Michel Guérin's 'Nihilisme et modernité' Reexamines Nihilism Beyond Cliché

In his essay 'Nihilisme et modernité,' published by Éditions Jacqueline Chambon, Michel Guérin offers a rigorous reading of nihilism that avoids the rhetorical traps common among his contemporaries. Rather than denouncing the emptiness of the present or calling for new values, Guérin calmly and rationally engages with texts. His definition of nihilism—that modern sensibility arises from the void left by the eclipse of transcendentals such as God, Nature, the Subject, and History—is not original, but his analyses are subtle and elegant. The book includes examinations of Diderot, revealing the idea of an analogy between truth and fiction, and portraits of French decadent writers as 'gloomy vituperators' who cannot do without transcendence, even of Nothingness. A concluding homage to Marcel Duchamp presents his paradoxical anti-nihilism not as a 'relève' (sublation) but as an 'inner turn,' where one no longer merely accustoms oneself to melancholy but inhabits it, then pulverizes it into dust. The review was written by Philippe Forest for artpress.