Volume 17

The Prosthesis of Nihilism

30 October 202523 November 2025By Rafael Fernandez

Donovan Stewart
Leuphana University Lüneburg/ Leiden University

Volume 17, 2025


We have abolished the true world: which one remains? Perhaps the world of appearances? … But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one!


Nietzsche, F. Götzen-Dämmerung, KSA 6, 81


Nihilism is a posture that is completely symmetrical to, thus dependent upon, the principle of reason. 


Derrida, J, “Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils”, Diacritics 13.3, 15


What does it mean to pose the question of nihilism, today? What animates this recourse to the series of questions presented by the heading ‘Nihilism and the Anthropocene’? For these are questions and a word, ‘nihilism’, that occur today not only in ‘continental’ philosophical discourses, but across and beyond the ‘West’ in contemporary critical theory, political debates, fine arts and popular culture. What is happening here, and what is pre-comprehended in these different returns of and to ‘nihilism’? 

One precomprehension will concern us in particular: the ostensibly obvious fact that in its various returns, ‘nihilism’ arrives with the exigency to ‘overcome’ it. Whether it is understood as an event, epoch, history of history, psychological disposition or essential operation of metaphysics, ‘nihilism’ returns to be overcome. What are the ramifications of this presupposition and more fundamentally, of the assumption that there is something that can be definitively named ‘nihilism’ in the first place? Our focus will be this recoil of the question of nihilism, which passes through the question of its essence and possible overcoming, to the status of the desire to ‘overcome’ and first posit ‘nihilism’ as such. Wozu this prostheticisation of nihilism? For nihilism is placed before us as a kind of prosthesis, as if it were a necessary condition for any ‘us’ or indeed ‘I’ today, a necessary supplement for every contemporary discourse, form-of-life or thought. My wager is that in order to think ‘nihilism’ and thus to approach these questions, it must be resituated and ‘denaturalised’ as most fundamentally a discourse, that is, as a metaphysical project and technical prosthesis. Only through such an epochē of nihilism can its ‘overcoming’ be thought, and perhaps in the end it will not be so much a matter of enacting an overcoming within the providence of nihilism, as much as a passing-by, an oblique step that will not only take leave of ‘nihilism’, but also provide new paths back to the many thoughts that have run aground in this discourse, which may remain a late, robust, guise of ontotheology.

***

So why is the question of nihilism so audible in our time that can more or less accurately be named the Anthropocene? Without affirming a reductive psychological or existential explanation, perhaps this return can be credited in part to a collective experience of fear. Indeed, to reject the patent fear that characterises much of contemporary mediatic, cultural, and scientific milieux, or to dismiss fearful attunements in general as inessential, would be absurd and even dangerous, for such is not only bound to the Angst that is an ineradicable dimension of finite existence, but even in its prosaic forms, fear demonstrates a base level perception of a threat, and in our case, perhaps traces of the threats of mass extinction, entropic consumption, and ethno-nationalism. It is ‘correct’ to experience such fear that increasingly shapes our worlds today, the fear which brings them to occasionally articulate, perhaps silently, ‘nihilism’. To further develop a sense of these worlds in which our questions arise, here are two preliminary notes on the relation of fear and thought:

1. In Friendship, Maurice Blanchot offers a brief text entitled, “The Apocalypse is Disappointing”.1 This essay is particularly instructive concerning the different ways in which one can respond to an exigency like the Anthropocene, nihilism, or in Blanchot’s case here, the atomic bomb, and respond perhaps firstly to the fear that discloses and is disclosed by them.2 Blanchot’s concern is also a text by Karl Jaspers, Die Atombombe und die Zukunft des Menschen, which declares that the nuclear bomb initiates an epochal transformation with the novel potential of a total annihilation of humanity by humanity. Blanchot’s response is in many ways dismissive, not least because he is struck by the fact that although Jaspers calls for “a radical conversion”, a total transformation of the work of philosophy and life itself in the wake of the bomb, his discourse does not reflect this “conversion” at all. For Blanchot, the problem of annihilation posed by the bomb, and perhaps for us in a different way by the Anthropocene, must transmute the very senses of writing, philosophy, and urgency itself. He writes:

It is not a question of hindering, in the way of the Sophists, with some ad hominem argument, the dialogue that is proposed to us. We simply ask ourselves, why does a question so serious—since it holds the future of humanity in its sway—a question such that to answer it would suppose a radically new thinking, why does it not renew the language that conveys it, and why does it only give rise to remarks that are either biased and, in any case, partial when they are of a political order, or moving and urgent when they are of a spiritual order, but identical to those that we have heard in vain for two-thousand years? (Friendship, 103)

