War Under Erasure: Contretemps, Disappearance, Anthropophagy, Survivance.

War Under Erasure: Contretemps, Disappearance, Anthropophagy, Survivance Allen Feldman Theory & Event, Volume 22, Number 1, January 2019, pp. 175-203 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/715049 Access provided by New York University (1 Feb 2019 17:49 GMT) War Under Erasure: Contretemps, Disappearance, Anthropophagy, Survivance Allen Feldman Abstract Interlacing collateral damage, political disappearance, state anthropophagy and survivance, this essay anatomizes the Derridean contretemps- the essential accident- as the time out of time of wartime. The contretemps fractures teleocratic optics while escalating the sovereign right to be without right in war. Accidentalized violence does not speak to war as inconvenienced by mishaps but rather to the political mobilization of the accidental as war by other means. Collateral damage and enforced disappearance constitute a temporal counter weight to the indivisibility of sovereign force, crosscutting the latter with shape shifting indeterminacy that preempts critical witnessing and political dejustification. Polemos as Counter-time We are living the time of wartime as a largely unwitnessable time out of time, as a fall out of conventional time that fractures any polemological idea of progress and political achievement. The war on terror, initially driven by retaliation, securitization, and democratizing regime change has ignited global networks of counter-retaliation and micro-emulation that shore up antidemocratic regimes. It has inseminated new unforeseen insecurities and generated human casualties and serialized disposable enemies beyond count who are largely irrelevant to its inceptual justifications. The long list of its recursive blowbacks includes the creeping militarization of American life traversing racialized policing, armored crowd control, omnivoyant algorithmic privacy invasions, and the recasting of economic migrants and asylum seekers as crypto-terrorists and our southern border as the ground zero of national insecurity. Fleeing criminal cartels, initially trained by the CIA as paramilitaries, asylum seekers are subjected to mass kangaroo tribunals, interminable detention and the triple chaining and orange jumpsuits that previously adorned the now geriatric terrorists of Guantánamo. Theory & Event Vol. 22, No. 1, 175–203 © 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press 176 Theory & Event Jacques Derrida names such chronotopic and programmatic dislocations contretemps which is poorly translated by the English accident and better read as counter-time.1 As catastrophic disruption the possibility and actuality of the contretemps conditions all proper and programmed temporality such as war, law, securitization and democracy as their inadmissible contingency. The contretemps is the elusive rupturing of a directional temporality of which jus ad bellum was once a privileged expression. It interrupts any cultural predication of synthetic time by accelerating the “the separation of monads, infinite distance, the disconnection of experiences, the multiplicity of worlds, everything that renders possible a contretemps.”2 The historical experience of contretemps desynchronizes internal-time consciousness and the institutional metrics that compress the differentia of social time and space into the measure and meaning of the contemporaneous. The contretemps forecloses accessible pathways to a center, to a subject, to a privileged reference and is also a surplus effect and externalized cost of production of closed systems and bounded networks: Dates, timetables, property registers, place names, all the codes that we cast like nets over time and space—in order to reduce or master differences, to arrest them, determine them—these are also contretemps traps, intended to avoid contretemps, to be in harmony with our rhythms by bending them to object measurement, they produce misunderstanding, they accumulate the opportunities for false steps, or wrong moves, revealing and simultaneously increasing this anachrony of desires in the same time.3 Contretemps etymologically carries the formative sense of a mishap as a blow to the body and deeply participates in the lexicon of war and force. The phrase à contretemps, originally a 17th century category of fencing and combat, diversely signifies an inopportune movement of a weapon, false timing, a motion out of time, an unexpected and untoward event, a reversal, a random but intervening occurrence, being in counter-time and the unaccented portion of a rhythmic pattern.4 Allumage à contretemps, cross-fire, encompasses the self-cancellation of a force caught by and between its own violence, that turns against its violence with violence, and is no less destructive for this self-effacing retroaction. I will contend in this essay that the recursion of the allumage à contretemps mediates the indemnification of war-crimes such as collateral damage and enforced disappearance. Machiavelli proposed a logistics of the aleatory and the contretemps as mediating political rule. In his Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livy history becomes a discontinuous assemblage of occurrences, random occasions, and accidenti against which the security and duration of the state is to be measured.5 For Althusser these were “sequenc- Feldman | Contretemps, Disappearance, Anthropophagy, Survivance 177 es of conditions” and conjunctures lacking any originating or principial cause.6 Machiavelli also spoke of a similitude of the accidenti that permits comparative-historical analysis, contributing to what Althusser terms a dispositive—a political assemblage of multifarious constellations of probability and the aleatory. The accidenti are intrinsic to the character, “qualità dei tempi,”of modernity in relation to the exemplarity of ancient history against which contemporary virtù or its lack is to be measured. The accidenti were not pure external flux but might emanate from the self-positing political will of a sovereign or polity that eventually controverts the latter. Governance requires an ongoing political thought of, and vigilance for their surplus immanence—the accidenti were not to be nullified but were potentially maneuverable as a medium of prudent governance. The survival of a regime in time was in direct ratio to its exposure to and a navigation of the accidenti that signified the impossibility of the political as the self-evident. The Machiavellian dispositive identified by Althusser, is a tactical arrangement that is able to cast temporal nets over inverting contingency. The conjuncture of structural duration and the invasive discontinuity of the accidenti are described by the translator of Machiavelli and Us as “the endeavor to think the conditions of possibility of an impossible task, to think the unthinkable.”7 Machiavelli’s accidenti, in their seeming peripheral errancy, constitute a temporal counter weight to any indivisible and continuist model of executive power by crosscutting the latter with shape shifting indeterminacy. In Machiavelli’s schema the executive model of the political, whether republican, monarchical or aristocratic, was inadequate to the historico-accidental and is to be superseded by a heterotopic and implicitly discontinuous model of governance—a dis-positivizing admixture of differing executive modalities akin to Derrida’s web of contretemps traps. This mixed modality assemblage unfolds as the disequilibrium of counteractions and heteronomous political modalities that evoke the allumage à contretemps—politico-polemological cross firing. This dispostive would present as a “play of differences, a system of signs referring to each other in their continuous transformation, where nothing is simply present or absent. The center of the projecting thought is not replaced by another center, but instead, by the endless deconstructive work, claiming to produce the plenitude of absolute presence, the play of programmatic differences.”8 In Hegel’s Phenomenology every concept as a figure of self-consciousness must pass through the pathos and contretemps of enactment such as the struggle of Master and Slave where self-consciousness re-stages itself through the risk of death and the desire for recognition that culminates in misrecognition.9 This trial by unthought actualities dramatizes the inversion of subject and substance such as the Master’s 178 Theory & Event unrecognized dependency on the Slave; the latter reemerges as the contretemps of the Master’s drive for a subjectifying autonomy over confining materiality. Hegelian enactment as contretemps becomes the recursive pathogenesis of the concept it was meant to exteriorize, conserve and repeat but instead displaces and detours. The enacted contretemps unfolds as the concept of the concept in being the scenic affirmation of that which was unthinkable within the concept. In Society Must Be Defended Foucault excavates a historiographic contretemps with pragmatic political import when describing how the evolutionist “Roman” juridical history of progressive civic pacification is deauthorized by the contretemps of “invasion history.” The latter, for Foucault, is the encrypted motor of state formation for which juridical formalism serves as facade.10 This is more than a literary dispute for Foucault uses the ‘anti-Roman” counter-history of invasion to disinter a “permanent” war beneath law that contests the public reason, self-description and ideological authority of civic institutions and their proceduralism.11 A disavowed political strata situates the modern civitas as a disemic assemblage underwritten and infiltrated by the counter-temporal logistics of warfare and not pacification. This disavowed polemology functions like an allumage à contretemps subverting the polarity of war and peace through political self-cancellation and errant recursion. Foucault concludes “We are always writing the history of the same war, even when we are writing the history of peace and its institutions.12 For Derrida the politically axiomatic is foregrounded against a negativity from which the contretemps can unfold as “the background of a shadowy zone against which […] stands out […] the self-evidence of self-evidence.”13 The contretemps bifurcates the scenic affirmation of the axiomatic and aphoristic and riddles their fixed schema with puncturing anomaly—chronotopic black holes. It arrives as an incalculable envelopment “that allows the motif of calculability to be thought as what it is.”14 Foucault similarly points to a counter-temporal exposure of the abyss upon which the politically self-evident appears: “the politically intelligible appears against the background of emptiness and denies its necessity.”15 This necessary “emptiness” speaks to the alea and abgrund of the contretemps against which systematicity and repeatability are forearmed and by which they can be disarmed in the refutation embodied by the catastrophic.16 Caught in the net of the transgressive contretemps the political for Reiner Schürmann shows itself as indeterminate beneath its schematized categories: “there would also be no legislation if power did not constitute an indeterminate moment in every formation, a counter-strategy of transgression, a stimulus of dissolution, making each normative configuration potentially other.” 