The Politics of Nihilism

From the Nineteenth Century to Contemporary Israel

Nitzan Lebovic, Roy Ben-Shai, Nitzan Lebovic, Roy Ben-Shai

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781623566982
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Utilitarismo

Contemporary politics is faced, on the one hand, with political stagnation and lack of a progressive vision on the side of formal, institutional politics, and, on the other, with various social movements that venture to challenge modern understandings of representation, participation, and democracy. Interestingly, both institutional and anti-institutional sides of this antagonism tend to accuse each other of "nihilism", namely, of mere oppositional destructiveness and failure to offer a constructive, positive alternative to the status quo. Nihilism seems, then, all engulfing. In order to better understand this political situation and ourselves within it, The Politics of Nihilism proposes a thorough theoretical examination of the concept of nihilism and its historical development followed by critical studies of Israeli politics and culture. The authors show that, rather than a mark of mutual opposition and despair, nihilism is a fruitful category for tracing and exploring the limits of political critique, rendering them less rigid and opening up a space of potentiality for thought, action, and creation.

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, or—as it was understood in ancient Greece—“the 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.

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 Ophir’s 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 Aristotle’s 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 Aristotle’s 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.2.1302a16–21). 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 state’s 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 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 stages … when 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, 2–3).

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 Löwith’s critique of Western philosophy. Both thinkers characterized nihilism—a century apart,—as a major force in Western philosophy and politics (Löwith 1995, 187). Their shared notion of demise, adopted also by Heidegger and Jünger, 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 metaphor—“The ‘stasis of appreciation’ recalls Alcaeus’ boat at a standstill from the stasis of the winds”—that 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 word … are 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, 192–193; 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 Žižek 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” (Žižek 2002, 129). But the question, of which Žižek 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 suspense—a refusal to negotiate or a calculated strategy of derailing peace talks—as a tool of control and internal as well as external politics. Žižek expresses this in philosophical terms when he wonders, “Is not this antagonism the one between what Nietzsche called ‘passive’ and ‘active’ nihilism?” (Žižek 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 destruction—in 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 modern—nihilistic—shape from its earlier form in Gregory of Nazianus’s De Filio. It is mentioned again in Goethe and Nietzsche before Carl Schmitt politicizes it in Politische Theologie II in 1969. Schmitt’s 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 Peterson’s stress on the Catholic dogma of trinity and Hans Blumenberg’s 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, 90–92). Building on Thomas Hobbes’s 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 action … stasis 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 purpose—as Hobbes and Schmitt argued—or 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 nihilism—the end of homogeneity and convention—call for a sudden burst of action, no matter the cost. Both strive for a pure time of action for action’s 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 désoevrement 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,” Agamben’s 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 element … a 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 doesn’t 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 “L’insurrection 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 Jacobi’s attack on Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s 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. Hegel’s (1770–1831) 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 (1775–1854), influenced by Jacobi, pondered “Fichte’s dilemma at the close of his 1794 ...