The Shadow Life: Negation, Nihilism, and Insanity in Thomas Bernhard’s Correction

Abstract

Thomas Bernhard’s correction is of special interest to negation theory because it foregrounds one notion of negation—involving elimination, nullification, and erasure—while implicitly demonstrating another, that of negation as the mainspring of creative processes. The first form of negation is mathematical, grammatical: it signifies an act that destroys or reverses the sign of its object. It has the apparent simplicity of a negative prefix (in-, dis-, non- or the minus sign), which cancels out the prior meaning. This is a sanitary notion of negation, as if the act of negating achieves a pure reversal, leaving no trace of what was prior and no remainder.