the recirculation of negativity
TRANSCRIPT
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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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