Why Nihilism?

I never understood why the intellectual elites in this country adapted the nihilist philosophy of the French after WW2. I asked my liberal college professor friend why academics were so odds with America and he said that intellectuals feel marginalized by big business and those who run the government. So they strive for power in other ways.

Sartre, Camus, Lacan, Derrida and many other French nihilists have greatly influenced post-post-modernistic thought among academics. And "deconstruction" of the canon of western literature, philosophy and even theology has really been the attempt to marginalize, if not destroy western literature, philosophy and theology.

What's to take its place? Red Elk Speaks or how about Clotel: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States? I'm not kidding. These are the books you'll find in an American lit class these days.

Pictured above Sartre (left and below) and Camus (right)