The matter of absence

Introduction

Where is my love, who sat next to me on this couch? Where is my home, which stood on a plain that has now been taken over by other buildings? Where is the factory at which I and my colleagues melted and forged steel for a lifetime? The absence of people that have been, of things that have been but are not anymore, can hurt deeply. The experience of such absences can exert so much force, so much gravity, ¹ that it feels as if it pulls one’s heart out.

Why are reinforced steel doors flanking the entrances to Prague’s metro? Who forced a chisel into one of Manchester’s town hall’s stones, leaving a mason’s mark? Traces of absent people and things are everywhere. From time to time they capture one’s attention, making senses and bodies wander along unexpected paths, paths that are as wonderful as they are unsettling.

This unsettling quality of absence, the rift that it might open in the ‘present’, its haunting quality is what makes it a theoretically interesting as well as challenging term, as is documented in several recent conference sessions on the subject and in a string of publications in the field of human geography and beyond. ² As I will discuss in more detail below, the problem with accounts of absence is that they implicitly or explicitly use absence as ‘the other’, the opposite, the unknown, the spectral, the immaterial. Absence is posited as something that derives its inherent quality from the fact that it is beyond mere materiality, beyond the body and its embeddedness in the physical world. In this article, I want to combine a phenomenological perspective with observations made in my own fieldwork and in the studies of others that engage both the topic of materiality and the topic of absence to show that the opposite is the case: the experience of absence derives its peculiar power from its embeddedness in the body, in bodily practices, sensual perceptions and emotions. To elaborate on the background of the term absence, I will first discuss the theoretical roots of this term in the deconstructionist critique of Husserl’s phenomenology. Based on a description of the relation between absence and presence in lived experience, I will provide an account of how the experience of absences actually arises in practical experience. This account will draw on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body. In the final section of this article, I will address the different qualities of absence. These differences display themselves in relation to the quality and depth of the corporeal engagements with absent entities in everyday life. To articulate this connection to everyday practices, to demonstrate why absence is such an important phenomenon not only with regard to questions of difference and spectrality but also with regard to embodied everyday experience is one of the main goals of this article.

Absence in deconstruction

The term absence, together with the term trace, plays on the theoretical register of deconstructionism. Beginning in the 1960s, it has been used by Derrida in his critique of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. Husserlian phenomenology is presented by Derrida as the most advanced philosophical offer of that time intending to go beyond a metaphysical understanding of being. But for Derrida it fails in its endeavour: ‘Phenomenology has criticized metaphysics as it is in fact only in order to restore it’. ³ Since I do not want to lose readers in the exegesis of Derrida’s work, I will only provide a rough sketch of the criticism launched by Derrida, giving it a particular spin on the tension between absence and presence. The critique that Derrida develops in his writing revolves around the suspicion that phenomenology (in the guise of Husserl) supposes presence, being present, self-presence as the foundation for being, for the sense and the meaning of being. Being a philosopher of language, Derrida sees a problem with such a theoretical setup. The focus on presence does not leave room for an understanding of difference as it is created in writing:

In emerging from itself, hearing oneself speak constitutes itself as the history of reason through the detour of writing. Thus it differs from itself in order to reappropriate itself. [Husserl’s] Origin of Geometry describes the necessity of this exposition of reason in a worldly inscription. An exposition indispensable to the constitution of truth and the ideality of objects, but which is also the danger to meaning from what is outside the sign. In the moment of writing, the sign can always ‘empty’ itself, take flight from awakening, from ‘reactivation,’ and may remain forever closed and mute. ⁴

