ABSTRACT
Succeeding chapters of this book will follow some of negativity’s adventurers. Is Kant among them? Deleuze has commented that he ‘is the analogue of a great explorer – not of another world, but of the upper and lower echelons of this one.’1 An explorer, then, rather than an adventurer: one who maps a familiar but previously uncharted terrain, presenting himself as cartographer and gate-keeper rather than venturing into the perils of the unknown. Does he encounter negativity in this world he explores, or banish it to a beyond he eschews? Kant will be presented here as an ambiguous figure: as one who engendered or succumbed to negativity in his attempt to exile it, but in whose project of critique a certain negativity is nevertheless embraced.
