Give us this day our daily nothing
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, 27 agosto 2026
In a book published at Leipzig in October 1844 by the publisher Wigand, a not unknown at all kind of man makes his appearance, one who seemed intolerable and unprecedented to his contemporaries, but who has since become perfectly familiar to us: the man who, as we read on the first and last page, “founded his cause on nothing”, i.e. a being in whom the dissolution of all faith and values reached its extreme form. He is certainly the first and unsurpassed nihilist, provided one points out that the nihilism here in question has today become the normal condition of humanity. The book is titled The Ego and Its Own, author Max Stirner.
Eighteen years later, in the magazine Russian Messenger, Turgenev published the novel in which the type of nihilist (the word makes here its appearance), incarnated by the protagonist Bazarov, is defined as follows: “a nihilist is a man who bows before no authority, who accepts no principle without examination, no matter what credit the principle has”. In Demons, published in volume form in 1873, Dostoevsy decides to confront the epochal problem of nihilism, particularly through the figure of Kirillov. From the nihilistic denial of the existence of God, Kirillov draws a radical consequence which both absolutises and upsets his very ego. “If there is no God,” — he asserts — “I am God. [...] If there is God, then the will is all his, and I cannot get out of his will. If not, the will is all mine, and it is my duty to proclaim self-will... It is my duty to shoot myself because the fullest point of my self-will is — for me to kill myself... There is no higher idea to me than the idea that there is no God... Man has always invented God in order to make it possible for him not to kill himself: that’s the whole of universal history up till now. I alone on earth and in the history of the universe do not want to invent God”.
It is by meditating on these pages that Nietzsche thinks of the death of God as the fundamental event of modernity: “The greatest recent event — that ‘God has died’, that the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable — is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe. [...] But in the main one may say: the event itself is far too great, too distant, too remote from the multitude’s capacity for comprehension even for the tidings of it to be thought of as having arrived as yet”.
For both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, the death of God and the advent of nihilism meant something so terrible that mankind could never accept it without questioning its very existence. For once, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky were not good prophets. Nihilism became the normal condition of humanity, but, unlike Kirillov, the ordinary man seems now to live with the death of God and nihilism without suffering or caring about it, literally as if nothing had happened. It is this dull and indifferent nihilism that we deal with; it is this normal daily nothing that we must account for. And if, as Nietzsche himself suggested, nihilism, accomplished and seized as such, is humanity’s great opportunity to escape its fatal destiny, i.e. if, as Benjamin thought, nihilism can become the method of a new politics, then the question we must ask ourselves is: “Why was this opportunity not taken? What prevented us from truly laying our cause on nothing and, instead of making it our normal condition, finding in it a way out of the fates of the West?”.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, 27 agosto 2026
In a book published at Leipzig in October 1844 by the publisher Wigand, a not unknown at all kind of man makes his appearance, one who seemed intolerable and unprecedented to his contemporaries, but who has since become perfectly familiar to us: the man who, as we read on the first and last page, “founded his cause on nothing”, i.e. a being in whom the dissolution of all faith and values reached its extreme form. He is certainly the first and unsurpassed nihilist, provided one points out that the nihilism here in question has today become the normal condition of humanity. The book is titled The Ego and Its Own, author Max Stirner.
Eighteen years later, in the magazine Russian Messenger, Turgenev published the novel in which the type of nihilist (the word makes here its appearance), incarnated by the protagonist Bazarov, is defined as follows: “a nihilist is a man who bows before no authority, who accepts no principle without examination, no matter what credit the principle has”. In Demons, published in volume form in 1873, Dostoevsy decides to confront the epochal problem of nihilism, particularly through the figure of Kirillov. From the nihilistic denial of the existence of God, Kirillov draws a radical consequence which both absolutises and upsets his very ego. “If there is no God,” — he asserts — “I am God. [...] If there is God, then the will is all his, and I cannot get out of his will. If not, the will is all mine, and it is my duty to proclaim self-will... It is my duty to shoot myself because the fullest point of my self-will is — for me to kill myself... There is no higher idea to me than the idea that there is no God... Man has always invented God in order to make it possible for him not to kill himself: that’s the whole of universal history up till now. I alone on earth and in the history of the universe do not want to invent God”.
It is by meditating on these pages that Nietzsche thinks of the death of God as the fundamental event of modernity: “The greatest recent event — that ‘God has died’, that the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable — is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe. [...] But in the main one may say: the event itself is far too great, too distant, too remote from the multitude’s capacity for comprehension even for the tidings of it to be thought of as having arrived as yet”.
For both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, the death of God and the advent of nihilism meant something so terrible that mankind could never accept it without questioning its very existence. For once, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky were not good prophets. Nihilism became the normal condition of humanity, but, unlike Kirillov, the ordinary man seems now to live with the death of God and nihilism without suffering or caring about it, literally as if nothing had happened. It is this dull and indifferent nihilism that we deal with; it is this normal daily nothing that we must account for. And if, as Nietzsche himself suggested, nihilism, accomplished and seized as such, is humanity’s great opportunity to escape its fatal destiny, i.e. if, as Benjamin thought, nihilism can become the method of a new politics, then the question we must ask ourselves is: “Why was this opportunity not taken? What prevented us from truly laying our cause on nothing and, instead of making it our normal condition, finding in it a way out of the fates of the West?”.
(English translation by I, Robot)
Ilya Yefimovich Repin, Student Nihilist, 1883. Courtesy of WikiArt. |
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