Literature, Philosophy, Nihilism: The Uncanniest of Guests

Since Nietzsche’s appropriation of the term in his later work, the concept of nihilism hasplayed a decisive role in the thinking of both modernity and postmodernity. This book charts the deployment of that concept by some of the most influential philosophers and literary theorists of the modern period, including Heidegger, Adorno, Blanchot, Derrida, Agamben, Vattimo, and Badiou. Focusing in particular on the ways in which each of these deployments involves both a countering redetermination of nihilism and a privileging of a certain concept of the literary for what is taken to be its power of resistance to it, this book proposes neither a critique nor a revalorisation of nihilism; rather, it explores through an historical, conceptual, and philological anaysis the various ways in which nihilism, as what Nietzsche terms the ‘uncanniest of all guests’, returns to haunt the thought of those who would counter it.