Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo: theological reflections on nihilism, tragedy, and apocalypse

Abstract

Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo is a serious philosophical and theological reflection on the human condition in the light of politically motivated forms of radical evil and oppression in our time, including the Holocaust, Rwanda, and Sarajevo.Throughout the book, as David Toole reflects on this subject, he refers his thoughts to a staging of Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot by Susan Sontag in Sarajevo during the summer of 1993.Like Beckett's characters Vladimir and Estragon, Toole finds himself situated in an "undecidable" zone somewhere between seeing life as meaningless (nihilism), meaningful only as art (tragedy), or meaningful only in Christ (apocalypse).With Susan Sontag as his model, Toole argues that no matter what anchors one's ultimate vision of life in the face of suffering and death, it is important, above all else, to stage the play, even as the bombs are flying all around the theatre.If suffering and dying are our plight, at least we can die well.Toole has many conversation partners, and they all contribute important pieces to the story that he tells.Alasdair Maclntyre begins the story, jousting at Nietzsche's monumental war on reason with the tiny toothpicks of his Thomistic "logos."According to Toole, Maclntyre's mistake is that he tries to beat Nietzsche on his own ground, that is to say, on ground ultimately defined by a metaphysic rooted in conflict.From Maclntyre, Toole turns to other critics of Nietzsche, who, like Maclntyre, try to peg Nietzsche as a radical nihilist: notably, Michael Gillespie, Martin Heidegger, and John Milbank.He concludes that, in the end, all of these thinkers misread Nietzsche by seeing him as a nihilist.They do this in order to set off their own work of salvaging liberalism (Gillespie), Being (Heidegger), or Christian charity (Milbank).In fact, according to Toole, all of these thinkers share with Nietzsche the conviction that "nihilism has become our 'normal condition.'"(p.51) Then, to the reader's surprise, Toole asserts that, like Maclntyre, Gillespie, Heidegger, and Milbank, Nietzsche was not content to live as a "normal nihilist."(p.51) Nietzsche also wanted to escape this predicament of meaninglessness.The way that he accomplished this was through a "metaphysics of tragedy" that attempted to justify the world as art.Toole conducts a masterful tour of Nietzsche's Dionysian vision of a city of reason poised on the edge of the abyss, propped up by an Appolinarian order designed to keep the "other," the abyss, tamed or banished.Ultimately, of course, this fragile order cannot keep the 53

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