On Two Forms of Political Nihilism: Apocalyptic Reduction vs. Hypocalyptic Suspension

Stefano Franchi
Independent Scholar

Volume 17, 2025

If we extend Nietzsche’s classical understanding of moral nihilism to the political realm, we might define political nihilism as the impossibility of positing values guiding action aimed at social change. That would be incorrect, though, because political nihilism has a partially independent and rather peculiar history of its own. Well before Nietzsche made it a cornerstone of his philosophical vocabulary (but a few decades after Jacobi’s use of the term turned it into an accepted concept), nihilism entered the political lexicon as the proud self-profession of a literary character. When Pavel Petrovich asks his nephew what Bazarov, the main character of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons is, Arkady does not hesitate to reply that,

‘He is a nihilist!’ ‘A what?’ asked [his father] Nikolai Petrovich. ‘He is a nihilist,’ repeated Arkady. ‘A nihilist,’ said Nikolai Petrovich. ‘That comes from the Latin nihil—nothing, I imagine; the term must signify a man who…who recognizes nothing?’ ‘Say—who respects nothing,’ put in Pavel Petrovich, ‘[…] Who looks at everything critically,’ observed Arkady. (1965, 94)

Bazarov himself will soon make clear that a nihilist is not just a critical thinker who subjects everything to relentless scrutiny, as his friend Arkady had put it. Critique having destroyed all traditional authorities (a point Jacobi had already made when he reproached Fichte, and warned him of his implied nihilism), Bazarov affirms that he must base his conduct on what is useful, and “In these days the most useful thing we can do is to repudiate—and so we repudiate” (1965, 122). When he is warned that to repudiate everything really means destroying everything and that one should be thinking about the construction that must follow, Bazarov does not balk: “That is not our affair. …The ground must be cleared first” (ibid.). “’And that is called nihilism,?’—asks his interlocutor—’And that is called nihilism,’ Bazarov repeated again”(1965, 126).

In other words the nihilist Bazarov, as Turgenev knew well, is the well-meaning radical revolutionary who recognized, as Nietzsche will write a few years later, that “destruction is the most creative and most difficult act” and yet the necessary preliminary of any new better order. The nihil that Bazarov’s nihilism references retains a more essential connection to the act of negation than to a state of nothingness, it is a verb more than a noun.

This conclusion would be far from surprising in the 1860s context in which Turgenev, a former roommate of Bakunin and a contemporary of Chernyshevsky, wrote his novel. One hundred and fifty years later, it may strike us as uncanny: how could the progressive revolutionary who wanted to subvert the repressive, serf-based social system of Czarist Russia be a nihilist, when nihilism is now widely acknowledged by political philosophers as the most serious ailment of our times? Let us listen, for instance, to Wendy Brown’s recent indictment, when she claims that the predicament of our epoch is “the pervasive nihilism that disinhibits aggression and devalues values (compounding neoliberal depredations of democracy, social responsibility, and concern with future generations)”(2023, 9). Nihilism has turned from the preliminary ground clearing inaugurating social change—to use Bazarov’s words—to a glorification of violence for violence’s sake that could not be less interested in the possibility of change, or in society as a whole.

The connection between nihilism and gratuitous violence, best known in popular culture through the satirical depiction of the “German nihilist” in the Coen’s brothers The Big Lebowski, has become so entrenched that any justification of violence is ipso facto deemed an instance of nihilism, even when—as it happens in de Sade’s novels, for instance—violence on one’s fellow human beings is proclaimed to be the logical consequence of a set of alternative ethical values that the author had allegedly discovered. But an action grounded in a set of authoritative rules can never be deemed nihilistic, regardless of the nature of the action itself, as the authority-repudiating Bazarov would be the first to acknowledge. The affirmation of a set of authoritative rules—no matter how “wicked” they may appear from our preferred moral perspective—is incompatible with the nihilistic negation of all authorities.

