Process

We can make this word mean what Adorno and Horkheimer called Aufklärung, what Nietzsche called Nihilismus, what Heidegger called Nihilismus and Metaphysik, what Marx called Kapital, what Monsieur Homais called progrès, what Guénon called règne de la quantité, what Freud called Unbehagen der Kultur, what Spengler (and Wittgenstein) called Zivilisation. So comprising as well the slow movement of the absolutes Wissen described by Hegel (“because the self has to penetrate and digest the entire richness of its substance”).⁴⁶⁰ This means carving out of world history a picture of Western history, inside which a sequence of events and transformations is acted out, in laboratory conditions. It is not clearly understood how the sequence begins, or how it ends. There is, however, considerable agreement—though based on differing terms and valuations—about the various transitions that happen within the sequence, in a chain reaction. Transitions observable in each area. Chopin and the merchant bank.

That which still remains to be understood: a process that certainly has a direction of its own, and this direction has a sign, but that sign is not a plus or a minus, as Condorcet and Joseph de Maistre respectively would have liked, but a sign similar to a bronze Shang animal, which includes within it many other animals, including Condorcet’s plus and Joseph de Maistre’s minus, though now linked, intertwined, incorporated into many other signs that are hard to interpret. And it is this composite sign, at variance in each of its parts, that we are called upon to decipher.

What is the first negation of the whole? A negation that negates not a detail but a characteristic of the whole: interdependence. This step leads to those that follow: once the interdependence of the whole is negated, the world remains divided into bigger or lesser aggregates, more or less stable, from which—now and then—individual elements break away to become autonomous.

This process in which elements become autonomous, avoiding authority and the looming context—this is the process which for several decades was called “nihilism.” Like a gradual release of isolated substances from a compound of which they are a part. And, once released, those elements also act upon the compound. Above all, they act in one respect: they contribute to its further breakdown.