Antisemitism is a nihilism

Hatred of mediation and language, abolition of differences in an all-or-nothing logic, a solipsistic dream in which the world disappears: in this aphoristic text, the philosopher Gérard Bensussan proposes a conceptual approach to nihilism. This pathology of reason appears, beyond the diversity of its manifestations, as that which threatens thought as soon as it forgets its outside – a slope on which the critical gesture easily slides, and where the old Jewish question is encountered.

 

 

For nihilism to exist, there must be a negation, and this negation must be total (all or nothing), totally negative, that is to say neither speculative, like Hegelian negativity which ends up freeing itself, nor infinite, as with Kierkegaard for example. Such total negation, here, now, and in thought and in action, forms the basis of the hatred of what it denies, for example of politics, and by extension of politicians. To this extent, in this relationship between negation and affectivity, it could be said of nihilism that by affirming the negative it represses the repression. Once it is no longer repressed, nihilistic hatred ultimately reaches speech itself, poisoning it in its most vivid, irreducible aspect. In this violent register, the non-repression of hatred – and of hatred of speech – opposes the praise to the spoken word as well as to the person speaking. Against the media, mediations and intermediaries, it promotes the erection of a total live broadcast that is the counterpart of a complete negative. Terror annihilates speech in the act: what cannot be spoken of must be done. To the authorities, to the principles and articles of faith, to all acts of language, the nihilist opposes his nothing, “no, none of that,” Nicolas Pétrovich explains to his uncle in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. His nothing, each time nothing, each time no, aims at and establishes the necessity of a destruction, of a nihilization prior to any renewal, which finds itself caught up in an incessant deferring, whereas the destruction is immediate, here, now, right away. It is supposed to ensure the memory of a name, as for Schwob’s or Sartre’s Herostratus. Goncharov’s Oblomov also opposes his nothing, a completely different nothing. Against the injunction to get up, to do things, to worry, to make an effort in everyday life, he weighs down with all his inertia. There is absolutely nothing to be done, for Oblomov, so why bother, what’s the point, what’s the purpose? Oblomovism is obviously a form of (passive) nihilism, which tells us the opposite of that of agitators, activists and terrorists. The nihilist gallery of Russian portraits can proliferate indefinitely: Raskolnikov and the salutary crime, Rogozhin and Myshkin, devil and angel of divine nihilism, Alyosha and Ivan Karamazov, the full and the nothing, Stavrogin, etc. A constitutive equivocation of all these figures, impossible to put together, to enclose in the same circle, and yet equalizable in the same nihilism.

The Russian terrorists of the 19th century, or the jihadists of today, even radical populists: in what way and why are they nihilistic? In this, I repeat, they regard the spoken word as worthless – hence the inflation and deflation of the quest for “meaning”. Do actions speak louder than words? Enough talk. This nihilism of action is a pathology of the direct, a refusal of separation. Far from holding that we are spoken beings [parlêtres] (Lacan), nihilism does not want to pay its debt to language, to speech, to the pledge that language represents and what it commits. It does not want the equivocity that language carries, the separations that it carries, that of the signifier and the signified, of symbolization. It does not want what, in language, always goes beyond language, by virtue of what in it exceeds decision, intention, deliberation, as if an irrepressible vis semantica moved it ever further than itself, inhibiting control and mastery – holding an ontological status close to that which Thomist thought reserves for angels, differentiated according to their theological index of substantiality.

The 19th-century Russian terrorists, or today’s jihadists, or even radical populists, in what way and why are they nihilistic? In that they regard the spoken word as worthless.

Hatred of representation = nihilism. This hatred envisages the transvaluation of all values, the Nietzschean Umwertung[footnote]“Umwertung aller Werte”: “revaluation of all values” [Editor’s note]</footnote>, as a total reversal, that is to say a destruction of all values except the value of destruction. With Nietzsche, on the other hand, the Umwertung continually brings about a reassessment of the value of these values; it re-, de-, over- or under-values.

Nihilism, however, is based on the escalation of meaning, on an unbridled desire for meaning which, once it has been stripped of itself, renounced, passed on to the choice or the realization of a generalized disappointment, sinks into depression or resentment or both, a vituperation, the grin of the last man. Zola’s Lazarus Chanteau “giggles at everything and professes nothingness with a white and sour voice” in his interminable “trial of humanity” (The Joy of Living). The deflation of meaning that follows its feverish exacerbation brings with it a gnostic anguish in the face of emptiness, the epic nothingness of the abyss. Lazare thus falls into an “ill-digested pessimism”, into “the great black poetry of Schopenhauer” and, under the “trial” of the world, of humanity, of the “system” as we would say today, his “rage at defeat” and the resentment nourished by the failure of all his attempts to become famous simmer – a Herostratus complex.

