Momenti negativnega

Evoking Leo Strauss’s 1941 text “German Nihilism” and his forceful claim that nihilism is above all “the rejection of the principles of civilization as such,” my intention is to thematize the possible forms of coexistence that survive and develop despite the negation and even exclusion of certain forms of civic forms of cooperation and collaboration, as well as insistence on a closed society in the Bergsonian or Popperian sense. If nihilism is often connected to a crisis of legitimacy and reasoned discourse, with a crisis of justification of certain actions or manipulative and perverted uses of language and mind, with various protocols of destruction across many levels and taking many shapes, what interests me is the role of negation and a potential classification of various negative, socially negative, destructive, or nullifying actions and acts in the construction of (non)homogenous and (in)human social groups.