Introduction

In 2012, the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto held its twenty-third annual international conference on the expansive theme of absence in all its forms, and particularly in relation to the (an)aesthetic. The following articles in this special issue, initially presented in the context of the “(An)aesthetic of Absence/Une esthétique de l’absence” conference, here engage with and flesh out this theme in diverse and yet complementary ways: acknowledging the representation, sensation, and function of absence, and the epistemological, ontological, and hauntological consequences of theorizing what is not, or no longer, there.

Inextricably tied to absence are notions of loss, lack, scarcity, ruins, and spectrality; however, this issue also addresses the positive and creative aspect of absence: as an addition, a space or an idea not hollowed out but imbued with signification, an absence that demands recognition. These articles investigate the function of absence as an aesthetic that stimulates sense and sentiment and also as an anaesthetic, which negates the former, which numbs and desensitizes. Such conditions evoke a sense of modern subjectivity, not to mention the role of the reader or spectator, often subdued by a fallacious presence or a “simulacrum of presence,” to invoke Derrida. How is absence felt? How does one perceive it or interact with it, both consciously and unconsciously? Why does one feel the need to constantly fill the void, to replace what is gone, to stuff – as a taxidermist – what no longer has substance? How is one “taken-away” by absence, or anaesthetized by it, and what are the sociopolitical, ecological, aesthetic, and philosophical ramifications of representing, understanding, and theorizing absence? The articles in this issue address these questions from distinct vantage points in the true spirit of comparative literature: from the visual arts and poetry to architecture, ecology, cultural studies, and history.

C’est ainsi que se regroupent des textes divers touchant à des visions età des conceptions protéiformes de l’absence: du manque à la perte et à l’ineffable, ou de la trace au spectre, en passant par une épistémologie jusqu’à une ontologie – pour ne pas dire hantologie – de l’absence dans tous ses états.

Clark Lunberry, in his artistic reflections, “Seeing in Plain Sight – Installations in Flight,” sets the tone for this issue by evoking the physical space in which the conference took place, and its multiple, even parallactic or stereoscopic vantages, thus inviting the reader to participate in the fleeting and often ambiguous nature of perception and aesthetic subjectivity. Lunberry suggests that awareness, perception, and the self are constantly shifting and re-negotiating vantage points: from Wittgenstein’s desired “viewpoint of eternity” to Proust’s “spiritual border” in which the aesthete’s awareness hovers between himself and the external object. Lunberry therefore suggests a liminal space that plays on the binary of presence and absence, a “proscenium” (or more specifically, the “veiled vacancy” in Robert Smithson’s art), a sublime, in the etymological sense of the word, in which the threshold of interiority and exteriority, of flight and sight merge and even collapse. Whether in the works of Proust, Smithson, Wittgenstein, or Lunberry himself, the ontological is further problematized by perception, one which creates a new space beyond presence and absence, in which the observer can be “in two places at once, but also, simultaneously, in neither at all dissolving in the divisions.”

The problematics of perception and absence continue from Lunberry’s multiple and especially aerial viewpoints to the “hoaxic” nature of cinematographic apparatuses to represent that which is not “there” in Judith Roof’s “The Actor Who Wasn’t There: Economies of Absence in Virtual Ecologies.” One such example includes the use of ocular parallax in 3Dor RealD animation, in which the brain is tricked into perceiving depth in lieu of a flat screen. Roof scrupulously analyzes the aural reception and visual perception of a spectacle of absence, in which trickery and misrecognition unite with lack – absence’s “conscious correlative” in the face of desire, in Lacan’s mirror stage – in a “fantasy of presence.” Roof’s meta-cinematic analyses demonstrate that cinema, through its tricks and lures, “is the illusion...