I will try to make this passage more intelligible. Writing, or, put differently, producing signs, leaves these signs out in the open. The written words are traces that might display certain meanings. But as with all traces, they might also be overlooked, ignored, misinterpreted, and, even more than that, their significance changes with their context – as Derrida displays in his deconstructionist writing, in which he rearranges the order of texts and thus shows new, hitherto invisible connections, other layers of meaning, layers that are different from the supposedly present. In his writing, Derrida circles around Husserl again and again, to stake out a limit of Husserl’s transcendentalist enterprise, of Husserl’s trying to get to the essence (Wesen) of things, to the essence of being. According to Derrida, Husserl fails in his endeavour because he gets trapped in presence – but entities themselves are not present to consciousness, their ‘essence’ is only accessible via a detour, a supplementation, a différance. ⁵ Husserl is concerned with consciousness, with pure logic. Here, presence means presence to consciousness. Derrida on the other hand is concerned with signs, writing and language. Presence for him can only be a failure, a gap; since the sign, since a word always points to an absence. Seen from Derrida’s perspective, Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology is about presence and the self-presencing of consciousness. Derrida’s deconstructionism aims to uncover this as a fundamental flaw in the phenomenological enterprise. One of the argumentative moves made by Derrida in this critique is to declare that even the dialogue of a consciousness with itself, as analysed by Husserl in his Logical Investigations, ⁶ cannot function without the différance that is a necessary part of language. Thus, différance is something that even logic cannot escape from. ⁷ The absence of the signified, the sign as a trace is presented as the spectre that haunts essentialist understandings of being. The written sign points to the finiteness of being, to death. ⁸

This unsettling quality of absence, and of the trace that evokes an absence, is often invoked in human geography. Spectro-geographies follow Derrida’s concept of spectro-politics. They challenge geography’s concern ‘with the “rational”, the “ordered” and the “sane”’. ⁹ They show that – opposed to a comfortable understanding of entities dwelling in the world – haunting exists as an eerie undercurrent that threatens to destabilize established categories of self as well as place. ¹⁰ Absences point to these undercurrents, to entities that are not there, seemingly not covered by phenomenological approaches to geography ‘that would confine human perception and presence to living, breathing, organic flesh’. ¹¹

At the same time, however, many works discussing absence in human geography and beyond discuss another aspect of absences: the fact that they are experienced. The experiential quality of absence is discussed in relation to ghosts and haunting, in their connectedness both to places and to persons. ¹² One particularly strong aspect of the experience is the emotional quality of the feeling of loss, and the experience of places and occasions for remembering. ¹³ Other, more mundane aspects connected to everyday life are also being discussed in connection with the experience of absences. ¹⁴

In the following sections I want to move to a discussion of absence that bases the understanding of absence on its experiential qualities. As something that is experienced, absence is not an entity of itself, something that is just there, like the proverbial ghost sitting in the machine, waiting to be discovered, extracted and analysed. ¹⁵ An absence is also not just immaterial, a mere thought without an anchor in the corporeal world, sometimes there, sometimes not there. An absence arises in the experience, it is a relational phenomenon that constitutes itself in corporeal perceptions. Someone has to miss something for it to be specifically absent. Different from a general not-being or not-existing, it is a not-being-here, a not-existing-now. There was a farm at this place, but it is not here anymore. Someone stood at a place, with his beloved partner, but she died of cancer two years ago, and now he is there, at the same place, all alone. To some degree, this relational character is reflected in the term itself, which derives from the Latin roots ‘ab-’ (from, away) and ‘esse’ (to be). ¹⁶ To be absent, someone or something has to be experienced as being distanced from the place and time where the absence is experienced. Accordingly, an absence necessitates a relation to a lived place-time.

Absence and presence

Absence as a concept is often discussed in connection with presence, where both are seen sometimes as opposites, sometimes as partners. In the case of Derrida’s criticism of Husserl, absence is presented as the category of the trickster, the devious category that undermines the almighty, shining presence; the category that lurks in the inevitable shadows cast by presence’s radiating glare. In the next paragraphs I want to slowly shift focus from the exegesis of academic texts such as Derrida’s to actual experience as the guide in the understanding of absence and its relation to presence. The peculiar tension between absence and presence, which borders on the paradoxical, is one of the aspects that makes the concept of absence so difficult to grasp. How can something that is absent be present at the same time? Since this coincidence of absence and presence fuels as well as troubles the productivity of the concept, ¹⁷ I want to discuss this difficult relation in more detail. To start with the way Wylie puts it:

The shreds and patches of things, whether treasured possessions or soiled ephemera – handled, venerated or discarded – all the traces of presence of those now absent are worked in such a way so as to show, synchronously, the absence of presence, the presence of absence, and so in the final analysis the threshold assumes the status of an enlarged, uncannier zone of indiscernability and dislocation, disrupting all distinctions. ¹⁸

In this quote, the important distinction is made implicitly: it is not the thing that is experienced as absent that is present, but the absence itself, ‘the presence of absence’. I do not feel the person or the thing that I miss, but I feel that it is missing. When I have lost my wallet, and put my hand in the pocket to grab it and pay, I do not feel the wallet. But what I do feel quite distinctly is that it is not where I expected it would be, my searching fingers do not meet resistance where I expected it.

