Cutting the Not: Negativity and Reflexivity, Versus Laboratory, Jan Van Eyck Academy, Maastricht (10-12 September

2010)

The Recirculation of Negativity

Benjamin Noys (2010) I want to begin with an ending (which is also a beginning) and a beginning (which is also an ending). The ending is the last word of Joyces Ulysses (1922), which is Yes (capitalised), the final yes of a sequence of yess: yes I said yes I will Yes. 1 It is from this repetition, in part, that Derrida derives the double affirmation, the yes, yes, which conditions deconstruction and makes of Joyces last word an opening to the Other.2 The beginning is from Joyces Finnegans Wake (1939), which completes the Viconian circle of the book, looped back from the last word the, to the first line: riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.3 This recirculation implies a closed circle, the recapture and totalisation that, in Derridas words, circulates through all languages at once, [and] accumulates their energies, 4 and which makes the machine of Joyces text a Perpetuum Mobile. And yet, the closure of the circle is always conditioned and undone by the primacy of affirmation, what Deleuze and Guattari would call the fundamental yes,5 and we recirculate between the yes of affirmation and the yes of recapitulative control and reactive repetition.6

1 2 3 4 5 6

Joyce, Ulysses, p.933. Derrida, Ulysses Gramophone. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p.3. Derrida, Origin of Geometry, p.102. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p.244. Derrida, Ulysses Gramophone, p.308.

For Derrida Joyces textual machine doubles Hegels; this circle of affirmation stands in relief to Hegels circle of negativity. 7 If, as Derrida notes, there is ever so little literature, 8 that most literature, we could say, is saturated by philosophy, and if any literature remains it is only as a remainder, then Joyce is the philosophical double of Hegel, but with that remainder, that recirculation or riverrun of affirmation that overflows from any Perpetuum Mobile (one early example of such a machine, that of Villard de Honnecourt from about 1230, was a water wheel). While Joyces machine, true to his name, is joyous, comic, and affirmative, beginning from a desire to totalise everything, all the languages of the world, only always to end with an equivocal affirmation that always displaces and exacerbates that desire, 9 then Hegels machine only ever begins from negativity, operating through the tragic and a certain form of mourning, 10 to return, through the negation of the negation, to an affirmation of totality. 11 That, at least, is the clich. Negativity, it is presumed, is saturated in its closure, with absolute negativity equivalent to the interiorisation of absolute knowledge, a recirculation that does not and cannot, it is assumed, Hegel is overflow always its channelling. to a In work Derridas of influential and characterisation, derived from Bataille, the flow of negativity in restricted mourning interiorisation, whereas Nietzschean or Bataillean affirmation opens to a general economy of forces that always overflows.12 This, we might say, is the doxa of contemporary Continental theory. On the one hand, the insistence on the necessity that we
Jean-Luc Nancy argues that the circle in Hegel is a privileged figure, but only as the circle of circles, that forms a turning point and an unending restlessness (p.17-18). 8 Derrida, The Double Session, p. 223; Acts of Literature, p.73. 9 Derrida, Two Words for Joyce. 10 Bataille, Hegel, Death and Sacrifice. 11 It is the process of its own becoming, the circle that presupposes its end as its gaol, having its end also as its beginning; and only by being worked out to its end, is it actual. Hegel, Phenomenology, 18, p.10. 12 Derrida, From Restricted to General Economy, in Writing and Difference, pp. 251-277. Negri makes a strikingly similar diagnosis we he speak of the dialectic as a mere sublimation of negation (Kairs, Alma Venus, Multitudo, p. 250).
7

