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Apophasis combines apo-, “other than,” with phanai, “to speak.” As opposed to affirmative description, this “other speech” attempts to describe something negatively through what it is not. The sixth-century monk Dionysius the Areopagite used the word apophasis to describe “the unsaying of the names of God,” his diligent attempt to demonstrate the inadequacy of any human conception of divinity. In delineating the limits of thought, apophasis is intimately connected to critique. Many modern and postmodern philosophical discourses grounded in the critical tradition therefore share an apophatic dimension, from Hegelian dialectics to phenomenological reduction and deconstruction. This session argues that apophasis also has a particular visual dimension with profound relevance for art history.

The panelists address how various contemporary art practices employ apophasis as an aesthetic strategy to repudiate the affirmative logic of liberal human rights, queer affect theory, and humanist race thinking, respectively. Working across media—including film, sculpture, sound art, and performance—the panelists address negativity as a visual and aesthetic concept challenging the politics of representation. Apophasis also intervenes in art historical discussions of form by short circuiting the binary of representation and abstraction. Even if abstraction “draws away” (etymologically), it does not negate. Apophasis prompts us to reconsider the positivism of formal analysis and to identify the formal logic of negation itself. Above all, apophasis announces the continued capacity of art to shatter preconceptions and conventions, imagining a new world in the abyss.