The Recirculation of Negativity

‘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 Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), which is ‘Yes’ (capitalised), the final ‘yes’ of a sequence of ‘yes’s’: ‘yes I said yes I will Yes’. Joyce, Ulysses, p.933. It is from this repetition, in part, that Derrida derives the double affirmation, the ‘yes, yes’, which conditions deconstruction and makes of Joyce’s last word an opening to the Other. Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’. The beginning is from Joyce’s 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.’ Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p.3. This ‘recirculation’ implies a closed circle, the recapture and totalisation that, in Derrida’s words, ‘circulates through all languages at once, [and] accumulates their energies’, Derrida, Origin of Geometry, p.102. and which makes the ‘machine’ of Joyce’s 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’, Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p.244. and we ‘recirculate’ between the ‘yes’ of affirmation and the ‘yes’ of ‘recapitulative control and reactive repetition’. Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’, p.308. For Derrida Joyce’s textual ‘machine’ doubles Hegel’s; this ‘circle’ of affirmation stands in relief to Hegel’s ‘circle’ of negativity. 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). If, as Derrida notes, there is ‘ever so little literature’, Derrida, The Double Session, p. 223; Acts of Literature, p.73. 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 Joyce’s 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, Derrida, ‘Two Words for Joyce’. then Hegel’s machine only ever begins from negativity, operating through the tragic and a certain form of mourning, Bataille, ‘Hegel, Death and Sacrifice’. to return, through ‘the negation of the negation’, to an affirmation of totality. ‘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. That, at least, is the cliché. 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 Derrida’s 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. 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’ (‘Kairòs, Alma Venus, Multitudo’, p. 250). This, we might say, is the doxa of contemporary Continental theory. On the one hand, the insistence on the necessity that we 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’ Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.186.), Derrida (in the beginning is ‘minimal, primary yes’, ‘the light, dancing yes of affirmation’ Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’, p.298, p.308. ), Negri (‘My intention ... is to develop a philosophy of praxis, a materialism of praxis, by insisting on ... the affirmative power of being’ Negri, ‘Kairòs, Alma Venus, Multitudo’, p. 157.), Badiou (‘[philosophy] must break with whatever leads it through nihilistic detours, that is, with everything that restrains and obliterates affirmative power’ Badiou, Polemics, p. 35.), 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), Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 308 note 4. ‘the negative power [potenza] of the positive’ (Negri), Negri, Books for Burning, p. 258. a ‘negativism beyond all negation’ (Deleuze), Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p.71; see also, Toscano, ‘In Praise of Negativism’. and a ‘non-Hegelian category of negation’ (Badiou), Badiou, ‘“We need a popular discipline”’, p.652. 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 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 Hegel’s 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.’ Hegel, Phenomenology, p.400 ¶658. 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’, Ibid., p.207 ¶668. 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 Bataille’s formulation (and valorisation), appears as ‘unemployed’. Bataille, ‘Letter to X.’ Drew Milne notes that, in relation to Beckett’s 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 negativity as a process of determinate negations.’ Milne, ‘The Beautiful Soul’, p.78. 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 Beckett’s 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.’ Hegel, Phenomenology, p.483. ¶795. 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[?]’ Ibid. p.81. 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’. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p.207. To avoid this fate, Deleuze asserts, we require the ‘proper degree of positivity’ to release ‘a power of aggression and selection’. Ibid. p. xviii. 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 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’ Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p.52. requires a political 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, Althusser’s 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’. Ibid. p.208. To be able to resist the stabilisation of difference, or what Deleuze calls ‘the counterfeit forms of affirmation’, Ibid. 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[.] Ibid. p.208. 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 Deleuze’s ‘transcendental field’, Derrida’s différance, Negri’s dispersion of singularities, or, in a perhaps more dubious characterisation, Badiou’s ‘event’. Borrowing Peter Hallward’s 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 negativity. Hallward, ‘The One or the Other’. 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 capitalism’s ability to capture and ‘federate’ difference, especially in the period of what Badiou calls its ‘triumphant restoration’. Badiou, ‘The Communist Hypothesis’. Hardt and Negri write, ‘Empire does not create division but rather recognizes existing or potential differences, celebrates them, and manages them’, Hardt and Negri, Empire, p.201. 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’. Badiou, Saint Paul, pp.10-11. 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 Hegel’s logic is capital’s logic, and the ‘labour of the dialectic’ is assimilated to the extraction of labour by capital. Similar characterisations of Marx can be found in ‘value-form’ Marxism, notably the work of Roberto Finelli, which characterise Marx’s description of the ‘logic’ of capital as following, and parodying, Hegel’s Logic. 