always begin from affirmation, the world as I found it (to quote Wittgenstein), doubled and radicalised to force a perpetual opening and a kind of force or strength of thought. This affirmationism is the tone (Stimmung) of contemporary thought, hegemonic in the precise sense of shaping even the resistance to it, and multiplying amongst a diverse and often antagonistic range of thinkers whose projects resonate in the present: Deleuze (Affirmation itself is being, being is solely affirmation in all its power 13), Derrida (in the beginning is minimal, primary yes, the light, dancing yes of affirmation14), Negri (My intention ... is to develop a philosophy of praxis, a materialism of praxis, by insisting on ... the affirmative power of being15), Badiou ([philosophy] must break with whatever leads it through nihilistic detours, that is, with everything that restrains and obliterates affirmative power 16), and many others. On the other hand, this affirmationism is also often cast as the radicalisation of a negativity that does not and cannot recirculate. This is a negativity that breaks with the reflexive return to consciousness, that escapes dialectical capture or sublimation, a savage negativity that returns or recirculates only to itself, in a number of guises. We have a negativity so negative that it could not even be called such any longer (Derrida), 17 the negative power [potenza] of the positive (Negri),18 a negativism beyond all negation (Deleuze),19 and a non-Hegelian category of negation (Badiou),20 again to select only some examples. The philosophical or theoretical front against Hegel is double: the front which opposes him directly, if we like, with the force of affirmation as opening, and a more oblique front, attacking Hegel from the rear, which wages war on the restriction of negativity, on
Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.186. Derrida, Ulysses Gramophone, p.298, p.308. 15 Negri, Kairs, Alma Venus, Multitudo, p. 157. 16 Badiou, Polemics, p. 35. 17 Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 308 note 4. 18 Negri, Books for Burning, p. 258. 19 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p.71; see also, Toscano, In Praise of Negativism. 20 Badiou, We need a popular discipline, p.652.
13 14

its recirculation to consciousness, to absolute knowledge, and to totality. This is a coordinated attack, a pincer movement that at once accuses Hegel of a failure of affirmation and a failure of negation. If the dialectic, driven by the motor of the labour of the negative, appears (and on this turns everything) to return to a stabilised difference, but a stabilised difference organised through contradiction and conflict, a tragic dialectic, then we might say, for affirmationists, the dialectic fails twice. It fails at the moment of totalisation, the final recirculation and gathering of negativity in absolute knowledge, but it also fails at each point of the drama, at each figuration or moment of the dialectic. This is because at each of these moments we find the abstract negativity that threatens to overflow its alloted channel, that threatens to stall, destroy, or derail the dialectical machine. Hence the war on the dialectic (as motor of negativity) is a guerilla war, that strikes not only at the strongest point of the chain, but also at the weakest points, ambushing Hegels text in its various figurations of negativity. The form I want to select is that of the beautiful soul, which lives in dread of besmirching the purity of its inner being by action and an existence and so flees from contact with the actual world. 21 While Hegel regards such a disposition as an empty nothingness which is disordered to the point of madness, [and] wastes itself in yearning and pines away in consumption,22 it is possible to counter-read the beautiful soul as attesting to an intractable and unsublateable negativity. At this moment then, negativity idles, or, in Batailles formulation (and valorisation), appears as unemployed. 23 Drew Milne notes that, in relation to Becketts fictional re-tooling of the beautiful soul, we find: The process is dynamic, but the dynamism animating this process moves between the vanity of minor differences and absolute indifference, refusing to become dialectical or to recognize its
21 22 23

Hegel, Phenomenology, p.400 658. Ibid., p.207 668. Bataille, Letter to X.

negativity as a process of determinate negations. 24 It is the dialectical indetermination of the beautiful soul, treated as a failure by Hegel, which opens a potential rupture in the dialectic to locate a perpetual negativity of failure; in Becketts often-quoted words fail again, fail better. The difficulty is, however, the pejorative status of the beautiful soul from within Hegelianism. For Hegel, the beautiful soul is the one-sided shape which we saw vanish into thin air, but also positively externalise itself and move onward. 25 Without this externalisation and realisation the beautiful soul would remain objectless and one-sided. From within Hegelianism, the beautiful soul is accounted for, and to remain at this point amounts to a regression within the dialectic. The question is, as posed by Milne, does our scepticism or indifference to the achievement of absolute knowledge leave us remaining restless within the literary and philosophical shape of Spirit represented by the beautiful soul[?] 26 This troubling position would seem to leave us without a means for intervention into the world, leaving us unable to accede to any labour of the negative and so merely in impotent contemplation of restless or unemployed negativity. In abandoning the sharpness of dialectical contradiction for the play of differences, as Deleuze notes, the philosophy of difference must be wary of turning into the discourse of beautiful souls: differences, nothing but differences, in a peaceful coexistence in the Idea of social places and functions. 27 To avoid this fate, Deleuze asserts, we require the proper degree of positivity to release a power of aggression and selection. 28 This is exemplary of the strategic necessity that dictates the linking of a thought of affirmation together with a thinking of negativity detached from dialectical circulation. The thought of difference requires affirmation
24 25 26 27 28

