"Violence and Disappearance: Knowing and Seeing" By Terrell Carver (Keywords: Disappeared; Absence; Memory; Bodies; State Terrorism)
- Terrell Carver
- Jun 15
- 8 min read
Updated: Jun 19
From The Philosopher, vol. 112, no. 2 ("Violence")
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Violence leaves victims and victims leave traces, since violence sends messages and messages require visibility. The dead and mutilated body, the bones in the ashes, the objects in the mass grave, the head-count at the camp and body-count at the execution, the severed head over the city gate or affixed to the motorway overpass – these are horrific but familiar methods of intimidation and empowerment.
Sometimes the process goes awry, bodies are not found or are too far gone or there isn’t time, or something gets in the way, and the message doesn’t get sent. But this is somewhat exceptional and generally accidental. So, disappearance happens, but it isn’t a strategy. It’s intransitive; bodies disappear, and victims disappear, uncertainty engulfs the living, and doubt devours closure.
But generally, disappearance isn’t a strategy, a practice, an undeclared but highly deliberate message, one that has to be deduced, subliminally felt, presumed but not performed. The dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983), misleadingly termed a “war,” and “dirty” in some unspecified way, made history, by making disappearance a strategy, a practice, a plan.
What happened in Argentina made language anew, by making the practice transitive: people were “disappeared”; they are the “disappeared.” The novelty and horror that those terms now evoke will also provoke a considerable number of philosophical questions and meditations. So, to get at that, we start here at quite an abstract level philosophically and work toward the concrete – quite literally the concrete slabs of pavements and sidewalks in Buenos Aires.
***
“I know it when I see it” is a commonplace remark. It links perception to the world and asserts what something is with certainty. “It” is both the perceptual object and the conceptual object, an epistemological virtuous circle and an ontological identity. “It” is what it is and cannot be otherwise, or so it seems “to me.”
And in a perlocutionary assertion, “I tell you” that what I know is what you should think. A presentation of “my everyday self” – whoever I am – performs all this, referencing the familiar performativities of instruction and persuasion in body language, tone of voice, and lordly gestures.
What happened in Argentina made language anew, by making the practice transitive: people were “disappeared”; they are the “disappeared.”
When “it” is an act of violence, or a still or moving image of violence, then all the certainties apply all the more. This is because we really know violence when we see it. And there are so many iterations of it through all the still and moving visuality, textual imagery and verbal rhetoric, and blockbuster films and video games that saturate human imaginings.
“To know it when I see it” isn’t to reject it or object to it, though it might be, and for some it stokes a desire to perpetrate it. But then aversion or desire require repetition, and repetition requires memory.
Beyond the perlocutionary scenario outlined above – “I know it when I see it” – the illocutionary act kicks in. The repetitive enactment, not of stylised violence but of stylised memory, will pack a powerful political punch. Moreover, the memories enacted are necessarily collective, because they are enacted, not simply experienced.
Even if the images of the “Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo” (Madres de la Plaza de Mayo) have faded in our minds, any mention – such as this one – will trigger a recovery from forgetfulness. Or at least it will trigger a curiosity to find out something to remember.
The Madres are not forgotten: their silence speaks volumes, their mournful clothing says it all, their continuous circulation in a public "filmic” space, their clockwork-like appearances make them predictable. Their distinctive processional mode mimics the melancholia of trauma-time for each and all. And “Madres” is itself a conflation of binary gender femininity and non-violent, archetypically caring relations in the most powerful way.
It is hard to think of anything more non-violent in a politics of change-making than the Madres. They were not blocking anything, as with so many non-violent, change-making protests – nor were they even trying to “do” anything.
What was to be done was lodged in memories that they made, and in the trigger-value of the synecdoche – each individual mother, grieving for a disappeared child – an individual instance of the entirety of the national trauma. They turned private grief into public meaning.
It is hard to think of anything more non-violent in a politics of change-making than the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo.
The national trauma was that of los desaparecidos – “the disappeared” – someone gone without a trace. The Madres were an emotional part of that trauma, standing in for the whole, a physical presence and performance that made an international memory and iconic political cause.
***
But what whole were they a part of? With a bit of clarification, a double inversion results. “I know it when I see it” becomes a question and an absence: “How do I know it when I can’t see it?” In the case of “the disappeared” in Argentina (and elsewhere), the violence of abduction may have been seen, though usually it wasn’t – it was quick and quiet. And it was seldom “witnessed,” that is publicly or even privately declared at the time, or perhaps only in whispered suppositions – not expecting much reply.
The unmarked cars, Ford Falcons in a particular model, were the vehicles of choice for the plain-clothes abduction squads, and were widely observed, albeit quickly avoided. But the specific actions weren’t really observed and registered – eyes were lowered, footsteps turned away, silences hung in the air, forgetting-work took over. Individual and collective repression was an understandable self-defence.
