All for nothing

We should differentiate the nothing from that which is worthless (nul) – by maintaining the idea that what is worthless is precisely that which has forgotten the nothing.

 Baudrillard

Alice: “I see nothing.”

Cheshire Cat: “My. You have good eyes.”

There it is, nothing. Or, actually, it is not, which is its sole characteristic. Nothing evades all attempts at conceptualization, even though language often overshadows and obscures this fact. Even so, one should distinguish between different notions of nothing: for instance, nothing and nothingness. The suffix renders “nothingness” a noun, whereas “nothing” is grammatically far more flexible as it can be a noun or pronoun. Nothing evokes semantics that plays with ambiguity and polysemy.

Nothing has both positive and negative connotations, and philosophies that either exclude or lead to it. Despite the non-linearity of the Western tradition concerning nothing, it is quite clear that from Socrates onwards nothing has been considered inferior to something. For instance, Aristotle has no room for nothing in his categories, neither has Plato in his theory of ideas. Contrary to the apparent hostility towards nothing in classical metaphysics, Conor Cunningham outlines a tradition that is founded on meontotheological nothing. According to him, a noteworthy early representative of the meontotheological tradition was Plotinus (c.205–70), who stated that being and something are inferior to non-being and nothing (Cunningham xiii, 3–4). The ultimate logic of nothing governs meontotheological thought, whereas the “ultimate something” has been the standard point of departure in metaphysics since Plato and Aristotle.

Predictably, the meontotheological nothing recurs in various religious mysticisms (such as Kabbalah and apophatic Christian mysticism) from late Antiquity to the pre-Enlightenment period, manifesting through themes such as ineffability, obscurity and unattainability. In mysticism, nothing represents that which is beyond the grasp and comprehension – a property most commonly assigned to God. In other words, it illustrates a religious desire that is without an object of desire. Eastern religious thought is topical here as well: Chan and Zen Buddhism influenced the philosophies of Heidegger and the Kyoto School.

In addition to these philosophical and theological approaches, the essays in this special issue study the various manifestations of nothing in art. Pliny took advantage of the idea, Shakespeare and Lewis Carroll toyed with it and Mallarmé made it the aim of his aesthetic pursuits. The most familiar instances of nothingness in art are probably the non-representational paintings of Malevich and the recurring uses of typographical empty spaces in poetry by authors as varied as Celan, e.e. cummings and the Russian futurists. The interplay of art and nothingness culminates in completely blank books (e.g., George Maciunas, Isidore Isou) and empty exhibitions by Yves Klein, Robert Irwin and others. It should be noted that these experiments were often spurred on by various forms of mysticism, as was the case with Malevich, Celan and Isou.

nothing and nihilism

In the existential-phenomenological line of thinking nothingness is not only a textual phenomenon in the strict sense but also a primordial experience. Experiential nothingness is deeply rooted in German soil by virtue of the speculative theology of the High Middle Ages. On the one hand, Western mystical traditions from, say at least, Rhine Mysticism onwards, render the experience of nothingness a holistic experience, which connects the spiritual subject to every flow of creation and ultimately to the godhead in pantheist or pan-entheist manner. On the other, there is a more obscure current, presumably originating from gnosticism and its apocryphic sermons. This trait regards nothingness as a kind of counter-holism, where nothing relates to nothing and nothing else. In addition, this alternative non-identity fuels the gnostic verve of the apophatic tradition of negative theology.

The modern tradition of the dialectical metaphysics of nothingness is easily traced back to Hegel's famous passage in the third chapter of Science of Logic (1812–13), which provides the grounding dialectics of Western nothingness that relates to being and becoming. However, it is the renegade Hegelian and anarchist Max Stirner who gives this vision an existential-political motto in the preface of The Ego and his Own (1845). “All things are nothing to me,” he formulates, and continues: “I am not nothing in the sense of emptiness, but I am the creative nothing [schöpferische Nichts], the nothing out of which I myself as creator create everything” (5).