Milne, The Beautiful Soul, p.78. Hegel, Phenomenology, p.483. 795. Ibid. p.81. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p.207. Ibid. p. xviii.

and positivity, if it is not to sink into acceptance of things as they are, or a mere plurality of pacified differences. To avoid or trading the dialectic for only respectable, a political reconcilable federative differences29 requires

intervention. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze argued for the necessity of a turn to Marx to avoid the philosophy of difference collapsing into consolation or conformity. In brief, for Deleuze, the work of Marx (or, to be more precise, Althussers Spinozist rearticulation of Marx), especially his treatment of the economic as a problem, allow us to realise revolution as the social power of difference, the paradox of society, the particular wrath of the social idea.30 To be able to resist the stabilisation of difference, or what Deleuze calls the counterfeit forms of affirmation, 31 requires the affirmation of difference qua revolution. This form of revolution: [N]ever proceeds by way of the negative but by way of difference and its power of affirmation, and the war of the righteous for the conquest of the highest power, that of deciding problems by restoring them to their truth, by evaluating that truth beyond the representations of consciousness and the forms of the negative[.]32 To avoid the stalling of the philosophy of difference in the position of the beautiful soul requires a surplus political affirmation to refuse negativity and its reflexive return to consciouness. The turn or return to affirmation is never, it seems, a return to consciousness, but only to a form of alterity that is reflexive to itself, whether dubious that is Deleuzes transcendental event. field, Derridas Peter diffrance, Negris dispersion of singularities, or, in a perhaps more characterisation, Badious Borrowing Hallwards characterisation we might argue that affirmationism is singular affirming an intrinsic principle that resists any relational negation, all the better, it is claimed, to open onto a non-relational
29 30 31 32

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p.52. Ibid. p.208. Ibid. Ibid. p.208.

negativity.33 And yet the thinking of affirmative difference remains haunted by the threat of endorsing only counterfeit forms of affirmation and federative differences. We could say this, in part, accounts for the scission between thinkers like Derrida and Deleuze, and their followers, and the thought of Badiou and Negri, and their followers. The point of rupture falls politically. Badiou and Negri are more directly concerned with capitalisms ability to capture and federate difference, especially in the period of what Badiou calls its triumphant restoration.34 Hardt and Negri write, Empire does not create division argues but rather recognizes existing or potential of differences, celebrates them, and manages them, 35 while Badiou, similarly, Capital demands a permanent creation subjective and territorial identities in order for its principle of movement to homogenize its space of action. 36 In this situation we cannot simply trust difference, but instead must re-formulate it against this recuperation and pacification. In fact, the dialectic of capital, to follow Hardt and Negri, is a dialectic that integrates difference, that operates through negativity, to organise the reproduction of capitalism. For both Hardt and Negri and Badiou capitalism is defined by the DeleuzoGuattarian couplet of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, in which negativity lies solely on the side of the motor of capital, constantly recirculated to the benefit of accumulation. In this way Hegels logic is capitals logic, and the labour of the dialectic is assimilated to the extraction of labour by capital. 37 In response to this problem of negativity forming the motor of capital, through the capture of the labour-power of the working class, we could argue that a split emerges in affirmationism between those who more strongly valorise a unworked concept of negativity (Bataille,
Hallward, The One or the Other. Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis. 35 Hardt and Negri, Empire, p.201. 36 Badiou, Saint Paul, pp.10-11. 37 Similar characterisations of Marx can be found in value-form Marxism, notably the work of Roberto Finelli, which characterise Marxs description of the logic of capital as following, and parodying, Hegels Logic.
33 34

