ABSTRACT

Malaise – e.g. melancholy, ennui or boredom – compels subjects to deal with profound existential crises concerning the meaning of life. Discussions of malaise, however, tend to focus on points of departure that fragment its myriad forms. This is often done by downplaying points of overlap that are not given their proper due, and this means that it is difficult to appreciate the ways that malaise constitutes being. Attempting to address this issue, this article focusses specifically on acedia, ennui and boredom and claims that malaise gives rise to ‘nothingness’ in subjects. In other words, malaise constitutes the being of subjects as nothingness. The article theorizes nothingness as a simultaneity of nothing and something. Nothingness is not nothing in the sense of a tangible absence of something but a feeling of emptiness or void that is not fully explicable. This means that nothingness also captures a missing ‘thing’, itself something, though again not tangible and also not fully amenable to explication. The article concludes by locating the importance of nothingness to being, one constituted by indeterminacy.

摘要

疾病-例如忧郁，精神疲倦或无聊-迫使受试者应对与生命意义有关的深刻的生存危机。然而，不适的讨论往往集中在分散其无数形式的出发点。这通常是通过轻描淡写没有适当应得的重叠点来完成的，这意味着很难理解不适的构成方式。为了解决这个问题，本文专门针对acedia，ennui和无聊，并声称身体不适会导致受试者“虚无”。换句话说，不适感构成虚无的主体存在。本文将虚无理论化为虚无和事物的同时存在。在某种物质的有形缺乏的意义上，没有什么不是虚无，而是一种无法完全解释的空虚或虚无的感觉。这意味着虚无也捕获了缺失的“事物”，它本身就是某种事物，尽管这又不是有形的，也不是完全可以解释的。本文最后通过定位虚无对存在的重要性进行了总结，虚无由不确定性构成。