'The Hectoring of Limits': Kathe Koja's Skin

For Steven Shaviro

Kathe Koja's 1993 novel Skin is a novel of transgression and its usual destination: death. It concerns two symmetrical artists: Tess Bajac (the narrative voice), who works with metal to make it live, and Bibi Bloss, a dancer who makes to transform the flesh through integration with metal. These symmetries, as Tess and Bibi, pass from comrades to friends to lovers to enemies to final collapse, trace a narrative of 'transgressive/alternative' culture. Tess's work in the novel is obviously modelled on Survival Research Laboratories (referenced in the text), and in her later departure from public art her 'boxes' are obviously Joseph Cornell's (a favourite model, it seems, for fictional artists). Bibi, on the other hand, is the 'modern primitive' of Re/Search fame, with her extreme body modification and, implied in the novel, quasi-Facist tendencies.

While the account of the art created is, typically in a novel, not every convincing in terms of the effects it is supposed to be producing, the account of the 'hectoring of limits' engaged in by the transgressive artist, especially Bibi is - as critique. What's also interesting is he emergent narrative in the book of the function of the manipulative character Michael Hispard who, in a sense, runs the whole show by playing off Tess and Bibi against each other to produce or force the 'spiral' of transgression.

In particular Tess's account of Bibi, and her scepticism, offer a questioning (quite literally) of this 'dynamic':

Do you modify to improve, or empower, or simply to feed the greedy black scorn of the human boundaries that succor flesh to blood to the pulse and contraction of the emperor mind within?

In a key formulation Tess remarks of Bibi 'her body was the vanguard'. This captures, I'd argue, a contention we can derive from Badiou that the collective 'passion for the real' of the avant-gardes has become saturated. This does not mean it is simply exhausted, but rather dispersed into the body itself - hence Badiou's scepticism concerning 'postmodern' art as the art of bodies/languages in their implosive and inert 'presence'.

The novel, however, seems to terminate all options - public performance, collectivity, individual involution - in a final pairing of death, inert madness, and inertial passivity. The novel explicitly formulates the problem of change as its core - transformation, transfiguration, becoming, all seemed to twist finally into forms of failure. While this can be seen as a 'local' pathology, either of this 'scene' or the characters in the narrative, the book also points to the winding down of the 'dynamic' of transgression. Of course, the novel itself is the 'creative' allegory of these 'failures', and it is fitting that it is not entirely successful - or perhaps successful in its own strangely drawn-out inertia. We might say it is the prefigurative novel of 'democratic materialism' and its pathologies, the indicator of the impasse of Bergsonian 'mechanical' vitalism as 'creative'; in this way, it is the dead-end of transgression.

The Melancholy of Resistance

The invocation of melancholia to characterise the mood of the present, to characterise something of our ‘condition’, is a veritable cliché. Certainly, the concomitant attempt to make a politics out of that melancholia can often seem like the attempt to pile one cliché on top of another. In his usual pugnacious style Slavoj Žižek (2000) has noted how melancholia is to the taste of our times – indicating the preference for an attentive narcissism that ‘preserves’ the dead object and a reluctance to embrace the step to mourning that would imply internalisation and action. Typically, however, of this style of opening I am going to avoid that good advice and indulge in the very vice that I have just anatomised – trying to grasp a politics of melancholia, or better the limits of a particular instance of a politics of melancholia. Even more typically, for an academic, I am going to indulge that vice at one remove by considering one contemporary invocation and endorsement of the politics of melancholia: Andrew Gibson’s Intermittency: The Concept of Historical Reason in Recent French Philosophy (2012). My aim is to suggest, in this case, how an appeal to affect can block politics.

Rebecca Comay (2011) remarks on ‘the ideological versatility of melancholia: an uncompromising rejection of the existent (nothing short of total transformation is tolerable) coupled with an easy accommodation to whatever happens to be the case (everything is equally terrible, so why bother…).’ It is useful, I think, to analyse Gibson’s work because he hyperbolises this versatility, and so also speaks to and reveals the disavowed ideological underpinnings of much contemporary theory. In his work, as we will see, the ‘uncompromising rejection of the existent’ finally becomes indistinguishable from ‘an easy accommodation’. At the root of the ‘uncompromising’ is a ‘compromise’ that is all the more problematic for being concealed. What also becomes evident in Gibson’s explicit anti-Marxism is a more general tone of contemporary theory that rejects negation and dialectics as inevitably ‘compromised’. This is a book of the enemy; hence deserving of critique.

