the recirculation of negativity

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Cutting the Not: Negativity and Reflexivity, Versus Laboratory,

Jan Van Eyck Academy, Maastricht (10-12 September 2010)

The Recirculation of NegativityBenjamin 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 thisrepetition, 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 andEnvirons.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 Joyce, Ulysses, p.933.2 Derrida, Ulysses Gramophone.3 Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p.3.4

Derrida, Origin of Geometry, p.102.5 Deleuze and Guattari,Anti-Oedipus, p.244.6 Derrida, Ulysses Gramophone, p.308.

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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 anyliterature 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, overflow its channelling. In Derridas influential

characterisation, derived from Bataille, the flow of negativity in

Hegel is always restricted to a work of mourning and

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

7 Jean-Luc Nancy argues that the circle in Hegel is a privileged figure, but only asthe 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 itsgaol, 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 asa mere sublimation of negation (Kairs, Alma Venus, Multitudo, p. 250).

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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 theprecise 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 power13), 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 ofpraxis, 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 power16), 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

13 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.186.14 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 ofNegativism.20 Badiou, We need a popular discipline, p.652.

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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 thenegative, 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

Hegel, Phenomenology, p.400 658.22 Ibid., p.207 668.23 Bataille, Letter to X.

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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 failagain, 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 ofpositivity 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 Milne, The Beautiful Soul, p.78.25 Hegel, Phenomenology, p.483. 795.26

Ibid. p.81.27 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p.207.28 Ibid. p. xviii.

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and positivity, if it is not to sink into acceptance of things as they

are, or a mere plurality of pacified differences.

To avoid trading the dialectic for only respectable,

reconcilable or federative differences

29

requires a politicalintervention. 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 re-

articulation 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 that is Deleuzes transcendental field, Derridas

diffrance, Negris dispersion of singularities, or, in a perhaps more

dubious characterisation, Badious event. Borrowing Peter

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-relational29 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p.52.30

Ibid. p.208.31 Ibid.32 Ibid. p.208.

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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 but rather recognizes existing or potential

differences, celebrates them, and manages them,35 while Badiou,

similarly, argues Capital demands a permanent creation of

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 Deleuzo-

Guattarian 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,

33 Hallward, The One or the Other.34 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, notablythe work of Roberto Finelli, which characterise Marxs description of the logic ofcapital as following, and parodying, Hegels Logic.

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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 tothe 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.

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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

andcomedy 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

39See 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.

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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

whichpermeates 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

Marx, Afterword to the second German edition of Capital (1873).46 Losurdo, Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns.47 Lukcs, History and Class Consciousness, p.181.

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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 Hegel, Phenomenology, 19, p.10.49 Bataille, Letter to X.50 Heidegger, Letter on Humanism.51 C. Wright Mills, Letter to the New Left, p.22.52 Tronti, The Strategy of Refusal.53

Lardreau and Jambet, LAnge.54 Postone, Time, Labour and Social Domination.55 Anderson, Origins of the Present Crisis, p.44.

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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

LabourParty. What was required, theoretically and practically, was a

dose of negativity as theorised by Sartre and Lukcs, and

practiced by more aggressive and revolutionary communist

movements.

What I would suggest was that contemporary theory,

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

Ibid.57 Ibid.58 Noys, The Persistence of the Negative.

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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 confluencewith neo-liberal assaults on organised labour and the social-

democratic 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 re-

organisation 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 re-

invented 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 locking-

into place (Rancire is the key figure here), but which refused any

figuration or relation of its own.

59

Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, p.108.60 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics.61 Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method, p.4.

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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 absolutepoverty.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 positivityof 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 Marx, Grundrisse, p.296.63 Ibid.64 Ibid.65 Ibid., p.297.66

Ibid., p.297.67 Ibid., p.298.68 Thorie Communiste, Much Ado About Nothing.

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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 orreconstructed 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, all-

too-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 self-

abolishing proletariat seems remote, to say the least. This would

seem to confirm the affirmationist diagnosis of aligning capitalism

with creative destruction, with negativity as motor of

accumulation. On the contrary, I am suggesting that the

downgrading of negativity in contemporary thought, its

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 any69 See Noys, Apocalypse, Tendency, Crisis.70

Benedict Seymour, Eliminating Labour.71 Endnotes, Misery and Debt.72 Balakrishnan, Speculations on the Stationary State.

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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.

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