In this bold and highly original book, Benjamin Noys rethinks the role of the negative in both ontology and political practice. His critical revaluations of familiar figures in recent European thought move in surprising new directions; they have forced me to reconsider much that I thought I knew. Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English, Wayne State University. The Persistence of the Negative is a compelling critique of contemporary continental theory. It contests the tendency of recent theory to rely on affirmation, and especially an affirmative thinking of resistance. Through a series of incisive readings of leading theoretical figures of this affirmationism - Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, Antonio Negri and Alain Badiou - this book reveals a profound current of negativity that allows theory to return to its political calling. It is essential reading for anyone concerned with continental theory and its relation to left politics. ---Original MD1 BlurbThe Persistence of the Negative offers an original and compelling critique of contemporary Continental theory through a rehabilitation of the negative.

Against the usual image of rival thinkers and schools, Benjamin Noys identifies and attacks a shared consensus on the primacy of affirmation and the expelling of the negative that runs through the leading figures of contemporary theory: Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, Antonio Negri, and Alain Badiou. While positioning the emergence of affirmative theory as a political response to the corrosive effects of contemporary capitalism, Noys argues that, all too often, affirmation is left re-affirming the conditions of the present rather than providing the means to disrupt and resist them. Refusing to endorse an anti-theory position that would read theory as the symptom of political defeat, The Persistence of the Negative traverses these leading thinkers in a series of lucid readings to reveal the disavowe.