ABSTRACT
As a result of the refl ections on nihilism in the last chapter, the possibility came into view that any distinctive phenomenality of violence-grounded in its subjective negativity, or its capacity for temporal distortion-effectively dissipates in nihilism. If violence mobilizes the resources of negativity in order to affi rm the inessentiality of things, then this alone would not set it apart from nihilism as a whole, which draws indiscriminately from the same resources without itself being a violence. The generality of this argument about the nihilism of violence should be emphasized: it does not limit itself to any debate about the putative decadence of the age, but instead insists that “violence” and “affi rmation of the inessentiality of things” are not equivalent, or at least not necessarily so. Even if one does not accept fully, or at all, the accounts of a Jünger or a Heidegger that would characterize the contemporary age as “nihilistic,” the larger point remains: if violence is not the root or originary instance of the affi rmation of the inessential, then the possibility remains open that it is inscribed in a horizon that is not itself violence, but something that must be thought in a different manner from those refl ections on violence that we followed in Sartre’s Notebooks for an Ethics. This in turn bears directly on our problem of whether or not violence could be said to be constitutive of its own meaning instead of instrumental: for if one were to track the consequences of Sartre’s argument that violence implies nihilism, then it could very well turn out that the “nihilism” of violence in the end justifi es the purely instrumental interpretation of its sense; more, as a result of a deeper refl ection on the nihilism of violence, one may very well be forced to affi rm the principle of the “stupidity of violence” discussed above in the Introduction.