The absence was not simply people who “simply disappeared.” It was the “present-absence” of the presumed violence required to abduct someone summarily – “for questioning.”
In the case of the disappeared, the violence of torture and death is all supposition, as is the ruminative comfort of hoping-against-hope that a missing person will one day reappear
After that, the violence of torture and death is all supposition, as is the ruminative comfort of hoping-against-hope that a missing person will one day reappear. Even finding a body, human remains, or survivors’ testimony would count, even a record of sequestration or imprisonment. The memories of those things would then close, in a narrative way, following the directionality that memory takes when an individual is what the memories are about: birth, life, death.
Along with the experience or even sight of violence, “I know it when I see it” creates conviction because as Aristotle poetically put it, we expect a beginning, a middle, and an end. But I didn’t see it happen. With how much conviction, then, can one speak?
So, can I know the violence I haven’t seen? Can I know violence as supposition? As deduction? As absence? As silence? As “things we don’t talk about”? As “something we don’t dare to mention”?
Embedded in the pavements of Buenos Aires are the baldosas por la memoria. Looking a little like tombstones, but scuffed and dirty underfoot, they startle down-lookers because they are unexpected. They are also eye-catching because they are black concrete rectangles with stark white lettering.
As artefacts, baldosas are timeless and for the ages, as official fixtures. They enact a unique genre.
Yet the border to each is multi-coloured, mosaic but abstract, playful and childlike in its somewhat random irregularities. Baldosas have a crudity and an oddity that is thoroughly of the everyday. And like much of the everyday they want to tell you something, to stop you in your tracks, if only for a moment of remembrance.
The baldosas declare the everyday (“Here lived/worked/studied … so-and-so”) but indict the “state” for its “terrorism.” They inscribe names, but they aren’t merely personal, private-public memorials for friends and family. As artefacts, they are timeless and for the ages, as official fixtures. They enact a unique genre, though with some variation. Yet they are not ephemeral, since they are in and of the ordinary concrete paving slabs of the everyday sidewalk.
There is no “baldosas” memorial trail, no apparent and predictable sequence, no fenced-off or affixed upright monumentality about them. While the circulating Madres have been gone for many years, the baldosas remain, but the way that city streets remain. They evince the decay to which memories are subject, yet these traces of “the disappeared” are with us, even though for most down-lookers this will be a memory of narrations.
Lodged in memories, those narrations are knowledge: what we know, because others have put it into print, attended to it as speech, shared it through media as experience. The baldosas are metonyms for that particular elemental horror that resides in our collective consciousness. We know a lot about what we haven’t seen.
Baldosas are a cue, a trigger, not a poster or a banner. Unlike tombstones, they don’t mark a grave or site of death because there isn’t one, neither a site, a body, nor even remains. They don’t mark a locatable event in someone’s life because what really happened didn’t really happen there. They mark the absence of a life, a life not lived, tragically cut short, “so far as we know.”
And the baldosas incite a memory of the violence we haven’t seen.
***
These simple markers are hand-crafted by loosely networked activists, calling themselves “neighbourhoods (barrios) for memory and justice.” The practice began in 2006 but relates to the period of “the dictatorship” (dictadura) of 1976-1983, when the “state terrorism,” that each baldosa names, “disappeared” at least 30,000 (treinta mil) individuals (los desaparecidos).
Baldosas are a cue, a trigger, not a poster or a banner. Unlike tombstones, they don’t mark a grave or site of death because there isn’t one, neither a site, a body, nor even remains
The baldosas are a synecdoche for the “down and dirty,” extra-judicial, silent and silencing practice of clandestine and unrecorded abduction, torture and murder. But importantly, they are more than they seem, because they incite memories that recur, the nightmare-to-come, the very rational and quite reasonable fear that “it will all happen again.”
What “will all happen again” is the negation of democratic constitutionalism based on rule of law and human rights. Those rights are inalienable, in that they cannot be assigned or annulled. The crux of this rule of law is legal redress against the state, which the state itself is obliged to provide through an impartial judiciary and citizen-centric law enforcement.
Dictatorship is a simple notion anyone can grasp, but its opposite – which is what the baldosas incite us to remember – is also a simple term: democracy. What we should be remembering, though, is the complexity of the institutional practices democracy requires, not just the witness the baldosas bear to the violence of silence.
Terrell Carver is a Professor of Political Theory at the University of Bristol. The author of many books and articles, he is a scholar of political ideas and philosophies, particularly Marx/Engels/Marxism and more recent studies within feminist theory, particularly gender studies and men/masculinity studies.
First published online on 15th June 2025
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