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, 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 Adorno’s 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. See Critchley, Infinitely Demanding. 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 Beckett’s ‘negativity’ has the pathos of failure (Gibson), See Andrew Gibson’s Beckett & Badiou for a thoroughgoing re-inscription of Beckett in terms of the pathos of finitude. or whether it reinscribes itself within a generic capacity for human patience and courage (Badiou). Badiou, Beckett. In the case of comedy a similar contest takes place, between comedy as deflationary strategy of political subversion (Critchley), Critchley, ‘Comedy and Finitude’. and comedy as tracing of infinity (Zupančič). Zupančič, The Odd One In. As Nina Power has insisted, Power, ‘Towards an Anthropology of Infinitude’ and ‘Philosophy’s Subjects’. 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, Jean-Luc Nancy, Hegel, p.3. 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 Marx’s 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 negation of that state’, and is ‘in its essence critical and revolutionary’. Marx, ‘Afterword to the second German edition of Capital’ (1873). Instead, we are returned to clichés of Hegel as ‘state philosopher’, thoroughly dismantled by Domenico Losurdo, Losurdo, Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns. 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 Lukács’s remark that the antagonistic domination of capitalism ‘is not guided by a consciousness but is instead driven forward by its own immanent, blind dynamic’. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p.181. 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 clichés used to characterise Hegel or Marx, I would suggest much here turns on the perception of 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’, Hegel, Phenomenology, ¶19, p.10. and also through Bataille’s conditioning of the rupture with Hegel in the form of ‘unemployed negativity’. Bataille, ‘Letter to X.’ This identification, however, is also vectored through social reality and politics, in terms of the rupture with labour qua dialectical category of capital, from Bataille’s anthropology of excess, on to, more equivocally, Heidegger’s objection to ‘labour’ as metaphysical essence, Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’. then C. Wright Mills’s objection to a ‘labour metaphysic’ in the American New Left, C. Wright Mills, ‘Letter to the New Left’, p.22. Italian operaismo’s assimilation of labour with the dialectic and concomitant calls for strategies of separation from and refusal of ‘labour’ (as always relationally assimilated to capitalism), Tronti, ‘The Strategy of Refusal’. Lardreau and Jambet’s Gnostic Maoism of radical separation and hyper-asceticism, Lardreau and Jambet, L’Ange. Moishe Postone’s critique of ‘labour’ as capitalist category, Postone, Time, Labour and Social Domination. 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’. Anderson, ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’, p.44. The dialectic of these moments would prevent the twin disasters of a ‘pure positivity’ leading to ‘immobilisation in its own fullness’, and a ‘pure negativity’ of ‘permanent, suicidal insurrection’. Ibid. 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.’ Ibid. 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 Lukács, 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. Noys, The Persistence of the Negative. Of course, there is a strong continuity for Badiou and Negri as their political positions of the 1970s were already deeply hostile 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 social-democratic compact. With the failure of the agent of this new ‘positivity’ to arrive, which Lyotard sarcastically dubbed the ‘good hippy’, Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, p.108. neo-liberalism stepped into the ‘revolutionary’ role. In his lectures of 1978-9, The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault presciently analysed neo-liberalism’s 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. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. 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’. Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method, p.4. 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’ (Rancière is the key figure here), but which refused any figuration or relation of its own. 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’. Marx, Grundrisse, p.296. Treated ‘positively’, as ‘negativity in relation to itself’, labour is not value but ‘the living source of value.’ Ibid. 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’. Ibid. 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]. Ibid., p.297. Labour, in Marx’s formulation, ‘is the use value of capital itself.’ Ibid., p.297. Capital appropriates labour ‘as a fructifying vitality’. Ibid., p.298. 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 Théorie 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.’ Théorie Communiste, ‘Much Ado About Nothing’. ‘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 relation, of negativity between capitalism’s hollowing-out of the proletarian’s 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 Lukács 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. See Noys, ‘Apocalypse, Tendency, Crisis’. 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, Benedict Seymour, ‘Eliminating Labour’. ‘creative destruction’, and the abandonment of ‘surplus humanity’ endemic to the capitalist system. Endnotes, ‘Misery and Debt’. Whether these processes signal terminal decline, entropic drift, or the re-starting of capitalism, is certainly not yet clear. Balakrishnan, ‘Speculations on the Stationary State’. 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 any 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 Althusser’s 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.’ Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, p.42 n18. 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. References Althusser, Louis, and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital [1968], trans. Ben Brewster (London and New York: Verso, 2009). 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