The same goes true for the other way round: what is experienced as present is the absence, not the thing or person itself: ‘the absence of presence’. When I orient myself towards a person that is not there, then I feel that this person does not fill the space that I want or expect them to fill. Since they are not there, I experience a void, a lack of presence, a lack of sensual connection or resistance. It is this void that I myself then fill with my own emotions and imaginations. ¹⁹

It is important to note, however, that this connection, this coincidence of absence and presence is not at all paradoxical, because in the given situation absence and presence do not refer to the same thing, i.e. the thing or entity that is absent. One expression, ‘the presence of absence’, refers to the absence itself, while the other expression, ‘the absence of presence’, refers to the missing thing. Because they refer to different entities, the actual relationship between these two formulations is not of a kind that would be ‘disrupting all distinctions’. The absence of presence and the presence of absence can co-exist without logical – or sensual/sensory – problems. The feeling of dislocation and disruption does not stem from a paradoxical distinction, it rather originates in the disruption of expectations.

This is why the experience of absence is quite an ordinary experience, not something that is only triggered in rare encounters with the spectral, with hauntings or ghosts and everything para-normal. The concept of absence is often brought into play when borderline situations and experiences are analysed, when the uncanny growls in the dark corners of regulated and orderly places and social settings. ²⁰ But people also experience absences in their mundane activities, in everyday encounters. In his article on the mundane hauntings that characterize his commuting experience, Edensor also demonstrates this ‘significance of everyday urban space, that habitual realm within which most urban dwellers carry out quotidian practices’. ²¹ It is one of the main intentions of this article to show that paying heed to the ordinary character of absences does not lead to a weaker concept of absence. To the contrary, it rather shows that absences create powerful effects in many different situations and on very different levels of affect.

Time and matter: becoming absent

Moving forward from distinctions based on the fact that absence is a phenomenon that exists in actual experience, it becomes necessary to examine how such experiences come into being. For this undertaking I will need to go back to phenomenology – but not the phenomenology of Husserl, with its interest in logic and consciousness. This article focuses on the matter of absence, on its material and bodily aspects. Accordingly the relevant phenomenologist is Merleau-Ponty, with his phenomenology of the body. How does Merleau-Ponty understand the emergence of absence? In the following citation he describes how silence is experienced as the absence of sound.

It is said that sounds or colours belong to a sensory field, because sounds once perceived can only be followed by other sounds, or by silence, which is not an auditory nothingness, but the absence of sounds . . . [In] the hearing subject, the absence of sounds does not cut off all communication with the world of sounds. ²²

Here, Merleau-Ponty states that silence is not nothing, but an absence of sounds that appears as such because it follows on from sounds that could be heard. Silence appears as an interruption of sounds that have been perceived – i.e. sounds that did not just exist somewhere, but that were actually experienced by someone. Listening, of course, is very clearly a temporal experience – in contrast to vision, which sometimes is treated as if it would be involved with static pictures that present a more or less complete totality of their own. ²³ However, both in listening as well as with all other senses, everything that is experienced is experienced processually, it always appears in the context of ongoing practices.

