Non-Privative Negativity

From time to time, a strange and engulfing darkness sweeps across academia. Not one that stands dark simply in contrast to the wonders of Enlightenment, but a proper, willful, darkness that insists on an attitude of utter pessimism. It evokes names like Pascal, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, along with questions about an ethics beyond the petty human perspective. Many thinkers seem today (for different reasons) to challenge anthropocentric tendencies in what one could call mainstream-critical philosophy, wanting to find new ways to think about objects and matter, and this is detectable in discussions of “speculative realism” and “object-oriented ontology”. But some want to go darker, like Eugene Thacker, who insists on attacking anthropocentrism through the concept of horror.

Our critique of the metaphysics of darkness in academia and popular culture is that it is somehow too pure or too clean; there is still, for all its invocations of the dark and occult, for all the Lovecraftian tohuvabohu, a cosmological “settling of forces”, an erection of a safe barrier between the unknown and the knowable, between the indifferent outside and the trivial human passions of the inside. There is for sure in this approach “the negative”, as something unknown haunting us from the outside, but there is not “negativity” as something wrong with the very inside, the world-for-us, itself. In other words, the concept of the negative of the new pessimists seems to block the possibility of going to the end, or perhaps to the beginning, of negativity.