Abstract EN:

This work investigates the question of Nietzsche’s relationship to the Jews and Judaism, a key issue that the polemics with anti-Semitism has up until now obfuscated. The Jews and Judaism are at the core of the question of nihilism, whose explicit treatment only appears in Nietzsche’s late writings but whose traces can be found early in the work under different approaches (dealing with decadence, the death of god, etc. ). Thanks to these traces, Nietzsche reinvested his entire work after he mastered the problematic of nihilism. The "Judaic reversal of values was first identified as the single beginning of nihilism; yet the subsequent analysis of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity enabled Nietzsche to delineate their respective roles within nihilism. Moreover, immediately after reelaborating the problematic of nihilism, Nietzsche reinscrited Greek decadence within that perspective and explored nihilism’s various endings; he thus opened the way for a deconstruction of nihilism s origins and of the relationship between Judaism and Hellenism. If moments of creative affirmation are many - as is the case for the various processes of decadence - there can be no pure and preserved origin, no time before decadence, and thus no origin to nihilism. There can be no sense either in waiting and hoping for the end, or overcoming, of a process that is merely "normal". The history of humankind is seen as a sailing through, without an origin and an outcome, nihilism, which nonetheless takes on a new inflection in modernity - the epoch of the news of the death of god, of the absence of the foundation of meaning, and of errancy, as the ontological condition of the human being. Having started with a questioning of Jewishness (errancy, absence of ownmost), Nietzsche affirms a new form of inactuality, one liberated from nostalgia and hope, a non-reactive thinking on modernity, which is the time of errancy, the absence of anchoring and inscription within an ownmost.