Cunningham om nihilismens logik

For example, because thought and being are not the same, accidents happen, tragedy arises. But the danger is that if one simply renames life as tragic, tragedy disappears, for its now ‘metaphysical’ status – its reality – leaves it without the requisite space for tragedy to occur. To put it another way, to say that the world is full of suffering and so is meaningless, is to dilute the very suffering that initially motivated the negative judgement: there is suffering in life, therefore life is meaningless, therefore there is no suffering. Absurdity and nihilism operate in a similar fashion, for they are names that settle into the gap between being and thought, reforging a novel chain. This is the ‘Devil of the Gaps’, who is a bridge to the void, after which it lusts.

Conor Cunningham, A Genealogy of Nihilism: Philosophies of Nothing and the Difference of Theology (Routledge, 2002), 258.