It is true that the connection between radical critique and gratuitous violence had been made early in the wake of Turgenev’s novel, and it quickly became a topos of Turgenev’s conservative critics. Dostoyevski is perhaps the best known representative of this critical line, his Raskolnikov being a self-aware caricatural exaggeration of Turgenev’s Bazarov. It is somewhat strange, however, to see a self-declared progressive such as Wendy Brown adopt the same conservative view that Dostoyevski and so many other championed. The strange convergence between conservative and progressive notions of nihilism could only be explained if it were possible to demonstrate that any act of radical negation necessarily leads to the explosion of uncontrolled violence we tend to associate with an apocalyptic terror (a radical negating act that may have started with Kant’s Critique, or maybe with Descartes’s Meditations, or even with Plato’s Socrates, as many a conservative-minded philosopher have argued).¹ We need to question this association and ask if apocalyptic violence is the only possible outcome of radical negation. We need to ask, in other words, if there is a possibility for a post-nihilist politics that would accept political nihilism’s radical negation, as Turgenev’s character posited it, but would not end up in a generalized terror, as its conservative critics, along with quite a few progressive, seem to hold.

I will discuss this question by comparing two approaches to the possibility of radical critique and transformational change in late capitalistic societies. Although similar in their diagnoses, the very different consequences their respective authors draw may afford us a better understanding of both and perhaps even of their subject matter.

Apocalyptic Reduction

I will start with the analysis Peter Trawny advances in his On Freedom (2017). Trawny starts from a characterization of life in the current late-capitalistic era as, as he calls it, the TCM: “Technology, capital, and medium, he claims, determine the universal topography of life in the world” (2017, 17), because the TCM rules over the “production of possibilities” and therefore over the production of things as well as the production and destruction of cultural items. It follows that the TCM predetermines all political forms—or rather, it predetermines the possibilities that become available, including all political possibilities. It also follows that no radical change is possible, because,

it would not only have to locate an “outside” of the universal, but also turn this outside into the political goal of a given community. It would thereby run into the aporia of having to mobilize the TCM universal’s own instruments in the service of its abolition. The politics of the TCM universal is a pragma-politics. (2017, 17)

Indeed, even a meaningful critique of the existing topographical order has become impossible, Trawny continues: the “normalized TCM universal has come to constitute a field of absolute immanence” that cannot be escaped,” for “any ‘critique’ of the medium itself has to be communicated via the medium” and will therefore be immediately reinserted into the circuit of production to “generate further capital movements” (2017, 117). This implies that exiting the TCM via political action—in other words, through revolutionary change—is not just pragmatically impossible but non-sensical. It would have to be initiated from within a field of absolute immanence that admits no exteriority, because it is able to productively recycle even its most severe internal crises, as it happened, for example, with the “successful” resolution of the 2008 financial meltdown.

However, as Trawny suggests, the impossibility of an internally-activated change does not ensure the sempiternal existence of the TCM. Change may–or perhaps will—still happen, because “life always finds a way,” to use Ian Malcolm’s words. The life at stake here is the natural life that remains external to the TCM—the life of the planet and all its interconnected elements. Natural life is still transcendent to the TCM and may still impart unrecoverable shocks: “when the immanence of the universal is shaken by external factors such as water, oil, or raw material shortages, or by a global virus, an ecological catastrophe, or a sharp rise in sea levels” Trawny says, and when “the economic difference between rich and poor leads to a critical mass of the population being cut off from basic goods, the demise of pragma-politics through a violent uprising will be at hand.”(2017, 112)

He concludes this characterization with a salient statement: “The precondition of the last revolution: an apocalyptic reduction.” (ib.)

