  Paraconsistency is commonly defined and/or characterized as the failure of a
principle of explosion. The various standard forms of explosion involve one or
more logical operators or connectives, among which the negation operator is the
most frequent and primary. In this article, we start by asking whether a
negation operator is essential for describing explosion and paraconsistency. In
other words, is it possible to describe a principle of explosion and hence a
notion of paraconsistency that is independent of connectives? A negation-free
paraconsistency resulting from the failure of a generalized principle of
explosion is presented first. We also derive a notion of quasi-negation from
this and investigate its properties. Next, more general principles of explosion
are considered. These are also negation-free; moreover, these principles
gradually move away from the idea that an explosion requires a statement and
its opposite. Thus, these principles can capture the explosion observed in
logics where a statement and its negation explode only in the presence of
additional information, such as in the logics of formal inconsistency.
