Abstract

Costantino Esposito's recent book, The Nihilism of Our Time, has renewed public interest in nihilism. This paper explores a specific path of nihilism, one that begins with Nietzsche and ends with the dialogue between E. Jünger and M. Heidegger, and which Esposito critiques in his scholarly work. Jünger sees nihilism as a crisis requiring salvation, while Heidegger believes nothingness is intrinsic to being, with salvation found in commemorative thinking [Andenken]. Esposito notes the paradox in Heidegger’s position: salvation is both impossible and necessary. Starting from this insight, my paper questions if Heidegger’s conclusions are truly definitive and argues that his nihilism of the 1950’s is already present, albeit embryonically, in his interpretations of primordial Christianity from the early 1920’s. Heidegger’s adoption of an immanent model of subjectivity in the religion lectures isolates the human being and places an insurmountable abyss between the self and an authentic Alterity. I seek another path, one that leads not to isolation and nihilism, but to a relationality that leaves the subject open. Through an alternative reading of the lectures on Paul’s epistles and Augustine’s Confessions, I show that the sealed immanence of the Heideggerian subject depends on a peculiar form of “theological epoché” that doesn’t simply exclude theological or religious elements from his analysis, but brackets them and leaves them suspended, never again to return to them. But a full implementation of this epoché (which is ostensibly what Heidegger is seeking in these lectures) actually yields an account of factical life as a relational structure that consists in a fundamental desire. In this view, factical life remains inherently transcendent, just as Heidegger wants, but this transcendence consists not in pure self-relation as Heidegger concludes, but in openness to Alterity.