Blanchot does not deny the danger of the bomb or the necessity to think it and in a certain way from out of it, but he refuses the totalising quality of Jasper’s discourse which threatens to replicate the homogenising violence of the bomb. There is the danger that his discourse would participate in the bomb’s mystical force that would take hold of thinking and produce a single horizon and form-of-life in its image.3 To counter this sensationalist threat, Blanchot calls for the deflationary work of the “understanding” [l’entendement], which:

is cold and without fear [crainte]. It does not mistake the menace of the atomic threat, but it analyses it, subjects it to its measures, and, in examining the new problems that, because of its paradoxes, this threat poses for war strategy, it searches for the conditions in which the atomic threat might be reconciled with a viable existence in our divided world. This work is useful, even for thought. It demystifies the apocalypse. It shows that the alternative of all or nothing, which turns the atomic weapon into a quasi-mystical force, is far from being the sole truth of our situation. It shows that a few bombs do not give power and that only naive and weak heads of State may, nostalgic for the strength they are missing, hope to summon this magical compensation […]. (Friendship, 108)

The understanding suspends the passion of fearful urgency and substitutes for it the slower cadence of thought, questioning, and repetition. This of course is a very traditional philosophical response to urgency. To the man of action, the philosopher has tended to always say: ‘wait, let’s relax. Rather than giving into fear, be reasonable, measured, with a sense of ratio.’ And yet, Blanchot’s response is not so simple, for he is well aware of another danger, not only that of the paranoiac who fearfully perceives the same catastrophe in everything and thus total closure, but also the danger which arises through the obliviousness of the man of good conscience, the man of sound understanding whose inexhaustible patience and lack of fear fools him into believing that he has always already seen what is to come, which renders him particularly vulnerable and irresponsible. “Yes, this lesson of understanding is sound [sage]. Only, it is almost too sound, because it exposes us to a loss of fear [peur], the fear that misleads, but also warns [avertit].” (108) Fear, after all, is also a passion and part of the reception of what takes place. Echoing Heidegger’s distinction between fear [Furcht] and anxiety [Angst], there are perhaps two qualities of fear that we should maintain when receiving the questions of nihilism and the Anthropocene today: the fear that thematises what is believed to produce it, an event, development, or being; and an earlier modality of fear before any determination, arising in response to a hollow source—the nihil. In many ways, the meaning of nihilism relies on how these senses of fear are understood, if and how one thinks them, and what one believes they can do with them. A question, for example, is if this nihil is a quasi-transcendental structure that would be synonymous with temporisation, messianicity, or différance, which would constitute all possible history and thus would not result from any intra-historical event; or, if this nihil is historically conditioned, according to which its contemporary ‘source’ could be noetic and planetary desertification, making ‘the Anthropocene’ an epoch irreducible to any other. This is to ask how one reads or wants to read Derrida’s famous provocation in the exergue to Grammatology: “L’avenir ne peut s’anticiper que dans la forme du danger absolu. Il est ce qui rompt absolument avec la normalité constituée et ne peut donc s’annoncer, se présenter, que sous l’espèce de la monstruosité.” (De la grammatologie, 14) “The to-come can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which absolutely breaks with constituted normality and can only be announced, presented, as a kind of monstrosity.” (Of Grammatology, 5) Should and can this ‘monstrosity of the to-come’ be understood epochally? Derrida had after all flirted with epochal language during the writing of Grammatology, and even if he very quickly exorcised it, along with the language of ‘grammatology’ itself, some of his interlocutors and students such as Bernard Stiegler, to whom we will now turn, would find this abandonment to be a grave mistake, a demonstration of Derrida’s hesitance before some of the most radical consequences of his thought. Perhaps the first step of a response to this question is to understand that this ‘should’ and ‘can’ are fundamentally separate, and that the phrase ‘after deconstruction’, means amongst many other things that we find ourselves in this uncanny space between them.

