ABSTRACT
How, then, does nihilism relate to the ‘social’ and its affective structures? To make a case, I take my point of departure in the three historical social formations discussed by Deleuze and Guattari (1983) in Anti-Oedipus: primitive, despotic, capitalist societies. These formations are linked to three distinct affects: cruelty, terror and cynicism, which all have specific and decisive relations to nihilism. Crucially, however, these three social formations are not mutually exclusive but, following a serial logic, can re-enter one another, or, repeat themselves in one another (for instance, despotic tendencies can be present in a capitalist social formation). Against this background, the chapter relates nihilism to contemporary society by focusing on its two significant aspects: capitalism and postpolitics. Then I discuss a contemporary problem, the ‘antagonism’ between the war against terror and terror, as a biopolitical version of the disjunctive synthesis between passive nihilism and radical nihilism.
