Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: As a core form of deconstructive historical philosophy in the 20th century, the nihilism of historical subject dismantles historical necessity by negating the reality of the subject and objective laws. From the dual perspectives of tracing its intellectual genealogy and critiquing it through the lens of historical materialism, this theory has undergone three major transformations: the relativism of Neo-Kantianism, the linguistic turn of structuralism, and the discursive reconstruction of postmodernism. Through a strategy of decentralization, it obscures the agency of the subject and absolutizes historical contingency. Its formation mechanism is rooted in the value vacuum during periods of social transition, and it constructs a consumer logic of symbolized history through pseudo-positivist data collage and the entertainment-oriented dissemination of digital media. The critique from historical materialism reveals its essence as the ideological cover of the bourgeoisie over the dialectics of history, which dissolves revolutionary potential by severing historical continuity. Based on the reconstruction of practical subjectivity, the reinterpretation of objective laws, and the methodology of class analysis, this paper proposes a pathway to restore historical subjectivity, thereby forming a practical paradigm to resist postmodern nihilism.
Source: Advances in Humanities Research
Author: Ruoming Guo
Institution: Zhejiang Normal University
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4410907379