2. One more note on fear, this time with Stiegler, whose thinking in the Technics and Time series begins with the charge that Derrida does not take the finitude of différance seriously enough, and that he thus fails to carry out the “history of the supplement” that he called for, which Stiegler claims is nothing but an epochal history of technics that constitute the quasi- of any quasi-transcendental condition of existence. What I want to focus on however is a brief passage in a crypt of Stiegler’s work, a footnote of a rough draft of his final book series, Qu’appelle-t-on Panser?, which provides a key to understanding Stiegler’s singular sense of philosophy, which is deeply bound with the question of responsibility, as well as fear. Stiegler has after all been very frequently written-off as a sensationalist thinker, terrorised by the impending annihilation of culture, the natural earth, conditions for philosophy and any future worthy of the name. The accusation, strengthened by his breathless writing style peppered with italics and the language of totality, is that he is yet another nostalgic man longing for a previous time, who describes the decline of the world as such, but testifies to little more than the decline of his own. And while these tendencies increased over time, perhaps culminating in the texts gathered in The Neganthropocene (2018) from which our note stems, they were already present in his first works, being quite brutally identified by Geoffrey Bennington in 1996, in his review of  La technique et le temps 1 and 2, “Emergencies”. Bennington there at times resembles the first Blanchot above, demonstrating how Stiegler’s haste, stemming from the fear of what he too quickly accepted to be an unprecedented emergency, led not only to at times inaccurate readings of Rousseau, Heidegger and Derrida, but more seriously to the reproduction of a series of metaphysical presuppositions that rendered his thinking into a philosophical anthropology bound to the same essential dangers that inspired his sense of emergency to begin with. And Bennington is correct. Without fear, he does the homework, the reading, that Stiegler in his haste did not, and due to this diligence Bennington’s work remains a very accurate and in many ways unparalleled presentation of the limits of the foundations of Stiegler’s project. And yet, here we also see a more fundamental encounter, what is perhaps a misunderstanding, or better, a confrontation between two very different understandings of the task of thinking ‘after deconstruction’. These are two ‘sons’ of deconstruction deferring no more or less than in their emphases, their styles of inhereting and inhabiting the same place. Stiegler errs less to the call of rigour, to the labour of (re)reading as the fundamental experience of deconstruction and indeed justice which shapes Bennington’s thought, and rather to another demand to (ab)use discourse to produce desirable effects, with a pragmatic indifference to the charge of being ontotheological or ‘wrong’.4 Stiegler’s thinking is motivated by something other than ‘correctness’, a sense of responsibility to what takes place in his world that demands for caring responses, “panser”, in part by instilling fear. This is articulated in the note that I finally share, an anecdote from the defense of his dissertation which contained material for the first two volumes of Technics and Time. Thirty years later, Stiegler recalls:

Derrida concluded his introductory remarks on my thesis, which he supervised, in front of a jury chaired by Jean-Luc Marion, by asking me the question, ‘What is it you’re afraid of?’ In the course of the weeks and months that followed, I could not help but think that, in this way, Derrida was both downplaying the gravity of the situation I was attempting to describe as the uncontrolled extension of retentional technology, and making a show of being someone ‘who is not afraid’. The question I was raising, however, had nothing to do with fear [peur] in a way connected to cowardice, but to do with worry [crainte], in a way that requires courage.” (The Neganthropocene, 319 f. 555)

***

‘The prosthesis of nihilism’ sounds in any case like something Stiegler would have written in one of the thousands of pages he dedicated to the originary technicity of human existence and its inextricability from the history of metaphysics, understood by Nietzsche, and later Heidegger, as the history of nihilism. In 2016, Stiegler would write that, “two notions, Gestell and nihilism, have come to dominate my thinking. Gestell as a way of reflecting on what I call disruption. And nihilism as what leads, today faced with this ordeal of Gestell—as purely, simply, absolutely computational capitalism—to a generalised madness.” (Age of Disruption, 62-3) And yet even as these two thoughts shaped his work from the start, Stiegler would never articulate the phrase ‘the prosthesis of nihilism’ nor ‘technique of nihilism’. ‘Nihilism’ would instead be accompanied by another kind of word: ‘completion’, ‘advent’, ‘final extremity’, ‘fulfilment’, ‘closure’. This is because nihilism would not be a matter of an isolated instance, which ‘technique’ or ‘prosthesis’ would perhaps bring to mind, but for Stiegler and many other thinkers, nihilism is a matter of totality—the whole, the archē as the founding, guiding and fulfilment of itself as telos. ‘The prosthesis of nihilism’ would be insufficient for this thought due to its appeal to fragmentation, invention, spacing, multiplicity, to the “technical différance” that Stiegler himself, along with Nancy, Derrida, Blanchot, and a certain Heidegger, would invite us to think.

