If philosophy, as Gilles Deleuze claims, is about posing the right problem rather than finding the correct solution then, contra Deleuze, we have argued that the correct problem is the problem of negativity. To conclude requires some clarification of this problem, and especially its dissociation from a number of common confusions. Negativity is all too persistently associated with a pernicious abstraction, whether in the form of the violent abstractions of a communist politics that would disrupt and destroy the true density of the life- world or, symmetrically, in the form of the abstractive creative destruction of capitalism, which itself is an equally utopian project of violently re- making the life- world. Reflecting this doxa, Simon Critchley argues that the radical politics of the 1960s was doomed by a ‘politics of abstraction … attached to an idea at the expense of a frontal denial of reality.’ Critchley's call for a new self- abnegating ‘politics of love’ is at one with a number of contemporary attempts to solve this antinomy of abstraction by recourse to ‘warmer’ affirmative abstractions, whether they be found in the ‘richness’ of the material density of the world, in an immanent ontological point of resistance, in the exception of an event or in Christian mysticism. Such ‘solutions’ merely compound the problem of abstraction by the creation of a pseudo- concrete ‘point’ of affirmation somehow external to real abstraction. Instead, I have argued for the return to negativity as the means for the immanent of traversal of these real abstractions. It is the abstractive potential of negativity that allows us to re- pose the problem of agency in terms of rupturing with this aporetical structure.