The absence of absence: of ekphrasis and blind witnessing

Abstract

The centrality of apparition and disapparition as political manifestation and existential threshold informs enforced disappearance as a political regime that interrupts the existing densities and securities of social visibility in private and public spheres. The author contends that executive power deploys enforced disappearance to amplify its ekphrastic power. However, the latter can be confronted by the ekphrastic testimony of survivors of disappearance as surrogates of those kin who lack embodied presence. Ekphrasis is the creation of an effect upon its auditors that they are actually beholding through sound and/or language what is visually and temporally withdrawn from their present. Enforced disappearance names the extrajudicial ‘abduction and deprivation of liberty’ of individuals and communities by a sovereign that conceals the act, location of the victims, circumstances of their death and their post-mortem disposition. In this article, the author navigates the complex and intertwining agonistic social rhetorics of visibility and invisibility associated with disappearance that collide as historicizing and dehistoricizing forces through competing ekphrastic rhetorics. She examines how ekphrastic witnessing as a form of blind witnessing becomes an affective media of postwar justice in a society that has erased and disavowed its war crimes.