On this account, for ‘the prosthesis of nihilism’ to have any sense, it would need to refer perhaps to a moment in a process culminating in our absolute, and on Stiegler’s account last, epoch of the Anthropocene, nihilism’s completion; or ‘the prosthesis of nihilism’ would simply refer to this totality itself, the Anthropocene would be the prosthesis of nihilism, the long finale destined from the start of absolute noetic, idiomatic, and biological desertification—no future, total closure. And importantly for this logic, the phrase would seem to correctly place the conceptual family of techne, technics, Gestell, prostheticity, and artifice, at the heart of nihilism, affirming what is ostensibly understood without question, what is nothing less than the natural truth of technique: that beginning with the reductive violence of mathematisation at the origin of metaphysics in the calculative reduction of Being to the totality of beings, the restriction of temporisation to metrified presence, or reification of quality into quantity—technics has guided history as the history of the forgetting of Being, the fall, qua nihilism. As is rehearsed ad nauseam, the Anthropocene would be a name for only the newest, most extreme stage of an operation as old as the West—the technical annihilation of physis.

Such however would not seem to promote much thinking about nihilism or the Anthropocene, for it would do little more than confirm a series of presuppositions about metaphysics, while repeating several nominally overcome metaphysical presuppositions. And even if these thoughts of closure are depressing, this total logic would also offer a strange form of comfort. Sure, things are bad, but at least we know this and why, things thus become easier, closure being the key to seemingly every development, and perhaps uncannily so.5

Indeed this first reaction to the phrase ‘prosthesis of nihilism’ should raise suspicion, for the history of metaphysics as nihilism would be but a series of different processes of closure that would mime one another—a single thought that would find itself everywhere, in naive, critical, and diagnostic discourses, writing itself as the history of Being, as an autobiography of a desired and feared, conjured (away), closure that takes place identically on every scale up to the ‘whole world’ and the ‘planetary’. In the determination of Being as eidos, ousia, energeia, to the effects of technology, writing, and ‘the political’, we would infallibly discover an ever narrowing closure of an earlier difference, allegedly culminating in the fully-automated entropic becoming of the Anthropocene and determination of Being as Bestand. 

The seeds of this total position are presented by Stiegler from the start and completed by the mid-2010s, but we can hear a similar, more clearly distilled, articulation of this logic in Jean Vioulac’s The Apocalypse of Truth (2014): 

The advent of mathematics is […] the true foundation of the epoch of technology, which only unconceals beings within the horizon of objectivity, representation, and ultimately, calculability; machination is first of all the surge of the power of calculation.[…] The epoch of technology is that of a danger, and “not just any danger, but danger as such”: that of annihilation. Annihilation is not incompatible with the persistence of machinery and its servants, which can actually continue to function indefinitely—but mechanically, without thinking about it—and this is what Heidegger ultimately emphasised: “Everything is functioning. That is precisely what is strange.” Technology does not primarily focus its power of annihilation on beings—which, on the contrary, have achieved power and autonomy through it—but on Being itself, and the annihilation is precisely the annihilation of Being. (Apocalypse of Truth, 26-27)

To think nihilism in this way, one really needs only one thought, ‘closure’—a single thought with another face, the mourning of ‘openness.’ To experience this closure everywhere and constantly, one would have had to have fallen from a better time and place, or rather to have believed to have fallen in this way. There would, could, or at least should have been: ‘openness’, ‘sense’, ‘authenticity’, ‘community’, ‘Being’, ‘God’. Such a fundamentally resentful disposition echoes a witty definition of the nihilist provided by Nietzsche in 1888: “A nihilist is a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist. According to this view, our existence (action, suffering, willing, feeling) has no meaning: the pathos of ‘in vain’ is the nihilist’s pathos—at the same time, as pathos, an inconsistency on the part of the nihilists.” (Paragraph 585 Will to Power, spring-fall 1888) In this way, such a logic of ‘overcoming nihilism’ becomes undistinguishable from the most fundamental ontotheological desire to return to a state of affairs ‘before the fall’, before sin, and before the corrosive force of calculation, representation, and finitude. 

Thus far, we have remained within the metonymic orbit of a single thought of closure: metaphysics, technique, calculation, automation, nihilism. And perhaps we have not yet even had this thought, insofar as it seems to be inappropriable, indigestible: throwing itself up and spreading itself around as its own condition and symptom, its own indestructible object. From within this orbit, we ostensibly would have only one option, a complete and total break. Solely through such a radical new beginning would we finally be liberated from this metonymic closure, that we encounter all over, that crushes us.

