Anyone who reads continental philosophy or the philosophical
essayists will soon be impressed by the almost obsessive mooning over the
concept of absence.
This has no parallel in Anglophone philosophy – absence is
at most treated as a simple description of a physical phenomenon. Jack doesn’t
show up for the exam – he is absent.
There is nothing here for the
analytics (or post-analytics) to get moony about.
Nevertheless, there is something strange about the absence
of absence in Anglophone philosophy. The unexamined master-trope of that
philosophy is substitution. Surely it if
were examined, understanding substitution should encourage us to look at absence
more closely.
Substitution implies that a place is preserved – in logical
or physical or social space – that is filled with one or another variable. In a
sense, the presence of the variable isn’t total, since it isn’t identical to
the place. One can find another variable to put in that place.
The latest metaphor in the analytic tradition to designate this
is “candidate”. A candidate – whether as an explanation or as a particular – is
always being considered as the solution to some problem. Whether it is
materialist accounts of cognitive states, theories of the reduction of the
biological to the physical, etc., etc., the papers I edit in philosophy are
built upon comparing one ‘candidate’ with another.
Although analytic philosophers go about closely peering at
language with the fervor of a myopic seamstress threading a needle, they are
curiously indifferent to their own use of language – so I have not read any
account of how suddenly the candidate metaphor appeared in all the right
journals. It is easy to see, though, that it is a metaphor that tells us
something about how absence is thought of here. The implication is that the
“place” where substitution takes or can take place is like an office. It is a
position created by a political system. The politics may only be bureaucratic –
it may be a position in a firm, in which the candidates compete against each
other without seeing each other, before a hiring person or board. Or it may be
a political system in which they compete against each other consciously, before
a voting constituency. The main thing is that the competition is about filling the position. The binary in
place is between the filled place and the empty place – or potentially empty
place. These are pre-eminently relative states – the dialectic between them is
deflected onto the system which determines them, and which has the power to
simply get rid of the place – or multiply it.
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