Introduction to the Topical Issue “Nihilism through a Contemporary Lens: Post-Continental and Other Perspectives”

The “most horrible of all horrors” is how Jacobi describes the appearance of nihilism in philosophy.^[1] Such is the dreadfully unexpected consequence of Kant’s discovery of the transcendental subject, which, according to Jacobi, finds its completion in Fichte. This is a discovery in the fullest sense as it announces the coming of something objective, irreversible, and universal, replacing the entire classical world with an intelligible world centred around the subject’s nascent rational capacities – it marks the death of God, with the human taking its place. However, it soon emerges that what arrives with this event is something exceedingly alien and indifferent not only to the ambitions of the Enlightenment but also, and more importantly, to the very alternative between God and the human. For Jacobi, the “most horrible of all horrors” is a double-sided violence peculiar to the rise of reason, which imposes itself by blocking in advance any possible escape route for thought. On the one hand, granting full autonomy to a conditioning subject tends to negate the entirety of experience as an illusion; on the other, this conditioning subject finds itself trapped in an unavoidable compulsion for self-negation. Being fully immersed in the horror of this inescapable violence, Jacobi oscillated between the opposite poles of “flying into rage” and “invoking Annihilation,”^[2] until he found solace in a renewed concept of faith.^[3] After him, philosophers have struggled to escape the manic-depressive vacillation between fury and suicide, as well as the regress to fideism. But none of these attempts have alleviated the horror; on the contrary, each new solution has seemed to exacerbate the initial trauma or bury it even deeper.

The whole ambiguity of the critical turn, the double movement through which the subject is limited and liberated, appears to have been the breaking of something so deep within and fundamental, the opening of a fracture so threatening that the ensuing philosophy becomes a series of attempts to oppress it. Nick Land presents perhaps the wittiest depiction of the horrors of reason when he writes that “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth,” with the period immediately following it nothing but a series of wretched and reactionary efforts to prevent the horror from leaking into thought.^[4] From Jacobi to the late nineteenth century, including Hegel, nihilism was perceived as either something to be avoided like a plague or a means for accusation.

However, the meaning and function of this mysterious violence underwent a fundamental transformation when philosophy was gradually taken over from the academic authorities. As Michael Allen Gillespie notes, the Left Hegelians made use of the Hegelian concept of negation – contra Hegel’s own intentions – as a means for transforming nihilism into “a world-historical political program.”^[5] This is the crucial “moment when nihilism passed from the realm of ideas into actuality.”^[6] What seemed the greatest of all existential disasters to the idealist became a blessing and an immense source of hope in the hands of the realist. The attempt here was, on the one hand, to expose dialectics’ battle with nihilism as a symptom of philosophy’s complicity with the state and, on the other, to uncover the potential for a revolution in both theory and practice in the same dialectics and in the negative powers of nihilism. The Left Hegelian experimentation with nihilism was later taken up in a more rigorous way by the Russian intellectuals and revolutionaries.^[7] Nihilism was a crucial determinant in the long series of cultural and political upheavals that eventually led to the October Revolution.^[8]

The ultimate leftist strategy in the face of nihilism is to treat its destructive shock waves as if they are raw energies to be channelled into an emancipatory ideal. Nietzsche was fully aware of this and had the privilege of writing at a time when the revolutionary potential of nihilism was already revealed. This allowed him to obtain an overarching perspective on nihilism’s reactionary and revolutionary aspects so that he could accommodate them within the wider project of overcoming nihilism – the path beyond nihilism required us to pass through nihilism and push it to its ultimate consequences.^[9]

In this way, Nietzsche glimpsed the first indications of a non-nihilistic future that is not merely a reactionary oppression of the horrors of nihilism – which is ultimately an aggravation of the same nihilism – but a traversing and transforming of the forces that have been at work in the constitution of nihilism from the very beginning. This futural vision enabled Nietzsche to look deeper into the origins of nihilism by tracing its genesis much further back than the Enlightenment. Nietzsche makes us realize that, while nihilism made itself known in the Enlightenment, it was already operative at the dawn of philosophy: Anaximander’s moralization of existence, the Parmenidean abstraction of “being,” and Plato’s doctrine of Ideas were the initial forms in which life or existence was denied.^[10] The death of God and the concomitant devaluation of all values are conditioned by this more fundamental life-negating tendency, which defines the original sense of nihilism. With Nietzsche, the whole history of philosophy becomes the history of nihilism, of denying life. As such, the overcoming of nihilism or the affirmation of life becomes the grand philosophical project which unites and coordinates diverse post-Kantian projects such as the overcoming of metaphysics, positivism, representation, state thought, morality, and anthropocentrism.

