This book shows how Nietzsche can be read against the grain and counters the general view of nihilism as without hope. Towards Ethical Nihilism involves the search for a hopeful moment within the otherwise bleak expanse of Nietzschean nihilism. Nihilism has been treated by a whole range of thinkers across many fields, most notably in cultural studies, theology, philosophy and ethics. Among other things, it leaves us with the problem of moral relativism and complexities regarding the judgment of good and evil.
The idea was introduced by Nietzsche and concerns the loss of meaning in a world without God. The phenomenon of nihilism casts a troublesome shadow across modern society and culture. This is how the author of this thesis understands and works the Lévinasian term of 'ethical responsibility.' I will aim toward the ethical implications of this expulsion, insofar as this expulsion is taken here to be inscribed deep within prevalent ethico-political discourses and hermeneutic structures, part-and-parcel of their sustaining inertia.
This "antipathology of treason" aims its epokhe at evoking the mechanisms of (political) ‘abjection’ – a concept borrowed from Julia Kristeva – employed in the automatic expulsion of the 'traitor' from the political as such, and the unique and specific forms that this expulsion takes. The argument unfolds via readings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Emmanuel Lévinas – both serving as each other’s readers and interpreters – taken to share the project of critiquing (a prdominantly Christian-Thomistic) morality. By expounding on what is here termed an ‘antipathology’, it performs a phenomenology of these types, not so much enclosing them as totalities - consistent concepts/essences - as taking them in their discursive-affective import, “at their word”. This thesis explores the notion of betrayal through a sustained examination of two politically abject types – ‘the corpse/body’ and ‘the dilettante’.
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