5) In your essay, “Negative Emergence,” you argue that what matters is not adding new entities, but how negativity/lack constitutes what “is.” Can you say a few more words about this “negative emergence”, what is it that “standard” emergence debates miss? How it is related to the “miraculous” Events, one of your examples being Love?

I think we have a spontaneous tendency to think of the world as made up of stuff, things, objects. And then we account for those objects through science, more and more precisely and completely, and in the end, we’ve got it. In some sense, this is the phantasy one needs to engage with in one form or another to motivate scientific pursuits. However, then you need to account for the relationship between these entities and then along comes the trouble - even if we still only regard the world as consisting of discrete entities. The Earth orbits the Sun and we can account for the gravitational effect of these two on each other. However, when we introduce the Moon, there is no general, closed-form solution. The so-called three body problem. Relationships are complicated. I get the Lacanian inclination here; you can account for the relationship between subject and object, but then you add the Other, and all three are screwed.

One solution, philosophically, has been to talk about emergence. Higher level properties that arise from lower level components which none the less did not contain the properties of the emergent whole. On the simple level, the will of the bird flock is irreducible to any individual bird but is also not present as its own subject when the flock dissipates. But the concept goes further in some philosophical debates: properly new entities arise from the assemblages but are ontologically irreducible to them, and yet produce new causal powers.

Consciousness is perhaps the most famous. I do not go into this discussion. However, a recent, but not in any sense new, attack from the analytical school of philosophy made me want to engage with the positivist worldview of a universe of countable objects and nothing more. My take is not to defend the “magical appearance” of strong emergence’ new entities, but rather to say that the critique fundamentally misses the point: You cannot even account for “what is,” and meaningfully call that the universe – not even scientifically.

The concept of a negative emergence that I am introducing in the essay aims at the creative, productive, say ontological force, that negativity has. So, emergence tries to account for the surplus that occurs in human and material interactions, while the prefix of negativity aims at the lack. What I’m trying to do is to bring those two things together; to say that perhaps in looking for what really drives forward ideas, subjects, societies, but also materiality itself, we might be approaching the matter too naively if we fixate the discussion around whether or not (seemingly) emergent entities can be reduced to their lower-level components. This is not the two sides of the discussion, but already itself a kind of positivist discourse. Negative emergence is in some sense a self-contradictory concept; but this is none the less what I try to pursue: What if your best ideas are not magical appearances out of nowhere, but also not preexisting building blocks in your mind. The best thing that can happen for anyone is for a really good problem to appear. The Lacanian view here is that this is how human desire works. It does not appear as a surplus, as the sudden or spontaneous wish for this or that, but it surely does not correspond to a kind of logical or physical need either. Instead, what really drives the subject is a lack. Desire does not revolve around desired objects, but around lacks. In the essay, I’m trying to make the case for “the conversation” as an everyday arena of this. Neither of the participants of a conversation owns its logic. It moves about, the themes and mood changes, and then, if you are really lucky, something negative emerges. A lack that no one can truly account for, and that cannot be said to have been there beforehand in some material sense. So, a true emergence in this way, but a negative one. This is where things start to move. This is how new thinking is born, this is how one falls in love; with someone or something that brings about the right kind of lack into one’s life.

The future does not magically appear out of nowhere, free of any material determinism, but perhaps the past disappears in a way that cannot be accounted for by the present. The case that I’m trying to make is to say; what if emergence is very real but can only be seen in the shape of a lack?