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Absence
Open accessAbstract
ngaging the surrealist landscapes of René Magritte is an equivocal endeavor.Les Charmes du Paysage (The Charms of Landscape; fig. 1) is an invitation into the plurality of absence.Through an explicit presentation of the absence of landscape, however that may be understood, we find ourselves in the presence of our own conjuring.The trace left by Magritte speaks to us in a manifold manner, an exemplification of absence's ontological power.It is a divergent opportunity found through the circumstantial constellation of what is not that indulges a (re)thinking of what has been and what may be.In an epoch characterized by its losses-mass extinction, environmental degradation, Indigenous livelihoods-I propose taking seriously the affective force of absence to accommodate a politics more attuned to the ethical affordances they bring about.This attentiveness to that which we do not or cannot completely know poses a methodological interjection which, at its heart, speaks to the fragility of the earth itself and all of its inhabitants.Absence is not synonymous with loss.It speaks to much more: what is not anymore and what is not yet, what may never be and what never has been.By speaking to and being spoken to, these ghosts of disjunct pasts and futures help construct an ethics for the present.The environmental humanities may engage this provocation on geologic and evolutionary timescales, facilitating ways of understanding and translating the world that acknowledge the presence of absence.Absences are the disjunctures of geographies and histories, profoundly marked by the traces they leave, as one can only begin to speak in terms of an absence through presumption, reconstruction, or fantasy.And as argued by Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx, these disjunctures are the very possibilities of an other ontology.1 Absences are not immaterial.Hauntings materialize through their inseparability from pre-existing material conditions, 2 their anachrony realized through the forging of 1. Derrida, Specters of Marx.2. Barad, "No Small Matter."
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“However, concerns about absence – about “what is not anymore,” and “what is not yet” (Searle 2020: 167; emphasis in original) – are not limited to religious contexts.”
From Communities of Absence: Emotions, Time, and Buddhism in the Creation of Belonging (2021) · cites this paper as Searle 2020: 167
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“However, concerns about absence – about “what is not anymore,” and “what is not yet” (Searle 2020: 167; emphasis in original) – are not limited to religious contexts.”
From Communities of Absence: Emotions, Time, and Buddhism in the Creation of Belonging (2021) · cites this paper as Searle 2020: 167
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Research works printed but not linked: 18
- Barad, 2017, No Small Matter: Mushroom Clouds, Ecologies of Nothingness, and Strange Topologies of SpaceTimeMattering, 103
- Barua, 2015, Encounter, Environmental Humanities, 7, 265, 10.1215/22011919-3616479 · DOI
- Derrida, 2016, Of Grammatology, 10.56021/9781421419954 · DOI
- Derrida, 2006, Specters of Marx
- Derrida, 2008, The Animal That Therefore I Am
- Fisher, 2014, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures
- Foucault, 1984, What Is Enlightenment?, 32
- Latour, 2004, How to Talk About the Body? The Normative Dimension of Science Studies, Body and Society, 10, 205, 10.1177/1357034X04042943 · DOI · Paper page
- McCormack, 2010, Remotely Sensing Affective Afterlives: The Spectral Geographies of Material Remains, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 100, 640, 10.1080/00045601003795004 · DOI
- McCorristine Shane , and AdamsWilliam M. “Ghost Species: Spectral Geographies of Biodiversity Conservation.” Cultural Geographies27, no. 1: 101–15. doi.org/10.1177/1474474019871645. · DOI
- Rose, 2017, Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations
- Searle, Anabiosis and the Liminal Geographies of De/extinction, Environmental Humanities, 12, 10.1215/22011919-8142385 · DOI
- Tsing, 2015, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
- van Dooren, 2014, Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction
- van Dooren, 2014, Life at the Edge of Extinction: Spectral Crows, Haunted Landscapes, and the Environmental Humanities, Humanities Australia, 5, 8
- Weisman, 2007, The World without Us
- Wylie, 2009, Landscape, Absence, and the Geographies of Love, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 34, 275, 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2009.00351.x · DOI
- Wylie, 2007, The Spectral Geographies of W. G. Sebald, Cultural Geographies, 14, 171, 10.1177/1474474007075353 · DOI
Cited by
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Communities of Absence: Emotions, Time, and Buddhism in the Creation of Belonging
Baffelli, E., & Schröer, F. (2021) · Numen · doi:10.1163/15685276-12341635 · Cited by 7
Metadata
- Authors
- Searle, A.
- Affiliations
- University of Cambridge (GB)
- Corresponding author
- Searle, Adam
- ORCID
- Searle, Adam
- Venue
- Environmental Humanities
- Publisher
- Duke University Press
- Published
- 2020-05-01
- Volume
- 12
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 167-172
- ISSN
- 2201-1919 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W4237493868
- Cited by
- 14
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2025: 4 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 3 · 2021: 1 · 2020: 1
- FWCI
- 14.42
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- diamond
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by-nc-nd
- Locations
- Environmental Humanities (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- Repository@Nottingham (University of Nottingham) (publishedVersion, other-oa)
- Repository@Nottingham (University of Nottingham) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Literature and Literary Theory › Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature
- Social Sciences › Cultural Studies › Posthumanist Ethics and Activism
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Nature and Landscape Conservation › Environmental Philosophy and Ethics
- Keywords
- absence, René Magritte, landscape, haunting, ethics, Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, ontology, loss, environmental degradation, mass extinction, indigenous livelihoods, materiality
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