Rothenberg, Molly Anne. The Excessive Subject. Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 2010.
Warning: I’m about to spoil the first 30 pages of Rothenberg’s book. They’re page turners so my apologies, but I would like to set up her discussion of ‘negation’ through her absolutely fantastic discussion of Badiou’s notion of the empty set { }
Here is one of many scintillating quotes I could draw upon from her book:
{ } The simple addition of a formal property, the empty set, which has no substance in and of itself, negates the state of sheer being that attends each thing-as-such. It does so by establishing a minimal point of orientation — like making a small cut in a sheet of paper. Once this cut is added, then “things” can bear some minimal relation to each other — they all have a relation to this minimal point of orientation. This “cut” of the empty set creates a vector, and with this stroke, things precipitate into a world of identities, properties and relationships — as objects (33).
🙂 Now that is an awesome way of putting it. What Rothenberg is getting at is this whole idea of a determinate negation: things become objects, only through a cut, a negation that allows them to be placed in a relationship to another. If this sounds abstract, Rothenberg comes down to earth a bit later when she concretizes this concept by explicating it in conjunction with the Nom-du-Père. This is a standard Lacanian move that locates the child’s entry into language, the ‘cut’ that vaults it into the ‘defiles of the signifier’. Rothenberg is setting up her argument which consists in a very complex but fascinating and unique interpretation of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory which will allow her to argue for a totally new and innovative way in which to view the ‘social’ or ‘social field’ as she prefers to call it.