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Freedom of the Void: Hegel and Nietzsche on the Politics of Nihilism: Toward a Critical Understanding of 9/11

Occasionally you will hear it said that the violence perpetrated by organizations such as Al Qaeda is "nihilistic." The senses of the term as thus employed seem to be largely intuitive, and involve a cluster of notions. The journalist and pundit Christopher Hitchens, for example, offers up such descriptions as "sinister grandiosity," "pointless nastiness," and "the tactic of demanding the impossible and demanding it at gun-point."¹ The idea is that contrary to the revolutionary, idealist rhetoric of those enacting the violence, there is something hollow, cruel, and irrational at the center of such actions. This intuitive application of the term...