Such an appearance may be sudden, like the shock of realizing that a step is missing in a stair, or it may unfold gradually, like the realization that the sun went down and there is not enough light to read anymore. It is not as if the stair would vanish from the experience of someone who realizes that a step is missing, or the sun cease to exist for someone who reads into the dusk. For both, the absent arises as such in a continuous flow of events that is intimately and corporeally intertwined with expectations about this embodied flow of events. To further illustrate this with the example of stairways: The stair is part of my movement. The movement could not unfold as it does without both the stair and my embodied intention of descending the stair. In fact these two are inseparable – they are part of one corporeal flow, or of one mingling of bodies, as Serres would put it. ²⁴ I only miss the step because in this situation the stair was a given to me as a complete stair, as such it was as much part of my projected movement as my feet, my legs, my whole body. ²⁵ I did not pay attention to the single steps, and the lack of a step was not obvious from my trajectory through this situation. Accordingly, the step established itself as absent in the course of the trajectory that carried me down the stair. The absence of the step arises from a historical background and in towards a future projection. It is part of a process, a flow that is always and necessarily both intentional and circumstantial.

The above examples are taken from a personal or ‘subjective’ context (i.e. a kind of context that is very commonly used in phenomenology), because one has privileged access to one’s own perspective and it seems sensible to affirm this origin by writing in the first person. Other accounts, however, also describe the evocation of absences and they do so in relation to very different settings – with a time scale that can extend into the geological, such as in the case explored by DeSilvey, where Britain’s changing coastline interacts with a socially, spatially, and materially constituted harbour settlement in ways that cause the site to slowly pass into oblivion. ²⁶ All of these absences, regardless of their scale, display themselves as being constituted in processes. They establish themselves in a sense of movements that have gained their field of action in past experiences but that encounter the current state of affairs, where spatial and perceptual expectations originating in the past overlay themselves with the current composition of the material field of experience. Again and necessarily, these expectations are also oriented – they move towards a direction, a projection into the future, ²⁷ to the gravity of the to-come. ²⁸

Before I differentiate between the absence of something like a step in a stairway on the one hand, and absences that go along with more emotional involvement on the other, like the absence of a deceased person, I need to direct the attention from the temporal and spatial to the ‘material’ level, to the fact that absences involve the body. In the phenomenology of the body, the body is understood not only as a physical or material entity, but rather as the living site where all perception, experience, (inter)action, cognition, etc., originates. Accordingly, the body is not just an object of study, it also is what performs the study. At the same time, it is both the instrument used to gain insight into the world and it is part of the same world. In practice, it cannot be separated from or taken out of the world, not even for an instant. In theory, in analysis, it is often forgotten that every cognition is necessarily and continuously embedded in the world – through the material body. This characteristic can also be expressed terminologically. The word ‘body’ has two translations in German: one is Körper, which usually refers to the physical body, the object of medical study, etc.; the other is Leib, which in phenomenology refers to the peculiar nature of the body: it is the origin of all perception, of all experience and thus of the world towards which the body is oriented. The use of the English adjective ‘corporal’ instead of ‘bodily’ refers to this quality of the Leib, which is also referred to in the use of nouns such as ‘corporality’, ‘corporeity’ or ‘corporeality’, instead of mere ‘physicality’. This link between body, senses and world is made even more pervasive in Merleau-Ponty’s later work, where he presents the world and the body as being part of one flesh. ²⁹ Flesh (or chair in French) is the term that Merleau-Ponty uses. Following Martin, the shared quality of body and world can also be evoked with another entity, one that fits the subject of the article better: fog. ³⁰ The following vignette illustrates the mingling of perception, body and materiality in which absences come into being.

Fog engulfs the beach on a German North-Sea island, muffling the noise of the breaking waves. Mist blurs the boundary between earth and sky, both of which coalesce into each other in the close distance. The landscape quickly fades away as the eye roams further. Everything becomes hidden in a light, blue-grey haze. The beach is still there, as are the waves – but the sea in front and the dunes behind are absent from view. They do not cease to exist. But they can no longer be seen, they have moved into absence. The lifeguard shown in the photograph (Figure 1) looks out onto the sea; he uses a horn to maintain his connection with those around him, to maintain the presence of those who might fade away. When someone swims out too far, vanishing into the fog, he sounds his horn through the fog to call the swimmer back. Absence comes to life here: the swimmer does not cease to exist for the lifeguard, he becomes absent instead. He still exists for the lifeguard, although in a different way. He is more than a memory, a mirage or a ghost. His life might be in danger and his absence might prompt the lifeguard to cease being an observer. The lifeguard might have to dive into the waves, to attempt to retrieve the swimmer before he drowns in the waves of the North Sea, becoming absent for good.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Fog.

