Download - All for nothing
-
This article was downloaded by: [University of Kent]On: 30 November 2012, At: 05:14Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Angelaki: Journal of the TheoreticalHumanitiesPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cang20
All for nothingAntti Salminen a & Sami Sjberg ba Huhtimenkatu 5 E4, Tampere 33100, Finlandb Peter Szondi Institute of Comparative Literature, FreieUniversitt Berlin, Habelschwerdter Allee 45, 14195 Berlin,GermanyVersion of record first published: 27 Nov 2012.
To cite this article: Antti Salminen & Sami Sjberg (2012): All for nothing, Angelaki: Journal of theTheoretical Humanities, 17:3, 1-6
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2012.722388
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.
The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representationthat the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of anyinstructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primarysources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings,demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly orindirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.
-
ANGELAKIjournal of the theoretical humanitiesvolume 17 number 3 september 2012
We should differentiate the nothing from that
which is worthless (nul) by maintaining
the idea that what is worthless is precisely that
which has forgotten the nothing.
Baudrillard
Alice: I see nothing.
Cheshire Cat: My. You have good eyes.
There it is, nothing. Or, actually, it is not,which is its sole characteristic. Nothingevades all attempts at conceptualization, even
though language often overshadows and obscures
this fact. Even so, one should distinguish between
different notions of nothing: for instance, nothing
and nothingness. The suffix renders noth-
ingness a noun, whereas nothing is gramma-
tically far more flexible as it can be a noun or
pronoun. Nothing evokes semantics that plays
with ambiguity and polysemy.
Nothing has both positive and negative
connotations, and philosophies that either
exclude or lead to it. Despite the non-linearity
of the Western tradition concerning nothing, it is
quite clear that from Socrates onwards nothing
has been considered inferior to something. For
instance, Aristotle has no room for nothing in
his categories, neither has Plato in his theory
of ideas. Contrary to the apparent hostility
towards nothing in classical metaphysics, Conor
Cunningham outlines a tradition that is founded
on meontotheological nothing. According to him,
a noteworthy early representative of the meon-
totheological tradition was Plotinus (c.20570),
who stated that being and something are inferior
to non-being and nothing (Cunningham xiii, 34).
The ultimate logic of nothing governs meon-
totheological thought, whereas the ultimate
something has been the standard point of
departure in metaphysics since Plato and
Aristotle.
Predictably, the meontotheological nothing
recurs in various religious mysticisms (such as
Kabbalah and apophatic Christian mysticism)
from late Antiquity to the pre-Enlightenment
period, manifesting through themes such
as ineffability, obscurity and unattainability.
In mysticism, nothing represents that which
is beyond the grasp and comprehension a
property most commonly assigned to God.
In other words, it illustrates a religious desire
that is without an object of desire. Eastern
religious thought is topical here as well: Chan and
Zen Buddhism influenced the philosophies of
Heidegger and the Kyoto School.
In addition to these philosophical and theolo-
gical approaches, the essays in this special issue
study the various manifestations of nothing in art.
EDITORIALINTRODUCTION
antti salminensami sjo berg
ALL FOR NOTHING
ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/12/0301^6 2012 Taylor & Francishttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2012.722388
1
Dow
nloa
ded
by [U
nivers
ity of
Ken
t] at
05:14
30 N
ovem
ber 2
012
-
Pliny took advantage of the idea, Shakespeare
and Lewis Carroll toyed with it and Mallarme
made it the aim of his aesthetic pursuits. The
most familiar instances of nothingness in art are
probably the non-representational paintings of
Malevich and the recurring uses of typographical
empty spaces in poetry by authors as varied as
Celan, e.e. cummings and the Russian futurists.
The interplay of art and nothingness culminates
in completely blank books (e.g., George
Maciunas, Isidore Isou) and empty exhibitions
by Yves Klein, Robert Irwin and others. It should
be noted that these experiments were often
spurred on by various forms of mysticism, as
was the case with Malevich, Celan and Isou.
nothing and nihilism
In the existential-phenomenological line of think-
ing nothingness is not only a textual phenomenon
in the strict sense but also a primordial
experience. Experiential nothingness is deeply
rooted in German soil by virtue of the speculative
theology of the High Middle Ages. On the one
hand, Western mystical traditions from, say at
least, Rhine Mysticism onwards, render the
experience of nothingness a holistic experience,
which connects the spiritual subject to every flow
of creation and ultimately to the godhead in
pantheist or pan-entheist manner. On the other,
there is a more obscure current, presumably
originating from gnosticism and its apocryphic
sermons. This trait regards nothingness as a
kind of counter-holism, where nothing relates
to nothing and nothing else. In addition, this
alternative non-identity fuels the gnostic verve of
the apophatic tradition of negative theology.
