Re-spiritualising geographies of subjectivity through Daoism

Abstract

This intervention seeks to advance geographical interpretations of the body as the ‘usual’ and ‘universal’ site for understanding subjectivity and spirituality in human geography. Affective and emotional geographies have predominantly located subjective experiences within the lived body—the site where bodies actively engage with the world through embodied practices such as sensing, affecting and feeling. Through these bodily engagements with the world, geographers have mapped the landscapes of embodied subjective experiences and space-making. However, the geographies of subjectivity face significant challenges in understanding spirituality beyond worldly embodiments and without equating it with religious faiths and their spatial productions.

Drawing on Daoist philosophy, I propose an alternative account that re-spiritualises the geographies of subjectivity. In Daoist thought, re-spiritualisation is seen as processes of relocation, reconnection and respatialisation of subjectivity in the Universe. Subjective experiences are relocated from the lived experiences of bodies to the spiritual place—the Heavenly heart in the Universe. They are reconnected within its mind, body and spirit, and with the Universe as Oneness, through the spiritual, understood as vital and life-giving energies. They are respatialised through spiritual energies making different spiritual spaces (e.g. the empty, the unbounded, the transcendental) in the Heavenly heart. Such spatial–spiritual processes are animated by three actions: emptying, resonating and awakening. Daoist geography makes a cosmological call for an ethical–political movement that harmonises spiritual disconnections through invoking the cosmological in selfhood without subjectivisation.

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ORCID for Yu-Shan Tseng: orcid.org/0000-0003-3728-314X

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