Nihilism has re-emerged as a significant problem, in people''s lives and in the events of the world. While its victory was almost hidden in the folds of individuals'' lives, it seemed nevertheless to have won, definitively and quietly, in the societies of the advanced West, achieving a universal dominance accelerated by world globalization and an increasingly developed information technology. It is the pervasive conception that marks the most diverse worldviews, united by a tacit recognition that there is no longer a meaning to reality, an ultimate sense of oneself and of things, that can really "take hold" of our lives in the present; conquer and change us, that is, make us free. Certainly, values remain (solidarity, legality, care for the environment.), as duties to which we should direct our ethical responsibility. And yet, these often resonate as sadly beautiful words, incapable of overcoming that dull feeling that we are all destined to simply end. A consensual divorce seems to have been consummated between life and its meaning: life is identified with the naked desire to want itself, as an instinct of self-affirmation; and meaning is reduced to an uncertain cultural construction, made up of what we would like to be, of what we believe we are entitled to, of what the social system presents to us as an obligation. While nihilism seemed to have won, it was a strange victory.

It was no longer due to the ever-increasing "power of the spirit" (the superman as will to power). On the contrary, it was that "passive nihilism" which is rather the "decline and recession of the power of the spirit", so that, As Nietzsche writes, "previous goals and values have become incommensurate and no longer are believed; so that the synthesis of values and goals (on which every strong culture rests) dissolves and the individual values war against each other: disintegration-and whatever refreshes, heals, calms, numbs emerges into the foreground in various disguises, religious or moral, or political, or aesthetic, etc." (Posthumous Fragments 1887-1888) . This was an inverted outcome, so to speak: not the revolutionary attack against the idols of the clerical bourgeoisie--which still resounded in ''68--but the educated and "correct" style of a radical mass bourgeoisie (of which Augusto Del Noce had spoken). Having now become a quiet product of consumer society, nihilism no longer meant the radical questioning of truth, but the cross-play of opinions, in which each has the right to exist, as long as it doesn''t claim to be anything more than an opinion. Now, however, a new breach seems to be opening into this narrative fabric. In the widespread "staging" of nihilistic culture, thanks also to the digital interconnection of all possible information on the face of the earth, to ask whether there is a greater meaning than this connective network (greater not in the extensive sense, but in the intensive sense, that is, that has something to do with why I, just I am in the world), would be branded as the myth of the "conspiracy", to use the brilliant formula suggested in the novels of Umberto Eco. The liberation from sense was presented as the promise of the liberation of the ego; and instead it has led to the emptying of the person''s experience.

: Rather than becoming the creators of their own destiny, people are instead lords of the void. This is because there is sense and destiny only when the ego recognizes (even if only to contest it!) an other from itself, not as its own dialectical projection, but as irreducible to itself, whose most appropriate name may be that of "you" or "father-mother" (the generators) or "friend". And it is exactly here that nihilism returns as a "problem", to disturb us as it did at the beginning (who remembers Dostoevsky''s Karamazov?), and perhaps even more radically than before. Now, in fact, this word, "nihilism", no longer indicates (only) the phenomenon of a loss , but also (and above all) the emergence of a need , the making visible of a desire for meaning as a desire to "be", like the impossible flowering of a seedling from the dry and stony earth. From this point of view, nihilism is today, paradoxically, not an obstacle, but a chance for the search for truth, precisely because of the anti-idolatrous force that it has deployed. At the moment when not only the old values of tradition have collapsed, but also the anthropocentric claim to replace them with the pure will of power, individuals have ultimately become irrelevant, that is, interchangeable, or purely random in the great web of the world. And it is here that something irreducible shows itself again in its nakedness. It is as if an "I" were asking to be born again, that is, looking for something--a glance, an encounter, a factor external to itself-- that reveals to it what its being is made of, or rather that calls it to be itself.

(excerpted from chapter 3).