The modern tradition of the dialectical
metaphysics of nothingness is easily traced back
to Hegels famous passage in the third chapter
of Science of Logic (181213), which provides the
grounding dialectics of Western nothingness
that relates to being and becoming. However,
it is the renegade Hegelian and anarchist Max
Stirner who gives this vision an existential-
political motto in the preface of The Ego and
his Own (1845). All things are nothing to me,
he formulates, and continues: I am not nothing
in the sense of emptiness, but I am the creative
nothing [schopferische Nichts], the nothing out of
which I myself as creator create everything (5).
Hence Stirners anarchic ego is asubjective
and devoid of essentialistic substance. With this
gesture, Stirner opens up the possibility of the
empty revolutionary subject that is capable of
leaving the beaten track because of the subjects
radical non-detachment. In fact, this is reminis-
cent of Meister Eckharts negative self, which
Stirner adopts via Hegel. If Stirners Nichts is
atheist and atheological to the point of outright
nihilism, it is his most faithful follower,
Nietzsche, who revitalizes the spiritual urgency
of nothingness. In The Gay Science (1882) one
has to pay attention to the cosmic topography
of the after God situation, which lays the
foundation for the whole of post-Nietzschean
thought. In the words of Nietzsches madman
who seeks God in the market place:
I will tell you. We have killed him you
and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did
we do this? How could we drink up the sea?
Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the
entire horizon? What were we doing when
we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither
is it moving now? Whither are we moving?
Away from all suns? Are we not plunging
continually? Backward, sideward, forward,
in all directions? Is there still any up or
down? Are we not straying, as through an
infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath
of empty space? Has it not become colder?
(Nietzsche 181)
It may be that in the post-Nietzschean era,
namely after the death of God, nothing is the
place (or no-place, utopos) forsaken by the
godhead. If this is true, longing for nothing has
become a placebo for the longing for God. For
instance, Giorgio Agamben highlights the impor-
tance of the experience of nihilism. For him, the
formulation that there is nothing to reveal
becomes the subject of revelation. Yet Agambens
nothing does not simply designate the mean-
inglessness of existence, but rather the absence of
any final (eschatological) revelation (Agamben
34, 160).1 In a similar manner, most of the post-
Nietzschean thought has adopted the atheism of
Nietzsche, which emphasizes a belief in nothing.
editorial introduction
2
Dow
nloa
ded
by [U
nivers
ity of
Ken
t] at
05:14
30 N
ovem
ber 2
012
-
The belief in nothing constructs a kind of
atheist transcendence, and the transcendental
nothing appearing in texts is a tacit and everyday
revelation, mysticism without mysticism, and an
open horizon of immanent transcendence. It is
worth mentioning that the same abyss without
relief, God without existence, is to be found
mutatis mutandis in another remarkable advo-
cate of gnostically inspired (a)theology, Georges
Bataille. One aspect of his interior experience
(lexperience interieure) is as transgressive as
possible: a sudden encounter with the dead God.
Whereas in Nietzsches thinking God leaves an
empty space after dissolving, Batailles sense of
nothingness summons the absolute spectre, which
continues to haunt contemporary Continental
thought. In other words, many key thinkers of
1900s encountered the radical divine alterity in
nothingness, the ontological status of which was
far from irrefutable.
Active and passive nihilisms, with or without
theological undercurrents, are not, of course, all-
encompassing categories. It is quite surprising
that in Objective Logic (1898), Charles S.
Peirce takes a stance between the two extremes:
The nothing of negation is the nothing of
death, which comes second to, or after, every-
thing. But this pure zero is the nothing of
not having been born. There is no individual
thing, no compulsion, outward nor inward,
no law. (148)
A similar stance is assumed by Blanchot in his
musings about death and dying: the former
is beyond our reach and the latter manifests
our anguish resulting from this fact. However, the
French debate regarding nothing is somewhat
distinct and requires a bit of backtracking.
