negativity

The work of Slavoj Žižek includes the highly arguable concepts towards the re-articulation of the Lacanian notion of the death drive.This paper presents an expository trend joining the fragmentary depictions of the death drive inSuzan-Lori Parks's play, Father Comes Home from the Wars. The present analysis begins with tracing the most intuitive aspects of Žižek’s re-articulations of the concept in connection to the Freudian-Lacanian Psychoanalytical concepts of the death drive. Opposing the notions of the death drive as biological instinct, Žižek instead highlights the Lacanian notions of the excess of negativity, "undead" eternal life, and symbolic mortification. In Father Comes Home from the Wars, the death drive stimulates Hero as a social antagonist and allows him to defy his constraints as a slave and develop an entirely different man with a new form of subjectivity. His struggle towards freedom makes him the subject of conflict and disintegration. Hero's attempts are in vain and ineffective as freedom tends to figure forth to the Real and becomes the target of oppression. The paper ends with focusing on how the notion of self-relating negativity consolidates the foregoing Lacanian concepts and how the illusion of freedom opens up the experience of loss or trauma and undermines Hero's desire for emancipation.

The relation of the many and the one, difference and identity, multiplicity and unity, particularity and universality, and finally that of negativity and negativity of negativity through reason and history is the core of Hegelian Absolute which is still an inevitable philosophical source to deal with most of the contemporary ontological problems. The article’s claim consists of two parts: Absolute is internally a retrospective totality of the System, on the one hand, and it is intertwined with a prospective negativity in a reciprocal relationship, on the other hand. Therefore, Absolute would be an absolute totality and an ongoing openness to the future at the same time. This article explains how Hegel’s articulation of the absoluteness is still a challenging ontological problem since it would simultaneously include both totality and negativity.

This paper deals with Wallace Stevens’s first collection of poetry, Harmonium, in light of Heidegger’s philosophy, with a particular emphasis on Da-sein as the place of negativity. The focus is particularly on Heidegger’s later philosophy, where he defines Man as the juncture where the four constitutive elements (earth, sky, divinities, and mortals) converge to let Da-sein appear as the futural authentic animal whose Being matters to him as his distinctive mark. Stevens’s poetry in Harmonium displays an experimental development along the same lines. The collection consists of poems dealing with the effect that the prospects of death and finitude have on its protagonists. Stevens achieves authentic protagonists who accept the nihilating power of death in order to save themselves from any form of social, poetic, and philosophical closure. This is significant because Stevens conceives a creative potential that not only runs counter to the romantic nostalgia for a return to an innocent past, but also openly embraces the idea of finitude as the only way out of any logocentric and metaphysical forms of thinking. This study, therefore, aims to show how in Harmonium Stevens poetizes an endless creative power that sets upon reproducing the non-closure associated with nihilation and nothingness.