Destituency

Destituency, as it appears in Kornbluh's analysis, names a theoretical-political posture that treats radical negativity — dissolution, dismantling, abandonment — as the highest or sole form of political action. Etymologically derived from the Latin de + statuere (to move away from setting things up, to desert or forsake), the term is Agamben's coinage for a mode of power or practice that refuses to constitute anything, positioning itself as the pure opposite of constituent power. In Kornbluh's framing, destituency functions as the signature gesture of what she calls "anarchovitalism": a tendency within Marxist-inflected critical theory that equates radicality with formlessness, pure negation, and the refusal of any constructive or form-building project. Destituency, on this reading, is negation without Aufhebung — a subtraction that never advances to new determination.

What makes destituency theoretically problematic for Kornbluh is precisely its asymmetry with the dialectical tradition it claims to radicalize. Where Hegelian-Marxist dialectics insists that negation is always productive — that the "tremendous power of the negative" is equally the energy of a new construction — destituency freezes at the moment of dissolution and celebrates it as an end in itself. Against this, Kornbluh recovers a constructive, form-building dimension latent in Marx's own materialism: ruthless critique (rücksichtslose Kritik) is not a terminus but a precondition for the proactive projection of a new social order. Destituency, then, is positioned as the error to be corrected by any genuinely dialectical materialism.

In anna-kornbluh-marxist-film-theory-and-fight-club-bloomsbury-academic-2019, destituency is introduced on p. 27 as a named instance of the broader "anarchovitalist" tendency that the book sets out to critique. It occupies the position of a negative foil: by naming and etymologically unpacking Agamben's term, Kornbluh can make precise what she is arguing against — not negation as such, but negation divorced from construction. The concept therefore functions as a specification of the broader canonical concept of Negation in its most one-sided form: destituency is Negation arrested before its second moment, a refusal of the negation-of-negation that in Hegelian-Lacanian dialectics would produce new form. It is also directly opposed to Form as a positive theoretical value in the corpus: where the Marxist-materialist tradition treats form as the historically specific shape of social relations that critique must both dissolve and reconstruct, destituency abandons the reconstructive half of that task entirely.

The concept further illuminates the stakes of Dialectics and Ideology as cross-referenced canonicals. A destitutent politics, by refusing any positive project, implicitly leaves existing ideological form intact — or, worse, mistakes the jouissance of dissolution for structural transformation. This aligns with the Lacanian-Žižekian insight that cynical withdrawal (knowing ideology is ideology while continuing to act within it) is itself ideology's deepest operation. Destituency, in this light, risks being not the outside of ideology but one of its more seductive internal positions: the fantasy that abandonment alone constitutes freedom, without the harder dialectical work of sublation and construction.

Marxist Film Theory and Fight ClubAnna Kornbluh · 2019 (p.27)

Giorgio Agamben even has a name for this dissolution and dismantling, which he celebrates as the opposite of constituting: 'destituency' (from the Latin de + statuere—moving away from setting things up, deserting, forsaking, abandoning).

The quote is theoretically loaded in two directions at once: the etymology (de + statuere) unpacks the concept's internal logic as pure subtraction from constitution, while the phrase "celebrates as the opposite of constituting" marks the political-theoretical move Kornbluh is resisting — the elevation of non-construction into a positive value. The juxtaposition of "dissolution and dismantling" with the series "deserting, forsaking, abandoning" accumulates synonyms of abandonment that collectively foreclose any dialectical remainder or constructive supplement.