Eli Noé
Researcher Theory
01.01.09 – 31.12.10
My project this year will deepen the focus on negativity and ontology. What is negation, what are its different forms and what role does negativity play in the genetic and structural differentiation of thought and being?
In approaching these questions, I will take my lead from Hegel's concept of the negative, and will try to trace the various ways in which this concept is interpreted, recuperated and criticised in contemporary ‘materialist’ thought (Lacan, Deleuze, Badiou, Zizek). Whereas, traditionally, the reception of Hegel in French philosophy was centered on “figures of the negative” contained in the Phenomenology of Spirit (most notably the “unhappy consciousness” and the “master-slave dialectic”), more recent interpretations take the Science of Logic as the main point of reference, thereby shifting the focus from negativity as a function of human subjectivity to negativity as a power inhabiting being as such. A decisive role in this turn was played by Jean Hyppolite's essay Logic and Existence, which, counter to Kojève's ‘antropological’ interpretation, set the tone for an anti-humanist conception of the negative – thereby paradoxically clearing the way for the “generalised anti-Hegelianism” (Deleuze) that came to dominate French (post-)structuralist thought in the 1960s and 70s.
The basic aim of my research is to critically examine this anti-Hegelianism, to displace it into Hegelian thought itself, and to revive, in the light of the recent ‘materialist’ critiques, the old question of the relation between the Phenomenology and the Logic: how do phenomenological negativity (lack, desire, finitude) and onto-logical negativity (logos as the infinite self-relation of being) relate? How does this question resonate today, à propos the work of e.g. Lacan (the ‘idealist’ poetry of castration versus the ‘materialist’ doctrine of the matheme) or Badiou (Being and Event versus Logics of Worlds)?
Antwerp, BE
MA Philosophy. Ghent University, Ghent, BE.
MA Psychology. Ghent University, Ghent, BE.
Independent doctoral research project. Ghent University, Ghent, BE.
Part-time clinical psychologist. Psychiatric Centre Dr. Guislain, Ghent, BE.
The not-yet and the always ready. Psychoanalysis, Hegel and the dialectics of anticipation. In: International journal of computing anticipatory systems, 20.
Subject in staat van ontbinding. Een Lacaniaanse lezing van Lasch’s De cultuur van het narcisme. In: Psychoanalytische perspectieven, 21(4).
Anticipating the unanticipatable. Kant and the anticipations of perception. (4 August). In: Computing anticipatory systems conference. Liège, BE: Université de Liège.
Kant en de anticipaties van de waarneming. (20 June). In: Intercardeldag van het Gezelschap voor psychoanalyse. Kortrijk, BE.
Science fiction as ideology critique. Philip K. Dick and the dialectics of the strange and the familiar. In: Tickle your catastrophe. (7 March). Ghent, BE: Kunstencentrum Vooruit.
The downward synthesis. Slavoj Žižek’s materialist critique of Hegel. In: Opening week 2009. (12 – 16 January). Maastricht, NL: Jan van Eyck Academie.
The constraint is the possibility. On the constitutive role of negation in the emergence of subjectivity and objectivity. (12 April). With Gertrudis Van de Vijver. In: The substance of thought. Critical and pre-critical. Ithaca, US: Cornell University.
Tarrying with the negative. Slavoj Žižek als interpretator van Hegel. (24 August). Ghent, BE: Psychiatric Centre Dr. Guislain.
The not yet and the always ready. Psychoanalysis, Hegel and the dialectics of anticipation. (10 August). In: Computing anticipatory systems conference. Liège, BE: Université de Liège.