In his mapping of modern post- Kantian philosophy Giorgio Agamben suggests that it is divided between two lines: the line of transcendence, which starts with Kant and culminates in Derrida and Lévinas, and the line of immanence, beginning with Spinoza and passing through Nietzsche to Deleuze and Foucault. The contemporary dominance of affirmationism in Continental theory can be read as a sign of the triumph of this second line of immanence, which has become correlated with the political ability to disrupt and resist the false transcendental regime of capitalism. It is the affirmation of immanence, particularly as the locus of power and production, which is supposed to deliver the re- establishment of the grandeur of philosophy and the possibility of a new post- Nietzschean ‘great politics’. It would, however, be an error to understand the appearance of affirmationist theory as simply another in the regular ‘turns’ of contemporary theory, or as the re- tooling of the particular verities of pre- Kantian metaphysics. Instead, in this introduction, I want to argue that we can map the emergence of this high affirmationism in a more localised and politically- sensitive fashion in order to better critique it.

The emergence of affirmationist theory obeys a strange temporal logic in which this supposedly new current in fact developed in parallel with the more well- known theoretical orientations of the 1970s and 1980s, which are usually grouped together in the Anglophone world under the banner of poststructuralism. In fact, we might better speak of resurgence rather than emergence.