Persistence of the Negative A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory
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Biographical note
Benjamin Noys is Professor of Critical Theory at the University of Chichester. His books include Crisis and Criticism: Essays, 2009–2021 (Brill, 2024), The Matter of Language: Abstraction and Poetry (Seagull, 2023), Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism (Zero, 2014), and The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Theory (Edinburgh University Press, 2010).Persistence of the Negative A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory
Benjamin Noys' important new book The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory singularly reverses the recent tendency toward caricature in its fine-grained readings of the contemporary thinkers of what he terms ‘affirmationism’ … He [raises] complex and important questions in a deft, clearly written and intellectually generous fashion.
- Tom Eyers, Kingston University, Mute
Noys’ text constitutes a vital contribution to a resurrection of the negative as key to thinking political antagonism and will set a precedent for the decisive status of thinking the negative in the present. More importantly, perhaps, it is also an injunction to thinking political antagonism again, to a return to the level of form in order to address real abstraction in a way that is foreclosed by a prevailing affirmationist culture.
Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy
It is a strong argument ... communicated philosophically rather than politically, for dialectics, critique and contradiction... it is a progressive argument that arises not out of pure philosophising but out of the necessity to rescue emancipatory critique and agency from the recuperation by state and capital.
Shift Magazine
Noys’ thesis has the virtue of being, once formulated as tightly and consistently as is done here, both original and completely self-evident. It is a thesis that will define, I hope, polemics around and among the factions and currents in contemporary thought for years to come.
Theory & Event
Benjamin Noys' brilliant and wide-ranging new book is a timely reminder that no revolutionary and egalitarian approach to politics and philosophy can afford to overlook the disruptive "labour of the negative", or to neglect the active contribution that contradiction and antagonism make to a critique of actually-existing forms of domination on the one hand and a renewal of emancipatory agency on the other.
- Peter Hallward, Professor of Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University,
Benjamin Noys' brilliant and wide-ranging new book is a timely reminder that no revolutionary and egalitarian approach to politics and philosophy can afford to overlook the disruptive 'labour of the negative', or to neglect the active contribution that contradiction and antagonism make to a critique of actually-existing forms of domination on the one hand and a renewal of emancipatory agency on the other.
- Peter Hallward, Professor of Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University,
In this bold and highly original book, Benjamin Noys rethinks the role of the negative in both ontology and political practice. His critical revaluations of familiar figures in recent European thought move in surprising new directions; they have forced me to reconsider much that I thought I knew.
- Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English, Wayne State University,
Benjamin Noys' important new book The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory singularly reverses the recent tendency toward caricature in its fine-grained readings of the contemporary thinkers of what he terms ‘affirmationism’ … He [raises] complex and important questions in a deft, clearly written and intellectually generous fashion.
- Tom Eyers, Kingston University, Mute
Noys’ text constitutes a vital contribution to a resurrection of the negative as key to thinking political antagonism and will set a precedent for the decisive status of thinking the negative in the present. More importantly, perhaps, it is also an injunction to thinking political antagonism again, to a return to the level of form in order to address real abstraction in a way that is foreclosed by a prevailing affirmationist culture.
Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy
It is a strong argument ... communicated philosophically rather than politically, for dialectics, critique and contradiction... it is a progressive argument that arises not out of pure philosophising but out of the necessity to rescue emancipatory critique and agency from the recuperation by state and capital.
Shift Magazine
Noys’ thesis has the virtue of being, once formulated as tightly and consistently as is done here, both original and completely self-evident. It is a thesis that will define, I hope, polemics around and among the factions and currents in contemporary thought for years to come.
Theory & Event
Benjamin Noys' brilliant and wide-ranging new book is a timely reminder that no revolutionary and egalitarian approach to politics and philosophy can afford to overlook the disruptive "labour of the negative", or to neglect the active contribution that contradiction and antagonism make to a critique of actually-existing forms of domination on the one hand and a renewal of emancipatory agency on the other.
- Peter Hallward, Professor of Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University,
Benjamin Noys' brilliant and wide-ranging new book is a timely reminder that no revolutionary and egalitarian approach to politics and philosophy can afford to overlook the disruptive 'labour of the negative', or to neglect the active contribution that contradiction and antagonism make to a critique of actually-existing forms of domination on the one hand and a renewal of emancipatory agency on the other.
- Peter Hallward, Professor of Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University,
In this bold and highly original book, Benjamin Noys rethinks the role of the negative in both ontology and political practice. His critical revaluations of familiar figures in recent European thought move in surprising new directions; they have forced me to reconsider much that I thought I knew.
- Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English, Wayne State University,