Persisting with the Negative. ppt

Persisting with the Negative

The Simple Version

1. No, doing the same

thing faster won’t make

it disappear any faster.

2. No. No. No. No.

Persisting with the Negative

The Simple Version II

‘The aim of this book is

simply stated: to rehabilitate

a thinking of negativity

through

an

immanent

critique of contemporary

Continental theory.’

Affirmationism

I, however, am a blesser and a Yea-sayer, if

thou be but around me, thou pure, thou luminous heaven! Thou abyss of light!—into all abysses do I then carry my beneficent Yea-saying.

Low Affirmationism

But as the liberties and the

restrictions vary with times

and circumstances and

admit to infinite

modifications, they cannot

be settled upon any abstract

rule; and nothing is so

foolish as to discuss them

upon that principle.

Accelerationism

there is jouissance in it, the English unemployed did not have to become

workers to survive, they – hang on tight and spit on me – enjoyed the hysterical,

masochistic, whatever exhaustion it was of hanging on in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in hell, they enjoyed it,

enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed upon them, they enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity, the identity that the

Real Abstraction

A commodity appears, at

first sight, a very trivial

thing, and easily

understood. Its analysis

shows that it is, in reality,

a very queer thing,

abounding in metaphysical

subtleties and theological

niceties.

Traversing Stasis

Reading Kafka demands a

great effort of abstraction –

not of learning more (the

proper interpretive horizon of

understanding his work), but

of

unlearning

the standard

interpretive references, so

that we become able to open

up

to the raw force of Kafka’s

writing.