Absence and disappearance in law

Abstract

Forced disappearance is the consequence of illegal and clandestine practices committed by out of control punitive powers, but social disappearance is also the effect of public policies where the law intervenes. In this text we inquire how the law produces absence and disappearance in the field of public and private law, looking specifically on the mechanism the law uses to manage those situations between representation, legal or voluntary, and exception. The refugee, the undocumented migrant, the enemy, are paradigmatic examples in the processes and in the dispositifs through which law invisibilize and remove some subjectivities, not only outside of public space, but also of the protection of the State; it replace and substitute persons and individuals that the State is going to represent and that other are going to act in their names.

Keywords

• law
• absence
• disappearance
• representation
• exception