Blanchot, Foucault, Derrida, Nancy), and those who re-valorise affirmation, either in terms of superior Difference (Deleuze, Negri), or the Same (Badiou). We could add that this split also seems to follow a temporal pattern, with affirmationism proper coming to the fore in the 1990s and 2000s as a response to the globalised dominance of capitalism. This conjunctural shift to the constellation of contemporary thought organised around the triad Deleuze (as figure of inspiration), Negri, Badiou, is merely a shift within a more generalised affirmationist consensus. In response to the capitalism hegemonisation of difference, the solution proffered is more affirmation to restore a power of aggression and selection (Deleuze) against the distributive stuff of mere differences (Badiou). In this conjuncture of high affirmationism, which gives affirmation a positive political valence to resist the solvent powers of a capitalism that lacks any significant anti-systemic opposition, negativity is recirculated in weak forms. On the one hand, weak negativity is valorised as the source and form of resistance to the dominance of contemporary capitalism. Drawing inspiration from Adornos insistence on the disjuncture between the suffering subject and capitalism, the damaged life, and a post-deconstructive insistence on passivity before the Other, this model sutures negativity to the incapacity of the subject.38 Negativity is ontologically or anthropologically correlated to finitude and failure, inscribing negativity in the subject as the sign of their evasion of capitalist capture. Despite its professed antipathy to the supposed heroism of affirmationism, this remains a soft affirmationism, offering a similar ontological affirmation that resistance comes first. In fact, something of this convergence can be noted in the symmetry of the sites in which this weak negativity is articulated with affirmationism: Beckett and comedy. We witness a competition, if we like, over whether Becketts negativity has the pathos of
38

See Critchley, Infinitely Demanding.

failure (Gibson),39 or whether it reinscribes itself within a generic capacity for human patience and courage (Badiou). 40 In the case of comedy a similar contest takes place, between comedy as deflationary strategy of political subversion (Critchley), 41 and comedy as tracing of infinity (Zupani).42 As Nina Power has insisted,43 we find here a return to the anthropological, and more precisely a neo-Feuerbachian generic anthropology, at work within these variant anti-humanisms and, in fact this seems the common point of affirmation. What I have traced is a recirculation, a vicious circle even, between affirmation total negativity weak negativity and affirmation. We can start at different points, but still seem only to permutate the terms. We could begin, like Simon Critchley, from the weak negativity of the suffering body to return to the affirmation of absolute alterity, or, like Badiou, subsume any weakness of the body under the affirmation of a generic procedure of fidelity to the event. Of course, this circle is only hegemonic, and one thing that I take has partly gathered us here together is the desire to break this circle. This circle, as I have intimated, is also a political circle no matter how sceptical we might be concerning the reality of such a politics, or the political claims made for difference or affirmation, the stakes of affirmationism always insist on the political stakes of a rupture with negativity. Of course, the settling of accounts with Hegel, who radically implicated philosophy in actuality, 44 plays a key role here. Hegel is taken as the philosopher of actuality, which is to say the misery of contemporary (capitalist) actuality. What has been lost is Marxs faith that the dialectic could be returned to a rational form: a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom that both recognises the existing state of things and recognises the
See Andrew Gibsons Beckett & Badiou for a thoroughgoing re-inscription of Beckett in terms of the pathos of finitude. 40 Badiou, Beckett. 41 Critchley, Comedy and Finitude. 42 Zupani, The Odd One In. 43 Power, Towards an Anthropology of Infinitude and Philosophys Subjects. 44 Jean-Luc Nancy, Hegel, p.3.
39

