Abstract

The paper establishes a correlation between nihilism and history from the premise of the end of metaphysics in the age of the technosphere. In presenting the genealogy of the postmodern turn in contemporary philosophical thinking, the author critically deals with Vattimo’s thesis that Heidegger’s notion of overcoming metaphysics is the key to understanding postmodernity. Despite its close proximity to Nietzsche and Heidegger, it is undeniable that the main notion must be derived from late Wittgenstein’s thinking, as Lyotard did in his analysis of the “postmodern condition”. It is a notion of “language games” that introduces into consideration the relationship between the pragmatics of knowledge, the performativity of language and the event horizon. In this way, it will be shown that postmodernity cannot be any “new” epoch but rather a re-actualization of the condition determined by the rule of technoscience, cybernetics and plural patterns of culture in post-industrial society. Based on his previous analyses of this problem, collected in the books The Postmodern Game of the World, Identity Politics, The Posthuman Condition, and Technosphere I–V, the author believes that only extensive analysis and interpretation of Lyotard’s premises allows one to reach the right philosophical path to the answer to the question of the essence of nihilism in the face of Being, and the technosphere as computation, planning, and construction of the inhuman. In contemporary times, what is left of postmodernity is neither “telling stories” about the stylistic tendencies of the modern and neomodern, the avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde, nor, moreso, the conflict of the universality and particularity of society and culture. All that remains is the feature of the unwavering “fate” of this nihilism of the technosphere: from the postmodern condition to the posthuman condition, thought is confronted with the challenge of an event that goes beyond anything seen in the history of Western metaphysics. When the image precedes the language and the writing to speaking, we find ourselves in a closed circle of turns and reversals of metaphysics. It is time to step out of this “vicious circle” in which the living becomes non-living, the Being becomes the information, the system of objects replaces society, and the human-too-human with inhuman as such.