Nietzsche’s even more profound discovery was that nihilism extends far beyond the scope of philosophy. He conceived the entire history of the human as various manifestations of nihilism. The overcoming of nihilism, therefore, required a rupture that could not be understood by philosophy alone and demanded wider artistic, scientific, political, ethical, physiological, and spiritual considerations – a rupture beyond the human as a whole.

If twentieth-century continental philosophy is predominantly post-Nietzschean, this is due to the way it carries Nietzsche’s radicalization of nihilism to a further level by re-problematizing nihilism through the newly emerging differential ontologies. These philosophies of difference – largely initiated by Martin Heidegger and Gilles Deleuze – present to us the various forms under which difference is oppressed, which for them is how nihilism is produced, and supplement this with a strategy to locate nihilism’s oppressive forces within a more original, affirmative framework. This represents a tendency to discover the roots of nihilism in depths that remained uncharted even by Nietzsche.

When Deleuze, in his early reading of Nietzsche, conceived of nihilism as “the transcendental principle of our way of thinking,”^[11] he sought to highlight that the origin of nihilism cannot be tracked down to an empirical moment. While factual data and common sense tell us that nihilism is a historically contingent phenomenon that appeared at a certain time, hence human beings had surely lived a long pre-nihilistic past, the cunningness and tyranny of nihilism lie in its ability to retroactively posit itself as the transcendental condition of the entirety of this past, without showing us the illusory operation through which it sneaks into the a priori. Indeed, nihilism initially shows itself in a series of empirical phenomena: The highest values devalue themselves, right-wing ideologies grow stronger, the joy of collective struggle is forgotten, individual despair becomes rife among revolutionaries, self-destructive tendencies become more dominant in all aspects of life, etc. Once one attempts to inquire into the source of all these disquieting events, however, it turns out that spotting their source in another – and final – empirical instance is impossible. There can be no anthropological, psychoanalytic, biological, or historical account of the emergence of nihilism. The special disciplines can only remain at the level of symptoms, that is, they can only present a science of the logic of the development of symptoms. That which must be presupposed to have knowledge of these symptoms is the still unknown domain of nihilism.^[12] The origin of nihilism escapes the empirical; it resists a complete genealogy. The more one approaches the origin of nihilism, the more one approaches the limits of the empirical. This makes the Nietzschean overcoming-of-nihilism-through-its-traversal all the more relevant for Deleuze, but only if one dares to embark upon a dangerous limit experience in which the traumatic fracture that so terrified Jacobi is deepened and perceived as the harbinger of a non-nihilistic conception of the transcendental.^[13]

However, Deleuze’s continual reworking of the transcendental, as well as his attempt to subordinate negation to affirmation, seems to have remained unresolved throughout his career. Thinkers such as Eleanor Kaufman,^[14] Daniel Colucciello Barber,^[15] and Andrew Culp^[16] have pointed out Deleuze’s inability to produce the revolutionary negation that he promised. Benjamin Noys^[17] conceived the impasse of Deleuzian vitalism as part of the more general affirmationism that characterized twentieth-century continental thought from Jacques Derrida to Alain Badiou. Ray Brassier^[18] has made the same critique by claiming that Deleuze’s subordination of negation to affirmation was dependent upon the more fundamental subordination of science to philosophy or knowledge to revolutionary desire, which risked regressing to pre-critical naivety.

All these suggest that Deleuze’s impasse was not an individual crisis but rather belonged to the peculiarities of what Ashley Woodward has diagnosed as nihilism’s post-modern turn.^[19] For Woodward, the post-Nietzschean responses to nihilism are marked by an epochal shift: They struggle not only with the problems arising from the modern condition but also with the changes that occurred with post-modernism. Nihilism changes sense as we move from one social, historical, and political period to another. In such diverse philosophers as Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, and Gianni Vattimo, Woodward observes various solutions to the decline of the pre-modern and the modern. The challenge that these post-modern philosophies face is the formulation of a non-nihilistic mode of thinking while simultaneously affirming the modern disenchantment of the world and not falling back on a pre-modern ideal or submission to a non-nihilistic utopia.

