Malraux is more than a nihilist. Not only is God dead, but so is Man, like a figure of the voice incarnated in history. But what they leave after them is not a void; it's a vitality swarming with larvae, spiders, octopi, and soft crabs; a nightmare in which the cycle of putrefaction and regeneration endlessly repeats itself. Without end and without purpose. The stars in the sky form a spider's web, indifferent and threatening; and 'more interior in one-self than the self', man does not discover the voice of God, as Augustine thought, but horrifying beasts vegetating in the bottoms of pits. The nihilism here is not philosophical; it's the body that experiences it like a filthy Repetition.

Lyotard, 'Being Done with Narrative by Cubism and Malraux'