***

And yet, perhaps there is another way to respond to this ordeal, starting with a suspension of our precomprehension of this metonymy of closure and asking anew what it is that we are speaking of with the word ‘nihilism’. This other path can begin on familiar territory, with a reiteration of an influential Heidegger-Nietzsche: the Heidegger who privileges Nietzsche for having first undergone nihilism as a metaphysical-historical event and for having articulated it as the collapse of the transcendent values that had grounded the West. As Heidegger writes, for Nietzsche, “nihilism is this historical operation through which the supersensible becomes coincident and nothing, and thus beings themselves lose their value and sense.” (Nietzsche IV, Heidegger [32-33]) The ‘nihil’ of nihilism refers most fundamentally here to the nothing that all previous values have been reduced to, and in fact are revealed to have always been concealing. Life, thought, law is revealed to be without transcendent ground; and a huge, terrifying, and yet to be expelled question mark appears.

On this scale, ‘nihilism’ simply names the historical disclosure of how things are: there is no supersensible truth ordering existence, no purpose shaping the universe or at the arche-telos of Being, and indeed no ‘Being’ that would not only have the modality of a question, of nothing, of the nihil that brings ‘us’ (in)to question. As Nietzsche famously puts it at the opening of “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense”, consciousness and all of the ‘justice’, ‘purpose’, ‘evil’, ‘essence’, and ‘God’ it has produced, is nothing more than a brief accident on a speck of dust surrounded by nothing. To understand this nothingness as a ‘fault’ or ‘lack’ would be to judge our condition with the misguided expectation that there could have been a truer truth than this nihil.6

Amongst the several explanations of the ‘arrival’ of nihilism, the most important for our purposes comes in book three of the Genealogy of Morals, which suggests that nihilism results from the “inward-turning” of the will-to-truth originally sown by Christianity and Platonism.7 This recoil of the will-to-truth presents a vertiginous question: why truth? Why is the truth of truth accepted to be of value and often as value itself? And why is this presupposition unaffected by the otherwise merciless work of questioning? Why, and wozu this why? It is the silence that comes in response to these questions that for Nietzsche announces the ‘death of God’, that is, makes evident the auto-destruction not only of ‘religious belief’, but the belief in the absolute inherent value of truth that undergirded metaphysical inquiry. Philosophy as the articulation of the truth of beings as such and as a whole cannot continue as before and the question of thinking is posed frighteningly anew.

For Nietzsche this “arrival of the most unwelcome of guests” matters for a very precise reason: its devastating psychological and social effects which pose immense dangers to the promise of life. As with previous nihilistic articulations such as ascetic practices, herd morality, or bad diets, the problem of nihilism is that it potentially ‘lives off the future’s blood’, producing illness, decay, stasis, etc. And although for Nietzsche it is never a matter of simply opposing such forces of deferral, resistance, or pain, to the opaque ‘great health’ that orientates his thinking, the need to overcome nihilism will at bottom always be explained in terms of the value of health. Old tables of values must be destroyed, new ones produced, and the abyssal experience of the nihil that undergirds existence must be subdued and transformed in the name of a thriving to come. Health becomes the absolute value of values, the ground and goal of much of Nietzsche’s thought and paths beyond nihilism.

Famously for Heidegger this response only posits a new metaphysical value and thus fails to overcome nihilism at its most fundamental level, because on Heidegger’s account ontotheological metaphysics as the forgetting of Being is the genuine nihilism. “The essence of nihilism is the history for which Being itself is nothing.”(Nietzsche II, 338) To determine Being as the totality of beings and to place these beings at the service of the optimisation of life is only to enact a reversal of inherited metaphysical concepts, to place the body, desire and life, over the soul, intellect and spirit, and to thus dig oneself deeper in a more insidiously complete and concealed oblivion of Being. On Heidegger’s account, the only chance of a genuine overcoming will arrive through another beginning, a radical break with the history of ontotheology including its thinking of value-positing, in a more originary saying, poeticising, and thinking that is attuned to Being qua Being, to its giving withdrawal that has encrypted itself throughout the history of metaphysics and in the modern epoch of Gestell made itself conspicuous through its total absence. In sum, for this Heidegger, the path beyond nihilism is to be cleared through a return to the question of the truth of Being.

***

And yet the radicality of Nietzsche’s insights seems to go unheeded here, for the former does not simply suggest that the history of metaphysics has operated with incorrect understandings of truth, Being, or value, which need to be corrected with a more fundamental determination of truth, as will-to-power or un-concealment; but Nietzsche intends to show how the very gesture of positing and even desiring truth is ‘metaphysical’. His question is thus prior to any single determination, being posed to the will-to-determine itself. Truth in any of its determinations, truth-in-determination, is revealed to be nothing more than a strange technique, a kind of lie, a prosthetic ruse. And thus even as Heidegger carries out an unparalleled destruction of truth in its various determinations, from: Richtigkeit, Wahrheit, Adequatio, Veritas, to Aletheia; all of this is done still in the name of a more truthful truth, motivated by a desire that may place all of the words of metaphysics under erasure, but cannot displace itself as the fundamentally ontotheological desire to articulate what-is-as-it-is-as-such, which only is radicalised in Heidegger’s thought.

