This anonymity is the figure of “Bloom,” which does not refer simply to a particular type of person or social group but is the name for radical exposure and a mood, a Stimmung. The figure of Bloom is the name given to the present condition of ordinary humanity. In the 1990s, an anonymous collective of French intellectuals naming themselves “Tiqqun”[3] began writing to address the possibility of rethinking the notion of the communal—a radical communism—in an effort to stand against the onslaught of technologically driven, capitalist economico-politics and its ideology of what constitutes individualism and society. Rather than merely engaging in a post-Marxist analysis and agenda, Tiqqun extended its critique to include the outgrowths of existential, phenomenological, process, deconstructive, and poststructural thinking. One of the works it produced was titled Theory of Bloom. Here the figure of Bloom is analogous to what Joyce names in Finnegan’s Wake “Here Comes Everybody.” Bloom is a catholicity both secular and spiritual that emerges from and simultaneously deconstructs and moves beyond the institutional Church and State, signaling in its wake the kairotic watchfulness of the messianic time, that is, the subversion of the contemporary politics of biopower and sovereignty, about which Agamben, following Foucault, has so forcefully written. Bloom does not simply represent the modern person or society; rather, Bloom is one “who has become so thoroughly conjoined with his [or her] alienation that it would be absurd to try and separate them.”[4] The figure of “complete nihilism,” Bloom’s “lot is to open the way out of nihilism or perish. The ecstatic opening of [the human being], and of Bloom in particular, the I that is an Anyone, the Anyone that is an I, is the very thing against which the fiction of the individual was invented.”[5] Bloom is everywhere and yet is precisely from Bloom that there must be escape. Boom is the figure who points to the reinvention of what it means to confront the imminence of a potential impending consummate nihilism. Bloom is the name of resistance to the growing hegemonic sway of the spectacle, in Debord’s sense of the term, and to its often neutralizing, paralyzing reactive power. This power is the same that was exposed by Plato in his famous allegory of the cave, and against which Nietzsche, despite his attempt to reverse the movement of Platonism, which is to say, Greek-Christian metaphysics, also set himself. Bloom is that which names both what is to be overcome and celebrated in the human being. This is the transformative ecstasy that nihilism is capable of achieving, but only when the depths of its danger are fully plumbed and the risk of its potential consummation are actually and fully confronted.

But how to do this—that remains the task, the work, that faces us all. Bloom means “that we don’t belong to ourselves, that this world is not our world.”[6] There can be no lasting communal transfiguration until the Bloom that we all are is taken seriously. This is the development of the soul, the locus of Bloom’s blossoming into something new and different.

One does not usually think together play and nihilism, but play lies at the very heart of ekstasis, and thus is integral to the transition to an ecstatic nihilism. Is it not play that brings one to the liberating freedom of laughter? Nietzsche captures both the problem of and the solution for overcoming nihilism: “To laugh at oneself as one would have to laugh in order to laugh out of the whole truth—to do that even the best so far lacked sufficient sense for the truth…. Even laughter may yet have a future…. For the present, the comedy of existence has not yet ‘become conscious’ of itself. For the present we live in the age of tragedy, the age of moralities and religions.”[7] The play of ecstatic nihilism—laughter—is the antidote to all other forms of nihilism. Blanchot is correct when he notes that the will to overcome nihilism absolutely is the very realization of nihilism.[8] Play not only constitutes the essence of the game; it also defers completion of the game. Nihilism is the necessary counter aspect of life, without which there would be no development. That nihilism is part of the intrinsic logic of Western metaphysics is no mere accident or error; nihilism and affirmation are inseparably connected just as are active and reactive forces.