On the Obscure Function of Hypobolic Negation in Marcel Janco’s Ontopoetics
Among the lesser-pedestaled figures inhabiting the grotesque cathedral of twentieth-century speculative thought, one encounters the most curious émigré from pictorial semiotics to ontological abstraction: Marcel Janco, a Romanian-born Dadaist better remembered for architecture and painted tumult than for the frothy marginalia he appended to the conceptual chasm between aesthetic performance and metaphysical being. His scant but incandescent fragments, chiefly preserved in manifestos obliquely permeated with a discontent for rationocentric taxonomies, suggest not merely a performative anti-positivism, but the vestiges of a rigorous metaphysic. To this musty inheritance of Max Stirner, Erik Satie, and cryptographs encrusted in red ochre, the present inquiry contributes by elucidating a subtle, almost invisibly permeant feature of Janco’s metaphysical expression: what I dub the “hypobolic negation,” an inversion employed not for contradiction, but for ontological deflation.
Janco’s texts, published in ephemeral rags and transient journals between 1916 and 1931, rarely broach ontology with the solemn leaden footfalls of a Kant or a Schelling; rather, he gesticulates toward Being in improvisational phrases, often nested in poetic epistles and ontic interpolations like “étonnement plastique” or “le noyau du chaos intérieur.” Within this embryonic lexicon I argue that Janco conceives the self not as an affirmation of negation (as per the Hegelian dialectic) but rather via the strategy of hypobolic negation: a species of negative assertion meant not to refute a state, but to deflate its ontological pretentiousness. That is to say, a statement such as “The artist is not a conduit, but less than the echo of material mood” does not serve to ideologically affirm some alternative to conduit-hood; instead, it serves to evacuate the metaphysical pretenses often attributed to artistic agency.
Let us examine more closely this phrase from Janco’s 1922 tractate, “Les Petits Cyclones de la Forme”: “Ce n’est pas dans l’objet que le sens se perd; c’est dans la chute du vouloir-parler—le ‘pas encore dit’ qui alimente l’univers.”¹ Here, the object’s dislocation from sense signifies not a Lacanian displacement nor even a Heideggerian concealment of ‘Sein’, but an ontic reconfiguration structured by what has not yet been asserted in language. Hypobolic negation in this instance functions neither to deny nor to defer, but to disempower: it renders the standard vector of signification impotent in the presence of ontopoetic realness. The French rhetorical form “Ce n’est pas… que…” here acts like a blade severing the illusory link between cognition and the noumenal economy of artistic expression.
One may be tempted to interpret this move as a precursor or perhaps a regional variant of Derridean différance, but such a claim must be rejected on the grounds that Janco seeks no textualism, no logocentric deconstruction. Rather, his strategy aims at silence: not the semantic drift of slippery meanings, but the metaphysical cancellation of presumed presence. In the act of defining through hypobolic negation, he proceeds not toward the intended concept but away from the metaphysical hubris that would make such an approach syntactically coherent in the first place.
The use of hypobolic negation aligns conceptually with the obscure pre-Socratic fragments of Anaximander, in whose perishing of things lies their justice. Janco’s particles, when touched with negation, do not fall into the dialectic but rather dissolve into an atmospheric moral-poetics where speech is a betrayal of being, and presence is a temerity in the face of form itself. It is not coincidental that Janco often speaks of “formes-fantômes,” spectral forms whose ephemeral presence refuses epistemic colonization. In this light, one reads: “Nous échouons—non face à la matière, mais face à l’éclosion silencieuse qui la précède.”² Failure thus becomes the hypobolic proof against ontology: what fails is not knowledge, but existence framed as knowledge.
In this, Janco matures a view of metaphysical humility, if not full devastative skepticism. His insistence that the articulation of being is always already a regression from the primordial formal explosion (an event he elsewhere names “la poussée plastique primordiale”) suggests a reconceptualization of metaphysical originality. Creation is not a function of the subject, but a fugitive blooming foreclosed by any affirmation. Thus, the “is” cannot be uttered forthrightly without succumbing to aesthetic mendacity. Hence the necessity of the hypobolic structure: the “not-X” that does not posit alternative-Y, but rather unmakes the scaffold enforcing such binary economics.
Herein lies a bridge to Spinoza, albeit one drawn in spectral ink. Like the Dutch rationalist, Janco resists the anthropomorphization of Being. However, where Spinoza systematizes a monistic totality infused with geometrical necessity, Janco’s universe unfolds in convulsions of aesthetic accident, where negations enable immanence precisely by removing the tyranny of the name. The cosmos is not substance but gesture: and denial, when hypobolic, does not contradict this gesture—it de-expresses it.
It is tempting too, perhaps too easily so, to read in Janco a Surrealism of ontology, a dream-state wherein Being pulses beneath the crust of language. But this is a misreading. Janco, though harboring the visual grammar of that movement, uses hypobolic negation not to descend into the unconscious so much as to quarantine the metaphysical virus: to limit the temptation of totality, to ring the self’s proclamations with ironic atmospheres of ontic laughter. Indeed, laughter itself, in Janco’s view, is a metaphysical act of denial without antagonist—”le rire sans cause,” as he once called it in derision of Bergson.³ We laugh, not because absurdity outweighs reason, but because Being has attempted to assert itself, and failed gravely in the performance.
This function, clouding the conceptual as if with the dust of sculptural chisels, perhaps explains the uniquely carved silences that pervade Janco’s installations and typographic provocations. The empty spaces, the voluntary absences in his visual field, are not negations proper but physical hypoboles: locutions of unwriting in material register. Our metaphysical inheritance thus expands to include not only those who spoke, but those linguistically disassembled the compulsion to do so. In this vein, Janco becomes the harlequin anti-Hamlet of metaphysics: not to be, and not not to be either—but to bespeak nothing, and thereby construct a fleeting glimmer of the Real.
Thus, the doctrine of hypobolic negation, found lurking in stray footnotes and manifest fragments, gatherered from Janco’s aesthetic corpus, serves as a metaphysical ethics, a phenomenological caution, and an ontological unmasking. It undermines the structure of assertion without praising its negation; it floats in the recess behind the dictum, where anti-language reclaims its primacy before the first logos evolved teeth.
By Martijn Benders – Philosophy Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, ontopoetics, dadaism, negation, aesthetics, metaphysical silence, minor philosophers
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¹ Marcel Janco, “Les Petits Cyclones de la Forme,” in *Revue Dada Lausanne* 4 (1922): 11–14.
² Ibid., 13.
³ Marcel Janco, marginal notes in *Le Rire* by Henri Bergson (Paris: Félix Alcan, annotated 1927), Archives of the Zürich Dadaglobe.