‘Nach und nach müssen wir alles ablehnen’: Hyperbolische Negativität bei Thomas Bernhard

Thomas Bernhard's work abounds in rejections. The impulse of not wanting to participate, of refusing to be complicit, lies at the heart of Bernhard's oeuvre. If this refusal is frequently embedded in discursive or even programmatic strategies, it really seems to undermine its own foundations, the very arguments and justifications put forward to make the refusal possible. Before being directed at a specific object, the refusal appears to stem from a more general disposition to say no. Drawing on Der Keller (1976), the second book of Bernhard's Autobiographie, as well as on Auslöschung (1986), the article examines the narrative as well as the discursive aspects of what could be called hyperbolic negativity in Bernhard's work. Hyperbolic negativity is characterised by totalisation. As Auslöschung’s protagonist Murau puts it: ʻBy and by, we have to reject everything.ʼ While in Bernhard's autobiographical writings the primacy of rejection is turned into work and a renewal of life, this impulse becomes aporetic in Auslöschung. Employed as a means of constituting the subject against the determining effects of education, heritage and history, negativity at the same time triggers a destructive turn against the narrator himself. The gnostic attitude, moreover, rules out political action. Yet, as a mode of discourse that is able to point at its unsaid other, hyperbolic negativity generates aesthetic productivity.