Hence Stirner's anarchic ego is asubjective and devoid of essentialistic substance. With this gesture, Stirner opens up the possibility of the empty revolutionary subject that is capable of leaving the beaten track because of the subject's radical non-detachment. In fact, this is reminiscent of Meister Eckhart's “negative self,” which Stirner adopts via Hegel. If Stirner's Nichts is atheist and atheological to the point of outright nihilism, it is his most faithful follower, Nietzsche, who revitalizes the spiritual urgency of nothingness. In The Gay Science (1882) one has to pay attention to the cosmic topography of the “after God” situation, which lays the foundation for the whole of post-Nietzschean thought. In the words of Nietzsche's “madman” who seeks God in the market place:

I will tell you. We have killed him – you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? (Nietzsche 181)

It may be that in the post-Nietzschean era, namely after the death of God, nothing is the place (or no-place, utopos) forsaken by the godhead. If this is true, longing for nothing has become a placebo for the longing for God. For instance, Giorgio Agamben highlights the importance of the experience of nihilism. For him, the formulation that there is “nothing to reveal” becomes the subject of revelation. Yet Agamben's nothing does not simply designate the meaninglessness of existence, but rather the absence of any final (eschatological) revelation (Agamben 34, 160).1 In a similar manner, most of the post-Nietzschean thought has adopted the atheism of Nietzsche, which emphasizes a belief in nothing.

The belief in nothing constructs a kind of atheist transcendence, and the transcendental nothing appearing in texts is a tacit and everyday revelation, mysticism without mysticism, and an open horizon of immanent transcendence. It is worth mentioning that the same abyss without relief, God without existence, is to be found mutatis mutandis in another remarkable advocate of gnostically inspired (a)theology, Georges Bataille. One aspect of his “interior experience” (l’expérience intérieure) is as transgressive as possible: a sudden encounter with the dead God. Whereas in Nietzsche's thinking God leaves an empty space after dissolving, Bataille's sense of nothingness summons the absolute spectre, which continues to haunt contemporary Continental thought. In other words, many key thinkers of 1900s encountered the radical divine alterity in nothingness, the ontological status of which was far from irrefutable.

Active and passive nihilisms, with or without theological undercurrents, are not, of course, all-encompassing categories. It is quite surprising that in “Objective Logic” (1898), Charles S. Peirce takes a stance between the two extremes:

The nothing of negation is the nothing of death, which comes second to, or after, everything. But this pure zero is the nothing of not having been born. There is no individual thing, no compulsion, outward nor inward, no law. (148)

A similar stance is assumed by Blanchot in his musings about death and dying: the former is beyond our reach and the latter manifests our anguish resulting from this fact. However, the French debate regarding nothing is somewhat distinct and requires a bit of backtracking.

A key characteristic in the French discussion concerning nothing is the interplay between philosophy and literature that addresses philosophical themes, such as existential topics. The interaction became apparent during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Victor Hugo illustrates this characteristic in Les Misérables (1862) by stating that everything is something and nothing is not anything (272). Hugo continues along the lines of Diderot and D’Alembert, according to whom thought and language always render nothing into something (Diderot 816).

The beginning of the twentieth century was a culmination of the French tradition of thought regarding nothing. Henri Bergson's seminal Creative Evolution (1907) treats nothing as utterly alien to everyday life. According to him, nothing is a pseudo-idea that is merely an impression produced by language. Bergson's renowned argument is that nothing “is as absurd as a square circle,” which resurfaces anew in philosophical discussion (Bergson 167). The Bergsonian view holds that absolute nothingness is comparable to lack of awareness or death and, hence, it is not within the field of experience. The ability to imagine nothingness is merely a characteristic of imagination, not an ontological foundation.

Bergson's positivist critique stands against the backdrop of Hegel's philosophy. Hegelian dialectics and its emphasis on negativity were pivotal in French philosophy throughout the twentieth century. Alexandre Kojève's lectures on Hegel in the 1930s resulted in the predominance of Kojèvian Hegelianism in France, which also aroused determined anti-Hegelian reactions, one of these being Bataille's idea of interior experience. Besides Kojève, Bataille's influences derive both from Nietzsche and Heidegger, the grand old man of nothingness-related thinking in twentieth-century Continental philosophy.

