slim,
In depth I completely agree with what you wrote and, ironically as ever, find it quite healthy (that's the adjective which came to my mind when I was reading you, realising at the same time that it might have a lot of "healthy people" roll down laughing.)
I'm just reacting over one detail fwiw:
For half a second I agreed with you. But then I thought, wait a minute - why "can become"? Why not simply "is"? How odd for instance if one also said:I agree that Marxism can become a meta-narrative or I agree Christianity can become a meta-narrative.
You wouldn't get away with that because we know they are such. So why does nihilism get a free ride? Because it combats narratives? The anti-narrative can't be a narrative! Does that make sense? In so far as nihilism makes sense at all it draws on discourse and arranges itself in patterns of thought just like any other system. Maybe there is a somenothing that does not arrange itself in this or any other way. But if it is named by this or any other name otherwise it is broken and relegated.
You're quite right in principle. Perhaps the difference in "nihilism" (as I defined in that thread) is that unlike Marxism or Christianity it is practically never claimed by anybody. So far thinkers (I'm thinking of Nietzsche and Camus in particular) have gone out of their way to prove that they were not nihilists. When "nihilism" becomes a fashionable self-definition I'll probably avoid the term (I already used it quite reluctantly).
Btw, why should that make sense?
Maybe you are already at the beach. I loved to play in the sand when I was young. Can it ever be the same?
I don't know but, believe it or not, "at the beach" (or "on the shore") are the only words I found to answer a religious publisher who asked me where I now stood a few months ago. I never heard from him since.