negation of that state, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.45 Instead, we are returned to clichs of Hegel as state philosopher, thoroughly dismantled by Domenico Losurdo, 46 which permeates a quasi-anarchist opposition to what Deleuze and Guattari call state thinking in contemporary thought. Allied to this, as we have seen, the assimilation of the dialectic to capitalism closes the circle from the other, Marxist, side: the dialectic is powered by negativity, the state and capital are mirrored in the dialectic, therefore negativity is subordinated to the function(ing) of the state and capitalism. We could argue that in this conception the state / capital play the role of reflexivity, the return of negativity into an interiorisation although I would add Lukcss remark that the antagonistic domination of capitalism is not guided by a consciousness but is instead driven forward by its own immanent, blind dynamic.47 The broken dialectic, the broken promise of the imbrications of rationality and actuality, fuels the detachment of negativity into total alterity, and the primacy of affirmation as point of ontological or evental resistance. In this situation the rehabilitation of negativity itself struggles with any relational orientation, because any negativity of relation is assimilated to this schema, which results in the tendency to position negativity itself as absolutely singular either in the extreme forms of alterity, or even when accepted or valorised as such linked to the singular subject. Negativity as the night of the world, as the ground zero of subjectivity, negativity as linguistic indetermination, might carry a strong negativity, but, once again, seem to be locked-into the subject, or the metaphysics or ontology of the subject, as a means of immunisation or resistance to the capture or assimilation of negativity. In fact, beyond the clichs used to characterise Hegel or Marx, I would suggest much here turns on the perception of
45 46 47

Marx, Afterword to the second German edition of Capital (1873). Losurdo, Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns. Lukcs, History and Class Consciousness, p.181.

10

labour the more classical model of negativity as relation. Here I want to make some preliminary remarks concerning the possible political and philosophical costs, or elements, of this identification of negativity with labour. Of course this identification gains license in Hegel, through his perspectival shifting of tarrying with the negative into the labour of the concept,48 and also through Batailles conditioning of the rupture with Hegel in the form of unemployed negativity. 49 This identification, however, is also vectored through social reality and politics, in terms of the rupture with labour qua dialectical category of capital, from Batailles anthropology of excess, on to, more equivocally, Heideggers objection to labour as metaphysical essence,50 then C. Wright Millss objection to a labour metaphysic in the American New Left,51 Italian operaismos assimilation of labour with the dialectic and concomitant calls for strategies of separation from and refusal of labour (as always relationally assimilated to capitalism),52 Lardreau and Jambets Gnostic Maoism of radical separation and hyper-asceticism, 53 Moishe Postones critique of labour as capitalist category,54 down to a whole range of anarchist, post-anarchist, and dissident Marxist currents that refuse work and dialectics. In each case the reflexivity of negativity is correlated with its political limits, leaving us only with faith in an excess or subtraction from any relational labour. Writing in 1964 Perry Anderson noted the Janus-faced nature of the working class: divided between a prefigurative proletarian positivity and a self-abolishing proletarian negativity. 55 The dialectic of these moments would prevent the twin disasters of a pure positivity leading to immobilisation in its own fullness, and a
48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

Hegel, Phenomenology, 19, p.10. Bataille, Letter to X. Heidegger, Letter on Humanism. C. Wright Mills, Letter to the New Left, p.22. Tronti, The Strategy of Refusal. Lardreau and Jambet, LAnge. Postone, Time, Labour and Social Domination . Anderson, Origins of the Present Crisis, p.44.

11

pure negativity of permanent, suicidal insurrection. 56 The then moment of the English working class was one of positivity a whole dense, object invested universe [that] testifies to the monumental positivity of the oldest working-class in the world. 57 Here inertia is, classically, correlated with positivity, and positivity with the gains of social democracy that locked the working class into consensus precisely as the working class represented by the Labour Party. What was required, theoretically and practically, was a dose of negativity as theorised by Sartre and Lukcs, and practiced What by I more would aggressive suggest and revolutionary communist theory, movements. was that contemporary especially in the 1960s and 1970s, although reflecting back to that other moment of crisis, the 1930s, was a re-alignment of the sort of schema proposed by Anderson. In fact, the valence is reversed: negativity became the inertial capture of proletarian energies, negativity put to work was correlated with social democracy or actually-existing socialism (in the latter case a slightly more convincing argument about the fate of revolutionary negativity). The dialectical machine was a social-democratic machine, predicated on wage labour and the working class staying in their place as working. In an unlikely reversal positivity now became an ontological virtue of rupture, a separation from the working class into a proletarian excess that would shatter the relation of labour. This analysis did not significantly re-align itself with the collapse of actually-existing socialism, social democratic forms, and the rise of neo-liberalism. Instead, as I have traced elsewhere, no real return to negativity was made, but rather to enhanced versions of positivity, which is especially visible in the work of Alain Badiou and Toni Negri.58 Of course, there is a strong continuity for Badiou and Negri as their political positions of the 1970s were already deeply hostile
56 57 58

