Language, Nihilism and Television

The origin of meaning has been an area of interest for many Western researchers and thinkers studying in various fields such as semiology, language and philosophy. In an attempt to clarify what meaning is, how it is built and perceived by readers, various philologists and philosophers including Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida and Friedrich Nietzsche discussed several important concepts ranging from semiotics/signs to existence and from text to its author and readers. Comprehensive debates over these concepts have ultimately extended to nihilism. In this vein, this article in its limited scope investigates certain aspects of meaning and its repercussions scrutinizing how signs that form a language lose their associative power over time, how texts lose their essence/core and how authors are no longer a part of meaning. Within this framework, the fact that a sign does not signify anything but itself leads to significant problems in terms of essence and existence. Indeed, a text that is composed by signs that cannot signify anything other than themselves and that has intertextual relations with the other ones can refer to neither its author nor creative power. Underlining that every signified might also be a signifier of something else, everything can turn into discourse due to absence of origin and that the semantic field can be expanded infinitely, Derrida pointed out to the fact that there is continued mediation as well as motion among eternal signs of the universe in reference to self-continuity and eternity of existence based on the nature of language. This eternal rebirth or renaissance of what is in kind, namely self-continuity, further consolidates the idea of ‘nichts’ by negating the purpose of existence and the relations between the ‘creator’ and things. From this perspective, as well, it is essential to tackle the relationship between nihilism and television which has its own particular logic of language. In this sense, the most important question to ask is how television paves the way for nihilism.