Search

Gershom Scholem, the pioneering historian of Jewish mysticism, was fascinated throughout his career by the mystical sources of nihilism in the Jewish tradition, sources which ultimately produced the antinomian Sabbatian movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But in his own political philosophy, he eschewed nihilism for a more moderate religious anarchism, identifying the right-wing Revisionists with the Sabbatians. The relationship between Scholem's history of the Kabbalah, his anarchistic religious philosophy and his political activism can be traced in his published writings as well as his letters and other private writings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Nihilism is commonly defined as ‘a philosophy of negation, rejection, or denial of some or all aspects of thought or life’ [Craig, Edward, ed. 1998. “Nihilism.” InRoutledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge]. It has been interpreted since its early days as a radical negation of all forms of authority – whether that authority be God, a human sovereign, or moral values. More specifically, the concept of nihilism has emphasized the connection between authority and interpretative competence, political sovereignty, and a hermeneutic knack. My article attempts to introduce both the history of the concept and its current theoretical implications. While introducing the key motives of nihilism – investigated in a research group under my guidance at the Jerusalem Van Leer Institute during 2010 and part of 2011 – I hope to clarify what made this concept so relevant for a younger generation of critics and scholars. As demonstrated in this article, the history of the concept has been traditionally marking the limits of legitimate critique, i.e., signifying the borders of the political discourse and marking those ‘outsiders’ of it, dissenters or those creating a supposed threat over the key assumptions of political norms. In short, nihilism is where any discussion about ‘the limits of political critique’ should begin. My article demonstrates – extending simultaneously from the broader historical perspective and the narrower reality in Israel – that nihilism is closely related to the temporality ofstasis(political paralysis or a body suspending its own functions), on the one hand, and to the attempt to open a new hermeneutics of active and effective critique, from the outside of the political normative language, on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

If nihilism is a largely misunderstood concept, it is on account of both its ambivalence and its affirmative horizon. Drawing on these aspects, this article reactivates the concept of nihilism in rereading one of the most influential moments in the history of modern Hebrew literature: Y.H. Brenner's novelFrom Here and Thereand his subsequent essay on ‘the genre of Eretz Israel.’ Indeed, in a central episode in the novel the limits of legitimate political critique are traced along the lines of nihilism; but, as Nietzschean-inspired theories of nihilism emphasize, nihilism, taken to the point of its own overcoming, can be completed into a moment of creative affirmation. Following the philosophy of ‘weak thought,’ I read this moment in Brenner as a moment of weak affirmation. Through it, I argue, Brenner proposes a weak political and literary paradigm as an affirmative continuation of the nihilistic, post-Zionist critique. Surprisingly, then, Brenner, one of the central figures in Zionist history, turns out to be a weak thinker: he thus allows for a rethinking of the relations between nationalism, literature, and historiography. Or, in other words, for a weakening of national politics, literature, and literary historiography. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay examines the use and understanding of the term ‘nihilism’ in liberal discourse. It argues that this discourse originated in Ivan Turgenev's 1862 novelFathers and Sonsand developed in the series of commentaries on exegesis the anti-revolutionary novel received over time. The essay consists of three parts. After examining the context in which Turgenev wrote his novel, it discusses three historical moments that were central to the development of this discourse: (a) the immediate aftermath of the novel's publication in the 1860s; (b) following the 1905 Revolution; (c) the Cold War liberal discourse that tied the New Left of the 1960s with the Russian prerevolutionary intelligentsia of a century earlier. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The discourse of ‘nihilism’ was of central ideological significance during the Cold War. The Soviet Union, argued many politicians and intellectuals, was inherently nihilistic and could only be overcome through a retrenchment of fundamentally Western ‘values.’ This article historicizes this emphasis on nihilism, suggesting that German Catholicism was one of the conduits that ferried the concept from the dark corners of Nietzsche's posthumous writings into mainstream Cold War culture. I begin by staging a debate over Catholicism and nihilism in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche and one of his most important early interlocutors: the Catholic philosopher, Max Scheler. Drawing on suggestions that Nietzsche himself had provided, Scheler argued that only certain forms of Christianity were subject to the nihilist temptation; Catholicism, in particular, was robust enough to stand up to Nietzsche's challenge. I then turn to the Weimar journalism of Waldemar Gurian, one of Scheler's students. Gurian carried the concept a step closer to its Cold War usage when he theorized that both Nazism and Communism represented forms of ‘conservative nihilism.’ In the early years of the Cold War, Adenauer and others had a ready-made rhetorical strategy to draw upon: the traditions of the Catholic West against the creeping nihilism of Bolshevism. In this way, paradoxically enough, the theory of nihilism that Nietzsche had formulated as a weapon against Christian moralizing was reformulated and used in its service. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Louis-Ferdinand Céline is considered one of the most pro-Nazi, antisemitic writers in Europe. In 1994, an intense controversy arose in Israel after the decision to translate into Hebrew and publish his novel,Journey to the End of the Night. The heated debate soon went beyond the question of the book's publication. This essay analyzes Céline's reception in Israel, and more specifically, the controversy that erupted over the translation ofJourney. It argues that while this debate was relatively minor in the context of the heated polemics on the Holocaust, it nevertheless has significant implications on both contemporary public discourse on the Holocaust and the limits of political criticism in Israel. Israeli intellectual discourse is framed, to a large extent, I contend, within the borders of Auschwitz, a metaphor for the borders of consciousness of many Jewish-Israelis, from both the left and the right. To this day, the trauma of the Holocaust is still present in Israeli society in a way that determines what is legitimate to read, discuss, and disagree with. Furthermore, by examining the different voices in this controversy, I demonstrate how the Israeli ‘Céline affair’ in the mid-1990s moves us away from the overstated positions of the major debates, and sheds new light on the specter of the Holocaust in Israel in seemingly non-political discussions of culture, art, and leisure. The political underpinnings of the Céline controversy, I conclude, are not clear or clear cut, and are not defined by the traditional political camps in Israel. The implication is that public Holocaust debates represent an autonomous field, subordinated to no political party dictates, and yet are still political. The public debate that followed the translation ofJourneyserves as a watershed. It shows us how at the end of every political–cultural divide in Israeli society, we arrive at ‘Auschwitz’ as a metaphor for the existential threat. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper argues that nihilism is not an obsolete cultural and intellectual problem that can be safely left in the past. Nihilism involves processes that are not fully historicized. Some sense of the concept is necessary in order to understand important social selections and acts of power. Using some key works by Deleuze and Nietzsche, this essay argues that nihilism is a way to discuss specific academic processes, including topics of peer-review, scholarly recourse to ideals, and conceptual misrepresentation. The arguments focus on the nihilistic implications of progressive discourse, especially some ideas of Fredric Jameson on cultural studies and knowledge-production in relation to activism. Nihilism, it is argued, involves the political falsification of concepts and is built-in to contemporary contradictions of intellectuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is a variation on the theme of academia and academic practices in Sande Cohen's work. It develops through reference to two systems of discourse: Cohen's semio-critical analysis of academic writing and its cultural and political implications; and writings on epistemology, social-psychology, and semiotics, not just in themselves relevant to the analysis of academia, but including some of those orientating Cohen's writing. Taking the discipline of history as the paradigmatic academic practice, it outlines the academic function as a technological device that authorizes and facilitates the wide range of cultural and political behaviour generated by the economic system of totalitarian capitalism. It argues that the academic function discloses itself not as knowledge seeking 'truth' but (in the Platonic sense) as sophistry with privileged currency and value in the socio-economic climate of information and opinion. The academic function, therefore, operates cognitively in terms of equivalence and identity: its language encodes it as a socially affirmative, natural attitude, as a common sense. Additionally, both by its claim to universality and by its internal logic of self-amplification, its authoritative expertise has a theological aura, a clerical posture. Its structure is narcissistic since the world the academic function reflects and interprets is a likeness of the techno-sphere it helps to maintain. It culminates in nihilism because the profuse production of expert opinion on heterogeneous topics results in the redundancy of meaning and the negation of all values except production for its own sake. Even so, as Nietzsche recognized, because it negates, nihilism can also liberate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]