Unsettling relatonality: Attachment after the ‘relational turn’

Abstract

In this response, I place the concept of attachment in the context of debates about the ontological commitments and political-ethical value of relational thinking today. Reading the four commentaries in this forum as emerging from and enacting a fraying of the promise and hold of relational thinking, I explore how, together, they pose a series of questions to my account of attachments as trajectories that ‘bring closer’ a promissory ‘object’: how do some objects become promissory, what, if anything, is the outside of attachment, and what accompanies attachments? The terms through which the commentaries pose these questions and complement the concept of attachment – economies, desire, problem, detachment – revise and supplement my vocabulary and research agenda for a cultural geography of attachment. Simultaneously, they question and challenge relational thinking more broadly.