Non-Privative Negativity
February 18, 2024
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.
This approach seems to have hit a soft spot in the Zeitgeist. Take for example the HBO series True Detective (that was inspired by Thacker) amongst so many other shows and books on unspeakable crimes, mass murderers, religious fanatism, strange phenomena. There is whole cultural trend here, encompassing the revival of Scandinavian crime fiction in “Nordic noir”, the revival on interest in H.P. Lovecraft and other artists of the occult (for example Leonora Carrington, who delivered the title for the 2022 Venice Biennale), the general fascination of the occult, of esoteric knowledge, of witches etc. in popular culture and in both right-wing conspiracist and left-wing ecofeminist milieus etc. When times are dark (pandemic, wars, climate crisis) it seems that one strategy is to embrace the darkness and go even darker, doing away with the “rationality” that brought us where we are.
Thacker’s concept of horror – as discussed in his three-volume work on the “Horror of Philosophy” – is the horror of the unknown and the unhuman. There is a limit to what is knowable and masterable. There is a world-without-us, Thacker argues, simply indifferent to our human affairs, and this in the end makes Thacker opt for a nihilistic and pessimistic approach: An approach that acknowledges the sheer futility of human existence. And perhaps the time has indeed come for such a darkness to resurface. A crucial flaw would consist in countering the cosmic pessimist with a good attitude. Deliver the premises of hopeful thinking. There is some truth in the current nihilistic reopening of ontology and ethics, but “dark ontology”, we would argue, is not the only conclusion one could reach.
In short, and as a first approximation, 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.
Schopenhauer
Thacker’s approach is an attack on any philosophy that want to be edifying, which amounts to very large parts of the philosophical tradition. Because of its reliance on the principle of the sufficient reason, philosophy has traditionally shied away from thinking “nothingness”. But, as Thacker writes, following Schopenhauer, for “the pessimist philosopher, that “everything that exists, must exist for a reason” must not be taken for granted.”[1]However, how should one think this nothingness, this lack of ground, saluted by Thacker? Should we start by reducing any ground into a non-ground? Should we count backwards through metaphysical explanations all the way to zero to conclude that all is for naught?
Thacker adopts his stance of darkness not least from Schopenhauer’s distinction between nihil privativum and nihil negativum. We have privative negativity, subtraction, the cat is not on the mat, and we have absolute negativity; that which is in every respect nothing (as Schopenhauer formulates it), not just something which is contingently not the case, but rather nothingness as such. For Thacker the world-in-itself (“the Will” in Schopenhauer’s terms) is first to be understood according to the fully developed logic of privative negativity, it is the absence of everything here. All phenomena are transitory and ephemeral, they have no grounding, and “nothing” is thus what cuts across them all.[2] At the same time, however, we need to go one step further, because there must be the world-in-itself as something which is not even nothing in relation to something, but simply nothingness; the very indifferent “unground” itself, radically outside the human perspective.
How to concede of this? There are of course some paradoxes in this because we must think something that withdraws from thought, we must think something that “ultimately negates even itself”.[3] What Thacker, with Schopenhauer, wants to think is the very limit of thought, the “hinge through which positive knowledge turns into negative knowledge”,[4] the limit where knowledge can only implode, where it moves at the mercy of the great nothing. What is felt here is the very corrosion of thought, the way it crumbles, which to some extent is a very physical occurrence, even if (or exactly because) it borders on nothingness. This is the liminal space where we meet up with what H.P. Lovecraft called “cosmic outsideness”, because the phenomena we meet here are strange, non-knowable, non-human. In a list of such Lovecraftian phenomena scholar Massimo Berruti mentions: The strange architecture of R’Lyeh, the Great Race, tons of rats in the walls of an abbey, the music of a cello evocating the Great Beyond, a ghoul in the catacombs of Boston.[5] Thought here radically crashes, pits against itself, meets its own disability to go further, and thus confronts something (radically nothing) that it will never be able to defeat. The experience of this is negative, and this is because, in Thacker’s argument, what thought meets there is a negative nothing, something that is negative in itself, something that is only negative, nothing that is only negative, nihil negativum.
