THE RELATIONALITY OF DISAPPEARANCE

Abstract

In this article I examine what happens to the “I” when the other disappears. I elucidate the relationship between ontic – relational ties to specific others – and ontological relationality – the fundamental relationality that facilitates the very existence of the “I.” The loss of an ontic relationality, I contend, ensures that the “I” can never be the same as it was prior to the loss. But the disappearance of an ontic relationality also accentuates that the “I” cannot disavow its ontological relationality, despite the pain and suffering brought about by the loss of a specific other. I argue that exposure to this ontological relationality, through the deprivation of an ontic one, offers us the opportunity to re-think habituated and potentially damaging forms of relationality, particularly in an age when neoliberal rationality encourages us to turn away from the other and to seek shelter in the self. To explicate the chiastic relationship between ontic and ontological relationality, I draw on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the “hinge,” Judith Butler’s work on grief and mourning, and Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of the “face.” By looking specifically at remembrance campaigns for victims of forced disappearance – particularly in Guatemala and Argentina – I show how faces of the disappeared continue to haunt the political present in ways that refuse the fantasy of a return to a former order. In doing so, these campaigns keep exposing us to the ontological relationality that underpins all human life, encouraging us to find new ways of relating that transcend our habituated and repetitive relational behaviours. This exposure, I argue, illustrates that no amount of self-sufficiency allows us to escape the ontological necessity of relationality. The disappearance of the other, any other, discloses the fraudulent anti-relationality of the neoliberal era by revealing the ties that connect beings together. This disclosure, I conclude, constitutes the importance of the relationality of disappearance.