17 The contretemps does not achieve the status of a codified norm and as initially nondescript is denied the stature of a legible action. In Feldman | Contretemps, Disappearance, Anthropophagy, Survivance 179 its anomic illegibility the contretemps is the action of a nonaction, a “cipher in algorism,” a figure of insignificance within a computational regime which is incomputable as an “inessential surplus of actuality” and “inconsistent multiplicity.”18 The contretemps can be mapped onto the topology of the nondescript as delineated by Giorgio Agamben: “Nondescript is the figure of pure singularity. Nondescript singularity has no identity, is not determined in relation to a concept . . .the nondescript is a singularity plus an empty space.”19 The nondescript causality of the contretemps has to be retrofitted ad seriatum from an abruptly inceptual yet derivative punctum —the emergency zone triggered by the collision of system and event which rules as a commanding anachronicity. The contretemps unfolds as the cause of the cause that thwarts the capacity of the afflicted subject or apparatus to catch its causality in the act. This nondescript swerve that undermines executive power can also amplify it. The latter is the passage that Derrida in The Beast and the Sovereign terms á pas de loup that is essayed by a beastly and predatory sovereignty. Á pas de loup is the mode of motion of the contretemps as ambush by the insensible and the virtual that, like a drone “kill chain,’ seemingly unfolds from nowhere: To move à pas de loup is to walk without making a noise, to arrive without warning, to proceed discreetly, silently, invisibly, almost inaudibly and imperceptibly, as though to surprise a prey, to take it by surprising what is in sight but does not see coming the one that is already seeing it, already getting ready to take it by surprise, to grasp it by surprise.20 As Hölderlin’s “dark light” within the apparent the contretemps disrupts the presence of the present as the form assumed by synchrony, plenitude and the self-evident. In tandem with the disorientation of warfare the contretemps undermines repetition as a future present as the transmission of the same through time that once promised to secure life, habitation, ends and orientation. If the securing condition of historicity is presence temporalized as the past, the now and the future, then by shattering such scenic affirmations the contretemps opens “intemporality” that exposes the “ahistoricity of history.”21 In its contravention of the calculable the contretemps signals the anachronism of historicity through the wreckage of narratives of sequence and causation once required by justified war and political program. By uprooting presence and synchronicity the contretemps unfolds as radical temporalization and anachronic acceleration. With the advent of the contretemps the portentous breaks into our universe in the form of a parallel creation, a breach of procedure that disrupts societal syntax.22 This is the shock of exception profiled against eventless continuity. 180 Theory & Event The Accidentalization of the Accident Under rule by contretemps jus ad bellum no longer fulfills the normative tasks that have been historically assigned to it. As exemplified by the nomadic “dwell time” and calculated collateral damage of drone signature strikes war now unfolds as “rhythmed anachronies” and as “moving errors whose errance is both finite and infinite, aleatory and programmed.”23 The “mission creep” and “cluster-fuck” called collateral damage is the measure without measure of war. This doctrine effectively reconstitutes executive power in situ as a contrivance and entrapment of the accidental. The contretemps embedded in the military doctrine and practice of collateral damage becomes the alibi— the elsewhere—provisioned by an unreliable enemy who has failed to appear at the proper geopolitical coordinate and who has remaindered inappropriate civilian casualties in its place. Such assault against the name and not the substance of the enemy that is often inflicted on noncombatants by drones and hell-fire missiles is aphorized and indemnified as “scenario fulfillment” (errant threat perception), “crowd killings” and “signature strikes” in which the political culpability of targets are silently outlined “á pas de loup” by metadata. Under collateral damage surplus death and mishap are exempted and dismissed as the unavoidable cacophony of algorithmic governance.24 The encyclopedia of collateral damage that is ‘regime changed’ Iraq with its discountable casualties, leaked torture photography, infrastructure failure, imploding democracy and proliferating sectarianism, became the contretemps that provisioned an alibi (an elsewhere) for Obama’s return to the “good war” in Afghanistan. A cognate contretemps recently befell democracy closer to home in the inauguration of a counterfactual American presidency, though not for the first nor last time. The political generativity of the interface between the counter-temporal and the counterfactual needs to be thought as a counter-history of truth informed by the recursion of the fictive as factual and the obverse. In retrospect it is but a brief swerve and incline from the contretemps of lost Iraqi WMDS and fabulated 9/11 culpability to executive rule by “alternative facts.” Reiner Schürmann would describe such governance by contretemps, counterfact and disavowal as “polemically turned against itself… It is not just that “beneath the rule: abuse…but in both its essence and incidences…it is not a matter of abuse by some agent, but rather that the rule abuses itself in its ruling.”25 Or as Derrida describes this trompe-l’œil sovereignty: The One divides and opposes itself, opposes itself by posing itself, represses and violates the difference it carries within itself, wages war, wages war on itself, itself becoming war (se fait le guerre), frightens itself, itself becoming fear (se fait peur), and does violence to itself, itself becoming violence (se fait violence), trans- Feldman | Contretemps, Disappearance, Anthropophagy, Survivance 181 forming itself into frightened violence in guarding itself from the other (il se garde de l’autre), for it guards itself from, and in, the other, always, Him, the One, the One “different from itself.”26 Derrida tersely opens an interrogation of polemological and xenophobic state formation as a recursive apparatus of errant mimesis and self-substitution in the law making violence of its self-division. Recursion as contretemps is here associated with Carl Schmitt’s stasiology (intestinal discord) wherein generative denegations “have but one goal—to keep us from conceiving the one as position, as thesis.”27 Derrida’s reading of recursion through the contretemps also communicates with Frederich Kittler’s mediology of the reversible time axis of playback teletechnology.28 Both Kittler’s and Derrida’s treatment of time axis manipulation converge on the violation of syntactical rules and sequence to which the contretemps can be related. However, Derrida politicizes time axis manipulation, rendering it irreducible to Kittlerian archival storage and transmission. In Derrida’s forensics of autogenetic fear the archive implodes and overflows itself into an-archic warfare and fearfare. He aligns a recursive, self-induced addiction to terror with a metaphysics of power that precipitates war as contretemps. While Kittlerian time-axis recursion celebrates repeatable fidelity, Derridean recursion, whether machinic or polemological, does not generate the identical and the indexical, but rather obtrudes an errant dis-identity into the structure of the command or program wherein the rule abuses itself in its ruling. Under the alibi of collateral damage indemnifying recursion is an analeptic intervention that profoundly alters the proleptic meaning of violence and its aftermaths. “The recursion runs back, it ‘takes recourse’, as it were, to itself, but at the same time it runs ahead to a predefined result (which, however, could not come about without the running back). Note, however, that this expanded reproduction involves a Janus-type double movement.”29 Derrida coincides with Kittler in deriving an automatism of war from the counter-time and double-time of recursion. Though, for Derrida, politico-technical automatism is wedded to the contretemps of an autoimmune disorder of the political. The pathological recursion of autoimmunity is in play when “The same unique source divides itself mechanically, automatically, and sets itself reactively in opposition to itself: whence the two sources in one. This reactivity is a process of sacrificial indemnification, it strives to restore the unscathed (heilig) that it itself threatens.”30 As an allumage à contretemps, autoimmunitary war wars on itself to make itself. Werner Hamacher recognizes the reversible time axis of the contretemps in translating it as Unzeit, as an anachronous pre-essence that refuses “every compossibility and every co-presence and therefore also every place within a time series, a place that could