maanskyn

I presented a paper at the Philosophical Society of Southern Africa’s annual conference at the University of Pretoria under the above title. The abstract below and the paper attached.

Abstract

This paper argues that there is a tradition of philosophical critique which starts with Hegel’s dialectics and was developed, each time in a slightly different direction, by Marx, by the thinkers of the Frankfurt School and reaches its most compelling contemporary articulation in the work of Derrida—the primary exponent of poststructuralist philosophy. This tradition of critique turns on a certain negativity: operations of negation and the recognition of difference. It is argued that this approach represents an attempt at coming to terms with contingency. While it is true that negativity and negation provide the driving force of the Hegelian dialectic, difference is ultimately reduced to a mere internal moment of a greater and more original unity, and is thereby robbed of its originary significance. In Adorno’s philosophy, however, negativity is developed away from the totalising re-appropriation of non-identity with an ever greater emphasis on difference, in which the dialectical movement amplifies the dimension of negativity in a ‘negative dialectics’ rather than arresting it in reconciliation. In this sense, Derrida’s work can be read as a continuation and radicalisation of Adorno’s project, with différance as the notion that embodies this negativity most directly.

Full paper: Negativity and critique in Adorno and Derrida