Content area
Full Text
Unmasking the Faces of Nihilism Herrero Senes, Juan. El nihilismo. Disolución y proliferación en h tardomodernidad. Barcelona: Montesinos, Ediciones de Intervención Cultural, 2009. 161 pp. ISBN: 97884-92616-30-5.
Since the term was first popularized by Ivan Turgenev in Fathers and Sons ( 1 862), nihilism has acquired many shades of meaning in European thought. In this unpretentious and useful study, Herrero Senes traces those meanings over a canvass that stretches from the middle of the eighteenth century to today. What was once the concept and then the problem of nihilism is seen in these pages as part and parcel of the human condition, even if, throughout, Senes avoids tangling with the axiological consequences of accepting the pointlessness of life. Instead he suggests that nihilism is at the center of many a modern and postmodern movement, including decadentism, existentialism, the absurd, and antifundamentalism, and sets out to provide a running commentary on a wide variety of philosophers' views on the subject. The book is, in a sense, a compendium of the consequences and meaning of meaninglessness, as seen through the prisms of various philosophers, which, in its final chapters, posits art as the sole possible means of coping with nihilism.
In "Nietzsche y el debate contemporáneo," Senes touches on nihilistic appraisals of the Second World War and reviews positions held by Nietzsche (all too briefly, given his impact on how nihilism would be viewed ever after, although Nietzsche does reappear...