The Political Image: Art and Disappearance

The starting point for any examination of disappearance must be a ­reconsideration of contemporary political theory. Disappearance, in our era, has created an upheaval in the very fabric of ­temporality, if one ­considers this temporality from the point of view of a ­modern “­philosophy of history.” The teleological linearity of events, a ­continuity of ­processes—or at least the superposed layers of ­knowledge-power—constitutes “our” experience of historical beings: a genealogy and ­archaeology of knowledge. Disappearance, an event that can go so far as to cancel any event, has a radically disruptive effect upon “our” ­experience. It is the ultimate “anti-event,” the disaster event.¹ 1 - See Maurice Blanchot, L’écriture du désastre (Paris: Gallimard, 1980). One might say, with Jean-Louis Déotte, that what finally manages to “­interrupt history” isn’t a “Messiah” or communism, but, under the aegis of Catastrophe, the fact that a police tactic used from the time of the Nazis right up to the military regimes of Argentina and Chile, and ­including the French in Algeria,² 2 - See Jean-Louis Déotte, Alain Brossat, L’époque de la disparition. Esthétique et ­politique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000). can manage to make a woman, man, or child cleanly disappear, vanish, without leaving a trace. The disappeared come back only as ghosts, to haunt our “social peace,” to demonstrate the very impossibility of community. What happened? Where did the event die? Political thinking must then shift toward ghosts, develop into a “­political philosophy of the ghost,” the central intent of any political thought ­concerning what might today be a “post-catastrophe” ­community.