie Holiday, stayed for a decade, and died there when he gave up being
a painter and returned home. (see Krauss 2013)
50
Paul Kahn aptly labels this an unhappy synthesis (see Kahn 2004, 43).
in which a particular act of killing can be thought of as equally legal and illegal
(with no authoritative arbiter to make the final call). But the error also suggests
that it might be worthwhile to go back to the case and reread it more carefully.
From a rule-of-law perspective, a cosmopolitan reading of the text will be
just as erroneous as the sovereign reading of it, embodied by the protagonists
of Nevelot. Did both parties forget what the rule of law had once meant
for the community they belonged to? If so, the task would presumably be to
rediscover, and ultimately make it possible to appeal to, the rule of law as a way
out of nihilism. But simply appealing to the rule of law will prove to be a failure.
Unaccompanied by judgmenta concept that I will return to belowit will
simply lead to another, third, brand of nihilism.51
In Malinki, Justice Halevi convicted eight of eleven defendants. The soldiers
were charged with murder. As the Israeli military went to war for the first time
on the Egyptian front in 1956, it declared a curfew effective in certain Palestinian
villages in Israel, starting 5 p.m.52 Halevis opinion recounts how one soldier
asked his commander what would be the fate of people coming home from work.
The response was the Arabic Allh yaramu, literally translated may God have
mercy on their souls. As the order was passed down, it was specified that women
and children would have to be shot as well. What is normally a consolation for
relatives of the deceased became an order to open fire on unarmed civiliansor
more to the pointon citizens.
This is the crucial and often-quoted paragraph from Halevis decision, in
which he explains the criminal legal status of such an order:
The distinguishing mark of a manifestly unlawful order should fly like a
black flag above the order given, as a warning saying Prohibited. Not formal
unlawfulness, hidden or half-hidden, nor unlawfulness discernible only to the
eyes of legal experts, is important here, but a flagrant and manifest breach of
the law, definite and necessary unlawfulness appearing on the face of the order
itself, the clearly criminal character of the acts ordered to be done, unlawfulness
piercing the eye and revolting the heart, be the eye not blind nor the heart not
stony and corrupt, that is the measure of manifest unlawfulness required to
release a soldier from the duty of obedience upon him and make him criminally
responsible for his acts.53
51
On the nihilism of the rule of law, see also Liron Mor, essay in this volume.
52
For a background of this decision, see Orbach (2013, 493494).
53
Verdict, 213214. English translation from Solis (2010, 360). For the Hebrew original see Israel,
District Military Court case No. 3/57, Military Prosecutor v. Malinki and Others (1957). For an
extensive review of the doctrine in international law, see Osiel (1998).
In his opinion, Halevi sifts carefully through the evidence from the massacre,
a large part of which came from statements by Palestinian villagers who
survived. Among the stories are several incidents in which men and women
coming home from work were rounded up and shot. Some of the witnesses
were only able to testify because they played dead until the next morning. One
scooted among a herd of running goats, barely escaping the shooting. Justice
Halevi meticulously paints the picture of a harrowing crime. He deliberately
mentions in his opinion that some of the witnesses were either grieving family
members or were physically maimed following that night (Malinki, sec. 6).
His judicial response to this crime seemingly marries the oppositions outlined
above: nature and decision; violence and human rights.
Malinki ostensibly demonstrates that it is very important for the rule of
law to allow for a certain modicum of natural or universal law to prevail. As
Adi Parush explained, the opinion makes no sense from within a positivist
understanding of law (Parush 1990). One of Parushs objections to a positivist
justification for the manifestly illegal test is the following: imagine the Israeli
parliament passes a statue authorizing soldiers to kill unarmed civilians. The
Kafr Qasim order could then not be regarded as manifestly illegal under
Israeli law. The same objection can be reformulated in terms of conventionalist
positivism (which relies on accepted social practice): if soldiers generally
think and act as if they are authorized to kill, such action can no longer be
regarded as manifestly illegal. But this seems contrary to Halevis decision.54
Assuming that with appropriate legislation Israel could also exempt itself from
international law, Parush concludes that the result Halevi reaches requires a
reliance on natural law.55
So we have a component of nature. But for the rule of law to be enforceable,
it must also allow for a modicum of decision. Extant commentary is unanimous
in rejecting the idea that a soldier identifying a black flag during combat is
the decision Halevi refers to. The decision is that of the judge, who presumably
54
This is the interpretation the Israel Supreme Court preferred in later case law. See, especially, Member
of the Knessent Yossi Sarid v. Prime Miniser Ariel Sharon, HCJ 4668/01 (December 27, 2001). Ehud
Yatom, who had murdered captive terrorism suspects by order of the head of Israels secret security
service, testified that he did not know a black flag hung above that order. Though he explains he
later realized this, the problem supposedly raises doubts about his culpability (or Mens Rea). Justice
Matza does not believe he could have not identified the illegality of the order. The Black flag, he
explains, is reserved for orders that every soldier identifies as illegal. From the present perspective,
however, the burden was on Yatom. If he identified the Black Flag, he would presumably have
resisted. The fact that he did not resist is precisely what exposes him to the judgment Im thinking
about here. The remedy against such a flaw is not reserved to courts, though courts can carry them
out. Such actions question a persons very membership in her community. See also Arendt (1963).
55
He happens to reject natural law on philosophical grounds unrelated to this opinion.
represents no individual in particular, but the community in which judgment

is made; the community of citizens to which both the defendant and the victim
belong. The judge is able to make a decision about a natural norm, curiously
rendering it both positive and natural at one and the same time.56
Just as importantly, this vision also relies on a conjunction of human rights
and violence. We already know that natural law provides a human rights
component. The violence is that of punishment at the end of the process,
conceived as a retributive remedy in the name of society, and ultimately for the
benefit of the victim. Violence is of course married to human rights not only by
realizing the right to retribution. The violence of punishment is expected to be
proportionate to the crime, distinguishing it from revenge.
It is in this context of punishment that the poverty of the rule of law was
exposed in concrete historical terms. The eight soldiers convicted for murder
were sentenced with various periods in prison, the shortest seven and the longest
seventeen years. These sentences were not served in a military prison, but rather
in a hostel. Worse, all the convicted soldiers were pardoned by Israels president,
Yitzhak Ben Zvi. The longest sentence served was one year long. In retrospect,
the invocation of a black flag seems more like a smokescreen that barely hides
yet another kind of nihilism. The rule of law figures as a third nihilism, borne of
sovereign and cosmopolitan nihilism combined. It is a reflection of the worst of
both worlds.
Sovereign nihilism comes into play in the fact that in Kafr Qasim Israeli
sovereign command directed the killing of the states own citizens. This is not
Schmitts world, or the venerated world of the Partisans during the founding.
In both, the political decision involves killing enemies. The villagers of Kafr
Qasim bare the marks of what Giorgio Agamben has called the homo sacer
(Agamben 1998). Agamben defined homo sacer as a person who is killed
without being sacrificed; and whose killing remains unpunished. Both
components of the formula are squarely on point, as is Agambens emphasis
that not only enemies or foreigners, but (paradigmatically) citizens, are under
the threat of such death. Cosmopolitan nihilism is relevant too, in giving Justice
Halevis words their properly dismal interpretation. The black flag that appears
on the face of the order itself comes to appear only on that order. It comes to
have no real legal or institutional force, and is merely a rhetorical trope.
56
This dual reliance on both community and universality captures much of what human rights lawyers
hope for today. To name just one relevant source on this, the Rome Statue signals a preference for
domestic enforcement of universal law.
One may object that pardon is not part of the rule of law, and that it should
properly be understood as an exceptional political intervention after the legal
process is over. This, however, would rearticulate the problem in other words.
Recall that Schmitt is the most important theorist of exception. When war
crimes against a countrys own citizens are exceptionally pardoned, what is
exposed is the defining feature of Schmittian sovereignty. The political decision
is revealed as something that can neither be reduced to a norm (natural or
positive) nor to the sovereignty of the members of ones community. What
Schmitt demonstrated perhaps better than any other legal theorist is that a
theory of law without an account of politics is meaningless. What should be at
stake in the question What is law? is not merely an explanation of legal rules.
It should rather be a more general picture of normativity, which would be able
to account both for the norm and for its exception, unlimited in its scope for
one or the other.
Historically, the massacre of Kafr Qasim was a reenactment of the
constitutive violence of Israels founding.57 Though carried out less than
a decade after the founding, it is also structurally similar to the imaginary
assassinations of the young generation in the 1990s. In both cases, violence
is directed toward citizens. It set the precedent for sovereign nihilism. The
judgment of Halevis courtwhatever he may have had in mindbecame an
embodiment of cosmopolitan nihilism after Ben Zvi granted the murderers
pardon. It produces the most evocative rhetoric in the name of justice, while
failing to do anything to realize it. Only by considering both options as
interconnected, can one appreciate the nihilism of the rule of law.
Judgment
Extant interpretations of the manifestly illegal clause stress its legal nature in
one of the following ways. In the natural law tradition, the suggestion is that a
black flag hangs above actions that are prohibited by a code inscribed in our
very making as humans (Osiel 1998, 1008). As the sections Cosmopolitanism
and The Rule of Law argue, this view risks reducing the space of human
As Orbach explains, the plan occurred in the context of a top-secret plan (Operation Mole) that
57
envisioned a scenario in which the Arabs of the region were to be evacuated to enclosures in central
Israel until the end of the 1956 war. Rumors about the plan reached officers of the Border Police, some
of whom mistakenly understood that the objective was to expel the population to Jordan (Orbach
2013, 493494). Gadi Algazi has argued that the massacre was the first part of Operation Mole.
decision. The concern is that law is bifurcated from politics, making it impossible
to employ the violence that the enforcement of rights may require. In the positive
law tradition, the best reading of the opinion is conventionalist: it suggests that
a black flag hangs above actions that a reasonable person would believe is
manifestly illegal (see Osiel 1998, 1009).58 The role of a judge is to decide what
the content of an objective reasonable person as a matter of fact, avoiding
recourse to the judgments of any particular individual (including her own). But
as discussed in the sections Sovereignty and The Rule of Law, such a test
may also bifurcate rights from remedies. If exceptions are made in the name of
popular opinion within a particular community, the result can be arbitrariness in
remedies for violence (illustrated by the pardon for the Kafr Qasim murderers).
This arbitrariness amounts to further violence.
In her short essay titled Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship, Arendt
calls her readers attention to this point. Writing in the aftermath of the debate
Eichmann in Jerusalem unleashed, Arendt returns to Halevis idea of the Black
Flag. For Arendt, this idea refers to the individual responsibility of each and
every person to determine the justification of her actions. As she painstakingly
emphasizes, this determination cannot rely on the application of rules. Following
her own observations during the Eichmann trial, she is interested in historical
conditions in which all such rules are occluded. These were the historical
conditions in the Third Reich, in which the most respectable members of
society carried on with what should have been properly recognized as a criminal
regime. The contemporary experience that has unfolded during the postCold
War period, and even more significantly in the ongoing post-9/11 period, is
also characterized by such an occlusion of rules. This is not necessarily because
we are all cogs in an enormous transnational criminal enterprise, as Agamben
sometimes seems to suggest. It is, rather, because of the disenchantment
described above, which gave way both to sovereign and cosmopolitan nihilism,
and to the nihilistic rule of law they had borne out.
Arendts interpretation emphasizes the clause in which Halevi explains that
what is manifestly illegal [pierces] the eye and [revolts] the heart, be the eye not
blind nor the heart not stony and corrupt. As she explains, this presupposes
an independent human faculty, unsupported by law and public opinion, that
judges in full spontaneity every deed and intent anew whenever the occasion
arises (Arendt 2005, 41). Despite this rhetoric, she says, courts that applied this
58
On the importance of conventionalism in jurisprudence more generally, see Posner (1988, 333).
standard had not actually asserted such an optimistic view. What courts had
actually said is that a feeling for such things has been inbred in us for so many
centuries that it could not suddenly have been lost. In the terms introduced
above, they relied on conventionalist positivism. At least with regard to the Third
Reich, however, all evidence shows that in fact the feeling has been lost. Arendt
is thus pushed to the demand of judging without being able to fall back upon
the application of generally accepted rules, which is precisely the condition in
an environment of sovereign and cosmopolitan nihilism (Arendt 2005, 37).
In his commentary on Manifest illegality, Mark Osiel deplores the fact
that there is not more case law from domestic and international tribunals that
might grant content to this standard.59 From the present perspective, however,
decrying the sparse jurisprudence on this issue is missing the underlying point
Arendt introduces so forcefully. No jurisprudence would help, as this area of law
does not allow us to rely on judges, and requires each member of a community
to make her own choice. Arendt talks about those who simply walked away from
their roles in the German state. In the final paragraphs of the essay, she relies
on them as a force that, cumulatively, could have prevented the catastrophe of
the holocaust (Arendt 2005, 47). Here, however, we might go even further than
her: because a black flag pierces the eye, the foremost mode of enforcement
is a right to resist, passively or actively. Second, perhaps, come practices of
witnessingwhether in a court or in public. In itself, witnessing can be a remedy
for the violation of a fundamental right.
One might object that the requirement of such judgment conflates law and
morality. This is not true. Legal and moral issues are by no means the same, but
they have a certain affinity with each other because they both presuppose the
power of judgment (Arendt 2005, 22). What we find is a zone of indistinction,
to use Agambens phrase (against his own intentions), between personal moral
choice and the communitys law. Agamben discussed an indistinction between
politics and law, which potentially exposes every citizen to being killed by
the sovereign (or becoming homo sacer). Arendt, however, exposes the far-
reaching entailment of this assertion within a democratic context: once such a
zone is recognized with regard to sovereign choice, it must also be recognized
59
Osiel believes that the passage from the Malinki decision, quoted above, is rather purple and
overheatedthough he admits that there is rarely a more precise definition, as he wishes for. As he
explains, The reason for this is clear: most prosecutions for war crimes are conducted by the very
state whose soldier stands accused. The fora for such prosecutions are the municipal courts-martial
of the defendants nation state. The collective inclination within any military organization to punish
ones comrade in arms, when he has risked his life for the country, is rarely strong (Osiel 1999, 77).
with regard to the choices of each and every one of us.60 What in Agamben is
conceptualized as a site of abandonment and killing can also be seized upon as
a site of remedy or rescue (as Agamben too obliquely suggests in a few places
in his writing). Moral judgment applies to any situation in which I ask myself:
what is the right thing to do? The judgment discussed in Malinki is not about
all such cases. It is only about those conditions in which moral judgment is
experienced as an imperative. This imperative must not be held in abeyance or
suspension, and must trump any form of positive law: domestic, international,
or natural. It expresses a realization according to which for a legal system to
enjoy legitimacy, actors must subject it to judgment that assesses it from outside
its own terms.61
To be sure, the word judgment here does not point to an exclusively
cognitive process. Phrases like piercing the eye reflect a process far removed
from computation or even from discourse (which is Arendts preferred mode
of thought).62 While the actor believes she is following an already established
rule, she may not have had access to this rule before the encounter that
provokes such judgment. In that sense, while we seem to know in advance
that killing unarmed civilians is illegal, this interpretation of Halevis black flag
rule is potentially more expansive. It invites the possibility of illegality in a set
of circumstances that is not defined a priori and that must be experienced in
real time. Think of the Israeli military control of the Palestinian population in
the West Bank. As years passed since the beginning of the occupation, some
have refused to serve in the Israeli Army. For people who made this choice,
a Black Flag is raised over the permanent military control of a population
of noncitizens. As Chaim Gans has noted, the failure of Israeli left-leaning
politicians to endorse such decisions has exposed the poverty of their ability to
exercise judgment (Gans 2002, 20, 23). Or, to take another frequently discussed
example from the other side of the Israeli political map: inasmuch as a soldier
would refuse to follow an order to evict settlers for reasons anchored in her
own conscience, that soldier too would be exercising judgment.
60
Ariella Azoulay has usefully conceptualized this as a civil state of emergency (see Azoulay 2012).
61
This comes close to Adi Ophirs definition of nihilism in this volume. Compare with Robert Covers
anarchism, according to which law is a bridge in normative space connecting [our understanding
of] the world-that-is [] with our projections of alternative worlds-that-might-be. (Cover 1985,
181).
62
The precondition for this kind of judging is not a highly developed intelligence or sophistication in
moral matters, but rather the disposition to live together explicitly with oneself, to have intercourse
with oneself, that is, to be engaged in that silent dialogue between me and myself which, since
Socrates and Plato, we usually call thinking (Arendt 2005, 45).
As Critchley explains in a related discussion following Emmanuel