To what extent the twentieth-century responses to nihilism have been successful is open to discussion, but what is now becoming ever clearer is the fact that, for over two decades, the philosophical scene has been witnessing a move from the post-modern/continental paradigm towards a new epoch that is still in the making. In his prescient book from 2006, Post-Continental Philosophy, John Ó Maoilearca speaks of a silent but irreversible event that occurred in 1988 with the publication of four important texts by Deleuze (Le Pli), Michel Henry (Voir l’invisible), Alain Badiou (L’Étre et l’événement), and François Laruelle (discussion with Derrida in La Décision Philosophique No 5).^[20] Maoilearca argues that the basic features of the diverse philosophies that have been categorized under the title “continental philosophy” are in the process of fundamental change. Two main aspects of this new “post-continental” orientation should be noted. First, it embraces an uncompromising radicalization of immanence and a defence of naturalism against the transcendence and irrealisms that populate continental thought. Second, these post-continental philosophies do away with philosophy’s congenital habit of grounding sciences and instead affirm the autonomy of sciences by establishing equality between philosophy and sciences. We might consider the intellectual developments in the late 2000s as a succession of justifications for Maoilearca’s claim. What we observe is an unexpected resurgence of realisms as well as more science-oriented forms of doing theory, as seen in currents such as Non-Philosophy, Accelerationism, New Materialism, Speculative Realism, Object-Oriented Ontology, and Neo-Rationalism. Furthermore, this is accompanied by the progressive blurring of the continental/analytic opposition – one of the main bases on which the continental has traditionally distinguished itself.

Yet, this does not mean that there is a clear line that separates continental and post-continental; quite the contrary. We are far from having definitive criteria with which to categorize a work under either heading. Especially in comparison to the analytic/continental distinction, the continental/post-continental distinction is less well-defined, which limits the degree to which it can be said to replace the former’s authority. Furthermore, the term “post-continental” is only used occasionally, and when it is used, it ultimately serves as a tool for detecting nuances that one hopes will have the potential for deeper differences. One might therefore doubt whether the post-continental turn is more than ephemeral or if the resurrection of the real and the autonomy of the sciences are powerful enough to accomplish the change it promises. Might this be because the essence of the movement that initially separated the post-continental from the continental cannot be reduced to the features that Maoilearca “outlined,” as the subtitle of his book suggests? Can there be a deeper instance that guides the turn towards the real and science? This topical issue departs from the premise that nihilism might be the unspoken problem that secretly orients continental philosophy towards a different epoch.

Beyond Maoilearca’s work, most of the emerging post-continental currents have remained largely unresponsive to the problem of nihilism despite the central role it has played in the development of continental philosophy. This suggests that the continental paradigm is left behind without encountering the main problem upon which it rests. Post-continental currents, therefore, seem not to have sufficiently analysed their opponent. As a result, nihilism either tends to become obsolete or is occasionally and temporarily/strategically embraced as a means to counter the continental. But even in those cases when nihilism is defended, it remains unclear why such a need appears in post-continental discourses.

Having said that, the disregard for nihilism is not unique to post-continental currents. An even greater negligence can be observed in today’s more established forms of continental or post-modern philosophy. Nihilism is either forgotten or reduced to an object of mere scholastic interest. We can comfortably say that the overcoming of nihilism has long since lost the status of an ambitious project as found in the cases of Heidegger and Deleuze. The same goes for the lack of any political motivation behind the interest in nihilism, either with an agenda to expose nihilism’s role in subordinating philosophy to right-wing ideologies or making use of nihilism as a means for emancipation from state thought.

A confrontation between nihilism and the post-continental might not only allow us to understand the deeper operations that triggered the divergence from the continental but also, more importantly, shed new light on the procedures that initiated the disenchantment of the world. If the post-continental turn is a late consequence of the Kantian turn, this connection can best be understood by looking at how the latter’s traumatic fracture is deepened in the former. The post-continental conceptions of immanence, reality, and science can be conceived as new tools for probing into the initial fracture and finally discovering the meaning of the horror and trauma that so obstinately haunted post-Kantian philosophy.