From Lovecraft to Sex
But is this the final destiny for an ontology that wants to acknowledge the horror of philosophy? Paradoxically, the nihil negativum itself seems to be something quite soothing for Thacker. The problems we have in the world-for-us about “grounding” the phenomena that surround us are transposed to the very limit of our world, where they seem to vanish in the mist. All our problems are nothing in relation to a nothingness, which we will never be able to master, which cannot even be inscribed into a mastering relation, but radically breaks away into indifference. Out of this can be developed an ethics that amounts to a “cosmic pessimism” that “seems to move towards an uncanny zone of passivity, “letting be”, even a kind of liminal quietism in which non-being is the main category”.[6] The invocation of a kind of (early) Wittgensteinian silence is not innocent. It marks the very endpoint of philosophy; it is not the articulation of an anti-philosophy, but something like a zero-philosophy, philosophy reduced to the passive suffering (and enjoyment) of its own fatal destiny.
However, what if this confrontation with cosmic nothingness is merely an adaptation of a much more radical nothingness? Thacker’s move seems to be to reach being by dissolving it into nothingness and indifference. This move, however, leaves out the truly critical point: The being of nothingness, which is to say, not simply the lack of being, but the being of lack. It is as if, for Thacker, there must first be a fully constituted world-for-us (however ephemeral and transitory), a world in which we can move around and do stuff (however vain and meaningless), and then the nihilist-pessimist path leads to the edge of this world-for-us where one can find nothingness. There is positivity and there is negativity. Negativity can be nihil privativum, thus of course completely reliant on positivity (reactionary negativity). And it can be nihil negativum, thus completely unreliant on positivity (emancipated negativity). However, what is never discussed or explained in Thacker, even though many of his examples border on this, is a negativity that is coexisting with positivity, thwarting and twisting positivity from within (what we could call radical or spectral negativity). Another ontology opens itself altogether if you take as starting point not simply the earthly phenomena and positivities and dissolve them into nothing, pit them against the limit of nihil negativum, but rather the possibility of a non-privative negativity. Let us articulate as precisely as possible the ontology of the non-privative negativity: It concerns not a lack produced from the negation of something positively there, or the negative as such, rather it concerns negativity as the very structuring of what is there. What does this mean?
One of the major sources of inspiration for an ontology of non-privative negativity would be the work of Alenka Zupančič in her seminal book, What Is Sex? In this book, the theme of “sex” is explored from the angle of psychoanalysis with the wager that, approached in this way, “sex is of ontological relevance”,[7] and from this starting point, Zupančič articulates an ontology of the minus one. What is ontologically interesting about sex, according to Zupančič, does not have to with it being a murky domain of mystical drives and forces, or whatever “dark” conception one could have of it, but with its (philosophical) status as a “a concept that formulates a persisting contradiction of reality.”[8] Sexuality is there, all around us, there are sexual dramas, encounters etc., however something seems to be missing in all this, namely the very “idea” of sex: “sex is all around, but we don’t seem to know what exactly it is”.[9] Sex turns around an unknown core, and yet this core is not simply withdrawn, rather it is the “inner” unknown of what is going on. For Zupančič the problem of sexuality is thus closely connected to ontology; through (problematic) sexuality one can think a contradiction of (symbolic) reality itself, namely that its emergence always coincides “with the non-emergence of one signifier”.[10] In more general terms what we have here is an ontology that does not begin by establishing a “one”, that does not begin with a world that is somehow always already for-us, but rather take this for-us, not as a response to the Real World, but merely to the Real (of sexuality) itself. It carves out the minus one as the core of the entanglement of in-itself (as something unknown, meaningless) and for-us, the way that these “entities” can never be neatly separated.
