Chapter 17 - Absence, Metaphysically Speaking

Summary

This chapter revisits reception theory through an exploration of the metaphysics of presence and absence across time. Bringing together the ‘Letter to Horace’ of the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky and Horace’s own Epistles, it uses the theory of communication developed by John Durham Peters and the philosophy of the afterlife of Samuel Scheffler to elucidate the experience of, on the one hand, communicating with a past where one and so much of what makes one what one is was not present and, on the other, of projecting oneself into a future in which one will no longer exist so as to communicate with those who do not yet exist and whom one will never know. Recent metaphysical thinking has sought to make us sensitive to the existential incompleteness of people and things and the fragility of selves that are distributed across the multitude of ‘attachments’ which Bruno Latour suggests as one ‘mode of existence’ that makes us what we are. Latour suggests that we should not think of ourselves as simple, atomized, points of emission and reception for texts, and appeals to Étienne Souriau’s notion of instauration to suggest how our selves and what and whom we value are sustained.