Negation, Negative Dialectics and Utopia: Why Sex Matters

As part of the 2025 Melbourne Critical Theory Winter School on Forms of Life, Professor Claire Colebrook will deliver a public lecture on "Negation, Negative Dialectics and Utopia: Why Sex Matters".

Abstract:
There’s a standard and long-standing hot take on Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: desire has nothing to do with the negative or lack, but is fully positive.  Life begins not with anxiety, lack, or the subjection to an other — as if there were bodies that then made connections.  Rather, there is a relation from which bodies are formed and organized.  No body exhausts the potentiality of the forces that bring it into being.  We might then contrast Adorno, for whom damaged life only knows itself through the compensations it creates to deal with the shudder of existence, with Deleuze and Guattari’s Body without Organs that refuses dialectics and negation.  For Adorno the world as it is given is a negation of that which can only be intimated through the forms of lament that characterize modernism.  For Deleuze and Guattari, there are positive forces that are always more intense than the terms and relations they bring into being, Schizoanalysis is neither dialectics — the incompletion of forces requiring their negation — nor the labor of the negative that is propelled by the restlessness of an intimated absolute.  This seeming opposition between negative dialectics and schizoanalysis is not dialectical in any simple sense.  It is negatively dialectical.  This is not to say that Adorno trumps Deleuze (nor vice versa) but rather that the tension between the two trumps the Trumpocene.  By the latter I refer to a new literalism.  For all the talk of ‘post truth’ what marks the new forms of late fascism is a brutal literalism that is also essentially sexual.  The late fascist focus on two, and only two, biological genders is more than political distraction and baiting.  It is a microfascism writ large, the becoming-bourgeois of the world.  What Adorno and Deleuze and Guattari offer is — despite first appearances —  a sexual dialectic.  Desire — from Kant onwards — is the refusal to stop with this world, the refusal of already given terms as the end of the matter, and the affirmation of refusal as a creation that is inexhaustible especially in a time of exhaustion.

Speaker bio:
Claire Colebrook is Professor of English Literature at Monash University, Australia. Her recent books include Who Would You Kill to Save the World? and Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols (2016, with Tom Cohen and J. Hillis Miller).

Please also join us on Tuesday 22 July for a lecture by Vanessa Lemm (University of Greenwich) on The Poverty of Life: The return of Cynic philosophy in the Age of the Anthropocene.