The core concept of Gibson’s book, derived from Christian Jambet, is an ‘anti-schematics of historical reason’. What this in fact means is that history is split into two: the history of law and the history of grace, with history divided between long stretches of ‘dead time’ (Gibson 2012: 223) and sudden irruptions of justice or the good through punctual and intermittent events. Therefore, ‘historical reason’ has a temporary and fragile existence and what we confront most of the time, and certainly for the last 30-odd years, are the ‘deserts stretches of dead time’, a ‘dead time [which] breeds melancholy.’ (Gibson 2012: 223) Gibson ratifies an experience of historical defeat, especially the ‘polar night’ of the 1980s, which is then translated into the metaphysical register of historical experience itself.

The ‘enemy’ for Gibson is any ‘progressive’ conception of historical reason as unfolding in and through history, and more specifically the usual melange of Hegel/Kojève. To characterise this ‘progressive’ conception Gibson indulges in the familiar commonplaces: ‘immanence; plenitude; the active principle; freedom; dialectical reason, negative and positive together; culmination; overcoming; the project; completion in the State; mediation; finitude; the schema.’ (2012: 6) The antonyms, vectored through the critique of Christian Jambet, are fairly, although not entirely, predictable: Metahistory interrupting immanence; intermittency; passivity; openness to being mastered; negative reason; sporadic truth; discrete singularities; irregular events; resistance to the State; immediacy; the infinite; and anti-schematics. This unabashed metaphysical dualism is the Gnostic principle of Gibson’s analysis.

Gibson’s alternative to the ‘progressive’, bewitched by the unfolding of historical reason, is a thinking that suggests that ‘historical reason’ only ever irrupts intermittently, and we live a ‘melancholic-ecstatic conception of history’ (Gibson 2012: 10) as we lurch from the melancholy of dead time to the ecstasy of the event. He characterises the philosophical element of the rare and intermittent event through readings of Alain Badiou, Françoise Proust, Christian Jambet, Guy Lardreau and Jacques Rancière, which are all ‘paired’ with literary examples that characterise the limits of melancholia the philosopher can never fully grasp. Gibson institutes a division of labour, with philosophy dealing with the moment of the event and literature dealing with the ‘remainder’ of melancholy. In fact, to add an example he does not mention, this anti-schematics seems allegorised most for me in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1978). In that film we have the traversal of the ‘wasteland’ of the zone, and the witnessing of the sudden moment of the irruption of grace (quite literally).

It is in the lengthy conclusion of the book that Gibson articulates his ‘own’ anti-schematics constituted through this traversal of contemporary thought. Here he particularly engages with ‘speculative realism’ – that odd non-movement, in which realism and speculative metaphysics are coupled together (Bryant et al (eds.) 2011) – to insist on history as ruled by absolute contingency. Fully-embracing that ‘randomization of history’ that Perry Anderson regarded as one of the signal vices of post-structuralism (Anderson 1983: 48), Gibson insists on the rarity of events, the irruption of contingency, and the persistence of the negative situation of the absence of events and the petty compromises and disgust of everyday life.

Melancholia, for Gibson, has a polemical and political (or anti-political) purpose. Embracing the melancholia breed by the dead times (á la T. S. Eliot) immunises us against false hopes and the embrace of ‘progress’. As he puts it:

Melancholy functions both as a scrupulous refusal of the contemporary will to contentment, its disregard for the contemporary ‘state of emergency’, and a cautionary brake on a century and more of a fruitless and finally bankrupt ‘left positivity’. (2012: 242)

In a rather typical ideological manoeuvre Gibson runs together the ‘affirmative’ culture of late capitalism, and the teleological positivity of neo-liberalism, with the supposed teleologies of ‘traditional’ Marxism (a ‘point’ also made by Jacques Rancière and Bruno Latour ). Lumped into one camp, ‘progressives’ now encompass a promiscuous set running from Newt Gingrich to any remaining Marxists, taking in reformist prophets of a re-created ‘caring’ capitalism and the marketeers of the new.