Ibid. Ibid. Noys, The Persistence of the Negative.

12

to the organised left and social democracy, located as the primary enemy for siphoning-off proletarian radicalism, with capitalism running second. This new positivity would find itself in unfortunate confluence with neo-liberal assaults on organised labour and the socialdemocratic compact. With the failure of the agent of this new positivity to arrive, which Lyotard sarcastically dubbed the good hippy,59 neo-liberalism stepped into the revolutionary role. In his lectures of 1978-9, The Birth of Biopolitics , Foucault presciently analysed neo-liberalisms new governmental rationality as the reorganisation of society on the model of the mobile and fluid enterprise, and made disturbing connections between this and the state phobia of the left.60 In fact, affirmationism, even in its more politically-nuanced forms, occluded this moment by failing to grasp the inertial positivity of capitalist social forms, especially in the moment of spectral financialisation and real subsumption. The supposed creative and productive powers of capitalism could only be out-trumped but a higher ontological creativity and production, which reproduced this new spirit of capitalism and could not fully recognise what Fredric Jameson noted as Stasis today, all over the world.61 Aligning capitalism with negativity, and implicitly coding this capture through social-democratic forms, left the prescriptions of affirmationism hanging: the assertion of positivity became more remote, subject to the rarity of the (future) event in Badiou, or reinvented fidelities, or dissolved into the undifferentiated multitude in Negri, which had somehow won through seeming defeat. Affirmation led a floating existence, as a radical programme that could disrupt any or all potential political identities and any lockinginto place (Rancire is the key figure here), but which refused any figuration or relation of its own.

59 60 61

Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, p.108. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method, p.4.

13

The neuralgic point is the loss of faith in the relational concept of proletarian negativity, generated out of, precisely, a mutual negative interlocking with capitalism. In the Grundrisse Marx describes labour, as posited by capital, as not-value, as absolute poverty.62 Treated positively, as negativity in relation to itself, labour is not value but the living source of value.63 The contradictory existence of labour, as absolute poverty and as general possibility of wealth, is presupposed by capital as its contradiction and as its contradictory being. 64 In this relation living labour is a real or practical abstraction abstract labour deprived of any particularity and treated as substanceless, merely formal and, equivalently, merely material [stofflich].65 Labour, in Marxs formulation, is the use value of capital itself.66 Capital appropriates labour as a fructifying vitality. 67 We could say that in this process affirmationism appeals to a pseudo-concrete, a vitality of living labour, or irreducible ontological residue, which escapes this relation rather than the radicalisation of negativity that could traverse abstract labour qua real abstraction. In this sense it retreats into an anthropology as Thorie Communiste remarked of post-68 radicalism: We momentarily all became Feuerbachians again, some of us remained so. They have thus made of an ideology born of the failure of 68, the eternal formula of the communist revolution.68 Labour, in this conception, becomes a dirty word, rather than a possible point of intervention, not least, of course, because of the disintegration of traditional forms of workers resistance, which tended to reinforce the positivity of labour, but also the absence of any new formation of the old mole in radicalised forms of negativity detached from work and the party. The dialectic, or
62 63 64 65 66 67 68

Marx, Grundrisse, p.296. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p.297. Ibid., p.297. Ibid., p.298. Thorie Communiste, Much Ado About Nothing.