be put before 182 Theory & Event or after another.”31 The contretemps is the intemporal “pre-possibility of all temporal possibilities that does not precede these within a time series; rather it precedes the latter as the non-linear—non-geometric and non-metrical—play of various times and time-possibilities, and precisely therefore lies within these as what is absolutely external to them.”32 The accidental as both alien and recursive becomes the dangerous supplement to purposeful time. Such anachrony can be embedded in the planning, execution and political neutralization of an act of force in media res and ex-post-facto. Hamacher’s denegating description evokes the parasitical counter-temporality that Avital Ronell refers to as “operations of destruction operating ‘inoperably’ from a time and space that destroys time and space.”33 Such operations can extract surplus value from the misarrival of the contretemps. As Jean-Luc Nancy observes of the Fukushima disaster the techno-environmental accident must now be conceptualized as “plus d’une catastrophe,” as recursively more-than-a-catastrophe, in its risk assessment and actuarial calculation and as no-more-a-catastrophe under the algorithmic governance of Capital that extracts surplus value through disaster accumulation. For Nancy, “It is this equivalence that is catastrophic.”34 Here, Nancy activates the Heideggerian practice of durchkreuzung wherein a pivotal and anchoring term like catastrophe is typographically crossed out and placed under erasure (sous rature) to signal its inoperability. In being retained in the text beneath the mark of its defacement the deferred concept signals a flashing accident zone—a contretemps has befallen the concept in its historical trajectory that becomes an operative vacancy. What appears under erasure is recast as an allumage à contretemps that bears its own self-cancellation across time as the intrinsic catastrophic structure of its being. Consider how Francois Hollande politically and perceptually severed the random killing of Parisians on November 13, 2015 from the preceding damage of his bombing campaign in Syria. Hollande, under the ceremonial innocence of retribution and re-securitization, effectively escalated France’s greyed-out anti-ISIS bombing campaign whose collateral damage provisioned tit for tat legitimacy for domestic terror. The killing, mutilation, and displacement of, not only ISIS, but of contiguous and expendable Syrian noncombatants, drove the future anterior of the 2015 Paris attacks as the catastrophe that will have been. Hollande and his advisors recursively calculated the civic sacrifice of collateral domestic deaths at a temporal distance as corollary to vertical killing at a geographical distance in Syria. Bombing Syria was the temporal pre-possibility of the Bataclan and other deaths and of the contrived accidentalization of the ‘random’ Parisian victims cordoned off by Hollande as absolutely external to his already in-place arbitrary Syrian civilian deaths. The ‘surprise’ catastrophe in Paris already hap- Feldman | Contretemps, Disappearance, Anthropophagy, Survivance 183 pened before it happened as a node of the kill-chain pre-assembled by the French aerial assault on Syria. Benjamin Netanyahu also pursued a strategy of recursive indemnification by contretemps when ‘mournfully’ speaking to CNN of the Gazan civilians killed by Israeli missile strikes in 2014: “All civilian casualties are unintended by us but actually intended by Hamas. They want to pile up as many civilian dead as they can, because somebody said they use, I mean it’s gruesome, they use telegenically dead Palestinians for their cause. They want the dead, the more the better.” 35 In Netanyahu’s phantasmagoria each “carefully” launched Israeli missile is subject to a mishap in its recursion by a Hamas imputedly committed to the mechanical mass production of televisual Palestinian dead. The Israeli first-person shooter, morally inoculated by the Holocaust with an a priori and racialized incapacity for genocide, discharges a ballistics of innocence. The Israeli missile assault was described by an Israeli government spokesperson as restricted by “hesitancy and care,” and as ultimately in search of a “sustainable quiet.”36 Under this polemological regime of ‘care and quietude’ civilian causalities in Gaza are imputedly emplotted by Hamas. Israel’s launched ordnance becomes the accidentalized and recursive prosthetic of the Palestinian will to telegenic death. The “true violence” of Gaza is cast in lead by Netanyahu as the self-enclosure of the agent and patient of force exclusively within the Palestinian body politic. Derrida distinguishes the accidental contretemps—the singular, unlooked for and inessential accident—from the essential contretemps; the latter is the designed mishap exploited by Netanyahu, Hollande and Obama.37 With the essential or needful accident, the slippage of warfare from beneath its schematized categories is refunctioned as a self-organizing constitutive power (potentia) severed from authorizing political institutions and norms (potestas). The essential contretemps as the time of wartime manifests as the accidentalization of the accident. The suffix shifts the root term from the intransitive to the transitive in the sense of conforming to the thing expressed by the derivation. The doubling of the stem word in the theorem “the accidentalization of the accident” implies an assault upon the accident as concept and event—an historical contretemps has befallen the essence of the inessential accident. Accidentalized war is also a catastrophe that has befallen the prestige and finality of the political terminus now placed under erasure by the infinite plateau of the seemingly incomputable contretemps and its attendant machinery of recursive deniability. This process culminates in warfare that has purloined its own purposiveness. The prescriptive promise of jus ad bellum and the very act of its silent disavowal undergo their own fall out of perceptible time and history. 184 Theory & Event The contretemps discernable in the retraction of war by war infers a sovereign will to unwill violence. In doing so, the executive power does not choose to be nonviolent but makes of its violence a nonviolence- a sub voce or sub rosa attendant line of force that functions as a political aside and exemption in its “sending off” of causality, accountability and witnessing. The accidentalization of war does not refer to war as inconvenienced by mishaps but to the political mobilization of the accidentalized as war by other means. Through the contretemps, executive power is expansively multiplied by its self-division into the legitimating fact and the extra-factual surplus of its disavowed indiscriminate destruction—its violation of jus in bello (justice in war). The programmed contretemps is a political denegation that consists of political power “presenting [its] being in the mode of not being it.”38 Denegation, exemplified by the collateral damage doctrine, is a recursive nomination that simultaneously unnames itself, an enunciation that renounces itself and an appearance that disappears itself. Under a regime of denegation the enunciation of law opens the unstable recursion between law and nonlaw, lawfare and warfare, as di-visualizations of sovereignty. For example, the aporetic American debate on the legality or illegality of torture is analeptically transcribed onto the afterimage of torture’s routinization on ‘rogue bodies’ in rogue spaces. At issue here is not the measure of torture’s lawfulness or criminality, but of a juridical contretemps-- the institutionalization of torture’s legal indeterminacy. The war on terror, to escalate predation while evading legal accountability, has off-shored its violence by reversioning the manifest time-scapes of its force through the containerization of extraordinary rendition of captives, mercenary outsourcing, robotic and paramilitary proxies and roaming drone “kill boxes.” Death is containerized within rarefied and autonomic algorithmic pattern detection and anomaly detection. In tandem with this rarefaction of negativity warfare’s own incomputable and countertemporal relation to securitization and teleology becomes undetectable. The concept of war itself is subjected to an extraordinary rendition in being vacuumed back into the ‘black sites’ of disavowal and deniability. As a structuring threshold the essential accident overturns the philosophical dicta that the perfection of substance is far more perfect than the objective perfection of the accident—the latter is the project of the needful contretemps as desired and designed anachrony. Derrida observes that the infelicity of the accidental contretemps “remarks the essential contretemps which is as much to say it is not accidental.”39 Derrida’s “remark” indicates a relation of repetition, simulation, tracing and mimesis between the extrinsic and essential accident. However, the interface between model and copy is haunted by dislocating acts of surrogation where emulating repetition infiltrates and suborns the original to the point of indistinction. Through parricidal assault on the Feldman | Contretemps, Disappearance, Anthropophagy, Survivance 185 original the copy effaces the paternal position of the model through a disruptive and impinging counter-time arising from its errant recursion. The essential contretemps becomes the concept of the concept of the inessential accident that conveys what is unthinkable within the latter. However, the trace of the “re-mark” indicates that the threshold between the essential and inessential accident is porous, that there is no pure accident be it designed or not, intrinsic or extrinsic. There can also be a contamination of the calculated contaminant, a mishap can befall the concept, status and experience of the needful accident that ruptures its prognostic architecture triggering an aleatoric cascade. Appearing Under Erasure “Invisibility in everything is the thing we aim at in modern war.” Solomon J. Solomon, 191640 The indemnification of war crimes by the contretemps orchestrates the vanishing of noncombatants and combatants in pogroms of enforced disappearance and covert rendition