Notes on the Emergence of Nihilism and the Yellow Sign

A series of displacements trace the progressive emergence of Nihilism from Philosophy: 

Operation #1: From Logos as origin to Logos as principle (Kant, Hume, Secular Humanism)

Operation #2: From Logos as principle to Logos as contingent projection or operative tool (by implication, subject as logos or unitary point) (Deism, Utopian Socialism, Bergson, Post-Levi Occultism)

Operation #3: Elimination of unitary subject as source or origin of this application (Artaud, Blanchot, Derrida, Kristeva)

Operation #4:  ?????????????????????

In terms of the corollary radical subjective praxis examined in The Ecstatic Nerve, one could indicate this progression from Blake and Nerval to Huysmans and Jarry to Schwitters.

The advent of the idea of the absent centre of the subject, and subsequently that of the absence or im-propriety of a 'centre' as such, is what opens the thinkability, and then the possibility, of the development of 'subjects' without biological properties or cognitive 'centres', subjectivities not founded in the experience of 'self' but rather exploring it as one articulation of a subjectivity whose defining experience is elsewhere. It is thus that the Yellow Sign has most generally been most effective or discernible when articulated or approached in relation to negative/nihilist/antiplatonic models of Thought.