Theorizing nothingness: malaise and the indeterminacies of being

ABSTRACT

Malaise – e.g. melancholy, ennui or boredom – compels subjects to deal with profound existential crises concerning the meaning of life. Discussions of malaise, however, tend to focus on points of departure that fragment its myriad forms. This is often done by downplaying points of overlap that are not given their proper due, and this means that it is difficult to appreciate the ways that malaise constitutes being. Attempting to address this issue, this article focusses specifically on acedia, ennui and boredom and claims that malaise gives rise to ‘nothingness’ in subjects. In other words, malaise constitutes the being of subjects as nothingness. The article theorizes nothingness as a simultaneity of nothing and something. Nothingness is not nothing in the sense of a tangible absence of something but a feeling of emptiness or void that is not fully explicable. This means that nothingness also captures a missing ‘thing’, itself something, though again not tangible and also not fully amenable to explication. The article concludes by locating the importance of nothingness to being, one constituted by indeterminacy.

KEYWORDS:

• Nothingness
• being
• indeterminacy
• simultaneity
• boredom
• ennui
• acedia
• malaise

Acknowledgement

This article benefitted from the helpful feedback received from several anonymous reviewers. Many thanks as well to Professors Christian Borch and Mikkel Thorup for their very helpful guidance and direction during various stages of the review process. The usual disclaimers apply.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on the contributor

Prashan Ranasinghe is an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa. His first book, Helter-Shelter: Security, Legality and an Ethic of Care in an Emergency Shelter, was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2017. He is currently working on a broader project related to nothingness and being.

Notes

1 Other types of malaise, such as melancholy or depression, while important, are not considered because the grounding for this article comes from the sources noted above and they tend to focus largely upon acedia, ennui and boredom.

2 As evinced in the foregoing, even in Spacks’ analysis, the connection between boredom and acedia cannot be denied, despite her efforts to underline disconnections.

3 It would be remiss to speak of Christianity as though different factions and denominations (e.g. Catholicism, Protestanism or Methodism) do not exist and that these differences are not fundamental both in doctrine and practise. There are, nevertheless, a few strands that appear to unite these disparate positions, one being the relation between nothingness and salvation.

4 For example, Isaiah 38:17 in the Amplified Bible (AM) and the New American Standard Bible (NASB) use nothingness, while most common translations, such as the New Revised Version (NRV), do not. The same is the case in Isaiah 40:17 as found in the Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB). Similarly, the AM uses nothingness in Jeremiah 40:30, while the Weymouth New Testament (WNT) uses nothingness in 1 Corinthians 1:19 which quotes from Isaiah 29:14.

5 This form is also referred to as ‘simple’ (Svendsen 2017, 205), ‘superficial’ (Heidegger 1995/1929–1930) and, perhaps more famously, ‘vulgar’ (Kracauer 1995/1963, 331).

6 This form is also referred to as ‘real’ or ‘radical’ (Kracauer 1995/1963, 331–332) and, perhaps most famously, ‘profound’ (Heidegger 1995/1929–1930).

7 What follows departs from the form that has buttressed the article up to this point and, as such, tends to – as noted in the introduction – both contribute to and cement an intellectual inquiry that is eclectically grounded. There is precedence for this: as one example, the work of Goodstein (2005), which is heavily relied upon in the article, can be mentioned. The reason for drawing upon fieldwork here – which departs from the reading of textual material of literary analysis which formed the discussion up to this point – is specifically related to vividly homing-in on the way boredom and nothingness constitute the subjectivities of contemporary subjects as they grapple with the meaning of existence (such sources of data would not necessarily be available for the particular historical periods examined here). Thus, the extant fieldwork provides a rich source from which to work with and the article ‘reads’ the words and deeds of ‘Sergeant’ in his work environment in a similar fashion to the reading of textual material in order to illuminate the nothingness that emanates from boredom and the way it constitutes being.