Christopher Nealon has noted the ironic violence of the identification of Marx and Marxism with its ‘object’ of critique, a trope with a long Cold War history. We find, in Nealon’s words, ‘the punishing, all-too-familiar reversal by which critics of capital, not its agents, are imagined as the bringers of violence into the world.’ (2011: 8) This practice involves turning the features of capital – teleology, economic determinism, and totality – onto its critics, ‘as though it were the critic who tried to name the totalizing work of capital, rather than capital, who was failing to do justice to particulars, or to aesthetic experience.’ (Nealon 2011: 10)

For Gibson the aim is to extract an ethics from this melancholia to allow us to ‘cope’ with the long periods of reaction, as the horizon of the event seems to take care of itself (if such an event should come along, Gibson notes it may well not). This is ‘an ethics of perseverance – the perseverance of the traces of subjectivity and truth, of the subject itself – through dead times, times in which truths appear to have failed.’ (Gibson 2012: 273) To ensure this possibility Gibson is explicit about the necessity of religion or theology against what he calls ‘the simple registers of Marxism.’ (2012: 276) In another contemporary ideological common-place Gibson regards religion as the place-holder of a density and depth of experience and thought that cannot be understood or matched by an ‘optimistic’ thought. Marxism is Brechtian plumpes-denken writ large, which may not sound that bad compared to the inflationary Augustianianism of ‘original sin’ and the ‘fallen state’ which dominates Gibson’s thinking.

More generously, there certainly is something (or very little), even if it is ‘through a glass darkly’, in Gibson’s remark on the necessity for perseverance amidst and against the ‘affirmative’ positivity of contemporary culture that resists negation. Like so many others, however, Gibson reifies negation into the grand event of rupture that may, or may not, arrive, on the one hand, and reifies it into the melancholia of an ‘atonal’ or ‘eventless’ everyday, on the other. Developing the speculative realist critique of correlationism – the tendency to posit the world and reality as always in relation to a human subject – Gibson remarks that: ‘A correlationist culture is characterized by the ubiquity and pure meaninglessness of positivity.’ (2012: 278) And yet, the melancholia of negativity, in Gibson’s hands, seems to give use little reason to persevere at all, except perhaps to await an event that will only flash briefly on the horizon. Here ‘perseverance’ and negativity take on the cynical cast of damming all attempts at historical change, and justify an attentisme which has lost even the minimal faith in the event.

This is not the melancholy of thinking defeat, or registering the difficulty of radical change, but the melancholy of consolation that justifies our own exceptional place as the ‘less deceived’. The vanity of the theorist is flattered by placing themselves as the lucid non-dupe who can, at least in thought, evade the crushing weight of the practico-inert:

To think intermittency is to run counter to the contemporary culture of plenitude, of which positivity is a crucial feature, and to persist with a Sartrean principle of austerity. This constitutes an emphatic, properly philosophical refusal to buy into the contemporary will to be swiftly controlled. (Gibson 2012: 279)

Of course, swiftly or slowly controlled doesn’t seem to make that much difference, especially as no action seems to be able to take place between those two states. In this case ‘lucidity’ becomes cynicism, disguised as tough-minded thinking.

To analyse this problem further I want to consider the crucial ‘ideologeme’ that justifies Gibson’s de-politicising political melancholy: this is the distinction and valorisation of revolt at the expense of revolution. Gibson implicitly favours revolt over revolution, re-articulating what Badiou diagnosed as the ‘speculative leftism’ of Lardreau and Jambet (Badiou 2005: 210-211) – in which the ‘pleb’ or resistant is always opposed to a finally triumphant power – but without the ‘leftism’. In doing so, Gibson not only ignores Badiou’s general diagnosis of this ‘infantile disorder’, but also Badiou’s specific criticisms of Lardreau and Jambet, whom he had dismissed as ‘Linbiaoists’ – i.e. as incarnating an ultra-left purity predicated on an absolute break that reproduced the ‘excesses’ of Lin Biao’s thought (Bosteels 2011: 148). The metaphysical One is replaced by the Manichean Two. The purpose served by Gibson’s gesture is the not uncommon one today of avoiding any imputation of ‘dirty hands’, even if this is now displaced firmly into the ideological past. The ‘purity’ of revolt is recoded as an interruptive moment that never solidifies into the bad attempt to impose ‘purity’ in the process of revolution, as ‘purity’ is the bad signifier of our times (‘purity’, inevitably ‘fatal’, we might say, to write a new entry in Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas). Of course, this involves ignoring the violent experience of revolt, which speaks to one’s doubts in the depth of Gibson’s endorsement. Lacking any sense of the reality of revolt, any meaningful political content is evacuated from what was already an attenuated politics – a ‘revolt without revolt’, or a decaffeinated revolt.

