Negative Revolution

Reviews / Votes

The Negative Revolution convincingly diagnoses the melancholia of our present moment as a symptom of revolutionary negativity gone awry. From Kant to Badiou, weaving together philosophy, politics, and poetry, Artemy Magum confronts us with the demand to rehabilitate negativity to transform this melancholia into new revolutionary possibilities. * Benjamin Noys, author of The Persistence of the Negative (2010) * Artemy Magun's erudite and original philosophical reflection on revolution and negativity comes at an important critical historical juncture to illuminate the meaning and possibilities of emancipatory politics from South to North and from East to West. The Negative Revolution is a highly innovative account that offers new resources for understanding important contemporary popular practices of resistance and insurrection that escape standard conceptions and theories. Equally important, it has the virtue of historicizing these practices by situating them in relation to post-Cold War transnational forms of power and mobilization. Magun's splendid book is simply indispensable to those who wish to rethink revolutionary politics in a truly philosophical fashion that challenges both the normative idealization and the empirical cynicism built in all classical writings on the subject. * Andreas Kalyvas, Associate Professor of Politics, New School for Social Research, New York * Revolution comes to us from Russia, again. Artemy Magun, writing from Saint-Petersburg, calls it 'negative,' in order to show that it is open to a transgression, to a transcendence, and to a transvaluation of itself. This book works above all to hold in check the melancholia of today's 'developed' societies. Such a book is long awaited. It's a must read. * Jean-Luc Nancy, Emeritus Professor, University of Strasbourg, France * Magun's deep investigations of logical, linguistic, and philosophical negativity are an important corrective to theoretical over-emphasis on affirmation. Rather than celebrating multiple modes of becoming, Magun attends to multiple dimensions of negation: contradiction, contrariness, privation, foreclosure, repression, disavowal, and so on. ... Magun's theory of negativity provides a conceptual apparatus for theorizing modernity under the sign of climate change.