About the event
The Centre for the Study of Democracy is hosting an afternoon workshop and evening public discussion to celebrate the launch of The World as Abyss: The Caribbean and Critical Thought in the Anthropocene (Pugh and Chandler, University of Westminster Press 2023). The event is co-organised with Jonathan Pugh (University of Newcastle) and Thomas Dekeyser (Royal Holloway, University of London).
This event is free, but you will need to register for the workshop sessions in advance by emailing David Chandler at [email protected].
Timetable:
- 1–3pm: workshop session one – Why negative space(s) now?
- 3–3.30: coffee break
- 3.30–5.30pm: workshop session two – What is at stake in negative (para)ontologies?
- 6–7.30pm: The World as Abyss: Interrogating the Negative Turn with authors Paul Harrison, Mitch Rose, Anna Secor, Jonathan Pugh and David Chandler.
This event will be followed by the book launch and reception for The World as Abyss: The Caribbean and Critical Thought in the Anthropocene. Copies will be available to purchase for £10 (cash only).
This event takes place at the 5th Floor meeting room, 32–38 Wells Street, London W1T 3UW.
Workshop abstracts
Why negative space(s) now?
In this session, we examine the recent emergence of 'the negative' as a problem for geographical critique. The negative has an extensive history in geographical thought, with early Marxist geographers keen on exploring what it might mean to take Marxist-Hegelian negative dialectics seriously. More recently, however, geographers have started engaging negative thought beyond its initial Marxist interpretation. On the one hand, we are witnessing a heightened interest in particular kinds of negative spaces (eg Pohl, 2021), affects (eg Wilkinson and Ortega‐Alcáza, 2019) and politics (eg Kanngieser and Beuret, 2017). On the other hand, on a more explicitly conceptual level, geographers are tackling negativity head-on as a useful problem-space for (re)theorising central geographical concepts, from 'worlds' (Dekeyser, 2022) and 'space' (Kingsbury and Secor, 2021) all the way down to 'subjectivity' (Harrison, 2009; Rose, 2021) and 'affect' (Bissell, 2022). The result is that negativity is increasingly understood as a wide-ranging but internally differentiated concern for geographical thought. But why now? The central questions we want to explore in this session is: what are the ontological, political, social and/or cultural conditions enabling the surge of interest in negativity? Why negative space(s) now?
Introductions:
- Thomas Dekeyser, Royal Holloway, University of London
- Mitch Rose, Aberystwyth University
- Thomas Jellis, University of Bristol
- Paul Harrison, Durham University
- Anna Secor, Durham University
What is at stake in negative (para)ontologies?
This session seeks to explore what is at stake in paraontology. For some authors the world of ontology, of the symbolic, of being, is the graspable and instrumentalisable world of modernity, therefore there is a desire to problematise, challenge, disrupt, move beyond, end or abolish this ‘world’. Perhaps key to discussion of negative ontologies is their relationship to ‘the world’ and what it would mean to imagine being ‘outside of’ or ‘against’ the world. Karera argues that (for Nahum Chandler) ‘blackness poses radical questions about ontology’ whereas other theorists ‘begin from the bewildering conceit that blackness puts ontology radically into question’. (p.183) What does this mean? Perhaps Karera points towards Blackness as a weak link in the chain of signification of the symbolic realm through which the world becomes meaningful. Blackness perhaps works in the same way as Queerness, according to Edelman, as a necessary projection of otherness to a world of the (Lacanian) subject suborned to modernist spacetime. Thus ‘blackness’ or ‘queerness’ do not name literal people or modes of being nor are they prejudices or ideological fictions (p.14), they lack being but are essential to the coherence of the world of being. This figurative positionality is a construct or fictional projection but can be claimed as a positionality of radical critique.
Introductions:
- Farai Chipato, University of Glasgow
- Marie Petersmann, Tilburg Law School
- David Chandler, University of Westminster
- Jonathan Pugh, Newcastle University
Reading lists
Workshop background reading:
- Axelle Karera, Paraontology: Interruption, Inheritance, or a Debt One Often Regrets. Critical Philosophy of Race 10(2), 2022, pp. 158–197
- Lee Edelman, The Future is Kid’s Stuff. In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, 2004, pp. 1–31
- Thomas Dekeyser, Worldless futures: On the allure of ‘worlds to come’. Transactions, 2022
- Tiqqun, Silence and Beyond. In Tiqqun: Conscious Organ of the Imaginary Party, 1999, pp. 70–77
- Claire Colebrook, Can Theory End the World?. symploke 29 (1), 2021, pp.521–534
The World as Abyss: Interrogating the Negative Turn reading:
- David Bissell, Mitch Rose and Paul Harrison (eds), Negative Geographies: Exploring the Politics of Limits. University of Nebraska Press, 2021
- Anna Secor – Paul Kingsbury and Anna Secor (eds), A Place More Void. University of Nebraska Press, 2021
- Jonathan Pugh and David Chandler, The World as Abyss: The Caribbean and Critical Thought in the Anthropocene. University of Westminster Press, 2023
