Between the Will To Power and the Declaration of Anti-Event Nihilism

Abstract

The basic aim of the article is to delineate the location in which Nietzsche's three main themes - the will to power, nihilism and the eternal return of the equal - meet. We have found this meeting-point in the »free-will mythology«, which has a double relation to the will to power: on one hand, the will to power as a subject-figure perceived as that to be challenged by the will to power, entails the nothingness of free-will, and on the other, the result of a will to power's challenge is always accomplished exactly in the exigent returns of the free-will subject. A free-will subject is a form of active nihilism - rather to will nothing itself, than not to will at all. The answer to active nihilism can not be its even worse passive form - not to will at all, but to step in between the two forms of nihilism - to be a hiatus between two nothings, which we thematize as to endure by forms of senselessness against the meaning produced by the likeness of the free-will subject.