Lvinas, judgment is never entirely autonomous (Critchley 2007, 3868). It
is heteronymous in the sense that it is given to me, directly, by that which
pierces the eye. The judges description is as visceral as it is cognitive. Halevi
requires the actors within the legal system not only to feel, but also to make
themselves open to such feelings. This may sound sentimentalist, in a way
that immediately invites the criticisms against cosmopolitan nihilism, meted
out above.63 However, returning to Nevelot and Malinki suggests how this
understanding of judgment differs from cosmopolitan nihilism. In short, it
is intimately related to action, and cannot be exercised from the armchair of
cosmopolitan nihilism.
Apart from the Palestinian survivors of the Kafr Qasim massacre, one
witness who appeared before Justice Halevi was particularly effective. This
witness, a soldier named Kotler, suggests yet another signification for the title
of the novella. As he recounts, as part of his military duty he arrived at Kafr
Qasim that night and saw that the Military Police posted there rounded up
villagers and were killing them. Justice Halevi quotes what he said: You are
murdering innocent people coming back from their work, you are committing
a crime. Stop! He then added a sentence that is particularly important in the
present context: If our people [the Military, as opposed to the Military Police]
would have been there, we would have attacked them and finished this up. The
murderous actions thus provoked an urge to defend the Palestinian citizens by
using violence. As Halevi specifically writes, the use of the word Nevelot!
reflects the way this soldier thought about the murderers (Malinki, sec. 7). They
were no longer part of his community. Protecting the Palestinian citizens, for
him, became analogous to self-defense.
By speaking out in the course of an operation, he is presumably taking on some
measure of risk. He is positioning himself in adversity with military policemen
who are supposed to be on his side. Kotler, however, doesnt represent more than
a missed opportunity, as he does not in fact intervene. He does, however, stand
for the realization that remedies for policies that look like they have a black flag
over them are not the responsibility of judges alone. Such remedies are the role
of every member of a community that is presumed to share a way of judging
particularly egregious wrongs. And even if the opportunity on the battlefield is
missed, reporting and witnessinginside of courts and outside of themcan
63
Compare with Liron Mors discussion of sympathy in this volume.
still help generate processes that grant remedies to victims. Such witnessing may
also entail a risk, even if it is an undoubtedly more modest one.64
The imperative of this encounter is experienced in the following terms:
either I take a risk and secure my communitys constitutive commitments, or I
secure myself and allow my communitys constitutive commitments to be put
in risk.65 This kind of risk is precisely what the sovereign nihilists are willing to
take, but they stand for no constitutive commitments, and are not carried out
in the name of community. For cosmopolitan nihilists, the idea is, of course,
to preserve commitments while avoiding their actualization when that means
taking a risk. While the rule of law explained in the section The Rule of Law
reflects an attempt to speak in the name of constitutive commitments, its
delegation to judicial institutions invites a decline into nihilism. Courts cannot
replace personal judgment.
The three categories of nihilismsovereignty, cosmopolitanism, and
the rule of laware relevant also for a historically situated understanding
of judgment. Both sovereign and cosmopolitan nihilism signal the same
underlying crisis in community. They both amount to two different descriptions
of a globalized or internally fragmented political condition in which there is no
identifiable community at all. This remains a real challenge, which can perhaps
be overcome by pointing out the different temporal orientation that judgment
stands for. Sovereign nihilism was associated with the past, cosmopolitan
nihilism was associated with the present, and the rule of law was a failed
attempt to join the two together. But judgment is oriented toward the future.
It conforms to a regulative ideal: what are the constitutive commitments that
my community will stand for? Nevelot is about a community that is haunted by
its own founding. Returning to the use of the word nevelot during the night
of the Kafr Qasim massacre invokes a future community that was possible but
was never born, one in which killing an Arab citizen of Israel is exactly like
killing a Jewish one.66
64
In Israel, it is exemplified by the work of a veteran organization called Breaking the Silence (see
Breaking the Silence 2013, and Naaman 2012).
65
As Eric Santner notes in a related discussion, At a certain point the measures designed to immunize
the population against risk begin to destroy the vibrancy of the community and the values on which
its civic life is based (Santner 2011, 7).
66
One of the defendants testified that even if the order was to fire on unarmed civilian citizens of a
Kibbutz, he would fulfill it Because it is an order (Protocol, session 55, July 18, 1957, 12, 26, IDFA
165/199212. Quoted in Orbach 2013, 34). This would indeed suggest equality between Arab and
Jewish citizens of Israel.
Postscript
In the 1990s postCold War period, many Israelis found themselves caught
between sovereign and cosmopolitan nihilism. In the United States this moment
arguably began only after 9/11 and is still very much alive. But for many Israelis,
Kaniuks characterization of cosmopolitanism no longer captures the present.
Consumer culture thrived but its flipside of human rights has been significantly
marginalized.67 The decisive moment in this respect was the 2009 Operation
Cast Lead in Gaza, its aftermath with the Goldstone Report accusing Israel of
war crimes, and the backlash against the report.
It is doubtful that Kaniuk would have believed in the power of judgment
to amend any of that. Responding to the Goldstone Report, he voiced a
fundamentally Schmittian opinion that seemingly rejected the impetus to
legalize warfare; perhaps more importantly, he also rejected the young generation
of Israeli veterans who cooperated and testified before Goldstone. Because his
own public position is one of a veteran, this rejection was rather dramatic. Here
is a translation of a few paragraphs of Kaniuks opinion piece (Kaniuk 2010):
When you see someone approaching you under fire, you do not open Immanuel
Kant in order to know what is moral and what is not. You do not think what is
a manifestly illegal order, because with such an order the war will be lost. You
shoot because you were told to shoot. You kill because otherwise you will be
killed.
[]
Revolutions in history killed millions of people for no good reason, apart
from justifying their own causes. Those who wanted a better world massacred
millions in the name of their will, like the French Revolution that shed tons of
blood. And? Was it just or not? At its moments of truth, it was.
[]
It is forbidden to judge soldiers at moments of war. Perhaps whoever decided
on Cast Lead made a mistake. Perhaps Hamas made a mistake that it asked
for this. Perhaps the commanders gave contradictory orders, I saw a lot of
unnecessary blood, but in war there is nothing unnecessary, this is the price, if
people want to live togethersomeone needs to be the policeman, even before
there is anyone to arrest.
67
Perhaps this is unsurprising, given that this commitment was never of the constitutive kind that
people are willing to die, or even takes risks for.
Preparing for this essay, in June 2012, I went to visit Kaniuk at his small
apartment on Bilu Street in Tel Aviv. I asked him about this opiniondid he
really think that the Kafr Qasim murderers should not have been tried? Did he
think it right that they were released so early? Of course not. In Kafr Qasim, it
wasnt a war, he explained. But there was a War on the Egyptian front, and why
not assume that Kafr Qasim was part of that War? I asked. Dont get all lawyerly
on me, he laughed.
Bibliography
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Arendt, Hannah. 1963. Eichmann in Jerusalem. New York: Viking.
. 2005. Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship. In Responsibility and
Judgment, edited by Jerome Kohn. New York: Schoken.
Azoulay, Ariella. 2012. The Civil Contract of Photography. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Baudrillard, Jean. 1995. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press.
Bilsky, Leora. 2000. In a Different Voice: Nathan Alterman and Hannah Arendt on the
Kastner and Eichmann Trials. Theoretical Inquiries in Law 1: 509547.
Breaking the Silence. 2013. Our Harsh Logic: Israeli Soldiers Testimonies from the
Occupied Territories, 20002010. New York: Picador.
Cover, Robert. 1985. The Folktales of Justice: Tales of Jurisdiction Capital University
Law Review 14: 179203.
Critchley, Simon. 2007. Infinitely Demanding. New York: Verso.
Dinstein, Yoram. 2012. The Defence of Obedience to Superior Orders in International
Law. Oxford: University of Oxford Press.
Dundes, Alan (ed.) 1991. The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semetic Folklore.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Eggers, David. 2010. Zeitoun. New York: Vintage.
Finnis, John. 1980. Natural Law and Natural Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fiss, Owen M. 1992. Capitalism and Democracy. Michigan Journal of International
Law 13(4): 908, 911920.
Forman, Geremy and Alexandre (Sandy) Kedar. 2004. From Arab Land to Israel
Lands: The Legal Dispossession of Palestinians Displaced by Israel in the Wake of
1948. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22(6): 809830.
Gans, Chaim. 2002. Right and Left: Ideological Disobedience in Israel. Israel Law
Review 36: 1971.
Grewal, David Singh. 2009. Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization.
New Haven: Yale.
Kahn, Paul. 2004. Putting Liberalism in Its Place. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
. 2008. Sacred Violence. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
. 2010. Out of Eden. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
. 2013. Finding Ourselves in the Movies: Philosophy for a New Generation.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Kaniuk, Yoram. 2006. Itim Venvelot. Tel Aviv: Yedioth Aharonot.
. 2010. Milhama Baalil. Ynet, December 28, available at http://www.ynet.co.il/
articles/0,7340,L-4004359,00.html. Accessed April 21, 2014.
. 2012. 1948. New York: New York Review of Books.
Kantorowicz, Ernst H. 1957. The Kings Two Bodies. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Kershner, Isabel. 2013. Yoram Kaniuk, 83, Israeli Novelist. The New York Times,
June 12, A25.
Kimmerling, Baruch. 1998. Between Celebration of Independence and
Commemoration of Al-Nakba: The Controversy over the Roots of the Israeli State.
Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, 32(1): 1518.
Krauss, Nicole. 2013. Born Again. New Yorker, June 12, 2013. http://www.newyorker.
com/online/blogs/books/2013/06/yoram-kaniuk-postscript.html. Accessed
October 10, 2013.
Levinson, Sanford. 2005. In Quest of a Common Conscience: Reflections on the
Current Debate about Torture. Journal on National Security Law and Policy 1:
251252.
Mann, Itamar. 2013. Dialectic of Transnationalism: Unauthorized Migration and
Human Rights, 19932013. Harvard International Law Journal 48(2): 313, 346355.
Masalha, Nur. 2011. New History, Post-Zionism and Neo-Colonialism: A critique of
the Israeli New Historians.. Holy Land Studies 10(1): 153.
Mbembe, Achille. 2003. Necropolitics. Public Culture 15(1): 1140.
Moyn, Samuel. 2010. Human Rights in History. The Nation, August 30/September 6.
http://www.thenation.com/article/153993/human-rights-history?page=0,0. Accessed
October 23, 2013.
Naaman, Oded. 2012. The Checkpoint: Terror, Power, Cruelty. Boston Review,
November 13. Available at http://www.bostonreview.net/world/checkpoint-oded-
naaman.
Orbach, Danny. 2013. Black Flag at a Crossroads: The Kafr Qasim Political Trial
(19571958). International Journal of Middle East Studies. 45: 491511.
Osiel, Mark J. 1998. Obeying Orders: Atrocity, Military Discipline, and the Law of
War. California Law Review 86(5): 9391129.
. 1999. Obeying Orders: Atrocity, Military Discipline and the Law of War.
New Burnswick and London: Transaction Publishers.
Parush, Adi. 1990. Psak Hadin Beparashat Kafr Qasim, Mivhan Hadegel Hashahor
Vehamusag shel Pkuda Blti Hukit Baalil. Tel Aviv U. L. Rev. 15: 245272.
Pikington, Ed. 2010. The Amazing True Story of Zeitoun, The Guardian, March 11.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/mar/11/dave-eggers-zeitoun-hurricane-
katrina.
Posner, Richard. 1987. The Decline of Law as an Autonomous Discipline: 19621987.
Harvard Law Journal 100(4): 761780.
. 1988. Conventionalism: The Key to Law as an Autonomous Discipline?
The University of Toronto Law Journal 38(4): 333354.
Santner, Eric L. 2011. The Royal Remains. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Schmitt, Carl. 1996. The Concept of the Political. Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press.
. 2007. Theory of the Partisan. Candor: Telos Press Publishing.
Shapiro, Gary. 1989. Nietzsches Narratives. Indiana: Indiana University Press.
Solis, Gary D. 2010. The Law of Armed Conflict. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University
Press.
Tamari, Assaf. 2010. Erev-Rav. Mafteakh 2: 4374.
Taussig-Rubbo, Mateo. 2008. Sacrifice and Sovereingty. In Killing States: Lethal
Decisions/Final Judgements, edited by Jennifer Culbert and Austin Sarat. Durham:
Duke University Press.
Trachtman, Joel. 1998. Cyeberspace, Sovereignty, Jurisdiction, and Modernism.
Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 5(2): 561581.
10
To Be at Home: Spaces of Citizenship in the