While I was doing field research about the everyday experience of climate change in coastal communities, I experienced this situation – which allows me to provide a more detailed account of the experiential qualities of this process. I was swimming in a zone where the waves were fine but the lifeguard almost lost in the fog. There were not a lot of people in the water and the lifeguard obviously noted me as being absent at a certain point. I was also markedly aware that I was becoming absent. Both of us were aware of our relation as a special one, marked by a potential absence, established through shifting densities of fog and a changing distance that grew or shrank with every wave through which I passed or that I tried to ride. I for my part managed my presence and absence – trying to never vanish for too long, to ensure the lifeguard of my ability to quickly reappear and never slip away completely, waving to him after one occasion where I might have been gone too long, too far. It was through that fog, arising from the water in which I swam and permeating the air that we breathed, that we were present to each other in a very peculiar way – even when we lost sight of each other. Both the lifeguard and I were confronted with each other’s absence as soon as it established itself. We stayed connected, we shared the same fog, the fog that Serres contrasts with darkness in that the fog creeps into the skin, weaving veils into our experience while darkness only pertains to optics – it does not touch. ³¹ In Merleau-Ponty’s terminology we were both in the ‘chiasma’, ³² we shared the same flesh, even if we might not be visible to each other.

As this vignette shows, absences involve the body, they are no abstract entities, no mere figments of imagination. They come into being in a mingling, in a flow of practices, where something that is distant is experienced locally. In a way, such involvement is with the world at large, as it is invoked in Ingold’s ‘weather-world’ ³³ and in concepts like atmosphere ³⁴ or envelopment. ³⁵ Experience extends beyond the threshold of a body that is merely delimited by its size, a body that is nothing more than a container. The corporeality of the senses extends the body into the world, while the materiality of the world inhabits the body too. This relation of co-presence, however, is not just a neutral mixture. The corporeality evoked by Merleau-Ponty’s use of the term flesh also includes tension and strain, a potential for pain and ruptures. In the following and final section, I want to highlight this quality to argue against an understanding that posits phenomenology as either being concerned with the harmony of body and world, as in Wylie’s or Harrison’s critiques of phenomenology in human geography, ³⁶ or as being concerned with pure form, logic and reason as in Derrida’s critique of Husserl. I want to show that when one is open to the actual, corporal experience of absence, it becomes evident that a phenomenology of absence shares Derrida’s, Wylie’s and Harrison’s interest in breaking points, in disquietude, in the instability of form and the evocative nature of traces. But more than that, a phenomenology of absence does not stop at the sign, the signified and the signifier, revolving around language and its deconstruction, around spectres and imaginations, again and again – it does something more than that, it delves into the flesh, it shows the hurt and the pain, the surprise, fear and wonder that enter the corporal field when absences are experienced.

Pain, fear and surprise: qualifying absence

Those who experience something that is absent are given no sensory input, encounter no resistance, find no contact with the absent entity. But that does not mean that they have no access to it. To be able to experience it as absent it needs to already be part of their corporality, of memorized bodily practices, of their habitus. Those who experience the absence themselves are the ones who provide its texture, its sensual quality. They have to raise it, make it live for themselves. It is this unique quality that makes the experience of absent entities so strong – and so fleeting. Something that is experienced as absent, like a deceased relative, can be extremely powerful because the person who experiences the absent entity must raise it herself, from her own corporeality. The absent entity becomes sensible through the emotions, ³⁷ longings and incorporated experiences of the person who experiences the absence. This experience can be heart rending or terrifying, rooted in the strongest emotions, or – if it is only loosely anchored in the corporeality of those who experience it – short lived and fleeting.

