Most people are terrified of nothingness; that’s why they fill it with Ikea curtains, life insurance, and a constant stream of notifications that don’t matter to anyone. Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, however, saw in the vacuum a spiritual business opportunity. Active nihilism isn’t about sitting around crying because God is dead; it’s about taking the corpse, dissecting it, and using the bones to build a structure where pleasure doesn’t have to ask morality for permission. It’s destroying the inherited inventory to write a new one on skin that hasn’t yet learned the meaning of fear.
The lobe of my left ear itches a bit—a tiny distraction that makes me lose the thread of this transcendence. Am I really trying to explain the abyss while worrying about a minor skin irritation? I don’t know. Perhaps the truth is precisely that interference.
The air in this room has a strange weight; it smells of paper overheated by the printer and that trace of dampness that climbs the walls when the city decides it has rained enough. I feel the air a bit thick in my lungs. It is the atmosphere of someone who knows that civilization is just an agreement not to scream too loudly at each other in the morning.
The Engineering of Demolition: Sade and the Blank Canvas
We have been educated to conserve, to accumulate “moments” as if they were discount coupons for an eternity that doesn’t exist. Mental health has become a kind of modern decoration; we put self-help quotes on our phone screens so we don’t have to see that the structure of what we call “the self” has more cracks than a ruined building. Sade, instead, preferred the hammer. He knew that only when you have dynamited every notion of “good” and “evil” can you begin to feel the real temperature of a desire.
Sometimes, the truth isn’t elegant. It’s dirty. Like the floor of a bar at five in the morning.
I wonder if you, on the other side of the screen, also feel that small knot in your stomach when you realize you could delete your entire digital life and absolutely nothing would happen. Or maybe you’re just hungry. The line is very thin between an existential crisis and the need for a carbohydrate.
The New Inventory: From Spasm to Sovereignty
Sade understood that the human being is a predator that has learned to use silver cutlery so as not to be frightened of itself. His active nihilism consists of reclaiming the cutlery and turning it into weapons of sensory exploration. If nothing is sacred, everything is possible. If life has no intrinsic meaning, we have the right—almost a decorative obligation—to invent one that is, at the very least, fun.
My chair makes a strange noise every time I move. A dry creak. It’s irritating. It distracts me from the idea of absolute sovereignty I was trying to explain to you, reminding me that my will depends on a poorly adjusted screw.
Why does the idea of destruction scare us so much? Perhaps because it forces us to admit that our identity is just a collection of old furniture we’ve been lent. Order is just the fear we have that the neighbor will discover that we, too, are empty inside. Sade invites us to inhabit that vacuum, to turn it into a laboratory where the only limit is the resistance of the human material.
The Transparency of the Abyss
There is some relief in knowing that, no matter how hard they try, they cannot map every corner of our shadow with an Instagram algorithm. Sade died asking for his name to disappear, for the forest to swallow his trace. He wanted total opacity because he knew that only in the shadow is one truly the owner of the fire.
Today, when everything is about “sharing” and “being transparent,” Sade’s urgency to destroy the trace seems like the most subversive act in the world. Active nihilism is not hatred; it is a necessary cleaning so that the nervous system can begin to register frequencies that morality has always filtered out.
I stopped writing for a moment to look out the window. There’s nothing interesting—just a gray cat crossing a brick wall. That cat doesn’t know what nihilism is, but it lives in it with an elegance we can only dream of. Sometimes I envy the cat for its lack of need to give meaning to its impulses.