Community Settlements of the Galilee
Fatina Abreek-Zubeidat and Ronnen Ben-Arie
Introduction
In her short article Reflections on Little Rock, published in Dissent in 1959, the
political theorist Hannah Arendt refers to discrimination as an indispensable
social right, just as equality is a political right, after examining the historical
events that unfolded in Little Rock in the fall of 1957 and spring of 1958,
following the famous US Supreme Court decision in the Brown vs. Board of
Education case (Arendt 1959). Arendt argues that the Supreme Court and civil
rights activists were misguided in their attempts to forcefully integrate schools
in the South. Central to her arguments are her notions of the political, social,
and private realms (Duran 2009; Hinze 2009; Morey 2011). Arendt argues
that each realm is governed by a different dominant principle. She asserts that
the political realm is governed by the principle of equality, the social realm
by the principle of discrimination, and the private realm by the principle of
exclusivity. Arendt states that the government should enforce equality in the
political realm and nowhere else (Morey 2011, 11). Arendt inveighs against the
blurring of the boundaries and the threat of reasoning of one of the domains
based on the others. The separation of the domains is a must for her as she
identifies the blurring of the boundaries as a nihilistic threat for the possibility
of political action.
In this chapter, we seek to examine the relevance of Arendts distinctions
between the domains in light of the story of a couple of Palestinian citizens living
in Israel, who chose to live in Rakefetone of the Community Settlements of
the Galilee. The couple, that attempted to build their home in the community
settlement, struggled against the effort to prevent Palestinian citizens from living
there on the basis of ethnic-national discrimination and segregation. In contrast to

Arendts definition of home as an enclosed, secure, and interior space that belongs
to the private space, we wish to think about home as the contours of the public
space, that is, to highlight the limits of the home, by outlining the powers of the
community and state institutions to allow and deny such a home. We try to relate
to the question of how the home enables some to think of it as secureassuming
the existence of an autonomous subject residing in it, separated from the public
sphere, while for others, living in the same territory and governed by the same
regime, the home is considered through negation and absence.
The first part of the chapter describes the general background of the struggle
around the Palestinian citizens right to choose their place of residence, and
details the spatio-historical conditions that enabled the establishment of the
community settlements by limiting the Palestinian citizens living space. This
section details the nihilistic acts and procedures of the state that constitutes
its power through the negation and destruction of the Palestinian existence.
In the second part, we discuss the concept of community as related to the
social sphere according to Arendts definitions. In this context we ask about
the power of the community in acting within the social realm, justifying
the negation in the name of securing the separation between the political
and the private spheres. In this complex reality, the chapter analyzes how
the political is organized, how it intervenes and attempts, through the High
Court of Justice, to secure the distinctions between the spheres and to ward
off the nihilistic threat. The third part of the chapter explores the political
boundaries through the private spherethe home and wonders as to the
meaning of the act of providing and denying a home. The chapter concludes at
the point where the home, and the claim for a home, might exceed the fixated
perception and mark a new political space, which emerges from the acting-
together of all citizens in an attempt to rearticulate the nihilistic counteract
as a positive one.
Act 1
On June 2013, the Zubeidat family, husband and wife, began to build their new
home in Rakefet, a community settlement in the rural region of the Galilee, in
northern Israel. This might seem a trivial, almost banal, thingto build a home
in the place of your choiceyet this is not the case here. It required seven years
of public and legal struggle, culminating in the verdict of the Israeli High Court
Spaces of Citizenship in Galilee 207
of Justice, to reach this point. It all begun in 2005, when the Zubeidats wanted
to build their home on a family-owned private plot of land in the hometown of
Sakhnin, an Arab-populated town at the center of Galilee. Soon they found out
that due to planning regulations, this was impossible. The plot was divided by the
municipal border between Sakhnin and the neighboring regional municipality
of Misgav, and any attempt to build on the plot required the agreement of the
neighboring municipality, which denied any such appeal on the ground of their
disapproval of any expansion of the Arab town. Facing the impossibility to
build on their own land, the Zubeidats have decided to challenge the housing
and planning systems that severely limit the possibilities available to Arab-
Palestinian citizens in Israel.
The couple chose to live in Rakefet, one of the twenty-nine community
settlements in the Misgav Regional Municipality surrounding the city of
Sakhnin, which are designated for Jewish residents only. The choice of Rakefet
was due to its proximity to Sakhnin and the fact that it is located on lands that
were originally owned by Palestinians living in Sakhnin and confiscated by the
state in order to establish new settlements for Jewish citizens.
The Judaization of Palestinian land
The origins of the current spatial conditions in Galilee, as they are present in
todays Israeli planning, land and housing policies, are to be found as far back
as the time of the 1948 war, which led to the establishment of the state of Israel.
The war, which is considered by most Israelis as their War of Independence and
by most Palestinians as their Catastrophe (Nakba), broke out immediately
after the acceptance of the United Nations Partition Plan in November 1947
and ended in January of 1949. This tragic event led to the destruction of dozens
of towns and about 400 villages, with about 750,000 Palestinians rendered
homeless and stateless. Only about 160,000 Palestinians remained in Israel and
granted citizenship by the new state (Khalidi 1992; Masalha 2000; Morris 1987;
Papp 1988, 2007; Segev 1998). At the same time, Israel absorbed some 700,000
Jewish immigrants and refugees from Europe and the Islamic states of Asia and
North Africa and quickly settled them throughout the country. Thus, by 1953,
the state established 370 new settlements for Jewish residents, 350 of which were
located on lands that were occupied before by Palestinians (Falah 1996; Golan
1995; Kedar and Yiftachel 2006).
Different practices were used by the Israeli state in order to allocate public
and state lands and lands that were previously owned by Palestinians for the
use of its Jewish-Israeli citizens. The expansion of existing Jewish settlements
and the establishment of new ones continued, as well as the destruction of most
Palestinian villages, towns, and urban neighborhoods and the restriction on the
expansion and development of the ones that remained at place. The landscape
went under a Hebraization process with the changing of the names of localities,
sites, and geographical elements, and the municipal boundaries were redrawn
in order to secure the Jewish dominance and control of space (Benvenisti 1997;
Kedar 1998; Kemp 1997). These practices, according to Kedar and Yiftachel
(2006), characterize the Israeli regime, which they designate as an ethnocratic
regime that supports the expansion of one ethno-national group in a multiethnic
contested territory (Yiftachel 2006). Such a regime promotes the spatial,
economic, political, and cultural objectives of the dominant ethno-nationality,
and it is the ethnic ascription rather than the civic one that operates as the main
key for the allocation of resources. Kedar and Yiftachel contend that one of the
main bases for the constitution and institutionalization of ethnocratic regimes
is the system of spatial and land control, having its core in two complementary
state apparatuses: the land authority and the planning administration (Kedar
and Yiftachel 2006, 131). The Israeli ethnocratic regime has enabled, assisted,
and supported the Zionist project of Judaizing the Israeli and Palestinian space
(Kedar and Yiftachel 2006, 133), at first mainly by legislation during the formative
years of the state, which aimed to normalize the displacement and dispossession
of the Palestinian people (Forman and Kedar 2004), and then complemented
by administrative arrangements between the state and several Jewish suprastate
institutions. The ethnocratic regime constitutes itself through the regularization
and normalization of the nihilistic acts of destruction, dispossession, and
negation that it is founded upon.
In the wake of the war, only about 13.5 percent of the territory that has
now become the state of Israel was under formal state and Jewish ownership,
available for the interests of the Jewish sovereignty and the Jewish vast majority,
which by 1951 reached almost 90 percent of the population. In order to answer
this discrepancy, between 1948 and 1960, millions of acres of land formerly
owned and used by Palestinians have been transformed into Israeli state lands.
The nationalization and Judaization of the formerly Palestinian land were
accomplished by several corresponding measures (Kedar and Yiftachel 2006,
139142; Yiftachel 2006, 136143):
1. Confiscation of lands owned by Palestinians, mostly those who became

