This thesis asserts that Marcuse and Nietzsche, in their concepts of one-dimensionality and nihilism, are discussing properties of the same phenomenon, and that their discussion can be structured through reference to Hegel's theory of alienation: Beginning with a separation of the subject and object-world (which I will call 'first stage Hegelian alienation'), the subject orders the object-world (in their perception of it) in order to dominate it (in order to avoid the dissolution of the self in nature/Being). The same structure applies to the state-subject relationship. Once this structure is instigated, it is self-perpetuating as its criteria of acceptability are limited precisely to 'value-less values' that already fit its 'schema of calculability'. This has the effect that everything is pre-determined, and also that dissent, defined as a (transcendent) form of contradiction of the status quo, is no longer admitted. Given that dissent will be defined as the assertion of an alternative possibility, the paradigm grounded in instrumental reason, in denying the possibility of such dissent, is, it will be argued, a nihilistic paradigm.

This thesis presents an account of nihilism in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, and a critical response to it using the philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas. Chapter one gives an account of the three different types of nihilism in Nietzsche’s writings, and of how the latest outbreak of nihilism, modern European, came about. Chapter two presents Nietzsche's own responses to modern European nihilism, focusing on the overman, the will to power, the eternal recurrence and his view of truth, and points out the disturbing ethical implications of Nietzsche's responses to nihilism. Chapter three places Nietzsche’s philosophy within the context of Heidegger's account of nihilism as 'forgetfulness of Being', and considers Heidegger's critique of Nietzsche and the notion of 'values', Heidegger's account of the philosophical tradition since Plato, and his reflection on our ‘technological' understanding of Being as an inevitable result of the 'forgetfulness of Being’. Chapter four discusses how Being and Time and its critique of Descartes and the subject-object distinction can be seen as a response to nihilism as the 'forgetfulness of Being՝, and as an implicit part of Heidegger's critique of Nietzsche. Chapter five considers Heidegger’s response to nihilism in terms of his writings on authenticity, art, language, and thinking, and shows how all of these features of Heidegger's thought aim to attune us to Being as the mysterious 'source' of all particular understandings of being, a source to which we are beholden for the sense we are able to make in our lives. The potentially dangerous features of this picture of human life are then addressed, as is the lack of an explicitly ethical dimension to Heidegger's response to Nietzsche's explicitly ethical account of nihilism. Chapter six gives an account of Levinas's phenomenology of ethics and his critique of Heidegger and the philosophical tradition as 'philosophies of the Same'. It presents Levinas's theses concerning the importance of the other person in giving philosophical accounts of language, truth, and objectivity, and the heteronomous nature of the moral subject, as a way of making good the lack of an explicitly ethical response to Nietzschean nihilism in Heidegger’s philosophy.

This thesis examines the relationship between nihilism and postmodernism in relation to the sublime, and is divided into two parts: theory and literature. Beginning with histories of nihilism and the sublime, the Enlightenment is constructed as a conflict between the two. Rather than promote a simple binarism, however, nihilism is constructed as a temporally-displaced form of sublimity that is merely labelled as nihilism because of the dominant ideologies at the time. Postmodernism, as a product of the Enlightenment, is therefore implicitly related to both nihilism and the sublime, despite the fact that it is often characterised as either nihilistic or sublime. Whereas prior forms of nihilism are 'modernist' because they seek to codify reality, postmodernism creates a new formulation of nihilism – 'postmodern nihilism' – that is itself sublime. This is explored in relation to a broad survey of postmodern literature through a series of interconnected themes. These themes – apocalypse, the absurd, absence, and space – arise from the debates presented in the theoretical chapters of this thesis, and demonstrate the ways in which nihilism and the sublime interact within postmodern literature. Because of the theoretical and literary debates presented within it, this thesis concludes that it cannot be a thesis at all.