Soapbox #6: On the Uses of Absence

Can we speak of a turn of absence? Across the contemporary academic conjuncture, whether in queer theory, trans studies, Black studies, Eastern European studies, or literary studies, enduring scholarly investments in re-presenting and re-presenting the absented body have become supplemented by an affirmative interest in staying with absence as such, allocating absence at the heart of myriad resistances against explotiation, approporiation, undoing, and normativity. As an object of study, a critical figure, and theoretical tool, absence is given a shape, meaning, form; it is put in writing, where it has a function, a flavour, and a politics. Absence, in other words, falls every time to be purely nothing. How, then, to hink the contraction and the provocation of a contemporary aesthetics of absence?