refugees and absentees during the war, but also much of the lands owned by
those who became citizens of Israel. This was done by military, administrative,
and legal procedures, of which the major ones up until the mid-1950s were the
Absentee Property Law (1950) and the Land Acquisition Law (1953). During
the 1950s and 1960s, this was done mainly by the legal procedure of a land
title settlement that transferred much of the lands claimed by Palestinians into
state-owned land. As of today, only about 3.5 percent of the lands within Israel
are privately owned by Palestinian residents.
2. Transfer of about half a million acres of previously Palestinian agricultural

land to the ownership of the Jewish National Fund (JNF).
3. Concentration, since 1960, of the control and administration of all these lands
in the hands of the Israel Land Administration (ILA), which is in charge of the
management of all public lands, amounting to as much as 93 percent of the
land within the Israeli boundaries, including those owned by the state and by
the JNF. The agreement between the state and the JNF granted the latter equal
representation at the executive Council of the ILA although it owned only about
17 percent of all public lands.
4. In 1960, the state adopted the JNF policy and stated in the first section
of the Basic Law: Israel Lands that all state lands will never be sold and will
remain forever in the ownership of the state, the Jewish people, and its national
organizations.
These were the foundations of the Israeli ethnocratic land regime that is still in
effect even to this very day. For the past sixty-five years, the Palestinian citizens
have remained almost totally excluded from the state public land regime, with
only about 0.25 percent of all public land allocated to them (Yiftachel 2006, 143).
The subordination of expropriated Palestinian lands to the Jewish people
was fixed in covenants that were signed between the state and the Jewish
organizations, particularly the JNF and the Jewish Agency. The former secures
the Judaization of the land at the stage of ownership and the latter at the stage
of allocation. As part of this process, a sophisticated apparatus was shaped,
which excludes Palestinian citizens from rural areas where state lands were
allocated only to settlements designated for Jewish inhabitants. According to
the three-party lease arrangement, the initial land allocation for a settlement
was signed by the state Land Authority, the Jewish Agency, and the settlement
as a collective. In order to be able to lease a plot of land in the settlements,

individuals had first to be accepted as members of the collective that was legally
arranged as a cooperative association. This enabled the effective screening of
Palestinian citizens from almost all rural settlements that are organized in
Regional Municipalities that control about 84 percent of the state area (Kedar
and Yiftachel 2006, 144).1
The development of Jewish settlement in the Galilee region has its origins
even earlier than the beginning of the Zionist movement, as early as 1881.
However, most of the settlement attempts have failed and only a small part
has succeeded, mostly near the northern border. This settlement has modestly
increased during the time of the British Mandate, adding a few small settlements
along the border. Even after the 1948 war, the establishment of the state of Israel,
and massive destruction and expulsion of the Palestinian towns and people,
the Galilee remained a large condensation of Palestinian population. During
the 1950s and the 1960s, the state responded to this situation mainly by the
establishment of peripheral new towns amidst areas that were highly populated
by Palestinians and their inhabitation mostly by Jewish immigrants.
During the early 1970s, new plans for the expansion of the Jewish towns in
the Galilee were made along with intentions to establish new small settlements
throughout the region in order to increase and disperse the Jewish population.
These plans were accompanied by the publication of new expropriation orders
for thousands of acres of Palestinian owned lands. These plans were devised at a
time of increase of national consciousness among the Palestinians living within
Israel and crystallization of processes of their political organization. This led to
mass reactions to the state policies and plans, which culminated in the events
of the Land Day of 1976, when massive demonstrations were held in many
Palestinian towns throughout the country and were responded to harshly by
police and army forces, killing six demonstrators (Bashir 2006; Yiftachel 1999,
2006, 170171). The events of the Land Day and the political developments
within the Palestinian population in Israel and their relationships with the
state acted as a catalyst for the implementation of new state policies and plans
for Jewish settlement in the Galilee (Sofer and Finkel 1988, 1011; Yiftachel
2006, 69).
1
Some commentators emphasize the role of the religious discourse in the desire to create a Jewish
place, which has its origins in the historical right for the country (see Bashir 2004). In our analysis
we focus more on the institutional and procedural apparatuses that enable the dual project of
Judaization and de-Arabization of the space.
The Mitzpim plan
Rakefet was initially established as one of the Mitzpim (literary, outposts or

lookouts) that were established throughout the Galilee as part of an extensive
national project that was initiated at the end of the 1970s. Within only four
years, between 1978 and 1982, forty-four new settlements were established on
state-owned lands, mostly located on bare hilltops, and inhabited by Jewish
citizens who readily joined the national effort. The project was a joint enterprise
of the state government and The Jewish Agency, which was very dominant as
the main body to initiate, promote, fund, and execute the project (Lipshitz and
Law Yone 1992; Sofer and Finkel 1988). The project was not a direct outcome
of a comprehensive statutory plan, but rather the product of an ongoing
struggle, debate, and negotiation between various government ministries, state
authorities, the army, and suprastate Zionist organizations, all having their own
aims and goals, which did not always match one another. The declared goals
and objectives changed with time, as did practices of realization. Still, the most
fundamental and consistent goal, agreed upon by most actors most of the time,
was epitomized by the slogan Judaization of the Galilee, which had both a
spatial and a demographic dimension. That is, to increase the number of Jewish
residents in the Galilee in order to increase its proportion in the total population
of the region, to secure hold by Jewish population of as much land as possible,
and to establish Jewish presence in areas that are over-dominated by Palestinians.
As stated in the decision of the Joint Settlement Committee shared by the Israeli
government and the World Zionist Organization, The Mitzpim plan is intended
to promote the deployment of Jewish population in the mountainous Galilee and
to secure the protection of state lands by presence and inhabitation (April 30,
1979, cited in Lipshitz and Law Yone 1992, 182).
The basic practices in the realization of the project were to locate possible
sites to be inhabited, to open rough roads to the localities chosen, and to
organize small groups of seven to fifteen families to inhabit the outposts, with
only minimal basic infrastructures and temporary housing structures at the
beginning. At the time of their establishment, the exact future designation of each
outpost was not determined, as there was no general plan to set their purpose
of use or expected size, rather they were conceived as temporary settlements
to be developed in the future to various different kinds of permanent ones. In
this way, dozens of new outposts were established quickly within a very short
time, setting the conditions for future development. Thus, practices that were
already in extensive use in the Occupied Territories during the 1970s, and were
in fact a continuation of Zionist practices originating in the 1930s (Bashir 2004;
Rotbard 2003), were now relocated and used in similar ways in a new region.
Three aspects of the Mitzpim projects realization are of particular significance
for our discussion in this chapter and will serve as its basis.
First, the role of the Zionist suprastate organizations in the planning and
implementation of the project. The World Zionist Organization and its operative
arm, the Jewish Agency, together with the Jewish National Fund, were all very
dominant in initiating and promoting the project. Although in partial cooperation
and coordination with the government, as for instance in the Joint Settlement
Committee, but also in initiating independent actions that caused continuous
strife and contention with state authorities (Lipshitz and Law Yone 1992, 185187).
These organizations had a major role in the mobilization and administration of
the Jewish population in Palestine prior to the establishment of the Israeli state,
and continued to take a significant part in the development of the state, while
holding on to their unique position as external to the state. The relations between
the state and the Zionist organizations are complex, as the goals and aims of the
different parties, as well as their institutional commitments and obligations, do
not always coincide. Regarding the Mitzpim project, some commentators claim
that part of the motivation of Jewish Agency officials in promoting the project
was to influence against the priority given by the new right-wing government to
the new settlements in the Occupied Territories (Sofer and Finkel 1988, 1112).
Thus, although there might be a general agreement on the goal of Judaization of
the Galilee, in practice, there can still be effective disagreements, whether on the
national scale, as to where to concentrate state investment, or locally, with states
authorities, as to specific locations or the order of operation. Nevertheless, these
complex relations and the external position of the Zionist organizations, enables
them to be very effective in their influence on the trajectories of investment and
development of the state, allegedly in the name and benefit of the global Jewish
people, and, when needed, to work in collaboration with the government, helping
it to disregard its obligation to the non-Jewish citizens of Israel. These complex
relations were later identified and signaled out as problematic by the Israeli High
Court of Justice in the verdict of the Kaadan case, to which we will return later,
by stating that the state is not entitled to allow discrimination in [the allocation
of] state lands by transferring these lands to the Jewish Agency.2
2
HCJ 6698/95 Kaadan vs. Israel Lands Authority (2000).
Second is the intertwining of the national and the personal in the realization
of the Mitzpim project. One of the main objectives stated for the project was
to protect state lands, which is a code for preventing Palestinians from
making use of lands that were expropriated and are now owned by the state.
Typically, there are state authorities that hold the responsibility for executing
this task, and various possible practices are available for that purpose, such as
delineation, fencing, and continual surveillance performed by state officials.
In this case, this task was supposed to be handed over to the residents of the
new small settlements, who were supposed to fulfill it by the very presence of
their bodies and homes. There were some debates among officials whether this
fulfillment should be a passive one, meaning that the physical holding of the
land should suffice, or whether it should be more active, with some suggesting
that the settlers should be properly trained for the mission (Sofer and Finkel
1988, 2223). In either way, there was a general agreement that by choosing
to make their homes in one of these outposts, the newcomers take upon
themselves the vocation of a national mission. Thus, the seemingly personal
and private act of choosing a place to live and build ones home has become,
right from the start, a political act and a crucial element in a national project.
This understanding of the way the national is entangled with the personal
and the equivocal nature of the act of building a home, being both public and
private, is of great importance when considering the Build Your Own Home
(Bneh Beitcha) trend, which became widely popular in Israel during the same
years, as will be discussed next.
Third, and last, is the evolvement of a new type of settlementthe
Community Settlement. As mentioned before, the outposts were established
with no determined designation as to their future type of settlement, and they
could have developed into any one of the already existing types in the Israeli
rural settlement system. The most common ones at the time were Kibutzim and
Moshavim, which were originally based on agriculture, and which maintain
different degrees of communal life and corporate economy.3 Nevertheless,
almost all the original Mitzpim have eventually developed into what is known
today as, and was new at the time, Community Settlements. This, in fact, is
the fulfillment of one of the secondary objectives of the project that aimed to
create new types of settlement (Dor 2004, 20; Sofer and Finkel 1988, 13). It
was already clear at the time, to the projects initiators, that promoting more
3
These types of settlements have undergone a fundamental change in the past thirty years or so, but
were still very much based on these principles at the time of the Mitzpim project.
rural settlements based on agriculture in the Galilee is very problematic, both

