The starting point for any examination of disappearance<\/em> must be a \u00adreconsideration of contemporary political theory. Disappearance, in our era, has created an upheaval in the very fabric of \u00adtemporality, if one \u00adconsiders this temporality from the point of view of a \u00admodern \u201c\u00adphilosophy of history.\u201d The teleological linearity of events, a \u00adcontinuity of \u00adprocesses\u2014or at least the superposed layers of \u00adknowledge-power\u2014constitutes \u201cour\u201d experience of historical beings: a genealogy and \u00adarchaeology of knowledge. Disappearance, an event that can go so far as to cancel any event, has a radically disruptive effect upon \u201cour\u201d \u00adexperience. It is the ultimate \u201canti-event,\u201d the disaster<\/em> event.^{1<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 1 <\/a> - See Maurice Blanchot, L\u2019\u00e9criture du d\u00e9sastre<\/em> (Paris: Gallimard, 1980).<\/span> One might say, with Jean-Louis D\u00e9otte, that what finally manages to \u201c\u00adinterrupt history\u201d isn\u2019t a \u201cMessiah\u201d or communism, but, under the aegis of Catastrophe<\/em>, the fact that a police tactic used from the time of the Nazis right up to the military regimes of Argentina and Chile, and \u00adincluding the French in Algeria,^{2<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 2 <\/a> - See Jean-Louis D\u00e9otte, Alain Brossat, L\u2019\u00e9poque de la disparition. Esth\u00e9tique et \u00adpolitique<\/em> (Paris: L\u2019Harmattan, 2000).<\/span> can manage to make a woman, man, or child cleanly disappear, vanish, without leaving a trace. The disappeared come back only as ghosts<\/em>, to haunt our \u201csocial peace,\u201d to demonstrate the very impossibility of community. What happened? Where did the event die? Political thinking must then shift toward ghosts, develop into a \u201c\u00adpolitical philosophy of the ghost,\u201d the central intent of any political thought \u00adconcerning what might today be a \u201cpost-catastrophe\u201d \u00adcommunity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I shall begin by setting down what I will call a \u201cpolitical image.\u201d A \u00adpolitical image (not all images are political) is an image that takes into account the political process that annihilates meaning, what D\u00e9otte and others call the catastrophe,^{3<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 3 <\/a> - See Jean-Louis D\u00e9otte, Oubliez! Les ruines, L\u2019Europe, le Mus\u00e9e<\/em> (Paris: L\u2019Harmattan, 1994)<\/span> that is, the radical crisis of \u00admeaning \u00adsubsequent to the horror experienced by thousands of victims of \u00adtotalitarian regimes from Auschwitz to the present. Since Auschwitz, any notion of political community can only be articulated, understood, or \u00adpostulated around this central issue: the disaster of meaning, the very core of politics as an \u00adexercise (that is always paradoxical and based on \u00admisunderstanding, according to Ranci\u00e8re) of a community\u2019s \u00adbeing-together, due to the \u00adcollapse of the possibility of writing history. Images that are not born from this issue are not \u201cpolitical images.\u201d They may be advertising, scientific or mental images but in no case are they political images. This type of image, arising from rather specific determinants, is one definition of the political fact of \u201cus\u201d (this \u201cus,\u201d says Lyotard, must always be in quotes, due to the crisis in conventional means of inscribing existence, i.e., history, \u00adnarrative, technique)^{4<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 4 <\/a> - See Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Lyotard, L\u2019inhumain. Causeries sur le temps<\/em> (Paris: Galil\u00e9e, 1988).<\/span> that was \u00adspecifically developed, worked on, and created in contemporary art. As we know, the clearest effect of Adorno\u2019s famous \u00adsentence about the impossibility of art after Auschwitz was precisely that art subsequently functioned solely on what I, following Blanchot, would call disaster<\/em>. From this perspective, the political philosophy of ghosts can only be a philosophy of art \u201cafter the era of disappearance.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It isn\u2019t a coincidence that photography became the most \u00adsignificant \u201cartform\u201d after Auschwitz. Photography\u2014the art of the trace\u2014\u00addeveloped most intensely when the fundamental political problem was precisely an \u201cabsence of traces.