Event overview
Benjamin Noys, The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory. Book launch and discussion chaired by Alberto Toscano, with responses by Jodi Dean and John Roberts.
Today negativity is reified into images of disaster, apocalypse, terror, and depression, while contemporary theory insists on beginning from affirmation as the only way to resist the supposed 'failures' of negativity.
The Persistence of the Negative (Edinburgh University Press, 2010) challenges this consensus and aims to rehabilitate a contemporary thinking of negativity as site of resistance. Analysing the 'affirmationist consensus', from Derrida to Badiou, via Deleuze, Latour, and Negri, The Persistence of the Negative excavates disavowed traces of negativity in their work, and relocates theory within the context of capitalist abstraction and crisis.
This discussion deals with the core arguments of the book, placing the author in debate with leading theorists.
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Benjamin Noys is Reader in English at the University of Chichester, and the author of Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction and The Culture of Death, and the editor of the forthcoming Communization and its Discontents.
John Roberts is Professor of Art & Aesthetics at the University of Wolverhampton. He is the author of a number of books, including The Art of Interruption: Realism, Photography and the Everyday (Manchester University Press, 1998), and The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade (Verso, 2007).
Jodi Dean is Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and Erasmus Professor of the Humanities in the Faculty of Philosophy at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. She is the author, most recently, of Zizek's Politics, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies and Blog Theory.
Alberto Toscano is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths, and the author of Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea.
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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10 Dec 2010 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
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