ABSTRACT
It is Hegel’s dialectic that introduces negativity explicitly into modern thought and it is to his work that its provocateurs must always return, either to lament his failure to remain faithful to the negativity he discerned or to read him against the grain in order to retrieve it.1 The dilemma that Hegel poses for negativity is already apparent in his response to Kant. On the one hand, he does away with the distinction between phenomena and unknowable things in themselves and thus with the limits of reason. He points out that their very distinction relies on the category of negation. Knowledge now appears over time via a reciprocity between, which is also a production of, subject and object. Negativity migrates out of the off-limits inertia of noumena and into the dynamics of becoming, wherein its productivity yields both a phenomenology and a logic. Kant’s spatial metaphors yield to temporal ones. Yet on the other hand, this process seems itself to culminate in the elimination of all non-identity, since dialectics is a becoming of reason and, when it is realised, movement apparently ceases, otherness is recouped and negativity transcended. As Hegel writes: ‘The sealed essence of the universe has no power that could withstand the spirit of knowledge; it is compelled to open itself and to lay out its riches and its depths and offer them for its enjoyment.’2
