Working with the Negative : Critique at the End of the World

How can critique engage with the violences and exclusions of modernity without either disavowing them or reproducing them in new forms?

This edited collection explores the contemporary stakes of ‘working with the negative’ at a time increasingly defined as ‘after the future’, when catastrophe appears less as a coming event than as a persistent condition. Bringing together perspectives from a variety of disciplines, including philosophy, politics, media, geography, critical Black and Indigenous Studies and critical theory, the volume examines how critique might persist without reliance on promises of progress, redemption or repair. Through engagement with debates on negation, pessimism, opacity, the Anthropocene and refusal, contributors rethink subjectivity, agency, temporality and resistance. Structured around Encounters, Mobilisations and Aporias, the book traces how the negative is theorised and mobilised across contemporary critical thought, opening ‘working with the negative’ as a key problem for critique in the wake of modernity’s exhausted promises. By drawing these threads together, it engages the complexities of ‘staying with the trouble’ of modernity’s entanglements, providing space for critical thought that refuses the impulse to replace them with new ontological certainties.