The essays collected in this issue approach the problem of nihilism within the new context opened by the post-continental. They aim to rethink nihilism outside the confines of the modern/post-modern and continental/analytic dichotomies by making use of post-continental thought’s realist and scientifically oriented resources. In doing so, they explore the previously unexplored possibilities of the post-continental turn and extend its boundaries. This hopefully offers a fresh look at the way nihilism operates in today’s philosophical scene.

The issue also presents, under the “other perspectives” title, approaches to nihilism that fall outside the post-continental turn and instead attempt to rethink nihilism through new readings of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Iqbal, Heidegger, Derrida, and Deleuze.

In “Supernormalising Nothing from the Hyperbolic Nihil to the Ordinary Supernothing,” John Ó Maoilearca offers a comparative reading of the mystic Mina Bergson and the philosopher Henri Bergson to bridge the gap between philosophy and spiritualism. Maoilearca claims that this provides a new concept of negation that does not designate an emptiness or a creation ex nihilo, but rather a primary and productive process. Maoilearca opposes his position to Nietzsche’s and Deleuze’s affirmationism or anti-nihilism and conceives of nihilism as a better opportunity for creation. For Maoilearca, this productive nihilism or “supernothing” is a mode of establishing the continuity of the natural and the so-called “supernatural.” Maoilearca invites us to understand this continuity as part of the “immanentism” that is characteristic of the post-continental orientation.

Ashley Woodward’s “Signifying Nothing: Nihilism, Information and Signs” presents a novel solution to the problem of nihilism by establishing a synthesis between post-continental thought and information theory. Although both these theories are determined by a nihilistic orientation, Woodward argues that their synthesis can effectuate a “retorsion” in which they begin to produce an unexpected non-nihilistic result: Two nihilisms – one philosophical and the other scientific – go hand in hand towards the overcoming of nihilism. On the one hand, information theory’s liberation of information from the authority of a transcendent meaning – and hence its desacralization of the world – does not have to lead to nihilism, unlike what Heidegger thought. Instead, it makes possible the affirmation of the world that Nietzsche foresaw, but in a way that cannot be realized within the post-Nietzschean/continental paradigm. On the other hand, the philosophical resources for such a liberation are found in the more scientifically oriented post-continental thinkers such as Badiou, Laruelle, Brassier, and Quentin Meillassoux. In particular, Meillassoux’s concept of “meaningless-sign” and Laruelle’s real as “secret” help Woodward affirm the radical autonomy of information as “sensations and affects, … libidinal intensities and bodily desires.”

Patrick Gamez’s “Being Truly Wrong: Enlightened Nihilism or Unbound Naturalism” follows the same trajectory as Woodward and offers a new way of overcoming nihilism by making use of post-continental theory. Rather than information theory, however, he takes naturalism as a fulcrum for developing a philosophical response to the problem of nihilism. Gamez presents his post-continental naturalism through a detailed analysis of Brassier’s Nihil Unbound. While he embraces the basic concerns of Brassier’s Laruellian–Sellarsian attempt to rehabilitate representation and rationalism and uses Brassier as a means to move beyond the continental paradigm, he ultimately deems this project to be a reproduction of the Christian morality that Nietzsche opposes. Instead, Gamez makes use of Willard Van Orman Quine and Huw Price as alternatives to the nihilistic tendency in post-continental thought. The naturalism of these philosophers allows Gamez to claim that the discovery that life and thought are “always already in error,” that they are susceptible to both going wrong and correcting themselves, is an opportunity to make a more “legitimate claim to the legacy of Enlightenment.” Against Brassier’s nihilistic embrace of the objectification of thinking and the trauma of life, Gamez proposes this new naturalism as a revaluation of truth through its subordination to error.

Like Woodward and Gamez, in “How does one Cosmotheoretically Respond to the Heat Death of the Universe?” Joel White criticizes the nihilistic orientation of post-continental thought, but he does so by taking cosmology as the scientific standpoint. According to White, contrary to general opinion, thermodynamics and heat death do not need to serve as scientific justifications for nihilism. Instead, they can help unify the cosmic and moral orders that have been separated by the cosmic nihilism of the Enlightenment. For White, the reason we seem to be eternally stuck in a disenchanted world is that the argument concerning the heat death of the universe relies on a misuse of Kant: Instead of, like Brassier did, relating the heat death to the faculty of understanding, we should relate it to the faculty of reason and conceive of it as a transcendental Idea. In this way, White relocates entropy as the “a priori condition of (im)possibility of thought.” This will in no way produce a “reactionary anti-modernism,” as we find in various continental currents. On the contrary, it can allow us to both affirm the modernist project and experience the self-overcoming of nihilism in order to find the human a new place “within the greater ecological and cosmic whole.”