The strength of this anchorage in the corporal body – and thus also in the material world – affects how strong an absence can become. In the case described by Jones it is the abundance of connections with his homestead along with the nearly complete erasure of its core places that gives the absence of the farm where he grew up such an almost overwhelming power. ³⁸ Describing the texture of these places, the many different things that he did there, Jones gives ample evidence of how deeply he was embedded into the soil and the landscape of his childhood – a landscape that was not only contained in a view, but that permeated everything with its sounds and scents. This strong embeddedness alone, however, is not a sufficient condition for raising the experience of absence. While the connections are deeply anchored in his being they are also long past and could have been lost in the depths. But there are many strings that are pulling memories into awareness: collections of photographs, notes, and a host of other small or large items. The pull that extends from these things, these images of the past, becomes tangible, it presents itself as a very corporal experience. The indexicality of photographs, the way their trace-like character can serve as a point of entry into the ‘having-been-there’, becomes apparent. But Owain tell us that there is even more at work, repeatedly evoking the absence of his homestead. He encounters the bridges that lead to his former home, sometimes seen from afar, sometimes seen through the window of a car, sometimes while passing through their posts, posts that carry the weight of the bridge and the car and the passengers. ³⁹ The bridges present the connection. The location still exists, it could be reached – but it is beyond the bridge and all different by now.

This is the crucial quality of the experience of absence: it rests on more or less deeply ingrained sensual and emotional connections or attachments. The stronger the connections, the deeper their mark, the stronger is the experience of absence. Thus, the absence of a loved one is experienced in a very different manner than the absence of a wallet or the missing step in a staircase. The loved one has been invested with many strong emotions. Even if one has possibly only had a very short time to actually interact with a loved (or even hated) person, much shorter than the length of a whole childhood, one can attach so much emotion – a flush, a racing heart, the smell of the person’s skin, even a host of anticipated future sensations – to this missing person, that the experience of his or her absence takes grip of the whole body, the corporal self. Encounters with similar people or things or places could be occasions for strengthening these emotional bonds, even though the actual entity is not present. The absence of the father one has only met once can become stronger every time one watches someone else interact with their father. ⁴⁰ An absence that is caused by the loss of the absent person or place probably marks the more powerful end of the continuum of different qualities of absence. The absence of a wallet that one wants to take out of a pocket will not go as deep, but it could still lead to a shock – the fear of losing access to all the possibilities that are enclosed in the wallet, to the money and the things it could have bought, the memories, the personal information contained in the wallet. Here again it is not just the absence of the physical entity itself that is relevant, but the attachments that belong to it. The missing step in the stairway, located on the other end of a continuum, can lead to physical injury and to a sudden disorientation, but usually it will not disrupt emotional attachments – the experience of this kind of absence does not tap into longer lasting, more deeply embedded involvements with the world. It constitutes itself in such a short interval, connected to very little else than a brief, projected movement, so that it can fade nearly as quickly as it arose. But even such minor absences point to the potential instability of everyday routines and corporal expectations – probably one of the reasons why the brutal school-time joke of pulling someone’s chair away before he or she tries to sit down is almost archetypal.

Now that I have delineated the range covered by different qualities of absence, I want to re-enter the recent debate in human geography around absence as a counter to phenomenology. I will focus on Wylie’s argument, because it is explicitly criticizing phenomenology for not being able to capture ‘the element of difference, distance’. ⁴¹ He discusses the absences that are raised by benches that carry memorial plaques. The connection of Wylie to the memorial benches above Mullion Cove, a place at the coast of South-West England, is not very deep. As such, it allows him to ponder their placement, their character as sites for seeing and thus the access to landscape that they provide, just as well as their connection to love and memory in general.

These benches are about landscape almost per se, because even just coming across them involves being enrolled into a quite particular way of seeing – the visual contemplation of an externalised scene . . . Just as they are about landscape, the benches at Mullion Cove are about absence and love – and in this sense more widely about memory. They are visible makers or material manifestations of memory and love – very often they are put there precisely in loving memory. ⁴²

One could probably argue that for Wylie the benches are about landscape per se because ‘landscape’ is something that he and many other geographers are concerned with. We inspect landscapes, we read about different concepts of landscape, we describe landscapes as landscapes, we argue about the role of the visual, ⁴³ about the practices that are part of landscapes, ⁴⁴ about questions of power, ⁴⁵ and many other facets that are relevant to the lives of (human) geographers. Our attachments and performances are very different when compared to the attachments of someone who still feels the love and the loss of one of the persons whose absence is raised here. The entities that are raised at these memorial benches are manifold and very different. They are carried to this place by those who visit it, in their flesh, their senses and emotions, their embodied past. But they can only arise as absent when a connection is brought forth, either through an encounter with a trace or by entering a certain posture, a certain mood that gives space and time to that which is absent. The absence of an entity needs to establish itself – which, again, is easier if many connections are maintained to that entity than if the entity is distanced and only attached to the experience by thin strands of past experiences.