The difference between these proposed paths out of nihilism can be thought with the help of an aphorism by Nietzsche from Twilight of the Idols. “How the real world finally became a fable” traces a history of the self-overcoming of truth, its ‘aging’, which passes from its birth, its highpoint when the ‘true world’ was embodied by the virtuous, powerful, and wise; into something that is to-come in another world so long as one behaves righteously. But as time passes and the truth remains illusive, it becomes increasingly doubted, until belief fades entirely, leaving only the residue of ascetic practices without sense, leading finally to rebellion: “The true world—an idea that has no more use, that is no longer obligatory—a waste, an idea now superfluous—consequently a refuted idea: let’s abolish it!” (KSA 6, 81) The idea of the true world deteriorates rapidly and dies, inaugurating the psychological experience of nihilism. What occurs next however, after its funeral and wake, is crucial: “We have abolished the true world: which one remains? Perhaps the world of appearances? … But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one!” (KSA 6, 81) For Nietzsche, with the breakdown of ontotheological truth, its opposite, mere illusion, also self-destructs. The entire apparatus is put out of commission through this double movement.

The experience of ‘nihilism’ must be understood as a moment within this breakdown, as an event ‘within’ the closure of ontotheology. The ‘nihilist’ suffers the collapse of the ‘true world’ as the disappointment, exhaustion, and depression of metaphysics. To remain there is not only to remain ‘in metaphysics’, but it is also to obscure another Nietzschean experience: the “high-noon”, the “hour of the shortest shadow”, the lightness resulting from this breakdown. This Nietzsche offers a different kind of new beginning—a newly achieved innocence, from which Derrida would depart. Contrarily, this Heidegger seems to in fact offer a negative image of the parable above: his destruction of the history of metaphysics would seem to end with the following reversal of Nietzsche’s words: we have abolished the ontotheological determinations of Being: which one remains? The true one.

***

The ‘overcoming of nihilism’ must be thought in light of a revaluation of the relationship between ‘nihilism’, ‘metaphysics’ and ‘ontotheology’. If it remains the case that the history of ontotheology is correctly conceived of as the history of nihilism, then it is critical to distinguish metaphysics as something entirely different, which cannot be overcome, but only inhabited otherwise. The necessary step beyond nihilism will thus remain ‘metaphysical’, but in a sense that must be clarified.

Ontotheology refers to thinking which is orientated by an arche-telos of truth, whether this is satisfied by the determination of truth as adequatio or pursues a truth beyond its hegemonic determinations, perhaps as the “face”, absent God or a-letheia. In any case, ontotheology maintains that it can articulate what is as it is, or should have been able to, being in every case shaped by a desire for full presence—the experience or achievement of which is ‘true’. This ontotheological work is usually referred to as ‘metaphysics’, but this slippage hamstrings the already difficult task of reconsidering the possibility and aims of rigorous discourse ‘after deconstruction’. 

As Derrida and Heidegger demonstrated: Being, the Other, or God, words that at their most rigorous signify no-thing and refuse the presence of any adequate representation, can only give themselves to thought, and perhaps only as questions, insofar as they ‘take place’ with and as beings, an other, or creation. There must be an experience of presence within which and constitutive of which there would be such conspicuous ‘difference’. Heidegger’s thinking of Sprache is concerned with nothing but this problem: the necessity of idiomatic locality to give place for the articulation of Being. Likewise any es gibt is co-originary with an irreducibly historical and singularly-inherited metaphysical detour that gives access to (the question of) Being as beings. Being only is, as; that is, through a detour of finite presence that is called metaphysics. And metaphysics is the perfect word for this necessity, for we are speaking of the articulation of physis (Being), what remains after (meta) physis. To affirm the necessity of this ‘originary’ detour and différance is not to make a truth claim about the accuracy of what is articulated, but to accept this undeconstructable phenomenological necessity. (cf. Derrida, “The Retrait of Metaphor” in Pysche).