However, perhaps the most renowned popular application of ontological nothingness derives from Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943). According to him, the scope of philosophical inquiry is broader by means of negation than with affirmation. Sartre's point, which is derived from Hegel, in all its simplicity, is that negation has a broader phenomenal scope than affirmation. His term nihilation (néantisation) refers to negation on the level of immediate perception instead of reflexivity. Furthermore, nothingness is the ontological reality derived from nihilation. Sartre aims his argument at Bergson, because, for Sartre, nothingness could not be a part of consciousness, which is why it necessarily establishes a separate ontological category. Sartre hereby emphasizes the fact that nothingness cannot be named without rendering it an object with a false presence. However, the problem is that even in this manner nothingness is postulated by the conscious subject, which renders nothing noumenal. In this respect, Sartre proves to be an essentialist.

nothingness as a way of being

The German ideas of nothingness preceding Heidegger were characterized not only by active and passive variations but also by ontico-spiritual transformations. In his mid- and late philosophy (after the Kehre of the 1930s), Heidegger perfects his anti-Hegelian – and anti-Kojèvian – understanding of nothingness as a dichotomy-transcending third term that is not bound to any negation. The final corrections to his What is Metaphysics? (1929) reveal that nothingness is the authentic way to Being and that Being ultimately fuses with nothingness without resulting in any difference.2 Following Heidegger's thought, nothingness is non-dialectical and does not negate “something.” Rather, “nothing nothings” (Nichts nichtet) and is thus “more originary than the ‘not’ and negation” (Heidegger 86). According to Heidegger, nothingness is not reducible to negativity, absence or negative poetics of any kind, nor can it be rendered into a positive term. Rather, Heidegger names it as a placeholder (Platzhalter) for Dasein. Just as zero lies between negative and positive numbers and appears as part of other numbers (e.g., 0.0093; 10,022), nothingness is not an ultimate end or beginning of Being but an event of an in-between within language instead of its apophatic failure.

Here we are far from Rudolf Carnap's and Bergson's positivist views of nothingness, which depict nothing as a pseudo-concept and a saturation point of classical metaphysics. Challenging Heidegger as a champion of nothingness in his polemic article “The Elimination of Metaphysics through the Logical Analysis of Language” (1932), Carnap fails to see that in Heidegger and his tradition of nothingness – rooted in Eckhart's vernacular sermons and Angelus Silesius’ Cherubinischer Wandersmann (1674) – nothingness is a crucial overcoming of the very logic of Hegelian negation. Neither does he credit the experiential quality of nothingness as mystical and fundamentally ontological topos, but only a failure of propositional language. Against this eliminativist background it is not surprising that the idea of nothingness became a watershed separating the post-Heideggerian Continental tradition from the analytical. In Continental thought, nothingness is understood as a creative blind spot that would overcome the double root of Western metaphysics – Aristotle's classifying ontology and Plato's duplication of reality. In the legacy of the Vienna Circle, nothingness is considered a kind of linguistic fog that should be removed in order to achieve a scientifically pure language. Depending on the school of thought, nothingness represents either a threat or an opportunity. In this historical and ongoing debate, nothingness reveals its pre-conceptual and pre-dialectical power as a non-differentiating concept and an experience that is an origin, to adopt Benjamin's dictum, as far as it becomes a goal.

Even after Sartre and Heidegger, the Hegelian identification of being and nothingness is central in French phenomenology (for instance for Michel Henry). However, by virtue of anti-Hegelian philosophers such as Levinas and Blanchot, the discussion about nothing develops towards somewhat scattered adaptations of the concept that branches off to (apophatic) terms like “otherness” and “abyss,” which flicker at the limits of conceptualization. For instance, there is no room for pure nothingness in Derrida's thought, in which language plays a seminal role. Advocating this development is the fact that even though Derrida does not arrive at a clear position on nothing, his later philosophy revolves around the idea. Arguing against Bergson, Derrida (like Deleuze later on) does not define the square circle as a logical absurdity. Rather, even though there is no possible object the proposition could relate to, the proposition is meaningful in itself. The grammatical form of the square circle tolerates “a relation to an object” (Derrida 110–11). In Speech and Phenomena (2003), Derrida applies nothing (rien) that lies between phenomenological dualisms. It is not pure nothingness but a sort of indefinite and indefinable limit-state, much as nothingness is for Heidegger.

