What Is the Measure of Nothingness? Infinity, Virtuality, Justice
<p>Nothingness. The void. An absence of matter. The blank page. Utter silence. No thing, no thought, no awareness. Complete ontological insensibility.</p> <p>Shall we utter some words about nothingness? What is there to say? How to begin? How can anything be said about nothing without violating its very nature, perhaps even its conditions of possibility? Isn’t any utterance about nothingness always already a performative breach of that which one means to address? Have we not already said too much simply in pronouncing its name?</p> <p>Perhaps we should let the emptiness speak for itself.</p> <p>At the very least, listening to nothing would seem to require exquisite attention to every subtle detail. Suppose we had a finely tuned, ultra-sensitive instrument that we could use to zoom in on and tune in to the nuances and subtleties of nothingness. But what would it mean to zoom in on nothingness, to look and listen with ever-increasing sensitivity and acuity, to move to finer and finer scales of detail of …? Alas, it is difficult to conceive how one would orient oneself regarding such a task. What defines scale in the void? What is the metric of emptiness? What is the measure of nothingness? How can we approach it?…</p>
Authors: Karen Barad
Series Editor: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Chus Martínez, Bettina Funcke
Editors: Katrin Sauerländer, Cordelia Marten
Copy Editor: Claire Barliant
Proofreader: Stefanie Drobnik, Sam Frank
Translators: Astrid Wege
Designer: Leftloft, Daniela Weirich
Part of: dOCUMENTA (13): 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts
ISBN: 9783775731287