Absence Presence

Winner of the 2012 National Translation Award “What Sinan [Antoon] has done with In the Presence of Absence is a kind of miraculous work of dedication and love. Reading this volume is sheer enjoyment and sublimity.” —Saadi Yousef “There are two maps of Palestine that politicians will never manage to forfeit: the one kept in the memories of Palestinian refugees, and that which is drawn by Darwish’s poetry.” —Anton Shammas One of the most transcendent poets of his generation, Darwish composed this remarkable elegy at the apex of his creativity, but with the full knowledge that his death was imminent. Thinking it might be his final work, he summoned all his poetic genius to create a luminous work that defies categorization. In stunning language, Darwish’s self-elegy inhabits a rare space where opposites bleed and blend into each other. Prose and poetry, life and death, home and exile are all sung by the poet and his other. On the threshold of im/mortality, the poet looks back at his own existence, intertwined with that of his people. Through these lyrical meditations on love, longing, Palestine, history, friendship, family, and the ongoing conversation between life and death, the poet bids himself and his readers a poignant farewell.

“Presence and Absence is a book of importance for all who are actively engaged in the philosophical enterprise, whatever their differing persuasions. It shows philosophy to be flourishing in the midst of its own self-proclaimed signs of morbidity.” – The Review of Metaphysics “A splendid, provocative and profound work, this book explores the manifold ways in which the contrast of presence and absence operate to establish the possibility of human discourse and truthfulness...belongs in every philosophy collection.” – Choice “Quite simply a superb book, which deserves more than one careful reading. A fresh, unified treatment of a grand philosophical theme, the theme of the connections between thought, truth, and being.” – Man and World “A thoughtful book about thoughtfulness and truthfulness and their ontological conditions. Simply put, this is a book that will reward its careful reader a hundredfold, for Sokolowski is a speaker who says things in ways that are provocative, exciting, and invariably insightful.” – Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology “Has few peers in phenomenological literature.” – International Philosophical Quarterly “[Sokolowski is] an original thinker of the first rank, who has significantly furthered the path of phenomenological philosophy. As well as being an exciting synthesis, a thinking of the previously unthought in predecessors, and a ground-breaking movement, this work is written with a sensitivity to language and its graceful use that one would hope for from one exploring its richness and power.” – Human Studies

This book takes Roland Barthes’s famous proclamation of ‘The Death of the Author’ as a starting point to investigate concepts of authorial presence and absence on various levels of text and performance. By offering a new understanding of ‘the author’ as neither a source of unquestioned authority nor an obsolete construct, but rather as a performative figure, the book illuminates wide-ranging aesthetic and political aspects of ‘authorial death’ by asking: how is the author constructed through cultural and political imaginaries and erasures, intertextual and intertheatrical references, re-performances and self-referentiality? And what are the politics and ethics of these constructions?

Biblical Foundations Book Awards Runner Up and Finalist In the biblical canon, two books lack any explicit reference to the name of God: Song of Songs and Esther. God's peculiar absence in these texts is unsettling, both for theological discourse and for believers considering implications for their own lived experience. Chloe T. Sun takes on the challenges of God's absence by exploring the often overlooked theological connections between these two Old Testament books. In Conspicuous in His Absence, Sun examines and reflects on the Song of Songs and Esther using theological interpretation. She addresses three main questions: What is the nature of God as revealed in texts that don't use his name? How do we think of God when he is perceived to be absent? What should we do when God is silent or hidden? The experience of God's absence or silence is an important part of the human condition. By exploring the distinct themes and perspectives of Song of Songs and Esther, as well as how they've been received in Jewish and Christian history, Sun demonstrates how both books serve as counter texts to the depiction of God and his work in the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures. Thus both contribute to a fuller picture of who God is and what it means to know him.

The Absence of God's Presence will create the presence of someone or something else in your life. The content of this book reveals God's Presence, who you are, what power you have, how to activate your faith and help you understand the power within versus the power without. This workbook will refuel your faith life and fill up your emptiness, as it will also challenge you to recognize what life you were made to live. After reading this book, you will change for the better; just like it happened for Peter after Jesus called him to become a fisher of man. This is the book you have been waiting for that you didn't know existed. It carries keys that will unlock doors before you and bring newness of life to you, as you follow its instructions.

This research project investigates the concepts of absence across the disciplines of theatre, visual art, and performance. Absence in the centre of an ideology frees the reader from the dominant meaning. The book encourages active engagement with theatre theory and performances. Reconsideration of theories and experiences changes the way we engage with performances, as well as social relations and traditions outside of theatre. Sylwia Dobkowska examines and theorises absence and presence through theatre, performance, and visual arts practices. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre, visual art, and philosophy.

Although post-structuralism has 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 or disciplines. The book conceptualizes '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 20th-century theory, literature, film, and the arts. Phantasmatic and outrageous, such figures play with creative strategies of de-materialization, 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 is in need of more subtle and flexible epistemological frameworks. The author proposes to think it not only as a counter-concept for presence, but also - perhaps more productively - as infinite spacing, deferral, fragmentation, and displacement.

In studying material culture, anthropologists and archaeologists use meaningful physical objects from a culture to help understand the less tangible aspects of that culture, such as societal structure, rituals, and values. What happens when these objects are destroyed, by war, natural disaster, or other historical events? Through detailed explanations of eleven international case studies, the contributions reveal that the absence of objects can be just as telling as their presence, while the objects created to memorialize a loss also have important cultural implications. Covering everything from organ donation, to funerary rituals, to prisoners of war, The Archaeology of Absence is written at an important intersection of archaeological and anthropological study. Divided into three sections, this volume uses the "presence" of absence to compare cultural perceptions of: material qualities and created memory, the mind/body connection, temporality, and death. This rich text provides a strong theoretical framework for anthropologists and archaeologists studying material culture.