The Disappeared of History

Date: 

Monday, April 11, 2022, 12:00pm to 1:30pm

Location: 

Thompson Room at the Barker Center

For a recording of this event, please click here.

Speakers: Brad Evans, Professor of Political Violence & Aesthetics, University of Bath, UK; Chantal Meza, artist
Moderated by: Susanna Siegel, Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy, Harvard University

How are we to bear witness to those who leave no trace? What role can politics, philosophy and art play when dealing with violence so extreme it takes us beyond all intelligible limits? And how might we recover something of the human in the face of its total annihilation? This collaborative talk will speak directly to the disappeared of history. Drawing upon our critical and artistic interventions from the State of Disappearance project, we will seek to explore the role witnessing, including the transgressive witnessing of art and how this allows for a rethinking of the political. In doing so, the talk will also provide further reflections on the ways disappearance demands considered ethical consideration on the role of perpetrators, victims, and witnesses, along with accounting for the multiple ways bodies can vanish from the surfaces of human belonging.

Brad Evans is a political philosopher, critical theorist and writer, whose work specialises on the problem of violence. His work is particularly concerned with addressing the multiple forms’ violence takes in the world, while developing a more poetic critique that highlights the importance of the arts and the imaginary. The author of nineteen books and edited volumes, along with over a hundred academic and media articles, he currently holds a Chair in Political Violence & Aesthetics at the University of Bath, United Kingdom.

Chantal Meza is a self-taught abstract painter living and working in the United Kingdom. Abstraction is her language. It has also shaped her. Chantal's creative act is guided by the conflict in the imbalance between the sensory and the technical. As such, her challenge concerns how to express the abstract in thought.

Susanna Siegel received her PhD from Cornell University. She currently works on topics in the philosophy of mind and epistemology. Her books The Contents of Visual Experience (2010) and The Rationality of Perception (2017) were both published by Oxford University Press.

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Philosophy, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, the Mahindra Humanities Center, the Cervantes Institute at Harvard, and the History Design Studio.