that are frequently dissimulated as anomalous, nondescript mishaps by the abducting agent. To think through this aporia is to step back from the worthy tomes of empirical data on enforced political disappearance (that are merely the tip of an unquantifiable iceberg) collated by human rights organizations in order to consider the making of the missing as a formative metaphysics of executive power.41 This proposal runs counter to human rights and legal perspectives that treat political disappearance as an extrinsic mishap that befalls the otherwise normal proceduralism of the state and the law and which can be rectified by the restoration of the latter. The Office of the Commissioner for Human Rights of the United Nations defines disappearance as “the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty by agents of the State or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorization, support or acquiescence of the State, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law.”42 The qualifications “enforced” and, “involuntary” mandated by human rights agencies inversely confirms the predominant orchestration of disappearance as accidentalized war which extends from abduction to the postmortem disposition of bodies. Practices and campaigns of enforced disappearance reactivate the spatial and visual logic of genocide though these actions differ in crucial ways. In pogroms of disappearance, as with genocide, one collective claims a nomos of the earth for itself and denies the right to the earth for another. Judith Butler, following Hannah Arendt, declares genocide 186 Theory & Event to be impermissible, for we have no choice with whom to cohabit on the earth. Butler asserts as existential fact and ethical a priori that topographic diversity precedes birth and cohabitation.43 Both genocide and enforced disappearance declassify persons and populations as proper to the terrestrial surface. A regime of vanishment similarly defaces any evidence of the victim’s terrestrial anchorage. The rhizomatic dispersion and cordoning off of the disappeared from molar space in turn enhances the circulating spectrality of an executive power that gives itself an immaterial anchorage in its attrition of somatic and biographical gravity—the missing become sheer effluvia and ephemeral historical dust that fuels power and fear. The publicness and systematicity of certain genocidal operations is frequently precipitated by its required large-scale infrastructural mobilization and its justifying propaganda. In contrast enforced disappearance can be accidentalized in being randomized, silenced and rendered unmotivated and acausal by the disappearance of disappearance. Both the vanished and the act of vanishment are literally placed under erasure, not completely voided, but subsumed under the quasi-opacity of a self-cancelling act that is recast as a nondescript mishap inflicted upon those who henceforth will be nondescript. Disappearance and its aftermaths are designed to simulate the extrinsic and non-exemplary accident, the pure aleatory contretemps, in order to inhibit the capacity of political and legal witness to catch its causality in the act. The missing are denied political exemplification in the midst of the orchestration of their vanishment.44 The anonymization of the missing achieves the dephenomenalization and demanifestation of the event that persists as a public secret whose force lies in its political and epistemological inviolability. Whether an occurrence authored by an executive power becomes event or nonevent is here a matter of aleatory dehistoricization—a machinality of the contretemps dams the flow of events that could have been forensically reassembled. This disappearance of disappearance is the essential contretemps passed off as the inessential accident, as the elliptical action of a non-action in which the disappeared become ciphers in algorism. The regime of vanishment that disavows itself commits to the objective perfection of the accident by way of fabricating the insignificance of the act and the disappeared as nondescript. The apparatus of disapparition provisions an alibi, an elsewhere, for enforced disappearance by removing any terrestrial imprint and trace of the internal deportee and denying any rationality to their abrupt unbecoming. The il-logic of the alibi is extended to claims that the disappeared abdicated their lives and their survivors for an elsewhere where they remain perpetually incommunicado—this is the u-topia of the disappeared, the nonplace of their mostly wall-less confinement, the counter-geography and counter-time of interminable displacement without end. Feldman | Contretemps, Disappearance, Anthropophagy, Survivance 187 This sequence of retraction, demanifestation and disavowal is a double burial and banishment of the disappeared behind the dis-positivizing alibi. The vanished have a diminished phenomenological relation to the earth and this persistent condition of political flotation eventually washes over any imprint on the earth they left prior to being exscribed. The regime of vanishment stubbornly resists such qualifying humanitarian supplements as “enforced” and “involuntary’ by forwarding mischance and the accidental through the elaboration of intimidation and symbolic terror through explicit threat and whispered innuendo which promise further randomized subtraction for those who speak and seek out. The regime simulates structural indifference that morbidly envelops the survivor-families as much as the subtracted. Either the initial detention/abduction is greeted with a frozen bureaucratic silence, or an undocumented arrest and fictive release or escape is recited to exonerate custodial responsibility. The 2018 abduction, murder and postmortem disposal of Saudi dissident-journalist Jamal Khashoggi by his own government in Istanbul follows this scenario. The national public media frequently says little or nothing about a disappearance as pattern or policy, preferring to treat each instance as episodic if reported at all. The officiating bureaus of the police, the public prosecutors and the courts extend the stigma of culpability to the families who are criminalized for re-calling those who have become politically and culturally uninheritable. The local community where disappearance occurs has little alternative but to respond with self-protective unknowingness—they forgo vocal witnessing as inviting their own eventual vanishing. Only the most stubborn of kin resist this foreclosure, withstanding the years in which the missing remain under erasure, insisting on their living-on and survival until shown otherwise in the form of a corpse or its fragments and not even then, for many will reject the exhumed part for not being the whole that was originally taken. In the documentary film Nostalgia for the Light a Chilean woman, whose brother was abducted by the Pinochet regime, searches for decades through the Atacama Desert where political prisoners were incarcerated and/or summarily executed. She eventually recognizes, authenticates and mourns a detached half buried foot and sock mummified by desert aridity as belonging to her brother. And yet, she deems this fragment to be ultimately unsatisfactory—it merely points to what is unreturnable.45 Accidentalized disappearance is structured around a counter-temporality of ellipsis that informs the act, its aftermath and social knowledge of the latter. If, as Bernard Stiegler claims grammatization/ discretization are axial to a technical history of memory, under the dis-positivizing apparatus of disappearance these operations inform a techno-political history of forgetting or de-archiving that presuppose the reversible time axis of Hamacher’s Unzeit.46 Disappearance, that 188 Theory & Event containerizes the missing within a discrete counter-temporal series, generates a recursive de-grammatization; rather than assembling the encapsulated bodies of the vanished into the syntagmatic ensembles of an archive their doubled subtraction as act and memory promotes systemic inattention—a politics of the unretainable and errant trace. The grammatology of enforced disappearance produces repeatable and compressed nonmemory—the essential contretemps of a designed loss of loss. The elliptical disappearance machine is “cut as well as cutting with regard to the living present of life or of the living body: it is an effect of the cut as much as it is a cause of the cut.”47 Derrida here speaks of bodies as insectum, meaning a cutting into and resectioning of a body as in its severance by disavowed abduction; to insect is to separate, to dissect and to intersect and to hunt and catch insects.48 Those appearing under erasure in being rendered culpable (coupable) become cuttable and cut off from society, family, their bodies, biographies and deaths. A recent report from Sri Lanka attests to disappearance as a political technology that crosscuts sharply divergent ideological postures of justified warfare. The sheer ideological indifference of the viral practice begs the question of an inadmissible, an excluded third protocol underwriting the act’s trans-political infrastructure. Enforced disappearance emerges as a purposiveness without purpose- as a contretemps that inverts any recognizable political teleology. The report describes the following personae and scenes of enforced disappearance (my comments in italics): • Village roundups by of Tamil and Muslim civilians (wartime and postwar) and Sinhalese civilians during the Southern (JVP) insurrections (student/peasant Marxist rebels) by the police, army and intelligent services. • White van abductions of Tamil, Muslim and Sinhalese civilians including human rights defenders, journalists, workers, students and others. (The ubiquitous and otherwise unmarked white van deployed by intelligence and police agencies was so firmly wedded to the imaginary of disappearance that it may have been adopted by anti-state organizations to cover their tracks when engaged in similar abductions.) • Surrender and subsequent disappearance of Tamil (LTTETamil Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) combatants to the Sri Lankan armed forces and police particularly during the last stages of