Psychoanalysis has often been accused of being able to explain everything by referring to “sex”, which is strange, because the wager of psychoanalysis is the opposite: Nothing can be explained by sex (or sexuality). “Sex” does not explain all the mistakes and innuendos of human language and endeavors, rather “sex” is one of the names that psychoanalysis gives to something that is inherently problematic and that is played out in all these endeavors. It is not that, “at the bottom” we have a dark, unapproachable kernel of negativity, and that we now and then get a glimpse of this kernel, like in a nihilistic primal scene. It is rather that negativity is always there in the very texture of our lives, structuring it from within.
This also has consequences for how we approach horror. Horror is not simply about being confronted with some mysterious display, or some hardcore-spectacle (of a violent murder scene, of something unspeakable, unfathomable) etc., which establishes itself as something completely Other or Foreign to human epistemology. Rather, horror is the result of a certain short-circuiting of human epistemology, pointing to something that “doesn’t stop not being written”, in the words of Lacan.[11] The killer, the murder scene, the monster, the abyss etc. etc. is not simply “it”, the world in-itself, in its pure rawness, in its meaninglessness; rather these entities are objectal counterparts to what does not stop not being written. The genre of horror “thinks”, even writes, this in a certain way.
Take the curious case of Freud’s example of the burning child from Interpretation of Dreams. A child has died, which is something truly horrific for the father in Freud’s story. However, this horror is only truly released in the father’s dream, and thus in and trough the logic of the non-privative negativity. In the dream of the father, something much more unsettling than the “fact” of the death of the child takes place: The child stands beside his bed, takes him by the arm and whispers reproachfully to him: Father, don’t you see I am burning?[12] Truly, in the room next to the sleeping father, flames from a candle have caught the dead child’s shroud (and the smoke of this incident may have reached the father’s senses), but the real horror resides in the words of the child, inscribing the very contingency of his death into the life of the father. “Is there not more reality”, Lacan writes, “in this message than in the noise by which the father also identifies the strange reality of what is happening in the room next door.”[13] What do the words of the child in the dream hint at? What fundamental guilt do they touch on? Non-privative negativity is brought into the life of the father – it relates to something he did not do, something he could not do, something he cannot explain or fathom, but in the form of a dream that will probably haunt him, that will make him think.
So in this sense, what the father is realizing is not simply that a universe in which his son dies is a cruel one; that the “don’t you see” is a kind of hysterical address to the father: “Don’t you see the horror of the bleak and empty universe – don’t you see that there is no justice, that there is no God and that it is all for naught?” In some sense, this would be the easy escape through a kind of cynical melancholy. Rather, what the son is really telling him (which is, of course, what he is somehow telling himself, only being able to do so in this manner), is that even in spite of this knowledge, even in spite of the notion that the universe is utterly meaningless, bleak, and cold, you are still substantially attached to it through this negativity that does not simply amount to zero, but which is rather a constitutive lack, foundational for your possibility of moving into the incomplete and contradictory social, symbolic order. The place of (incomplete) meaning. This lack is what burns the child, even after his biological death, and what will keep burning the father, even if he settles with the fact that his son has died. The lack that carves a space in the binary division between meaning and non-meaning; the world as complete, a full one, or the world as a complete zero. The horror that the child brings to the father here, is that there is an even more fundamental lack that is ruining this neat arrangement of one and zero: the minus one that was there before (or at the very point of) the establishment of the one, and which will continue to be there after the reduction to zero (the death of the son, the meaninglessness of the cosmos and so on.) This constitutive lack is the true horror, not because it detaches us even more from the world, but because it does not allow us to rid us of the attachment to the world by simply reducing it to a zero. The child returns in the dream, which is even more unbearable than the privative reduction from one to zero. The constitutive lack, the never being a good enough father, bringing the son into a contradictory and never fully coherent world of signs and meaning, and yet being deeply and fully attached precisely to this lack, which cannot be countered with attitudes of nihilism and pessimism.
