The sense is that there is nothing left to be said about nothing, yet, despite this, anyone who approaches the subject matter suddenly appears to harbour some degree of expertise. Weirdly enough, the notions of nothing and nothingness always seem to accumulate alluvial sediments: semiotic debris generating parasitic meanings. This may be because, when freakishly pondered and scrutinised under reason’s lens, it microloops thought itself, birthing chaotic and absurd rationales. To a point where every statement on the matter appears to revel in doomer-esque non-sequiturs, simp over aporias, or simply drown in la-di-das. In most cases, what results is an account (sometimes well-documented, other times seemingly insightful) on ‘nothing chan’: a cute chibi version of something well beyond anyone’s grasp. 

There’s even a fancy word for it: meontology. This notion perfectly illustrates language’s (mostly) futile attempt to capture nothing(ness), and in doing so mirrors the human subject’s denial through affirmation. Each approach yields more loops and paradoxes. On one hand, there is the horror vaccui permeating Western thought, from Parmenides through Spinoza’s nature that “abhors a vacuum” and beyond, has buried nothingness in its comfortable domain of negation. On the eastern front, however, rooting its approach in Zen Buddhism, the Kyoto School’s zettai mu elevates absolute nothingness to the creative principle enveloping the sensible world. It postulates a nothingness so profound that it negates itself into Being. It’s weird that in the case of nothing, there is no either/or situation. Either hidden or foregrounded, nothingness gets pushed aside to make way for being. But nothingness exists (the irony of this sentence perfectly encapsulates our limitations), the only problem is that there seems to be no way of truly accessing it, other than by proxy.

It’s like in that horrible joke, the one where Baudrillard walks into a bar, dumbfounded by TV, ads, and the increasingly unreal state of the world (poor bastard, you would have loved to hate TikTok). So in the bar, instead of the usual banter from the barkeep, he is met with dead (/deafening) silence. Not the usual run-of-the-mill door-to-door silence, something else. Noting solemnly, nothing grand, just pure punch-line-obliterating nothing. 

There is still a nothing-drive, a drive either of or towards nothing, through which pockets of nothingness are created, no matter how quickly they may be filled back up. This is the case in Bataille’s general economy, where the accursed share, the excess of energy which cannot be integrated into a system, needs to be destroyed, often in catastrophic and spectacular fashion – the proliferation of being is dependent on its own squandering into nothingness. This is true at the level of individual specimens, as the writer puts it “the luxury of death is regarded by us in the same way as that of sexuality, first a negation of ourselves, then – in a sudden reversal – as the profound truth of that movement of which life is the manifestation” (1988: 34-5), but even more so in wars and the plethora they exude (25). 

Life turns to nothing to give way to life, but as the scale grows larger, these interstices of nothingness also expand, while the ambivalence of life and death sends forth insubstantial shapes. As Pynchon describes the goings-on in the German Zone after it was devastated by WWII, “ghosts used to be either likenesses of the dead or wraiths of the living. But here in the Zone categories have been blurred badly. […] this is even more than the bureaucracy of mass absence – some still live, some have died, but many, many have forgotten which they are. Their likeness will not serve. Down here are only wrappings left in the light, in the dark: images of the Uncertainty” (1974: 353). As being tries to reassert its place, nothingness boils and bubbles at its core, emanating the eerie vapours and condensation of life. While the void lingers as such, no amount of lumens thrown into it will render a definite shape. You can try to illuminate yourself at the centre of it, but be mindful that “the goat-god’s city cousins wait for you at the edges of the light, playing the tunes they always played, but more audible now, because everything else has gone away or fallen silent” (353). 

NIMICH is an attempt to confront, engage, and ‘rap with’ this (unknowability quality of) nothingness. To dig it up and see it for what it isn’t, embracing perpetual self-negation ad nauseam. Once we admit that there is no spoon, or blank page, that any page is pre-filled with “the infinite world of stupidity”, any act of writing “will fundamentally be ‘erasing’, it will fundamentally be ‘deleting’” (Deleuze 2025: 40). To write on nothing would be to continue erasing still, to find the good, non-cliché idea and search for the space remaining empty, near or beneath it, to delete the act of deleting, and try to signify it, to say something in and of the void. Nothing left is nothing plenty, and there is room for nothing still. Nothing as a (non)material of sorts, as state and process, as body and nobody, as verb and noun, as already and yet-to-come.

It ought to be celebrated for what it is and can provide: an access way (be it one bolted shut) to the Great Outside. As Adventure Time’s Lich states: “Before there was time, before there was anything, there was nothing. And before there was nothing, there were monsters” (Xayaphone et al. 2015). ÎNDĂRĂT + NIMICH. The goal is not communing with eldritch nothingness (by all accounts an impossible feat), but to repeatedly and relentlessly bang our heads against the door in an attempt to trace an echo of the monstrous noumena.

NIMICH: any and all endeavours to do so, regardless of outcome, results, or success rate. What we collected here is the resulting detritus from these lost battles: the flattened remains of hubris-induced ventures, now adorned with a shiny plastic gold star. 

★

Radu Corfus
Cristian Drăgan

Editors