We can dispute this valorisation of revolt through a resort to the analysis Furio Jesi offers of the Spartacist Insurrection of 1919 (Jesi 2012). Jesi gives a classical statement of the distinction between revolt – which ‘suspends historical time’ – and revolution – which is ‘wholly and deliberately immersed in historical time’. Of course, this is why ‘revolt’, reworked at the ‘event’, has value for Gibson, while the revolution does not. Now, while Fusi displays sympathy to the function of ‘revolt’ what he also does is indicate its historical and political limits. In particular he notes how revolt can serve the very forms of power it attacks. In the case of the Spartacist uprising the suspension of historical time it engaged in allowed the restoration of ‘normal’ capitalist time after the disruption of the time of war. Also, the action of revolt – punctual and immanent – can function as a release of energies that would otherwise coalesce into the more sustained historical process of revolution. In this more nuanced analysis we can see, at least, the necessity for a more careful historical analysis rather than the transfer of the problem into the metaphysical or spiritual register.

Gibson’s ‘solution’ can then be regarded as a ‘political melancholia’, in the symptomal sense, which fails to properly register the melancholia that belongs to the structure of revolt, and occludes the risks and dangers of revolt by passing these over to the revolution. In this way we can turn, with ‘clean hands’, to reactionary or dubious literary forms as justifications for our experience of the ‘remainder’ of dead time detached from any political content. The result is a deliberate consolation that, in effect, blocks any politics through the deployment of affect.

Bibliography

Anderson, Perry (1983) In the Tracks of Historical Materialism. London: Verso.



Badiou, Alain (2005) Being and Event, trans. Oliver Fletham. London: Continuum.



Bosteels, Bruno (2011) Badiou and Politics. Durham: Duke University Press.



Bryant, Levi, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (eds.) (2011) The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Melbourne: re.press.



Comay, Rebecca (2011) Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.



Gibson, Andrew (2012) Intermittency: the Concept of Historical Reason in Recent French Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.



Jesi, Furio (2012) ‘The Suspension of Historical Time’, trans. Alberto Toscano. Chapter 1 of Spartakus. Simbologia della rivolta (2000), ed. Andrea Cavaletti. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri.



Latour, Bruno (2004) ‘Never Too Late to Read Tarde’. Domus 874.



Nealon, Christopher (2011) . The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.



Rancière, Jacques (2010) Chronicles of Consensual Times. London: Continuum.



Žižek, Slavoj (2000) ‘Melancholy and the Act,’ Critical Inquiry 26.4: 657-681.



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Live Life to the Full

Recently I've been thinking and writing a lot about the critique of the various political vitalisms that dominate the contemporary theoretical scene. Some of this work is available here (turned down as an article by Radical Philosophy for lack of nuance) and here, some will appear soon in various forms (including, eventually, as a chapter in my next book).

At the heart of my deliberately blunt criticism is the suspicion that political vitalisms are often homologous to capitalist operations of value extraction, as both depend on erecting a concept of 'Life' as perpetual resource over the various miseries and joys of 'life' as empirical existence. This replicates capitalism's treatement of labour as perpetual resource, always available for extraction (and abandonment). In particular I suspect a theological discourse at work in which the misery of life is transformed into the glory of Life, in a 'postmodern passion' (Negri) that repeats a Christological dialectic.

Recently my friend Jernej directed me to an article by Alenka Zupančič in this book, which analyses the relation of surplus value to surplus enjoyment, and which can help develop a critique of political vitalism. Her argument is that in capitalism our surplus enjoyment, which usually appears an entropic waste, becomes the means for value extraction and capitalisation. We might say that in capitalism no waste goes to waste, which doesn't mean it is not a uniquely wasteful system only that waste could potentially generate value out of this waste (being recycled... which gives an image of the circular drive of capital).

The result is an 'imitation surplus jouissance' that takes the form of the 'entropy-free enjoyment' of the kind we find in the decaffeinated products Zizek identifies as the 'absolute commodity' of contemporary capitalism (my own favourite being Coke Zero; I'd suggest a reworking of the Lacanian formulas of sexuation on the distinction between Coke Zero and Diet Coke).