Situationist Récupération

Almost exactly 60 years ago, a seemingly similar analysis of the contemporary socio-political situation of late capitalism was advanced by the writers gathered around the International Situationniste, a group that lasted from 1957 to the early 1970s. The Situationists started from a different standpoint than Trawny’s—aesthetic experiences rather than the analysis of techné—yet they reached a similar conclusion. In late capitalism—in the society of spectacle, to use Debord’s own term—even the most radical forms of critiques are neutralized through constant recuperation, that is, through the alienation of every possible production, including radical dissent, through their reduction to a show that is always already at hand for passive consumption. As Debord put it, “Spectacle is the sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity” (1983, 13). The passive consumerist consumption of every production as a show is the Situationist slightly more Marxian inflected doublet of Trawny’s emphasis of the circulation of capital. The Situationists insisted more on the process of reduction of every item to merchandise, while Trawny is more concerned with their products’ endless circulation within the absolute immanence of the TCM. But the final result is similar: as Günther Anders once observed, “We should not preach to be given daily bread—we should rather preach to be given daily hunger so that the production of bread will not be stopped.”²

It is on the possibility of radical change—i.e., on the possibility of revolution—that their analysis differs from Trawny’s. Influenced by the work of historian Henri Lefebvre, the Situationists stressed that the radical change of modern society should start from a transformation of the conditions of the most “insignificant” everyday experiences.³ For the Situationists, the lack of attention we paid to daily life and its constant deferral to a future utopian society is the most valid indicator of the practical and theoretical bankruptcy of revolutionary theory. On the contrary, the revolution the Situationists were after would start from a radical overturning of the structure of everyday life and from the creation of “concretely built situations,” the construction of temporary settings of life, and their transformation into a life endowed with a “higher passionate nature.”⁴ The passions are the key elements of this new existential condition. The passion of creation, the passion of love, and the passion of jeu (play and game), they argued, constitute the ontological ground for the three essential dimension of life—realization, communication, and participation.

Consistently, Raoul Vaneigem, another Situationist, suggests that it is only in poetry that activity is returned to the Greek concept of poiein and “reconstituted to the purity of its original bursting forth and, as it were, to totality” (1967, 208). Poetic activity is thus the radical theory that all Situationists act incorporate; it is the crowning achievement of the revolutionary strategy and tactic; it is the climax of the grand jeu played over daily life. The Situationists’ emphasis on the passions is the generalization of the poetic activity to daily life in general: “The work of art to come is the construction of a passionate life […]”(1967, 209)” The programmatic last sentence of Debord’s Rapport sums it up with a Marxian quip: “The passions have been interpreted enough: the point now is to discover more of them” (2002; 2000, 50; 44).

One Question, Three Answers

Let us now compare Trawny’s diagnosis about the im-possibility of revolution in the current TCM topography with the Situationists’ diagnosis. How is it, we may ask, that two analytic frameworks that share similar assumptions about the (impossible) role of critique and radical dissent as well as a profoundly negative outlook on past revolutionary efforts reached such different conclusions?

One possible answer would locate the source of their difference at the ontic level. The economic-political situation of the world has changed so much between 1957 and 2017, one might claim, that it is no surprise that Debord’s and Vainegem’s still hopeful outlook no longer holds. Western societies’ forceful reactions to the popular movements of the 60s and early 70s—which culminated in the neo-liberal consensus that made globalization possible and inaugurated China’s and Cuba’s entering the TCM—would mark the rupture between a still potential global capitalist order and its full current deployment. Situationism’s earlier revolutionary hopes have been refuted by history, one might conclude.

This argument is not fully convincing, however. Current socio-political developments would rather prompt us to reverse the interpretation of the historical flow and recast the brief years of anti-capitalist uprisings that the Situationists inhabited as the temporary fissure that may have just slowed down, and only briefly, the unrelenting and totalizing expansion of capital. In other words, I would claim that the deployed immanence of the TCM, as Peter Trawny calls it, was already present in 1957. The “short 20th century,” as it has been called, or perhaps the even shorter half-century that began in New York in 1929 and ended 50 years later in Berlin has been more of a bloody intermission than a rupture.

