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Contemporary politics is faced, on the one hand, with political stagnation and lack of a progressive vision on the side of formal, institutional politics, and, on the other, with various social movements that venture to challenge modern understandings of representation, participation,and democracy. Interestingly, both institutional and anti-institutional sides of this antagonism tend to accuse each other of 'nihilism', namely, of mere oppositional destructiveness and failure to offer a constructive, positive alternative to the status quo. Nihilism seems, then, all engulfing.In order to better understand this political situation and ourselves within it, proposes a thorough theoretical examination of the concept of nihilism and its historical development followed by critical studies of Israeli politics and culture. The authors show that, rather than a mark of mutual opposition and despair, nihilism is a fruitful category for tracing and exploring the limits of political critique, rendering them less rigid and opening up a space of potentiality for thought, action, and creation.
About the author
Nitzan Lebovic is an associate professor of history and the Apter Chair of Holocaust Studies and Ethical Values at Lehigh University. Nitzan is the author of The Philosophy of Life and Death: Ludwig Klages and the Rise of a Nazi Biopolitics (2013), and of Zionism and Melancholy: The Short Life of Israel Zarchi (2015). Nitzan co-edited Catastrophe: The History and Theory of an Operative Concept (2014). He edited special issues of the New German Critique (2008), Zmanim: Tel Aviv Journal of History (2008), and Rethinking History (2014). Nitzan published articles about German and German-Jewish history, film, political philosophy, and literature.Roy Ben Shai received his PhD in philosophy from the New School for Social Research in New York. He has taught ethics and modern philosophy in New York, Iceland, and Mexico and has published articles in The European Legacy and Telos as well as several book chapters. His dissertation, titled "Moral Pathology", is the first book length philosophical study of the writing of Holocaust Survivor and essayist Jean Amery. It won the Hans Jonas Memorial Award for best dissertation in philosophy and he is currently preparing it for publication as a book. His current research is a historical study of shifting approaches to the concepts of pathos and pathology in the philosophical tradition.
