War Under Erasure: Contretemps, Disappearance, Anthropophagy, Survivance

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.