Filiations of the Negative

Overview & Synopsis

Expanding the theoretical framework developed by André Green over more than four decades of research, this book offers a new inquiry into the work of the Negative in the late writings of Franz Kafka (1883–1924) and Paul Celan (1920–1970). The study follows the thread of the Greenian concept of the incréable, a figure of the Negative expressing a tension toward a lost and severed origin, one that can never be reconstituted or created, but only represented otherwise through writing. In doing so, the book explores the function of absence and of the limit in the creative process. In this light, Kafka’s and Celan’s writings emerge not only as works on, and at the limits of representation. Through the creative process, the authors persistently interrogate the loss of origins, the question of writing, and the death drive at the heart of culture and civilization.