A key characteristic in the French discussion
concerning nothing is the interplay between
philosophy and literature that addresses philoso-
phical themes, such as existential topics. The
interaction became apparent during the latter
part of the nineteenth century. Victor Hugo
illustrates this characteristic in Les Miserables
(1862) by stating that everything is something
and nothing is not anything (272). Hugo
continues along the lines of Diderot and
DAlembert, according to whom thought and
language always render nothing into something
(Diderot 816).
The beginning of the twentieth century was a
culmination of the French tradition of thought
regarding nothing. Henri Bergsons seminal
Creative Evolution (1907) treats nothing as
utterly alien to everyday life. According to him,
nothing is a pseudo-idea that is merely an
impression produced by language. Bergsons
renowned argument is that nothing is as
absurd as a square circle, which resurfaces
anew in philosophical discussion (Bergson 167).
The Bergsonian view holds that absolute nothing-
ness is comparable to lack of awareness or death
and, hence, it is not within the field of
experience. The ability to imagine nothingness
is merely a characteristic of imagination, not an
ontological foundation.
Bergsons positivist critique stands against the
backdrop of Hegels philosophy. Hegelian dialec-
tics and its emphasis on negativity were pivotal
in French philosophy throughout the twentieth
century. Alexandre Koje`ves lectures on Hegel
in the 1930s resulted in the predominance
of Koje`vian Hegelianism in France, which also
aroused determined anti-Hegelian reactions, one
of these being Batailles idea of interior experi-
ence. Besides Koje`ve, Batailles influences
derive both from Nietzsche and Heidegger, the
grand old man of nothingness-related thinking
in twentieth-century Continental philosophy.
However, perhaps the most renowned popular
application of ontological nothingness derives
from Sartres Being and Nothingness (1943).
According to him, the scope of philosophical
inquiry is broader by means of negation than with
affirmation. Sartres point, which is derived from
Hegel, in all its simplicity, is that negation has
a broader phenomenal scope than affirmation.
His term nihilation (neantisation) refers to
negation on the level of immediate perception
instead of reflexivity. Furthermore, nothingness
is the ontological reality derived from nihilation.
Sartre aims his argument at Bergson, because,
for Sartre, nothingness could not be a part of
consciousness, which is why it necessarily estab-
lishes a separate ontological category. Sartre
hereby emphasizes the fact that nothingness
cannot be named without rendering it an object
salminen & sjo berg
3
Dow
nloa
ded
by [U
nivers
ity of
Ken
t] at
05:14
30 N
ovem
ber 2
012
-
with a false presence. However, the problem is
that even in this manner nothingness is postu-
lated by the conscious subject, which renders
nothing noumenal. In this respect, Sartre proves
to be an essentialist.
nothingness as away of being
The German ideas of nothingness preceding
Heidegger were characterized not only by active
and passive variations but also by ontico-spiritual
transformations. In his mid- and late philosophy
(after the Kehre of the 1930s), Heidegger perfects
his anti-Hegelian and anti-Koje`vian under-
standing of nothingness as a dichotomy-
transcending third term that is not bound to
any negation. The final corrections to his What
is Metaphysics? (1929) reveal that nothingness is
the authentic way to Being and that Being
ultimately fuses with nothingness without result-
ing in any difference.2 Following Heideggers
thought, nothingness is non-dialectical and
does not negate something. Rather, nothing
nothings (Nichts nichtet) and is thus more
originary than the not and negation (Heidegger
86). According to Heidegger, nothingness is not
reducible to negativity, absence or negative
poetics of any kind, nor can it be rendered into
a positive term. Rather, Heidegger names it as a
placeholder (Platzhalter) for Dasein. Just as zero
lies between negative and positive numbers and
appears as part of other numbers (e.g., 0.0093;
10,022), nothingness is not an ultimate end or
beginning of Being but an event of an in-between
within language instead of its apophatic failure.
Here we are far from Rudolf Carnaps and
Bergsons positivist views of nothingness, which
depict nothing as a pseudo-concept and a
saturation point of classical metaphysics.
Challenging Heidegger as a champion of nothing-
ness in his polemic article The Elimination
of Metaphysics through the Logical Analysis of
Language (1932), Carnap fails to see that in
Heidegger and his tradition of nothingness
rooted in Eckharts vernacular sermons and
Angelus Silesius Cherubinischer Wandersmann
(1674) nothingness is a crucial overcoming of
the very logic of Hegelian negation. Neither does
he credit the experiential quality of nothingness
as mystical and fundamentally ontological topos,
but only a failure of propositional language.
