Minima Relata: A reflection on negative geographic life
Abstract
This paper makes a conceptual intervention beside affirmationist and negative geographies. Deploying a novel linguistic-functional schema, it parses the latter's proliferating vocabularies, problematics, and conceptual formations. From this analysis, drawing on Adorno's negative dialectics and Minima Moralia , it introduces Minima Relata: empirically graspable constellations of attenuated socio-spatial life that persist without becoming otherwise in a post-affirmationist relational limit zone. To apprehend them, the paper advances attenuational lingering as a perceptual-critical-empirical geographic stance, alongside a grammar of registers and an aesthetics for differentiating these often obscured modalities of contemporary socio-spatial life.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Spatial and Cultural Studies
Historical Geography and Geographical Thought
Urban Planning and Governance
Publication details
- Journal / source
- Progress in Human Geography
- Volume
- 50
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 696–713
- Publication date
- 4 March 2026
- Language
- EN