Description
http://www.egs.edu
The least one can say today about the notion of negativity in all its aspects is that it has seen better days – it definitely has shot its bolts, its philosophical potentials seem to be exhausted. In philosophy of the last two centuries it was mostly valued as positive (negativity as permanent feature of subjectivity in all its guises, from Hegel through Marx to Freud), while positivity relates to the existing order that should be undermined, transcended, etc. In the last decades, however, negativity is more and more constrained to a disturbance which threatens to undermine our psychic or social health: the task is to get rid of it or, at least, to contain it. I’ll try to rehabilitate negativity, going through its main figures: Hegelian negativity, Freudian death drive, mystical experience, withdrawal from social engagement, the prospect of nuclear war, ecological slef-destruction of humanity.
https://pact.egs.edu/schedule/