Figures of Radical Absence
Blanks and Voids in Theory, Literature, and the Arts
What can be discerned in invisible artworks, empty books, or blank screens? How do formal absences create meaning? This book presents an annotated inventory of textual, visual, and conceptual figures of absence across various media, revealing a creative tradition that embraces absence as a productive state of radical indeterminacy, complete with its own politics and poetics. While post-structuralism emphasized the significance of the offstage, lost, or silenced, the poetics and politics of absence have seldom been examined across disciplines. The concept of ‘radical absence’ is introduced to describe a tradition that resists ontology and representation, challenging the metaphysics of presence. Figures such as apophatic speech and empty signifiers illustrate how radical absence manifests in twentieth-century theory, literature, film, and the arts. These figures engage in creative strategies of dematerialization and irony, making absence more than a mere theme; it reflects the medium and the conditions of meaning-making. As an elusive subject, absence demands more nuanced epistemological frameworks. This work suggests we view it not just as a counter-concept to presence, but as infinite spacing, deferral, fragmentation, and displacement.
