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      Social nothingness: A phenomenological investigation

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      European Journal of Social Theory
      SAGE Publications

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          Abstract

          This article identifies and explores the realm of ‘social nothingness’: objects, people, events and places that do not empirically exist, yet are experienced as subjectively meaningful. Taking a phenomenological approach, I investigate how people perceive, imagine and reflect upon the meanings of unlived experience: whatever is significantly not present, never appeared or cannot happen to them. These ‘negative symbolic social objects’ include no-things, no-bodies, non-events and no-where places: for example, rejected roles, unpursued careers or absent people. Reversing some key concepts from phenomenology, I examine the process of ‘negative noesis’ (subject-object relations) in three aspects. ‘Negative intentionality’ describes people’s motivational stance towards absent things, such as feelings of missing, wishing, haunting, avoidance or surrender. ‘Negative embodiment’ is the corporeal grounding of negational acts, through experiences of impairment, incapacity, severance, disturbance and decline. ‘Negative temporality’ describes the recognition of past or future impossible selves and their place within biographical identity stories.

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                European Journal of Social Theory
                European Journal of Social Theory
                SAGE Publications
                1368-4310
                1461-7137
                May 2022
                September 24 2020
                May 2022
                : 25
                : 2
                : 197-216
                Affiliations
                [1 ]University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
                Article
                10.1177/1368431020958899
                1173bcfe-f10b-43d9-8933-8baf3aee8c7f
                © 2022

                https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

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