14

relation, of negativity between capitalisms hollowing-out of the proletarians existence and the possibility of this operating as the formation of resistance, again appears broken. While this recognises a political reality, it also attests to a loss of faith in the potential or reconstructed rationality of social reality, precisely through a negativity that could free-up the inertia of capitalist relations. Whereas Lukcs has resort to the tendency as a method of radicalising negativity, the tendency, in contemporary theory, alltoo-often takes on extreme and apocalyptic forms. 69 Therefore, considering the imbrications of the theoretical fate of negativity with the social forms of negativity, any re-alignment of relational negativity in this kind of political form has to take cognisance of the tendencies of the present. In particular, crucial are a set of processes, thrown into sharp relief by the current capitalist crisis, of devalorisation, 70 creative destruction, and the abandonment of surplus humanity endemic to the capitalist system.71 Whether these processes signal terminal decline, entropic drift, or the re-starting of capitalism, is certainly not yet clear.72 In terms, however, of the conception of negativity they suggest both the massive negativity aligned with capitalism as annihilation of value (and, of course, people, as producers of value), and the further hollowing-out of labour qua identity. In this situation labour is destroyed, but the articulation of a selfabolishing proletariat seems remote, to say the least. This would seem to confirm the affirmationist diagnosis of aligning capitalism with creative of destruction, On the negativity with I in negativity am contemporary as motor that thought, of the its accumulation. downgrading contrary, suggesting

subsumption under the primacy of affirmation, actually reproduces the operations of capitalism predicated on the fantasmatic positing of a primary ontological creativity. Such a modelling blocks any
69 70 71 72

See Noys, Apocalypse, Tendency, Crisis. Benedict Seymour, Eliminating Labour. Endnotes, Misery and Debt. Balakrishnan, Speculations on the Stationary State.

15

thinking of a radicalised negativity from within social forms as the condition to rupture and resist the inertial forms of real or practical abstraction generated by capitalism; forms that now stand frozen and malign in the moment of crisis. The commonly-ascribed fault of relational negativity is that it remains mired with what it negates, for example in Althussers remark on the ambiguity of a negation which still clings to the universe of the concepts it rejects, without having succeeded in adequately formulating the new and positive concepts it brings with it.73 This is a common thread in affirmationism, and more widely in the rejection, theoretical and political, of negativity as a concept. Instead, I am suggesting the necessarily generative dynamic of change in which negativity is bound immanently to relations as the possibility of their rupture. This is a doubled, and even uncanny, negativity circularing between capitalism as the social form of real abstraction and the endogeneous modes of resistance this negativity induces, through a radicalised and further mediated negativity. To track back to the philosophical and theoretical this suggests the closer interrogation of the sociogenesis and social forms of negativity, and a resistance to rapid ontologisation and affirmation that claims to break the vicious circle of negativity qua accumulation.

73

Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, p.42 n18.

16

References Althusser, Louis, and tienne Balibar, Reading Capital [1968], trans. Ben Brewster (London and New York: Verso, 2009).

Anderson, Perry, Origins of the Present Crisis, New Left Review I/23 (1964): 26-53. Badiou, Alain, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). ___, Polemics, trans. and intro. Steve Corcoran (London and New York: Verso, 2006). ___, The Communist Hypothesis, New Left Review 49 (2008): 2942. ___, We Need a Popular Discipline: Contemporary Politics and the Crisis of the Negative, Interview by Filippo Del Lucchese and Jason Smith, Critical Inquiry 34 (Summer 2008): 645-659. Balakrishnan, Gopal, Speculations on the Stationary State, New Left Review 59 (September / October 2009): 5-26. Bataille, Georges, Letter to X, Lecturer on Hegel [1937], in Denis Hollier (ed.), The College of Sociology, 1937-39, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp.89-93. ___, Hegel, Death and Sacrifice [1955], trans. Jonathan Strauss, Allan Stoekl (ed.) On Bataille, Yale French Studies 78 (1990): 9-28. Critchley, Simon, Comedy and Finitude: Displacing the TragicHeroic Paradigm in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, in Ethics PoliticsSubjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas and Contemporary French Thought (London and New York: Verso, 1999), pp. 217-238. ___, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (London and New York: Verso, 2007).