Nihilism believes that it knows that there is nothing, and even knows that there is nothing. But this knowledge is all it can know; it does not know how to believe, it does not know that at the heart of knowledge there is trust in knowledge. It does not want to believe and therefore does not know how to know. A double nihilistic refusal: rejection of the theocratic, the all-god, in favor of the revolutionary atheocracy, an all-without-god. Where the All is, the Nothing has already come to pass and the “nothingness” is continually “professed”.

Nihilists dream of revenge, fusion, indiscrimination, levelling, destruction, revolution and counter-revolution, of everything and nothing. Soteriological simulacra of all kinds are their fodder. This is why nihilism is so often expressed in pathos (total war, for example, or the exacerbation of the class war in the era of the dictatorship of the proletariat, democracy seen as the ultimate trick of domination). Pathos of the apocalypse and catastrophe, almost always, pathos of fear in the face of war (left-wing radicalism) or revolution (right-wing radicalism).

Nihilism wants to abolish the gap; it cannot bear difference or the distinction of fields. It always borders more or less on fundamentalism and its Gnostic variants, which seek a foundation, a place and a basis in the differences and the polymorphism of the variegated real, where they would come to explain and abolish themselves in an ideal intelligence. It transfuses as much as it confuses.

The philosophical coup of nihilism, one of its coups, is to have established the certainty that the world in which we are born, live, experience and die, is a phenomenon, even an epiphenomenon: it is only appearing, in other words it is nothing; the true, the real, the being of this world would be the opposite of this appearing and would reside in its intimate and invisible depth.

The opposite of appearing is not being, it is disappearing.

This disappearing is removed against the flickering background of our appearance. Without these intermittences of finitude, it constantly risks dialectical essentialization where “the born and the disappearing… itself neither is born nor disappears” and where the “disappearing” must therefore be “considered as the essential”^[1]. Remarkable trick: the disappearing no longer disappears. It thus weighs on the appearing much more effectively than in the fixed duality of the sensible and the intelligible. Against an essential disappearing, there is only one way out: to restore the existential pain of being born and dying. To appear, like a child coming into the world, to appear, to stand in a shared space, summons up places and times that make for continuous interrelations. People affectively appear to each other, talk to each other, meet or cross paths, engage in deliberations and confrontations, love each other, hate each other; then they disappear, they die – and their disappearance does not disappear.

Nihilists dream of revenge, fusion, indistinctness, levelling, destruction, revolution and counter-revolution, of everything and nothing. Soteriological simulacra of all kinds are their fodder.

There is a famous metaphor used by Jacobi in his critique of Fichte, called Letter on Nihilism. The logos is compared to the knitting of a sock with various patterns, flowers, sun, moon, stars. The world that the philosopher arrives at at the end of his logical knitting would be similar in its weave to the design on this sock. The philosopher weaves “forms” without anything outside the loom ever being mixed in. Speculative reason in its “dream” detached from the “sensible”, as in a “feverish fit”^[2] produces this “chimerical” image: in the end a sock instead of the world. The entire universe in its fundamental exteriority, flowers, sun, moon and stars, is nothing more than a poor knitted motif, an immensity substituted by an image, a nothing taken for the truth of the world. Reason knits its own world and surreptitiously passes it off as the real world.

Nihilism is above all a denial of the “outside”, its nihilization by the skeptical self, the sophistical self, the Cartesian self, and, by a snowball effect, it is a narcissism of thought. Jacobi invokes the mythological figure of Narcissus for whom everything, apart from him and his image in the water, is Nothingness, “a phantom in itself, a real Nothingness, a Nothingness of reality”. There is nihilism only in thought, for thought, for “my being”. The narcissism of self-centered reason is a nihilism.

