The Birth of Thinking From the Spirit of Negation

Abstract

The following essay is an analysis of philosophical categories that commentators extrapolate from Sigmund Freud’s short 1925 text “Negation (Verneinung).” In particular, my text takes as its starting point a commentary on Freud’s text by Jean Hyppolite and Jacques Lacan that takes place during the latter’s first seminar, Octave Mannoni’s 1969 text on disavowal (Verleugnung) in Freud and beyond, but moreover, the Slovenian Lacanian school’s own work on both of these commentaries. While these authors (discussing Žižek and Zupančič here in particular) have cogently analyzed figures of negation in Freud’s corpus and also centered their corpuses on the critique of the “fetishist disavowal” constitutive of ideology, a notable question persists: what of the relation between these two figures, Verneinung and Verleugnung? My own basic claim is that what denial/Verneinung negates first and foremost is disavowal/Verleugnung itself. First, I begin with a historical anecdote about Freud’s “Verneinung” text. From here, I center Alenka Zupančič’s own further commentary on Hyppolite and Lacan’s analyses of “Negation (Verneinung)” in relation to different modalities of negation that she borrows from Alain Badiou’s 2008 text “The Three Negations.” Alongside classical, intuitionist, and paraconsistent logics, Zupančič and Slavoj Žižek advance a fourth possible logic in which neither the law of the excluded middle nor the law of noncontradiction applies, and I will argue in these terms that Lacan’s focus on Verneinung and negation is a thread that connects his first seminar to some of his latest, in addition to grounding his “return to Freud.” Finally, I attempt to draw out the full implications of Zupančič’s claim that “Aufhebung activates [Verneinung as] the very point that separates…two realities […and] puts this point to work” with reference to some key moments in the Judeo-Christian tradition that exhibit the tension between Verneinung and Verleugnung.

Keywords:

• Negation/Verneinung Keyword: Negation/Verneinung
• Disavowal/Verleugnung Keyword: Disavowal/Verleugnung
• Cancellation/Aufhebung Keyword: Cancellation/Aufhebung
• Intuitionistic Keyword: Intuitionistic
• Paraconsistent Keyword: Paraconsistent

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Rights: In Copyright