The Social Life of Nothing
eBook - ePub

The Social Life of Nothing

Silence, Invisibility and Emptiness in Tales of Lost Experience

  1. 208 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Social Life of Nothing

Silence, Invisibility and Emptiness in Tales of Lost Experience

About this book

Nothing really matters. All the things that we do not do, have or become in our lives can be important in shaping self-identity. From jobs turned down to great loves lost, secrets kept and truths untold, people missed and souls unborn, we understand ourselves through other, unlived lives that are imaginatively possible. This book explores the realm of negative social phenomena – no-things, no-bodies, non-events and no-where places – that lies behind the mirror of experience.

Taking a symbolic interactionist perspective, the author argues that these objects are socially produced, emerging from and negotiated through our relationships with others. Nothing is interactively accomplished in two ways, through social acts of commission and omission. Existentialism and phenomenology encourage us to understand more deeply the subjective experience of nothing; this can be pursued through conscious meaning-making and reflexive self-awareness.

The Social Life of Nothing is a thought-provoking book that will appeal to scholars across the social sciences, arts and humanities, but its message also resonates with the interested general reader.

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Yes, you can access The Social Life of Nothing by Susie Scott in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Psychology & Sociology. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2019
Print ISBN
9781138297975
eBook ISBN
9781351581509
Edition
1
Subtopic
Sociology

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Half Title
  3. Series Page
  4. Title Page
  5. Copyright Page
  6. Table of Contents
  7. Acknowledgements
  8. 1 Being through nothingness
  9. 2 Lost opportunities
  10. 3 Silence and quietness
  11. 4 Invisibility and absence
  12. 5 Holes, gaps and emptiness
  13. 6 Stillness, rest and inactivity
  14. Bibliography
  15. Index