A second explanation would rather focus on the difference between continuous commodification and endless circulation. Debord and his fellow travelers emphasized the process of commodification of all forms of production. Indeed, the concept of recuperation stressed that all cultural forms are reduced to consumable objects to be shown and passively enjoyed as spectacle. This emphasis allows the Situationists to leverage the Marxian concept of alienation in order to rescue, as Marx had done already, the form of artistic production as a form of un-alienated work.⁵ While commodification is a prerequisite to the circulation of the produced commodities, the emphasis on the latter aspects not only blocks the Situationists’ effort to rescue work but shows how even the idealized artist cannot escape alienation (Entfremdung). Hence, artistic work can still be recuperated within the circuit of consumption. I think this second alternative points not so much to a substantial difference between the two critical models at stake, but to the serious shortcomings in Debord’s and Vainegem’s conception of poetic (better poietic) everyday’s work. A more consistent Situationist position would have to broaden their Romantic-inflected critique of alienated work to a critique of work in general, instead of replacing it with creative activity. This position is indeed prefigured in some of the Situationists’ own work, such as their theory of drifting, and epitomized by their best-known motto, “Ne travaillez jamais,” “Never work,” and it has been developed in more recent works, such as, for instance, the work of Moishe Postone (1993, 2015) or of the Endnotes collective (2011, 2020). I do not have time to enter into this topic here, but I would simply point out that the possibility of such a critique of work in general shows that the positive revolutionary outlook the Situationists maintained could still be kept in spite of the “recuperations” they themselves highlighted. To put it differently: abandoning the emphasis on commodification for circulation entails jettisoning the ever-productive artistic subjectivity as the harbinger of the upcoming revolution. Yet, it is still possible to salvage the analytic part of Situationism’s interpretation of late capitalism, provided we replace the ever-active subject with its never-working counterpart.

This conclusion does not solve the problem we started from: we are still confronted with two analytic frameworks that are similar—admittedly, after a few theoretical adjustment—yet reach diametrically opposed conclusions. Let me suggest one final option: perhaps there is some categorial mismatch behind the surface similarities, some hidden assumption we have not yet brought forward that may shed some light upon the difference in the envisaged possibilities of revolution. Let me start from revolution itself, and, especially, from its relation to time.

Apocalypse and Hypocalypse

The meaning of the term “revolution” is often diluted in modern discourse, where any incremental change becomes “life-changing” or “paradigm-shifting,” to use advertising language. Contemporary political science often defines revolution as mass-powered institutional change driven by social justice visions (Goldstone 2014), but this interpretation neglects their temporal dimension. It reduces revolutions to elite-manipulated perturbations in a homeostatic system, where revolutionary change only occurs when the elite is weakened or when one of its f(r)actions allies itself with the masses. Revolutions become merely temporary disruptions in a predetermined system—not unlike the astronomical revolutions that periodically repeat without changing the general configuration of the system.

On the contrary, usually we understand revolutionary change to introduce qualitative discontinuity, creating new social configurations that transform people’s minds and relationships. Indeed, in the 1844 manuscripts, Marx called communism the “solution to the riddle of history,” suggesting it dissolves historical flow into a timeless present.⁶ This presents a paradox: if revolution brings about an unfathomable new state, how could anyone in pre-revolutionary times imagine it? The solution to this paradox depends on temporal framing. Revolutions may be understood in three ways: as future culminations at history’s end; as restorations of idealized past states; or as eruptions of already-existing subterranean realities. The first two options are popular theological solutions, while the third enjoys currency among social scientists who link revolutions to geographical, biological, or geological factors.

The most common solution to revolution’s temporal paradox has theological roots. The “vision of social justice” of the political scientist becomes the true revelation of an otherworldly post-historical state. This apocalyptic bent was already apparent in the English “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, which was interpreted as the rupture of a corrupted state that would restore a lost Edenic past. Marxism itself has drawn connections to Christianity. Engels reinterpreted the 16th century European Peasants’ War as class struggle rather than religious conflict, seeing the preacher Thomas Münzer as a visionary proletarian forerunner of socialism.⁷ The social revolution that, according to Engels, Kautsky, Luxemburg and so many other after them, picks up and completes the Christian precursors’ inherits the apocalyptic-eschatological structure that underwrote it.

