Becoming Nothing The Death Drive and the Working Class

A striking cultural and philosophical study of working-class artists and the resilience of radical survival.

Becoming Nothing is an exploration of the concept of negative freedom and the working class.

Originating from German idealism, negative freedom the ability to say no to everything outside of one’s self. This can take the form of withdrawing from capitalist society, but can also include addiction, self-harm and crime. Although often self-destructive, even at times resulting in death, these forms of negative freedom can also provide a temporary escape from capitalist reality.

Analysing the work of working-class writers, musicians and film-makers — including the Fall, Jean Genet, Marguerite Duras, Don DeLillo, Lynne Ramsay and David Wojnarowicz — Becoming Nothing shows how these artists' engagement with negative freedom can provide the working-class subject with a means of cleaving themselves from a society they don’t feel at home in, while at the same time creating an alternative space, a home, within which to survive, and perhaps even dream.

Cynthia Cruz is the author of seven collections of poems, Disquieting: Essays on Silence, and The Melancholia of Class (Repeater Books, 2021). Cruz lives in New York City and in Berlin.