the war 2008–09. • Disappearance of families of LTTE combatants, including very young children. • Injured persons left behind in hospitals in LTTE controlled areas or driven away by police and army vehicles. • LTTE and TMVP (Tamil Makkal Viduthalai Pulikal) Feldman | Contretemps, Disappearance, Anthropophagy, Survivance 189 • • • • • • • abductions of child soldiers whose current location is unknown. Indian Peace Keeping Force abductions of Tamil and Muslim civilians. JVP (Marxist) abduction of Sinhalese civilians. Disappearance of Tamil and Muslim fisherman by the LTTE and Sri Lankan navy. Abduction of Tamil civilians by other Tamil militant groups. Disappearance during rehabilitation of LTTE ex or suspected combatants. Disappearance in IDP camps of Tamil, Muslim civilians and combatants Disappearance of (state) combatants and police missing in action. Disappearances that took place across the island in the context of pervasive abductions.49 The final item registers both a certain self-enclosing recursivity and perhaps the exasperation of the reporting organization, an NGO sponsored task force of local lawyers, academics, social workers, mental health specialists and civil society activists. It inadvertently records the empirical fact that a contretemps has befallen any criteria of political utility in Sri Lanka during its chronic postcolonial internal and separatist wars. The final item is effectively the meta-structure of which all the preceding deprivations of liberty and life partake and yet is included in the very series it totalizes. The list ends by asserting disappearances occurred “in the context of pervasive abductions.” This is a palindrome of political programming wherein disappearance disappears within itself to cause itself. The terminus of the list is neither outside the series nor gives itself to repetition in the series; it halts the orchestrated sequence of abductions and returns the reader to the beginning of the list as if winding it up one more time for a recursive procession towards its non-end. This non-end is confirmed in the continuation of disappearances after the ostensive military triumph of the state in 2009. The terminal item of the list is the undecidable element, an absent cause, that renders all the preceding instantiations possible and which demands evocation while remaining unpresentifiable—excluding in its inclusion. The underlying apparatus of vanishment that is ‘the reason’ of the chain is not determinable—it is opaque to historical reason. “Context” is exposed here as inadequate to any commensuration of these events, targets and patterns of vanishment. Context is precisely what is lacking here as that which that is expected to weave together the heteronomy of ideologies and practices through the leveling uniformity of a mediating purposiveness and recognizable metric. Rather, as constitutive power, enforced disappearance is its own 190 Theory & Event surplus value, generating itself from itself. The final item on the list confesses that there is no context for “context” here and this cutting away of contextual ground announces the arrival of the essential contretemps as a mishap assaulting the identifiability and necessity of contextual frames. Here Gramsci’s taxonomy of conditions of antagonism precipitating relations of antagonism is supplanted and reversed by the subsumption of the former by the latter that constitutes its own conditions of war. The list is left to symptomize a sphere of political unmaking by which various executive powers delimited their terrain of jurisdiction and dominion—not over the expected amassed corporeality of subjects nor even over the bent bodies of the subjugated, but over the faded footprint, the whispering and barely limned trace of the vanished, of persons and bodies withdrawn and remanded to dust and wind. The Anthropophagy of Disappearance The disappearance of disappearance captures errant temporalities and topologies that Orlando Patterson associates with slavery, in particular social death and natal alienation (in this case cloaking both the disappeared and their affected peers, families and related survivors).50 The disappeared and their affected families are afflicted with the contretemps of a living death that beyond any biological certainty is a socially and political enforced interstitiality—a demission of life without its documented termination. The missing, suspended within an attenuated life/deathworld of abduction, detention and decertified death, are presumed to be alternatively detained or denuded by inhumation or incineration. Social death for Patterson is enchained to natal alienation where the disappeared, like the enslaved, are forcefully estranged from their natality in all of its bio-symbolic nuances that have been explicated by Arendt.51 Natal alienation removes the disappeared from the sites of their birth as kin, subjects and citizens, from their ascendants, descendants and from the general biopolitical condition of natio that constitutes the civil subject in the nation state. For Arendt, natality is not merely biological, but the ability to bring something new into the world, to initiate the unprecedented and the unrepeated and this temporal possibility too is denied the disappeared and their stranded survivors. The missing are not only abducted and vanished for what they have done and said nor for who they are (and many times not even that), but for what they can politically become. If, as Arendt and Butler claim, unwilled proximity and unchosen cohabitation are preconditions of our political existence, enforced and disavowed disappearance inflicts a contretemps on the very possibility of the political through the banishment of potential political interlocutors from the earth. Feldman | Contretemps, Disappearance, Anthropophagy, Survivance 191 Examining disappearance as contretemps need attend to the sensory content of a phantasm in which the vanished have disappeared outside of their disappearance. A tropology of devourment orders a regime of vanishment as political cannibalism wherein the disappeared, the event of their disapparition, and the socio-cultural memory of the event are mechanically and voraciously consumed by an executive power. Redacting and withdrawing denizens, subjects or citizens, and then retracting its own acts through the signifiers of the accidental and promissory recurrence repels any historicizing and juridifying predication of the regime’s own praxis. The regime of redaction is the gradated disappearance and auto-consumption of the modern pastoral power itself to the degree that it is customarily defined by a duty of care, law and citizenship and held accountable to habeas corpus. Derrida asserts that only an anthropos can be “anthropophagic” and disappearance, as the intestinal cannibalism of a political order, exhibits the anthropology and anthropophagy of sovereign power that is recognizable in Hobbes’ discussion of civil war as intestinal discord.52 The cannibal is traditionally seen as antithetical to executive power. However, Michael Taussig envisions colonial and neocolonial phobias about the cannibal as the “hallucinogenic re-creation” of the sovereign self in an anti-self. This transverse mimesis politically embodies the fear of the colonizer, the hegemon or sovereign power of “being consumed by difference” as aversion to the contretemps that the Other xenophobically personifies.53 Can programs of enforced disappearance be construed as the apotropaic consumption of difference that is imagined as potentially engulfing? Would this explain the regime’s interdiction of natality as the foreclosure of future political interlocutors? Enforced disappearance maps difference onto those it wipes off the earth either preemptively or ex-post-facto. However, despite its ultimate project of dispersal, enforced disappearance must cast its nets over time and space in order to arrest and master difference. This begs the question of under what historical conditions does difference becomes so ubiquitous and generic as to be implanted in the masses of those to be rendered nondescript in excess of any substantive threat and datable political antagonism. Considering Taussig’s mimetic cannibalism, it can be suggested that a regime of vanishment turns to political anthropophagy, not only to preemptively consume difference, but to make the difference to which it be seen to oppose and devour. In the two volumes of The Beast and Sovereign Derrida discusses the voracity of the sovereign become beast, cannibalism and the anthropophagy of the posthumous. Derrida negatively relates the experiences of being devoured and of being incinerated or inhumed while alive to the corpus as property and legal personality. The proprietorial corpus partakes of sovereignty under which the living possess the 192 Theory & Event right of deciding on the disposition of their posthumous remains—a right denied the disappeared. Derrida questions to what degree posthumous right remains enforceable both within and beyond life. The abrogation of this right by a sovereign power infers the politicization and colonization of a zone beyond life and ultimately beyond death. Derrida will name this continuum that supplants the civic opposition of life/death “survivance” which bears within itself all the errancy of an essential contretemps afflicting the law and social ontology. How and to what will they proceed in the time that follows the deceding? To decede, to proceed, to retrocede: it is indeed a matter of a procedure, a path, a movement along a path, a path of departure or return; it is indeed a matter of progress or regression or digression, of process and processing, proceeding and procedure, and so already of arrangements that are both technical and juridical, which have themselves left the order of what is called in the current and belated sense nature. We are already either in the opposition of nomos, tekhnē, thesis to physis in the late and derived sense, or else in that differance (with an a) of originary physis, which takes the forms of law, thesis, technique, right, etc. 54 Enforced disappearance cannot take place in the absence of technicities of proceeding, deceding, and a retroceding of the act itself