Karl Löwith even turned the apocalyptic interpretation of Socialist (pre-)history into a negative indictment of Marx’s philosophy as a whole, by deeming the materialist conception of history an ultimately self-contradictory secularized version of Jewish-Christian history of salvation (Heilsgeschichte) that had its “unconscious root in Marx’s own being and even his race” (1949, 52). Löwith’s own conclusion was that all philosophies of histories are ultimately self-contradictory, because they presume to devise the rationality of historical change through an uneasy mixture of the Greek-derived conception of circular temporality (the cosmos as a well-ordered jewel that keeps repeating itself), with the Jewish-Christian belief in an eschaton that inevitably assigns a beginning and an end to the temporal succession (1949, 207). However, according to Löwith, both conceptions are unable to conceptualize change, be it emancipatory or not. The Greek cyclical view cannot really accommodate any temporal rupture, while the Christian view holds that providence acts in such “a cryptic and intermittent way” that “it makes little difference whether man feels himself in the hands of God’s inscrutable will or in the hands of chance and fate.”(1949, 199) The intelligibility of revolutionary change requires an ultimately inconsistent, apocalyptic, secularized salvation history, therefore revolution is not intelligible and it may not even exist.

In short, a consistent, traditional view of revolution (be it Marxist, liberal, or neo-liberal) is inseparable from an apocalyptic narrative as a solution to the problem of its temporality It is inseparable from what some cultural studies scholars have labeled “apocalypticism,” namely the dualist view that assumes the existence of a transcendent and ultimately ineffable reality lying beyond human comprehension and posits the imminent resolution of cosmic conflict though a redemptive deliverance whose proximal advent orients existence and gives life meaning and purpose (DiTommaso 2014, 474).

The connection between TCM immanence and apocalyptic reduction that we saw Trawny posits as the precondition of revolution may be recast as the necessary consequence of the latter’s intrinsic apocalypticism. Hence, the inquiry about the possibility of radical change in the age of late capital’s general subsumption—in short, the possibility of a post-nihilist politics—requires a concept that would decouple apocalypse from revolution. I would suggest that we have a suitable candidate for the job in the concept of hypocalypse.

The word gained some currency from Q, the 1999 historical novel written by the Italian collective called Luther Blissett that became an international best seller. In the second part of the novel, set in Leyden in 1533, the main protagonist, a former aid of Thomas Münzer who had unsuccessfully tried to save him after the battle of Frankenhausen put an end to the peasants’ revolt, claims that “Sitting and waiting for the Apocalypse brings you bad luck. Revelation only comes from below” (2003, pt. 2, chpt. 21). A few years before, in 1995, the same author(s) had defined the apocalypse as a “revelation from above, end of history, imposing act of a God who transcends our world and our will. […] Fascism, the strategy of terror, and the economy are apocalyptic,” and opposed to it the “Hypocalypse, or the revelation from below, in which alienation and widespread boredom retroact and are transformed into the vital dynamite charge that explodes the ‘historic continuum’.”⁸ Even if it proceeds in the right direction, this reading is still too close to the apocalyptic version, because it lacks any positive content and rests content with negative determinations: hypocalypse come “from below,” not “from above,” from “us and not from them,” “now and not at the end.” Instead, I would argue, the inversion of the apocalypse can only be reached through a suspension of its temporality rather than through a simple reversal of its movement. As I see it, Ipocalisse, hypocalypse, is a reading of revolution that no longer projects it as the catastrophic resolution of an antinomian conflict revealed by an angel to uncomprehending subjects, but rather as a suspension, as a political or rather an existential epochè that puts into parentheses the existing order to let a different one emerge. The identification of the late capitalist formation as a completely developed indeterminate totality leads to apocalypticism, to extreme forms of Luddism, or to a variety of accelerationisms.⁹ On the contrary, we should declare—rather, we should start from the acknowledgement that the revolution has already happened and that we won. The task ahead—better, the present task—is the articulation of a form of life that eschew tragedy and all its sacrifices hastening the advent of glorious future and would instead welcome comedy, as Hegel would say, and the “infinite light-heartedness and confidence” of those raised above their inner contradictions who, far “from being bitter or miserable in it at all,” experience the foolish bliss and ease of those who, being sure of themselves, can bear the frustration of their aims and achievements.” (1975, 2, 1200)