Against this eliminativist background it is not
surprising that the idea of nothingness became
a watershed separating the post-Heideggerian
Continental tradition from the analytical. In
Continental thought, nothingness is understood
as a creative blind spot that would overcome the
double root of Western metaphysics Aristotles
classifying ontology and Platos duplication of
reality. In the legacy of the Vienna Circle,
nothingness is considered a kind of linguistic
fog that should be removed in order to achieve
a scientifically pure language. Depending on
the school of thought, nothingness represents
either a threat or an opportunity. In this
historical and ongoing debate, nothingness
reveals its pre-conceptual and pre-dialectical
power as a non-differentiating concept and an
experience that is an origin, to adopt Benjamins
dictum, as far as it becomes a goal.
Even after Sartre and Heidegger, the Hegelian
identification of being and nothingness is central
in French phenomenology (for instance for
Michel Henry). However, by virtue of anti-
Hegelian philosophers such as Levinas and
Blanchot, the discussion about nothing develops
towards somewhat scattered adaptations of the
concept that branches off to (apophatic) terms
like otherness and abyss, which flicker
at the limits of conceptualization. For instance,
there is no room for pure nothingness in
Derridas thought, in which language plays a
seminal role. Advocating this development is the
fact that even though Derrida does not arrive at a
clear position on nothing, his later philosophy
revolves around the idea. Arguing against
Bergson, Derrida (like Deleuze later on) does
not define the square circle as a logical absurdity.
Rather, even though there is no possible object
the proposition could relate to, the proposition is
meaningful in itself. The grammatical form of the
square circle tolerates a relation to an object
(Derrida 11011). In Speech and Phenomena
(2003), Derrida applies nothing (rien) that lies
between phenomenological dualisms. It is not
pure nothingness but a sort of indefinite and
indefinable limit-state, much as nothingness is
for Heidegger.
editorial introduction
4
Dow
nloa
ded
by [U
nivers
ity of
Ken
t] at
05:14
30 N
ovem
ber 2
012
-
Derridas position contains several key
thoughts about nothing that may best be
described as an intrusion of literary language
into philosophy. The investigation may begin
with death, which Bergson compared with
nothing. For Blanchot and Levinas, death is an
ephemeral blind spot of philosophy. Levinas
points out that Heidegger mistakenly included
death in Dasein, even though death must be
exterior to the individual (cf. Levinas). The point
of the absolute unattainability of death can be
illustrated by comparing death with a black hole.
The event of death is commensurate with the
event horizon. Once a limit has been crossed,
no information, no thought can be transmitted.
In death, individual consciousness ceases to exist
and one can never know ones own death.
As Levinas states, only the death of others can
be known. Hence the event of ones own death
is comparable with that of nothing.
How can we live with nothingness, then? By no
means: nothingness, at least in Western thought,
is a dangerous idea and a radical experience that
has not often been tolerated, but understood as
mere nihilism pure and simple. The counter-
argument for championing nothingness could be
that, after all, foregrounding sheer emptiness
only radicalizes negativity, or, as Werner
Hamacher puts it, mindful of Paul Celans
poetics of nothingness, rendering nothing a
positive danger that threatens many of his
early texts: [. . .] the danger of allowing for
absence merely as the negative of presence, and
thus the danger of wanting to change absence, by
virtue of language, into everlasting Being
(Hamacher 348). Having said this, Hegels
meontic (compared with Spinozas oukontic)
nothingness does not fare any better if we
understand it in terms of the metaphysics of
presence (or absence). Rather, in Celan as well as
in late Heidegger, nothing is not to be taken
metaphysically as a perennial name for an
absolute absence or negation, but as an experi-
ential and dynamic matrix that reveals the
non-foundationality of acting and being (cf.
Schurmann). Such nothing leads to an existential
state of anarchy that has its roots in the mystical
non-detachment of Meister Eckhart as well as the
political Nichts of Stirner and his radical legacy.
nothing today
Amid the current crises, be they ecological,
economic or social, both nihilisms, the passive
and active, are topical again this time as
responses to the collapse of Western hegemony
over the liberal economy and biosphere. Perhaps
the heart of the late-modern capitalist matrix was
really the Stirnerite schopherische Nichts, which
was such a destructive view of nothing bereft of
meaning and out of joint from the start because
of its nihilistic passivity. It almost goes without
saying that the power centres are always empty
(just visit the capitals of capitalism: Brussels,
Beijing, Moscow, Paris or New York), and that
the idea of nothingness is to be found not in the
textual margins but in the inner kernel of late-
modern semiosis. Maybe there is an approaching
momentum in which the active concept of
nothingness could be taken up consciously and
politically, not only as a topos to be meditated.