As soon as it thinks, thought leans towards nihil, it eyes its nothingness and to better circumscribe it, it searches for its internal identities, it winks at everything that comes down to the same thing, it resolutely intends to suspend differences. Motorized agriculture, the food industry, the manufacture of corpses in gas chambers, blockades and the production of atomic bombs = from the same to the same “according to the essence”; Zionism, Nazism, apartheid, liberal democracy = from the same to the same “according to the essence” and the truth it brings to light; the American victors of 1945 and the defeated Nazis, the same ones who follow one another, resemble one another and share identical methods of neoliberal management (Chapoutot). The Shoah can be nihilized by reducing it to nothing, as Faurisson-style negationism did in its time, or by extending it to everything, everywhere, and making Nazism a universal wild card, a reality without shores. The same and the identical join hands with nothingness, which they produce by a leveling as regards “substance.” The differences are superficial, they can frolic and play tricks on us, such as the distinction between private intimacy and the public sphere, for example, in totalitarian regimes. In depth, their common belonging to the same ontological hold reigns. Nihilism indiscriminately, with obstinacy, constancy and insistence. It becomes indifferent to itself through uncontrolled extension (such as “Platonism”, such as “idealism”). It even produces equivalences (war and revolution with Bolshevism; socialism and nationalism with the conservative revolution: for both, power correlates with legitimacy). Some uses of the diamat, of the “materialist dialectic” of Marxist-Leninist textbooks, also fall under this leveling nihilism. Is Derridean difference (différance) a remedy against equivalence-based undifferentiations, a pharmakon?

Is it possible to escape nihilism, not to “go beyond” or “overcome” it, but to escape it? It all depends on what we put under this polymorphous term, as elusive as Hegel’s night of the absolute, where all cats are gray and all forms are shapeless. In any case, nihilism is a personal demon, a vice hidden within oneself. One can try to get it out of oneself, to expel it, but fighting it requires other complex maneuvers, other philosophical exorcisms. Each of us, taken for ourselves, has our own cursed, dark, inner part – and this part is a kind of nihilism, sometimes clashing with the nihilism, of course, in good faith, with integrity.

If one tries, if one attempts to escape it, one can only do so by means of a moral somersault, an interruption (what I have elsewhere called, in the case of literature, a conatus interruptus). Or else by means of what the English poet Coleridge called (and wished for) a willing suspension of disbelief. This mental operation is carried out by the reader or spectator of a work who agrees, for the duration of the consultation of the work, to set aside his non-belief: “[…] to draw from the depths of our inner nature a humanity as well as a plausibility that we would transfer to these creatures of the imagination, of sufficient quality to strike with suspension, punctually and deliberately, non-belief, which is the hallmark of poetic faith”^[3]. The nihilist does not accept, or accepts with great difficulty, interrupting the chain of his hypotheses and deductions. He never takes a break and does not give any credence to “poetic faith”. His critical ambition is not to renounce himself, but to tirelessly reveal, lay bare and denounce. Conatus interruptus and willing suspension of disbelief are modes, almost recipes, among others, to shake the power of nihilism.

The Shoah can be nihilized by reducing it to nothing, as Faurisson-style negationism did in its time, or by extending it to everything, everywhere, and making Nazism a universal wild card, a reality without shores. The differences are superficial.

Because we must beware. Anti-nihilists are almost necessarily nihilists: effect, symptom, sign, of the twentieth-century style insofar as it fundamentally thwarts framed oppositions, such as good and evil, East and West, democracy and tyranny, the better to re-split them, to cleave them within, good against good, evil against evil, communism against Nazism, the Russian revolution as a perpetual state, the “conservative” counter-revolution as an authentic revolution, democracy as a more or less hidden tyranny, dictatorship as a salutary one. Has this breeding ground vanished? What kind of nihilism in 2025? Has this linear series of ambiguities that can be reversed at will disappeared? These floating relativisms open up notions and concepts, thus enucleated by between-simulation, to their uses that are at once nihilistic and also totalitarian. And perhaps the political philosophy itself from which they originate is affected or called into question.

The old self-emancipatory words of the International Workingmen’s Association (“all men should be free”) are being converted, before our astonished eyes, into a potentially murderous antisemitic slogan: “we are nothing, they are everything”. They have everything as an indistinct, self-confident and domineering community, a bloc that makes no allowance for individual, singular positions. This gesture hypostases an essence into a pure spiritual self and, in doing so, denies all manifestations, always already absorbed, reabsorbed, into the essential self. Since “they” are and have everything, it is imperative to strip them of their invisible powers: this is becoming a real political program, in the name of the anti-racist struggle and social emancipation. This inversion is often confessed, from black to white, from dominated to dominant. It aims to legitimize or re-legitimize the most conventional antisemitism. To ensure its effectiveness, it articulates it with a critique of world domination, white in this case, but more broadly with a critique of social, political and cultural domination, that is to say, a critique of the (Jewish, Zionist) hegemony of a minority over an immense majority.

