Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Absence

2020; Duke University Press; Volume: 12; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/22011919-8142253

2201-1919

Adam Searle,

Geographies of human-animal interactions

E 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. 1Absences 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.