This book aims to rehabilitate a thinking of negativity within and against the usual forms of contemporary Continental Theory. It identifies and presents an analysis of the dominant tone of ‘affirmationism’ in contemporary theory: the insistence on starting from the affirmation of metaphysical ontologies, the inventive potential of the subject, the necessity for the production of novelty, and a concomitant suspicion of the negative and negativity. Despite all the conflicts and ‘wars’ of contemporary theory, this tone remains an unstated point (...) of unification. Although it was often developed to resist the corrosive effects of contemporary capitalism, this work argues that affirmationism remains bound to its ideological coordinates in its emphasis on production, creativity, and invention. Critically reconstructing this ‘affirmationism’ through the work of Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, Antonio Negri, and Alain Badiou, the book also recovers from their work a disavowed thinking of negativity. Dependent on negativity, despite their claims to affirmation, this dependence allows a critique of the reliance on affirmation. Also, this negativity is turned against this affirmative tone to develop a more sharply-focused political analysis of theory, and to suggest the possible politics emerging from a relational thinking of negativity. Contents: Introduction 1. On the Edge of Affirmation: Derrida 2. Adieu to Negativity: Deleuze 3. The Density and Fragility of the World: Latour 4. Immeasurable Life: Negri 5. On the Edge of the Negative: Badiou Conclusion. (shrink)

Everywhere, the twentieth century has been judged and condemned: the century of totalitarian terror, of utopian and criminal ideologies, of empty illusions, of genocides, of false avant-gardes, of democratic realism everywhere replaced by abstraction. It is not Badiou's wish to plead for an accused that is perfectly capable of defending itself without the authors aid. Nor does he seek to proclaim, like Frantz, the hero of Sartre's Prisoners of Altona, 'I have taken the century on my shoulders and I have (...) said: I will answer for it!' The Century simply aims to examine what this accursed century, from within its own unfolding, said that it was. Badiou's proposal is to reopen the dossier on the century - not from the angle of those wise and sated judges we too often claim to be, but from the standpoint of the century itself. (shrink)

The foremost philosopher of art argues for a new politics of looking.

After half a century exploring dialectical thought, renowned cultural critic Fredric Jameson presents a comprehensive study of a misrepresented, vital strain in Western philosophy. The dialectic, the concept of the evolution of an idea through internal contradiction and conflict, transformed two centuries of Western philosophy. To Hegel, who dominated nineteenth-century thought, it was a metaphysical system. In the works of Marx, the dialectic became a tool for materialist historical analysis, a theoretical maneuver that his critics derided and his descendants on (...) the Left have wrestled with ever since. Jameson brings a theoretical scrutiny to bear on the questions that have arisen in the history of this philosophical tradition, contextualizing the debate with essays on commodification and globalization, and with reference to the work of Rousseau, Fichte, Heidegger, Sartre, Derrida, and Lacan. Through rigorous, erudite examination, Valences of the Dialectic charts a movement toward the innovation of a "spatial" dialectic, culminating in a remarkable meditation on globalization, through a study of Paul Ricoeur. Jameson presents a new synthesis of thought that revitalizes dialectical thinking for the twenty-first century. (shrink)