The history of nihilism is thus not synonymous with metaphysics, which for its part is not coextensive with Western metaphysics, but nihilism shares its essence with the latter as a history of Western ontotheology. The increasingly automated total-exchangeability of beings that marks the latest stage of this history in the entropic becoming of the Anthropocene corresponds with the increasingly sovereign position of ontotheology, rather than that of metaphysics. This distinction matters because it refuses this sovereignty’s major premise that the only genuine line of response to the present crises would be to match and exceed its total planetary scale, and thus to affirm from the start its claim to absolute dominance and closure. To remain within this logic would give one recourse only to an absolute escape and thus total negation of a total problem, leaving one’s thinking dominated by the totalitarian spectre of ontotheology, with alternatives only of withdrawal, silence, and the(i)ology. Such alternatives themselves remain of ontotheology, which after all is not only the thinking of the totality of beings, being of beings, and highest being, but also the beyond of being. It is in any case from this position that we can begin to understand a throught-provoking parenthetical remark by Derrida in the 80s, while discussing the question of the task of the modern university: “Nihilism: a posture that is completely symmetrical to, thus dependent upon, the principle of reason”. (15, “Principle of Reason”.) Derrida invites us to think these two sides of the same closure—the determination of Being as the totality of objects for a subject, nihil est sine ratione reddende—and the suffering of this principle’s inadequacy and collapse, the experience of nihil.

This distinction between metaphysics and ontotheology must invite another thinking of nihilism unburdened by a desire, or at least belief in the correctness of the desire, to ‘escape metaphysics’; even as it is not at all clear if this desire is ‘deconstructable’ or rather ‘destructable’, for perhaps ontotheological desire survives and a lot else survives, ‘after deconstruction’.

***

Even if there is no ‘experience’ of deconstruction rigorously speaking, there surely are experiences of the deconstruction of ‘x’—philosophical discourse or technique for example. In fact, if we can speak of something like experience, it is only ever the strange experience of deconstruction taking place, or what is the same, the work of nihilation. There is thus certainly an experience of nihilism today, but this should be heard in two ways. On the one hand, there is the experience of the unworking of ontotheology that propels a variety of senses of disorientation amidst the collapse of any transcendent ground, leading to reactive desires to escape, amplify, or ignore this disruption. On the other hand, there is the experience of nihilation—the undeconstructable, absolutely other, the no-thing which invites fear, but also thinking.

Notes

  1. For a masterful account of Blanchot’s thinking of nihilism that demonstrates his reticence of any simple ‘overcoming’, cf. Ashley Woodward’s article: “Blanchot at the Limits of Nihilism” (2025). ↩︎
  2. In No Apocalypse, Not Now, Derrida suggests (as is thoughtfully discussed in the 2018 Ecodeconstruction collection) that nuclear disaster is “fabulously textual”: nuclear codes, war scripts, discourses, are shaped by texts that are largely concealed. By “fabulously textual” Derrida also has in mind the fabulous, that is, fantastic and phantasmatic quality of nuclear disaster. Although the danger is very real, the continuously reproduced image of total apocalyptic disaster has never taken place, but is a fabulation. By definition, such total disaster—nuclear apocalypse—can only ever be fabulous, a dream, informed by factors ranging from the book of Revelations, to recorded disasters, and artistic representations. To think ‘apocalypse’ is thus always a matter of thinking the conditions of this fabulous return—it is to ask of the forces, presuppositions, and cultures, that conjure this spectre each time anew. ↩︎
  3. This figure of a pure violence would worry Derrida continuously from “Violence and Metaphysics”, to “On a Recently Adopted Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy” and “Force of Law” to the Death Penalty seminars. The deconstruction of the metaphysics of purity is perhaps above all the work of deferring and displacing this absolute, purifying force and the desire that continuously draws back to ‘the worst’. ↩︎
  4. This indifferent continuation of ontotheology culminates in Stiegler’s late thinking of (neg)entropy which functions as the value of all values for his thought, which fundamentally determines Being as the totality of beings understood as energy. And yet simultaneously, that there remains at the very least a pull towards an arche-telos of truth as Richtigkeit, accuracy, or adequatio, animating Bennington’s thinking and all ‘wanting-to-(say-what-is-)correct’, should remind us of the many ways in which ontotheology lives on, must and perhaps should live on, ‘after’ and indeed ‘within’ ‘deconstruction’. ↩︎
  5. It is ironic that this epochal history, beginning with calculation and the determination of temporisation as a stream of present moments, is as a story itself a limiting force, functioning as a restrictive calculation on thinking. There is indeed a reason, and this is the power of Heidegger’s thinking that remained thinking from start to finish, that by the time of the Le Thor seminars in the late 60s, he was thinking the event and difference beyond the history of Being and its Greek-German filiation, in an altogether other thought of Ereignis as the “janusface of Gestell”. (Fourth session, Le Thor) ↩︎
  6. To demand sufficient reasons of what comes is already from this point of view to err. The thoughts of Der Satz vom Grund are crucial here and in particular Heidegger’s displacement of the primacy of the question at the lecture series’ climax, through the recoil question, why the why? Heidegger suggests that the why-question has a fundamentally modern providence, in a demand to render reasons of what takes place as an object for a subject determined as ego. However, his next step, or rather Satz or hop, out of this aporia is what remains questionable: does the thought that Being and Ground say the same, and that they precede the demand to render reasons (and thus determine Being as beings) alleviate the challenge posed by the question why the why? Or does Heidegger here only displace the question, avoiding it with only a more profound answer that remains in a familiar register? For the ‘work’ of the question why? is not suspended with Heidegger’s hyperbolic rigour, but only amplified to destroy the previous responses qua determinations of Being, and to offer a truth beyond these truths, even to transform the sense of truth. Yet, Heidegger’s response remains only the most powerful answer to the question why (are there beings and not nothing)? Warum ist überhaupt Seiendes und nicht vielmehr Nichts? (Einführung in die Metaphysik, 1) And remains here an unheeded invitation for another thinking that is anterior to this hyperbolic onto-theo-logic. ↩︎
  7. This providence of nihilism must always be kept in mind. The question of delimiting ‘nihilism’ as a prosthesis is little more than pointing to this question of providence, of place and idiom. The step beyond nihilism is impossible within its providence and it is thus a question of a change of ‘geography’. It is worth considering the difficulty of this change, and in many cases its impossibility. Under certain conditions, a providence cannot be so easily forgotten or destroyed. There is indeed the possibility of being stranded, for example in the experience of nihilism, even when rigorously speaking, it is not. This is an essential aspect of what Derrida thought with ‘haunting’: the disturbing irreversibility of being haunted or possessed by a thought, love, or scar. One bears the burden of an inheritance, a spectre which is nothing more than an inscription of others that has no more or less truth than its being-inscribed in its legible and incalculable effects, and one can only do as Deleuze so beautifully taught us, to be worthy of this scar, to wear one’s wound as a beautiful ‘gift’ and ‘charm’. For those who remain cursed, for example by ‘nihilism’, or a desire for truth beyond truth, they must learn to wear these wounds more beautifully. This is part of what it will mean to continue to speak and write, to do metaphysics, after deconstruction, which I explore in my forthcoming Articulations: Technique and the Metaphysics of Deconstruction. ↩︎

