The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture

By Gianni Vattimo

Book Overview

Gianni Vattimo reexamines the roots of modernism and postmodernism in Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Heidegger. Exploring the links between concepts of nihilism and destiny in nineteenth-century humanism, Vattimo follows these trends in aesthetic and scientific theory from Benjamin to Bloch, Ricoeur, and Kuhn.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801843170
• ISBN13: 9780801843174
• Release Date: October 1991
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Length: 252 Pages
• Weight: 0.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 8.7"
• Age Range: 22 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

How is nihilism our new condition?

Vattimo continues to issue his argument for a soft-ontology after metaphysics has suffered from the end of absolutes. The end is nothing...nihilism. I am convinced that Vattimo and others like him are correct in accessing our age as technocratic nihilism but I am not convinced that Vattimo's soft-ontology is much more than a "practical" excuse to live as though there is meaning even though tying life to shared experience is impossible. The only real impossibility is that life is impossible. Is a new motivation for innovation and culture possible if we admit with Vattimo that nihilism "gesture[s] toward a new human experience" (26)? I am not convinced that he demonstrates this. Instead I see Vattimo arguing for a kind of soft-ontology that attempts to balance the reification of objective language with the broader givens of life experience that are coordinated in forms of life. Although I am not convinced of Vattimo's vision for life and society after nihilism I do think this book is worthy of a serious read.

Vattimo's hard to accept tesis about a weak thinking.

This book is important to understand postmodernism. However, i don't image american readers accepting Vattimo's tesis about weak subjet right to have a place in world. Why modern civilization has impossed to us the obligation of being strong and the first in every action as the only way to be allowed as a member of this society?