ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how Jean-Francois Lyotard's work on André Malraux, Soundproof Room, takes up and furthers Lyotard's abiding concern to delimit and respond to nihilism. Whilst Lyotard does not make frequent use of the term nihilism, for him, as for Nietzsche, it designates the development, or better the unfolding, of Western culture and civilization. Lyotard argues that whilst it is tied to the expansion of capitalist technoscience, the origin of nihilism is neither economic nor social, but metaphysical. To speak of acting against nihilism at a concrete, historical level should not, however, by taken to entail a commitment to either a self-willed irrationalism, or an aversion to thought and theory in the name of a blind immediacy of action, which are nothing more than the complimentary inversion of rationalism. To prepare the possibility of acting against nihilism, of bringing it and the present to crisis, thus entails engaging with, and bringing to crisis, the philosophical tradition.
