Figures of Radical Absence: Blanks and Voids in Theory, Literature, and the Arts

Authors

Alexandra IrimiaFollow

Document Type

Book

Publication Date

10-4-2023

URL with Digital Object Identifier

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111150581

Abstract

Although post-structuralism highlighted the importance of what is offstage, lost, forgotten, hidden or discarded, silent or silenced, the poetics and politics of absence (much like its ethics and aesthetics) have rarely been discussed across media and disciplines. This book proposes the concept of ‘radical absence’ to describe a certain tradition of resistance to ontology, predication, and representation, contesting their reliance on a metaphysics of presence. Apophatic speech, empty signifiers, and figural voids are some of the figures through which radical absence becomes apparent with unprecedented intensity in twentieth-century theory, literature, film, and the arts. Phantasmatic and outrageous, such figures play with creative strategies of dematerialization, irony, and other forms of discursive undoing. Therefore, absence becomes more than a simple theme; it reflects back on the medium and the meaning-making conditions under which it operates. Elusive and imprecise as an object of study, absence requires more subtle and flexible epistemological frameworks than have been available to date. This monograph proposes we think of it not only as a counter-concept for presence, but also – and perhaps more productively – as infinite spacing, deferral, fragmentation, and displacement.

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Citation of this paper:

Irimia, Alexandra-Ecaterina. Figures of Radical Absence: Blanks and Voids in Theory, Literature, and the Arts, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111150581