This entropy-free enjoyment is split from the negativity it incarnates and is exploited. The result is that surplus jouissance is hijacked for generating value, and we find a convergence of power and resistance as the indirect despotism of capitalism encrypts its own mastery.

Returning to the political vitalisms I would argue that the 'negative vitalisms', like Agamben's, try to reconnect this waste into the form of life, to resist detachment and hence ruin value; 'affirmative biopolitics' tries to exceed value 'on the other side' through overloading or massifying jouissance. In both cases, however, they erect 'Life' over (or under) 'life', and so remain in the convergence of power and resistance on the site of 'Life' as waste/excess. This, as I've suggested, leaves them within the theological matrix of capitalism, which functions (to use Adorno's phrase) as 'psychoanalysis in reverse' - enabling our 'waste' as value. 

Our entropic subjection to perpetual value extraction is treated as the moment of saving: transforming waste into glorious excess, but leaving the recycling machine untouched. While the attraction of these discourses might seem obvious in the moment of capitalist bubble inflation, in which value seemed to spiral upwards without limit and giving 'substance' (or appearance) to the fantasy of Life qua excess, they persist in attraction at the moment of crisis. The denuding of capitalism into 'waste' merely triggers the fantasy of its exteriority and of our superior powers of 'Life' over capitalism. That this figures a gesture of 'creative destruction' is my suspicion.

Refusal of Work

Leopoldo Lugones's short story 'Yzur' (from his 1906 collection Strange Forces) is a tale premised on the idea that monkey's have refused language so they will not be forced to work. The narrator of the story evolves a theory that this initial refusal has led to a degeneration in monkeys, and he aims to demonstrate this by returning one to speech. He buys the animal Yzur from the circus and proceeds to his experiment.

Using methods to treat deaf-mutes the narrator laboriously tries to encourage the development of speech through physical manipulation and a system of association of vowels with food treats. This initial process takes three years and no word is uttered.  What does happen is the monkey develops a contemplative sensibility, and the tendency to cry.

The narrator becomes more and more frustrated, deciding that Yzur can speak but is choosing not to. This is reinforced when the cook tells him the monkey has spoken a few words (although the cook can't remember all the words, only bed and pipe). The next day the narrator, convinced the monkey is ironically taunting him, beats the creature violently and the monkey only sheds tears in silence.

Yzur then falls terribly ill, and the narrator desperately tries to save him. This ilness seems to humanise Yzur, but still he does not speak. The lessons continue, beginning with 'I am your master' or 'you are my monkey', but the monkey is now in decline to death.

The narrator speculates that the refusal to speak is the result of an 'intellectual suicide' that is 'petrified in the animal', from that long distant refusal of labour. He thinks man had persecuted these creatures, enslaving them in the ancient past, until they decided 'to break all advanced connections with the enemy.' 'Thus, their act of mortal dignity: to take sanctuary, as an ultimate measure of salvation, in the darkness of their animality.'

Yzur finally enters his death throes, remaining faithful to the ancient vow that refused speech, but at the final moment of death he draws the narrator close and murmurs 'Water, master. Master, my master ...'

In Spanish the play is 'Amo', which means master or as a conjugated verb I love. Lugones, who passed from socialism to fascism in his politics, inhabits the usual tropes of racism (we might also recall the teaching scene from Robinson Crusoe). The monkey is a failure to develop, a degeneration through the refusal of work, but one who still has the same capacities as humans (or, for the narrator, degenerate humans). Also, the monkey seems to taunt or refuse the strange scientific drive of the narrator that, typically, results in violence. Gwen Kirkpatrick notes Lugones own time as an Inspector of Schools... The positivism and modernism of Lugones are typically cast in equivocal light in this story, with its final enigmatic concession.

What we also have is the trace of the refusal of labour and slavery, and the implied 'hominisation' that takes place at the intersection of speech, labour, servitude. Unsuprisingly one of Borges's favourite stories, Yzur is an enigmatic fable that deserves to belong an anthology of stories about labour...

