From vanishing to terricide: Political ontology and the colonial negation of worlds

Abstract

This commentary responds to Özge Can Doğmuş's account of vanishing lakes and the ontology of absence by arguing that “vanishing” should not be understood as a sudden event, but as the perceptible threshold of a longer colonial, capitalist, and extractivist organization of loss. Drawing on Lacanian critical political thought and political ontology, this commentary shows how socioecological destruction is disavowed: known, yet rendered governable through the languages of scarcity, management, adaptation, and technical expertise. It then mobilizes the Mapuche's concept of terricide to historicize disappearance as a broader assault on the territorial, spiritual, epistemic, bodily, and more-than-human relations that sustain worlds. Finally, it turns to some of geography's conceptual resources—landscape, territory, emplacement, displacement, and pluriversal contact zones—to show how worlds are spatially (un)made and how their endurance might be defended. I then call for a human geography attentive to practices of emplacement: the grounding relations, memories, forms of care, and struggles through which besieged worlds continue to endure.