\u201d After Auschwitz, we find ourselves in the \u00adpresence of a myth written in the first century of our era: Pliny the Elder\u2019s story of Dibutade seems charged with political connotations. For friends and relatives of the disappeared, whether in Argentina or in Chile, \u00adphotography and its essential qualities\u2014anachronistic temporality, \u00adtechnical \u00adreproducibility, the processing of its images as an Index\u2014are an attempt to enable the experience of the that-has-been<\/em>, of showing and \u00addemonstrating to the broken community, with each new execution of the ritual, that its children, spouses, parents had a face, a body, a name\u2014in a word, had left a trace. It was a matter then of returning, with each iteration, to the Dibutade ritual, of tracing on a support (wall, paper) the inscription of a body in order to remember it, to know it had existed, that it had lived. Just as Dibutade had asked her lover to hold still as she marked his \u00adcontour on the wall\u2014the line and trace of memory\u2014in order to set an image of his presence against the reality of his disappearance, so too have kith and kin of the disappeared tried to inscribe, in paradoxical gestures laden with impossibilities, the \u201creality\u201d of the disappeared. In the famous \u00adsiluetazo<\/em> of the early 1980s, for instance, thousands of Argentinians traced \u00adanonymous silhouettes on hundreds of walls in the city to protest the dictatorship. This ritual was transformed into something almost epic\u2014\u201calmost,\u201d because the epic no longer has currency in a broken community deprived of any clear destination by the conjunction of terror and rampant capitalism\u2014, standing before the power of disappearance to show and to demonstrate that these people had existed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We must therefore identify the political moment, in the sense that we have defined the political image, of theories on photography that have emphasized the indicial nature of the photographic image. One may especially recall the work of Rosalind Krauss, Philippe Dubois, and Roland Barthes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The philosophical question itself goes further still. What is the relationship between trace, event, and inscription (and thus \u00adinscription surface)? May we consider disappearance as an event? Would it not rather be (as I suggested earlier) an anti-event, the event that cancels any \u00adpossibility of an event, since it annuls the possibility of inscribing a trace on a surface by cancelling the trace and the surface (the body and the imprint of the body)? Properly speaking, are the friends\u2019 and relatives\u2019 efforts, the ritual practices (dances, singing, masquerades), not gestures and political actions meant to conjure the event\u2014the disappearance and the life before the disappearance\u2014, to inscribe it onto new surfaces, like monuments, rituals in the streets, institutions (Fundaci\u00f3n Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, Asociaci\u00f3n de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos)?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the same time, disappearance may be understood as the \u00adinterruption of the social processes of individuation, as a radical crisis of that which enables the formation of \u201ccommunity.\u201d In such a moment, we must reconsider Gilbert Simondon\u2019s notion of psyco-social individuation.^{5<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 5 <\/a> - See Gilbert Simondon, L\u2019individuation psychique et collective<\/em> (Paris: Aubier, 1989).<\/span> His theory allows us to see how the fact of disappearance will utterly crush what one may consider the nuclear process in the constitution of a community and an individuality (knowing that an individuality \u00adcannot constitute itself without involvement of the community and vice-versa). Every community, says Simondon, is constituted from a process of social \u201cmeta-stability,\u201d i.e., of constant crisis in the subjects\u2019 social identification with the institutions, laws, and norms that sustain shared existence. Metastability suggests that sociability is generated through crisis rather than through stability. Disappearance, however, destroys this \u00admetastability, since it destroys the very possibility of an individual\u2019s \u00adrecognition among others as a member of a community. In this \u201ctime of disappearance,\u201d our societies must live with ghosts, that is, to use the words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, with the dead who are not \u201cfully dead,\u201d who come inexorably back toward us\u2014the \u201cintolerable\u201d dead.^{6<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 6 <\/a> - See Nicolas Abraham, Maria Torok, Le verbier de l\u2019homme aux loups<\/em> (Paris: Flammarion, 2007); L\u2019\u00e9corce et le noyau<\/em> (Paris: Flammarion, 2006).<\/span> Simondon himself insisted on the fact that, facing the dead, the process of individuation doesn\u2019t stop, since the dead continue with us, not only with the funerary rites, but also from all that may be considered part of the social process of recollection. Yet, following Simondon, one may conclude that a crucial anthropological characteristic\u2014the individuation relationship between the community of the living and the \u201ccommunity\u201d of the dead\u2014will be interrupted by disappearance. It will disrupt the very process of psychosocial individuation. Disappearance therefore leaves the subject in a pre-individual moment, which Simondon says is the moment of pure affectivity. In societies that develop under regimes whose \u00adpolitical strategies of terror include the systematic practice of disappearance there arises what D\u00e9otte called \u201csocial disindividuation,\u201d that is, the experience of a psychosocial affectivity rooted in anxiety and terror.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Translated from the French by Ron Ross<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n