Goldilocks and the Three Negations
An Appeal to a Minimal Ethics for the Phil-Anthropocene
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.56550/d.4.2.5Keywords:
Political ontology; intra-action; negation; philosophical ethics; classical logicAbstract
I pursue a focused reading of Joanna Zylinska’s Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene, structured around following theoretical motif: mapping the pattern in Zylinska’s notion of opposition or difference, marked by the logical negation. To account for this, Zylinska makes use of Karen Barad’s notion of an intra-action, a device for eliminating reference to binary polarity in identifying objects. The resultant picture—let’s call the negation procedure Goldilocks—is one where negation is “just right”: weak enough not to necessitate binary polarity between any two things but strong enough to “carve up” the world in myriad creative, intuitive, or useful ways. If negation is stronger than Goldilocks, we carve too much and erase the aboriginal embeddedness of things; and if it is weaker, then we miss important differences. I critique Goldilocks by claiming that: one, if there are three degrees of inferential strength to negations, then Goldilocks negations exhibit only the weakest of the inferential powers; and two, that there is a priori reason to think that denying this enriched view of negation rests on a foundational equivocation. The upshot therefore ought to be global for Zylinska’s notion of ethics: we cannot begin to think through ethics without first properly thinking through negation.
References
Badiou, A., 2022. Immanence of Truths: Being and Event III. Bloomsbury, London.
Badiou, A., 2009. Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II. Bloomsbury, London.
Badiou, A., 2006. Being and Event. Continuum, London.
Barad, K., 2019. After the End of the World: Entangled Nuclear Colonialisms, Matters of Force, and the Material Force of Justice. Theory Event 21, 524–550.
Barad, K., 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press, Durham.
Berankova, J.N., 2020. The Immanence of Truths and the Absolutely Infinite in Spinoza, Cantor, and Badiou. Filoz. Vestn. 41, 340–360. https://doi.org/10.3986/fv.41.2.13
Béziau, J.-Y., 2012. The New Rising of the Square of Opposition, in: Béziau, J.-Y., Jacquette, D. (Eds.), Around and Beyond the Square of Opposition. Springer Basel, Basel, pp. 3–19. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-0348-0379-3_11
Burgis, B.A., 2022. Logic Without Gaps or Gluts: How to Solve the Paradoxes Without Sacrificing Classical Logic. Springer Nature.
Copjec, J., 1994. Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. MIT Press, Cambridge (Mass.) London.
Correia, M., 2012. Boethius on the Square of Opposition, in: Béziau, J.-Y., Jacquette, D. (Eds.), Around and Beyond the Square of Opposition. Springer Basel, Basel, pp. 41–52. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-0348-0379-3_3
Derrida, J., 2000. Hostipitality. Angelaki 5, 3–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/09697250020034706
Dioguardi, E., 2022. The Birth of Thinking From the Spirit of Negation. Eur. J. Psychoanal. 9.
Gabriel M., 2015. Fields of Sense: A New Realist Ontology. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.
Gabriel, M., Žižek, S., 2009. Mythology, Madness and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism. Continuum, London.
Gillespie, S., 2008. The Mathematics of Novelty: Badiou’s Minimalist Metaphysics, Anamnesis. Re.Press, Melbourne.
Harris, D., 2021. Karen Barad’s Feminist Materialism: Intra-action and Diffraction. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne.
Jacquette, D., 2014. Ontology. Taylor and Francis, Hoboken.
Matte-Blanco, I., 1998. The Unconscious as Infinite Sets: An Essay in Bi-logic, Rev. ed. ed, Maresfield library. Karnac Books, London.
Moss, G.S., 2020. Hegel’s Foundation-Free Metaphysics: The Logic of Singularity. Routledge, Abingdon.
Priest, G., 2022. Everything and Nothing, in: Gabriel, M., Priest, G. (Eds.), Everything and Nothing. Polity press, Cambridge, pp. 19–38.
Schang, F., 2012. Oppositions and Opposites, in: Béziau, J.-Y., Jacquette, D. (Eds.), Around and Beyond the Square of Opposition. Springer Basel, Basel, pp. 147–173. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-0348-0379-3_11
Schüler, H.M., 2022. The Naturalness of Jacques Lacan’s Logic, in: Beziau, J.-Y., Vandoulakis, I. (Eds.), The Exoteric Square of the Opposition: The Sixth World Congress on the Square of the Opposition. Springer Nature, pp. 241–258. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90823-2_11.
Smith, D.W., 2006. Axiomatics and Problematics as Two Modes of Formalization: Deleuze’s Epistemology of Mathematics, in: Duffy, S. (Ed.), Virtual Mathematics: The Logic of Difference. Clinamen Press, Manchester, pp. 145–168.
Žižek, S., 2012. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. Verso, London.
Zylinska, J., 2014. Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene, Critical Climate Change. Open Humanities Press, s.l.