because of the regions topographical conditions, the lack of suitable available
lands for agriculture, and the decrease in the sectors profitability, and because of
a change in the preferences of the potential inhabitants of the new settlements.
The emergence of the Community Settlements reflects a radical change in the
political and economic ideologies of Israeli society since the 1980s (Newman
1984; Rosen and Razin 2008). Neoliberal tendencies have set the ground for the
desire by many for high quality of life to be found in rural and exurban small
settlements (up to 500 families, and usually much less than that), with private
houses in a green environment. This coincided with the increasingly popular
practice at the time by state housing authorities, of separating the planning and
allocation of land from the building itself. This practice was realized in the Build
Your Own Home (Bneh Beitcha) projects, in which residents would lease plots
of land from the state and self-build their homes according to their own design
(Yizhar and Kallus 2012). This practice, which is typically associated with ideas
regarding the responsibility and self-expression of the tenants, was incorporated
by neoliberal systems of individuation and common conceptions of quality of
life, as well as the national project of rapid establishment of new settlements.
Looking back, after more than three decades, it seems that the creation
of this new type of settlement is one of the most significant outcomes of the
Mitzpim project, while its principal objectives have failed. As of today, the
population of the Community Settlements in northern Israel numbers only
30,000, which is quite negligible in a population of 1.3 million throughout the
region (CBS 2011). Taking into consideration the fact that 75 percent of the
inhabitants of these settlements have relocated from other localities from within
the region (Dor 2004, 67) makes it quite safe to conclude that the establishment
of the Mitzpim failed to change dramatically the ratio of Jewish and Palestinian
residents in the region as had been expected by the projects initiators. As for
the protection of state lands from being used by Palestinians, it was already clear
at the time that the vast majority of unauthorized building by Palestinians is
taking place on privately owned lands within Palestinian localities (Lipshitz and
Kipnis 1991), and the presence of the new Jewish-inhabited outposts did not
make much difference in this regard (Dor 2004; Lipshitz and Law Yone 1992;
Sofer and Finkel 1988).
Thus, the most valid and present product of the Mitzpim project is the very
existence of the Community settlements, a neoliberal transfiguration of previous
Zionist modes of life and existence. These settlements, which have become a
symbol for high quality of life, usually lack any economic base and are almost
totally dependent on commuting to nearby regional and metropolitan centers.
They are formally organized as communal associations, but have no essential
corporate assets or cooperative existence.
Yet, although seemingly distanced from old ideological formulations, these
settlements still partake in the production of the segregated space of the Galilee.
Today, what holds together this double-faced operation of the Community
settlements is, more than anything else, the concept of community and the ways
it is understood, manipulated, and used in the current discourse and practice.
This will be the focus of the remainder of the chapter.
Act 2
In October 2005, the Zubeidats approached the Admission Committee of
Rakefet, the local body responsible for the absorption of new residents into
the community settlement. According to the administrative procedure, every
citizen who chooses to live in one of the community settlements needs to pass
an admissions process, which should examine and confirm his or her social
fitness to be part of the community. The process consists of three stages, the
first of which is a meeting with local representatives of the community, meant
for mutual acquaintance; it is not supposed to be decisive but rather only to
recommend. The second stage includes socio-psychological tests that aim to
diagnose the fitness for community life in the specific desired settlement. The
third stage is a meeting with a regional committee that includes representatives
of the regional municipality, the Jewish Agency, and the community settlement
in question. This committee has the authority to decide whether to allocate a
plot of land in the settlement, according to the recommendation and results
of the two prior stages. This procedure is effective with regard to almost 700
settlements throughout the state, which makes for 85 percent of all rural
settlements in Israel. At this stage, aware of the existing reality and of the
experience of previous attempts of Palestinian citizens to live in community
settlements, the Zubeidats approached two civil rights NGOs that cooperated at
the time in a joint action against the admission committeesAlternative Voice
in the Galilee, which was an action group of Jewish and Palestinian residents
of the region aiming to promote civil equality and a shared society,4 and
4
For a more extensive account of the organizations activities, see Svirsky (2011, 94108).
AdalahThe Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel.5 The Zubeidats
went through all three stages of the admission process and were rejected on
the basis of social incompatibility for living in a community. At this stage,
theyve decided to appeal to the High Court of Justice,6 with the legal and public
assistance of the two NGOs, claiming their civil right to build their home on
public state land in the place of their choice.
The place of community
A few years earlier, in 2000, the High Court of Justice (HCJ) issued a verdict on
another case of a Palestinian family that wished to build its home in a Jewish
community settlement. The Kaadan family appealed to the HCJ after being
rejected from purchasing a plot land in the Katzir settlement on the basis of
the argument that the Jewish Agency is entitled not to allot plots to Palestinians
as its commitment is only to the Jewish people. The HCJ decision was that the
state cannot discriminate against Palestinian citizens by using a third-party
organization, such as the Jewish Agency in the allocation of state lands. This
decision was considered as a breakthrough precedent, which might affect future
relations between the state and its Palestinian citizens with respect to land
issues, and even the judges added that, naturally, there exist different types
of settlements such as Kibutzim, Moshavim and Mitzpimthat might arouse
different problems.7 The HCJ decision stated that the Kaadan family is entitled
to go through the admission process as does any other citizen, but it did not
discuss the essence of the process itself. By doing so, the HCJ failed to challenge
the guiding principle that the authorities and the community have the right to
decide who may be part of a community settlement and thereby discriminate
in the allocation of the public resource of state land. Indeed, in the following
years, as the authorities rearranged the admission procedures as a result of
the Kaadan case, it was stated that the main criterion for acceptance would
be made on the basis of compatibility to social life in a small community.8
The concept of community was the basis for the Zubiedatss petition, as well as
the cornerstone of the state authoritys responses to it.
5
http://adalah.org/eng/
6
HTC 8036/07 Abreek-Zubiedat, Zubiedat and others vs. Israel Lands Authority and others.
7
For more on the Kaadan case, see Barzilai (2000); Ziv and Shamir (2000), and articles in the Adalahs
Review, Fall 2000.
8
Israel Land Authority Executive Council decision 1064.
Apart from the Zubiedats claiming the personal right to build their home
on state land in Rakefet, the petitions main claim was that the state is using
the concept of community in a way that excludes Palestinian citizens, among
other minorities in the Israeli society, disabling them to make use of the public
resources. According to this claim, the whole apparatus of the admission
process is based on the conception that a small group, supported by the state
authorities, is entitled to decide who can join in and benefit from public
resources. The principal plea of the petition was that this apparatus should be
abolished and that land, as a public resource, should be allocated equally to
all citizens. This plea was a direct response to the official deployment of the
concept of community as it was exhibited in the administrative procedure as
well as in the community settlements justification for using the criterion of
social compatibility.
In the settlements reply to the plea, it asserted that
[t]he essence of Rakefet as a community settlement is expressed in the overall
activities of its inhabitants as a homogenized and active communitythe
community atmosphere is expressed also in an increased social activity during
holidays, ceremonies, and different events that emphasize the atmosphere of
the brotherhood and the cooperation between the community membersthe
settlement is strict to mention and celebrate the [Jewish] holidays(italics in
the original)
The settlement claims its right to exist as a close segregated community,

and since this is made possible by the allocation of state public land and the
implementation of the administrative admission procedures, it also claims the
responsibility and obligation of the state to enable this existence and to protect
the right to exist as such. That is, the claim is that the HCJ cannot and should
not interfere with the internal conduct of the community settlement and should
not attempt to exert the principles of equality to which the state is committed,
in this case. Thus, given that in the Kaadan case the HJC has denied the
possibility to discriminate in land allocation through the use of a third party
that is committed only to Jews, now the demand is to enable the continuation
of discrimination on the basis of an allegedly legitimate exclusion by Jewish
communities.
This understanding of community as a legitimate exclusion based on an
internal common essence coincides with Arendts conception of community
as an element of the social sphere that is based on difference and maintains
discrimination. As Arendt asserts, within the social realm,
[w]e become subject to the old adage of like attracts like which controls the
whole realm of society in the innumerable variety of its groups and associations.
What matters here is not personal distinction but the differences by which
people belong to certain groups whose very identifiability demands that they
discriminate against other groups in the same domain. (Arendt 1959, 51)
That is, community as group association is a sort of expansion of the private

