I take my title from a remark made by Jean-Luc Nancy in a 2007 interview: ‘the state that we call in French “being beside oneself” [“être hors de soi”]... opens, quite simply, an outside-of according to which we don’t come back to ourselves, we don’t recover ourselves, nor do we find ourselves’. As Nancy goes on to note, the phrase ‘beside myself’ is suggestive in its connotations. One of these is solipsistic: what exists or remains, besides myself? Another is affective: I could be ‘beside myself’ with anger, with anxiety, or even with joy. Here, however, I will focus, as Nancy does, on a third level in which the phrase speaks to the non-coincidence of the self with itself; thus speaking against all ipseity or full presence. Such a focus is inspired by this session’s call for new figurations of the human, and of subjectivity more generally, which do not operate via recovery or recuperation of forgotten origins and essences, but which seek nonetheless to maintain the human as problematic for human geography, for example, if this appellation remains salient.

Nancy’s thought is clearly ‘relational’, insofar as it nominates being-with as intrinsic and inescapable vis-a-vis being per se. But here I will attempt to isolate for inspection the ‘singular’ aspect of his being-singular-plural, a singularity which remains somewhat at a distance, from the world, from others, and from itself. To contextualise these abstract thoughts, and to speak back to geographical work on issues such as subjectivity, creativity, landscape and ‘nature’, I will turn to examine some notable recent UK-based ‘landscape’ poetry – in particular Phillip Gross’s The Water Table and Thomas A Clark’s The Hundred Thousand Places.