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Theory, Culture & Society
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The (Impossible) Society of Spite

Revisiting Nihilism

Bülent Diken

Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, b.diken{at}lancaster.ac.uk

In the primordial scene, which Girard has described, society is constituted on the basis of the lynching mob, whose mimetic desire, envy and egotism culminate in sacrificing the scapegoat. With spite, though, we confront the opposite situation, in which the mimetic desire does not establish but rather destroys `society'. Here everybody, and not only the scapegoat, is threatened with destruction. Regarding the genealogy of spite, the article elaborates on radical nihilism (that is, the will to negation) and relates this to passive nihilism (the negation of the will as such), arguing that these two nihilisms are significant to understand both the hedonism/disorientation that characterizes contemporary post-political culture and the emerging forms of despair and violence as a reaction to it. These two nihilisms constitute a non-dialectical `synthesis' in spite of seemingly antagonistic `disjunctions'. The article concretizes the genealogy of spite with two cases: French bestselling writer Houellebecq's novels and (the war against) terrorism. Then it focuses on the relationship between the three social formations (primitive, despotic and capitalist societies) and spite as an `affect without society'. Finally, agonism as a political virtue is set against spite.

Key Words: agonism • antagonism • nihilism • post-politics • spite • terror

Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 26, No. 4, 97-116 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0263276409104970
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