Introduction: Negation, Critical Theory, and Postmodern Textuality

Abstract

I begin with the discourse of electronics, that branch of physics given over to the movement of the unseen electrons—carrying their negative charges—that shape the neuro-technological wor(1)ds through which postmodern discourse circulates. The negatron, an electron discharge device that “exhibits negative resistance” (OED), is, mutatis mutandis, a fitting metaphor for what this book provisionally attempts to do in postmodern critical terms: that is, release the uncanny “negative” energies that texts inevitably instantiate in various degrees of presence and absence, while resisting modes of declarative affirmation that lead, perhaps, to a false security about the putative epistemological certainties associated with various critical discourses, including those that deny (or challenge) the possibility of such certainties. The critical “negatron” thus posits a resistance to affirmative critical modes and a contrary engagement with the negative elements that define textual experience—the denials, erasures, contradictions, preteritions, negative rhetorical schemes, apophases, insubstantial presences, and the unspoken supplements, to mention only a few, that violate the signifying fixities of any text.

it is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human intellect to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives, whereas it ought properly to hold itself indifferently disposed towards both alike. Indeed in the establishment of any true axiom, the negative instance is the more forcible of the two.

—Francis Bacon, Aphorism 46