in the fabrication of its acausality. Nor can it take place without an element, time frame and locus of haptic and optical interface—no matter how episodic and encrypted it leaves traces of habeas corpus—a having of the body. In order for the encounter that results in involuntary disappearance to take place there must already been a disapparition chain in the making that requires a haptics of the body—techniques of identifiability, a chronology, and a cartography and optics of surveillance standing against all spatial and temporal dispersion. The teleocratic accident as a form of executive power must have its procedural essentialisms. A writ of habeas corpus is a command to produce the body that has fallen into a counter-time between life and death, presence and absence, apparition and disapparition. The writ seeks to bring the corpus before a space of witnessing and certification as a proof of life or, in its absence, death. The writ and range of habeas corpus includes, not only the living body, but any trace, imprint or recording of the state’s physical contact with or proximity to that body, however fractured, damaged these interfaces might have been. Habeas corpus depends, not upon the ordinary jurisdiction of the court for its effectiveness but upon the duty of care of an executive power in relation to the entirety of a nation state’s subjects and denizens, enfranchised or not. The writ gives habeas corpus terms of reference to restore the detained to a public and witnessable location while also demarcating a polit- Feldman | Contretemps, Disappearance, Anthropophagy, Survivance 193 ical cartography of occlusion parasiting the political community. An executive power cannot immunize orders or acts of detention from review by holding a detainee beyond the writ’s territorial reach; the writ thus becomes an interrogatory remapping of the executive power that defines the latter’s deliberately darkened frontiers and counter-temporalities beyond its formal frontality. As a spatial predicate habeas corpus implicitly recognizes a right to a civic and terrestrial habitus including the right to one’s own body that is trampled upon by enforced disappearance. For Derrida, however, habeas corpus is haunted by the possibility of cannibalization, not only of the corpus, but of the writ itself. For Derrida, habeas corpus is a legal artifice that is ultimately unable to exhibit itself as a concrete existential with sustainable political traction. But having my remains at their disposal can also take place before I am absolutely, clearly and distinctly dead, meaning that the other, the others, is what also might not wait for me to be dead to do it, to dispose of my remains: the other might bury me alive, eat me or swallow me alive, burn me alive, etc. He or she can put me to a living death, and exercise thus his or her sovereignty (emphasis mine).55 Derrida explicitly associates the counter-temporalities that can afflict habeas corpus with the “living dead,” to arbitrary technicities of disposal and phobias of living burial, actual and/or symbolic, as symptomatic of political devourment. The contretemps of the disappeared corpus is its becoming corpse before dying- death and demise are here severed by time axis manipulation. The posthumous comes before death as the future anterior of the disappeared who are buried in reverse as biopolitical anachronisms. Under enforced disappearance the corpse, which is precluded from the condition of habeas, of self possession, property, autonomy and sovereignty, already happens, in essence, before it happens prior to biological deceding; it becomes, to evoke Hamacher’s Unzeit, an anachronistic, symbolic pre-essence that refuses every place within a time series, a place that could be put before or after another, such as the sequence that orders life and death. Where no such distinction between bios and zoé, before and after, or life and death can pertain, where the living body is virtualized as corpse in order to preclude the juridical personality of the corpus, there is only an unlife and an unzeit, as that which cannot assume the historicity of its own death as proper to its life. Rather, death and life are stretched along the arc of a reversible time axis that culminates in a political necrology of the living. 194 Theory & Event The dead person no longer has the corpse at his or her disposal, there is no longer any habeas corpus. Habeas corpus, at least, is not a habeas corpse, supposing there ever were such a thing. Habeas corpus concerns the living body and not the corpse. Supposing, I repeat, that there ever were a habeas corpus for the living body. Because you can guess that I believe that this habeas corpus never existed and that its legal emergence, however important it may be, designates merely a way of taking into account or managing the effects of heteronomy and an irreducible non habeas corpus. And the non habeas corpse, at the moment of death, shows up the truth of this non habeas corpus during the lifetime of said corpus.56 Habeas corpus is vulnerable to the suctioning of juridical life from out of the still breathing body or to the sliding of the body, living or dead out from under the category of the subject. Derrida relates sovereignty to the decision on the state of death or nondeath by a third party which can also license and insure a discreet locus and technique for the disposition of the corpse. Corpse disposal requires a social contract between the living and the dead and amongst the living themselves that is mediated by a third as “a force of institutional coercion. (that)… guarantees it and can oblige the inheritors to obey its instructions.”57 Derrida provisionally situates the posthumous within a legal order only to envision its ejection from the juridical. The anthropophagy of vanishment places the disappeared as socially dead, natally estranged and biologically terminated and uncertified as such, outside the law and contract of postmortem disposition. Here, the state-that-disappears abrogates its social contract with both the living and the dead concerning the postmortem—the latter is now ostensibly consigned to the needful accident that disperses and suspends the posthumous— the corpse, despite being beyond death, affect and lived time, suffers a conceptual and juridical contretemps. Denied disappearance is a political computation to not to decide on the state of death, to withhold death and posthumous disposition from the disappeared and a possible community of witness. Sovereignty here occupies a threshold that de-juridifies and de-temporalizes death by abandoning any civic purview over the disposal of the dead—the clandestine mass grave without markers speaks of a withheld civic dominion over the postmortem. The admixture of life/death precipitated by anthropophagic disappearance is structured as a threshold of indistinction in which there is no clear delineation between bios and zoé (enfranchised and disenfranchised life or death) to use Agamben’s schema. Biopower enfranchises citizens to the same degree that it can expel them from civil securities embodied in Foucault’s maxim, “to make live and let die.”58 Derrida troubles biopower to say that both the living and deceased body, the natal and postmortem body, reside under a regime of survivance that at its core Feldman | Contretemps, Disappearance, Anthropophagy, Survivance 195 treats the quick and the dead with minimal or, at most, a highly precarious differentiation between the biopolitical and the thanatopolitical-each declension infiltrates the other with the bleed through of mirror images. Derrida addresses this interstitially as an apparatus of power, as a political technology and expropriated right that extends beyond life and death into a third domain—survivance. There is a politics of survivance, an Unzeit, that suspends the difference between the active and the passive, life and death, corpus and corpse, as indicated by the “ance” ending which re-traces the indifference of Derrida’s différance. This indifference between the active and the passive is built into the depoliticizing accidentalization of disappearance and the aftermaths of its silent disavowal. The indifference of disavowed disappearance is where both habeas corpus and the corpse become derivatives of what Derrida terms an “irreducible non habeas corpus” that infers the acorporeal Unzeit of survivance. Within a regime of vanishment citizens appear under the unwritten charter of a law founding violence—to let appear and make disappear—no civil appearance without potential political disappearance.59 No biographical dispensation by an appellate authority without the contretemps of biographical annulment. This is to render death itself, once an object of central civic administration, disposable. A regime of survivance disables the sovereign potential of the subject to be capable of death as death. Derrida’s non habeas corpus implicitly poses the question of, not what life justifies its inconsequential expenditure, but what forms of death no longer count as civically eligible as death as such. Consider the drowned Syrian asylum seeker- the transnational abandonment of the stateless to human traffickers, fragile boats and merciless seas ideologically derives from the acausal and aleatory fictions of enforced disappearance. The current political inhospitality afforded enforced exile culminates in remote and silent killing by the action of inaction that falsifies the death of asylum-seekers as aleatory catastrophe. In so doing, this transnational regime of inhospitality, of administered survivance, occludes the transnational kill chain of migrant death at sea as a computational contretemps and disavowed complicity implicating the Asad regime and their Russian and Iranian allies, ISIS and Asad’s NATO, EU, Turkish, Saudi and Emirati adversaries. The abandoned and detained asylum seeker like the disappeared and the collaterally damaged is consigned to the horizontalized u-topos of the nondescript where Derrida locates survivance. Survivance in a sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a sense that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death, … a survival that is not more alive, nor indeed less