Nihilism is often associated with pessimism and apathy, a general form of indifference. Alejandro de Acosta (A de A) has deflated this 'purified negation' with content, provocatively suggesting that nihilism might also be associated with ethics, so long as one is free from the burden of obligation. That is, he articulates nihilism as "I might be ethical: some days I am; some days I am not." (The Impossible, Patience). Being indifferent to morality requires that one not be opposed to it per se, as if one were desperately trying to negate it; to be amoral is to transcend the tied together unity of morality. To be indifferent (amoral) is to be neither moral nor immoral.
I want to futz with this (art)iculation a bit by structuring a place for nihilists within the @ milieu. So let's begin by following de Acosta's reading/repetition of the logic of anti-authoritarianism through Rouselle. If I am opposed to the pope, we might ask (as if we didn't know) Why, why are you against the pope? And my giving reasons here would reduce to opposition to representation, which would then reduce further to the idea of being against all authority, and finally, even to the idea of myself having authority over my future selves (A de A, 39-40). Nihilism thus posits a rift between commitment and negation; negation is always potential. The point here is that we wiggle between the meaninglessness of the universe (pure negation) and naming it with meaning for our personal or public projects, by rendering some project meaningless, that this or that utopian project is insufficient in some respect. Of course, nihilists know that our anarchist projects are temporary, fleeting; that our utopias might not fit with future desires. But if we are always logically open to our own anti-authoritarian presuppositions, the question is the degree to which we permit ourselves this opening onto meaninglessness. Thus the growth of post-anarchism--in particular nihilism and insurrectionary anarchism, green anarchism and green nihilism--can be visualized as anarchy (negation) at war with anarchism, through a logical method of resolving internal contradictions. That is, if one is against all authority, what say the anarchists of yore that would espouse a scientific materialism; of anti-authoritarians complicit with colonial-civilization? It's those badass nihilists that are surely at war with anarchism, among other 'isms' (A de A, 46).
Yet the question remains concerning what we are to do with morality; and I want to suggest that the metaphysical distinction between absolute and relative permits a way of making sense of the rather flat idea of active nihilism. What makes action nihilistic? Surely not that it is action per se. What makes something active nihilism, according to Nietzsche, is the application of Nothingness to something, as the russian nihilists wanted to render the church and the czar to/as nothing, for instance. But we don't really call everyday activists fighting against all sorts of shitty problems in our shitty world nihilists, per se, so much as we merely nod their activity. Is there then something about active nihilists that makes them distinct from run of the mill activists? Nietzsche didn't think so.
Historically, nihilists named those willing to carry out assassination, those willing to overlook petty human concerns in the mode of action, to achieve the end result. They are almost willing to say anything goes to get to the end; and so they remain committed to the end, to the project. What nihilists do is visualize a link to absolute amorality, in order to push the envelope, in order to define a position of negation within a project; in order to put activists into a different place, to expand the possible, to redescribe morality as relative, and as such, as linked with its complete opposite, amorality. That is: Nothing underpins morality; morality is just whatever our friends, or those we love, let us get away with.
So let me give you a few examples of how the milieu has gone down these roads. A relatively easy envelope pushing was carried out a few years back when
the once amoral conception of property destruction became acceptable in the milieu (in some places). ARM carries out action that might not be acceptable to everyday liberals; but perhaps such actions might be acceptable to some ALFers. In a riot, it might be unacceptable to throw a molotov cocktail (in Toronto), but not in Chile.--And I heard last week that a pig-cop got doused with corrosive acid. How amoral! And Earth First! supports kneecapping (and the OLGA cell) through prison writing now. WTF? Nihilists push the envelope, and they are accepted to the degree that they are committed to the project. Given what we said above, the reasoning here is obvious. Nihilism in the milieu functions to show a circle of commitments for strategy and action as larger than it actually is, because, at root, anarchists are also anti-authoritarian, and so, potentially against everything.
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