Abstracts

Grief, Narrative, and the Space of Imagination: The Case of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Ghosteen

Jussi Saarinen (University of Jyväskylä)

When a loved one dies, the bereaved person must balance between the loss of a prior life structure and the need to establish a new structure that integrates the absence of the other (Ratcliffe, 2023). Some authors have argued that this restructuration takes place in a space of imaginative play, where the bereaved individual can explore and negotiate alternative ways of making sense of their disrupted experience (Lear, 2022; Higgins, 2024). Recent research on grief has also debated whether and how such meaning-making pursuits entail narration and narrative forms of scaffolding (Goldie, 2012; Ratcliffe & Byrne, 2022; Fabry, 2023). In this presentation, I will discuss the relations between grief, imagination, and narrative in light of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Ghosteen (2019), an album which was created in the aftermath of Cave’s teenage son’s accidental death in 2015. Cave says that Ghosteen tells a “story of loss and longing”, even while its “narratives have been pushed through the meat grinder” to reflect the fact that, in the midst of his grief, “a neat narrative didn’t make sense anymore” (Cave & O’Hagan, 2022). Based on Cave’s account of Ghosteen, I seek to shed more light on (a) the role of imaginative play in making one’s experience of grieving more organized and intelligible, (b) the kinds of contributions narrative can make to this meaning-making process, and (c) the extent to which grief lends itself to narration in the first place.

Grief without Shared Lives or Meaningful Futures: The Challenges of Distant and Negative Relationships 

Becky Millar (Cardiff University)

Although grief is widely recognised to be heterogeneous, much of the literature within the philosophy of grief focuses on the archetypal case of grieving a much-loved person with whom a life was closely shared. Plausible accounts of such grief have been given that emphasise disrupted habitual patterns, lost futural possibilities, and the ways the grieving process is scaffolded through shared narrative practices. While these accounts seem apt as characterisations of many cases of grief, they seem surprisingly inapt for others—namely those involving the death of someone with whom a more distant, conflicted, or abusive relationship was shared.

Such relationships may have involved neither shared habitual patterns nor a sense of meaningful futural possibilities, and the grief experienced may lack social recognition and adequate sociocultural scaffolding. These types of grief are likely to resist narratability, particularly as it may be difficult to articulate exactly what has been lost. This talk will argue that distant and conflicted relationships pose significant challenges for extant philosophical accounts of grief, and will discuss what this tells us about grief’s intentionality and phenomenology, particularly when there is no clear pathway towards meaning making. The talk will also point towards ways that a deceased person may have an enduring impact on one’s identity, even when they played a minimal or negative role in one's day-to-day life. 

Games as Existential Imaginative Practices

Marilyn Stendera (University of Wollongong)

Drawing on recent work in ‘existential ludology’, which applies concepts from existentialist and phenomenological frameworks to the analysis of (video) games, this paper will position games as existential imaginative practices. These practices bring together a range of existentially significant meaning-making activities in ways that allow multiple interlocutors – players, designers, spectators, the game itself – to engage in collaborative imagining. Focusing on those aspects of games that exceed linguistic narratability, I want to explore not only how we make meaning in and through games, but also how games illuminate and dramatize the process of existential meaning-making as such, enabling them to shed light on the deep structures of our Being-in-the-world and Being-with. One particularly interesting and generally understudied example of this is, I will suggest, the way in which games utilise, reveal, amplify, transform, and enact the dynamics of existential temporality. Games radicalise and render visible the structures of lived time – including those shaping how we make and navigate time in dialogue, and how different contexts can open up or foreclose possibilities for doing so.

The Role of Narrative in Human Flourishing

Richard Menary (Macquarie University)

TBA.

Creative-Imaginative Practices of Resistance: The Case of Counter Self-Narration 

Regina Fabry (Macquarie University)

Self-narration is an important imaginative practice of meaning-making. By offering opportunities for giving imaginative form to past and anticipated future experiences, self-narration can be conducive to a sense of autonomy, an important condition for well-being. However, self-narration is constrained by master plots and other socio-cultural, ideologically shaped conditions of meaning-meaning. Master plots can be understood as structural, patterned arrangements that perpetuate and reinforce various norms, stereotypes, and practices that contribute to (often intersecting) forms of structural oppression. By doing so, they harm the meaning-making practices of self-narrators who are already targets of structural oppression due to their socio-cultural identities. However, members of structurally oppressed groups can resist the harmful wrongs of master plots by developing imaginative counter self-narratives. In this talk, I will explore the opportunities – and the challenges – that come with the development of counter self-narratives. Furthermore, I will discuss to what extent the crafting and curation of counter self-narratives can be understood as an imaginative exercise, affirmation, and re-gaining of a robust sense of autonomy through an active resistance to structurally oppressive forms of meaning-making.

How To Make Gravy: Making Sense of Blended-Family Bereavement 

Louise Richardson-Self (University of Tasmania)

Bereavement is part of the human condition, and so it is unsurprising to find an array of generic social scripts which operate to scaffold interactions with the bereaved. They are generic in that we will all lose parents and friends, and many of us will lose siblings, partners, or children. Each script supposes a gravity of loss that in turn translates to a ‘space’ for grieving and delimits requirements in caring for the bereaved. But human relationships are complex and exceed these generic formulations. There are more ways to ‘relate’ to others outside a bionormative schema, yet we lack widely disseminated and embedded social scripts to recognise the impact of these poorly recognised losses. In this paper, I analyse my own bereavement journey since the sudden death of my ex-step-father in 2013. I explore the impact and implications of grieving without a social script to guide me (and those around me), the meaning-making journey I have embarked upon to process this loss, and the central place that ‘recognition’ has occupied therein. In addition to demonstrating a need for more nuanced social scripts to deal with varied forms of bereavement, I critique the ongoing social centring of bio- and cis-hetero-normative familial relationships in life which is a precursor to misjudging the depth of blended-family (and chosen-family) loss.

Autistic Lived Time and the Question of Self-Narration 

Emily Hughes (Macquarie University)

Research suggests that autism involves significant disruptions to lived time. In particular, these disturbances are thought to be characterised by temporal desynchronization between oneself and the world; uncertainty in relation to the unpredictability of world events; and chrononormativity and the social demands of normative temporal expectations. In this paper, I consider the arguments that these autistic temporalities render autistic subjectivity unnarratable. Whilst conceding that divergent temporalities can involve significant distress and disorientation, I nevertheless suggest that the immanent present of autistic lived time can open up divergent possibilities for imaginative practice, which can both challenge and expand standard conceptions of the self and its narration.