Adventures in the Land of the (Imaginary) Empirical Working-Class

Alberto Toscano has pointed out the danger of possibilities of condescension built into the splitting of the ‘Idea of the Proletariat’ (Kantian in Lyotard) from the empirical working-class for the ultra-left. The failure of the latter to ‘measure up’ to the former can license snobbery and dismissal, a problem that can be dated to Engels's Condition of the Working Class in England (following Stathis Kouvelakis). I wanted to write of a classical instance of this risk I found in HG Wells The War of the Worlds. Of course, Wells’s socialism was ‘scientific’ and had its own ‘peculiarities’, which could account for the element of ‘condescension’, nevertheless the example is worth analysing.

The scene takes place in Chapter Seven, after the Martian occupation of colonisation of the area around London. The narrator, despairingly trying to return to his wife, encounters a ‘man on Putney hill’ – a soldier he had met earlier who had managed to survive a Martian attack.

At first the narrator is impressed with the soldier’s lucid analysis of the state of the situation, as it seems the Martians have developed flying machines - “Aren’t you satisfied it is up with humanity? I am. We’re down; we’re beat.” The soldier goes on to sketch the likely future:

‘So soon as they’ve settled all our guns and ships, and smashed our railways, and done all the things they are doing over there, they will begin catching us systematic, picking the best and storing us in cages and things. That’s what they will start doing in a bit. Lord! They haven’t begun on us yet.’

Of course, the implicit allegory is not just with the Martians as colonisers, but also as a form of class rule – after all they vampirically drain the blood of humans for food (‘Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.’ Marx).

The soldier sketches a situation in which the upper- and middle-classes will form happy collaboration in this situation of subservience: ‘Well, the Martians will just be a godsend to these. Nice roomy cages, fattening food, careful breeding, no worry. After a week or so chasing about the fields and lands on empty stomachs, they'll come and be caught cheerful. They'll be quite glad after a bit.’

Instead, in the future resistance, ‘If you’ve got any drawing-room manners or a dislike to eating peas with a knife or dropping aitches, you'd better chuck ‘em away. They ain’t no further use.’ Hence, the working-class will lead the resistance to the Martians and to these 'happy collaborators' (ie the complacent middle class).

This is cast in eugenic terms as well, as the resistance will have to go literally underground: ‘We’re not going to pick up any rubbish that drifts in. Weaklings go out again.’ The ‘tame’, meanwhile, ‘in a few generations they'll be big, beautiful, rich-blooded, stupid – rubbish!’ (hence The Time-Machine). Eventually, one these ‘able-bodied, clean-minded men’ will gain control of one of the Martian machines and then ‘Fancy having one of them lovely things, with its Heat-Ray wide and free! Fancy having it in control! What would it matter if you smashed to smithereens at the end of the run, after a bust like that? … And swish, bang, rattle, swish! Just as they are fumbling over it, swish comes the Heat-Ray, and, behold! man has come back to his own."

Impressed as he is the narrator is soon disillusioned by the man’s actual behaviour. He is digging a pointless tunnel from the cellar of the house he is hiding in to the sewers, when he could just enter the sewers. Also, he has proceeded very slowly, and so the narrator ‘had my first inkling of the gulf between his dreams and his powers.’ In fact, the man is lazy – ‘Oh, one can’t always work’ – and taken-up with drinking champagne and Thames-side burgundy. The narrator ‘resolved to leave this strange undisciplined dreamer of great things to his drink and gluttony, and to go on into London.’

Addendum on Affirmationism: 'The Pure Tone Drips with Positivity'

Re-reading Adorno's The Jargon of Authenticity and came across this quote, which captures rather better than I did the dual sense of 'affirmation' that runs together existence with the good:

'Simply to be there becomes the merit of a thing. It is guaranteed in the protection of the double sense of the positive: as something existent, given, and as something worthy of being affirmed. Positive and negative are reified prior to living experience, as though they were valid prior to all living experience of them; as though it was not thought that first of all determined what is positive or negative; and as though the course of such determination were not itself the course of negation.' (21)

There is much I could, and probably should, unpack from this. One thread is that although I vectored affirmationism through Nietzsche, we could also do so through Heidegger and Heideggereanism. Adorno's (and Benjamin's) scepticism concerning the fundamentally abstract nature of the phenomenological 'concrete' resonates with its affirmation of the existent and its refusal or demarcation of negativity (obviously complicated in the case of Heidegger through his reference to 'Nichts', but still capable of critique as a reification of the negative). This would also have implications for reference to the 'concrete' that derive from phenomenology, especially in the delimitation of negation.