The Courage to Hate: Noys’ The Persistence of the Negative

The landscape of contemporary continental theory is in disarray, deprived of stable reference points, shared problems and idioms, and dividing lines along which conflicting positions gather in their very separation. This is no doubt a cipher of the fundamental disorientation of the historical moment itself – a lack of any given horizon or hinges on which to hang the present. You need only measure the fragmentation of the field of continental theory today against the situation in post-war France, say, in which a certain Marxism – including a resurgent, “humanist” mode – could be declared the “unsurpassable horizon of our time” (and its unavoidable pendant, “an anti- Communist is a dog”), or the structuralist wave of the 1960s, whose methodologies and ideological commitments invaded and transformed the entire field of the human sciences, in order to see in just what a shambles the present lies. In the 1960s, Louis Althusser mapped out different, opposing and even antagonistic tendencies within the field of contemporary philosophy, distributing the various camps along fronts traversing a single and same Kampfplatz, a field of positions warring over a single terrain structured, in the last instance, by the dynamics of class struggle. As late as the mid-1970s, Alain Badiou could perform a similar analysis of the French philosophical conjuncture, tracing the leftist and rightist deviations that emerged within the narrow current of post-68 French Maoism as well as the more general field of French “radical” philosophy, torn as it was between persistent forms of philosophical revisionism and novel lines of libertarian or “anarcho-desiring” ultra-leftism (identified specifically with Deleuze and Guattari’s 1972 Anti-Oedipus, but indirectly implicating other “libidinal” inflections of Marxism such as Lyotard’s 1973 Libidinal Economy and Baudrillard’s 1976 Symbolic Exchange and Death). Twenty years later, in a much different historical moment that still defines our own, Badiou was able to read the philosophical present in terms of competing, if not antagonistic, “paradigms” that shared a now depoliticized field of investigation: an “immanent conceptualization of the multiple,” the exemplary variants of which are Deleuze’s hot, “vitalist” philosophy and the cold, “stellar” constructions of Badiou’s post-set-theoretical ontology.

Benjamin Noys’ The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory represents a forceful attempt at conceiving the philosophical present as structured by a seemingly unbroken consensus: every consequent theoretical project today must announce itself as “affirmationist.” Throughout this important book, consisting of finely tuned, relentlessly textual examinations of a range of continental thinkers, readings that are rigorously partisan and “selective” without lapsing into dogmatic sweeps of the hand or the self-assurance of mere critique, Noys pressures this point sensible around which various seemingly opposed theoretical currents (as opposed as those of Negri and Badiou, for example) converge, revealing, beneath these emphatic claims to affirmationism a nagging “persistence,” as the title has it, of the “negative.” The sequence of chapters locates the emergence of affirmationism in what Noys qualifies as the “weak” affirmationism of Jacques Derrida (and specifically his engagement with Nietzsche), passes through Deleuze’s work in the late 1960s and on to his “accelerationist” collaboration with Guattari in the 1970s, deviating, in a slightly outlying chapter, toward Bruno Latour’s actor network theory before returning to affirmationism’s summit in the later work of Antonio Negri. Noys concludes with Badiou’s recent examinations of the “crisis” of the negative in contemporary thought and the reconsideration, in his Logics of Worlds, of the role of negativity and “destruction” in his own work. For Noys, we enter the affirmationist parenthesis with the Derridian re-inscription of Nietzsche and the articulation of a performative double affirmation (“yes, yes”) that can be said to be the “undeconstructible” condition of any critical or deconstructive analysis or intervention, and exit it via Badiou’s most recent work. Along the way, Noys runs his finger over the fissures that imperceptibly appear in the affirmationist façade, textual chinks that point the way, we...