Derrida's position contains several key thoughts about nothing that may best be described as an intrusion of literary language into philosophy. The investigation may begin with death, which Bergson compared with nothing. For Blanchot and Levinas, death is an ephemeral blind spot of philosophy. Levinas points out that Heidegger mistakenly included death in Dasein, even though death must be exterior to the individual (cf. Levinas). The point of the absolute unattainability of death can be illustrated by comparing death with a black hole. The event of death is commensurate with the event horizon. Once a limit has been crossed, no information, no thought can be transmitted. In death, individual consciousness ceases to exist and one can never know one's own death. As Levinas states, only the death of others can be known. Hence the event of one's own death is comparable with that of nothing.

How can we live with nothingness, then? By no means: nothingness, at least in Western thought, is a dangerous idea and a radical experience that has not often been tolerated, but understood as mere nihilism pure and simple. The counter-argument for championing nothingness could be that, after all, foregrounding sheer emptiness only radicalizes negativity, or, as Werner Hamacher puts it, mindful of Paul Celan's poetics of nothingness, rendering nothing a positive “danger that threatens many of his early texts: […] the danger of allowing for absence merely as the negative of presence, and thus the danger of wanting to change absence, by virtue of language, into everlasting Being” (Hamacher 348). Having said this, Hegel's meontic (compared with Spinoza's oukontic) nothingness does not fare any better if we understand it in terms of the metaphysics of presence (or absence). Rather, in Celan as well as in late Heidegger, nothing is not to be taken metaphysically as a perennial name for an absolute absence or negation, but as an experiential and dynamic matrix that reveals the non-foundationality of acting and being (cf. Schürmann). Such nothing leads to an existential state of anarchy that has its roots in the mystical non-detachment of Meister Eckhart as well as the political Nichts of Stirner and his radical legacy.

nothing today

Amid the current crises, be they ecological, economic or social, both nihilisms, the passive and active, are topical again – this time as responses to the collapse of Western hegemony over the liberal economy and biosphere. Perhaps the heart of the late-modern capitalist matrix was really the Stirnerite schöpherische Nichts, which was such a destructive view of nothing – bereft of meaning and out of joint from the start – because of its nihilistic passivity. It almost goes without saying that the power centres are always empty (just visit the capitals of capitalism: Brussels, Beijing, Moscow, Paris or New York), and that the idea of nothingness is to be found not in the textual margins but in the inner kernel of late-modern semiosis. Maybe there is an approaching momentum in which the active concept of nothingness could be taken up consciously and politically, not only as a topos to be meditated. The potential of revolutionary nothingness is still largely untapped and has an imprint of Russian nihilism of the 1800s. Perhaps, and hopefully, there is a possibility of zero-points (becoming no-one, owning/owing nothing, having literally “nothing to lose”) that could evoke creative resistance to the current crisis.

Baudrillard envisions the power of nothing as a kind of non-recoverable resource. Against the Nietzschean backdrop of passive nihilism, which entails the exchange of everything to nothing, he envisions its opposite. Any system including nothing will face the non-exchangeability of nothing, in other words, the impossibility of exchange – be it economic, ecologic, the communication of messages and so on. The potential of nothing becomes apparent once it is not regarded as mere rhetoric.

Leibniz's well-known question “why is there something rather than nothing?” gains a pragmatic formulation in this special issue: “How is there nothing rather than something?” This change of perspective to immanent may partially resolve the Leibnizian paradox, which is, after all, a Western koan (as nothing is not). For these reasons our approach to the theme is largely descriptive: what is at stake, when nothingness unfolds in thought and writing, in semiosis and in experience? Alternatively, formulated into material form: “why is there ‘nothingness’ instead of   ?” Thus nothing is the remainder between the positive and negative connotations of nothing. After the operation of reduction to nothing, nothing remains.

Notes

1. Similar loss of foundation had already surfaced in Russian religious existentialism (Shestov, Berdyaev's Ungrund), which is, however, distinct from the nihilism-oriented French existentialism.

2. The original passage reads: “Das Nichts als das Andere zum Seienden ist der Schleier des Seins. Im Sein hat sich anfänglich jedes Geschick des Seienden schon vollendet” (Heidegger 55).