Dialectics Revisited. Reality Discharged

Dialectics is a powerful way of engaging with our conflicted world, and yet it remains obscure, neglected, and badly misunderstood. Despite the prevalence of attempts to come to terms with all manner of antagonisms, contradictions, polarities, and oppositions across a host of theoretical practices and domains, relatively few authors make recourse to dialectics, and those who do invariably frame it within the following, rather unhelpful, terms: thesis–antithesis–synthesis or position–negation–negation-of-the-negation. While the advent of poststructuralism in general, and of deconstruction in particular, has arguably robbed the dialectic of much of its purchase, it is nonetheless worth revisiting dialectics since it offers an exemplary distillation of what is at stake in thinking through the Real as conflicted and charged. Accordingly, the paper is an attempt to clarify the dialectical articulation of the Real in its confliction, and advances the heretical possibility that the Real may be bereft of charge. Almost everyone works on the basis of a charged Reality—of a Real that is essentially polarized, antagonized, and conflicted—and most critical and fatal theorists dream of discharging the Real: selectively in the case of the former; wholesale in the case of the latter. Thinking through dialectics in the company of deconstruction and poststructuralism, however, opens up an entirely new terrain for the Real that is untouched by the positive and the negative, and which slips through the grasp of both critical and fatal theory. Reality is always already cracked open, but there is nothing to discharge.