In “Nihilism: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Now,” Peter Stewart-Kroeker stands opposed to Woodward and Gamez and criticizes the post-continental nihilisms of Eugene Thacker and Brassier from a Nietzschean perspective. According to Stewart-Kroeker, the post-continental nihilisms of these two thinkers continue to remain within the two phases of nihilism that Nietzsche distinguishes: The union of the will to nothingness and the will to truth, on the one hand, and the eternal return as “the most extreme form of nihilism,” on the other. To account for why this is the case, Stewart-Kroeker first reads Schopenhauer’s theory of will with recourse to the respective interpretations of Thacker and Nietzsche. After showing the insufficiency of Thacker’s embrace of Schopenhauer as a cosmic nihilist, he sides with Nietzsche’s critique of Schopenhauer, which exposes the complicity of Christian morality and modern atheism. Stewart-Kroeker later compares Nietzsche and Brassier to show how – like Gamez did, but now from a continental perspective – Brassier’s nihilism serves to reproduce Christian morality.

Along with Maoilearca, Adam Lovasz, with his “An Ontologically Nihilist Critique of Graham Harman’s Ontological Liberalism,” is one of two authors in this collection to defend an openly nihilist stance. Lovasz does this through a “nihilist reconfiguration” of Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology. He claims that pushing Harman’s “ontological liberalism” to its ultimate consequences will inevitably produce an “ontological nihilism.” Liberalism is therefore a preliminary stage towards an emancipatory nihilism, but only insofar as we understand these terms independent of their political and moral connotations which have been opposed by the post-Nietzschean continental thought. For Lovasz, the two most important aspects of Harman’s thought – one being the attempt to establish an uncompromising equality among objects and the other to affirm their withdrawn nature – signify the discovery of the ontological dimension of liberalism. Nevertheless, this discovery is deemed to be inconsistent if it continues to insist on holding together withdrawal and realism. Instead, we need to effectuate a “violent rupture of thought” in which withdrawal goes as far as affirming the unreality of the objects. To account for such a nihilist ontology, Lovasz reads Harman along with the work of Jan Westerhoff.

In “What End of Thought? On the True and the False Problem of Philosophy,” Mark Leegsma presents an introduction to what he calls “catastrophal thought.” According to Leegsma, catastrophe, understood as an irreversible end in which one cannot participate, is the essential event that haunts post-Kantian thought. He argues that Kant’s critical project of delimiting thought and experience confronts us with the problem of the end of thought more so than the beginning of thought. To pursue this catastrophic tendency, Leegsma presents a comprehensive reading of Meillassoux’s After Finitude where he claims that Meillassoux’s principle of unreason is ultimately an expression of “active nihilism” that is quite different from that of Nietzsche. While Meillassoux’s active nihilism implies the end of thought, it cannot effectively think it. Just as Meillassoux’s principle of unreason derives from an attempt to push post-Kantian thought to its ultimate consequences, Leegsma applies the same procedure to Meillassoux to prove that the end of thought can effectively be thought.

In “Between the Void and Emptiness: Ontological Paradox and Spectres of Nihilism in Alain Badiou’s Being and Event and Graham Priest’s One,” Georgie Newson criticizes Badiou and Priest for the same reason that Lovasz criticized Harman: Producing some form of ontological nihilism through the prioritization of a negativist concept. For Lovasz, this concept was Harman’s “withdrawal”; for Newson, Badiou’s “void” and Priest’s “emptiness” serve the same nihilism. To account for why this is the case, Newson presents a reading of Badiou’s and Priest’s respective commentaries on Parmenides, where both of these philosophers try to resolve the fundamental impasses that have “haunted Western philosophy since its inception.”

In “Nihilism Lost and Found: Brassier, Jonas, and Nishitani on Embracing and/or Overcoming Nihilism,” Andrea Lehner and Felipe Cuervo Restrepo challenge Brassier’s speculative nihilism through a defence of Hans Jonas’ and Keiji Nishitani’s attempts to overcome nihilism. Lehner and Restrepo argue that this can help us to give a philosophical response to the ecological catastrophe that we are facing. In this relation, they criticize Brassier’s radicalization of the Enlightenment project for being unresponsive to the need for having an ethics of nature. Jonas and Nishitani, albeit from entirely different perspectives, find solutions to the nihilistic purposelessness of a mind-independent nature or reality. Lehner and Restrepo claim that philosophy can be in line with the autonomous activity of the sciences while at the same time affirming that there are inherent values in nature which force us to hear an ecological imperative.

