Transient Body, Transiting Body: The Disappeared or the Programmed Oblivion (Algeria)

This paper examines how the putative transiting from one detention center to another of abducted or apprehended citizens by various state forces during the Algeria's civil war (1992-2002), and the way in which disappearance is constructed and shaped. During this war, between 150-200 hundreds thousands of people disappeared. Searches by their families during the difficult and dangerous times of the conflict as well as in its aftermath have ended in dismissals, as if the bodies had “evaporated”. This paper shows that this vanishment is, on hand, an intrinsic part of a managing technology that uses the detainee’s displacement, real or unfounded, as a way to invisibilize them at the very moment of their arrest/abduction, and on the other hand, how within this detainee’s “mobility” the search by their relatives becomes itself and paradoxically part of their invisibilization. It is as if the families have de-duplicated and confirmed the disappearance, leaving the body in transit, between life and death, in a “non-lieu”.

To illustrate this repressive ordering, based on a presupposed displacement of bodies in detention, the techniques of transition/erasure, and the chain of memory belonging to Algeria's own history and to other practices of oblivion adopted elsewhere (e.g., Latin American dictatorships), we draw on a phenomenological analysis of the spaces supposed to be traversed by the detainees/disappeared, as recounted in their relatives’ search narratives. We also discuss the relationships of these spaces to temporal layers, that is to the moment of the arrest/abduction and its aftermath, to account for these bodies in transit and the politically and militarily programmed oblivion.