Landscape, absence and the geographies of love

TLDR

Recent scholarship on landscape, embodiment, perception, and material culture emphasizes presence; this paper instead explores motifs of absence, distance, loss, and haunting. The paper develops an account of landscape as absence and non‑coincidence of self and world, combining experiential observations of memorial benches with conceptual arguments, and explores the geographies of love. The author outlines and explores Derrida’s critical reading of Merleau‑Ponty. The paper argues that geographies of love fracture phenomenological fusion of self and world, producing simultaneous opening‑onto and distancing‑from, and that this tension entangles landscape, absence, and love.

Abstract

Working out from an encounter with a series of memorial benches at Mullion Cove, Cornwall, this paper develops an account of landscape in terms of absence and the non‐coincidence of self and world. Arguing that recent work on the topics of landscape, embodiment, perception and material culture has tended to stress presence in various ways, I seek to explore instead here motifs of absence, distance, loss and haunting. The paper further attempts to combine descriptive and experiential accounts of the memorial benches and the views they open with conceptual arguments regarding the limits of certain phenomenological understandings of self and landscape. In particular, Derrida’s critical reading of Merleau‐Ponty is outlined and explored. The final substantive section of the paper then takes a further cue from the memorial benches to discuss what it terms the geographies of love. The argument here is that such geographies constitute a fracture forbidding any phenomenological fusion of self and world, entailing instead a simultaneous opening‐onto and distancing‐from . It is within the tension of this openness and distance, perhaps, that landscape, absence and love are entangled.