However, when one engages with the intensity of absence another quality of absence emerges for this place: at first sight it presents itself as the absence of a thing or person – as if one would see a picture of it or her or him. But if the experience of absence is strong then it brings forth a host of practices – of utterances, gestures, and engagements with something or somebody. It is these corporeal engagements that bring the traces of the missing other in one’s own body into play. The corporal body cannot attach the absent entity to a present entity because this entity is not currently there, any such attempts extend into emptiness. Reaching out to the person who sat at Mullion Cove together with me – and not being able to touch her; I try to see with her eyes, as Wylie so beautifully recognizes – and fail, because they are my eyes. I am walking the path alone instead of following the tread of her feet. These are the moments during which absences mark their weight in the corporality of those who experience the absence. Again, these moments are not instances without duration, no sudden ruptures in the fabric of a communitarian being. They do not point to a realm of signs or spectres, a realm beyond all materiality. These moments build up, they maintain their presence for a while, they finally fade away, even if one tries to hold fast to them as much as one can. They fade because everything always moves on, devastatingly so. The world changes and someone dies. One wants to hold on to the person, to the richness of the life that has passed away, but the distance becomes ever larger. The pain can be stronger with growing distance or it may subside, but eventually it will also fade away – in a loud clash or slowly, silently. As DeSilvey’s work makes clear, the encounter with such processes, with slow decay, is difficult to manage both physically and conceptually. ⁴⁶

In the recent spell of publications about absence that build on the deconstructionist critique that has been discussed earlier in the article, absence is often presented as something opposed to presence – shattering it or the presentist or vitalist accounts to which it is connected. As Harrison writes about Ingold’s Perception of the Environment ⁴⁷ in his discerning exposition of the much neglected role of sleep, dreaming and passivity:

There is no exit and no outside to the rhythmic flows and immanent forces which compose Ingold's landscape and, as such, there can be no taking leave, no comings or goings, worthy of the name . . . Under the anonymous vigilance of Ingold's lens, things flow into each other without bleeding; there is exchange and transformation without expenditure or loss. ⁴⁸

I also argue that ‘there is no exit and no outside to the rhythmic flows’ – but, as I have tried to show, this is precisely why absences are such powerful experiences. They draw their strength from the depth of their embeddedness into the corporeality of those who experience them. Thus, I would state that the opposite of what Harrison claims later in the quote is what happens: that – according to the phenomenological account that I have developed in this article – things do not ‘flow into each other without bleeding’. To the contrary, the deeper the connection the deeper the wound that is cut when the absence arises, and the more intense the bleeding that is suffered while the experience of absence lasts, is maintained or maintains itself. The stress that I place on ‘the central role of bodily presence’ ⁴⁹ does not serve to establish a ‘claim to presence or communion’ ⁵⁰ in the sense of an undisturbed congregation or ‘of harmony as both the proper and best form of the relation between beings’. ⁵¹ Bodily presence is of such importance because it offers the ground in which the so-called striated space of Deleuze and Guattari leaves its marks. ⁵² The corporal body is the site of suffering. It can bleed and be wounded – because it is part of the world. It will harm itself because, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, it is oriented towards the world. A person can experience absence and loss as such because that which is missing has torn not merely into the physical body but into the whole corporeality of the affected person. What is missing is gone. My affectionate movement tries to stroke gently but finds no resistance – my loving movement is not reciprocated, it falls away from me, every time, without being returned.