sphere, which is dominated by difference and is not subordinated to equality,
which is the innermost principle of the political sphere. In this sense, the
community is part of the social realm, which is, according to Arendt, a curious,
somewhat hybrid realm between the political and the private (Arendt 1959,
51), one which connects the two, while keeping them separated. The social exists
between the private and the political realms, and although distinct from them, it
is dominated and operated by the logic of both. On the one hand, it is governed,
just like homes, by necessity and difference, but on the other hand, like the
political sphere, it is public. It is, in other words, the extension of the space of
necessity into the public realm, but without being governed by the principles of
equality.
According to Arendt, the social sphere acts as an in-between zone, for each
time we leave the protective four walls of our private homes and cross over the
threshold into the public world, we enter first, not the political realm of equality,
but the social sphere (Arendt 1959, 51). As Morey explains, the social realm
should exist as a transitional realm between the private and public realms, and
in no way should consume the latter two, which are necessary components
of modern society (Morey 2011, 19). Arendt understands the emergence
of the social realm and the blurring of the distinctions between the private
and the public as a disturbing phenomenon of modern times, one that puts
both the private and the public realms in danger and undermines the possibility
of the existence of a political space (Arendt 1958, 3850). For Arendt, the threat
stemming from the rise of the social and its expansion is that of the domination of
conformity over the plurality that is a prerequisite for political action. The threat
of conformism and homogenization as the annulment of the political is the basis
for her identification of the modern age as inherently nihilistic (Arendt 2005,
103) and of totalitarianism as nihilistic and anti-political (Arendt 2005, 120,
1973, 328). As Adi Ophir demonstrates in his chapter in this volume, for Arendt,
nihilism occurs when the distinct space in which men and women can come
together and freely compete and negotiate has been destroyed. Thus, it is crucial
for Arendt to secure the distinctions between the political sphere and the social
sphere in order to, on the one hand, protect the equality and plurality that rule
the political, and on the other hand, safeguard the possibility of free association
which is the expression of the private that extends into the public realm. It is
also vital to secure the distinction between the social realm and the private one,
which is where even those excluded from the world could find a substitute in
the warmth of the hearth and the limited reality of family life (Arendt 2005,
59). Moreover, for Arendt, securing the private realm, the home, is of the utmost
importance, since the possession of a home is a condition for the possibility of
taking part in the political realm (Arendt 2005, 3637). These claims for a stable
distinction between the different realms are based on the assumption of their
possible autonomy, and indeed, Arendt calls to protect the distinction between
the three realms and to resettle the boundaries between them.
These are the conceptual foundations for Arendts rejection of the enforced
desegregation in public schools in the southern states of the United States
(Arendt 1959). Following Arendt it is possible to understand the community
settlements demand to maintain its right to screen newcomers in order to
secure its inner essence as an attempt to secure the social realm within its
proper boundary. According to this reasoning, it is justified for the settlement
to demand that the HCJ, as well as any other state organ, should refrain from
exerting the principle of equality, which should be limited to the political realm,
on the communitys conduct within the social realm. The settlements claim is
that it should be warranted the ability to define the communitys boundaries
and those individuals who may be part of it. This claim should serve the need
for free association of the community members as the extension of the private
realm into the social, public realm. For them, this is the basis for the justified
discrimination of those who are not considered as their likes. At first sight, it
seems that Arendt should have agreed with this assertion. But this might not be
the case, as for Arendt a home is a completely different story. As she mentions in
passing, the right to a home is more fundamental than any other political right,
such as the right to vote, and should be strictly secured (Arendt 1959, 49). This
is of course understandable, taking into account the relation of conditioning
that prevails, according to Arendt, between the private and the public domains,
namely, that the possession of a home preconditions the participation in the
political realm (Azoulay 2010, 419).
If, as our spatio-historical analysis shows, the combination of the state-
supported practices of land expropriation, limitation on the possible development
of Palestinian localities, and the screening of Palestinians from rural settlements,
creates a denial of the right to a home for Palestinians in Israel, Arendt might
have agreed that this is the case for the political to intervene in the social. For
Arendt, such an intervention may have been justified in order to resettle the
private realm and thus to protect the very existence of the political. This is, in
fact, a re-inscription of the boundaries and restabilization of the distinction
between the private and the political.
Act 3
In September 13, 2011, the HCJ ruled that the Zubiedat couple should be
granted the right to build their home in Rakefet and that the ILA should allocate
them a plot of land in the community settlement. This was the end of a six-year
struggle for the couple but wasnt the end of the story. The HCJ has decided not
to pass judgment on the principal demand to abolish the admission apparatus
altogether. This was supposed to be settled in a legislation process that was
already going on in the Israeli parliament, and which began as a response to the
petition. The law, which is still under debate, wishes to strengthen the power
of the community to choose its members according to its own definition of the
communitys essence and shared values. Accordingly, some of the community
settlements in the Misagv Regional Municipality have already begun to attempt
to rewrite the bylaws of the settlements and redefine the community as founded
on the basis of the values of settlement, Zionism, Israeli heritage, values of the
Israeli state as a Jewish democratic state.
Negating political negation
How should we understand the HCJ decision and the communities reaction
in the context of Arendts conceptualization? Would the intervention of the
political through the HCJ decision to grant the right for a home secure the
possibility for Palestinians to participate in the political realm in Israel? Would
an acknowledgment by the HCJ of the negation of the right to a home by
Palestinians make a substantial change in the states spatial policy? And is the
re-inscription of boundaries a way to promote change in the political system, or
does it merely reaffirm the existing power relations?
Arendts suggestion that a relation of conditioning exists between the home
and the political sphere engenders a twofold effect. While on the one hand the
intervention of the political in order to facilitate those to whom a home was

denied is meant as an act of inclusion aimed at granting the basic condition that
enables to participate in the political sphere; on the other, by re-inscribing the
strict separation between the private and the political realms, the home has to be
excluded from the political sphere and its political conditions of possibility are
denied. That is to say, this is an act of excluding inclusion by which the home is
granted only through being depoliticized. While the HCJ accedes to the demand
for a home, it also reaffirms its own sovereignty to deny or grant this right and
ignores the prior political conditions that found this sovereignty, as well as the
denial of the home in the first place.
Judith Butler contends that Arendts conceptualization of the distinction
between the private and the political spheres is uncritical of the act of excluding
the private from the political, which is political in itself (Butler and Spivak
2007, 17). The home, which Arendt considers as a non-political outside of the
political sphere, is in fact part of the political since the act of excluding the
home is a political act. That is, the political is not that which takes place in the
political sphere but rather the act of defining the boundaries of the political and
between the political and the private. Thus, the HCJ ruling that aims to resettle
the boundaries, in line with Arendts conceptualization, ignores the political
dimensions of the home that originate in its exclusion to the private realm.
Moreover, the attempt to resettle the distinctions between the spheres also
overlooks the fact that these distinctions were never valid to begin with. As our
spatio-historical analysis shows, building a home in a community settlement
in the Galilee was never simply a private act. The conditions that make such an
act possible are grounded in the specifics of the exclusionary Israeli land regime
operating in concert with a neoliberal economy. Furthermore, the concept of
community that is allegedly legitimized due to its belonging in the social realm
as some extension of the private, is in fact related all along to the political act of
delimiting boundaries according to national identities, as became clear in the
settlements later attempts to redefine the communities essence. This act can
be understood as nihilistic since it exposes the communitys urge to undermine
the alleged boundaries and to cross over to the political realm in order to
protect itself when it seems that the state is not fulfilling this aim. Actually, as
Roberto Esposito asserts, it is the nothing in common, which is at the basis
of community (Esposito 2009), and what keeps individuals together is not a
common thing or essence, but rather the immunitary logic of distancing what
is perceived as a threat (Esposito 2011, 89). Hence, the community settlements
with their exclusionary practices should not be understood as standing alone,

but rather as part of a continuous and comprehensive project aimed at the
exclusion of Palestinians from the physical space as well as from the political.
This continuity between the current negation and the constitutive negation
lies primarily in the fact that the negation was shaped as a vehicleone of a
repertoire of available means whose significance is determined only according
to the end to which they are subordinated.9 It is indeed a negation of the political
existence of the Palestinians, but one that cannot be answered by the rectification
of the particular negation of the right to a home.
Based on this understanding, it makes sense to consider the very act of
approaching the HCJ in a demand to recognize and rectify the negation of a
home, as an affirmation of the regime that denies the home and has the power
to grant it. As some critics claim, to turn to the states juridical system is to
accept its rules of the game and is oriented toward a change that might come
from within the system without challenging its political foundations.10 It is also
possible to claim that the demand to be allowed to build a home in Rakefet is in
itself an affirmation of the very existence of Rakefet on expropriated Palestinian
lands and an acceptance of the Judaization project and its outcomes.11 A third
possible proclamation is that the desire to build a home in Rakefet is no more
than the acceptance of the neoliberal project of Build Your Own Home and
the affirmation of the current economic order. According to such assertions, the
attempt to negate the negation of the home carries with it an affirmation of the
negation itself and of the regime that entails it.
This is true only if we consider the demand for, or rather claim to, a home
as one that is simply aimed at being granted a home. But, following Rancire
(2004), we should understand this claim as directed not at the negation of the
home, but rather, at the negation of the political. According to Rancire, and as
shown earlier, the negation of the political is not to be responded by the granting
of the home, as Arendt might have had it, since it does not take into account the
very act of delimiting the political and the private. Rather, the claim itself is to
participate and to have a place in the political. This demand is the political act
that aims to challenge and reset the boundaries of the political. As Rancire has
it, the political is not the absolute or abstract sphere that was already determined;
rather, it is precisely where we draw the line separating one life from the other.
9
See Azoulays discussion of the destruction of homes of Palestinians (Azoulay 2010, 411415).
10
Ziv and Shamir (2000), in relation to the Kaadan case.
11
This claim was proclaimed by some Palestinian activists and residents of the region.
Politics is about the border (Rancire 2004, 303), it is the continuous process of
demanding participation in the political space and challenging the boundaries
that were set in order to exclude those who are not counted. As Bulent Diken,
following Rancire, argues in a similar vein, in the conclusion to his chapter,
the political is that which reconfigures the political space and constitutes a new
political scene, and politics is always dissensual (Rancire 2010, 3637), that
is, working against the consensus of the prevailing order. Thus, the claim to a
home in Rakefet is in fact a claim to participate in determining the boundaries
of the political. This act, which does not only expose the blurred boundaries
between the different realms but also undermines their very stability by aiming
at their rearticulation, should be considered according to Arendts terms, just
as the attempt to redefine the communitys essence by its current members, as a
nihilist act in itself. Both acts are aimed at the nihilistic actions of the state, but
while the communitys act is determined to preserve negation and exclusion, the
Zubiedatss one is a nihilistic counteract whose positive purpose is to establish a
new political space that will be effectively constituted on plurality and equality.
Act 4by way of conclusion

In the summer of 2013, as we are writing this chapter, the home of the Zubiedats
is already under construction in Rakefet, on that plot of land they were allocated
by the order of the HCJ. Soon after the future presence of the new, undesired
inhabitants became visible with the erection of the first concrete wall, it was
sprayed, anonymously, with the phrase: No LoyaltyNo Citizenship, which
is a well-known right-wing political slogan alluding to the Palestinians flawed
status as citizens in Israel.
This came as a reminder that not only is the saga not over yet for the Zubiedats,
but also that what is at stake is not simply the building of a home in a pleasant
environment, but rather the political existence of Palestinians. The presence of a
Palestinian home within the bounded limits of the all-Jewish community is not
just a threat in terms of real estate, but is in fact an undermining of the common
sense of exclusionary citizenship in Israel. It is a challenge to the boundaries
of political space itself and an attempt to realign them in a way that will make
it possible for a new political space to emerge, one that will be based not on
separation and exclusion, but on plurality, inclusive participation, and consent.
At the end of the day, the concrete walls that the Zubiedats have decided
to leave exposed, absorbed within them the harshness and the crudity of the
words sprayed on them. But the softness of this malleable matter created space
for congregation and for the beginning of a civil discourse between the two
sides, Jews and Palestinians, and marked the active space of resistance and acting
together.
Bibliography
Adalahs Review Volume 2Land (Fall 2000). http://adalah.org/eng/Articles/1385/

