Given the poverty of Blanchot's essay on nihilism, and that of the neo cons like Irving Kristol, I've returned to reading Heidegger on Nietzsche and nihilism. I've gone back to vol 4 of Heidegger's Nietzsche and I'm reading chapter 5, 'The Provenance of Nihilism and the Nihilism's Three Forms.'

Heidegger says:

If [the] uppermost values, which grant all beings their value, are devalued, then all beings grounded in them become valueless. A feeling of futility, of the nullity of everything arises. hence nihilism, as the decline of cosmological values, is at the same time the emergence of nihilism as a feeling of utter valuelessness, as a "psychological state."