David Chandler is Professor of International Relations at the University of Westminster and edits the journal Anthropocenes: Human, Inhuman, Posthuman. His recent publications include: Hope: Shortcuts to a Big Idea (2026); Race in the Anthropocene: Coloniality, Disavowal and the Black Horizon (2025); Hope in the Anthropocene: Agency, Governance and Negation (2024); The World as Abyss: The Caribbean and Critical Thought in the Anthropocene (2023); International Relations in the Anthropocene: New Agendas, New Agencies and New Approaches (2021); and Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds (2021). Jonathan Pugh is Emeritus Professor of Island Studies at the University of Newcastle. His main areas of research are islands and archipelagos. He has around 100 publications and is particularly noted for his development of what has come to be known as the 'relational turn' in islands studies. His recent books include: The World as Abyss: the Caribbean and Critical Thought in the Anthropocene (2023); and Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds. London: University of Westminster Press 2021. Valerie Waldow is Lecturer and Research Associate at the Department of Political Science at Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, Germany. Her research focuses on critical international political theory, liberal violence and democratic critique, and International Relations in the Anthropocene, with particular attention to intervention, governance, and political imaginaries. She works on critique, epistemic limits, and transformations of political thought, especially in relation to debates on hope and negativity in contemporary political theory. She is co-editor of Hope in the Anthropocene: Agency, Governance and Negation (2024, EUP).

• Notes on ContributorsIntroduction. Working with the NegativeValerie Waldow, Jonathan Pugh and David ChandlerPart I. Encounters1. Planetary Ecological Catastrophe, Crippled Action, and the Possibility of RecoveryCarl Cassegård2. The Worldless ImageRizvana Bradley3. Law Otherwise or Otherwise Laws? (Pre)figurative, (Para)ontological, and (De/re)worlding PracticesMarie Petersmann4. Black Weird Negativity: Rethinking the Embrace of the WeirdFarai Chipato5. The Event that Doesn’t End: Working with the Negative in Organizational LifeMarc Lenglet and Alexandre WongPart II. Mobilisations6. Negation, Negative Dialectics and Utopia: Why Sex MattersClaire Colebrook7. The Abyssal Halfbreed: On Race, Negativity, and SilenceMatthew Gravlin8. Glissant, Deleuze and the Radical Ontopolitics of OpacityHannah Richter9. Negative Interrupted: critical notes on some of the afterlives of the Hegelian AufhebungVassilios Paipais10. Being without Place: Politicising Nonbelonging in Worldless TimesLucas PohlPart III. Aporias11. Trembling Grounds: Pluriversal Ontopolitics and the More-than-human Reverberations of Radical AntagonismMin Seong Kim12. Death and Birth: Negative Life and Ecological ExtinctionJean-Thomas Tremblay and Steven Swarbrick13. Abolition: Processual, Fugitive and LibidinalCaroline von Taysen14. Impasses at the End of the World: Disavowal, Exhaustion, NostalgiaNathaniel O’Grady15. Brutal Necessity, Negative Capability, and the Empty Sign: Adrift in the Not-Yet with Carlos MartielP. Khalil Saucier and Tryon P. WoodsLosing Worlds, Losing Hope: EpiloguePaulina Tambakaki

Working with the Negative addresses the problem of critique: what, if anything, comes after the end of modernity’s progress? Competing models have emerged only to exhaust themselves. The theoretical impasse runs deep. This timely edited volume navigates this impasse with interpretive care and precision. It does so incisively not by speaking in unison, but by multiplying its examples, challenging us to apprehend critique—in its restless labor of negation—in the face of ever-looming apocalyptic horizons.