The vanishing forest that does not disappear: On finitude and worldings

Abstract

This commentary engages Özge Can Doğmuş's argument that disappearance should be understood as an effect of unequal exposure to finitude. Drawing on an ethnographic vignette from the Chaco forest, it argues that this formulation presupposes the stability of disappearance as an event, whereas political ontology requires treating the event itself as uncertain and relationally constituted. The article's tension between a Heideggerian grounding in finitude and a relational account of world reconfiguration is examined. The commentary proposes that disappearance is not a single event unevenly distributed but emerges differently across partially connected worlds, with implications for how care, justice, and philosophical analysis are conceived.

The South American Chaco forest is disappearing. Once part of a vast and biodiverse formation second only to the Amazon, it has, since the late 20th century, been steadily receding under the advance of the agricultural frontier. Soy cultivation, cattle ranching, and infrastructural expansion have destroyed the forest at an accelerating pace (see Vallejos et al., 2026). In response, a wide range of actors, from local communities to international organisations, have mobilised to halt or mitigate this process. Conservation initiatives, legal claims, and development programmes attempt, with limited success, to preserve what is framed as a vanishing ecosystem and its associated forms of life (Levers et al., 2024). Many of these efforts are driven by a strong affective investment. They express urgency, anxiety, and a commitment to care for a world perceived to be on the verge of disappearance.

Özge Can Doğmuş's article offers a forceful way of conceptualising such situations. The article proposes that events such as the vanishing of lakes should not be understood only as environmental degradation or governance failure, but as situations that reveal something more basic about existence. Dominant approaches, focused on management, infrastructural arrangements, and distribution, are said to treat disappearance (of lakes, species, ecosystems) as something to be explained and mitigated. What they leave unexamined, according to the article, is that such events expose the instability of the conditions that make a given form of life possible in the first place.

To make this point, the article draws on Heidegger. Disappearance is understood as an event that disrupts what normally appears stable and given, bringing into view that forms of life are contingent and can come to an end. This is what the paper calls finitude. It is not presented as a local feature of particular situations, but as a general ontological condition that becomes perceptible in moments of breakdown. On this basis, disappearance is not only the loss of water, livelihoods, or ecosystems. It is an event in which the limits of certain forms of life are made evident.

This claim is extended through the notion of a negative ontology of space. Absence, withdrawal, and loss are treated not as exceptional outcomes but as constitutive features of how space is inhabited. At the same time, the article insists that such processes are uneven. Drawing on political ontology, it argues that what counts as loss, evidence, and obligation varies across different ways of constituting reality. The disappearance of a lake does not have the same significance for all, nor does it affect all equally. This leads to a reformulation of matters of justice/injustice as the unequal distribution of exposure to finitude, and to a call for shifting from control to care, understood as attentiveness to fragile and threatened worlds.

The argument is compelling and I am sympathetic to its intent, yet it also contains an unresolved tension that I think is worth exploring, as it might be fruitful to complexify the programmatic horizon the author offers. I will tackle the tension by way of returning to the ‘threatened worlds’ of the Chaco. Consider the following observation an Indigenous Yshir friend made during a workshop, which, organised by a network of environmental and human rights NGOs, was trying to draft an action plan to counter the destruction of the forest. In response to a presentation showing that animals, plants, and other forest beings were disappearing fast, my friend said: ‘I don’t think they are disappearing, I think their bahluts (spirit owners) are making them come out as trucks, or phones, and those kinds of things’, and then, shaking his head, concluded, ‘the problem is we [Yshiro] rarely drive those trucks, and even if the younger people do, our elders do not know those phones’.

Placed alongside Özge's formulation, the vignette brings into view the root of the tension I want to explore. My friend's statement does not simply offer a different interpretation of the same event (i.e. disappearance of the forest). It calls into question whether ‘disappearance’ (and by extension finitude and the whole gamut of affects associated with it) is a universal category in the first place. What is loss and withdrawal within a given configuration of relations may be enabling transformation in another (the non-Yshiro that drive the trucks and the Yshiro youths that ‘know’ the phones) and profoundly disruptive transformation for others (Yshiro elders).

Centring the initial ontological uncertainty of ‘the event’ is the hallmark of political ontology. Hence the tension I began sketching above becomes especially visible at the point where Özge connects political ontology with Heidegger's existential analytic to conclude that disappearance ‘is an effect of unequal exposure to finitude’. If, for political ontology, ‘the event’ labelled disappearance is not given in advance but depends on how relations are configured, then explaining it as an effect of unequal exposure to finitude presupposes what is at stake. This tension has consequences.

In drawing more directly from Heidegger's analytic, the claim that disappearance is an effect of unequal exposure to finitude seems to imply one sequence of logical connections: finitude is the shared ontological condition, exposure names its uneven distribution, and disappearance is the outcome of that distribution. In that ordering, processes such as extraction, ecological destruction, and governance matter insofar as they operate as mechanisms that differentially distribute exposure. By contrast, when drawing more directly from political ontology, the article describes disappearance in a slightly different manner: as the reconfiguration of relations that sustain worlds, such that some forms of life become untenable while others persist or are displaced. That suggests a different sequence: reorganisation of relations produces asymmetries, and what Özge interprets as unequal exposure names how those asymmetries are actually inhabited.