alive, than life, or more or less dead than death, a sur-vivance that lends itself to neither comparative nor 196 Theory & Event superlative, a survivance … (that)… is without superiority, without height, altitude or highness, and thus without supremacy or sovereignty…the survivance I am speaking of is a groundless ground… It [Ça] begins with survival. And that is where there is some other that has me at its disposal; that is where any self is defenseless. That is what the self is, that is what I am, what the I is, whether I am there or not.60 If, as Derrida suggests, survivance is neither more nor less than life or death and yet irreducible to both and their opposition then this metabola attaches itself as a supplement and parasite to life and death—detouring, remediating, dismediating and dislocating what hosts it in much the same manner as the irruptive contretemps opens up an intermediary zone that disconnects the securing temporalities of sequence, transmission and inheritance. Derrida disrupts the anamorphosis of Agamben’s biopower wherein the mandated political sequence from zoé to bios is the becoming subject of substance, and the making of bare life as the disqualifying passage from bios to zoé, is the becoming substance of the subject.61 In both survivance and enforced disappearance subject and substance, corpus and corpse and their respective biopolitical rites of passage become unavailable. Derrida’s site is an unplaceable locus “without superiority, without height, altitude or highness”—that is without the sovereignty, ipseity or autonomy of either juridified death or life. However, Derrida warns “And that is where there is some other that has me at its disposal.”62 Disposability implies a surplus, a symbolic profit, extracted from the continuum of survivance in being neither life nor death, and in not being Agamben’s bare life from which nothing is meant to be accrued. At this juncture the haptics of disposal and alienability by “some other” points to a sovereign apparatus and a cutting decision beyond the law and contract of the post-mortem that punctuates survivance. The right to render death and the postmortem body alienable that so troubles Derrida, links a sovereignty that administers survivance to dominion, to a possession-right. In this dominion, as in The Antigone, the sovereign (Creon’s) right to the post mortem is installed through universal dispossession of the post-mortem rights of all others, thereby cutting across habeas corpse, non habeas corpus and their indifference. As Peter Fenvies proposes: “a possession character accrues to things because of their spatio-temporal finitude, whereas those who would possess them correspondingly confirm their non-finite character” (emphasis mine).63 Feldman | Contretemps, Disappearance, Anthropophagy, Survivance 197 Conclusion: Contretemps, Counterfact, Aphorism There would not be any contretemps, nor any anachrony, if the separation between monads disjoined only interiorities. Contretemps is produced at the intersection between interior experience (the “phenomenology of internal time- consciousness,” or space-consciousness) and its chronological or topographical marks, those which are said to be “objective,” “in the world.” There would not be any series otherwise, without the possibility of this marked spacing, with its social conventions and the history of its codes, with its fictions and its simulacra, with its dates. With so-called proper names.64 Under the regime of the essential contretemps executive power encases its violence in the aleatory and the accidentalized that are consequently repurposed as indemnifying media of ineffable and trans-ascendant exemption. When Schürmann describes the rule abusing itself in its ruling this abuse seals an act of force within the impunity of the inviolate. The needful accident consigns the historicizable time of violence to a dehistoricizing, inverting intemporality, to a history that recursively unwrites, retracts and disavows itself in its very inscription. This extradication of the historicizable points to formations of the counter-temporal- the accidentalized and the counterfactual- as media and weapons of war that enforce jus ad bellum as a regime of truth contingent on the deactualization of its force. Rescripted by the counter-temporal jus ad bellum ceases to be a law conserving force and consequently unfolds as an-archic constitutive power that seizes, resecures, and perverts the very epistemological and moral ground that names and measures its violence including that very ground-seizing act; for “any name laying down the law contains in it its own forces of abandonment.”65 The contretemps allied with the counterfact completes the inceptual work of political aphorism as the automatism of war. Contretemps and aphorism form the interlacing caduceus encasing the truth regime of warfare reliant on disavowal and deniability. Political aphorisms are self-referential ideational condensations, concentrates and insected units of political normation, justification and motivation (aphorismos means “delimitation”; its etymons, aphorizein and horizein, respectively mean to define, to separate). Derrida delivers the following aphorism on aphorism: “No contretemps, no aphorism without the promise of a now in common. For there is no contretemps, without the pledge, the vow of synchrony, the desired sharing of a living present.”66 Warfare cordons, sanitizes, neutralizes and indemnifies its violence by sentencing itself to such synchronizing aphorisms as democracy, securitization, undocumented migrants, the homeland, the border, narco-terrorism, 198 Theory & Event Islamo-Fascism, humanitarian pacification—that is to the polemos of armored and indemnified names. The prosecutory aphorisms of war enchains the name of the imputable Other to political culpability converting that very name into a sanction that legitimates punition. These proprietorial and compressive names are rhetorically cleansed of their proclivity for indiscriminate terror while still supporting an infinite possession-right to the monopoly of force. The scathing aphorisms that drive war presuppose and fabulate the “unscathed … <indemne> … the pure, non-contaminated, untouched, the sacred and holy before all profanation, all wound, all offence, all lesion.”67 War reemerges as a crime scene as its principial aphorisms are serially evacuated. War as a regime of truth recursively registers the counter-temporalities marring these potencies by re-inflicting further wounds, lesions and reverse profanations to restore its prestige. War’s privation of the privation of the inviolate does little to restore the latter’s foundational integrity but rather effectuates the sacrificial transplantation of the ineffable into its own empirical violence in media res which consequently becomes immune from self-profanation. The inviolate and the indemnified are encased in technicity and its political neutralization. The disappeared and the collaterally damaged carry the death of the proper enemy as a structuring, essential contretemps without being or even witnessing that death; they are wedded to the death of the absent enemy, the proper and capitalized target, through an infinitely elongated and immaterial kill chain of aphoristic misidentification and inadequation. Their disembodiment archives aphoristic interruption and foreclosure in being a medium of connecting without connection. There is often no actual relation between the disappeared and the structuring enemy for what is set up as the proper enemy is more often than not phantasmatic—a malleable void that the disappeared, once rendered nondescript, are conscripted to fill through anonymization, biographical attrition and state anthropophagy. Aphorism is the medium of an always unhinged commensuration by which the contretemps of the name is triggered as a sustaining terror and insecting fate. Thus, the kill chain that seems to underwrite and unwrite these figures is spun out into invisibility and elliptical disconnection enabling the bad infinity of the endlessly dislocated. The collaterally damaged and the disappeared vanish under the aphorism of the enemy that cuts into their very being and yet they are merely the name of that name which is not a name. Aphorism makes appearance by making disappearance. The disappeared and collaterally damaged are effaced by aphoristic sentencing that befalls them as the severity of simplification, the imposition of forms, regularities, and analogous semblance, that Phillip Lacoue-Labarthe calls the “fashioning” and “fictioning” of sameness, in order to render an account and to accuse.68 The victims-targets and even their survivors have no part in the enemy but are of him by Feldman | Contretemps, Disappearance, Anthropophagy, Survivance 199 virtue of the disconnection of names given and taken; they are a spun fragment of a name that restages what is not there—the reason and measure of war. They are the nonname of the “enemy” that their confinement, wounds and death incise and nominate. All names of such targets assigned by war function as needful accidents, as generative mishaps, and inadequations that befall the damaged before, during and after their death. This suggests that aphoristic sentencing is the protological contretemps and essential accident that occurs at and as the inception of war—for the most sovereignly and lethal of aphorisms which inaugurates both war and the inevitability of contretemps is the invocation: “In the beginning …”69 War begins, lives on and terminates in aphoristic certitude and delimitation. The terrorizing aphorism sentences, abbreviates, dissociates, encapsulates, enframes, and enables an automatism of the name beyond life. For Derrida it is “an economy or strategy of mastery that knows very well how to potentialize meaning… it says the truth in the form of the last judgment, and this truth carries [porte] death.”70 Aphoristic power gives and suspends death and administers survivance as we have recently witnessed in the racialized phobias of death-dealing borders: “because it traces, aphorism lives on (survit), it lives much longer than its present and it lives longer than life. Death sentence [arrêt de mort]. It gives and carries death, but in order to make a decision thus on a sentence [arrêt] of death, it suspends death, it stops it once more [il l’ arrête encore]” (131). The commanding contretemps of the name triggers the automatism of war as aphorism enforced, materialized and ontologized. Derrida notes that a machinality “virtually entrusts the trace to the sur-vival in which the opposition of the living and the dead loses and must lose all pertinence, all its edge.”71 War by contretemps, counterfact and aphorism sentences the vanished and collaterally damaged to the unwitnessable death of their death that, despite this privation of mortality, is incapable of returning life. Notes 1. Jacques Derrida, Aphorism Countertime. Translated by Nicholas Royle. In Psyche: Inventions of the Other 2, edited by Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford University Press, (2008): 137–142. 