Regular readers of this blog will know that I have engaged in a sustained collaborative interaction with Sinthome from Larval Subjects for some time. The two blogs are criss-crossed with mutual references, trackbacks, and links – the material traces of the threads of our conversations over the past year. And, even when public discussion has grown momentarily quiet, Sinthome’s questions and comments often lie just beneath the surface of what I write. Hopefully Sinthome won’t object if I reflect on some of those questions and comments in this post – at least as a placeholder for discussion at a later time.
The question that is currently echoing in my thoughts concerns the role of the terms “negation” and “contradiction” in my theoretical work. Sinthome has wondered whether these terms might toss readers into a thoughtspace that sits in tension with some of the other ways that I describe the work of critique. I generally describe critique, for example, as a process of exploring and rendering explicit potentials for practice that have been constituted within a determinate situation, but that contain the potential to react back on that situation itself. Sinthome has suggested that this is not how most readers will hear or understand a theoretical system that deploys terms like “contradiction” or “negation” – that these terms are historically and currently associated with a very different, perhaps more proscriptive, or perhaps more abstract, vision of the work of critique. Do I really need these terms – or are these just layers from an earlier theoretical training, which should be discarded for greater clarity in what I am currently trying to express?
I’ll place my reflections on these questions below the fold. I’m unfortunately still in recovery mode – from a complex term and from some rather intense sleep deprivation during the past couple of weeks – and, while I want to capture my fragmentary thoughts while they are still fresh, I don’t believe that the resultant discussion will be quite ready for prime time. Hopefully I’ll be able to pick up these fragments in a more adequate way some time soon. Read more of this post
Rough Theory 