Bad violence

Jacques Derrida

pp. 111-136

in: Shane Weller, Literature, philosophy, nihilism, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008

Abstrakt

We have seen that Heidegger's deployment of the term Nihilismus in his 1935 lecture course Introduction to Metaphysics, and his politicization of the thinking of Being through the privilege accorded to a certain Volk in the resistance of a nihilism now redetermined as Seinsvergessenheit, not only signals an engagement with Nietzsche that will continue throughout the later 1930s, but also constitutes a countering of the charge of nihilism directed at Heidegger's own thought in 1933–4. We have also seen that, for all the obvious philosophico-political differences between Adorno's negative dialectics and Heidegger's fundamental ontology, "nihilism" enters Adorno's own lexicon in a similar countering of the charge of nihilism, although in Adorno this countering redetermination and redeployment occurs not only on behalf of Adorno's own work but also on behalf of that "radically darkened art" which, he claims, reaches its pinnacle in the post-war plays and novels of Samuel Beckett. And the similarities between Adorno's and Heidegger's respecttive deployments of "nihilism" do not end there; for, just as Heidegger locates the consummation of nihilism in Nietzsche, from whom he takes the term without undue concern for its Latinity (to which Blanchot takes such exception), so Adorno characterizes Heideggerian ontology as nihilism.