2. Derrida, “Aphorism Countertime,” 130. 3. Ibid., 129–130. 4. William Hope The Sword Man’s Vade Mecum; a Preservative against the Surprize, of a Sudden Attaque with Sharps, &c. (Edinburgh: John Reid, 1691) 43; Raoul Auger Feuillet, Orchesography or the Art of Dancing; an Exact and Just Translation from the French of Monsieur Feuillet. By John Weaver, Dancing Master. Second edition. (London, ca. 1721). 200 Theory & Event 5. Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livy. Trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press (1995). 6. Louis Althusser, ‘L’unique tradition matérialiste’, Lignes, 18 (1993): 75–119: 99. 7. Gregory Elliot, Introduction, Louis Althusser, Machiavelli and Us, edited by François Matheron, Introduction and translation by Gregory Elliott, (London, New York: Verso Books, 2001): xviii. 8. Massimo Cacciari, The Unpolitical: On the Radical Critique of Political Reason, ed. Alessandro Carrera, trans. Massimo Verdicchio (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009): 128. 9. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, (1977): 257–252. 10. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, ed. Mauro Bertani, Allessandro Fontana, and Arnold I. Davidson, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 1997), 13– 63. 11. Foucault, “Society Must be Defended.” 28. 12. Ibid., 16. 13. Jacques Derrida, Heidegger: The Question of Being and History, Thomas Dutoit ed. with the assistance of Marguerite Derrida Translated by Geoffrey Bennington, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press (2016):141 14. Ibid. 133. 15. Michel Focuault, Friendship as a Way of Life, in Foucault Live: Interviews, 1961–1983, ed. Sylvio Lortinger, New York: Semiotexte, (1996): 312. 16. Foucault here coincides with Althusser’s possible-impossible aleatory, the empty-site of the non-anteriority of meaning that is occupiable by a constitutive political practice lacking any transcendent normative ground. 17. Reiner Schürmann, “Legislation-Transgression: Strategies and Counterstrategies in the Transcendental Justification of Norms,” Man and World 17, nos. 3– 4 (1984): 380. Allen Feldman, Archives of the Insensible: Of War, Photopolitics, and Dead Memory, The University of Chicago Press (2015): 363. 18. Reiner Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, trans. Reginald Lilly, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, (2003):182. 19. Giorgio Agamben, La Communauté qui vient. Théorie de la singularité quelconque Paris: Poche (1990), 68f. (translation by Reiner Schürmann in Broken Hegemonies). 20. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I: The Seminars of Jacques Derrida, Chicago; The University of Chicago Press, (2011): 2. 21. Jacques Derrida, Heidegger: The Question of Being and History, 140. 22. Roberto Farneti, “Of Humans and Other Portentous Beings: On Primo Levi’s Storie naturali,” Critical Inquiry, Volume 32, Number 4 (Summer 2006): 726. Feldman | Contretemps, Disappearance, Anthropophagy, Survivance 201 23. Jacques Derrida, “Why Does Peter Eisenman Write Such Good Books”, in Psyche, 114. 24. Ronald C. Arkin, “Governing Lethal Behavior: Embedding Ethics in a Hybrid Deliberative/Reactive Robot Architecture,” Technical Report GITGVU-07–11 (2011), http://www.cc.gatech.edu/ai/robot-lab/online-publications/formalizationv35.pdf (accessed September 10, 2016). 25. Reiner Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, 630. 26. Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, George Collins trans., New York: Verso, (1997): 109 n. 13. 27. Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, 149. 28. See Frederich Kittler, “Real Time Analysis, Time Axis Manipulation,” translated with an introduction Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Cultural Politics, Volume 13, Issue 1 (2017): 1–18. The concept of stasis here partially references the classical Greco-Latin concept of an agonistic division and/ or paralysis of a polity as well as the progression of a disease through a body, including a body politic. Stasis invokes the Latin cognate, sēditiō (sedition), a going aside, a going apart, and insurrectionary separation. Derrida’s discussion foregrounds the neglected recursive dimension of stasis in relation to the indivisibility and ipseity of sovereignty that stasiology transgresses. In this essay the stasiology of the state specifically refers to the generative fissure within a sovereign formation as regards its own residual anchorages in positive law, the procedural, and goal-directed action. See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology II: The Myth of the Closure of any Political Theology. Cambridge: Polity Press (2008): 122; see also Allen Feldman, Archives of the Insensible, 9–13. 29. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, “Siren Recursions” in Kittler Now: Current Perspectives in Kittler Studies Stephen Sale ed., (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015): 95. 30. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge” in Acts of Religion; edited by Gil Anidjar, (New York: Routledge, 2002): 66. 31. Werner Hamacher, N’essance, The Oxford Literary Review 36.2 (2014): 212. 32. Ibid., 214. 33. Avital Ronell, Loser Sons: Politics and Authority, Urbana: University of Illinois Press (2012): 87–88. 34. Jean-Luc Nancy After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes, Charlotte Mandell trans., New York: Fordham University Press, (2014): 6. 35. Netanyahu: Israel Seeks ‘Sustainable Quiet’ with Gaza,” CNN staff, updated 1:04PM EDT, July 21, 2014, http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/20/ world/meast/mideast-crisis- blitzer-netanyahu-interview (accessed July 21, 2014). 36. Ibid. 37. Derrida, “Aphorism Countertime,” 131 38. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Young (New York: W. W. Norton, (2002): 748. 39. Ibid. 202 Theory & Event 40. Solomon J. Solomon, the painter, was one of the inventors of camouflage in WW1. 41. The following phenomenology of enforced disappearance draws upon my witnessing of the testimony given by the affected families of the disappeared and in conversations with the latter in Cape Town, when attending hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,1997–2000. A discussion of the disturbing dialogical soundscape and bodyscapes enacted by these women at the TRC is discussed in my Archives of the Insensible, 295–310. 42. http://cambodia.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/InfoNotes/003_ InfoNoteE.pdf. 43. Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, New York: Columbia University Press, (2013: 23–24, 125–26 and Hannah Arendt Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil, New York: Penguin Random House, (1963): 266–268, 277, 279. 44. Feldman, Archives of the Insensible, 338. 45. Nostalgia for the Light, Dir. Patricio Guzman, 2010 Icarus Films, DVD (2011). 46. Bernard Steigler. For a New Critique of Political Economy. Trans. Daniel Ross, Cambridge: Polity, (2013): 31–32. 47. Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi, Peggy Kamuf ed., (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002): 133. 48. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign 2: The Seminars of Jacques Derrida, Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud, ed. Geoffrey Bennington trans, The University of Chicago Press, (2011): 136. 49. Final Report on the Consultational Task Force on Reconciliation Mechanisms, 17, Volume 1, (November, 2016): 180. 50. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, (1982). 51. See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Harcourt, Brace, (1973), 473; The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, (1958): 177; Love and Saint Augustine, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, (1996): 51. 52. Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 2, 142–143. 53. Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wildman, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, (1988): 104–126. 54. Derrida, “The Beast and the Sovereign 2, 126. 55. Ibid., 127 56. Ibid., 141. 57. Ibid., 143. 58. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 24. Feldman | Contretemps, Disappearance, Anthropophagy, Survivance 203 59. Enforced disappearance advances the non-habeas corpus of survivance yet overturns Derrida’s postmortem opposition between inhumation as immobilization and incineration as dispersion. The vanished, whether secretly living, buried or burnt, are both immobilized and dispersed in being denied any artifactual containment that could serve as a prompt for witnessing. 60. Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign II, 131. 61. Georgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). 62. Ibid. 63. Peter Fenves. The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time, (Stanford: Stanford University Press) (2010): 192. 64. Derrida, “Aphorism Counter-time,” 132. 65. Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, 630. 66. Derrida, “Aphorism Countertime,” 131. 67. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 61f16 68. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed. Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989): 70. 69. Derrida, Faith and Knowledge, 76. 70. Derrida, “Aphorism Counter-time,” 128–129. 71. Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 2, 14.