ON NEGATIVE ESSAYS

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“Negative Essays is a brave, unsettling, and deeply moving book. Julie Reshe refuses every easy consolation and every therapeutic injunction to transform suffering into recovery. Through death, depression, humor, love, motherhood, disability, and aging, she develops a radically relational account of existence: we do not suffer alone, because we never exist alone. Negativity is not the opposite of love but its most intimate condition—the wound through which we are exposed to one another. At once philosophically incisive and painfully personal, these essays bring thought as close as possible to what thought usually keeps at a distance. A remarkable and necessary book.”

— Catherine Malabou

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“Julie Reshe is the philosopher of the negative. In addition to her radical reading of the death drive, Reshe here develops a negative philosophy that undermines previous forms of pessimism by locating negativity in our essential involvement with others, not in isolation. It is precisely this involvement with others that is the source of the worst of our wounds rather than any existential loneliness. Reshe radically redefines negativity and the idea of community by turning all expectations about both on their heads. It’s a startling book not to be missed by anyone who’s ever felt destroyed by someone else.”

— Todd McGowan

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“I pride myself on knowing Hegel’s “night of the world”: that pure abyss of negativity that constitutes the subject. And yet Negative Essays is like a map that marks the location of the candle I secretly lit in the basement, the cupboard light that glows through the cracks of a closed door, the torch I’ve hidden under the duvet.

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These essays are so uncompromising that they rob the reader of that last defence against the suffering of being: reflection upon it. While the work is philosophically rich, the words have such an existential intensity that you cannot help but feel the burn of the black sun they describe.

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There is no escape into fantasy here. No therapeutic cure, political utopia or religious salvation. So, with all that in mind, why would I ever put myself through the hell of reading these essays? Because of the sheer enjoyment each one produces.”

— Peter Rollins