The potential of revolutionary nothingness is still
largely untapped and has an imprint of Russian
nihilism of the 1800s. Perhaps, and hopefully,
there is a possibility of zero-points (becoming no-
one, owning/owing nothing, having literally
nothing to lose) that could evoke creative
resistance to the current crisis.
Baudrillard envisions the power of nothing
as a kind of non-recoverable resource. Against
the Nietzschean backdrop of passive nihilism,
which entails the exchange of everything to
nothing, he envisions its opposite. Any system
including nothing will face the non-exchange-
ability of nothing, in other words, the impossi-
bility of exchange be it economic, ecologic,
the communication of messages and so on. The
potential of nothing becomes apparent once it is
not regarded as mere rhetoric.
Leibnizs well-known question why is there
something rather than nothing? gains a prag-
matic formulation in this special issue: How is
there nothing rather than something? This
change of perspective to immanent may partially
resolve the Leibnizian paradox, which is, after all,
a Western koan (as nothing is not). For these
reasons our approach to the theme is largely
descriptive: what is at stake, when nothingness
unfolds in thought and writing, in semiosis and
salminen & sjo berg
5
Dow
nloa
ded
by [U
nivers
ity of
Ken
t] at
05:14
30 N
ovem
ber 2
012
-
in experience? Alternatively, formulated into
material form: why is there nothingness
instead of ? Thus nothing is the
remainder between the positive
and negative connotations of
nothing. After the operation of
reduction to nothing, nothing
remains.
notes1 Similar loss of foundation had already surfacedin Russian religious existentialism (Shestov,Berdyaevs Ungrund), which is, however, distinctfrom the nihilism-oriented French existentialism.
2 The original passage reads: Das Nichts als dasAndere zum Seienden ist der Schleier des Seins.Im Sein hat sich anfa nglich jedes Geschick desSeienden schon vollendet (Heidegger 55).
bibliographyAgamben, Giorgio. La potenza del pensiero: Saggie conferenze.Milan: Pozza, 2005. Print.
Bergson, Henri. LEvolution cre atrice. Paris: PUF,1959. Print.
Carnap, Rudolf. U berwindung der Metaphysikdurch logische Analyse der Sprache. Erkenntnis2 (1932): 219^41. Print.
Cunningham, Conor. A Genealogy of Nihilism:Philosophies of Nothingand the Difference of Theology.London: Routledge, 2002. Print.
Derrida, Jacques. La Voix et le phe nome' ne. Paris:Quadridge, 2003. Print.
Diderot,Denis.Encyclope die. XXII.Geneva: Pellet,1778. Print.
Hamacher, Werner. Second of Inversion:Movements of a Figure through Celans Poetry.Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature fromKant to Celan. Trans. Peter Fenves. Stanford:Stanford UP,1999. 337^88. Print.
Heidegger, Martin. Pathmarks. Trans. William A.McNeill.Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print.
Hugo, Victor. Les Mise rables II: Cosette. Paris:Pagnerre,1862. Print.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Totalite et infini. Essais surlexte riorite .The Hague: Nijhoff,1961. Print.
Nietzsche,Friedrich.TheGay Science.Trans.WalterKaufmann.NewYork: Random,1974. Print.
Peirce, Charles S. Objective Logic. CollectedPapers of Charles S. Peirce. Vol. 6. Ed. CharlesHartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge, MA:Harvard UP,1965.147^54. Print.
Sartre, Jean-Paul.LEtre et lene ant.Paris: Gallimard,1949. Print.
Schu rmann, Reiner. Heidegger on Being and Acting:From Principles to Anarchy. Bloomington: IndianaUP,1990. Print.
Stirner, Max. The Ego and his Own: The Case ofthe Individual against Authority. Trans. Steven T.Byington.NewYork: Dover, 2005. Print.
Antti Salminen
Huhtimaenkatu 5 E4
Tampere 33100
Finland
E-mail: [email protected]
Sami Sjoberg
Peter Szondi Institute of
Comparative Literature
Freie Universitat Berlin
Habelschwerdter Allee 45
14195 Berlin
Germany
E-mail: [email protected]
editorial introduction
Dow
nloa
ded
by [U
nivers
ity of
Ken
t] at
05:14
30 N
ovem
ber 2
012