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Paper short abstract

Composed as a series of dialectical images, this lyric essay writes alongside periods of fieldwork, amidst a life lived, that refuse to materialize as planned—failed research projects, moments of incapacity—in an effort to listen and respond to that which cannot, and thus must, be given voice.

Paper long abstract

Composed as a series of dialectical images, written in the form of a letter in reverse, this lyric essay writes alongside periods of fieldwork, amidst a life lived, that refuse to materialize as planned—failed research projects, moments of incapacity, death and illness. We ask: How might the (ethnographic) subject-object create the minimal distance from itself necessary to inhabit, rather than resolve, the fundamental contradictions constitutive of (knowledge) re-production? How might we listen and respond to that which cannot, and thus must, be given voice? A mantle-archive of four texts that argue for an actively passive mode of receptive response at the limit of argumentation—Davé’s Indifference, Pandolfo’s Knot of the Soul, Kohn’s How Forests Think, and Zupančič’s What is Sex?—produce and provide a moving ground for this work, from which it can lose and thus create itself—through which you lose yourself and create something in the body which is not fully there. A practice of “too close” reading of the texts of the mantle-archive works with and against the limits of both naive empiricism and reflexive critique that leaves itself unchanged, manifesting in a citational practice of “negative inclusion” that enacts and argues for an (anthropological) mode, more generally, oriented not toward the accumulation of knowledge but, rather, the constitutive gaps in knowing, from which being emerges. This essay, stated otherwise, is an effort at acknowledgment without resolution, through which something is resolved, as we share forth the general pain, learn to die better, pleasure and play amidst.