...Mark Featherstone This article explores what one might call the dystopia of contemporary screen-based culture through a discussion of the work of Paul Virilio and Bernard Stiegler. Centrally, it explains that the screen might be seen as a negative abyss, where absolute surface creates the effect of...

...-to-face with the “negative abyss” of the screen, in the ever-increasing self- vacancy of social media platforms, and in the concomitant creation of new problematic forms of “subjectivity” in the “digi-child.” Some contributions seek to “reposition” Virilio ethically beyond the “squared horizon...

... or an abyss he most famously develops via analysis of the Kantian sublime. 8 The sublime, in Lyotard's hands, puts the entire aesthetic realm in touch with a radically nondialectizable negativity that, in his view, is what calls for thought by keeping events coming, always in a sense “out of...

... cannot adjust to the abyss of meaning represented by the other is that suicide starts to look like the only act that could make any sense or have any significance. My view is, therefore, that what makes Cioran particularly applicable for thinking about the philosophical, existential situation of the...

... respectively rendered by Deleuze (2004 : 27) thus: “One is negative… the other affirmative… One is static, the other dynamic… One is revolving, the other evolving.” Despite our contemporary celebration of the (faux) dynamism of hyperbolized speed and acceleration, it is more substantive movement...

... ), which reflects upon how the abyss of war can become a fatal attraction: “The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” As the noise of vehicles and voices becomes perceptible, the first few words fade out, leaving the phrase “war is a drug” visible, before that too fades...

... the first place, what hope does a transparent society have in its bid to unearth them? (4) A secret is not a positive form of knowledge to begin with and this compromises any act of revelation in the service of transparency. Rather than a positive form, the secret is negative knowledge, or not...

... the difficulty, the repurposing of bombsites brings with it no guarantee of efficacy; indeed, the power of the bombsite as a disordering of value was such that its negative force would always be in competition with this healing purpose. Two years prior to Paneth's sociological study of a streetful...

... Ficino, Bruno, Mesmer, and German idealism (mainly Schelling and Hufeland), Sloterdijk describes transitive relations between selves, rather than reflexive relations of the self. Under the banner of a “negative gynecology” he deals with the metaphysical, mystical, psychoanalytic, and messianic...

...), Arendt herself writes, “The nightmare is that [the Nazis] have shown . . . what man is capable of” ( [1945] 2007 : 91). She reiterates this in a review of Hermann Broch’s collection of poems The Death Vigil (1945). Broch’s writing, she says, in a style resembling a Homeric hymn, spans the abyss between...

..., current neoliberal ideology operates in Churchillian mode, in strictly negative “least-worst” terms; the Good is replaced by a perceived and relative absence of Evil, the “avoidance of mistreatment” calculated on a baseline of minimal social security and human rights. So we know very well that neoliberal...

... different symbolization. To “traverse the fantasy,” one of the key aims of analysis in Lacan's account (1979: 273), involves, according to Žižek, a recognition that the function of the fantasy is merely to mask the abyss opened up by the inconsistency of the Other and that, viewed from another perspective...

... It is no accident that these institutions are gradually adopting a networked model, transforming themselves into those networked organizations to which we referred at the beginning of this article. In this way, they unload the negative externalities on to the weak points of the network, while...

... indifference between potentiality and actuality. In fact, it is the experience of im-potentiality that is the experience of freedom. Agamben writes: “Here it is possible to see how the root of freedom is to be found in the abyss of potentiality. . .. To be free is, in the sense we have seen, to be capable...

... abyssal insight, that between understanding and fighting there is a convergence that is not easily avoidable and may even be inevitable. According to Plato, to think is necessarily to take sides in the logical civil war in which truth goes into battle against opinion. According to Nietzsche, to think even...

..., disappears after the young woman repeats in heavily accented English “strangers to the same land.” After adding another clear tie-in with the international conference being held in Sarajevo, where these “strangers” are “meeting at the tip of an abyss,” she recites Darwish’s lines dealing with unofficial...