ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the imbrication of aesthetics, history, and nihilism. It discusses the origins of nihilism in German Romanticism and the crucial intervention made by Friedrich Nietzsche, which thereafter becomes the central reference for all subsequent discussions of nihilism. The chapter also focuses on various major present-day representatives of new theoretical formations, in order to show how their work is still bound up with an-amnesiac relation with nihilism - to show how, in other words, nihilism persists in zones that may at first seem foreign or hostile to such concerns. Gianni Vattimo has perhaps been the most vocal and explicit contemporary proponent of nihilism. The chapter shows that nihilism is a fundamentally institutional problem, that it works the entirety of Romanticism in a way that the Romantics themselves misrecognize in a forceful manner, and that it is integrally linked to pedagogical and administrative restructurings of modern State institutions.
