In a book published in Leipzig in October 1844 by Otto Wigand, a previously unknown type of man appears, one who to contemporaries seemed inadmissible and unheard, but who has since become perfectly familiar to us: the man who, as we read on the first and last pages, “I have based my affair on nothing.”[1], that is, a being in whom the dissolution of all faith and all values ??has reached its extreme form. He is certainly the first and unsurpassed nihilist, but it must be noted that the nihilism in question here has today become the normal condition of humanity. The book is titled The Ego and Its Property, author Max Stirner.
Eighteen years later, in the magazine “The Russian Messenger,” Turgenev published the novel in which the nihilist type (the word makes its appears here), embodied by the protagonist Bazarov, is defined as follows: “A Nihilist is a man who declines to bow to authority, or to accept any principle on trust, however sanctified it may be.”[2] In Demons [The Possessedor, The Devils], published in 1873, Dostoevsky decides to confront the epochal problem of nihilism, particularly through the figure of Kirilov. From the nihilistic denial of the existence of God, Kirilov draws a radical consequence that both absolutises and overturns his very ego. “If there is no God”, he states, “I am God.” […] If God exists, all is His will and from His will I cannot escape. If not, it’s all my will and I am bound to show self-will… I am bound to shoot myself because the highest point of my self-will is to kill myself with my own hands… I have no higher idea than disbelief in God… Man has done nothing but invent God so as to go on living, and not kill himself; that’s the whole of universal history up till now. I am the first one in the whole history of mankind who would not invent God.”[3]
It is meditating on these pages that Nietzsche considers the death of God as the fundamental event of modernity: “The most important of more recent events—that “God is dead,” that the belief in the Christian God has become unworthy of belief—already begins to cast its first shadows over Europe. […] In the main, however, one may say that the event itself is far too great, too remote, too much beyond most people’s power of apprehension, for one to suppose that so much as the report of it could have reached them.”[4]
For both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, the death of God and the advent of nihilism meant something so terrible that humans could never accept it without radically questioning their very existence. For once, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky were not good prophets. Nihilism has become the normal condition of humanity, but, unlike Kirilov, the common man today seems to live with the death of God and nihilism without suffering or thinking much about it, literally as if it were nothing. It is this flat and indifferent nihilism that we deal with. It is this normal and everyday nothingness that we must account for. And if, as Nietzsche himself suggested, accomplished nihilism, grasped as such, is humanity’s great opportunity to escape its lethal destiny—if, that is, as Benjamin thought, nihilism can become the method of a new politics—then the question we must ask ourselves is: “Why was this opportunity not seized? What prevented us from truly basing our cause on nothingness and, instead of making it our normal condition, finding in it a way out of the destiny of the West?”
Giorgio Agamben: Give us this day our daily nothingness
In a book published in Leipzig in October 1844 by Otto Wigand, a previously unknown type of man appears, one who to contemporaries seemed inadmissible and unheard, but who has since become perfectly familiar to us: the man who, as we read on the first and last pages, “I have based my affair on nothing.”[1], that is, a being in whom the dissolution of all faith and all values ??has reached its extreme form. He is certainly the first and unsurpassed nihilist, but it must be noted that the nihilism in question here has today become the normal condition of humanity. The book is titled The Ego and Its Property, author Max Stirner.
Eighteen years later, in the magazine “The Russian Messenger,” Turgenev published the novel in which the nihilist type (the word makes its appears here), embodied by the protagonist Bazarov, is defined as follows: “A Nihilist is a man who declines to bow to authority, or to accept any principle on trust, however sanctified it may be.”[2] In Demons [The Possessed or, The Devils], published in 1873, Dostoevsky decides to confront the epochal problem of nihilism, particularly through the figure of Kirilov. From the nihilistic denial of the existence of God, Kirilov draws a radical consequence that both absolutises and overturns his very ego. “If there is no God”, he states, “I am God.” […] If God exists, all is His will and from His will I cannot escape. If not, it’s all my will and I am bound to show self-will… I am bound to shoot myself because the highest point of my self-will is to kill myself with my own hands… I have no higher idea than disbelief in God… Man has done nothing but invent God so as to go on living, and not kill himself; that’s the whole of universal history up till now. I am the first one in the whole history of mankind who would not invent God.”[3]
It is meditating on these pages that Nietzsche considers the death of God as the fundamental event of modernity: “The most important of more recent events—that “God is dead,” that the belief in the Christian God has become unworthy of belief—already begins to cast its first shadows over Europe. […] In the main, however, one may say that the event itself is far too great, too remote, too much beyond most people’s power of apprehension, for one to suppose that so much as the report of it could have reached them.”[4]
For both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, the death of God and the advent of nihilism meant something so terrible that humans could never accept it without radically questioning their very existence. For once, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky were not good prophets. Nihilism has become the normal condition of humanity, but, unlike Kirilov, the common man today seems to live with the death of God and nihilism without suffering or thinking much about it, literally as if it were nothing. It is this flat and indifferent nihilism that we deal with. It is this normal and everyday nothingness that we must account for. And if, as Nietzsche himself suggested, accomplished nihilism, grasped as such, is humanity’s great opportunity to escape its lethal destiny—if, that is, as Benjamin thought, nihilism can become the method of a new politics—then the question we must ask ourselves is: “Why was this opportunity not seized? What prevented us from truly basing our cause on nothingness and, instead of making it our normal condition, finding in it a way out of the destiny of the West?”
Quodlibet, 27/08/2026
[1] Max Stirner, The Unique and Its Property, 1845.
[2] Ivan S. Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, 1862.
[3] Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Possessed or, The Devils, 1873.
[4] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book 5, aphorism 343, 1882.