Adalahs-Review-Volume-2---Land-(Fall-2000). Accessed August 17, 2013.
Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
. 1959. Reflections on Little Rock. Dissent 6: 4556.
. 1973. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt.
. 2005. Introduction into Politics. In The Promise of Politics, edited by
JeromeKohn, 93200. New York: Schocken Books.
Azoulay, Ariella. 2010. When a Demolished Home Becomes a Public Square. In
HomeLessHome, edited by Ariella Azoulay, 396429. Jerusalem: Museum On the
Seam.
Barzilai, Gad. 2000. Fantasies of Liberalilsm and Liberal Jurisprudence: State Law,
Politics, and the Israeli Arab-Palestinian Community. Israel Law Review 34: 425.
Bashir, Nabih. 2004. Judaizing the Place: Misgav Regional Council in the Galilee (A
Primary Case Study). Haifa: Mada Al Carmel.
. 2006. The Land Day: Betwixt and Between National and Civic. Haifa: Mada Al
Carmel.
Benvenisti, Meron. 1997. The Hebrew Map. Theory and Criticism 11: 729.
Butler, Judith and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. 2007. Who Sings the Nation-State?:
Language, Politics, Belonging. New York: Seagull Books.
CBS. 2011. Statistical Abstract of Israel 2011, Central Bureau of Statistics, http://www.
cbs.gov.il/reader/shnaton/shnatone_new.htm?CYear=2011&Vol=62&CSubject=30.
Accessed April 22, 2014.
Dor, Avraham. 2004. The Mitzpim Enterprise in the GalileeTwenty Years Later.
Considerations of National Security, 6. Haifa: University of Haifa.
Duran, Jane. 2009. Arendt and the Social: Reflections on Little Rock. Critical
Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 12(4): 605611x. doi:
10.1080/13698230903471392.
Esposito, Roberto. 2009. Community and Nihilism. In The Italian Difference: Between
Nihilism and Biopolitics, edited by Lorenzo Chiesa and Alberto Toscano, 3753.
Melbourne, Australia: re.press.
. 2011. Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life. Malden, M.A.: Polity.
Falah, Ghazi. 1996. The 1948 Israeli-Palestinian War and Its Aftermath: The
Transformation and De-Signification of Palestines Cultural Landscape.
Annals of the Association of American Geographers 86(2): 256285.
doi:10.1111/j.1467-8306.1996.tb01753.x.
Forman, Geremy and Alexandre Sandy Kedar. 2004. From Arab Land to Israel Lands:
The Legal Dispossession of the Palestinians Displaced by Israel in the Wake of 1948.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22: 809830.
Golan, Arnon. 1995. The Transfer to Jewish Control of Abandoned Arab Lands During
the War of Independence. In Israel: The First Decade of Independence, edited by
Selwyn Ilan Troen and Noah Lucas, 403440. Albany: SUNY Press.
Hinze, Christine Firer. 2009. Reconsidering Little Rock: Hannah Arendt, Martin
Luther King Jr., and Catholic Social Thought on Children and Families in the
Struggle for Justice. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 29(1): 2550.
Kedar, Alexander (Sandy). 1998. Majority Time, Minority Time: Land, Nation, and the
Law of Adverse Possession in Israel. Law Review 21(3): 665746.
and Oren Yiftachel. 2006. Land Regime and Social Relations in Israel.
SSRN Scholarly Paper 1. Swiss Human Rights Book. http://papers.ssrn.com/
abstract=906336.
Kemp, Adriana. 1997. Talking Borders: The Construction of a Political Territory in Israel
19491967. Doctorate dissertation. Tel Aviv University.
Khalidi, Walid. 1992. All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and
Depopulated by Israel in 1948. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies.
Lipshitz, Gabriel and Baruch Kipnis. 1991. Satial Policy in Imagined Reality
ConditionsThe Land Background for the Establishment of the New Settlement in
the Galilee. State, Government and International Relations 35: 99118.
and Hubert Law Yone. 1992. The New Settlement in the GalileeThe Plannings
Objectives and Characteristics. Studies in the Geography of Eretz Yisrael 13:
179197.
Masalha, Nur. 2000. Introduction. In Imperial Israel and the Palestinians: The Politics
of Expansion, 128. London: Pluto Press.
Morey, Maribel. 2014. Reassessing Hannah Arendts Reflections on Little Rock
(1959). Law, Culture and the Humanities 10(1): 88110.
Morris, Benny. 1987. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 19471949.
Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Newman, David. 1984. Ideological and Political Influences on Israeli Rurban
Colonization: The West Bank and Galilee Mountains. Canadian Geographer/Le
Gographe Canadien 28(2): 142155. doi:10.1111/j.1541-0064.1984.tb00781.x.
Papp, Ilan. 1988. Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 194851. New York: St. Martins
Press.
. 2007. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. New York: Oneworld Publications.
Rancire, Jacques. 2004. Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man? The South Atlantic
Quarterly 103(2): 297310.
. 2010. Ten Theses on Politics, In Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics,
edited by Steven Corcoran, 2744. London and New York: Continuum.
Rosen, Gillad and Eran Razin. 2008. Enclosed Residential Neighborhoods in Israel:
From Landscapes of Heritage and Frontier Enclaves to New Gated Communities.
Environment and Planning A 40(12): 28952913. doi: 10.1068/a4066.
Rotbard, Sharon. 2003. Wall and Tower. In A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of
Israeli Architecture, edited by Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman, 3956. Tel Aviv and
London: Babel and Verso.
Segev, Tom. 1998. 1949, The First Israelis. New York: Henry Holt.
Sofer, Arnon and Rachel Finkel. 1988. The Mitzpim in the GalileeAims,
Achievements, Lessons. Publications in Problems in Regional Development, 43.
Rehovot: The Center for Research of Rural and Urban Settlement.
Svirsky, Marcelo. 2011. Arab-Jewish Activism in Israel-Palestine. Farnham, England:
Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Yiftachel, Oren. 1999. The Land Day. Theory and Criticism 12/13: 279289.
. 2006. Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
Yizhar, Dikla and Rachel Kallus. 2012. Splitting Discourse: Israeli Professional
Practice in the Neoliberal Era. Journal of Architectural and Planning Research
29(4): 347360.
Ziv, Neta and Ronen Shamir. 2000. Politics and Sub-Politics in the Struggle against
Land Discrimination. Theory and Criticism 16: 4566.
Index
Agamben, Giorgio 8, 1518, 223, 26, 88, Broch, Hermann 118

184, 194, 1968 Buddhism 47, 67, 151
Alterman, Natan 153, 166 Burke, Edmund 154
Amry, Jean 89, 125, 127, 13840, Butler, Judith 221
14250
Amichay, Yehuda 153 Camus, Albert 52
Anarchism 1819, 25, 28, 356, 41, 55, Canguilhem, Georges 1056
65, 198 Cannetti, Elias 188
anti-Semitism 6, 9, 29, 1045, 1079, capitalism 5, 35, 41, 53, 8891, 121, 180,
11415, 122, 156, 182 186, 190
Arendt, Hanna 45, 8, 51, 767, 130, 178, Caputo, John D. 434
1968, 2056, 21723 Castoriadis, Cornelius 121
Aristotle 1415, 59 chimerism 1, 19
Ataturk, Mustafa Kemal 8, 60 communism 53, 97, 136
Atheism 44, 47, 667 Conrad, Joseph 52
Avidan, David 153 Critchley, Simon 184, 189, 190, 199
Avineri, Shlomo 29
Azoulay, Ariela 26, 198 death of God, the 30, 44, 47, 556, 58, 67,
76, 82, 1512, 185
Badiou, Alain 456 Debord, Guy 88
Bakunin, Mikhail 19, 55 Deleuze, Gilles 9, 15, 234, 26, 65, 71,
Balke, Friedrich 21 94, 1512, 1556, 160, 1645, 167,
Bauer, Bruno 15, 20, 22, 27 174
BDS movement 29 Demokritos 15
Beiser, Frederick 19 Derrida, Jacques 7, 3944, 71
Benjamin, Walter 8, 18, 846, 89, 1034, Dobrolyubov, Nikolay 55
10910, 122, 1689 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 58
Ben-Yehuda, Eliezer 245 Duhamel, Roland 22
Ben Zvi, Yitzhak 1945
Bergson, Henri 146 Elbe, Stefan 22
Berlant, Lauren 35 Eliot, T. S. 59
Bernhard, Thomas 118 Empson, William 15, 29
Bialik, Chaim Nahman 170 Engels, Friedrich 53
Biopolitics 4, 22 Eros 104, 107, 109, 11617
Bismarck, Otto von 22 Esposito, Roberto 5, 221
Blanchot, Maurice 169 eternal recurrence, the or eternal return,
Bleuler, Eugen 107 the 9, 212, 43, 456, 567, 823,
Blumenberg, Hans 16 85, 97, 148, 1523, 1645, 167, 171,
Bll, Heinrich 118 174
Boyer, Alain 21 exceptionalism 22, 26
228 Index
Feminism 107 idealism 1, 19, 36, 38, 44, 53, 114, 117, 119
Feuerbach, Ludwig 20, 90 Israel
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 12, 7, 19, 367, 53 criticism of 5, 267, 29, 186, 1889, 201
Finnis, John 189 and democracy 5, 7, 16, 69
Foucault, Michel 15, 223, 26, 121, 140 and the holocaust 14850, 171
Fourier, Charles 19 Israeli army or IDF 9, 267, 152, 154,
Frank, Manfred 111 156, 1601, 163, 166, 177, 179,
Freud, Sigmond 44, 1078, 119 1878, 1914, 198
Fukuyama, Francis 93 Israeli law 10, 28, 178, 187, 193, 206,
fundamentalism or Islamic 209, 220
fundamentalism 35, 412 Israeli poetry and literature 166, 168,
170, 177
Gandhi, Mahatma 8, 60 Israeli politics and policy 9, 10, 16, 24,
Gans, Chaim 198 26, 152, 178, 187, 198, 20714, 2201
Garver, Eugene 14 and nihilism 1, 6, 13, 18, 25, 278, 69,
Gilboa, Amir 153 152, 172, 183, 1889, 199, 201
globalization 3, 18, 41, 190 Israeli-Palestinian conflict 5, 16, 27, 156,
Goethe, J. W. von 16, 57, 113, 131 160, 167, 170, 186, 198
Gorky, Maxim 52
Gouri, Haim 153 Jabotinski, Zeev 149
Gregory of Nazianus 16 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich 13, 7, 19,
Grewal, David 190 367, 3941, 53, 63
Groddeck, Georg 107, 119 Jesus 445, 667, 143, 151, 158
Guattari, Flix 26 Joyce, James 107, 11819
Jnger, Ernst 15
Habermas, Jrgen 7, 39, 425
Haeckel, Ernst 113 Kafka, Franz 66
Halevi, Binyamin 1878, 1916, 1989 Kafr Qasim, the massacre in 10, 161, 187,
Hardt, Michael 3 1936, 199200, 202
Hegel, G. W. F. 23, 7, 1920, 3641, 435, Kahn, Paul 1845, 1901
53, 57, 119 Kairos 845, 90, 957
Hegelianism 1920, 39, 45, 53, 55 Kalimtzis, Kostas 14
left Hegelianism 15, 1920, 53 Kaniuk, Yoram 10, 17780, 1836, 188,
neo-Hegelianism 43 1901, 2012
post-Hegelianism 1920 Kant, Immanuel 1, 37, 423, 53, 107, 109,
Heidegger, Martin 23, 9, 15, 17, 21, 40, 117, 120, 144, 201
46, 52, 72, 12632, 137, 144, 148 Kantianism 118, 1212, 155
Heroism 38, 1489 Kantian moral law 107
Herzen, Alexander 25 neo-Kantianism 19
Hirschfeld, Magnus 105, 107 Katechon 86, 92
Historicism 136 Kedar, Alexander 208
Hitler, Adolf 8, 60 Kelsen, Hans 182
Hobbes, Thomas 14, 1617, 183 Klossowski, Pierre 167
Holocaust or Shoah 9, 256, 41, 108, 123, Kojve, Alexandre 19
127, 1489, 153, 156, 161, 171, 186, Kraepelin, Emil 107
197 Krafft-Ebing, Richard 107
homo sacer 184, 194, 197 Kraus, Karl 107, 110, 118, 1212
Hume, David 141, 154 Krauss, Nicole 177, 191
Index 229
Kropotkin, Peter 25 Nietzschean philosophy 22, 104, 107, 109,