Anti-Cosmic Pessimism
So, do we prefer a zero or a minus one? This discussion is quite multi-facetted, crossing the fields of epistemology and ontology, and also possibly pinpointing some important differences between approaches that aim to break out of the so-called discursive cage and approaches that do not. However, here we would conclude on another point, thus coming back to the starting point of the discussion on horror, darkness, and pessimism.
What is negativity really for cosmic pessimism? An interesting approach would be: Can cosmic pessimism escape the logic of privation? Of course, the attempt is to mark a nothingness so fundamental it comes before anything and everything: the lack of meaning, of reason, even the reduction to zero, indifference, to a completely blind force radically outside of human understanding. Now, our project here is not to counter this by positing some metaphysical concept or to reinstate a meaningful principle where it was lost in pessimism.
However, the problem for any position of cosmic pessimism is to “ordain” this fundamental meaninglessness or indifference. In what sense is it a premise of human life? In what sense is it always already present? In other words: Can one really imagine a pessimism, based on cosmic indifference, that is not in some sense a disappointment? As Thacker himself, aware of the paradoxes, articulates it: “A philosopher rarely begins as a pessimist or nihilist; they arrive at it, and often through failure, futility and a philosophy in ruins.”[14] Is there not always a melancholic level of defeat or letdown in the pessimist’s promise of an indifferent cosmos? Not only in the sense that this melancholy is of course itself deeply enjoyable, a way to restructure a lost world and so on, but rather that its motion is with some necessity “backwards.” One does not begin with the zero-ground of indifference but rather counts back to it.
It seems that there is an almost implicit understanding of the world’s own positivity in cosmic pessimism in that the pessimist here moves backwards to then end at nothing. The only proper or honest outlook on the world is that which stands here at the metaphysical zero-point from which anything that sticks its head up can be shot down. But what is being discounted, that is dis-counted, is that negativity does not simply end with null. There is an even more radical, and coincidentally a lot more advantageous, negativity, if understood through the concept of a non-privative negativity. Two different philosophical stances or programs emerge from here, even though they both engage in negativity: The cosmic pessimist ends with negativity – as Thacker observes, Schopenhauer greatest work, The World as Will and Representation, begins with careful philosophical distinctions and ends in fragments, failure, and ruins. Destination pessimism is reached. The “anti-cosmic” pessimist (pessimist of the non-privative negativity) begins with negativity. In this latter approach, negativity is not simply nothing, not simply withdrawal, but it is already here, right in the middle of what we are doing. Negativity is the driver of horror, the driver of sexuality, the driver of politics etc.
You can be pessimistic about pessimism and say that it leads to nothing; this is Thacker’s stance, and it (paradoxically) has a lot to offer. A lot (of positive, uplifting bullshit) must be done away with if you adopt this stance. Again, the point would not be to be optimistic when it comes to pessimism, not even to be “affirmative”, to endorse its violence, its ability to produce fissures in the fabric of being etc., but simply to analyze its very weird, shadowy productivity.
[1] Eugene Thacker, “Darklife: Negation, Nothingness, and the Will-To-Life in Schopenhauer”, quoted from: https://parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia12/parrhesia12_thacker.pdf
[2] Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy (Volume 1) (Zero Books, 2011), 127-128.
[3] Ibid., 19.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Massimo Berruti, “Self, Other, and the Evolution of Lovecraft’s Treatment of Outsideness”, quoted from https://www.jstor.org/stable/26868393
[6] Eugene Thacker, Starry Speculative Corpse: Horror of Philosophy (Volume 2) (Zero Books, 2015), 140.
[7] Alenka Zupančič, What Is Sex? (the MIT Press, 2017), 3.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid., 23.
[10] Ibid., 42.
[11] Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX: Encore (Norton 1999), 59.
[12] Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in: The Standard Edition, Vol. V (Hogarth Press 1953), 509.
[13] Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, (Norton 1998), 58.
[14] Thomas Dekeyser, ”Pessimism, Futility and Extinction: An Interview with Eugene Thacker”, quoted from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0263276420907127
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