This experiential aspect of absence can also be taken in accordance with Lévinas’ take on the other. In his account of the trace, as that in which the face of the other can appear, he insists that the face of the other is not ‘beyond’ the trace. It is of course also not just ‘in’ the trace. The face of the other is raised precisely in the failure to capture the other either in a realm beyond the present or in the present, in the irrectitude of a relation posited as the one between signified and signifier. ⁵³ This failure is similar to the failure experienced by those who experience an absence and who suffer from it. ⁵⁴ The absent being is evoked, it is in those who experience it, but they cannot feel its resistance, they fail when they try to hold it – but they feel it nonetheless. As Lévinas writes: ‘The signification of the trace put us in a “lateral” relation, inconvertible to rectitude (which is inconceivable in the order of unveiling and being) and responding to an irreversible past’. ⁵⁵ When the absence of someone or something becomes present, we feel it in our corporality, but we fail to grasp it.

To wrap up the argument about absence being a counter to phenomenology, as being the other that goes beyond practice and the body: taking a phenomenological approach does not equal seeing the relation between body and world as a happy, not even a painless communion. To the contrary, an in-depth study of the actual experience of absence shows that the world and the body permeate each other, leave marks and traces in each other, respond to each other. This mingling of body and world is not a relation of identity, a relation without disruptions, pain and loss. The point I am making here is similar to Rose’s argument that a summons extends from absences. But these summons are not just immaterial, they are more than dreams, ⁵⁶ they lower themselves into the corporal body and pull – sometimes with devastating force, which is why I think Rose’s metaphor of absence’s gravity works so well. But still, between the backs of Rose and Wylie there lies Derrida, guiding the watchful eyes of both towards symbols, meaning, language, dreams. Here, instead, the goal is not to look at absence. The goal is similar to Serres’ quest for recapturing, as he puts it, the tender hardness of the world to escape the thundering softness of language, ⁵⁷ to first suffer the pull, the dread and the surprise and then work the argument from that corporal experience.

The difference of perspective between a deconstructionist understanding of absence and a phenomenological account of its power can be further illustrated by a close inspection of Derrida’s last major work, a book on Nancy and the sense of touch. In this book, Derrida finally tries to come to terms with the bodily, with touch and the corporal. After many years of taking apart Husserl’s phenomenology and deconstructing the transcendentalist logic of Husserl, of discussing the nature of the sign and the trace, Derrida takes on Nancy and Merleau-Ponty. But what does he do? He still confines himself to dissecting and reassembling their texts. The following quote is a quote of Nancy given in Derrida’s text. While he quotes Nancy, Derrida cannot resist the temptation of injecting his own view into Nancy’s image. He cannot accept the premise that thinking is different from weighing. This is the quote from Nancy’s ‘The gravity of thought’ ⁵⁸ (with Derrida’s injections in curly brackets):

Let us confess, instead, what everyone knows full well: thinking can never grasp weighing; it can offer a measure for it {doesn’t it then ‘grasp’ and touch it, test it? How is one to measure a weighing otherwise than by weighing, feeling the weight, thus by letting weigh? And what difference is there between weighing and thinking once thought is not limited to subjective representation (Hegelian argument)?-J. D.}, but it cannot itself weigh up {soupeser} the weight. Nor can weighing touch thinking; it may indicate a few ounces of muscles and neuron, but it cannot register the infinite leap of which they would supposedly be the place, support, or inscription. ⁵⁹

Here, Derrida clearly displays his unwillingness to go with Nancy’s proposition. He takes up the word ‘measure’ as implying a grasp and therefore also a touch, and thus proceeds to say that measuring is essentially the same as the experience of weighing that Nancy is concerned with – instead of accepting Nancy’s point that weighing is an experience of its own, with distinctive qualities not shared by thinking. Following this quotation, Derrida then goes on and says that he would like ‘to find the law of the relation between the semantics of Denken-Danken-Gedächtnis (thinking-thanking-remembering, and so on) and that of penser-peser-repenser, and so forth’. That is, he still wants to remain in the realm of semantics. He does not want to enter the realm of the senses. He does not write a book about touch, but a book about a book about touch. In this world, there is no escape from semantics. Everything always revolves around the sign and signification. ⁶⁰ Absence, when understood in this framework, will have difficulties in meeting with the realm that is of concern here in this article. A realm that is not beyond text, because beyond text would be the even more ethereal realm of ideas. Rather, my concern with absence is located in the realm on the hither side of text: the senses, the corporeal, pain, fear and surprise – regardless of whether they are mundane or extraordinary.