Heidegger, Jünger, Schmitt and their ilk: their Nietzscheanism is pathetic, their nihilism variable. The same people who mocked morality when they were preparing to conquer the world, did not stop moralizing after 1945, when they lost power, on the deplorable and unworthy grounds that “we are the Jews of today, have pity on us!” (see the same, by displacement, in relation to the Palestinians in a speech that adds pure and simple exclusion – “the Jews are not the Jews, we are” – where the orphans of National Socialism said: “Jews and Germans, one and the same disaster”).

There would be a symbolic place, that of the victim, the scapegoat, the sacrificed ram, the expiation without remainder (other figures still, almost innumerable): the “place” of the Jews. This place, this site of immemorial suffering, would then have to be taken and occupied so as not to leave it to itself and to “them”. This will be done according to the order of a (perverse) identification or an (ambiguous) equivalence of the executioners and those they put to death. The pharmakon, the remedy for this evil of persecution, is thus devolved to the enemies of the Jews once their “place” has been symbolically occupied or ventriloquized, by catharsis, by substitution, by mimesis. German intellectuals and scribblers from the Nazi or ultra-right conservative-revolutionary movements played this tune after 1945; the Palestinists are finding the harmonics again today. “The Germans today know what the Jews knew, namely what it means to be the object of scandal,” Jünger wrote in post-war Germany; just as the Palestinians today endure what the Jews endured at the time of their extermination, according to the decolonial narrative. It goes without saying that the Jewish experience of hatred is not exclusively the business of Jews and that other peoples have suffered massacres, detestation and persecution. That suffering can be exchanged, passed from one to the other, is not questionable. However, it is remarkable that this operation of destitution-substitution does not proceed by extension, but by exclusion – that it is directed above all against the Jews. The need to dislodge them from their “place” is part of a nihilistic logic of the exacerbation of the alternations of everything and nothing. (Jünger, referring to the extermination of the Jews, which he witnessed at first hand, spoke of “chief nihilist Heydrich” to describe the person most responsible, and in many of his texts when he wrote “nihilism” it should be read as “Hitlerism”.)

Either gassed or Nazis, once out of the “square” – this was the only recognized “status” of the Jews.

Since “they” are and have everything, it is imperative to strip them of their invisible powers: this is becoming a real political program, in the name of the anti-racist struggle and social emancipation.

“Systemism,” ‘systemic racism,’ for example, is a nihilism. It posits a generalized encompassing, a whole, from which nothing would a priori be excluded, always already regulable and absorbable in the whole of its nothingness and the nothingness of its whole – “Hegelianism of the poor”. Seeing racism everywhere, arranging it in every institutional place, explaining everything by racism and leaving nothing out: the functioning of the social order of white societies would thus find its profound intelligibility. This general disposition necessarily leads to an “intersectional” approach. Intersectionality is the functional postulate that guarantees the “systemic”, its texture, that is to say the system of references from the whole to nothing and from nothing to the whole: discrimination based on race, sex or gender, class, religion or culture constantly intersects with each other and, in their inseparability, establishes cohesion and coherence, i.e. the structural totality of the ‘system’. A virtuous circle of good decolonial conscience: the system is strengthened by the intersection and intersectionality reinforces the system.

Antisemitism is a nihilism (neither exclusive nor particular) insofar as it denounces and condemns the secessio judaica (Hans Blüher, 1922), that is to say, according to it, the mimetic effect by which the part, the very small part, exerts its hold on the whole, on a whole hitherto deceived, blinded, stunned. Antisemitism aims to break this spell and bring the whole thing back to its senses, to its truth. It would like to put an end to this separation by abolishing the protective pigment which, invented by them, has long preserved the Jews. It therefore sets out to send the “secession” back to its original nothingness, to abandon it to predators who, once their eyes are opened, will know how to do their “natural” job, biopolitical in a way. Blüher concludes his essay by writing: “there is no doubt about it, the universal pogrom is underway”, as if a great Reason is about to be realized in the history to come, on the horizon of a world without Jews.

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Gérard Bensussan