17

Deleuze, Gilles, Nietzsche and Philosophy [1962], trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Athlone, 1983). ___, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London and New York: Verso, 1998). Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus [1972], trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). Derrida, Jacques, Writing and Difference, trans. and intro. Alan Bass (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1978). ___, Two Words for Joyce, trans. Geoffrey Bennington in D. Attridge and D. Ferrer (eds.), Post-structuralist Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp.145-159. ___, Edmund Husserls Origin of Geometry: An Introduction , trans. John P. Leavey Jr. (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989). ___, Ulysses Gramophone, in Derek Attridge (ed.), Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 256309.

Endnotes, Misery and Debt, Endnotes #2 (April 2010): 20-51. http://endnotes.org.uk/articles/1. Finelli, Roberto, Abstraction versus Contradiction: Observations on Chris Arthurs The New Dialectic and Marxs Capital , trans. Peter Thomas, Historical Materialism 15.2 (2007): 61-74. Foucault, Michel, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collge de France, 1978-79, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008).

18

Gibson, Andrew, Beckett & Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). Hallward, Peter, The One or the Other: French Philosophy Today, Angelaki 8: 2 (2003): 1-32. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). Hegel, G. W. F., Phenomenology of Spirit [1818], trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). Joyce, James, Ulysses [1922] (London: Flamingo, 1994). ___, Finnegans Wake [1939], Seamus Deane (ed.) (London: Penguin, 1992). Lardreau, Guy, and Christian Jambet, LAnge: Pour une cyngtique du semblant (Paris: Grasset, 1976). Lukcs, Georg, History and Class Consciousness [1923], trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin Press, 1971). Lyotard, Jean-Franois, Libidinal Economy [1974], trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Athlone, 1993). Marx, Karl, The Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973). ___, Afterword to the Second German Edition (1873), Marxists Internet Archive (1991) http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p3.htm.

19

Mills, C. Wright, Letter to the New Left, New Left Review I/5 (1960): 18-23. Milne, Drew, The Beautiful Soul: From Hegel to Beckett, diacritics 32.1 (Spring 2002): 63-82. Nancy, Jean-Luc, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative , trans. Jason Smith and Steven Miller (Minneapolis and London: The University of Minnesota Press, 2002). Negri, Antonio, Kairs, Alma Venus, Multitudo [2000], in Time for Revolution, trans. and intro. Matteo Mandarini (New York and London: Continuum, 2003), pp.139-261. ___, Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy, trans. ed. Timothy S. Murphy, trans. Arianna Bove, Ed Emery, Timothy S. Murphy and Francesca Novello (London and New York: Verso, 2005). Noys, Benjamin, Apocalypse, Tendency, Crisis, Mute: Culture and Politics After the Net vol. 2 #15 (April 2010): 44-59. ___, The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). Power, Nina, Towards an Anthropology of Infinitude: Badiou and the Political Subject, Cosmos and History 2 (1-2) (2006): 186-209. http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/viewFile/ 34/67 ___, Philosophys Subjects, Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy 3 (2007): 5572. Seymour, Benedict, Eliminating Labour: Aesthetic Economy in Haroun Farocki, Mute: Culture and Politics After the Net vol. 2 #16 (2010): 54-65.

20

http://www.metamute.org/en/content/eliminating_labour_aesthetic_ economy_in_harun_farocki. Thorie Communiste, Much Ado About Nothing, Endnotes #1: Preliminary Materials for a Balance Sheet of the Twentieth Century (October 2008) http://endnotes.org.uk/articles/13. Toscano, Alberto, In Praise of Negativism, in Simon O Sullivan and Stephen Zepke (eds.), Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New (London: Continuum, 2008), pp. 56-67. Tronti, Mario, The Strategy of Refusal (1965), Libcom.org,

http://libcom.org/library/strategy-refusal-mario-tronti. Zupani, Alenka, The Odd One In: On Comedy (Cambridge, Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 2008).

21