Nietzsche is concerned with the decadence of modernity--- European society and culture generally---and how this cultural ill--nihilism--might be cured. Nietzsche characterises nihilism as the highest values devaluating themselves with truth as a key value in this self-devaluation. Modernity itself is defined in terms of constant overcoming; that is, creation of the new that overcomes the old.

This overcoming is essentially bound up with the modern narrative of progress; by overcoming the old history moves towards a future state of enlightenment. This state of enlightenment is understood as a return to an origin, a secure ground or foundation for the rationality that illuminates society in its ideal state. So a modernist conception of nihilism,follows modernism in general, as it employs a unilinear interpretation of history as it tells a single story, specifically about European society. Hence the transvaluation of values as the affirmation of life-- affirming rather than denying life---posits an overcoming of nihilism beyond it.

Is there a postmodern understanding of the process of nihilism and transvaluation? One in which the overcoming of nihilism is not thought of in modernist terms of a new era or a new foundation.