Works Cited

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  • Blanchot, Maurice. L’amitié. Paris: Gallimard, 1971.
  • —. Friendship. Translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997.
  • Derrida, Jacques. L’écriture et la différence. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967.
  • —. De la grammatologie. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1967.
  • Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Transl. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997.
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  • —. Psyché: Inventions de l’autre. Paris: Galilée, 2001.
  • —. Séminaire: La peine de mort. Tome 1. Paris: Galilée, 2012.
  • —. Séminaire: La peine de mort. Tome 2. Paris: Galilée, 2015.
  • Fritsch, Matthias, Philippe Lynes, and David Wood, eds. Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy. New York: Fordham UP, 2018.
  • Heidegger, Martin. Nietzsche. Pfullingen: Neske, 1961.
  • —. Vier Seminare. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1977.
  • —. Einführung in die Metaphysik. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1987.
  • —. Der Satz vom Grund. Gesamtausgabe 10. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1997.
  • Jaspers, Karl. Die Atombombe und die Zukunft des Menschen. Munich: Piper, 1958.
  • Nancy, Jean-Luc. Une pensée finie. Paris: Galilée, 1991.
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  • —. Kritische Studienausgabe. Vol. 1. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980.
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  • —. Kritische Studienausgabe. Vol. 6. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980.
  • Stiegler, Bernard. La technique et le temps. Tome 1: La faute d’Épiméthée. Paris: Galilée, 1998.
  • —. Dans la disruption: Comment ne pas devenir fou? Paris: Les Liens qui Libèrent, 2016.
  • —. The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism. Transl. Daniel Ross. Cambridge: Polity, 2019.
  • —. The Neganthropocene. London: Open Humanities P, 2018.
  • —. Qu’appelle-t-on panser? Tome 1: L’immense régression. Paris: Les Liens qui Libèrent, 2020.
  • Vioulac, Jean. Apocalypse of Truth: Heidegger’s Confrontation with Nietzsche. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2021.
  • Woodward, Alex. “Blanchot at the Limits of Nihilism.” Human Affairs (2025): xx–xx. Bratislava: Institute of Experimental Psychology, Slovak Academy of Sciences.

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