Kuzar, Ron 245 11617, 119, 1268, 1301, 133,
1378, 146, 155
Lacan, Jacqques 11516, 118 post-Nietzschean philosophy 223
Latour, Bruno 94 nihil (greek term) 12, 4, 13, 23
Lawrence, D. H. 107 nihilism (as a general term) 110, 15,
Lvinas, Emmanuel 41, 71, 199 2930, 357, 403, 512, 58, 635,
Lindemann, Albert S. 108 67, 702, 767, 7980, 823, 99,
Lingis, Alphonso 4 11415, 121, 12731, 1512, 173,
London, Jack 52 177, 218
Lwith, Karl 4, 15, 202, 27 active nihilism 16, 18, 25, 46, 557,
Lueger, Karl 108 60, 1523, 156, 167, 173
Lunacharsky, Anatoly 52 anarchistic nihilism 55
biotechnological nihilism 42
Machiavelli, Niccol 60 Christian nihilism 438
Malraux, Andr 52 consistent nihilism 74, 77
Mandela, Nelson 8, 60 and cosmopolitanism 1856,
manifestly illegal order 161, 173, 1778, 18891, 1947, 199201
187, 191, 201 critical nihilism 112, 153
Martinetti, Piero 52 Dionysian nihilism 7, 56, 589
Marx, Karl 20, 53, 8890, 978 epistemological nihilism or
Mayreder, Rosa 107 nihilistic epistemology 104, 107,
Mbembe, Achille 183 11012, 116, 122
Melville, Herman 79 ethical nihilism 166
Messiah or Messianism 8, 18, 667, 712, European nihilism 22, 63
845, 93, 104 fundamentalist nihilism 42
metaphysics 2, 19, 21, 23, 267, 30, 40 , 64, German nihilism 39
104, 130, 1456 as government 87
Mill, John Stuart 59 heroic nihilism 39
Miran, Reuven 29 history of 13, 67, 1824, 369,
Mbius, Paul Julius 107, 109, 119 535, 97
Morel, B. A. 121 implicit nihilism 59
Morey, Maribel 218 incomplete nihilism 56
Mosse, George 121 inverted nihilism 723
and law 154, 156, 161, 192, 1945,
nakba, the 153, 171, 207 200
naturalism 131 limited or unlimited nihilism 8, 70,
Nazism or National Socialism or The third 734
Reich 28, 122, 1301, 140, 161, 1967 methodological nihilism 8, 42,
Nechayev, Sergey 55 1034, 110
Negri, Antonio 3 negative nihilism 701, 126, 151,
Netanyahu, Benjamin 289 155, 159, 160
Nietzsche, Friedrich 24, 79, 16, 204, passive nihilism 8, 18, 44, 46, 547,
35, 40, 434, 46, 51, 5460, 635, 60, 82, 967, 151, 160
67, 712, 7983, 879, 91, 95, 97, practical nihilism 104
99, 107, 10911, 11617, 119, radical nihilism 2, 8, 82, 96, 167
12539, 141, 1458, 1512, 1556, reactive nihilism 71, 151, 160
164, 167, 174, 182 religious nihilism 88
230 Index
romantic nihilism 39 Saint-Simon, Henri de 19

Russian nihilism 19, 55, 58 Schelling, F. W. J. 19, 107, 109, 11112,
and sovereignty 1789, 181, 183, 11420
189, 191, 194, 195, 200 Schmitt, Carl 1617, 86, 93, 17980, 182,
as stasis 1318 1845, 18890, 1945, 201
straightforward nihilism 72 Scholem, Gershom 18, 25
subjective nihilism 389 Schnberg, Arnold 47, 118
western nihilism 46 Schopenhauer, Arthur 534, 56, 58, 110,
and Zionism 249 122
Nordau, Max 121 scientism 136
September 11 or 9/11 17, 24, 42, 196,
oikonomia 878, 90, 92, 97 201
Ophir, Adi 26 sex or sexuality 8, 59, 10314, 11619,
Osiel, Mark 197 121, 186
Shakespeare, William 54
Palestine (territory) 267, 69, 152, 154, 156, Shelley, Marry 181
167, 173, 186, 189, 198, 201, 212 Shlonsky, Avraham 153
Palestinian (people) 6, 26, 156, 1668, 171, Smith, Adam 90, 154
17980, 183, 186, 198 socialism 29, 96, 1078, 136
Arab-Palestinian (Israeli citizens) 187, Socrates 54, 1257, 155, 198
189, 1923, 199, 20511, 21317, Solon 15
21920, 2224 Sophocles 15
Parush, Adi 193 Sorel, Georges 52
Paul (the apostle) 4, 667, 856, 92 Spinoza 20, 36
pessimism 21, 536, 58 Stalin, Joseph 8, 60
Peterson, Eric 16 Stankevich, Nikolai 19
Pfeffer, Wilhelm 113 state of exception or state of emergency
Plato 2, 1415, 54, 106, 1256, 198 17, 23, 26, 856, 198
political theology 15, 85, 88, 90, 93, 182 subjectivism or subjectivity 379, 116
Pol Pot 8, 60
Positivism 2, 136, 193, 197 Taub, Gadi 278
Postmodernism 43 Taubes, Jacob 20
post-politics 923 Taussig-Rubbo, Mateo 184
poststructuralism 43, 93 Taylor, Charles 59
Primo, Avi 29 totalitarianism 218
Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 19 Turgenev, Ivan 20
Rabin, Yitzhak 154 utopia or utopianism 19, 53, 92, 96, 104
Rancire, Jacques 5, 2223
rationalism 37 Vardoulakis, Dimitris 1517
Ravikovitch, Dahlia 910, 1519, 1619, Vattimo, Giani 4, 7, 3941, 434, 72
1713 Vitalism 9, 109, 131, 145
Resnais, Alain 44
romanticism 21, 119 Wagner, Richard 545
Rorty, Richard 589 Wallach, Yona 153
Rosen, Stanley 24 Weber, Max 52, 89, 96, 182
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 190 Weininger, Otto 89, 10322
Roux, Wilhelm 113 Weitzman, Eyal 267
Index 231
Wieseltier, Meir 153 Zionist institutions

Wittgenstein, Ludwig 107, 118 Israel Land Administration (ILA)
209
Yiftachel, Oren 208 Jewish Agency, the 209
Jewish National Fund (JNF) 209
Zach, Natan 153 World Zionist Organization, the
Zionism or post-Zionism or anti-Zionism 211
5, 24, 27, 29, 167, 183, 191, 208, iek, Slavoj 3, 5, 7, 16, 36, 39, 437,
21012, 214, 220 11516

Lebovic The Politics of Nihilism PDF

Încărcat de

Informații document

Titlu original

Drepturi de autor

Formate disponibile

Partajați acest document

Partajați sau inserați document

Opțiuni de partajare

Vi se pare util acest document?

Este necorespunzător acest conținut?

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

Lebovic The Politics of Nihilism PDF

Încărcat de

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

The Politics of Nihilism

About the Series

The Political Theory and Contemporary Philosophy series stages an

The series is edited by Michael Marder, Ikerbasque Research Professor

Other volumes in the series include:

On Hegels Philosophy of Right by Martin Heidegger, translated by

N E W YOR K LON DON N E W DE L H I SY DN EY

1385 Broadway 50 Bedford Square

Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published 2014

Roy Ben-Shai, Nitzan Lebovic, and contributors, 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN: HB: 978-1-6235-6256-4

Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

Investigating the limits of critical thinking implies a set of highly debatable

Fatina Abreek-Zubiedat is an architect and co-owner of the Zubiedat

Ronnen Ben-Arie is conducting his PhD at the Department of Government

Roy Ben-Shai is a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow and visiting assistant professor

Bettina G. Bergo is professor of philosophy (Universit de Montral).

Luca Di Blasi, born 1967 in Lucerne (Switzerland), is University Lecturer in

Blent Diken teaches social theory at Lancaster University, Department of

Michael Allen Gillespie is professor of political science and philosophy at

on Montaigne, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Existentialism, and various

Nitzan Lebovic is an assistant professor of history and the Apter Chair of

Liron Mor is currently a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature and

A short history of a limit-concept

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobia German theologian and stern critic of the

once again calling to radicalize this nihilismwhose increasing presence since

perhaps to think beyond, norms and conventions, traditions and narratives,

The structure and contents of this book

is, Gillespie insists that it could never legitimately be practiced by a Hitler, a

how while exposing the vacuity and dis-communication generated by the

Nihilism as Stasis: A Plea for a New

The temporality of nihilism/stasis

connote a going apart (seditio) or a taking of sides (faction)[According

The simultaneous emphasis on universalization and individualization of

model, but as a kenomatic state, an emptiness and standstill of the law

The history of nihilism

in the Linsurrection qui vient [The Coming Insurrection], We name the

Karl Lwith (18971973), a radical German-Jewish thinker, saw nihilism

philosopher of power; a philosopher who managed to think power without

Nihilism and Zionism 101

This particular early twenty-first-century appearance of suspense, after 9/11

In spite of the normalabnormal opposition, the story of Hebrew is tightly

philosopher Adi Ophir published a series of articles that recommended moving

Looking at nihilism from the perspective of stasis is due to distance it from

Nihilism and Zionism 102

Recent developments in Israel suggest an inescapable and vital view of

Nihilism is commonly defined as a philosophy of negation, rejection, or denial

nihilism has emphasized the connection between authority and interpretative

Agamben, Giorgio. 2004. The Open. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Avineri, Shlomo. 2007. The Lie of Post-Zionism. Haaretz, April 7. http://www.haaretz.

. 2009. Thanato-Tactics. In The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli

Merriam-Webster OnLine, s.v. Stasis, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/

Less than Nihilism

We are witnessing a steady loss of legitimacy of the Western, capitalist, democratic

In this chapter I focus on nihilism as a connection of anarchic and religious

Faith, knowledge, and nihilism around 1800

philosophynihilismwas presented by Hegel as its very first step: The first

Hegel agreed with Jacobi that Fichtes destruction of Kants thing-in-

Furthermore, it is precisely the timid, fearful, and incomplete standpoint