Working with the Negative

Critique at the End of the World

Edited by David Chandler, Jonathan Pugh, Valerie Waldow

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How can critique engage with the violences and exclusions of modernity without either disavowing them or reproducing them in new forms?

Engages how the negative works in contemporary critical thought
Questions the demand for critique to be generative and productive
Analyses how the negative may enable ‘staying with the trouble’ of modernity
Provides examples of how the negative works across different disciplinary areas and debates
Explores the centrality of the negative to the problematisation of the human and the posthuman

This edited collection explores the contemporary stakes of ‘working with the negative’ at a time increasingly defined as ‘after the future’, when catastrophe appears less as a coming event than as a persistent condition. Bringing together perspectives from a variety of disciplines, including philosophy, politics, media, geography, critical Black and Indigenous Studies and critical theory, the volume examines how critique might persist without reliance on promises of progress, redemption or repair.

Through engagement with debates on negation, pessimism, opacity, the Anthropocene and refusal, contributors rethink subjectivity, agency, temporality and resistance. Structured around Encounters, Mobilisations and Aporias, the book traces how the negative is theorised and mobilised across contemporary critical thought, opening ‘working with the negative’ as a key problem for critique in the wake of modernity’s exhausted promises. By drawing these threads together, it engages the complexities of ‘staying with the trouble’ of modernity’s entanglements, providing space for critical thought that refuses the impulse to replace them with new ontological certainties.

Contents

Notes on Contributors

Introduction. Working with the Negative
Valerie Waldow, Jonathan Pugh and David Chandler

Part I. Encounters
1. Planetary Ecological Catastrophe, Crippled Action, and the Possibility of Recovery
Carl Cassegård
2. The Worldless Image
Rizvana Bradley
3. Law Otherwise or Otherwise Laws? (Pre)figurative, (Para)ontological, and (De/re)worlding Practices
Marie Petersmann
4. Black Weird Negativity: Rethinking the Embrace of the Weird
Farai Chipato
5. The Event that Doesn’t End: Working with the Negative in Organizational Life
Marc Lenglet and Alexandre Wong

Part II. Mobilisations
6. Negation, Negative Dialectics and Utopia: Why Sex Matters
Claire Colebrook
7. The Abyssal Halfbreed: On Race, Negativity, and Silence
Matthew Gravlin
8. Glissant, Deleuze and the Radical Ontopolitics of Opacity
Hannah Richter
9. Negative Interrupted: critical notes on some of the afterlives of the Hegelian Aufhebung
Vassilios Paipais
10. Being without Place: Politicising Nonbelonging in Worldless Times
Lucas Pohl

Part III. Aporias
11. Trembling Grounds: Pluriversal Ontopolitics and the More-than-human Reverberations of Radical Antagonism
Min Seong Kim
12. Death and Birth: Negative Life and Ecological Extinction
Jean-Thomas Tremblay and Steven Swarbrick
13. Abolition: Processual, Fugitive and Libidinal
Caroline von Taysen
14. Impasses at the End of the World: Disavowal, Exhaustion, Nostalgia
Nathaniel O’Grady
15. Brutal Necessity, Negative Capability, and the Empty Sign: Adrift in the Not-Yet with Carlos Martiel
P. Khalil Saucier and Tryon P. Woods

Losing Worlds, Losing Hope: Epilogue
Paulina Tambakaki

About the Author

David Chandler is Professor of International Relations at the University of Westminster and edits the journal Anthropocenes: Human, Inhuman, Posthuman. His recent publications include: Hope: Shortcuts to a Big Idea (2026); Race in the Anthropocene: Coloniality, Disavowal and the Black Horizon (2025); Hope in the Anthropocene: Agency, Governance and Negation (2024); The World as Abyss: The Caribbean and Critical Thought in the Anthropocene (2023); International Relations in the Anthropocene: New Agendas, New Agencies and New Approaches (2021); and Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds (2021).

Jonathan Pugh is Emeritus Professor of Island Studies at the University of Newcastle. His main areas of research are islands and archipelagos. He has around 100 publications and is particularly noted for his development of what has come to be known as the 'relational turn' in islands studies. His recent books include: The World as Abyss: the Caribbean and Critical Thought in the Anthropocene (2023); and Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds. London: University of Westminster Press 2021.

Valerie Waldow is Lecturer and Research Associate at the Department of Political Science at Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, Germany. Her research focuses on critical international political theory, liberal violence and democratic critique, and International Relations in the Anthropocene, with particular attention to intervention, governance, and political imaginaries. She works on critique, epistemic limits, and transformations of political thought, especially in relation to debates on hope and negativity in contemporary political theory. She is co-editor of Hope in the Anthropocene: Agency, Governance and Negation (2024, EUP).