Notes

The work by Michael Gillespie (1995) is a significant representative of this conservative tendency and its consonance with Brown’s earlier book (2019), whose final chapter she directly references in the above-mentioned passage, is quite striking. ↩︎
“Sofern das heute fällige Gebet überhaupt noch aus unserem menschlichen Munde kommt, da es ja eigentlich die Produkte sind, die beten. Nämlich: ‘Unsere täglichen Esser gib uns heute’” (1956, 16). The reference to the necessary update of Heidegger’s Sorge (a concept introduced in a work “from which economy, as well as hunger and sex, were completely missing”) is at p. 482. ↩︎
See, for instance, Lefebvre 1961; Lefebvre 1991. The “poor theater” (teatro povero) representation of a community’s everyday life, challenges, and hopes taking place every year in the small Italian village of Monticchiello is an ongoing version of the Situationist attempt (Tanner, 1979; Pianigiani, 2017). ↩︎
(2002, p. 44). “Notre idée centrale est celle de la construction de situations, c‘est-à-dire la construction concrète d‘ambiances momentanées de la vie, et leur transformation en une qualité passionnelle supérieure” (2000, p. 322), written in 1957 and presented at the founding conference of the Internationale Situationniste in Cosio d’Arroscia. See also Ford 2005; Chollet 2004. ↩︎
Marx (1973, p. 611). In another often-quoted passage, Marx describes the transition from Capitalism to a future society in terms of a radical transformation of work: “Capital’s ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth drives work beyond the limits of its natural needs, and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose work also therefore appears no longer as work, but as the full development of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its direct form has disappeared; because a historically created need has taken the place of the natural one.” (1973, 325, transl. modified). ↩︎
“Communism […] is the solved riddle of history and knows itself as such a solution [Der Kommunismus […] ist das aufgelöste Rätsel der Geschichte und weiß sich als diese Lösung],” Marx states (2010, vol. 3, p. 297; 1981, vol. 4, p. 536). ↩︎
Engels (1978), Kautsky (1925), Luxemburg (1970). Engels’ essay was published in 1850 in the double 5-6 issue of Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-ökonomische Revue, the monthly magazine Marx was editing in London after his expulsion from Germany after the failed 1848 revolution and the forced closure of its predecessor (the Neue Rheinische Zeitung newspaper). The essay was republished in book form with a new preface in 1870, and once more in a third edition in 1875 (this version is now available in English in Marx and Engels’s Collected Works (1978)). Engels meant to expand his work into a much broader analysis of German society, but never got around to it. ↩︎
Blissett (2000b, p. 70), originally published in 1995. The author continues: “The revolution is the brainstorm of a million minds, the climax of psychic warfare. It is not the apocalyptic, perennial wait for the ‘Right Moment,’ but rather a slow, viral infiltration that brings cancer into the system. The wait, the witnessing (martyrdom), the Resistance make only sense in the perspective of an Advent (the second Coming). But Parousia has happened already, there is nothing and no one to be waiting for. Nobody will ever come. There will be no Final Encounter within or without History” (2000, p. 71). In the same year, the same author(s) had also produced a short text titled “Ipocalisse,” which is a parodic retelling of John’s Book of Revelation in which Luther Blissett sings the praises of his own work as a media infiltrator and prankster (Blissett (2000a)). ↩︎
Even though the Luddist phantasm plays a strategic role within our current Western neo-liberal societies, where critical assessments of technology are usually rebuffed with accusations of crass primitivism, it is also true that some of its more or less sophisticated forms have inhabited leftist discourse, for instance in Marcuse’s one-dimensional man, or in the more recent work of Jacques Camatte (1995). ↩︎

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