Theorizing nothingness: malaise and the indeterminacies of being

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.