Feyzullah Yılmaz’s “Iqbal, Nietzsche and Nihilism: Reconstruction of Sufi Cosmology and Revaluation of Sufi Values in Asrar-i-Khudî” presents an extensive analysis of Muhammad Iqbal’s sufist solution to the problem of nihilism. Centring his reading against the backdrop of Iqbal’s personal life, Yılmaz shows how the personal crisis of Iqbal intersects with the collective crisis of Islamic societies. Iqbal suggests that the decadence that the Muslim world undergoes should be understood through Nietzsche’s critique of nihilism. To do this, Iqbal proposes an alternative to the false mysticism of Islamic intellectuals who conceive of the concept of law according to the metaphysical distinction between phenomenal and real, or inner and outer. This “self-mystification” serves as the conceptual background of Islamic nihilism, which, on a political level, distorts the original democracy and equality that, according to Iqbal, defined the early Muslim societies. In such a society, argues Iqbal, Islam is understood as the self-affirmation of the individual and God as the most unique individual. The religious ideal is thus attained not through the negation of life but by being more unique and creating in ourselves “the attributes of God.” Iqbal’s solution to the overcoming of nihilism is, therefore, a “spiritual democracy” whereby the fate of the human is not predetermined by God but is an “open-ended process” which will be determined by the human’s own capacities.

In “Beyond Negative Freedom and the Working-Class Subject: Another Kind of Madness,” Cynthia Cruz offers an equally Hegelian and Marxist theory of the working class in order to uncover new potential for the revolutionary subjectivity beyond the nihilistic tendencies of negative freedom. Cruz centres her analysis around the fact that the working-class subject is forcefully tied to negative freedom which designates the capacity to say “no” to an exterior force. While this capacity is the workers’ opportunity to access their interior life which has been invaded by capitalistic exploitation, and hence promises an invaluable liberation, it ultimately forecloses the possibility of a communal solution, becomes self-destructive, and tends to be complicit with capitalism’s own nihilism – the cancellation of differences. Cruz claims that, in negative freedom, the working class is trapped between two forms of nihilistic madness: The madness of “capitalist oblivion” and the madness which imprisons the subject in its own interior. However, Cruz believes that we can experience a third form of madness which will effectuate the movement towards the new and the unknown. This movement is the key to bringing madness a revolutionary power and going beyond the dialectics of madness, negation, and affirmation.

In “G. Deleuze’s Untimely [non-]: The Inverter of Platonic Nihilism to Ethics of Creation,” Konstantinos Nevrokoplis attempts a reformulation of Deleuze’s inversion of Platonism. Through a reading of Deleuze’s seminal texts such as Nietzsche and Philosophy and The Logic of Sense, he argues that we can observe in Deleuze a concept of “untimely [non-]” which not only expresses the “whole of Deleuzian philosophical war machine” but also represents the intersection of philosophy, arts, and politics. Nevrokoplis then makes use of the silent anonymity of the untimely [non-] as a means to challenge “the nihilism of the Ideas, images, and bad copies.”

Lee Braver’s “Eternal Return Hermeneutics in Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida” offers a new approach to Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return by conceiving of it as a hermeneutic apparatus. Braver argues for a textual experience of the eternal return in which reading becomes a way of submitting the text to the test of the eternal return. For Braver, interpreting a text faces the paradoxical challenge of making the text recur eternally without any change while at the same time transforming the text into something it has never been before. “The eternal return hermeneutics,” as Braver calls it, liberates the text from being an inert and past entity and converts it into a dynamic creation that comes from the future. Braver observes how the eternal return was already operative, first, in Nietzsche’s difficult relationship with Schopenhauer where he is forced to affirm his own past; second, in Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche where Heidegger imagines Nietzsche’s text as if it has been written uniquely for him; and, finally, in Derridean deconstruction which attempts to think of a repetition without an original beginning. Braver claims that bringing these three readings together provides a new mechanism for generating new meanings and allows us to overcome the nihilism concomitant with the loss of meaning.