The difference matters because it bears on how political ontology is mobilised. In work on ontological conflicts, the question is not only how a given event is experienced, but ‘what the event is’ within divergent configurations of existence. What is at stake in struggles around ‘vanishing’ forests, land, or lakes is not simply the uneven experience of loss, but the endurance, transformation, or displacement of heterogeneous worlds composed of different relations and obligations. From this perspective, disappearance cannot be fixed in advance as loss. It may also take the form of transformation, translation, or rearticulation, depending on how relations are organised.

Seen from this angle, my Yshir friend was not offering an alternative interpretation of the ‘disappearing forest’, but enacting a different event. His ‘event’ arises from a world (yrmo) in which nothing comes from nothing and nothing simply vanishes (Blaser, 2010). What exists does so through transformations. Beings that now appear as animals or plants are the outcome of prior configurations and may become something else (‘technological’ beings, perhaps) through ongoing processes of interaction and reorganisation. The suggestion that forest beings are ‘coming out’ as trucks or phones does not deny ongoing changes. It redefines them and foregrounds that what is at stake is not disappearance as angst-producing finitude, but a transformation of relations that makes certain forms of life less viable while enabling others. That difference is the place of critique.

This also reframes absence. In the article, absence is treated as constitutive and thereby always ‘present’. But it tends to be approached as withdrawal or loss, or as remnants that have a distinctively negative hue, for instance in the form of dust from exposed lakebeds, toxic residues, salinised soils, or other degraded conditions that register absence primarily through damage and hazard rather than through more open-ended or generative transformations. With regards to the first point, it is worth bringing in John Law's (2004) argument that absence is ‘positively’ (in the sense of productively) implicated in presence, for the latter is enacted through patterned absences (i.e. the excluded and/or Othered) which are necessary to stabilise what appears as given. With regards to the second point, it is worth considering that the ‘missing’ sea that once covered the Chaco is not simply gone but sedimented in the present, just as the forest that is said to be disappearing is being rearticulated within new assemblages. Absence, in this sense, is not only what remains (whether negative or positive for different beings) after disappearance but also part of ongoing and emerging relational configurations. In many Indigenous worlds, these kinds of present absences are called ‘ancestors’ (Krenak, 2019) and are respected and feared, for they are not always kind.

A similar point can be made about finitude. While the article treats finitude as a general condition disclosed through disappearance, this assumption is not necessarily shared across worlds. Work by Povinelli (2011, 2016) has shown how dominant understandings of life, endurance, and exhaustion, often marginalising other modes of existence, underpin ethical commitments, affects and governmental regimes. From this perspective, the presumption of finitude (or any other condition taken to be universal) needs to be understood as part of a specific way of organising and governing a particular mode of existence and its limits.

In summary, the tension being discussed makes it evident that the article moves between two argumentative logics without fully specifying their relation. In one, disappearance is understood through a shared condition distributed unevenly. In the other, it is understood through the reorganisation of relations that produce asymmetrical worlds. The Chaco vignette makes visible what is at stake in choosing between these orderings, or in attempting to hold them together without taking into account their divergent orientations.

This affects the ethical register. If disappearance is not a single event but an ‘event multiple’ (sensu Mol, 2002) that is differently enacted across worlds, then care cannot be directed towards a stable object of loss. The issue is not only how to care for what is vanishing, but how to act when what is at stake is not the same for all affected. In the Chaco, care for the forest may take the form of conservation, territorial defence, the maintenance of relations with known nonhumans, or the cultivation of new raltion with newly emergent ones, each grounded in different configurations of what matters. This suggests the need to move from care as a response to uneven exposure to finitude to carefulness as a mode of engagement attentive to the risks of acting across entangled yet diverging worlds.

Let me close with the article's claim that philosophy is necessary for geographers to fully grasp disappearance. Indeed, philosophy does make it possible to articulate disappearance as an ontological event, but what kind of event this is depends on the ontological commitments it brings into play. From a political-ontological perspective, the issue is which ontology is being enacted through philosophy and with what consequences. If philosophy advances a shared condition (such as finitude) as foundational, then differences tend to appear as variations in how that condition is experienced. By contrast, a commitment to the pluriverse, as developed in political ontology (Blaser 2025; de la Cadena and Blaser, 2018; Escobar, 2018), requires treating those differences as differences in what exists and in how what exists (including events) is constituted through specific relations. Disappearance, in this sense, will appear as the particular form in which ‘a problem’ emerges within certain worlds that might be partially connected with others where it appears with other shapes. The matter of care (de La Bellacasa, 2011) in this situation is not only what disappearance reveals, but how the event we label as such is enacted across worlds, and how philosophical concepts participate in stabilising one account over others.